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Yes. Would you say that the the jury's still out on this election? Yes, Tommy, I would. That's a really good point. I would say the jury's still out on this election as we were recording this on Monday.

Well, now it's Saturday, November seven. Now it's Saturday, November 7th, when people are listening. Hopefully the jury is not still out, but it could be. Tell me, what if it goes wrong or we're going to be out of jury because we're going to be. Yes, Lambretta to the face. More like a hung jury at this point.

At this point, it's likely I've slammed a lot of juror over the last few days need to meet juror wisky, dotcom slash, use the code love at ten and you'll get ten dollars off, as they say in Scotland. Sergeyevna, which is Gaelic for we're recording this before the election. What world do we live in when this comes out on Saturday? I hope it's a better one. I please, please let it be a better one.

So these guys sound crazy.

Well, to love it or leave it, it is Friday afternoon, and while the networks have not called it, we can say here at the Crooked Media Decision Couch HQ that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. Kamala Harris will be the next vice president of the United States and the first woman and first woman of color in that role in history. And Ivanka and Jared will never feel totally at ease in a New York City restaurant ever again.

Later in the show, we will be joined by Zeynep Tufekci and Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler. But first, you know her. You love her.

She requires no introduction.

Absolutely whatsoever. Alissa M. Monaco.

Love it. We did it. America did it. America did it. America did it. I wasn't sure on Tuesday. Let's get into it.

What a victory.

As I was going to sleep on Tuesday night, I have these two competing thoughts in my head, just being honest, which is on the one hand, I did feel this sense of grief, just the fact that it wasn't conclusive immediately all over, even though we knew that it would take time to count the votes, even though we knew that there would be this red mirage, even though we knew that we were polarized country, even though we knew we would win massively in the popular vote.

But then there was this other piece of me that felt like, wait a second, wait a second. How much of this is trauma? How much of this is fear? How much of this is it based on what we're seeing? I really thought about it right before I was going to sleep very, very late on Tuesday night, which is what reason do I have right now to be less hopeful in seeing these returns than I felt before the votes were cast.

And I really couldn't come up with a reason because everything that I had seen had told me that we were going to win in Pennsylvania, there were going to win in Michigan, we were going to win in Wisconsin. We were leading in Arizona. We had a shot in Nevada. We even maybe, maybe, maybe had a shot in Georgia. A lot of people sharing needles, which, as we have learned over the years, sharing needles is never good.

No. And so I went to bed hopeful on Tuesday night, even though I was a little bit browbeaten by reality. But you know what, though, Melissa? The point is what we fucking did it did it.

Did it because I'm taking a shot. You ready? Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. All right, all right, all right. Alcohol, you know, is the edible of of of of an earlier age, you know, in many ways it has been a real elixir this week as it is actually an elixir.

But on Tuesday night and I was like, you know what? I'm not going to get twisted because the coverage that's kind of the thing. Like after this is all over, maybe we should also start a cable news network where we cannot scare the shit out of the American people. But I decided I was just going to take a snooze. I took a snooze. I thought I'd wake back up in an hour.

I woke back up 5:00 in the morning and not a lot changed for like 72 hours until those mailings started showing the fox, those sweet, sweet ballots, those sweet, sweet pellets, those sweet, sweet ballads, the experience of going to bed really late, waking up exhausted, and there having been a few changes in the vote totals while you were sleeping, was really, really annoying. And it very much reminded me of 2008. Yes. When, like, I went to bed in my dorm room and I had the map open on my laptop that showed the Florida numbers.

And when I and I just said, I'm going to go to sleep and when I wake up, it's going to be better. Things are going to be better. It's going to be better. And then I woke up and it just wasn't better. It wasn't better.

In 2000, I was with my roommate Volpi, and we came home. I was working for John Kerry, came home. We had some cocktails, we made dinner. We watched the returns and then we got into bed. We fell asleep side by side. We woke up the next morning, were like, well, this went tits up. No, we fell asleep.

This. Yeah, that's it. So this one sits up. So, look, Joe Biden has urged patience and made it clear that he would declare victory with grace, humility and an earnest desire to unify the nation. But we have made no such promises. No, we have not.

On Monday, one day before the election, the White House fault itself in with a non scalable barrier, which honestly was a smart move. I'd like to see Biden become president with that in the way then then then Newsday. And little do we know it. It would be seventy two hours long. So it was the longest Tuesday in history. It was the march.

Twenty twenty of days as that one's a little esoteric. Think about that one. I was pretty good. I think everyone's going to get it.

Everyone's going to get it. The night unfolded a lot like twenty eighteen with Florida coming in early and making us feel the way land developers treated the Everglades drained in like shit. But I can take that history of land development in the precious precious Florida Everglades.

I was good. I bet you didn't even know that I had done commercial real estate investment when I was just a teeny tiny paralegal. I did.

Oh I did. I did asbestos. I did asbestos litigation when I was a when I was a and I was a temporary legal filling out the forms, filling out the forms.

I would sit in one. I was in a in a it was me and four other were three other temps in a very small room. No computer, no nothing, no phone, nothing, just a room with tables and a tiny little window in a a kind of vaguely decrepit building on Wall Street. And our job was to kind of correct the documents basically. You know, these are one of those firms that would just suck up claims like asbestos claims, like that's where I was.

And then we called it the parapet.

It was called the parapet because that's where the paralegals went in the pit.

Anyway, the election, the election. I had no idea that we shared such an ark.

But anyway, I was speaking of interminable processes of repetitive bureaucracy.

The vote counting has been ongoing counting. It became clearer and clearer as Wednesday unfolded that Joe Biden would slowly but surely make his way to the presidency, which is, of course, how Joe Biden makes his way anywhere.

We're allowed Dow is back up. I just want to make sure. I just wanted to make sure I think it's my Biden shirt on. All right, look, look, we're going to figure out the balance, all right?

We had his back. We will have his back as president, but we're going to let some of these jokes back in. All right. We're going get comfortable. Good, comfortable.

Oh, I feel good. I feel relieved. Yes, I feel relieved. There are a lot of jokes to be made.

We got to make them it's part of it. It's part of it. It's part of it. We can have fun now. So that's a part of his job. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Absolutely. We love Joe. We're going to do everything we can to help Joe succeed. And everyone makes some jokes. We're going make some, you know, everyone out to fight harder to help Joe succeed because it's getting the Senate's going to be really tough. It's going be a real slog. All right. We're going to be in his corner as well. We're going to have to do. I'm going to make some jokes.

Right. So, yes, we had spent months saying that it would seem bad at first that we all needed to be patient and then watch them count the mail ballots. But also we can know how something might feel. And then we can experience, like when you read a review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and then saw Indiana Jones in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, right? Definitely.

That's the would you would that have been your first go to for explaining the feeling difference?

It wouldn't have. It wouldn't have. I've never seen an Indiana Jones movie in my life. But let me just say, people can tell you that Sex in the City, too, is terrible. But you still might watch it several times to understand the exact points they were making.

