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Welcome to Pottsy of America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm John Lovett. I'm Tommy Vietor. I'm Dan Pfeiffer on today's show. The gang is all here to talk about the best news we've had to discuss on this podcast. Donald Trump has been defeated and Joe Biden will be the forty sixth president of the United States. Kamala Harris will be our next vice president, the first woman to hold the office, as well as the first black woman and the first Indian American.

This all became apparent early this morning when Biden's vote count passed trumps in Pennsylvania and Georgia and later when Biden's lead grew after more ballots were counted in Arizona and Nevada, mathematically sealing off Trump's path to the presidency. When all is said and done, Biden will likely have three hundred and six electoral votes and the second largest popular vote margin since the nineteen ninety six presidential election.

Overall reactions, thoughts, feelings, tears of joy so overwhelming. It's overwhelming. I keep thinking about Joe Biden. Look, nobody nobody deserves to be president, but Joe Biden has been trying to achieve this job for several decades now. And when you think about how much that period of time has humbled him, when you think about all the personal tragedy that he's gone through with this family and more recently with Bo's passing, I just found myself this morning waking up and thinking about what it must be like for him to have achieved this moment, the sort of bittersweet nature of it, the journey that he's been on, the fact that his his core decency and kindness as a human being is seemingly what got him elected.

It's just it's it's a lot to process. We've all been dreaming of this moment for four years. I literally can't believe it happened. And when this sentimental part is done, I'd like to do some score settling. So just put a button in this.

Dan, what do you think?

What's what's your thought? It's hard to believe it's happened like we have we've waited for this for so long. You know, people all around the country have worked for this for so long. People started organizing the day after Trump won in 2016. And the fact that it is here and there's just so much to think about, like Tom is exactly right. I thought about how Joe Biden feels about this, the fact that his son, Beau, as he was dying, talked to Joe Biden about running for president and what that means.

I thought about all the people who have been so afraid about what Trump would do to them over all these years and the idea that there might be some reprieve from that. It's just as it is a truly overwhelming thing. Like normally we do these podcasts, like I look at the outline and I'll make some notes about things I would say, and I just would be happy. Like, that's just this is this is a huge, gigantic thing. We were at a pivot point in this country and we made the right choice against all of the odds.

And it's just fucking great.

Yeah. That's why I took no notes to Dan. It's not the hangover.

It's I didn't either. Look, Will, I'll have more formed thoughts summit next week.

We'll have smarter points to make, I'm sure will be more articulate. But for today, this pot is just going to be whatever jumps into our heads. Yeah, I am.

I also just I think this will be very sentimental. I'm emotional. I am having trouble talking. And I think it's. You know. I remember when we started. Talking about this four years ago and the fears that we had and the concerns that we had about just how much damage someone like Donald Trump could do, whether our institutions were up for it, whether people were up for it, whether cynicism would take hold, whether we'd be able to mount enough of a response, a concerted response over the years.

You know, we this felt like a stress test for democracy every single day.

It was a new threat, a new a new assault on our institutions, a new bit of misinformation, a new sign that Republicans would capitulate. And through it all, people showed up at protests. They showed up to vote. They showed up in massive numbers here. They organized and they volunteered. And, you know, the threat against our institutions, the threat of the damage that could do, the threat that Donald Trump could do to our culture, they were all very, very real.

And the fact that we can say here now that we were able to defeat this incumbent, that we did it with the most votes ever cast in history is such an incredible achievement. It's an incredible achievement. And I think and I think it took a few days for that to sink in, in part because of how the votes were counted, in part because Republicans went to such great lengths to make counting those votes so hard. But I hope everybody allows it to sink in today that this was an extraordinary achievement.

We managed in the face of encroaching authoritarianism, approaching fascism to beat it back with the power of democracy. There's a lot of work to do. There's a lot of the problems that Donald Trump took advantage of that remain. There's two elections in Georgia we'll have to fight. But I hope everybody takes the time to feel incredibly grateful and proud and thankful for the fact that we were able to do this together because it's it didn't it was harder than we thought and we won.

Yeah, I mean, we've all been on campaigns where campaign staffers at heart, so of course, I've thought about how happy I was for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and their families and all their campaign staff and organizers and volunteers, especially since they all had to run a campaign from their houses.

They're not all they're probably not all together right now, which is really tough.

And then I also thought, like, this has been a different campaign because it's been a much bigger campaign and that at least half the country was involved in this campaign.

We were all part of the Biden campaign at one point because this was such an important election and democracy was on the line and love it. You know, I was thinking exactly about what you just said when we first did this. My biggest fear was that, you know, Donald Trump wins the presidency and people give up on politics, you know, and they think this isn't worth it. We can't we can't fix this. It's beyond fixing. And there was a lot of things that happened over the last four years that I worried would make people even more cynical about politics and people kept fighting.

The people who listen to this podcast kept fighting millions of people across the country, people who organized, people who volunteered.

They worked so hard and they just kept believing. And in the days and weeks before this election, what I worried about I worried about Trump winning. I worried about the policy consequences of Trump winning. What do you do to our institutions? All that stuff. But I just thought about all the like just all the people who stepped up and took a chance and what would happen if he won and what that would do to them, what that would do to their belief about our ability to actually change this country and and defend democracy.

And so it is a it is a joy. It's also like a relief. I've been saying to people like I feel like for the last year, the last four years, we've all been like on a plane that's like making a crash landing.

