| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
1975 Battle of Bunker Hill, where more than 1,000 reenactors commemorate one of the earliest and most consequential Revolutionary War battles. | |
| And at 9.30 p.m., a celebration of the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary, featuring a parade through Washington, D.C., an enlistment ceremony, parachute demonstration, and fireworks. | ||
| Watch the America 250 Thanksgiving all-day marathon on Thursday on C-SPAN. | ||
| Also, head over to C-SPAN.org to get the full schedule. | ||
| We bring you into the chamber, onto the Senate floor, inside the hearing room, up to the mic, and to the desk in the Oval Office. | ||
| C-SPAN takes you where decisions are made. | ||
| No spin, no commentary, no agenda. | ||
| C-SPAN is your unfiltered connection to American democracy. | ||
| Advance the mission. | ||
| Donate today at c-SPAN.org forward slash donate. | ||
| Together, we keep democracy in view. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Joining us to talk about the role of independence in politics is Adam Brandon. | ||
| He is senior advisor at the Independent Center. | ||
| Adam, welcome to the program. | ||
| Thanks very much for having me. | ||
| All right, so tell us about the Independent Center, your mission, and how you're funded. | ||
| Great. | ||
| So the first thing I'll just start by saying is that we're, in one sentence, we're trying to build a home for the politically homeless. | ||
| Whether it's Gallup or Pew or whoever's looking at this data right now says that about 25% of the American population, give or take, is a Republican. | ||
| The voters, about 25%, Democrat. | ||
| Somewhere between 40 and 50% of the population is independent, is unaffiliated. | ||
| And so traditionally, when you have a two-party system, most of the time it's that people make up, they join in one of those two parties. | ||
| But we're entering into a new era in American politics where there's three trends coming together right now. | ||
| Number one is the decline of people signing up for the parties. | ||
| People just, they don't feel the need to join a party anymore. | ||
| The second thing that we're seeing, and this is tremendous, particularly amongst millennial voters, voters under age 45, which is now going to be the largest part of the electorate going on for the next 20 years, the next two decades are going to be driven by millennials, and they're politically overwhelmingly independent. | ||
| The majority of millennials are independent. | ||
| So you're seeing the decline of the party, then the rise of this independent ID, but something else is happening right now, and that is the rise of artificial intelligence. | ||
| And for people like me who are trying to work on giving people other options besides just Republican and Democrat, AI is the great leveler. | ||
| We've never had technology like this, and we're able to do things right now in politics. | ||
| Just looking at data, being able to identify voters, being able to talk directly to voters. | ||
| So we talk about money in politics all the time. | ||
| Money's actually collapsing in value. | ||
| It doesn't make sense when you see all the billions of dollars going into politics. | ||
| But no one's watching TV ads anymore. | ||
| Everyone throws that mail away. | ||
| What we're looking for is someone who's authentic. | ||
| And the parties craft their images and they overproduce this or that. | ||
| And so there's an opportunity by using some of this new technology to directly talk to the voters. | ||
| And I think what you're going to see in 2026, in this midterm, the biggest story in this midterm is going to be you've got people running for independent as governor in Michigan, in California, in Maine. | ||
| You've got people on the ballot already running as independent, like Todd Achilles out in Idaho. | ||
| I know of multiple people running as independent for Congress. | ||
| So for the first time, people are actually going to have independent choices. | ||
| Okay, so we'll talk about that, but how are you funded first? | ||
| How are we funded right now? | ||
| I've got a small group of donors who are kind of my angel investors that came on that I've met along the way. | ||
| These tend to be more, I guess you'd say, from the politically libertarian or classical liberal side of things. | ||
| That's where I personally find my politics, but I used to at least have a home somewhat in the Republican Party, at least they pretended to care about spending. | ||
| But what I find right now is in the recent years, I became politically homeless as well. | ||
| And so I've become part of this group in the middle. | ||
| And one of the lessons I've learned after 20 years of working here in Washington is that our biggest challenges, you were just talking about immigration, whether it's health care, whether it's affordability. | ||
| There is not a Republican or Democratic solution to these problems. | ||