I haven't thought about Sex in the City, too. So, look, a conversation for another day because we got we got a lot on our plates. A big day. This is a big day. There's so much I have been, I will say, on a roller coaster in terms of my understanding of the Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall dynamic. And I would say much like the pace of vote counting at first I really did think the votes were in the favor of Kim Cattrall in terms of the reality of that story.

But as more and more information has come in, as more and more data has been revealed, it turns out that that might have been a Cattrall mirage. And actually, it turns out all Marisa Cattrall Mirage. And it turns out that, in fact, that none of it is on HBO and that I.

Stu, please, please. The point of you talking.

Oh, man.

You clearly were not part of the distract yourself from the election results and tweet your favorite Sex and the City scene.

I played so many video games during this period of time, it was really unconscionable. Anyway, Wednesday morning, Trump said he planned to go to the Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes.

There exists no mechanism that allowed him to do that. And we're starting to get I don't know about you, but I'm starting to get the sense that he doesn't really understand how the government might work. Again, I'm going to get a sense of that.

Not in four years. Not in four years. Learn stuff that out.

We are also sick of talking about Donald Trump. I am sick of talking about Donald Trump. I am sick of him looming large over our culture. I'm sick of the analysis of his personality, a project that I have certainly taken part in many times. I get that. But man, just take a moment. The man will leave this job exactly as he came in. No human being in history has been given more opportunities to learn and grow and change and not taken.

I mean, the the American presidency, the access to information, the people you get to meet, the problems you get to solve, the incredible, precious time you have to use to help people to have gained nothing, even just the fun of the intelligence he has access to that he seems to take no interest in. He has gained no insight, no wisdom, nothing, nothing.

No empathy, no empathy, nothing. He gained absolutely no skills, nothing. He only lost.

He only lost. Only lost. He only lost the presidency.

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign said that it would request a recount in Wisconsin.

If you want to help out, you can go to go fund me dot com slash Jill Stein, recount scam to that's where you go to help Donald Trump pay for this recount. Then members of Trump's Facebook queue squad flocked to voting centers in swing states to intimidate election workers. Busy counting the ballots, chanting stop the vote, count where they were ahead and keep counting. Count every vote in the places they were behind. Look, guys, election workers are coming to where you work and telling you how to honk or shiny red nose and how to fit in that incredibly small car because you're clowns, you're a bunch of clowns.

They're clowns. They are.

And I mean, I guess, you know, it's like, what do you think about it? America really should get time off to vote because I think these people got time off to just honk their worries.

Her Facebook got a free time. Well, if it's important us, you make time.

Oh, it's what I hear. Look, as with all things Trump, it has been both very stupid and very dangerous, very silly, very concerning as the threat of violence did for some locations to close. And there have been several arrests across the country. Then as Wednesday turned to Thursday and Thursday turns to Friday, it happened. Biden took a slim lead in Georgia, a southern state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton won the White House and our hearts in 1992.

Meanwhile, no clear winner emerged in either of the Senate races in Georgia, meaning both contests in all likelihood will advance to a runoff on January 5th. I don't know about you, but I was just thinking to myself, unless I don't want this to end ever, I want this election to continue so we can really savor it. Is my ass off? Yeah, but how much more could my osbey off? Could be off a little bit more.

Turns out it could be off a little bit more.

I mean why would I why why have this deliciousness, anxiety, stress, attachment to CNN? Why, why would we want any of it to end so that we could finish a book?

I have been reading actually I've had a lot of two screen experience where I've been playing a video game while having CNN on my laptop blasting into my retinas for MSNBC. I have them both. And also you, if you want to see a frustrated Ronan Farrow, watch him deal with me when I am. I swear to you, watching both CNN and MSNBC at the same time here, just mentally switching my attention between both on the screen as both audio feeds are coming out.

That's a level I got, too.

That's a lot I would say in our house. The extreme was we needed to really understand, you know, what was happening across the country. So we did a lot of fox the last couple of days, did a lot of fox.

You know what's interesting? I have a lot of friends who have been doing that. They're actually watching FOX.

I don't as a recording this. They were calling shit. Why wouldn't we watch? Well, that was the best part, right?

They really actually that must have been so frustrating for Trump because his his little, you know, his fascist coup cosplay really did depend on Fox not kind of getting ahead of Trump.

And so they were so frustrated by the Arizona call and that Fox News vote counter man who I had not seen before was so cocky. He was such a cocky guy. He was like, if pigs could fly, Trump will win this state, you motherfuckers. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch pays me. And I think you lost Arizona and I'm not taking it back. And I don't care that no one else has called it. And I don't care that it's narrowing.

Now, deep down, I was I really think that they were crossing their fingers. I really think that call was pretty early. It tightened. It tightened pretty hard. And I don't care because you know what? Sometimes shit breaks for us. Once in a while, this godforsaken year, all this shit will break for us.

I just I had been watching Fox for so long. I was like, what's this count on CNN? I don't what are they not counting? I'm like, why is if if Fox did it, what the fuck is wrong with everybody?

It was amazing. And then I decided maybe Fox was the fantasy land I wanted to live in. And then I turned them on after the press conference and I was like, I jumped the shark.

I went, no, no, no. It's that that vote counting man was really an exception that proves the rule over there, you know, like, you know, like we stand by our call and then just crossing their fingers so fucking hard that they keep Arizona because it got tighter and tighter and tighter. And you know what? Again, I do not care. We're going to win Arizona. It's going to be closer than they thought should have called it whenever they called it.

Maybe not.

One thing for us, I'm cool with it again. Great. Fuck you, Fox. We needed it. We needed it. We needed it. It really helped. It really helped because it made it very silly. It gets us through the last couple of days. It really did. It did. It did. It was that. It was that was that was a jet pack. That was a jet pack. And we needed it because Trump made it very hard when Trump went to the podium, because when you're going to claim you should stop the vote, you got to win and got to be it got to be winning.

And if you're not winning is pretty stupid and you seem low energy.

And I like that, too.

I'm getting loose. I have to say, we recorded positive America. I'm going to let everybody in. I'm a little now tiny bit. We recorded parts of America and it was right after it was this morning. And I think it was still kind of hitting us. I've had a few. I've had some time. I've had some time to reflect. I'm getting loose. I'm getting excited. I'm getting excited.

Yeah, that's it, man. Come on. Look, I went out today and even my guys at the gas station were feeling upbeat.

And I was like, oh my God, I so judged you. You're like stoked for Biden and Carmela. And this just, you know, it's been a great day since the moment I left the house. To be honest, it has been a great day.

We also saw Biden take the lead in Pennsylvania thanks to the overwhelming support of Philadelphia and all the votes that gritty, personally dumped in the Delaware River. Now, obviously, it's a conversation we need to have about the losses in the Senate and the failure to expand our majority in the House.