And the pilot's like, OK, we've got this, we're going to be OK. We're foaming the runway. Don't worry. Like, we're going to make it. But it still doesn't feel great even towards the end, even like the last couple of days. It's like I think we're there, but we're not quite there yet. I guess we're still not quite there yet. But we're close.

And it is the most twenty, twenty way for this to have played itself out, because in it, in a normal world, in a normal year, with a normal election, they would have we would have had some disappointment when Florida wasn't going our way or North Carolina wasn't going our way. But they would have quickly called Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona by late. They would call the election late in the night. Biden would go ahead and Georgia would be even more excited.

But instead, it's just this slow rolling process over several days where you just can't have like we have to do something that's a long process and we have to suffer through it in isolation. Right. As opposed to all being together with, you know, all of our friends and family and the Biden staff being together and being some giant event at the Chase Center in Wilmington, four for Biden's words, none of that. But in the end, the same thing happens.

Donald Trump loses, Joe Biden wins, and we get the opportunity to begin undoing all of this damage and starting to put things right in this country. But just going to take a ton of work. But at least we have this. This was table stakes. We have any chance to do any of that. We had to win this.

That was the feeling that I had to. That as we went into the final day of the election, we talked about it before, what it would look like if Donald Trump won, we tried to be really to make sure people weren't complacent, no matter what poll said. But I remember I felt going into the final days, like whatever happens this election, we can take on every single challenge that comes up out of it. We don't win the Senate.

We can win that fight. We got a better run of runoffs in Georgia. We can we can fight that fight there. These are these are fights that we know how to fight. We can we can tackle anything as long as we win the White House, as long as we win the White House, we have a fucking chance. And, you know, John said this about not feeling not feeling like it's a victory, feeling like it's a relief.

I do think that's right. I do think that that's how it feels because we went through something really tragic and really awful. And it's and we're going to be going through it for a long time.

You know, we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't gloss over like what we like the pain and suffering that was inflicted on so many people in this country because of this presidency.

You know, when you're when your house is on fire, you don't stop in the doorway on your way out and turn around and say, wow, I can't believe what we just went through. You're in panic. You're in crisis. You get out, you get out. You make sure everybody is OK. You make sure that you got the dog in the cat and that everybody's everybody's OK. And then you catch your breath and you take a second and then you realize what happened.

So I think we're just at the beginning of kind of unpacking this. That's all.

It's fun to get to the finish line and realize that that so many of the heroes of this story are people we got to meet and spend time with along the way, like all those organizers out in Iowa who were maybe working for different campaigns, who ended up on the Biden campaign and like literally delivered precincts and counties for Joe Biden. The reason he won people like Latasha Brown, who is on the HBO show in October of twenty eighteen, who is like organizing in Georgia, was absolutely critical to getting to this result.

Stacey Abrams, someone we got to know. Well, the the positive America world raised millions of dollars for Ferrofluid Action.

Her organization like Ben Wikler, like there's just so many people I shouldn't have listed people because now I'm going to forget people with so many heroes who just, like, worked their asses off in ways big and small in their own lives and made this possible. It's a story about sustained activism.

Miss Stacey is sort of the avatar for the American people in this, which is she is someone who, after Trump won, took this giant risk as a black woman to run statewide in Georgia, organized this is her ass off and then has that stolen from her because our institutions failed. And it would have been so easy for her to just go do something else, to give up, to wait for another race on the right. And she got up off the mat the next day and started organizing everywhere.

And because she did that, Joe Biden is going to win Georgia and we're going to have a chance to take the Senate with those Senate races. It's that's exactly what like who she is and what she did is just symbolizes everything that got us to this point where we can defeat Donald Trump.

It has just been an unprecedented alliance and revival of grassroots democracy from people pouring into airports to protest the Muslim ban to the women's march, to people going to the border about family separation, to the students who started the march for our lives and the Sunrise Movement and Black Lives Matter in the streets. And the organizer, I mean, it's just there's so much that's happened over the last four years that it's just beyond traditional politics and campaigns, that it goes to the heart of organizing in this country.

And so that's a long list of people as you start to tell me that we that we have to think that we can't even begin to think in this one podcast that are that are responsible for for today.

Can I just also add that Florida. It's not you. It's me. It was really it was really more of a summer thing.

I just think that it's time for us to move on and see other swing states. I'm sick of your shit. I'm sick of the way your stupid. So, no, no, you know, we got to we we're going to talk after this, but I need you to remind you of one important fact, which is in twenty twenty two, I know you're going to say Marco fucking Rubio is up for re-election.

And if we could take one thing that we could go work on, we have to take him down.

Don't be the good angel. Be the devil today. I want to be an asshole. No, no.

You know what? I am offering you vengeance. OK, I'll take vengeance. I'll take vengeance. Thank you. Yeah.

I thought so many times over the last couple of days about saying this about Florida. And then I thought about all of our friends in Florida who work in politics. And then I thought about Marco Rubio and I was like, OK, I move to Georgia.

I just want to and I want to just remember, just as long as we're on the subject of Marco Rubio, because you brought it up, I just want to point out that Marco Rubio, who still does not believe Donald Trump should be allowed to have control over nuclear weapons, continues to be his position decided in the final moments of this campaign to outright embrace Donald Trump's, you know, authoritarian and violent tendencies by praising people for trying to run a fucking bus off the road.

Marco Rubio, you are fully exposed. We saw you hiding for four years. We know why you were hiding. We will. We'll find you. We'll find you.

That's all. Politically, I want to talk about Trump. Want to talk about down ballot races, talk about what's next. But let's start with Joe Biden's win. How did he do it? What's his coalition look like? And how did the outcome compare with our expectations?

