Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and an appeals court judge has declared DeSantis's band on transgender care to be unconstitutional. We have such a great joke for you today. Recovering polster Adam Carlson stops by to talk about his analysis of the twenty twenty four polls. Don't worry, It's not terrible. Then we'll talk to the Washington Post Sarah Ellison about how
disinformation circles affect our media. But first we have legendary campaign manager and emotional support pundant, the author of the conspiracy to in America Five Ways my old Party is driving our democracy to autocracy. The Lincoln Projects owned Stuart Stevens. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Stuart Stevens.
Hidekra me to a party.
I'm such a fan of yours. I was thinking about it because I was thinking, like, now we can talk campaign with someone who has done many campaigns but also has a sort of nice, not too crazy way about him. I feel like campaigns make a person a little unhinged.
They do, and most people work in campaigns and then they grow up and they do something else. As my long time partner Rush Street for and I used to say, we'd look around after every cycle and we go like, what's wrong with us? We still want to do campaigns.
But you know, I think I probably in a lot of ways represented the worst of the American political system because I just like campaign I was never really interested in that thing called government, and it gave me a very simplistic and shallow and what proved to be ultimately dangerous value system, which is I was happy if I won and I was sad if I lost, And you know, that worked all great up until Trump. Then I had asked self, like, how is it that I didn't see this?
There's not, unfortunately, any good answer I've come up with. And I think it's absurd to think that Trump hijacked the party. Nobody made anybody vote for Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is so popular in the Republican Party, and the party has become Donald Trump because it's what the party wants. Let's quit pretending, you know that there's some party that we're gonna go.
Let you it's interesting to me. One of the things that I think a lot of us spend probably way too much time thinking about is why is Donald Trump so popular? Like still and again he's not so popular, right, he's not, but he has a certain thing that people still like about him, despite the fact that he's a convicted felon and out on bail for three other cases.
You can't get hung up on these little details, right exactly.
But the question is, like, I think that some of this just comes down to, like, charismatic politicians do better with the electorate. I mean, is that possible? Is it just that simple?
Listen, I'm pretty harsh about this, but I think I've earned a right to be harsh because I know these people, and I dealt with the Republican electorate. I don't think there's anything flattering that you can say about the Republican electorate. We can't blame this on Fox. At any given moment, the most watching Fox are three million and seventy plus million voted for Trump. There's more information available to voters today in America than any time or any place in history.
I mean an actual true statement. It's not North Korea. You know, it's not Mississippi in nineteen sixty five, when there was people referred to being behind the Magnolia curtain because one family owned all the newspapers, and it's not that way. I think at the heart of Trump is race. And Trump's coalition is eighty five percent white in a
country that is sixty fifty nine percent white less. So the time we finished this and I think that ultimately that is the reality of what happened to the Republican Party. And now I get in this argument with my still Republican friends and they go, well, so let me get
this stressory. You think everybody voted for Trump is a racist, and it's just no. But I think everybody who voted for Trump pretty much thought something was more important to them than having a racist as president, because you can't deny that Donald Trump is a racist. And sixty percent of the electorate was non college educated whites. That's now forty percent and dropping. It's the fastest shrinking demographic in America, and I think that is at the fear of what
drives so much of trump Ism. And they're right, they are losing control and America's headed to become a majority minority country, and in many ways it already has. If you're sixteen years and younger, in America, the majority are non white, you know, and odds look really really good they're going to be non white when they turn eighteen. And that is at the root of all of this. I think, you know, I do not understand these CEOs who support Donald Trump. I think it's shameful. I think
they should be shamed. I think to Steve Schwartzman, of the world, would you rather be a CEO in Russia? You have a pretty good year.
It's a very short term way of thinking of the world.
You look at Blackstone, Steve Schwartzman, So you've got a convicted felon in New York. Blackstone is over four thousand employees from New York. So is what Steve Schwartzman is CEO sending a message to his employees that the rule of law in New York State doesn't matter. That's interesting because I imagine if you work for Blackstone, they actually expect you to adhere to the laws of New York State.
If Blackstone were hiring convicted felons, like if you want a job at Blackstone and you owe more than one hundred million dollars, like yes, for fraud, would you get hired?
Absolutely not. You can go to the Blackstone Code of Ethics, which is prominent, and I just don't understand why there should be a higher standard for being an intern at Blackstone than being president.
Right, all right, exactly.
And I think that those like Steve Schwartzman and Jamie Dimond has said nice things about Donald Trump before, famously at the Davos. I don't know what he said about who he's going to vote for at this stage. If he said anything, I think a lot of people are
telling him to shut up, shut up and durabble. I think it is foolish to think that you can have the benefits of a democracy that you're enjoining now and elect a non democratic president, someone who is going to lead the country for four years, non wall d democratic and Trump obviously does not support democracy. I mean, there's no pretense of it. And if you think that Donald Trump won't come after you, you're feeding the alligator hoping he'll eat you. Last.
Well, it's the Mitch McConnell saying, right.