And we will do that later because today we are feeling good.

There's plenty to talk about, plenty to talk about. Everyone needs to stop chirping. All the reports about the conversation of the Democratic caucus and how they're all pointing fingers at each other, why they lost seats, guess what? That's a whole fight from a whole other day. Yeah. Shut the fuck up. That's a Monday problem. That's a Monday that's. Stop yelling. Everyone stop yelling. It's a Monday problem. It's Friday. If then. Yeah.

That is the equivalent that is the political equivalent of Friday night after business hours, sending an email that says, hey, can we talk about this next week? It's like, don't you outsource your anxiety to me? So I'll put something for me to remember that I know we got problems in the house. I know we got problems in the Senate. I'm dealing with that Monday.

And you know what? Send yourself a reminder to send that at eight a.m. Monday morning. Don't send it Sunday night either. Yeah, that's bullshit, too.

That is bullshit. The Sunday nights bullshit. Monday business hours. Sunday nights. Bullshit. Don't give me the Sunday Scarry's.

No, fuck you. Absolutely not. So everyone stop talking. Just party.

Just have a fucking drink or whatever makes you feel good. If running makes you feel good, go run. Do something that makes you feel good and stop picking it apart right now. Yeah.

Yeah. If you want to take some magic mushrooms, which are I think legal in most of the country now, that's not true. I mean, go to Oregon and do whatever you want. Yeah. Go have a absolu. Yeah. Just you know, take some DayQuil, add some method OxyContin. Have a time, have a time. But can we just just be like look like where we this is democratic politics. There's always time for recrimination.

And again, if it's important to you, you make time. One final thought. We just also should say, like the past few days have obviously been deeply strange and anxiety producing. And I think a lot of people just want to understand what kind of posture they should take around these legal challenges. And I think one thing that the Biden camp is saying, I think one thing that we should keep in our minds is that it's our job to be confident and to remember that the process is working, that we recorded record turnout, record and turnout.

Counting those ballots will take time. The reason that they are mounting these challenges is that they know they are going to lose. And the lawsuits are meant not to win, but to sow doubt and to generate suspicion, to undermine Joe Biden, to create chaos. And that that will not work, as Justin Levitt, a law professor, said, which I think he said it so well, he said a lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee.

And that is what we are dealing with here is not great. Don't you love that?

That's good. Yeah, that's good. You might have to pin that one. Yeah.

These attacks won't work unless we let them work. In terms of undermining Joe Biden and trying to attack his mandate, Trump will be removed and over the next few days we will take some time to chill and then get back to work. So we did it. That's that's the thing. We did it.

But love it. Can I be a little corny for a minute, please? Little corny. Do it.

OK, so the one thing that you won't say, but I want to is that without the tools, the crooked built without vote save America, which gave millions of people the tools and the community to be the activists that they want it to be. I mean, one of the things I remember after 2016, I was at an immigration organizing activist meeting in Brooklyn, which is where most of them are.

And all of these actors and actresses, Uzo Aduba and Ilana Glazer, were there. And Alana said the biggest thing is people are just nervous because they don't know how to get involved. She's like, we all should just record videos of ourselves calling Congress to show people that we're nervous to do it. We don't know how to do it. And that is like the embodiment of what votes of America has done over the past, however many fucking years, thousand years it's been.

And so you should be proud. You know, I don't give compliments easy, but it's been really fucking important and got a lot done.

So.

Well, I got to give you got to give him a little trans coastal kiss. Thank you.

Thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that. I feel I will join you in being earnest and say, you know, when we started we were devastated by twenty sixteen and I was, I was really proud. I have just how about just how quickly John, Tommy and I decided we were going to try something but we didn't have a business plan. We didn't really know really anything about the podcasting business, about how to build a media company.

We didn't, but we knew we wanted to try and come. Obviously so proud of God Save America. I feel so grateful that, you know, John and Tommy decided to do this with me, that we were able to build this show, that you could be a part of it, had all these wonderful people, could be a part of it. But the fact that this podcast that we started because we felt like the conversation was broken, somehow managed to give us the chance to find these incredible people like Sarah Wick, who runs our company, Tonya Eliminator.

Oh, my God, runs Votes of America. And that that this this podcast, the success of this podcast, which we never could have predicted, gave us the resources and reach to then empower people like that to build a media company, a progressive media company, to build votes of America. Like that's the thing I'm proudest of, that we were able to harness. Yeah. Harness this thing of this political conversation that we just felt like we needed to have to allow us to empower these incredibly talented people to build this organization and like provide this connection for people so that all these people out there that want to.

To do something that wanted to be involved, that wanted to make a difference, but just needed that tiny bit of connection between their desire to help and the fear that they had, just that little bit of that little bit of ease, that little bit of kind of removal of friction that that afforded so many people, you know, you know, almost 300000 people adopting states, 15 million or so calls and texts, 27000 poll workers. And, you know, I think over a thousand lawyers signing up.

Forty two million or so more dollars raised for these campaigns across the country. Like, I feel incredibly proud that we were able to build something that gave all these people the opportunity to do that. And that that like Georgia, like I think fourteen hundred or so people registered their votes in America because people shared it, because people pushed it, which people knocked on doors, because people made phone calls. Right. People put it on social media. That's the margin.

You know, that's the margin all across the country. These little bits like really mattered. And because the election was so close, because it was so tight, we know look, I talked about this with Ben Wikler. We know that the phone calls people made in Wisconsin, that the activism in places like Madison and Milwaukee made the difference. We know in Georgia, Stacey Abrams, my God, what she built through activism. Oh, my God.

The difference.

We know that Arizona turning blue was a work of all these incredible local organizations that now Navajo organizations turning out the vote to help win in Arizona. Like you can find these stories all across the country and.

The reality that, like the Senate is going to be really hard, that we still have a chance, meaning that like the next year or two is not necessarily a moment of unified democratic government, that it's going to be more of a slog. Yeah, it's like in some sense heartbreaking, but it should be a reminder that, like, the shit matters and it's a slog and it's a fucking fight and like we need to stay in it. These problems that we have that so much of what led to this moment was the failure for us to understand just how much power we had and that we didn't fix it in one election.

We didn't fix it in one election. But like we are fixing it, we are winning. Like we can do this. We are fixing it. Also on this front, I know we're tired. I know we're exhausted. I know we need a break. I know we're sick of paying attention to cable news and Twitter and returns. That break is earned. But after you've taken a break, just no votes of America will be pivoting in the coming weeks to winning the Senate by winning the two runoffs in Georgia this January.

We are not done yet. You are not done yet. If you know anyone in Georgia who isn't registered, send them over to vote. Save America dot com register. And if you want to help both the campaigns, you can donate at Vote Save America dot com slash. Get Mitsch. There is more coming soon. Let's just say we want to make sure people can adopt Georgia. That's not let's just say that's that's telling you. We're going to adopt a state for Georgia.