Dan, once you start, he won by generating a massive amount of turnout. This is he throws a gigantic blue wave here. It was also met by a red wave, but there's a giant wave of turnout. He turned out Democratic base, massive African-American turnout in all across the country. And he was able to get support from independents, some moderate Republicans and a lot of the voters who supported third party candidates that he was able to do that because he had a broadly appealing message that was also motivating.

And also the party stuck together, like at no point that I can remember in my life, whether it was Bernie Sanders or obviously or everyone else knew that Donald Trump is an existential threat to this country. Joe Biden, even if you didn't agree with them on everything, was the right person be present at the time and they worked their asses off for it. And it's something I think the entire party should be proud of. Yeah.

I also just want to add one thing that to which is I think if the votes were counted in the order that they received, what we would be saying right now as of this recording is that Joe Biden rebuilt the blue wall, which was was, in hindsight, more of a blue divider of the blue, a blue picket fence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like those dividers in gyms, you know that I always have a door for assemblies, but and Georgia and Arizona. And we would be talking about the fact that Joe Biden managed to expand the map. Pennsylvania, you know, we take this thing of counting votes and turn it into a story because it's a we're prone to drama because it's interesting, because it's how the news is covered and not the fault of people who cover it.

This is how the information is given out. And we're all on fever in a fever pitch to find out what happened. But the answer is revealed. That is not you know, Joe Biden doesn't take the lead. What what happens is the lead that was always, always there is is revealed. The Joe Biden won everywhere and all over at once. We're just finding out slowly and not in the right order because the Republicans in the state of Pennsylvania set out to make it both wrong to count ballots before the vote and wrong to count ballots after.

Yeah, I mean, look, stipulate here there is a lot we don't know about who voted for which candidate and why from a demographic perspective, because exit polls are usually bad and not very informative after an election, specifically after this election when there was so much voting by mail versus voting in person.

So there's a lot of people who will delve into this over the coming weeks and months. We should wait until we get sort of better data to make to draw any conclusions. I realized that's not stopping Twitter because that's Twitter.

But what we can what we can determine is we can look at, you know, sort of county results and states and which way they flipped. And, you know, this was in many ways a continuation of the twenty eighteen map. We flipped Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona statewide, like we did in twenty eighteen. This time we added Georgia, which we came close to doing in twenty eighteen. The the major difference was Democrats turned out in a huge way in twenty eighteen and in twenty twenty because Trump was on the ballot.

Republicans also met our turnout. And so in all those states it was a little closer and some of those states it was a little closer. And we had trouble in some of the House races that were sort of on the fringe of the coalition in twenty eighteen. But that's basically happened. We saw, again, suburbs, cities and suburbs became even. Bluer rural America and the exurbs became redder, and that was we're still a very divided country as we were in twenty sixteen, as we were in twenty eighteen, as we are again in twenty twenty.

But fortunately we were able to win because as much as Republicans turned out their base and then some, we met that turnout with enough of our own.

I do think we need to also. I think we actually failed to internalize something after twenty eighteen we did win in a wave but I think in places like Texas and elsewhere, I think some of the some of the places where it was very close, I don't think we ever fully countenance just how much of a turnout machine the Republicans had produced. We've talked about this before, but Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz, worst personality, you know, in a tough category in the Senate, managed to turn out millions of people.

Better hit his. No, but Ted Cruz did better than expected. So I think we need to really kind of unpack this Republican turnout machine and accept it as part of our challenges in the next few years. That's all. John, listen, I agree with you that we shouldn't take our cues from Twitter, but something I saw on Twitter that was interesting was Tom Bonnier of Target. Smart pointed out that that's real data. That's real. And we were getting smoked when it comes to voter registration during the pandemic.

And then after that, George Floyd Black Lives Matter demonstrations, there was a huge spike in voter registration. So I do think that's a that's a piece of the story. But it does totally cut against months and months of mainstream media narrative about how that was going to drive voters away somehow from the Democratic Party. And it was just interesting. One other question that may be kind of unique to this election, I'm just curious what you guys think. It's just Republicans kept knocking on doors and and Democrats didn't do it as much because of the pandemic, because we were responsible and didn't resume until later.

I wonder how much that made a difference. I do, too.

And I think I think we don't know enough yet. I would love to have a bunch of people do research into that. I have I have no idea. I'm trying to be very careful in drawing conclusions at this stage about the election. I think there'll be plenty of time. And I think it's somewhat problematic that there's you see a lot of fights and debates already based on information that we just don't know is real yet.

There's there'll be tons of time to confirm your Pryors tons of time. Yeah.

And there's just like a lot of confusing information in the facts we do have, which is vote totals to date. You know, when you look at polling.

Right. Like, why would it at all be possible? The polls would be mostly right in Minnesota and then very off in Wisconsin, a state that is very demographically similar in most cases, Biden outran down ballot Democrats and Trump underperformed down ballot Republicans. But that's not true across every state either. And there are third party candidates at the Senate level that mess that up a little bit. The Maine Senate race is mind boggling on about one hundred different levels and has to be unpacked.

So we should look at the exit polls. We should not draw big conclusions. We're already having a debate in the House about whether we were too progressive or not progressive enough. And we just don't know the answer to all the things. And the truth is probably it's going to be different in different be different answers to different situations and candidate specific issues and turn out specific issues related to how votes are counted and cast in that situation. So we do have take a little bit of a deep breath before we do the deep dive analysis of what worked and what didn't for us.

And right now we can just celebrate, be happy because Joe Biden's been exposed United States well.

