Hello from the Lincoln Project and welcome back, I'm Ron's Tesla. It's time for another state of the vote episode for the last time in the 2012 election cycle will update you on the national political map as voters around the country cast their ballots. And this election is unlike any other in history because of the record number of ballots that are being cast by mail. So although we've been conditioned to think about Election Day as a one time event, that happens only in election years, people are voting right now.

Millions of Americans have already voted by mail or early in-person, and millions more voters will head to the polls tomorrow. Joining me today is Lincoln Project co-founder and former political director of the California Republican Party. Mike, IHI numbers for breakfast, Madrid. You know, it's really funny, Mike. They actually put that in the intro script for me this time. And I usually just I love it, but it's now it's a thing. You are like eight numbers for breakfast.

Thank you for being on behalf of that part of the intro that you love it. I do. I do. I do. People on Twitter are calling you that now a lot more than I expected. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to make sure we get one really important announcement in here. If you have an absentee ballot that you haven't returned yet or you know someone who hasn't returned their absentee ballot, make sure you get it to a Dropbox or is your local elections office or if you're able to, in your state, drop it off at your polling place, you can visit.

I will vote Dotcom to find your polling or drop off location.

All right, Mike, about half of total expected voters have already cast their ballots. What are the trends we're seeing and have seen on the national political map that voters should be watching?

Well, the first relates to that exact dynamic, which is turnout is just kind of off the charts, like ridiculously so. And as we've been discussing for the better part of this year, you know, it's going to favor the Democratic constituencies, which is a different trend altogether. What we're going to really have to look for is the Election Day vote, where there's going to be an exceptional turnout as well. I believe this. Look, this this turnout dynamic is not happening in isolation.

It's very, very, very rare that you ever see one specific demographic significantly over perform. What we are seeing is very strong indicators and very strong signs that there's going to be extremely robust turnout for pro Trump and anti Trump forces. It's going to be a very big count. We're also going to have to expect that there will be long lines in every state in the country, not just battleground states, social distancing and the amount of people that are coming to vote on day of it's going to create lines in every state in the Union.

So be mindful of that. The second thing I think to keep in mind, and we'll be talking about this a little bit later on, is the fluidity within the Republican electorate that we've been focusing on as a Lincoln project? Numbers are moving. They're moving away. And so even though you will see, I think, a robust Republican turnout, we have to be mindful that that is not going to be universally pro Trump. Moreover, and again, another trend to look for Latino voters to talk about them a lot in Florida, Texas, Arizona specifically, but also Pennsylvania and even North Carolina, you're going to see significant pockets of Hispanic voters notoriously late deciding and more importantly, Election Day voters, Latinos do not vote by mail.

They are not early voters. They are data voters. They will show up. There's speculation every time as to whether or not there will be a big Latino bubb. Latinos will surpass black voters this year for the first time in American history, in turnout or in total in turnout and in total total in total raw numbers, there will be more Latino voters than black voters. For the first time in American history, you will have a minority voter group that is bigger than the black vote.

It's going to change a big story collection in so many ways and so many ways.

This is going to be a realignment election. Yeah, we could talk about that and how it's going to manifest itself with the Sunbelt strategy. But Latino voters in particular, with those kind of turnout numbers, when we look at places like Texas that has had sky high turnout numbers, there's already more people have voted in Texas in this point in the cycle than have voted in the entire twenty sixteen election. Yeah, there are still counties with low voter turnout, places like in El Paso and Imbert County, San Antonio area, huge number of Hispanic voters.

I'm not surprised or shocked or worried about that at all. You're going to see these counties perform very strongly on Election Day. So a place like Texas is going to have a lot of white Republican rural voters showing up at the same place as a lot of Latino Democratic voters showing up. And I think it's going to be a very, very robust turnout. So as of this recording on October the 30th, there are already more voters that have cast a ballot in Texas than it cast votes in the entire election of 2016.