That's what we're going to do. But that's coming. We're going to set it up. We haven't set it up yet. All right. It's going to take a minute. That's OK. That's part of it. But for now, celebrate and then let's get to work. And I and I also just want to say that the contribution that Aaron and I will have on Histeria is that we have for months been waiting, praying, hoping, doing our best so that we could live our dreams, which is holding all those motherfuckers accountable.

We're going to make sure Ivonka can never get a hair appointment, that Jarrad's never on a board.

We will follow them until they die.

We're not going to kill them. Don't get that out of what? Don't get twisted. Don't get to us. But we're going to make sure that there is no soft focus TV afternoon shows for these people.

We remember we're going to remember.

We are going to remember.

And now before we move on here, it is a montage of pundits saying the word dump due to get a pretty what should be a pretty big dump.

But again, I just want to say, guys, Donald Trump got a little benefit out of that last dump or massive dump.

So that means we could see a very big dump dump. LAURER nine o'clock East Coast time. We'll get in another dump around midnight tonight to Dump's today.

It was made at eleven twenty. There had been a huge dump, very big dump. You know, I have to look more closely after this dump. And so far the first dump here looks pretty good.

Yeah, that's part of it too. Olisa, that was awesome. I get it. I'm for it.

When we dump Iliza Mezger Monaco dump. What dump are you. Are you dumping me.

No, couldn't dare. Wouldn't dare.

I just want to say, OK, you know I worked with you at the White House, but I always you know, I told you this. I'll say it here, I'll say it here. What I was always terrified that you didn't want to be my friend. I told you that you did that I was afraid you didn't want to be my friend. I really was. And I have so loved that one great piece of these last four years.

Throw the fucking bullshit is that we got to make this place. We're like we got to we have to do tour shows together. You got to be honest all the time we get to have fun.

It's going to come back. It's going to come back. The shows are going to come back someday. You're going to be close to me where I'm going to tell you how good your hair looks. We're going to complement each other. Race.

Absolutely. I'm Skins.

Since the last time when we did that, did you see I gave myself a facial because I was coming.

I still have I still have the materials I need for the facial that you told me to get it. I will always remember the moment I saw your skin before those HBO shows.

My goodness. Yeah. My goodness. You know what? Our lives were ready.

I may be a gray haired hippie, but my fucking skin is like a thirty year old. Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, she's got her. Yeah. I don't know what the joke is. It's like hair went to Woodstock but the, the skin, the skin loves beats you know.

I was going to say the hair is Woodstock, the face is Madison Avenue.

That's got to could do that you think. Well we're obviously fuckin fried and very loose.

We're losing mezger monarchos love you are so proud of it to see when we come back then Wikler don't go anywhere.

There's more of love it or leave it coming up.

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I love it then, Wikler. I love it. I love it. You crafty son of a bitch.

I have followed by the reveal. There we go. Oh. Oh nice. Nice. Oh nice. Look gorgeous in the show. Here he is. He's the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, the man who helped save Wisconsin. He just shaved his head at the behest of Cory Booker in a bet he did not make.

That is very true. Cory Booker came on our staff call and announced to the team that I had committed to him the previous night to see if I had if Joe Biden won. And after that, I didn't really have any choice in the matter.

Then first of all, welcome Ben Wikler. Welcome back to the show Returning Champion. I haven't we haven't talked the last time you were on this show. We were in a big live event in Wisconsin. A lot has happened since. But congratulations on the work you have done to help deliver Wisconsin. What an incredible achievement. As we sit here now, the Kyron on CNN says Biden on the brink of winning. Donald Trump just gave a kind of a fascist win.

I guess you would call it a kind of I should be school president. And actually, all of you are terrible. And I don't even like going to the school, but we're on the verge. Hopefully, by the time this comes out Saturday, we'll have a more definitive answer. First of all, then talk to us about how you helped organize Wisconsin to deliver this victory.

This victory is the victory of thousands and thousands of people who have been working in the trenches for decades, and especially for the last miserable decade. I often say that the trouble started in Wisconsin in 2010. It arrived in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker six years before Donald Trump ran for president. And the damage that it's possible for this kind of stuff to do is visible in Wisconsin. They smashed organized labor. They ripped up voter registration rolls. They defunded universities and funded prisons massively the thing after thing after thing, and they rigged the rules to make it impossible for Democrats to win, they thought, and they won in twenty sixteen.

And there was this question of has Wisconsin become a red state? And the reason why it's not is that so many people decided that they were going to keep fighting back, even though it seemed like everything was lost. I was living I grew up in Wisconsin. I was involved in politics as a kid and in high school. And then I moved away and I worked across the country and watched as the uprising against Scott Walker took place, watched as he crushed the opposition and as people kept picking themselves back up and fighting him.

In twenty eighteen, I got to knock on doors for Tony Evans. His campaign was at the event the night that he won the governorship against Scott Walker. It looked like he had lost until like midnight when they opened the absentee ballots in Milwaukee. And then he won by one point one percentage points. And I have to tell you, nothing prepared Wisconsin better for this election night than that election night.

So one thing that has been I think is saving. Grace, that's, I think, unsung right now is we have a Democratic governor in Wisconsin, we have a Democratic governor in Pennsylvania, a Democratic attorney general, that's been a huge relief in the sense that we've had people at the top whose core value is democracy, of making sure every vote is counted and not giving in to the kind of right wing paranoia and misinformation. Can you talk a little bit about how much of a difference is made in Wisconsin to have people who believe in democracy in positions of power during this incredibly contentious period?

Yes.

So the machinery of the elections in Wisconsin is in the hands of public servants who think that what voters choose to determine what the outcome is. We have a Wisconsin elections commission with a professional staff. They've been working around the clock since the spring election, which was a disaster, and helping cities set up extra polling places, get people to get mark out, coronavirus social distancing lines. They've been helping get extra absentee ballot counting machines. We have mayors in cities that are just determined to try to help everyone vote, frankly, in Republican heavy cities, as well as Democratic held cities and statewide.

Our governor thinks the job of the state is to make democracy function as opposed to like shut out voters who one party the Republican Party doesn't want. And that meant that for all the incredible fear and anxiety that everyone had, this was a really smooth election in Wisconsin.

Yeah, and that came after there was some concern there's a wake up call out of Wisconsin because some of the challenges early on in the pandemic and running the primary. Yeah.

So in the spring Supreme Court election, twenty three thousand ballots were thrown out because for one reason or another, they didn't meet these incredibly Byzantine rules that the Republicans had put in place to make the system voter hostile. And as we went to the fall, the elections commission created a way to track ballots that were going to be rejected. And clerks started reaching out to people whose ballots didn't have a signature on the envelope or whatever the problem was. And we at the Democratic Party, as well as the Republican Party, could do this, could download the list of people with those problems and reach out to them.