It is precisely the miss McConnell thing that workout. Mitch. I've talked about this before, you know. When I was writing this book, it was all a lie. I stumbled across the memoirs of friends on pathin who was a Pressian aristocrat responsible more than anybody else for ushering Hitler into power. So he wrote his memoir in nineteen fifty three. Now things had gone a little sideway, I mean, a one hundred million killed World War two Holocaust, and he
still was defending supporting Hitler. And there are phrases that he uses is if memoir that are literally verbade him of what Ms McConnell said, that we will change him. There are more of us, He will have to adapt to us. So I wonder how did Mitch McConnell feel, well, his colleagues were running for their lives and their own offers. How did that work out? And still mits McConnell is afraid to say Donald Trump's name in public. So I think it's a historic failure of a party. And ultimately,
I mean that's I said about the selection. The selection isn't remotely about Donald Trump. It's about each of us. We know who Donald Trump is, He's just who are we? And I think it's a character tist. You know, I am so offended by these Trump supporters that say, you know, the system was rigged. We had to resort to what you know, storming the Capitol and all of this. So let me get this straight. There are Americans who actually were prosecuted, were hunted, were tortured, were murdered to stop
them from participating in the system. And they're called black America. So how did they react. They didn't storm the capital and violence easier. They stayed in the system, They registered more voters, they continue to believe in the system. And yet the overwhelmingly middle class white voters that support Trump have walked away from America. And I think it is shameful and I have no need to understand them. I really, I don't want to understand the guy in the camp
all switch sweatshirt. I just want him walk up.
Yeah. No, So let's talk about right now. We are still in this ecosystem where we don't really know know quite what the results from Trump's criminal conviction are going to be, though it does seem like there is some movement there. And I recently read something where that actually, Hunter Biden's trial is not hurting Biden as much as
Trump World wanted it to. That actually people can have two thoughts at the same time, you know, shockingly, So I'm curious to know what you You know, we're sort of in this weird period run up to the conventions, and I'm wondering what you think that Biden world should be doing and are they doing? What do you think?
I am a great admirer of the Biden campaign. I think they ran a brilliant campaign in twenty twenty that they don't get enough credit for. You know, be the incumbent president is incredibly difficult, and you know, nineteen seventy six, we passed campaign financing, so each Democratic Republican nominee got the same amount of money, and under that system, it did level the playing field. Under that system, Bush lost
and Carter lost. So then in two thousand and eight Obama walked away from that system, so he spent a general election about three hundred and seventy million. McCain spent eighty four million. So, as always happens, once nobody steps out of the system, everybody steps out. So twenty twelve was the first time since nineteen seventy two Nixon McGovern the two candidates were running against each other who were
not in the federal funding system Romney Obama. Romney lost, so Biden beat An incumbent president not in the federal funding system, so it's fair at last, when is the last time that happened? Well, the answer happens to be Herbert Hoover and he had a bad year. So I have tremendous respect for what the Biden campaign does. They have this quality that is so rare in politics, which
is patience. And you know, there is this overwhelming human tendency to day trade politics, so you have you know, Biden goes out and has a lousy press conference after this Special Council's finding, and you know, you have people like Ezra Client writing you should get out, this is it right, and then a few weeks later he gives a great state of the Union space you go, well, maybe you shouldn't get out, and politics is not for
day traders. You know. My greatest worry where i'm the Biden campaign would be peaking too early strangers that may seem, because I think there is a great narrative in American tradition of coming from behind, and I think the greatest danger for the Biden campaign is they're going to start leading too early, and then they may drop back, and then it's harder to go back again. You know, I have no contact with the Biden campaign, so this is
just purely outsider. I think that they understand the rhythm of this campaign and there is no need to win every news cycle that I think he'll probably be behind until the Democratic Convention, and then I think after the Invention they'll be able to come out and prosecute a campaign against Trump. That the elements are being laid for now. And if I had to make a bet now, I don't think the race is going to be particularly close.
I think it'll be close to about October twentieth, and then it's going to be like nineteen eighty and when Carter started to drop. I don't understand what you get when you vote for Donald Trump. What do you get when you vote for Republicans? I don't know. There's no policy except Project twenty twenty five, which God knows they don't want to talk about much because it is overwhelmingly unpopular.
One of the things that I was struck by this weekend was that Trump was in Nevada and he said to the group, I will make it so you don't have to pay taxes on tips anymore, a wildly unpopular thing. It's not clear how many people actually do pay taxes on tips. But that ability to just say whatever he would any interest in the possibility of being actually able to do it. Do you think that helps him? I mean, I feel like that that's the thing where I'm like, he's not bound by the truth at all.
No, I mean, this has always been the case. He was going to balance the budget in four years, said so when a Washington Post interview, he was going to make health care a beautiful plan for health care Mexico, was going to pay for the wall, as Mark Cuban famously said, he is the guy who will say anything
at closing time to get laid right, all right. And I think that his ability to do that is reduced every day because the difference between what he has said he was going to do and what he does is greater, and that includes to what he has actually done. So he's actually taken away roe v. Eight. Okay, let's live in that world. He actually is supporting putin. Let's live in that world.