So that's a sign of how extraordinary the turnout is going to be in this election cycle. Just phenomenal. Look, the probably the final trends to be looking at is the late breaking undecided votes. Always within the last seven to 10 days of a campaign, you will start to see a solidification of a race and you'll see movement one way or the other. You never know which way it's going to go. More often than not, those undecideds do break towards the challenger because of the incumbent hasn't put this away in the last four years.

He's probably he or she is probably not going to in the last seven days of a race. And in fact, that's what we've been seeing in the polling in the last 48 hours or so, is we're now seeing polls, whether they're accurate or outliers. You're seeing Biden plus six in North Carolina. I don't think that's where he's at, but it's moving in that direction. Florida, Florida's moving up into a three to five point range. I may or may not be there, but it's trending in that direction.

Pennsylvania is getting wider. So nationally, what we're seeing is a settling of this vote that is decidedly towards Japan moving in the right direction. Texas, I don't know if you mentioned it went from a Trump plus two to a Trump plus one just within the last. In our internal projections, the states are moving in the right direction. Then all every state is moving in the right direction at this point. We'll see quantifiably how much that is. But the break usually starts about now and it keeps trending until Election Day.

So I still think there's enough rain in Texas. I'm still going to say I'm bullish on taxes and probably one of the few people that's looking at the numbers saying I'm at about 50 50 now. We've been talking about this. I was forty forty two before. I must say, it's 50 50 now. You know, maybe it's all going to be all right. There will be having a beer together after this is over. I've got to. I tell you, just there's still enough time, the trend line is working in that direction and turnout has not slowed down.

I mean, we were worried that maybe that there would be this law that would happen after the first week. Yeah, yeah. It's not. And it's still huge numbers in early voting.

OK, I want to come to your beer with Bato and I want to bring Mary Trunk with us because I think we've got a lot of fire up the podcast. Make sure that we're all going to take this thing up for a spin.

Maybe a hell of a pod really would. OK, let's talk about the man in line. So back in December, when we launched shortly after that, Steve Bannon was quoted in the Associated Press, I believe, as saying, if these guys, meaning us, could move three to four percent of Republican voters, there would be a serious threat to the president. And so shortly after that, your team coined the phrase the band in line to refer to this, three to four percent of Republican voters.

Now, I think it's important to remind our listeners that we didn't set out to move a plurality of voters or a majority of Republicans in this race. We set out on a very narrow mission, moving a very small number of Republican voters away from the president to peel off enough for Biden to win. For months, we've been talking about the Bannon line. We have a New Democracy Fund and Eucla Nation SCAP poll that shows 13 percent of Republicans who have voted early have voted for Joe Biden.

Can you talk about how critical that will be and how we should expect that number to change as more votes are cast?

Well, first, that's pretty good, 13 percent exceeded all of our expectations. And like you said, you know, we originally set out the math was there at about four percent. You know, this was back when it was just eight of us at the link, Lincoln Consultants. And you and I were talking about these numbers and I said, I think we just need four. Yep. That was validated by Mr. Bannon himself, who refers to us as old school rhinos, which I think I'll get a T-shirt that says, let's call Rhino.

Rhino. Yeah, you can mark that up. Yeah. So, you know, I'm proud of that.

It's in has had their own team knows that this is the number. They're saying it. They're referring it to the same way that we kind of coined the phrase and you're hearing a lot on social media. People are looking for this metric to see whether or not the Lincoln Project experiment will be successful. Remember, our goal is to move just Republicans and give Biden the best position to win. And clearly, we have done that. The only state that was lagging out of the 12 that we had been playing into various degrees behind the ban and on most of the most states, by the way, have been at least double thirteen points.

Now, nationally, that's a triple banning. Yeah, all that. Right. I love it. The triple ban.

And yeah, the only state that was lagging was North Carolina. Yeah. And we went in there early and we were just pounding the Republican base. Our own internal rationale really having a tough time getting over two or three. We'll see what the numbers come back in the next couple of days. But, you know, even if we can't get there with just one state to be there over that number nationally and in a dozen battleground states, yeah, it's very, very impressive.