So that absentee ballot rejection rate is close to zero. It's super, super low. There's tons of people who voted early and there's tons of people who voted on Election Day because they knew that the safeguards were in place and precincts were open because so many young people were working the polls. Unlike the spring, all these pieces came together here because you actually had a government that was committed to making democracy work. And by the barest of margins, it was zero point six percentage points that Biden and Harris won Wisconsin.

But turnout shot up on both sides and that the people actually got to decide who the next president should be.

Four years ago, we saw a really devastating loss. We saw a Senate race that I think to this day is sort of like being kind of almost like outside of the narrative because it was a bit confusing. Like, why did Feingold lose to what happened here? And as you mentioned at the top, you know, Wisconsin was a place where a lot of this sort of anti-democratic, kind of scorched earth, sort of these tactics were pioneered, not pioneered.

They've been around a long time, but really exploited it and put into use by Scott Walker and the Republicans. Can you talk a little bit about the lessons from kind of trying to dismantle that operation and what you were able to do in this campaign to make sure, as you said, that voters didn't just vote, but that they were educated about how to vote to make sure those votes were counted?

The big shift from twenty sixteen to now is that in twenty sixteen, the whole organizing operation was set up starting in August. And although there was lots of advertising work in the Senate race, the Clinton campaign didn't start running ads until October twenty eighth the last week of the election. And there was this assumption that Wisconsin was a safe state. In the spring of twenty seventeen, my predecessor chair started building an Obama style neighborhood team based organizing operation, ran it all the way through the governor's race in the fall, and we swept every statewide race in twenty eighteen.

And then I was elected chair the next year and we supercharge this whole thing. We had a bigger team in the spring Supreme Court election this year than we had in the governor and Senate races in twenty eighteen. And that team knocked down almost twice as many doors as the presidential had two years before that. It was vastly bigger and we use the spring election as a rehearsal for the fall. And we partnered with Stacey Abrams and verified her organization to build a voter protection operation starting in January.

And what that meant was that we totally integrated this huge field organizing program with voter protection so that if someone had a problem with voting, the organizer would call the voter protection team and they would reach out to that person with one hundred percent follow up rate. And that helped all these people figure out how to deal with these barriers. Republicans had thrown up. And we got a lot right in the spring. But if it had been close, we would have lost because of these Republican rules.

But that experience taught us how to do it for the fall. And as we went into the final stretch here, you know, we had some big six nights a week to recruit poll workers and poll observers alongside this constant virtual phone making to actually talk to both. Directly alongside the follow up teams for absentee ballot tour, alongside text bankers, alongside at the end, people talking on college campuses and like driving soundtrack's around cities like every single piece. And it all fit together to help people learn about rules that were changing in real time.

And as a result, the ballots, like the US Supreme Court ruled a week out from our election that absentee ballots had to arrive by Election Day, unlike the script they could arrive at.

Unbelievable and unbelievable. And we just use that as a kind of like giant alarm system to tell everyone and deliver your ballot. And by Election Day, there was no flood of ballots coming in the mail. People had gotten the message and they were hand delivering them. That shift in response to this partisan U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the ability to turn on a dime allowed us to win.

Look, there's going to be a lot of conversations about polls, about what happened in the Senate. But fundamentally, can you talk a little bit, given how close this was of how important some of the phone banking, the volunteering, like in an election like this, how much of a difference did those acts for people in the state, for people out of state? How much of a difference did it make?

If you were sitting right now made calls to voters in Wisconsin, you were at the heart of the reason why Donald Trump is not going to get four more years, because the direct contact with voters, we could see the behavior of people that our volunteers talk to versus people who did not talk to our volunteers. We can we could actually see in the math that this was more than the margin of victory. This is a classic field margin. And I will tell you, we hit exactly our targets in terms of getting our voters out.

The Republicans spiked their turnout in a way that no pollster had captured. Our numbers were built to withstand a huge surprise and we got exactly that surprise. But our program worked exactly as it was intended to. And the Republicans, Trump energized a whole bunch of people that no pollster had discovered and think every piece of that work, every piece of work by a volunteer allowed us to reach this level that was higher than the Republicans giant juggernaut barrage things, drooling with their horrible like machine could could reach.

We were and it's a machine to machine. It is the truth. Drooling venomous cyborg wolf machine. Wow.

Various guys in various machine.

And we were we were out of its reach. It was so. Yeah. And the jump was powered by the volunteers who are listening to love it or leave it at this very moment. It was everything that we could do. All of it mattered. Everything mattered. It all added up to just enough. And that is how we won.

Then I also just want to say you won't say it, but I'll tell you one other reason. This incredible victory was possible. All the organizers, everybody turned out to vote, everybody who donated, everybody who helped. But watching you organize Wisconsin has been an extraordinary thing. And one thing I think a lot of people are saying when they see the success we've had in Wisconsin is not just how do we replicate the success, but how do we replicate Ben Wikler, everybody had votes in America, Tommy, Wisconsin adoptee's.

Everyone is so grateful to you for all the work that you did. And I hope that we can figure out how to harness what you did. Maybe you got to put a binder together, you know, when you get some sleep, your little plan. All right. But about how to be like that, thank you so much for all your work. And I hope that at a certain point soon you'll get some sleep, get some rest and then start focusing on twenty twenty two.

All right. It's right around the corner. Let me say twenty, twenty two. So today was his birthday. Today is literally the birthday of Grover Evers. Tony Evers put his whole re-election campaign on hold and spent this year fundraising and supporting like legislative candidates and supporting the party so that we could do all this work across the state. He has been he's an unsung champion in this fight, and he is up in a year when Republicans are counting on a backlash and we're going to re-elect him and we're going to stop Ron Johnson, America's worst senator.

I that was one last question. I forgot that I wanted to ask you. We've got Ron Johnson. He is under the radar, one of the absolute bottom feeding worst human beings in the United States Senate. We've got to get him out. All right.

You're going to do it. We're going to do it. We the big we we we all of us are going to do it. That guy should not be in the US Senate. He will not be in the US Senate. We are going to defy history and bring a blue wave. And a Democratic president midterm in Wisconsin in twenty twenty two. Ben Wikler, good to see you.

Congrats. This is amazing. We fucking did it. We fucking got rid of his fucking person that we just don't like. Terrible president. That's terrible.

President, here's the thing I've been thinking about. You look at these countries that we're democracies and are not democracies now, and there's these like dark forces, this horrible kind of spirit that amasses and like for Erdogan's fans, you know, and like all this kind of stuff. And we came so close to having that over the country and we just pulled the wheel and.

When background, I'll go even further, actually, I'll go even further, which is to say it is rare. I think the fact that this was close actually tells us that those forces had become more entrenched than even we realized and we managed to pull ourselves back from the brink. I think we forget even when we weren't complacent, I think we lulled ourselves into believing that the pandemic and the chaos and the economic disaster and the mismanagement and the unfitness would be enough to swamp these right wing fascist forces, these anti-democratic forces.