What do you think about those polls that say people don't believe that Trump actually was the person who took away roe v. Wade.
It's troubling. I think that's why if you're sitting in a Biden campaign, you want to spend over a billion dollars, and I think that's you know, as that old phrase goes, campaigns matter, and I think that there are a lot of very substantive, impressive, life affecting positive changes that have been brought by the Biden administration. Unemployment at record lows, you have stock markets at record highs. That does affect people more than realize because of the one ks. You
have wages rising. All of this actually is a positive underpinning to people. People who now are paying thirty three dollars for insulin know that people who are going to pay lesser than Haler's know that now it is always difficult for any incumbent to get credit for what they've done.
In two thousand and four, were sitting focus groups in the Bush campaign, and one of the great goals of the Bush administration was to reduce taxes for those in the lower income So the goal was family of four making forty thousand dollars or less would pay no income tax,
which happened under Bush. So we would sit in focus groups with people who no longer were paying income tax and would ask them, are you paying more income tax now under Bush or not, they say I'm paying more now, and then you would generally point out where you're actually not paying any income tax now, and they would say, well, I'm paying more in taxes, and they just wouldn't believe you.
And that's why in two thousand and four, among other reasons, we decided correctly, I think, really led by Carl Rowe, who I do think is a genius, that there were very few persuadable voters. I mean we would show people ads that, like you know, Mark McKinnon and I had made about women voting in Afghanistan, and people would cry, I mean openly cry. Men would cry. And then they'd say, you know, I'm never going to vote for him. That's
the best thing I've ever seen. I'm never going to vote for And out of that strategy of what came to be known as Fortress precincts, which the way you could win, the path to win was very simple. Where you got sixty percent, you needed to get sixty three percent. Where you got fifty two, you needed to get fifty five. You had to just increase your margin by just a little in every one of these precincts and not go after persuading voters. And I think that the Biden campaign
is in much the same reality now. So Biden won by eight million votes, Trump lost. He needs new customers. You start with the question how many Biden twenty Trump twenty four voters are there? Some? I don't think there's massive amounts. So what is Trump doing to get new customers? As far as I can tell, he's saying, if you're not a long term, devoted customer here, we don't want your business. Which people hear that, and I think they react. There was a lot of behind, you know, Nikki Haley,
and ultimately politics is more about addition and subtraction. And you know, one of my favorite clients in Haley Barber, you know, ran for governor Mississippi after a career in politics, and Haley like to say, it's better to be for the future because it's going to happen anyway. And you know, the Republican Party is basically at war with the modern world, and I think they're going to lose.
I would literally sit here with you all day because you just are so soothing. But I think that's a really good point that the Republican Party is at war with the future. Thank you so much, Stewart Stevens. I really appreciate you. Spring is here, and I bet you are trying to look fashionable, So why not pick up some fashionable all new Fast Politics merchandise. We just opened a news store with all new designs just for you. Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and top bags. To grab some,
head to fastpolitics dot com. Adam Carlson is a former and recovering Democratic polster. Adam, welcome back. I think of you as a fan favorite.
Oh wow, that's very flattering. Well, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me back.
Because we deal with polls, right, I hate polls. You probably don't hate poles as much as I hate poles, since you're a recovering pollster, But I find polls to be very annoying. But they're really the only indicator we have ultimately, right. We can do turnout on the primaries, but that's kind of different, so we have to sort of use them. But they are sort of a blunt instrument. And what is sort of the state of modern polling right now?
I think that the state of mone and polling is in plus right now. If you're doing a phone poll, response rates have never been lowered. This has been covered a ton, This has been a reason to criticize polls.
You're lucky to get a one percent response rate, as in, if you contact one hundred people, you're lucky to get one person to actually answer and finish your holl You have to call people on their cell phones now, which is a better way of contacting them, but it's a lot harder to get a hold of folks because you call our ID show the unknown number. You're not really ever sure if the people who are answering those unknown numbers are representative of the broader population or if they're
more engaged or kind of weirdos. It's a bit imprecise, and there's things you can do on the back end to try and retro sit them. People you're polling to be representative of the population. But again, you're making a lot of assumptions each time you're doing that. So each assumption that each polster makes and how much thought and rigor they put into it can affect the accuracy and can introduce bias. So, like you said, it's a blunk instrument. It's never been harder to pull than it is right now,
there's online polls. Of course there's live texts, people are trying different things, But it was a lot easier to be a polster ten twenty third years ago than it is today.
Explained to us sort of what we're seeing in these free Biden pre Biden Trump five months out polling.
Let me step back for a second here, and I think that the rise of the five thirty eight in Nate Silver Next starting in two thousand and eight was great for visibility for polling, and then by thirty eight in particular and others as well had really good cycles in two thousand and eight twenty twelve, and they're seen as like these oracles, people doing these models. But historically polling error is pretty high in one direction or another.