Yeah. So we've got to hold on to that. And again, I think we've run a very smart campaign to this this point in the cycle, very sophisticated, highly targeted. You would know better than I just how many hundreds of ads were run. Fifteen hundred in the rotation of the last couple weeks. Yeah. One of our team members, Reagan, placed over 1100 ads just over the weekend before Election Day because the the powers that be at Facebook decided they weren't going to allow any new ad creative to be introduced on their platform.

And so we had to preload a lot, a lot of ad units and it was just super human work.

But yeah, let me explain to the viewers listeners, what they actually want is a fifteen hundred ad. He made fifteen hundred different types of creative ads. Not like one ad. Fifteen hundred times. Right. He's talking fifteen hundred different advertisements that are appearing on social media. Right. So the volume and the sophistication and the deep, deep, deep dive and the work that has gone to get this four percent, you start to understand why we're surpassing that numbers, because it is moving the needle.

The analytics are working.

Yeah, that's right. So the same Democracy Fund and UCLA Nations Gallup survey found that 60 percent of independent voters who voted early voted for Joe Biden. So I know that we set out to move Republican voters because those are the people that we've spent decades talking to and campaigning with in our careers. But 60 percent of independent voters also move. So what what is the impact that's going to have on the outcome of the election?

So this is really important. And again, this was a voter group that Hillary Clinton actually lost to Donald Trump on the late break, really probably after the Cumi press conference came out. All the KOMY messaging. Right. The floor fell out of the Clinton campaign. A lot of voters broke away from her. And look, the math is very simple.

The Republican Party is smaller than the Democratic Party. If if Trump is losing 13 percent of the smaller party, he really only needs 50 percent, plus one of most of the independents when he's getting 60. That's a very, very good break. OK, Joe Biden. I'm sorry, Joe Biden. So Joe Biden is getting over 50 percent, is it 60 percent now? That's an extraordinarily high break when you're also with Trump is also losing 13 percent of his base vote.

That explains why there are 15 states and play states like Georgia, Texas, Iowa, some of these really red states. Why Wisconsin has never really been in play this entire cycle. And again, keep our Georgia, like I mentioned, Georgia, but I've been bullish on Georgia for a while. I think I think Biden gets Georgia. That alone is part of a realignment that is occurring in American politics. If all the stars line up and Biden wins Texas, we are in for a generational change in the way we handle our political power politics here in the country.

It's also important to note that when we talk about the smaller party, the Republican Party is smaller because Trump has shrunk it. Oh, yeah. Like when we hear these numbers about Trump having 96 percent approval rating in the Republican Party, what isn't? The story that isn't told is that the number of Republicans who identify as Republicans is now much smaller because of at least 10 percent smaller than it was when Donald Trump took office.

That's exactly right. So many Republicans now refuse to identify as Republicans to a pollster when they're answering these questions. And so when you hear that number, that is that is the remnant of the Republican Party who's still with him. But so many of those people now identify as independent voters. So I think that even underscores this 60 percent among indie voters who are breaking for Joe Biden. Right. Because many of them are or were Republicans. They're more conservative leaning independents or more conservative leaning because they're not Republicans.

They want to affiliate with the party. They are like us. They believe the same things that they believed in before Trump the Trump move the party away from them. And so they are conservative voters or conservative leaning independents who have just had enough. They just cannot be a part of what Trump is espousing.

So you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but we've seen early voting totals in states like Texas and Georgia surpassed their 2016 totals. Texas even past the total 2016 turnout. We're seeing major increases in turnout compared to 2016. Thousand voters in Miami-Dade County. Yeah, who did not vote in 2016 have now voted 125 thousand voters who did not vote in 2016 in Collin County in Texas have already voted. What maybe you can explain the significance of these two counties in these two states, because every four years they tend to get a lot of attention and especially everyone will remember Miami-Dade from the 2000 election.

Right. What's driving this turnout and how high how will high turnout impact this election?