But it turns out their entrenchment is deep and rooted and we have a lot of work to do. So I think it's more than just we prevented it from taking hold. I think we uprooted it at a key moment when it was about to become unstoppable. So I think everyone I think because it has been so close has been, I think, on edge. I hope once we get the final answer and we feel good about it, everyone takes a moment to appreciate just how big of an accomplishment this was.

Yes. And then get some sleep and then get some fucking sleep. Very excited. A lot of work still to do. We should probably just start now. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. When we come back, I talked to Zeynep Tufekci about polls modeling and misinformation.

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She is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of Twitter and Teargassed the Power and Fragility of Network Protest and writer of the newsletter Inside. Please welcome back, Zeynep Tufekci. It's good to see you.

Thank you for inviting me again. So I have a couple of things I want to cover with you.

You are. You know, look, I just also want to be clear. You know, you've gotten some great press lately, some great press. I just wanted to be well known that I was a Zeynep Tufekci fan before it was cool. I listen to your early albums. I was here first and I just think I deserve some credit for that.

And I just I wanted to say and now here I'm just smiling because I'm going to blame you for whatever I get really wrong. Next time they'll be completely your fault. I'll just be like John, it's his fault. So I want to talk about misinformation right now as votes are being counted.

I want to talk about models and I want to talk about covid. Let's start with with what we're seeing today. So as we're recording this, it is Thursday afternoon. We are watching vote totals inching towards their conclusion in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. As we do that, we're seeing a lot of misinformation being spread bottom up on Twitter and social media and top down from Donald Trump and his allies. How do you think the media is doing right now?

The political press generally in responding to both press conferences where wild assertions are made by Trump surrogates and the kind of noise online.

So I think we're going through something really interesting right now. Traditional media is just kind of reporting in a sensible way. And what can you do when the president. Is saying all these things, but what's interesting to me is watching Fox News and Facebook both kind of take some level of steps against his messaging. Right. I think the Fox News one is really significant. They called Arizona early and they're kind of resisting his messaging. And Facebook is shutting down some of the groups that have been bubbling up disputing the vote count and everything.

So we have a natural experiment almost. We're going to see what happens when misinformation doesn't have the outlets putting up with it or amplifying it. Right. Without Fox News and without Facebook groups, it's quite possible that this just might fizzle out, that he will keep tweeting and Twitter will put some labels on it and he'll say stuff and he'll have a press conference saying how unfair it was, but without sort of the oxygen. Yeah, social media and Fox in combination could have provided.

But very strikingly, both are kind of not providing, you know, you can't rule out single incidents, but I think it's just going to fizzle out. And he'll complain about it for the longest time. And then he'll launch his own TV show or TV network and talk about the glorious 2016 election for forever.

So I think that's like this is an interesting case of when there is misinformation attempts, but not cooperation by the megaphones. Yeah, no, it is. Well, I would draw a distinction, right.

Because it is true that the Fox News side has certainly been pleasantly responsible. And in fact, the Trump campaign has been furious at them for calling Arizona. And while it does look like at this moment, Joe Biden is on track to winning Pennsylvania, you know, at Fox News, fingers are crossed that that call turns out to be right. But it's probably just between you and me. It probably was like a little bit premature for them to call it.

I don't mind.

But what I was going to say is it does seem like there's a distinction between what the opinion people can muster and what Trump can muster, which is sort of these many little protests that have been popping up at polling places, kind of the most activated victims of right wing misinformation versus like larger purchase of these concepts among mainstream Republicans. You know, for example, Republicans in Pennsylvania have rejected the idea of awarding the Electoral College to Donald Trump because the election was stolen.

So, like, how do you think about this? Because one thing I know you've talked about a lot is there's a difference between ideas spreading broadly and the damage that can be done when a small group of people take hold of a dangerous idea. Right. Like we have people banging on the doors at polling places. That's not a majority. That's not effective politically, but it is happening.

It is happening. But it is also sort of see, again, it's like a natural experiment what happens to Trump without the enablers. And I almost feel like the Republican leadership is almost happy to see the end of him because they got a great election result as far as they're concerned, except for the presidency. Right. They haven't lost the Senate. They've made gains in the House. They won a lot of state legislatures. I'm just being honest on what it looks like if, you know, you're Mitch McConnell right now.

And the one problem they have is the president, while able to mobilize an interesting for them, coalition is a little too easy on the Twitter finger and is too unstable. So they kind of get Trump isms benefits electorally without necessarily having Trump for the next few years. And they have the Supreme Court kind of firmly in their place. So it's kind of interesting. I feel like despite all the noisemaking, the enablers have decided that's kind of it. And of course, they're not going to say anything to the president.

He's going to keep kind of making these noises. But leading Republican senators are going to come out and say, too bad, so sad. They're not going to come out and say this was illegitimate. They're going to be like, OK, we got to we're in a good place. We're going to do better in the midterms. And they're just plan their twenty, twenty four. That's my sense of it. And we'll just see.

We'll see. Now, there's another topic that I wanted to talk about with you, because you wrote a piece about models, the 538 model and these other models that put a percentage on the odds of an outcome in the election. I love this topic. I am very excited. I find these models. I actually am not critical of them existing. I understand why somebody would find them interesting. And I don't begrudge the people that make these models who rarely make assertions as to what they mean.

They're sort of taken for a ride by the general public. But it's not as though Nate Silver is making grand assertions as to what his model means. But can you talk a little bit about what your criticism is of these percentage based? Models, let me just say this, when the models first came onto the scene as probability models in 2012, I was a big fan. I even have an article saying all the pundits are wrong. Nate Silver is great.

Let's model because it is a better way to try to get some sense of the Electoral College as a forecast compared to just looking at state polls one by one and just looking at the polling averages because the Electoral College has, you know, so weird. The thing we have in this country, it is what it is, because what it was replacing, I hoped and I was wrong about was the pundits reading tea leaves from the number of lawn signs.

And I thought, you know what, this is just they're just trying to create this sort of narrative tension. And I'm like, you're going to write the great American novel, go write the great American novel, write like the punditry likes a narrative driven story because, of course, those are more attractive and the underdog and the turning point and the October surprise. Right. You know, the those are fun for a story. But I thought, you know what?

If we kind of get that false uncertainty out of the way when it looks like somebody kind of overwhelmingly winning and the polls are showing, then we can just focus instead on electoral substance. What's at stake? What's the policy? What should we do? Of course, fast forward. That's not at all what happened. What happened is the models just got incorporated and eaten up by the horse race coverage. So instead of reading the tea leaves from the lawn signs, now we're reading the tea leaves on whether the model moved from like 89 percent chance to 91 percent chance, which so that was problem number one, is that it just became subsumed and part of the prediction complex.