And I do want everyone to know who might be looking at the results still and thinking, God, it was still too close, like it was still too close.

We were a polarized country, closely divided before Donald Trump ever stepped onto the scene.

And we will be after that is the unfortunate reality of American politics right now. And there's a million reasons why that we can get into. But when all is said and done, three hundred and six electoral votes is a lot of electoral votes. And the popular vote margin, again, like I said at the beginning, is going to be larger than any popular vote margin since 1996. The biggest popular vote margin going to be Barack Obama in 2008.

This will probably be number two between 1996 and now, twenty two thousand for 2012. Twenty sixteen like this is kind of as big as it gets.

And I know we all think, well, it's Donald Trump. He should have caused some break in the system where suddenly there was like a 60 40 majority or so.

It's just that's not going to happen and it's probably not going to happen without Donald Trump on the ballot.

Well, I do think it's it's worth pointing out we all recognize that Donald Trump was a symptom of a set of problems. That's what we said from the very beginning. Problems in the economy, problems in politics, problems in the media, problem in our culture. Those problems were resolved over the last four years. They are still right over. They are still right there. And so I do think, like we we should, I think, be sad to see that someone like Donald Trump could still get so close to holding on to power.

That should be something that motivates us. That should be something that challenges us to to think about ways we can attack some of these problems in our politics, these deeper cultural problems and rot in our politics. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be proud, incredibly proud of the achievement of removing.

I think the other thing the other take away from this election, though, is we were viewing this through the prism of the Electoral College, which we should, because that's how you actually win the presidency and where we had success and where we did not in the Electoral College matters for how we win in twenty, twenty four. But if you're looking at this holistically about how the country responded, it is worth, I think just pointing out that the takeaway from this election is that we are a center left country with a center right political system.

If we just this was just a straight popular vote election, this would be a massive repudiation of Donald Trump and everything he stands for. But it's not.

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Let's talk about Donald Trump. He is, as we all expected, refusing to concede at this moment. We're recording this at eleven, thirty a.m. on Friday, Pacific Time.

He has family, his biggest Republican sycophants and his mega media goons are spreading conspiracies that the election has been stolen.

Not true. That ballots have been cast illegally. Absolutely not true. They have been filing lawsuit after lawsuit, most of which have been laughed out of court.

Some of the crazier assholes you're Steve Bannon's your Alex Jones is your Newt Gingrich's have tried to incite violence and called for the imprisonment of various government officials, election officials, poll workers, everything you'd expect, Steve Bannon, for rebels in beheading two of them.

Actually, he did. He called for two beheadings. Dr. Fauci and the head of the FBI call for them to be beheaded. So, again, not ISIS, Steve Bannon. Yep, got him got him suspended from Twitter, got his his video taken down from YouTube and by the way, he's also still under federal indictment and his lawyers quit, his lawyers quit her lawyers with lawyers.

We don't want to work for you anymore. The beheading thing was the final straw for us this much. Should there have been other straws, perhaps? What do they call that? Vanilla Ice. So Trump.

Trump, we haven't heard from you today, but he gave quite a press conference yesterday.

It was both sort of insane and trying to undermine the integrity of the election and like dark and authoritarian and sad and pathetic and low energy at the same time.

And then we're not going to play a clip from that because fuck that guy. But here's here's a clip of Jake Tapper on CNN right after Trump finished his press conference.

What a sad night for the United States of America to hear their president say that, to falsely accuse people of trying to steal the election, to try to attack democracy that way with this feast of falsehoods, lie after lie after lie about the election being stolen. No evidence for what he's saying, just smears about the integrity of vote counting in state after state.

When he wins a state, it's legitimate.

When he loses, it's because the vote is being stolen from him. It's not true. It's ugly. It's frankly pathetic. The president, for example, he assailed vote by mail, why he asked why or the vote by mail ballots so overwhelmingly in favor of Joe Biden. We all know the answer. It's because the president told his supporters not to vote by mail, so Democrats did it overwhelmingly and his supporters turned out in droves on Election Day.

Look, President Trump has always been transparent about the smears and lies and strategies of falsehoods. We knew he was going to do this. We knew he was going to claim votes by mail.

We're not real, but he's wrong. It's a lie. He's lying about the election. He's smearing the American people. He's smearing people who are working at polls. And it's a disgrace. When we knew we knew that the president was not going to lose graciously if he if he lost. But but frankly, watching him feel like this is just it's just pathetic.

So we are right now in a moment where and this hopefully will just be temporary. The networks have not called the race officially for Joe Biden. Donald Trump and his minions are out there peddling as much disinformation as possible to try to sow doubt about the results, because that's what they do, because they're losing. How serious is this?

What do we do about this in the days and weeks to come, Tommy?

I mean, listen, I think you should take every effort to steal an election seriously, but that doesn't mean that it's particularly feasible. I mean, what they're talking about, seemingly, is contesting allegations that might produce Joe Biden's win at the margins in Pennsylvania. They've got that Judicial Watch people suggesting that they have video or someone who's going to say they were backdated envelopes of ballots at the post office in Philly or something like that. I mean, good luck doing that to fifty thousand sixty thousand seventy thousand ballots or whatever the margin is.

So, like, I don't know, I'm not going to take it that seriously. I just want to say that our our dear friend Ben LaBolt that we all worked with on the 2008 campaign and in the White House one time he got a really whiny, obnoxious email from a reporter and he replied with just an image of a mime just crying in agony, just an agonized mime. And when I was watching Donald Trump yesterday, all I could think about was Ben's inbox in that very sad mime, because it was the most pathetic bullshit I have ever seen.