| You actually need to get both parties together to actually come together and find some consensus. | ||
| And it's only independents who are going to be able to force that change. | ||
| Adam, how do you define an independent voter? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| So we've spent a couple of years digging into this because traditionally an independent is just, oh, a Republican who may not feel like a Republican today, but will come home or a Democrat who will come home. | ||
| But what we're seeing is that's not actually true. | ||
| What was holding a lot of these independents together, and things like social issues, they're very live and let live. | ||
| What you do in your bedroom as consenting adults is none of my business. | ||
| So they tend to take on a social issues, kind of a live and let live. | ||
| I'm going to stay out of your business approach. | ||
| And then on the economic issues, so you can say that's more of a Democrat kind of approach. | ||
| And then on the economic issues, they're actually concerned about spending. | ||
| They look at this. | ||
| We have a growing economy, but still two, two and a half trillion dollars in debt. | ||
| They know this bill is coming due. | ||
| And so they want some adults in the room to finally deal with these issues. | ||
| And it doesn't fit in either party right now. | ||
| But how do you know that? | ||
| How do you know that independents are fiscal conservatives and they're social liberals? | ||
| Well, that's one way to put it. | ||
| Just a lot of research. | ||
| And remember, I mentioned about AI. | ||
| One thing we're able to, I work with some pollsters. | ||
| I work with a lot of people who are in emerging technology right now. | ||
| And what they're able to show is when you start talking to the people, you can take a survey and see what they're saying, but then you follow them also on social media to see what they're posting. | ||
| And what we find is if you have a candidate who's coming out with a message like that, that I'm going to stay out of your personal business, but I'm also going to make sure we're taking care of our fiscal house to make sure that a national fiscal collapse doesn't come home to collapse your home finances. | ||
| That's what people are looking for. | ||
| They're looking for some sanity and some normality right now. | ||
| And it's only independents who I think will be able to deliver it. | ||
| You mentioned some independent candidates that are running. | ||
| Does your organization support candidates directly? | ||
| So I represent a 501c3, which is a foundation, a 501c4, which allows us to get more involved in policy. | ||
| And then this is just amazing to me when we started this project. | ||
| Joe Smith for Senate 2050 has been registered. | ||
| No one registered the Independent PAC. | ||
| I literally just filled out the paperwork and registered it. | ||
| It's just called. | ||
| So we have it. | ||
| And we're going to be using that to support candidates. | ||
| And I'll just tell you, our direct strategy this election is that normally when I came up in politics, the Republican or Democrat majority was 30 or 40 seats. | ||
| Now it's two, three seats. | ||
| And so what our theory is, is that of the 435 congressional seats, only 10% of those, less than 40, are actually competitive. | ||
| And the reason that these seats are competitive is the plurality or majority of voters in those districts are independents. | ||
| So in 40 congressional districts in this country, only in 40, they would actually support an independent independent. | ||
| So our plan is to run and get about five independents elected so neither party can form a majority. | ||
| Neither party. | ||
| Well, that would be interesting. | ||
| It would be change all the incentives in Washington. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's what we're looking at. | ||
| It only takes, so everyone's looking at these grand schemes to reach. | ||
| No, independents go get five seats. | ||
| They control the direction of the agenda of Washington, and that's when the adults come back in the room. | ||
| All right. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation, talk to Adam Brandon about independence in politics. | ||
| You can do so. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And independents, we want to hear from you as well. | ||
| 202-748-8002. | ||
| You wrote an opinion piece for Real Clear Politics, and the headline is this. | ||
| In the shutdown, blame game, independents are the real winners. | ||
| How did you come to that? | ||
| It's just absurd to me. | ||
| I turn on the news and it's like, well, Republicans are winning this debate. | ||
| Democrats are winning this debate. | ||
| Yet I'm stuck in an airport for six hours because there's no airport air traffic control. | ||
| There's someone who's trying to get a small business loan that was processed that all of a sudden isn't there. | ||