And that was problem number one. Problem number two is that this is not a good prediction complex to begin with because presidential races occur every four years and they occur under a rapidly changing terrain. Right. Like who knew when the models use like 12, 13 previous elections, usually because that's where you have modern polling in the primary era. And if you just have 12, 13 instances of something, you can't really model that well, especially if some of your instances are, say, from 1980 or 1984, where we had no Facebook.

Right. Like Houghton's reply. So we don't really know. Third, the polls, which are the data that go into these models, are increasingly unreliable because the response rate is terrible. We can't get to people like in the 1990s, we would get 30, 40 percent response rate, which wasn't great. We were already worried about it. The social science world was like, this is too low. Now we're down to six percent, three percent plus pollsters are seen as the cultural enemy by people who are more likely to be on the Trump side and who have mistrust of these pollsters.

So in this kind of thing where you have, you know, terrible response rates and you have all these unknown unknowns, what polls do these days is they use weights, which means you take what data you have and you try to find standards for the people you think you're missing. Right. So you think you're missing the low trust Trump voter and you go find another person that looks like what you think that low trust Trump voter looks like, which is somebody maybe with less education, white guy.

And then you extrapolate from that. I mean, by the time you're done with it, you've put so many sort of adjustments on where your data is. It's not really a random poll in a recognizable way. It kind of depends on whether you got the weights right, which you have no idea, because once again, you're trying to model people that you don't know what they're doing. Plus, well, that's the whole point, right?

I mean, but I think that's the whole point. How are you creating the weights when the whole reason you're put in a position to require weighting is you can't get enough people on the phone to understand the makeup of the electorate? If you understood the makeup of the electorate and you had good standards, like if you were just missing some women randomly, you could put other women in their place thinking they'll be like that. But the people you're missing are not missing randomly.

Right. So that doesn't allow for fixing that. And plus, on top of all these problems, they don't tell us their weights. But given how they're both systematically wrong, like the polls in 2016 and 2020, they're systematically wrong, but kind of similar to each other. I'm betting there's a lot of what I would call Verdie. Right. And herding is when everybody looks at each other and says, this is what I think the results should be, just all the pollsters looking at each other and kind of trying to guess what the other one is doing.

So what you have is a mixture of unreliable data. Potentially groupthink, trying to model a rare event that you have no way of fine tuning your model because it's too rare and this is my biggest complaint, is that the way these things are interpreted, it means that a lot of people see these big numbers, 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent. And in the end, the big models we had, like the 538 and economists, I think they were like 80, 90, 90 percent for one in like 94, 96 percent for the other the last two days.

People cannot but get a sense of certainty from such a big overwhelming probability number.

And then they change how they behave. They may turn up, they may not turn up, they may make decisions. They may split their ticket. They may do all sorts of things based on what that prediction feels like to them. That was my complaint. It's not that I don't like modeling when we can do modeling, it's just that in this particular case, it's not doing us a favor. Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

So this problem of the model of behavior influencing behavior applies to polls as well. Right. And the models will struggle if the polls are wrong. Right. The models are based on public polling. If there's a big error in the polls, the models will be wrong. First of all, even, you know, look, as we're recording this, it is we are on track for Joe Biden to become president by winning the blue wall, potentially, plus Arizona and Georgia.

I'm quite sure that a lot of people who I think take out their anger on Nate Silver. We'll hear from Nate Silver, who will say we predicted an 89 percent chance that Joe Biden will be the president and Joe Biden is going to be the president. A lot of what our model predicted is what took place. But a friend of mine texted me and he said, I can't believe the model is wrong again. But I responded and said is no, it's worse than that.

The model isn't wrong. It actually can't be wrong. It philosophically offers no prediction. It can't be right. Correct. Can't be wrong. Forget it. On a philosophical level, the model is predicting outcomes interior to the model. It is offering a mathematical prediction based on numbers from the world as to what would happen if the world were the model. But the world is not the model. And so when we're talking about what these models offer, I just think I'm like a philosophical level.

It is not offering a percentage about anything in the actual world because what what does that even mean?

Just on a like a pure, like epistemological basis? What does it mean?

So these models are counterfactuals of if this was the distribution of the polls and if this is the polling error, we know and if we ran lots of simulations, this is 90 percent of the time Biden would win and 10 percent of the time, you know, Trump would win, which, of course, as you say, cannot be wrong. And the one good news for those where if you were like if this was a sports game and if you were betting.

Right, right. That's perfectly fine use of trying to model, you know, the outcome of sports games for the purposes of betting. But if you can't evaluate if this is good or bad, it goes back to the question, why are we doing this? Like, what is the particular public sphere purpose of modeling these elections? And more importantly, what is the purpose of paying so much attention to these models before the election? So if there was, you know, because the polling data is there and it's going to be there, if you just had the polling data and some people just ran some models anyway, fine.

But the point is, we can kind of treat them as these unreliable things that do not incorporate many important variables are not possible to kind of validate because of the rareness.

So anything could happen and therefore, like, don't give me numbers, like don't give me 90 percent, don't give me 60 percent, don't give me numbers. Because the numbers are implying kind of almost like a scientific understanding. I realize what the numbers represent. You know, you run your simulations. Yeah. But as we've been discussing, there's so much in it that they cannot account for and there's no reason to think they're simulations, have good data or are good models.

You know, we just don't know.

You know, you've made this point. You know, these models say things like eighty nine point two percent. Right. Like that level of precision is obviously impossible. They go back and they poll polls from, you know, the Gallup polls from whatever the 1930s just to have it in there. But, of course, then they say, well, let's make sure we're clear that this is uncertain. So let's make sure the tails are fat so that we can't get a ninety five ninety nine percent chance because then we'll look really bad if we're wrong.

Forget being off by a percentage. I find it hard to actually find meaning in a percentage at all. Like I don't what. Eighty nine percent of what.

I can't really distinguish a model like this when it says say twenty percent versus forty percent. Right. I kind of look at it and I'm like, is there really a meaningful distinction. But forty percent is kind of almost saying even. Right. Because it's saying four out of. Ten versus six out of ten, this is almost like a coin toss, so if I don't even have that kind of confidence in this model, like why are we constantly refreshing?

And what I think it has become is a way to channel anxiety. Right. People are understandably anxious about the outcome of the election. And if you want to soothe your anxiety and if your candidate looks like it's winning and you just kind of refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh, and also this kind of interest in scientism, let me say models are great. They have their uses. But what we're doing with election predictions is not really very sort of grounded in science because like you're doing weather models, you have thousands of weather stations, data every hour way to fine tune your model every day like we that's fine.

That's not what we're doing here. And in both cases, in both 2016 and 2020, what I saw was that a lot of liberals were worried about Trump. And in both cases they looked to 538 or New York Times. Yeah. To tell them it was OK that their candidate was going to win. And I kind of want to say that the comfort you seek isn't there. It's the side that thinks of itself as liking science. So you go to the things that feel like science.