Well, so this might actually be the most important metric that people really aren't talking about or not talking about enough. And that is how many people are showing up that did not vote in 2016. You have to keep in mind, 2016 was a pretty low turnout election. There was not a lot of people motivated. There was a general distaste for both candidates and there was a wider swath by about double the number of undecided voters. None of that is true.

In twenty twenty here you have this very strong anti Trump sentiment on the Democratic side of the aisle. Biden's positives have actually been going up since his convention, which I don't know that I've ever seen. OK, yeah, this is like literally the attack dogs start to do do what they do, bring both candidates down. Biden's numbers have gone up. So Trump's numbers, of course, have remained steady because the anti Trump vote was already already pegged in.

Bottom line is this. People are showing up that did not show up in 2016. That is not a Trump vote.

Common sense tells you that is not a trump. These people have been waiting for years to vote against. Exactly. These are people that probably couldn't vote for either candidate or were so low information that they weren't motivated to vote with two popular candidates. Regardless of what it is. They would have been a Trump voter in 16 if that was his base and stuck with them, at least of science bears. True. And if you believe in science, then it mattered for something.

So that, I think, is really the most important metric you're seeing everywhere. Between 16 to 20 percent of all of these new and early voters did not vote in 2016. That's extraordinary. Yeah, it is.

So last week, Donald Trump was speaking to reporters and said that the winner of the election should be declared on November 3rd. Let's take a listen to what he said.

It would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner was declared on November 3rd instead of counting ballots for two weeks, which is totally inappropriate. And I don't believe that that's by our laws. I don't believe that. So we'll see what happens.

So, Mike, we have gone over this before many times. Don't make me do it again. But for the benefit of our listeners who maybe haven't heard us do this song and dance before. Yeah. Maybe you can explain to Donald Trump. Yes. What the process is for counting votes and why that's a different. Process than what we see on the news on election night. Go ahead. So Donald Trump doesn't know much, but he does know this, which is why he is saying it.

The demography of who is voting early and voting by mail has never been more distinct or different than the demography of who is going to actually vote on election. The partisanship, the partisan construct is completely, completely different. And most importantly, they have flipped early voting and vote by mail used to benefit Republicans. They are voting was always something the Democrats spent a ton of time, energy, effort and money getting their lower propensity. Many of the lower likelihood voters, people of color and young people to show up on Election Day.

The dynamic, because the president has been in such a high-Profile way, saying that vote by mail is not secure, it's not safe and it's rife with fraud, has flipped that on its head. So that's important because Election Day is going to be skew heavily Republican. All of this early vote is overwhelmingly Democratic and pro Joe Biden. We know that from the demographics. We know from the partisanship and the the race, ethnicity and age of those that are voting early.

OK, so what you're going to see is Election Day will be very rife with Republican voters. Now, this is the important part, county election, county election center, where the votes are counted all over the country, especially in battleground states, will begin counting and processing Election Day votes first. And so what Donald Trump says, we should look at the vote count on election night and declare a winner. He's saying that because he will be at his strongest point at about midnight on November the 3rd or twelve eleven fifty nine on November the 3rd.

OK, beginning on November 4th, when these county government centers reopen and the employees come back in and start processing ballots literally from that moment until they're done certifying the election a week or 10 days later, the vote count will every day, every hour begin to benefit the Democrats and Joe Biden. And that's as they start counting the mail in ballots and the vote by mail ballots. That's 100 percent right. Those that were mailed in early, people who voted weeks ago and people who walked in and, you know, have been waiting three years to cast a vote against Donald Trump will have voted early.

Those votes, those ballots are counted later. They're counted and processed and counted after the Election Day votes are counted. So the Republican strength will be at its highest. It will be at its peak literally on election night starting on November 4th. All of the vote that comes in every day will show an erosion in Trump's support and it will skew more democratic. And because of the size of what we're seeing, in all likelihood, even if Donald Trump looks like he's winning in places like Pennsylvania and close in Wisconsin, the truth of the matter is he will probably lose and even maybe considerably in places like the Rust Belt states where the votes are going to break hard against him.