So twenty sixteen and twenty twenty eight underestimated Trump twice. So there's this working assumption that because the polls underestimated Trump twice in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, that they'll do it a third time. So to answer your question, right now, Trump leads Biden, maybe by a point, maybe it's tied nationally, that's depending on which aggregate you look at.
That's kind of where we're at right now. Biden got a roughly two point bump after Trump's conviction or thirty four or felony convictions, and nationally we don't have a lot of state pulling. It's compared before and after right now, so things are tight nationally. But people assume that because Poles underestimated Trump in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, that they'll do it again in twenty twenty four. And that's not necessarily how polling error works. That's happened in both directions.
In twenty twelve, underestimated Obama and this spill sally a much closer race than it ended up being against Smith Romney. It's tempting to say that again like Biden needs to be ahead by a lot more because the Poles will underestimate Trump again, But we just don't know that's the case, especially because I would bet good money that a lot of posters have made adjustments ince then.
This is why I wanted to have you on this podcast because it strikes me and you and I can both go into this right now, that there may be and again we don't know because we don't have algorithmic transparency and this is obviously not an algorithm, but we don't have the transparency for the numbers to see exactly how they're waiting these numbers to try and create the sort of this is an electorate that is very difficult to predict, right, And so the question is they're trying to,
yet again pull to explain an electorate that there is not a lot that you can't completely explain, right.
Yeah, this is the challenge every year. It's always easier in retrospect to see what the errors were, and I think a lot of posters are trying in good faith to figure it out and to get it right, to learn from previous mistakes. There's also a reputational risk for getting it wrong in the same direction a third time. So in twenty sixteen, it was okay, we underestimated the turnout or the Trump percentage of non college educated white voters.
In twenty twenty kind of underestimated the Republicans kind of coming home to Trump. We've made it a lot closer than the polls and anticipated as a Biden one, but it was he's supposed to win by a lot more.
And this time we don't really know.
I mean, no polster is going to nor should they reveal their secret sauce in terms of all, right, we're going to comperment with this, but we are seeing some weirdness, historical weirdness in the polls. We're seeing Trump winning a larger, historically large number of people of color in the polls, the largest in some cases since the Civil Rights Act
was passed, in which I find hard to believe. You never quite know, but that could be the artifact of them all changing their not all, but the way they're sampling, or a way to reaching people, or maybe they're trying something different, or maybe it's real.
I have my doubts, right, I have.
My doubts too, a lot of these. So let's talk about cross tabs for truth. A lot of these numbers look a little bit dicey. Explain to us like some of these sort of the things you've seen in the cross tabs. Besides this largest racial realignment since the voting right to that.
Yeah, So every month I'm behind for May, but every month I put together of higher quality national polls. I dig through and manually enter all the cross that bindings to see where the trends are releatant to twenty twenty and what holes are showing are going to be the biggest shifts again, we'll be, but what polls are capturing right now? So this kind of smooths out any one polster who's finding something super weird and also solves the
problem of looking at tiny sample sizes. This isn't a perfect way of doing this, but it is better than anything else that we have out there. So we have a lot of regular forecasts, right I'm like, like, here's the average of the polls. Here's real clear politics, here's five thirty eight. This is trying to go under the service. Okay,
so Biden is down from four years ago. Where is it happening among So every single month we're seeing black voters shifting away from Biden and towards Trump by twenty plus points compared to twenty twenty. We're still looking at like a you know, eighty twenty type margin, but it's above ninety ten in twenty twenty.
That's a huge shift.
And the polls right now are showing that Trump will get the highest share of black voters since before nineteen sixty four, so in a very.
Very very long time.
Based on why, there's a bunch of theories as to why this is the case, one of which is that this is real movement. This is based off of frustration with Biden, based off of not following through on promises, or impact of inflation or et cetera. But that doesn't really explain why it's afecting black voters more than let's say, Hispanic voters are non college educated white voters. I don't find that super convinced it could be part of it.
But there are also other theories too, right that there are just satisfaction with Biden is super high right now, and so black voters are just expressing their frustration. This is called expressive responding, where you're not really thinking about it as a binary election. You're kind of just like, I'm pissed at Biden, and you know what, I'm going to say, I'm undecided, or I'm going to say I vote for Trump, and.
Maybe you will, maybe you won't.
If we're using history as any guide, the base generally comes home. This is also weird election. My personal theory, the one I share with a few other polling nerds. It has to do and this might be getting a little in the weeds.
Please get in the weeds with us.