And I guess I'm just not going to sweat this legal bullshit too much. Dan, what's your what's your take? I agree with tell me.

I'm not worried about. Yeah. Don't plots. We can stop worrying about everything.

I guess the reality is I'm not I am not super worried about the Donald Trump actually stealing the election. What is really going on here is an effort to delegitimize the Biden presidency, to suggest that he stole it. And somebody in the same way that ultimately that was is at the heart of birthers. Right. Was to say that Barack Obama may have won all of these votes. And that's pretty clear. But he never should have been president because his presidency was based on a lie.

And so that's what they're doing. And I do think it's important for us to try to step out of our shoes as people who think about politics all the time with all politics and think about in the context of people who don't like. I was talking to my mother in law called last night, and she was incredibly concerned that Biden wasn't going to win because she's looking at the screen and Joe Biden is behind in Pennsylvania. He's behind in Georgia. The margin in Arizona is getting narrower.

And if you're not if you're not someone who is super steeped in politics and you're not on Twitter, because if we're on Twitter and we're seeing Jon Ralston tell us that Nevada is fine and we're seeing joke like Dave Wasserman go through and explain how the trajectory that Biden's on, but the television networks are being, in their minds, super responsible and saying and leaving out, you know, they're sort of they're kind of explaining the math, but they're not really saying that this is almost certainly going in this one direction because they don't want to call the race before they are, quote unquote, allowed to do that.

And so I do think there are a lot of people who probably woke up this morning quite confused that now everyone is saying Joe Biden's going to be the next president. And I so I do think that there is this information vacuum that is being filled potentially with misinformation that's going to change the the outcome of this election, but will have implications for American politics going forward.

And what's the best way to fight that? Because I think that the I totally agree with that is, you know, I've had we've all had a million texts from everyone, like, is he winning? Is it going to be OK? What's happening? Even people who are pretty engaged in politics and follow this pretty closely. And look, it is particularly confusing this year because so many people voted by mail. And so everyone knows the reason that the mail ballots in many states, Pennsylvania, specifically Wisconsin and Michigan, were not counted before the day of the election, even though they arrived the day before the election or weeks before the election, is because Republican legislatures in those states said, no, you cannot count the ballots.

Until Election Day, because they did that in order to then sew doubts about the results of the election while the ballots were counted later, that is what has happened.

Yeah, I do think I think we should separate two things, though, like I do agree that there is confusion about, because I think some of the major networks are being responsible, but ultimately, like, that's OK. Right. Because those networks will call it for Joe Biden. I think we've had a little bit of an experiment between, you know, the Fox News News site has been largely responsible, right? They called Arizona pretty early. The Fox News primetime has been ridiculous.

As always. Sean Hannity wants to do a redo in Pennsylvania. But I do think, you know, John, you said that we're polarized. That's, of course, true. But the news environment isn't polarized in the sense that there are these kind of two opposing sides. There is a vast firmament of kind of center and center left news organizations, mainstream organizations that are reporting responsibly. And then there is this right wing echo chamber from Facebook to the Fox News opinion side, often the Fox News News side that creates this alternate universe.

Now, in this case, we have been, I think, in a slightly better position because Fox News has behaved more like CNN than it has behaved like Fox Business that has really protected us. But what we see right is like my hope. My hope in this is that there may be the confusion people have will be resolved when the major networks call it for Joe Biden. And hopefully the Trump misinformation not backed up enough by mainstream outlets will mean that the kind of the fever swamp of conspiracy theories will be kind of contained.

That can still be dangerous, right? People are showing up and banging on the doors of vote counting places, but that's a really small group compared to the damage that can be done if what Trump is doing is embraced by a larger segment of Republican the Republican media apparatus.

Yeah, and I think what everyone needs to know when you get asked by friends and family about this, like Joe Biden is going to win enough more than enough votes to be the next president.

United States, when every single vote is counted. That is a mathematical certainty right now. And like you were saying, Tommy, like even some of these lawsuits from the Trump campaign, even if they were successful, they would shave votes off at the margins.

Joe Biden's margins in these states, while they initially appeared close because the votes were not counted yet, we're going to be are going to be big enough to avoid except maybe in Georgia, possibly in Wisconsin to avoid any kind of recount.

And like you said, Dan, last episode, like ninety nine percent of recounts don't change the vote, especially when we're talking about 10, 20 thousand vote leads in Pennsylvania alone. He could have one hundred thousand vote lead. Right. And so, like, we're going to count the votes. They're going to be counted by nonpartisan election officials and poll workers. And the winner of the votes in states that add up to 270 electoral votes is going to be the next president United States.

That's going to be Joe Biden and Donald Trump and a bunch of judges and a bunch of Republican politicians and state legislatures are not going to pick the next president. The people are going to pick the next president with their votes. When we count them, that's what's going to happen. And so everyone should feel calm about that.

And I do think that, like what Donald Trump and his goons are trying to do now is sort of sew panic and worry and make us afraid, because that's all they have. And we shouldn't be afraid. We should be confident we're going to win. Well, how many that might. My question is, like we've been seeing Republicans say a whole bunch of different things over the last 48 hours, like how many rats are going to stay on the ship here?

Because it does seem like there's a couple of scary how many rats are going to run for president in twenty twenty four. Right.

There will be a few reasonable rats. I think a few rats will let it drift away. But there is the entire Magga industrial complex is going to stick by this guy because he's their cash cow. I mean, that's how I'm thinking about this. You see these goobers like Harlan Hill or all these Fox News hosts or, you know, these like super right wing guys. They get paid because they incite a bunch of Donald Trump cultists and they get them to buy their products or subscribe to their things.