| Someone's trying to go to a wedding and they can't get their passport processed. | ||
| It's really Americans who are paying the price for all this while the political class is just fighting over who wins. | ||
| It doesn't matter who wins or loses. | ||
| It's the American people who are losing. | ||
| And this is just further evidence that the system that we have right now, this deathmatch, existential death war between these two parties is not serving this country anymore. | ||
| And so the only way that I see that you shake that up is you have to, again, not a party. | ||
| It's a movement. | ||
| Movements change politics. | ||
| The civil rights movement, the suffragette movement, movements. | ||
| What we're trying to do is support a movement, a political movement, and that is based on getting these independents involved in politics. | ||
| Now, how is that different than a third party, right? | ||
| Because you hear a lot about, oh, we're forming this third party, we're forming this whatever, or the Libertarian Party. | ||
| How is this different? | ||
| So again, my main issue that I came to Washington was debt and deficits. | ||
| And when I came to Washington, I think the debt was about like $5 trillion. | ||
| So how am I doing in my 20-year career? | ||
| Not well. | ||
| Not so well, right? | ||
| So when you take a step back and you look at the incentives, the system has these incentives that got us to where we are right now. | ||
| And unfortunately, those incentives all benefit the parties. | ||
| And so the only way that I see you're actually going to change something is that you have to change the incentives to go around what incentivizes the two parties right now. | ||
| And so if voters actually start saying enough, then they can actually come together. | ||
| But that doesn't need to be a party. | ||
| A party has party platforms. | ||
| A party says we're this, we're not that. | ||
| A movement, when I think about the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, they changed both parties. | ||
| And that's what I want to do. | ||
| I want to see change not just through a new party, but seeing changing how both parties actually act together. | ||
| So therefore, a movement that we could build support to help these people get elected, but it's going to be a big tent. | ||
| As the parties become narrower tense, we're going to be the new big tent in American politics. | ||
| I want to ask you about the two independents in the Senate, Senator Sanders, Bernie Sanders, and Angus King of Maine. | ||
| Do you consider them independents? | ||
| No, because they caucus with the Democratic Party. | ||
| When I'm talking about independence, I'm talking about people who are going to come to Washington and are not beholden to either party. | ||
| That's the kicker. | ||
| That's the party. | ||
| So they will tell you they're not beholden, that they choose to caucus with the Democrats. | ||
| 97%, 98% with the party. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| It's like this is one thing that nauseates me when I hear people say, I am so bipartisan. | ||
| You vote with your party 98% of the time. | ||
| I mean, bipartisan is going to be you're going to vote here and you're going to vote there. | ||
| But again, the incentives, because as much as I said, the money is in decline in Washington. | ||
| The people here, the politicians, haven't realized that yet. | ||
| And they need that money because they're trying to use that money to talk to voters because voters aren't listening to them because they've lost the faith of the voters. | ||
| That's what an independent has the ability to do, is to come to Washington and be like, I am not with Teen Red or Team Blue. | ||
| I'm actually with you and representing your issues. | ||
| And I think that change, when it hits politics this year, I'm not talking in two years or 10 years. | ||
| That is happening this cycle. | ||
| And it's going to funny. | ||
| So you're talking about the midterms, 2026. | ||
| A year from now. | ||
| You think that we could have five seats in the House to go to true independence. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Do not caucus with either party. | ||
| That is the kicker. | ||
| They caucus together. | ||
| What states are those in? | ||
| Do you say that off the top of your head? | ||
| So I could say, like, there's Ethan Penner, who's running for governor in California, Mike Dogan, who's running for governor in Michigan. | ||
| So, and I mentioned Tyd Achilles running for Senate. | ||
| Now, the House races, I'm going to have to keep those a little quiet right now. | ||
| And the reason is that our advantage is we don't have to run through a primary. | ||
| We don't have to go through all that process. | ||
| So our disadvantage is going to be we are not going to have a lot of money. | ||
| I estimate that each one of our candidates will have about $2 million, which is a lot of money. | ||