There are the ways of putting guardrails demographically. When you're sealing the poll right, you don't want to get too many white people, you don't want to get too many college educated people. And there are some people that are just easier to reach when you're polling colled educated folks, white folks, women, people who lean more democratic. And those are people as well, whether you're doing phone or online now, because there much more inter as savvy than they used
to be five ten years ago. So what happens is you put these guardrails up called quotas, make sure you're
not getting too many of one group. So you fill up the easy buckets first, right, you fill up white voters, you fill up seniors you feel up called it educated and women, and then you're left with Okay, at the end, we're scrambling to get black, Hispanic or Republican leaning voters, younger voters, people who are much much, much harder to reach, and so then you're kind of left with this weird group or non representative group of young conservative people of
color who are not representing population, but they're who you have left to reach, and so you get a couple of those to fill out your quotas. And then at the end, because you still don't have enough of them, because again, they're very very hard to reach, and it's very expensive to reach them, and you may not be able to hit your deadlines. If you're just keep trying to, you know, ram your head against the ball trying to
reach them, you upweight them. So what that means is you make them basically worth more than one of themselves in the actual final pool. Right, you wait, but the entire sample to be representative of whatever you're trying to go for. Let's say Red's registered voters or likely voters in a particular state. So not only are you getting people who aren't representative, you're making them more impactful than
they normally would be otherwise and you're down waiting. So basically early on you're getting all these like white seniors at college, which is maybe why you're seeing Biden holding up better among white voters and seniors and things like that, and while you see him slipping among young voters and people of color. The truth is it's probably somewhere in the middle of all these things. It's hard for me to believe based on that a rematch election in a
very very long time. But it's hard for me to see like these massive, massive swings in a rematch election where people, most normal people don't want to think or talk about this election. People are upset with their choices. I don't know most of the conversations I've had with people who aren't politically engaged, or just like Okay, I guess we're doing this, or don't even know who the
nominees are still in June. So in that case, you'd expect some movement on the margins, like yeah, okay, maybe Biden lou Is, you know, three or four percentage points among certain groups, gains, maybe some.
Back here or there.
But these twenty point swings, fifteen point swings would be, let's just say, unprecedented, especially when both candidates are such known quantities and very unpopular.
One of the things you said, which I thought was very interesting, I'm doing this annoying thing that people do where they talk about a tweet. It's a very annoying thing when people do it. To me, I think they're stupid. But you had a tweet that showed subthlet the effect of so much anxiety on the left that Biden is losing this saying that he should be winning by fifteen points, but he's not actually in a terrible place right now, is hey.
No, he's one, I mean historically normal pulling air away from winning fairly comfortably. But Trump's also was one pulling away from winning fairly comfortably too. But essentially we're looking at a I mean five thirty eight released their forecast today basically a coin flip, Biden as a fifty three percent chance of winning, Trump as forty seven, and that's
been tightening since the last couple of months. And they incorporate fundamentals like economics, consumer sentiment in addition to polling. You know, if you look at polls today, Trump is likely to win. But again, polls are not this far out, are not meant to be predictive of what's happening in November. Thought like, okay, this is again an imperfect snapshot, but the best toool we had, as you mentioned earlier, of
where the race is right now. But we also have these eyebrow race hitting shifts right and it's like, okay, which one of these are real? Are they canceling each other out? You know, is Biden doing as well among seniors as good polls are showing? Is that counteracting other stuff? So we don't really know.
And that was why I wanted to have you on because the other thing I wanted you to talk about, which I am struck by, is that in almost all of these polls you have down ticket Democrats, namely senators in swing states. And I'm thinking about Ohio here and share odd is a once in a lifetime politician. But also so he's running about ten points ahead of his competition. He's running like fifteen points ahead of Biden.
And your friends, like the NPR Maris pulled up tea out today that had him.
I think he was up five and.
Biden was down seven. And that's the first poll we've had there in a while. That's actually the neat good quality.
Yeah, this Biden down brought the rest of the ticket up for Democrats. See that in Pennsylvania, you see that in Wisconsin. Saw that Michigan is seems a little tighter in the center race. But I mean, you're seeing that in a lot of these polls. So make that make sense for me.
So I think there's two things going on.
There's a lot of races and what you're referring to in those other states, So like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Right, Arizona.
Ruben is running way ahead. Now I think Carrie Lake is her own problem.
Yeah, she the unique case. Yeah, so talk about Arizona first. So that's an open seat. Here's the cinema about running for re election Carry Lake versus Ruben Geego. So Carry Lake is running way behind Trump and Geago is running
a couple points ahead of Biden. That's a different situation because Carry Lake is very well known and not very well liked, and there's even been kind of whispers among Republican operatives that they might just triage that race, they might give up on her at some point, and that's too early to say, but the fact they're even talking about that in a state like Arizona is very telling.
But these other races in Nevada, in Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, you have the Democratic candidacity incumbent running out evenly with Biden a little bit more, maybe a point or two ahead on average, but the Republican is way behind Trump. So a lot of that might have to do with name recognition. They're like, I don't really know this person. I'm not going to necessarily so that they'll probably, you know, come home and vote the Republican We don't really know yet.
We don't really know if there's going to be we're going to see a big return to split ticket voting this year. It's been on the decline in recent cycles. We only have, I believe, two senators that represent states said the other party one in twenty twenty. That's Susan Collins and Maine and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin.
That's it.