So that's why he is asking or saying we should be voting or counting and declaring a winner when he's at the strongest point. Because what he will also do is every day by tweet start saying this is voter fraud.

That's somebody trying to steal the election from now. The thing that we really need to make sure everyone understands is that this is not new. We have been having elections this way for decades and decades and decades is a career, 30 years. This is how votes are counted.

And he's going to try and tell everyone that this is new, that this is an aberration, that this isn't right. This is how elections are held.

There's no elections are held. And the more that we vote by mail and remember, twenty seven states increased their vote by mail capacity because of a pandemic when we should be voting more by mail, we should probably be voting universally by mail. But as states started to accommodate this, it is going to take a little bit of time to get an accurate count. A lot of these states and counties like in Pennsylvania don't have never had the capacity to count this many ballots by mail.

So it's going to take a little bit of time. Yeah, probably weeks before we get a count. Now, that's why the Lincoln Project, you have heard us pushing so strenuously to get out the vote, because the bigger the vote margin is, the less credible.

His arguments, which are not true anyway, are that the election was stolen or less chance there is for misinformation and confusing voters and ultimately civil unrest, which is part of what he's trying to do.

OK, let's talk just really quickly about what just happened in Pennsylvania, the court ruling, because we were watching that so early on.

We told our listeners Pennsylvania looks good, but it's one of the easier states in the country on the battleground map to steal. Tell me what you mean by that and then why the recent court decision has made us feel a little bit better about what's about to happen in Pennsylvania. So, as I've always said, the myth about voter suppression is that the way it looks like people with armed AR 15 standing in front of polling places is the way you kind of scare voters away from the polls?

I'm not suggesting that that does not happen. But what I am suggesting is that is extremely, extremely, extremely rare. It's also not an efficient way to do it candidly. So part of the the dark underbelly of this is recognizing that the easiest way to disenfranchise these votes is to throw out signature matching and the way this works. We've talked about this on earlier podcast, too, is when you sign the outside of your envelope that that signature is literally verified with a digital imprint of what your voter registration card looks likes to make sure that, in fact, you were that person.

Right now, if you registered ten years ago or five years ago or 15 years ago, the chances of your signature are not looking the same, are very, very high. So a lot of times those votes can be challenged by saying that was not the same person. And if you can't quantifiably show that there's at least some close association with it, you can invalidate that ballot. This was the main court case that concerned me because Republicans, a Republican legislature, was trying to use that as a metric to throw them out.

The Democrats said you can't do that. The Supreme Court heard it or state Supreme Court heard it. And they ruled that, in fact, that could not be a sole use for throwing out ballots.

In other words, a signature that did not match was not on its own, was not a good enough reason to get rid of a ballot, a good enough reason to get rid of the ballot. That's huge. That could have been hundreds of thousands of votes, maybe more. And also, it's done county by county. Right. So a lot of the shenanigans are going into precincts where there are high numbers of African-American voters, high numbers of Democratic voters, and challenging, challenging, challenging all these ballots because it's just a numbers game.

You know that mathematically 85 percent of these votes are going for Biden. The more you kick out, the less the vote total becomes and you allow more conservative areas to have an overrepresentation of the votes. So this court decision tossed that out. Very big win for the Democrats and Joe Biden and I would argue for democracy. It also allows for ballots to be counted after Election Day, meaning they had to have been postmarked by and received within, I think it's three days of Election Day because they were considering trying to cut that off for people who mailed in their ballots on time, had them postmarked on time.

But because of the delays in the mail delivery service, they may not have been in the office by November 3rd. And so this case actually allowed for for an extension period of three days to allow those ballots to trickle in. That's exactly right. And this is actually another tactic that is being used by Republican parties throughout the battleground state areas, is being used in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

I think Minnesota actually upheld the rule, saying it has to be in the office by Election Day. Ballots that show up after aren't going to be counted. This is a way to disenfranchise tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of votes. And so you are seeing this type of legal activity popping up now at this point in a state by state determination, some courts are ruling that that's not accurate. Like you're saying in Pennsylvania, you've got till three days after you have to accept the ballot.