| But given that each opponent will probably have 20 or 30, our advantage is going to be the sneak attack coming down from the hill late in the game. | ||
| So some people are starting to already say they're running. | ||
| There's going to be some announcements soon of different candidates in certain states, places like Alaska and places like that, that there will be independents on the ballot, that by the way the ballot works, they're going to have to say what they're doing earlier. | ||
| But everybody else I'm counseling, let's stay quiet for as long as possible. | ||
| But it is Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, Arizona, California. | ||
| And remember, I said it's about 40 seats. | ||
| These tend to be your swing districts. | ||
| They tend to be more suburban districts. | ||
| They tend to be districts that millennials are overrepresented in. | ||
| And do you worry about being a spoiler in those elections? | ||
| So this spoiler is a fascinating concept because what I'm saying is we're giving Americans choice. | ||
| Choice. | ||
| You have one choice and two choices. | ||
| And I'm saying here's a third choice. | ||
| And I'm the spoiler. | ||
| I think the spoiler are the two people who are trying to lock in the system for themselves. | ||
| The only people who are coming at me and saying you're a spoiler are the people who are invested in the current system. | ||
| Everyone else is like, amen, have at it. | ||
| Give me another choice. | ||
| I would love to have another choice on the ballot. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's talk to an independent. | ||
| This is Sue in Alpena, Michigan, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I had to call in when your guest was describing an independent. | ||
| I go, that is me. | ||
| I am socially liberal and very fiscally conservative. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| And I've never been representative. | ||
| I live in a conservative area. | ||
| And it's so frustrating because, you know, we're electing people that don't have my values. | ||
| And there's so many of us. | ||
| And we are not represented. | ||
| We are not. | ||
| Sue, that is the most important thing is what I've learned in this project is that you're not alone. | ||
| You're actually about half the population. | ||
| And I know when you talk to your friends and family, and particularly younger people, they're all there, like, that's exactly how I feel. | ||
| But you don't have a political voice. | ||
| And what really drives me nuts is that every year you're expected to go vote for Tweedle D or Tweedledum, and you're expected that these are really good choices. | ||
| No, they're not good choices. | ||
| And if people like you say, you know what, I want something else, you're going to get it. | ||
| And I believe in 2026 and you in Michigan, you're actually going to have the choice to vote for an independent this cycle. | ||
| And so I hope you do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I will. | |
| All right. | ||
| And here's Tony, Washington, D.C., Democrat. | ||
| Go ahead, Tony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, yes. | |
| I wanted to ask, why is it that you don't have one vote and it counts whether you vote Democratic, Republican, Independent? | ||
| I think when you're locked in a box, I don't understand. | ||
| This is not a true democracy because you're forced to, you should have people running. | ||
| They state their platform and you vote. | ||
| You shouldn't be divided. | ||
| This gerrymandering and this is Democrat, Republican. | ||
| I think you should have the people running should go outstate their policy or their platform, and then people should freely vote. | ||
| You shouldn't be boxed into a box. | ||
| Ma'am, I couldn't agree with you more. | ||
| I couldn't agree with you more. | ||
| And I think that's part of the problem right now. | ||
| About 7% of Americans participate in the primary process. | ||
| So 7% of Americans choose the candidates that we get. | ||
| That's not, that to me is like anti-democratic. | ||
| And I also think about this. | ||
| The Republican and the Democratic Party, they're both private institutions that we're using taxpayer dollars to pay for their primaries. | ||
| That to me is like, so if the taxpayer is paying for a Republican or Democratic primary, everyone should be allowed to vote. | ||
| If the parties want to keep people out of their primaries, they should pay for their own party primaries. | ||
| They should pay for it themselves and not use taxpayer dollars. | ||
| I just think this is a basic fairness that is kind of almost like a modern civil rights era movement where you're denying 93% of the Americans the right to vote and who they choose to get into these elections. | ||
| So I think, again, this is another reason why if you want to break this box, you want to break out of these choices, this is why it's time for you to declare your independence. | ||