The other ninety eight senators represent states that they're party won at the presidential level in twenty twenty. So it's spliticket voting is not a big thing. The poles are showing that it might be, particularly in Ohio, where I think Sharon Brown's winning like ten percent of Trump voters, has a much higher favorability rating. And then there's also John Tester in Montana running in a deep, deep red state but has shown some resiliency in the past, even
more so than Shah Brown. So they face uphill battles, particularly if split ticket voting does not increase. They need to win a bunch of Trump voters to have a chance. But what I'm seeing elsewhere is that it's not that Democrats are necessarily senate. Democrats are massively outperforming Biden. It's that Senate Republican candidates are massively underperforming Trump. I kind of expect a great convergence towards the end when people
start paying attention to these races a bit more. But how much that converges, Like does Biden's numbers go up or did the Senate Democrats numbers go down?
And that remains to be seen.
I've done some light covering of these Senate candidates and they are bad. Like you know, they tend to be a lot of rich people who can self fund and you know, may not be the best person for the candidate. There's a lot of carpetbagging going on. I'm thinking about Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania you have Dave McCormick, you have Eric Hovedy. In Wisconsin you have these rich white guys who you know, can sell fund but aren't necessarily even from the places they want to represent.
Right.
So in Montana you have Tim Sheehey grew up in Minnesota and so elsewhere, came back to Montana. As you mentioned, Dave McCormick's I still lives in Connecticut.
Oh no, Westbark, Connecticut. Yes, we love it.
Yeah, And running in Pennsylvania. I have Eric Hovdy in Wisconsin who was supposed to be campaigning in Wisconsin but instead was at the beach in the Beach in California where he I think spill whims Or has a house there. And even Sam Brown and Nevada ran for Congress in Texas. I believe this a couple of years ago.
I'm sorry, I love this so much so.
Their strategy Steam Days is the head of a seeing of recruit a lot of these candidates. Yeah, like you said, they want these self funding candidates. They think that a first time candidates for the most part, who don't have
like a legislative baggage, which is theoretically a plus. But they're also pretty untested as candidates, which has not gone well for downballot Republican candidates in twenty twenty and twenty twenty two, and they coughed up some pretty winnable races with some pretty undisciplined candidates.
I'll put it lately.
That money is supposed to go to Trump's legal fees. Noah, thank you so much for making this make sense a little bit. You know, I think that it's all we have, so we just have to make it fucking work. But we have to realize that it really is a blunt indicator.
Yeah, and I would say that we still have a long way to go. I know polls are frustrating and confusing, and I totally get that. I would not overly focus on polls until we get to Labor Day, just for everyone's mental sanity. I'll be following it closely, but you all don't have to. It's okay. Things will become much clear after the conventions.
Thank you, Thank Nally. Sarah Ellison is a reporter at the Washington Post. Welcome too Fast Politics, Sarah.
Thank you so much for having me.
So one of the things you've been writing about, which is one of the many things that keeps me up at night. I have a couple. It's a teared system of things that keep me up at night. But is Trump was found guilty and immediately pivoted to trying to tear down the legal system, one of the last great sort of norms in our very kind of shaky American democracy. Can you explain to us sort of what that looked like and what the consequences of it are?
Sure he didn't even wait for the verse. What we were watching during that entire trial is that it was. You know, for months, his advisors expected that he would be convicted by a New York jury, and they were hopeful that he would not be convicted, but just in case, he and his team waged an all out war against the judicial system before the verdict even came in, hoping to whatever that verdict was going to be, he was going to blood the political damage and position himself as
a martyr. And you saw that day after day, Trump attacking the judge, the judge's family, Trump attacking the gag order that the judge placed on him so he wouldn't intimidate witnesses in the case. But I think the thing that people really were struck by is that it wasn't just Trump. It was and it wasn't just Trump's surrogates, you know, the people that you normally see going on social media to repeat his attacks and amplify his attacks.
You saw a totally different branch of government. You saw members of Congress show up to attack again, not just the judge, but the jury system. Like Tommy Tuberville said, these so called Americans who were serving on the jury, right, and like, we don't have anything better than the jury of our peers, Like that's as good as it gets, Like that's all we can offer. And so you know, what we were struck by is that it's all politics.
It's all for Trump and his allies. There's no institution of our democracy that they are unafraid to attack, and these attacks on the judiciary, Like the judiciary is the most popular branch of government. It's something that people still have some faith in. And every academic we talked to said that this case felt a body blow to that trust. And so we're just sort of watching it degrade before our eyes.
So why is it?
A mean?
I want you're on this straight news side, so I don't want to make you give an opinion here, but I'm curious. It's sort of if you try to make it make sense to me. Why is it that when Trump goes after a branch of government like he's doing with the judiciary right now, but he has done with Congress and with our elections are free and fair elections. Why is it that that works? And it doesn't work with everyone, It only works with his people. But why
does it work with his people? And why is it why can nothing penetrate that?