That's why Alex Jones is showing up in Maricopa County to berate people with the recount. So, like, I don't know, I think there's going to be some scary fringe people acting out. But I think over time, like Mitt Romney's come out with a pretty strong statement pushing back on some of the worst things. Trump has said he's been an outlier in several instances, to his credit. Sorry, Dan, but I hope we'll see a couple more like that.

I also think you see, like there's there's the kind of the mealy mouthed statements that are like, I believe we should count all legal ballots and no illegal ballots and saying, all right, yeah, that's what we are doing. And, you know, so you just want to stay out of this. That's where that's where that's that's McDonald is, of course, that's where Ivonka landed before she lands in a restaurant where she is stared at with so many vicious looks that she has to leave because they're burning holes in her.

Couteur, you know, thanks to Jimmy Carter. Thanks, Tony. Yeah, found the word I use a lot.

I think on the I'm not called the Mitt Romney thing go by, because if you are lucky and you get a and there's like there's a special decoder. Slive, you put over a statement, you can find the word Trump in there because otherwise you can't. But I think what's coming like those can be a lot of people, a lot of sort of never trump pundits who kind of sat between the people who wrote in Ronald Reagan in their ballot or whatever, who are going to think there is some coming battle for the heart of Republicanism.

And that's not what is coming. What is coming is a battle for who gets to be in charge of Trump ism once Trump is gone. And that's going to be between Ted Cruz and John Charlie and some number of Trump's probably. But I do think there has been this sense that, you know, Mitch McConnell and these other people have not parroted Trump's conspiracy theories. Some of them even said, count the votes like these people love America. Well, fuck that.

But you do not get to pass voter suppression laws, put out misinformation for years, be in charge of gerrymandering, rigged Supreme Courts to steal elections and then get to be a defender of democracy. That is not what is happening here.

Real quick on that point, the press has been great about pushing back on baseless allegations of voter fraud.

They need to maintain that tone. The next time Republicans try to pass a voter ID bill or any other voter suppression legislation. We need to be in favor of democracy and letting people vote. And we need to not use baseless voter fraud claims as a way to allow Republicans to pass these voter suppression bills. It drives me crazy.

I just think, like, you don't have to believe that Republicans are going to not protect Donald Trump and believe in his conspiracies because of, you know, they suddenly found a conscience or they're doing it out of the good of their heart, like just from a pure political perspective. He's a fucking loser now. They don't need him.

They don't need Donald Trump any more. You saw like The New York Post, even with sort of like throwing him under the bus with a headline that, like Donald Trump gives sad speech, baseless conspiracies. Like you said, the Magga Fringe is going to be there. Someone else is going to take the place of Donald Trump or maybe Donald Trump will hang on or maybe it'll be his fucking kid or something. It's going to be a force to be reckoned with and it's going to be a dangerous force, maybe the most dangerous force in our democracy.

But like a lot, you know, we're going to talk about sort of down ballot races. The Republicans did well enough in other races that, you know, I think some of them I don't know that they're going to be like jumping to Donald Trump's rescue. And look, there's a lot of theories going around, like what if the Republicans in the Pennsylvania state legislature seat trump electors, even though Joe Biden won the state like they already put out a statement saying they're not considering that everyone should be aware and like on guard in these last couple of days.

But sort of the the most alarming conspiracies of what Trump might do have so far not come to pass, because some Republicans are saying, yeah, we're awful, but we're not going to go that far.

Yeah, I do think, like in the early vote counting, I got these kind of fevered texts from friends saying I hear that they're going to stop the vote. That's not stopping the votes, not a thing. And now we're doing the same thing around the legal challenges. There's plenty of there's plenty of real threats we should worry about. Not saying we shouldn't be concerned about some of this bullshit, but like let's be worried about the real things we see coming down the pike.

And I also just want to make one very I don't know, I would say late night CNN style joke in the in a style of like something like James Carville adjacent, which is they could do a lot of these people spend four years worshipping Trump like he was a pharaoh. But that does not mean they want to be buried in the.

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Let's talk about what happened with the Senate and the House Democrats flipped two Senate seats, lost one, which leaves us too short of a tiebreaking majority, which thanks to two runoffs in Georgia and an undecided race in Alaska, is still not out of reach in the House.

Democrats have retained the majority, but it will be narrower thanks to a Republican gain of at least eight seats with a few races left to call.

What do we know about what happened with the House? Haven't talked about that yet. We don't like it. We lost seats.

Yeah, we don't. We don't. We think it's bad. Dan, why did it happen?

Well, we we picked up a whole bunch of seats in twenty eighteen where Democratic turnout exceeded Republican turnout. Many of those seats were in districts that Trump won. And you can win those seats when Democrats are not a gigantic Reagan Republicans turn out at a more standard rate when both sides are now a gigantic rate. You run out of voters. We've seen this happen. You pick up a bunch of seats in a wave election and that wave recedes in. Those members often get left out.

And that clearly happened here. A lot of these there are some exceptions in Florida that are worth talking about, but a lot of it was in the more Trumpy districts, in purple states, and they were just in within those districts. There are more people who support Trump than support Joe Biden. And when they all come out, that creates problems for Democrats. And also I would say that, you know, this is a dynamic that some people pointed out, which is Joe Biden was getting the support of some Republicans who were uncomfortable with Trump.