But I'm kind of like medicine isn't medicine because it smells like menthol. Right. There's something to the fact that that needs to be more vigorous. And, you know, with this kind of polling and with this kind of a rare event, this is the best you can do. But it's not really giving you the kind of precision and certainty people are seeking to soothe their anxiety and like just all too much focus. And plus, as we saw in 2016, there are a lot of cases where Comey says he sent that letter out thinking Hillary Clinton was going to be president.

We have reporting that President Obama thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. So there were certain actions he didn't take about misinformation and meddling. We know from reporting that Facebook thought, you know what, we have a problem, but let's just do this after the election because they thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. And how many people listen to someone like Edward Snowden who tweeted with a screenshot of New York Times showing ninety three percent. Ninety seven percent chance of Clinton winning something like that, saying there's never been a safe election to vote third party.

You know how many people did that thinking Hillary Clinton is a shoo in. So the model forecast itself is not an observer. It's a player in how people behave. So if I'm thinking like the main polls are all wrong, they show Senator Collins losing, she's comfortably winning. So there are two options here. Option one, the polls are all wrong and given garbage polling this year, that's quite possible. Option number two is that the polls were right, but people looked at the forecasts and saw, you know what, it's going to be a Democratic Senate and a Biden presidency.

So we might as well return her to what they thought would be a minority caucus and instead have entrench the Republican Senate race completely possible for various kinds of ticket splitting to happen, because people do make strategic calculations depending on who they think is going to win. And if they there's more certainty than attached to the feeling these models and many people are not making the correct strategic calculations. I'm not saying people shouldn't make strategic calculations, but I think the models should recognize their players in people's voting calculations.

Yeah.

And again, we don't know exactly. I think I think it's hard right now especially to point to any one influence over the models. But I do think, like, this is not a criticism of having those models or even taking interest in those models, though I do think to your point about their percentages, they would be less interesting to people if they were constantly saying the odds were somewhere between 55 and 45 percent. Right. If they were a little more cautious, which there's no reason to believe, they couldn't create a model that was more cautious based on the information that we have.

But it does seem that the problem is the outsized role they've played in the way people think about politics. That, to me, is the proper thing wrong with having a model. And I think actually, you know, Nate Silver is incredibly sophisticated and how he thinks about polls and how he thinks about the role of the model. But it's that it has played this outsized role. Well, something needs to change for sure.

Zeynep Tufekci, good to see you. Good to see you, too. Thanks, Zeynep Tufekci, for joining us. When we come back, let's end on a high note.

Don't go anywhere. There's more of love it or leave it coming up.

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OK, so on Friday morning we decided to ask everybody to leave us voicemails about how you were feeling now that we knew Biden had one because we needed this week. Here it is your high note. These were awesome.

Hey, love its current. And I just woke up this morning hearing that Biden is up in Pennsylvania and the is pretty much all but locked up. I'm extremely relieved that Biden will likely be the next president because as a trained person, I won't have to worry about the president attacking my rights on a daily basis. You know, I'm a little bummed about the Senate, but I'm energized and I'm looking forward to doing everything I can to get us off.

And we're not elected on January 5th.

We'll see how it goes. Hi, my name is Adrian and I am from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And this morning I'm just feeling completely emotionally overwhelmed. I did not really anticipate I would feel knowing that a woman is been elected to the White House. And it's just a testament to the organizers and the people who believe that we deserve better. And I'm so grateful that things are looking up and I'm feeling determined to fight harder than ever to get those last two Senate seats in Georgia.

So, you know, in 20/20 fashion, the hard work is never done. But this is an incredible day to be alive and for America.

Hey, lovely limitlessness. It's me, C.J. again. And hey, John, miss you, girl. I am so happy, so happy that they have been defeated. I cannot wait to see if Martha and her annoyingly pressed hair in Jersey and his walking stick looking. So is Placita characterless face to get the fuck out of my motherfucking house where I actually pay taxes for. Oh my goodness. It's just so sweet. It's almost saccharin. I am so happy.

I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. Hey, I love it.

Jake from Chicago. I'm feeling pretty elated this morning. Not only me, but our oldest daughter, who wants to be president someday, is very excited. Our middle child, she is super excited, too, because she is very clear on who she wanted to win this election. My wife has been counting down votes as they come in as an amateur, Steve Kornacki, and it's just really cool. And we were really excited. And thank you to everybody in the cricket media extended universe for all the work you did.

God love ya. I love it.

This is Corey from New York. I am feeling a sense of joy that I didn't quite realize I had left my body four years ago. And it's rapidly returning. And I feel like there's a piece that I haven't felt in a long time. And I feel so incredibly grateful for the organizers and the activist. Got to this point, D.C. area, I'm scared for getting so many people registered to vote and engaged in the process and I just feel so, so relieved.

Thank you for all that you and the crooked media family are doing. I have done up until this point. A lot of work to be done, but I'm excited to do it together.

Hey, John, it's Noah calling from Portland, Oregon. I wanted to say how good I am feeling this Friday morning. And despite all the ups and downs this week, I am so proud of the state of Arizona. I was in Maricopa County all last weekend and on Election Day working as a poll observer and the amount of enthusiasm and turnout so inspiring and just giving me advice throughout throughout the Election Day process and seeing that this morning, Congressional District seven, which is where I was at, just dropped a bunch of Biden votes on Trump's margins, has been giving me life.

So if thanks for all you do, but I love it.

This is McKenna from Arizona, and I am feeling just so much relief and happiness for the first time this year, I think. And I know that the work has been done. I know that we still have so much more to do. But I was at the women's march in 2016 and seeing that come full circle into our first woman. BP is very, very exciting to me and I am hopeful for the future. Thank you for all you've done to help.

And I'll see you on the other side. Thank you so much, everybody who called in.

If you want to leave us a message about something that gave you hope, you can call us at three two three five two one nine four five five. There were so many this week. There were far more than we could ever hope to use. But thank you so much for sending them in. They were great. Also, let me just shout out, obviously, fan favorites, Colin and C.J., always lovely to hear voices. Thank you. Alissa M.

Monaco, Ben Wikler and Zeynep Tufekci and everyone who called in.

There are 59 days until the Georgia Senate runoffs go to vote Save America dot com to help. In the meantime, though, please take a few days off.

Take a moment to celebrate in relief and success.

I mean, have a great weekend. Love it or leave it is a crooked media production, it is written and produced by me, Jon Lovett, Alyssa Gutierrez, Lee Eisenberg are head writer and the person whose gender reveal party started the fire, Travis Helwig, Jocelyn Kaufman, Pallavi Gungahlin and Peter Miller are the writers are assistant producer is Sidney Rafil. Lance is our editor and Kyle Segment is our sound engineer. Our theme song is written and performed by Shirker, thanks to our designers Jessie McClain and Jamie Skil for creating and running all of our visuals, which you can't see because this is a podcast.

And to our digital producers, Naar Melkonian and Milo Kim for filming and editing video each week so you can.