I mean, one of the things. I just did a piece on the effort post January sixth, twenty twenty one, to keep Trump's voice off of social media, right, like, there is this effort across the board Twitter, Facebook, YouTube
after January sixth. The idea was that Trump's message needed to be curtailed because it caused violence right the IDAAE and violated you know, all these social media platforms had laid around with different standards and trust in safety teams and efforts to make their platforms quote unquote safer and more reliable, and then after January sixth, there was this across the board fear that Trump had used his platform to encourage violence, and that is a clear violation of
everybody's policies. So he was taken off of social media and it was like banning him from a twenty first century town square. And the idea was, this is going to protect people from these harmful messages. And what we looked at was that three years later that had been an abject failure because Trump's message was as strong as effort. More people believe that January sixth was a peaceful protest than they did immediately in the aftermath of that case.
And so Trump is a potent political force. His messages get out even though all he's doing is posting on true social And what we sort of dug into there was why is that This is a long way of answering your question, but why is that message so crucial for people to continue to get out there? It feels very obvious in some ways, but there are both political advantages to mimicking his messages. You see that with Elie Stephonic,
you see that with Jim Jordan. There's a tremendous amount you can get out of Donald Trump if you are a Republican trying to advance your career. There are also great financial benefits for people people who have spread his messages and created mini media empires out of doing that.
And that is you know, when Trump went to war with Fox News after the twenty twenty election, there was a whole outpouring of new conservative voices who were finding their way to make money off of election denialism and Donald Trump, and Steve Bannon told me for a story that I did recently that that's what the economy of the Internet relies on the Trumps of the world and the mini Trumps of the world to get that message out and to create clickbit content, to create viral content.
So there's a real financial benefit to doing that, and then there's just the community benefit of you're with Trump. And a very strong message that I think people genuinely believe is that the federal government has been weaponized against Donald Trump. In all of these cases, whether they're state cases or federal cases, are being kind of manipulated by Joe Biden. I mean, this is the message and being
weaponized against an opposition leader. And that is a strong message that Donald Trump has seeded, and he's done it with his allies, and people genuinely believe that. And now we're dealing Marco Rubio, who used to attack Trump pretty strongly in the twenty sixteen election, is sending a message to his followers on X that watching Donald Trump's trial was like watching a show trial in Cuba.
Right.
That was insane, right, I mean, you can call it say a lot of things about that case, and I know a lot of people about the hush money case and their different views on the strength of the case and whether it should have been brought, But it wasn't a show trial.
Right right?
Right?
No? No, I mean here's a question for you though, if you were looking at this sort of like, I mean, how much of Americans are in that information bubble? Right this? You know? I mean what seventy seven million, eighty million
Americans voted for Donald Trump? When you look at there's all sorts of polling that came out last week about how like if you read the newspaper, you're like eighty percent more likely you vote for Biden, right if you just read any newspaper, right except possibly the New York Post. So is it, Joss? This information bubble is a just tech companies giving us sort of this pableum that isn't actual verified news sources. I mean, is that where this where the sort of echo chamber is being built?
Or is there something I'm missing here? It's such a good question, and I've actually talked to a bunch of misinformation researchers about this, who say themselves that we have wildly over credited the power of social media.
Oh good, thank you. You know, I ask everyone this question and most people either like, don't answer it or tell me I'm dumb. So to hear someone actually like address this is like probably the best interview I've ever done. So explain to me why we're overestimating it because I love to hear it.
Yeah, I mean, this is like I shouldn't be answering because I only really have half the answer, but I was fine. It's brilliant researcher from Harvard. His name is Johailer, he has one I mean, he's just so well regarded in the world of online disinformation, and he has been studying it for a quarter of a century. And he said to me in a relatively brief interview, although I've read his book and was asking about it, he was the person who said, we have focused too much on
the impact of social media. And he's like, now I'm going to after a quarter of a century, I'm turning my research efforts into looking at the political economy of this country and the way that it has created. And he didn't use this term exactly, but I think it's such a relevant way for us to think about this. We talk about the supply of disinformation constantly and how to stem the supply of disinformation. We don't talk as much about the demand for it and how hotent that is.
And I think that, I mean, it's that's more than like, let's not go sit in anymore diners and talk to people about why they might believe conspirac theories. But I'm going to piece together a few interviews that I've done with different people about this, which is that during COVID, there was a time where people felt like they were being fed information that turned out to not be true later right like at the beginning of COVID, Anthony Fauchu
was saying, don't wear a mask. You don't need to wear a mask, and then the you know, the advice changed and people can find sort of real reasons in that moment to think that the authorities are telling you the truth, even though with such a fluid moment, people didn't really know what the truth was. Where did the virus come from?
What?
You know, the whole world was turned upside down, so that kind of put people in a frame of mind that you didn't know what to believe. And then on that year was just so nuts because then you had the election and you had the conspiracies about the election.