But those people are still Republicans and they were more than happy to vote for their Republican member of Congress and Joe Biden. And there was certainly very little of the reverse of that in these Republican areas. Yeah, we didn't lose, we didn't lose, for the most part, blue seats or even purple seats, it was some of the Democrats were sitting in fairly red seats and again, back to the split in the country. It wasn't the sort of cities and the suburban gains we made in twenty eighteen.

It was like the exurban and rural gains that we made in twenty eighteen. Some of the seats that when they won, we were like, oh holy shit, I can't believe we won that seat. That's a pretty heavily Republican district. And so that does happen.

And that's not to say like we should just say, oh that's fine. What are we going to do? Like we have to make inroads there, right? Like we have to win those seats if we want a bigger majority.

But I think that's why that happened, because of the because of the bigger turnout on the other side. Yeah, I also do you think, like, um, you know, I think one of the things we should will be talking about, like, yes, to Dan's to Dan's point, we live in a center left country with the center right system. That means Democrats have to work harder and get more votes to to earn the seats that they need.

At the same time, we've seen you know, you look at Montana, a place where we lost a Senate seat, but like legal weed passes, right? Like you look across the country and find these incredible victories for progressive policies and then they don't translate to Democratic votes for Democratic candidates. And I do think that was true in twenty eighteen. That is true now. I do think like thinking about that space between the policy positions that are quite popular and some of our challenges of getting people to vote for Democrats is should be part of the conversation.

I mean, think about Florida is a great example here, which is in twenty eighteen, more than 60 percent of voters supported re enfranchising recently incarcerated visuals and elected Ronda saneness. And in twenty twenty there, they voted for Donald Trump and six percent in the past, a fifteen dollar minimum wage like there is the results of the minimum wage.

Voters are weird, voters are weird, they don't fit. But there's a lot to try to learn about that, right?

Yeah, but there are some. But there is something about the Democratic brand, right. Like we should just be honest about. There's something about there's a there's a problem there. It's for misinformation. It's from a tax, from what have you. That is part of the problem.

Yeah. And look, some of these places we're still dealing with tough maps. You know, like the one that's really bumming me out is Iowa one, I think an hour. And like, you know, if that congressional district drops a little lower under Cedar Rapids and includes Iowa City, she wins in a walk. But it didn't. So she didn't.

You know, I'm really sad about, Abbi, what is going on in Alaska with Doctor Dr. Outgrossed, like some of you would be like, who's that? That's that was a Senate candidate in Alaska. And they believe they tweeted last night that I think something like only forty four percent of the votes were counted.

And they believe when all the votes are counted that he'll win. Who knows? We'll wait to see if the votes, the votes are counted. But like, that would be something to pick up a Senate seat in Alaska, huh?

I mean, how gross is a man who was killed? The bear? He killed the bear.

So when he was like fourteen as his campaign slogan, it was what one man can do, another can do. That is for that. Listen, if you got that. Thank you. I'm not having to explain it. Not going to explain it.

So there's Allegra's hanging out up there in Alaska waiting for that vote count.

And now we are headed to two runoffs in the state of Georgia, John Orsa versus David Perdue and Reverend Raphael Warnock versus Kelly Loffler.

And those are going to happen on January 5th, I believe, are the two runoffs.

So let's see who's heading to Atlanta.

Like, what can we do to help win those races?

Guys, what were first of all, what are our chances and then what can we do to help make it happen?

Like, your chances are good. Look, I know we've asked people to donate a lot of time and money to a lot of places, but if you want to try one more time vote Save America Dotcom's get Mitsch will now split your contribution to Asaph and Warnock I. I bit down hard this morning and gave till it hurts and I think they're going to need that money early. And so I would invest their. Coming soon, adopt a state, Georgia.

Get ready for that, too. You'll be able to adopt Georgia.

Look, it's so important because there isn't to be completely honest, there's an outside shot right now of of actually flipping the Senate. But there is a shot now. I think the big question, Dan, is what is an electorate look like in Georgia that is a runoff electorate versus a presidential electorate that we just had? I mean, it all depends, right, sometimes as runoff elections have been very, very, very favorable to Democrats over the last four years, we have outperformed our partisanship in almost every single one of them we elected.

Doug Jones came very close to electing John Asaph, for instance, in a I think a Republican plus nine district in deep red districts and state legislative ones. We have done very, very well, Oklahoma and places like that. So it's just a question of whether people are going to organize and turn out and that that's a question that only people can answer for themselves. And so it is it is very positive we revert back to what it is like in a the pre Trump era about runoffs.

That is problematic because Republicans tend to turn out at a higher rate than Democrats on a more regular basis. But that doesn't have to be the case and we decide whether that's the case. And so, I mean, it is hard. I don't tell anyone that is easy. John, USCIRF got fewer votes than David Perdue. Rafael Warnock did not come close to getting to the 50 percent number. I mean, there is a multi candidate field and all of that.

But Perdue is a terrible candidate. Loffler is a terrible candidate, both as often Warnock ran very good campaigns. Joe Biden proved a Democrat can win in Georgia. So it it it is it is hard, but it is possible. And the and runoffs is a case where organization and enthusiasm decide the outcome. And so we just have to decide if we're going to have the enthusiasm of the organization to do it.

Final thoughts. What is the fight against Trump ism, conservatism, disinformation, all the rest of it. What does it look like from here now with Joe Biden as president, a smaller Democratic House, but still Democratic House and and a Senate that's up for grabs, but very possibly in Republican hands.