I think in Minnesota they said, no, it's got to be in that day. So part of this could be litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court. Probably will be. Right. And so those are things that we are very mindful of. But all of these, the way you suppress votes and the way you disenfranchise voters that like I said, it's not the stereotypical way that most people think they are from from from legend and lore and truth and fact that we had seen in other parts of this country's history, or maybe not a little bit similar, but the best way to do it and again, I say that best meaning, the most efficient way is to actually challenge the votes that have actually been processed, cast and are sitting before counters and trying to get them kicked out.

Hi, everyone, I hope you're enjoying the episode, I just wanted to take a second to remind you just how important it is to have a plan to vote. Every vote is going to be incredibly important in this election. You can find more information about how to vote in your state at Vogue if you've already voted. That's great. And if you're wondering what else you can do to defeat Donald Trump, rally anyone who hasn't voted and help get them to the polls, talk to your friends, your family, your neighbors, even your landlord, and you can email us a podcast and Lincoln project that us if you have any questions.

All right. Now let's get back to the episode. What does it tell you that at this moment in history, one of the major two parties is trying to win by suppressing as many votes as they can? We at the Lincoln Project believe that the voting franchise should be expanded to include everybody. More votes is better for the country. What does it tell you about the trajectory of the party and its prospects for long term success? That the way they are seeking to win, the only way they can win is by suppressing as many votes as possible?

You know, I've never understood ever the tactic and the belief that, you know, low voter turnout was somehow a good thing for the party. And even though, you know, look, I've never been involved in anything, you know, related to voter suppression. But as a political professional, when you start to realize that low voter turnout benefit Republicans and higher voter turnout benefits Democrats, that there are certain built-In advantages and structural advantages to to certain elections, which is why Republicans have gotten really good at targeting, especially in low voter turnout races and and do quite well.

The answer to your question has always troubled me, because I think it's sad. It's troubling. But I also never lack the confidence in my ideas to believe that you had to have low voter turnout in order to win. If you believe that you did, you might need to recheck your basic assumptions about what you believe, because first of all, having the beliefs of a minority rule over the majority is simply not sustainable.

You might be able to pull it off for a little while. What? But one, why would you want to? Knowing what you were doing was not reflective of what most people wanted. Like I never understood that.

Yeah. And also, it isn't just from a practical standpoint, it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable.

It's not moral. It's not sustainable. It just it doesn't make any sense at any level. That doesn't mean that Republicans haven't been doing that for a very long time to have. I mean, I've seen it. I always had a very different view, which is let's go argue our case and win the battle of ideas. It's really not that hard in a lot of places. And that's really kind of the point, unless your ideas are just fucked up, unless your ideas are just fucked up.

And that's what that that is the answer to your question. That's where the party's at. And the truth is, it knows it. It knows it, which is why they lawyer up. And there's an entire infrastructure that is now focused on making sure that votes are not enfranchised. And that is that is sad because it's not just a political party it's turning into. It's becoming institutionalized. What's more troubling is we're realizing there are hundreds of political operatives who are learning to do this now.

Yeah, like they're being taught like this is this is the way you you you you get people's votes challenged and kicked out. And here are the most efficient ways to do it. Like, that's that is really deeply troubling. And it's why I think you're going to see the Lincoln Project as soon as next year, involved in probably working to promote an ally and the Voting Rights Act. We will be hopefully at the tip of the spear that in our own unique Lincoln Project way is because that's not a value that any of us hold as members of Lincoln Project.

We've got lots of work to do, make a lot of work before us, but hopefully a little bit of rest after November 3rd. All right, last thing before we go, it's Monday, the day before Election Day, the day before the most important election day of our lifetimes. And there's a lot of anxiety out there about who wins. And about the potential for civil unrest afterward, about whether or not Donald Trump will go quietly about what we do if he doesn't.