And I think during that period the notion of when I talk to people about who know way more than I do and have studied this, they say that that was sort of the stew that led us it was such a disruption in society about what people believed was true and what they could rely upon that now we're in this moment where the demand for answers is so great and the supply of like definitive answers are sort of they're scarcer than the demand, so people sort of
fill in the gaps in their own way. If that makes sense.
No, it actually does. This is like I have to tell you sometimes I have a question and I just can't fucking get anyone to answer it. And this idea of and one of the reasons why I love having a podcast is because I get to ask people questions that I need to answer to, and you know, different kinds of people, et cetera. But this idea that the information we needed was not available and so bad information filled the void makes so much sense.
Yeah, and I'll add one other like data point into this from again people whose job it is to study bad information and how it travels. And I think everybody understands this a lot better now. But we've we focused so much on like top down bad information, like what does the Russian government want to do? What does Iran want to do? What does China want to do? And
that's all there still. But what these researchers have told me is that there's a much because we've established this and there's now a narrative and it's like the government is weaponized, or you know, the government is weaponized against its enemies, or the government is lying to you about COVID, the election was stolen. Those are big, big narratives. And you can have any random person on Twitter can take a photograph of, you know, a ballot in a trash
can and say what is this? It looks like X is happening and then and that's like a bottom up effort as opposed to a top down effort. And you don't even need to want to be creating a different narrative, but that one data point of a random user on Twitter can get picked up and just spread around in a way that is sort of entirely divorced from the initial intent of that poster. But the idea being that, like, it's not just someone is feeding you a line of
a created narrative. It is that the narrative is there and you can bottom up contribute to that. It's the old thing of like I'm just asking questions, what is this ballot? Doing here on the street, and then like, boy, are there going to be you know, ten other people who are going to pick that up and have their own answer, And then Gateway Pundit is going to come in and write a story about it, and then that's a headline that then can be picked up and kind
of taken and done something else with. So these are I think it's it's people who study what we call dissem information and misinformation are moving away from those terms because they're totally ineffective. You can't ever convince anybody that they've fallen for a piece of bad information. It's just like a completely losing exercise, right, And it's also like it moves faster than you ever could try to tamp
it down. So we talked to secretaries of State's office who say, well, last time we tried to have a strong social media policy where we would like knock down these false rumors, they don't even try to do it anymore because it doesn't work. And so I think that we're kind of moving into I don't know, is this like two point zero bad information studies where people are really realizing there's no putting the toothpaste back in the bottle or whatever, like the election was stolen in twenty
twenty is a narrative that is out there. It doesn't matter how many court cases or how many Donald Trump appointed judges say that that wasn't the case. Like, it's there. And so the question is, now, what does society do with that information? And it all comes back to the original Donald Trump verdict story, which is that there are a lot of people. I mean, you can have that that is a fact that had happened. There was a guilty verdict thirty four counts, a jury of his peers.
And if you want to you know, if you do crimes in New York, you got to sit in front of a New York jury. If you do crimes in Mississippi, maybe they don't necessarily care. If you do crimes or Palm Beach. Maybe he'd get a better, more partisan jury
that would let him off in Palm Beach. But look, Hunter Biden just got found guilty, and he had a jury of his peers in the state of Delaware where his father is pretty much Elvis, and he got found guilty too, which means the law is the law for everyone and is a real win for our justice system, and we should all be celebrating it because this is what we want, is a blind justice system that looks set the facts and that does what it's supposed to do.
Yeah, I mean, your weight is very apt here, and it was, you know, I was talking to people before the Hunter verdict came down, obviously because it just happened. But the lesson there was exactly what you just said, which is that the justice system is not captured because the president's own son was just found guilty of felonies. So the justice system itself is sort of standing standing
up for democracy. And that was the sort of split headline that we had the day after Trump's hush money verdict was the justice system worked, and it's been really harmed by all of the attacks. And the vast majority of Republicans felt that that jury was corrupt and that the case was wrongly decided, and that is due to Donald Trump's very concerted effort to discredit that jury and that entire proceeding. But if you look at the facts, the justice system sort of did its job, and it
did its job again with Hunter Biden. And so it takes a long time to have these verdicts come out, but they do, and just to add one other thought, which is when you talk about you know, that's why Jack Smith brought his case in Florida, and he didn't even want to fight over the venue. He just went directly to Donald Trump's backyard to bring that case and.
It happened to work out very well for Donald Trump. Thank you so much, Sarah. Really appreciate you. Really great to have you. Thank you, thank you for having me.
It was a pleasure a moment.
Jesse Cannon by John Fest I got to tell you, after hearing these recordings of mister and Missus Alito, I don't want to hang out.
With them, Alito, no go. There were some recordings of Missus Alito, mister Alito and also Justice Roberts. They were done by a woman who that's sort of her thing. She does these tapes. I thought that they said pretty much what we thought they would say, but you know, it's still kind of striking. The woman who recorded her as a woman called Lauren windsor Missus Alito. I want a sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag next month.
So Missus Alito, she wants to let her freak flag fly and for that she is our moment of Buckray. 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.