I mean, listen, if we win those two Senate seats, it's an entirely different ballgame for Joe Biden's ability to govern and do things. And so if all the things we talked about for four years that we wanted Joe Biden to do like climate change, like a public option, like passing voter reform bills, getting rid of the filibuster, we're going to need those seats. So it's a very different world if we can get them. Yeah, I do think I do think right, fighting to win those seats changes the conversation and becomes one about demonstrating progressive government, the conversation we had in the run up to this election.

Right. The opportunity to really attack some of the cynicism that is out there to demonstrate that government can really make a difference in people's lives, to attack that kind of that that that deep that deep sense that politics doesn't matter, that both parties are the same, that nothing ever changes that is so toxic. If we do not have the Senate, we are we have the same challenge. But it's that much harder. And it's our job to to make sure that Joe Biden uses every means at his disposal in the executive branch and by pushing Congress to get as much done as humanly possible over the next two years and while fighting like hell to win in twenty twenty two, I mean, I don't know, we don't have any other option.

That's all there is then everything that has happened over the last many years, whether about Trump versus Hillary, Trump versus Biden, the battles for the ACA and for the Supreme Court and all of that are proxies for a larger fight about whether America is truly going to be a majority and democracy. We want a politics that represents the views of the growing, diverse progressive majority in this country.

And Republicans want minority role in this fight for democracy. We won the battle this week, but the war continues. And to Tom's point, if we have the Senate, there are a bunch of very big, very important things we can do right away that begin to fix our democracy. Absent the Senate, we're going to have to work really hard. It's going to be more at the state level, more organizing, more building up support for our agenda.

But that that is what is at stake here. This is we are now able to begin fixing our democracy because we have elected Joe Biden as president elect to come as vice president. But there is so much work to do.

And at its core, like organizing voter registration and persuading people to vote for Democratic candidates is the answer. Voter suppression laws. Voter disenfranchisement is an enormous structural challenge. The only way we can change it is if we have a bigger majority.

The filibuster, huge problem. Only way we can change it is if we have a bigger majority.

All of these structural impediments to a majority in democracy, like you said then, the only way we can change them is by winning bigger majorities, not just at the presidency, but at the House level, at the Senate level, at the local level, and that the only way to do that is the work of organizing volunteer and knocking on doors and actually persuading people who either didn't vote or voted for Republicans to vote with us to change all of the other structural problems of our democracy.

We have to do that. And all of those structural problems remain. And one of the biggest ones that should be obvious by now is the disinformation environment and the right wing media ecosystem.

A lot of you know, a lot of these people who voted for Donald Trump are stuck in and we talked about this with our last change poll are stuck in information environments that are filled with conspiracy and misinformation. And it's making them angry and it's making them afraid.

And we have to break through that bubble somehow or else we will never sort of win a lot of these people over. And that's the only you know, we just have to win that fight. Prevent them from getting into that bubble in the first place. That's also true. You know, there it is. You know, I just described it like one of the things that was really striking and making calls was how many people said, oh, all my family is voting for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, but my brother, man, something happened.

You know, he wasn't like this. And then all of a sudden he was like, we shouldn't underestimate that. The harm that this does to its not just harm to our politics. Right. Is harm to our culture, its cynicism. It divides us. It really is. It's like this corrosive force that is at the heart of so many of these other problems. That's all.

One last thought, which is just we have lived in abject terror of Donald Trump, in the harm he has been doing to people and could do with the second term that, you know, as we sort of mentioned the topic, we haven't allowed ourselves to celebrate the many ways that the Joe Biden victory is great. It is also remarkable that the vice president of United States is a woman and an African-American woman. And that is historic and incredible and something worth celebrating.

And we've all been so scared, anxiously watching for Clayton County to dump the returns that we haven't even talked about this massive, unbelievable, historic, exciting first. So it just I think we should put it out there and celebrate.

I totally there's a lot I mean, you know, we had to talk about all the the dangers that still exist and the fight that continues.

But like, please, everyone, take a moment in this weekend, next week for a while.

First of all, like, take a breath, take a nap, get some sleep, go outside, get some fresh air.

But like, celebrate what we did here, not because we fixed all the problems that are facing America and democracy, but because we showed that we can make progress.

That's what this election did. And you should feel happy about that, you know, and you should feel proud about that. And every single person who volunteered to organize should feel good about that. I hope our entire our entire staff at Crooked Media, this incredible team, everyone who votes save America, all of our producers, all of our political team, every single person that works for us, every single person who adopted a state, you know, this this when is is yours to.

And I hope everyone feels very, very we're we're certainly grateful for all of you. And you're the best team around. And we we love you guys. And we we thank you for this. So. And we thank all you guys for sticking with us for four years who have listened and and not just passively listened and worried, but like actually contributed, donated, made phone calls, done all that. Like you you did something big here and you should be proud of it.

One tiny fact that came in while we were recording. Fourteen hundred and sixty people in Georgia registered through votes save America. The margin in Georgia is one hundred and thirty six votes. Right. Like every piece of this, every bit of volunteering, every donation, it mattered in these close places. It made a difference. Yep, everything.

All right, everyone, we are all going to go and just get some sleep, maybe take a fucking nap to nap.

But we will we will talk to you guys next week.

And the fight continues by everyone with everyone, right? By everybody. God Save America is a crooked media production, the executive producer is Michael Martinez, our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Soglin is our sound engineer thanks to Tanya Nominator, Katie Lang, Roman, Papadimitriou Quinn Lewis, Brian Semmel, Caroline Reston and Elisa Gutierrez for production support into our digital team, Elijah Konar Melkonian, Yael Friede and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.