What would you say to our listeners who are feeling that anxiety and are looking for some comfort through the trauma that the country is about to experience, undoubtedly in the aftermath of this election?

So the first thing I want to tell people in my social media feeds have been kind of on fire for the last week or two with with questions similar to this is it is very it is absolutely human nature for people to have gone through and experienced the levels of fear and disempowerment that they have over the course of the past three years to look for data points that are going to tell you bad things. And there are there's data out there. It's not good data, but there is data out there about the outcome of the election.

Now, I've been doing this long enough to know that there are anomalies in data and there are surprises in campaigns that does happen. But at a certain point, you also have to believe that math and science means something. Right? And when you look at things math and science and polling as a scientific instrument, OK, this is math. Overwhelmingly, the data is moving in the right direction for Joe Biden. There are not a whole lot of bad data points.

So I feel very good about where we're at at this point in the race. There is a human need and need to be very careful of this and mindful of this, a lot of people are just looking for bad data and you're probably not even conscious of it. But if you're looking for it and you may catch yourself doing this, stop doing that. OK, you can over data this stuff and worry leads you to find and look literally look for reasons to validate that worry, which will make you even more anxious and lose even more sleep.

So I want people to be mindful of that because that's not healthy. The second thing is this. The the chance the chances for civil unrest and shenanigans are very real. I don't want to disabuse anybody of that notion. I do believe I still believe in our institutions and I believe in the way that this campaign has come to a close in the past few weeks has, I think, really mitigated the chances of the way a lot of bad actors in and around the White House will be behaving.

Most of the activity that we have seen and we are heavily engaged in this through groups like Cissé and people that are volunteers, like many of you out there that are hunting trolls and doing what you can to be part of this. What we have recognized is that where we have found these incidences, they have tended to be the actions of lone wolves. It does not appear at this point in time that there is any massive orchestrated effort that is actually being effectuated.

That's good. Doesn't mean that can't change. It doesn't mean that it isn't happening. We haven't seen it. But again, you have to look at what you what evidence that you have. Most of what we are seeing is not terribly dissimilar from what we have seen in times past. Could something massive happened? Yes, it could. Could with the persistence of foreign influence. Most of that, if not all of that, are things that that are unforeseen, that we cannot control.

But I want people to be mindful a lot a lot of what, while we are concerned, we are watching it like a hawk. And we've got plans for, you know, people to disperse into different states and get get on a plane immediately or get in a car and go to these battleground states, literally from Lincoln Project to fight these things. A lot of what we were concerned about materializing to this point has not. So that's again, I think hopefully a good data points to keep in mind.

We are looking, we are watching. We are not the end all be all. But we are heavily focused on that with some pretty smart folks. And the chances I think honestly, Ron, I think a big part of this is as the polling numbers have moved away from the president, the realization from people who would otherwise be complicit in this that he is losing, that he is losing has has weakened considerably the resolve of a lot of hard core.

Trump is at the highest levels of government or middle mid-level bureaucrats who were just henchmen that would be implementing this bullshit has weakened considerably. And so part of our messaging is focused on that, too, is you will be held accountable. This country will remember your name and this is illegal and you will end up in jail. Yes. And should. Yes. And and we will prosecute this case and we will help in that process to the extent that we can absolutely make Madrid.

See it tomorrow on election night. I'll see you tomorrow, OK? I mean, yeah. Thank you to everyone at home for sticking around, and thanks as always to Mike for making the time for this conversation. We want to hear from you about what questions you have and what topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast. As always, you can reach us at podcast at Lincoln Project U.S. And please know that even if we don't respond, we read every email we get and we appreciate hearing from you.

You can find more information about our movement at Lincoln Project U.S. The most important thing you can do right now is to vote and to make sure you get your friends and family to vote in this election, if you enjoy the show, would help us if you could rate interviews wherever you get your podcasts. This really does help new voters find the show and join our movement to defeat Trump and Trump ism for the Lincoln Project. I'm Wran's destler. I'll see you in the next episode.