| And what a better year than the 250th anniversary of our declaration that Americans to come out and say, I'm done with this two-party BS. | ||
| She did mention redistricting and gerrymandering. | ||
| Are you watching that process? | ||
| Absolutely, because it's also a real challenge. | ||
| You're trying to recruit people in places like California and Texas, and you don't even know the map. | ||
| But what we're seeing is that the parties have already pushed the limit as far as they can go with gerrymandering. | ||
| So what's actually happening is they're weakening districts by kind of moving independents around, which we're seeing our opportunities are actually growing. | ||
| And then another opportunity we may have in this cycle, let's see what the courts say about the Texas gerrymander and the California gerrymander. | ||
| We could actually get in there and build a list of, let's say, 10% of the voters or, you know, a few, like 20,000, 30,000 voters in a district. | ||
| And we could start working with them and actually encourage them to vote the other way than the intended gerrymander and kind of start messing around with this. | ||
| So I think the parties, this is a sign of desperation that they can't win on their own merits. | ||
| They can't win on their arguments. | ||
| So we're just going to cook the books and try and move the crayons around to make the electorate fit into our little boxes. | ||
| And the American people are done with it. | ||
| Again, I come back to this age of technology and the age of AI. | ||
| It's going to be just this great opportunity to disrupt this system. | ||
| Here's Tom, Independent, in Crozette, Virginia. | ||
| Crossett? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Hey, Tom. | ||
| Go ahead, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question is this. | |
| I hope you do well with your effort. | ||
| I think that anybody who votes for an incumbent at this point has got a real problem at the fiasco that's going on in Washington. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| But the problem I see you're going to have is the same problem that no labels ran into when they couldn't come up with a candidate for the president of the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's the problem I think you're going to have. | |
| So I can't, like, I got a lot of problems. | ||
| Getting into this, I always joke when I hire new people. | ||
| It's like, chances are we're going to fail. | ||
| This has never been done before. | ||
| And you're probably going to blow your career up. | ||
| And everyone is like, where do I sign up? | ||
| This is an actual chance to serve the country and actually put issues before partisanship. | ||
| Sign me up. | ||
| So I understand the enthusiasm. | ||
| The challenge that you mentioned about the presidency is when I've got a little fortune cookie I was eating one, you know, got carry out when I'm like, this isn't going to work one day. | ||
| I opened the cookie and the cookie said, choose battles small enough to work but large enough to matter. | ||
| And so that's why our strategy is not looking at the presidency because that is very daunting, very difficult. | ||
| But we're looking at these congressional races. | ||
| Number one, ballot access is not easy, but it's a lot more achievable. | ||
| And number two, we can find these people that kind of can match the district. | ||
| And as we were talking about earlier, this is a movement, not a party. | ||
| Too often, when like, say, a Ross Perot is running for president, he becomes the face. | ||
| I don't want to be the face of this. | ||
| I'm just part of what's trying to build up to help this thing. | ||
| But say we have five, six, seven, ten candidates. | ||
| They will be the face of this movement, but they're going to represent these districts. | ||
| So the problem if you shoot for the presidency, it's just, I think, very difficult to pull that off. | ||
| Taking five seats in Congress, while difficult, is manageable and doable, and we intend to do that this cycle. | ||
| I want to ask you about this text that we got from Terry in the Plains, Virginia. | ||
| The reason independents caucus with the parties is to get a seat on the committees. | ||
| If they don't, they have only their vote to express themselves and no say as to what the committees are up to. | ||
| That is a great point, and I think there is some truth, but also that's buying into what the two parties want you to believe. | ||
| My concern is that when I've met so many congressmen, Republican, Democrat, when they come to this town, they want to do the right thing. | ||
| They want to be good. | ||
| And what happens? | ||
| It's almost like being rushed to fraternity as you're a new congressman. | ||
| And they will tell this to you. | ||
| This is the multiple congressmen, Ken Buck, Thomas Massey, have gone on the record on this system works. | ||
| You're handed a menu when you arrive in town before you're even sworn in. | ||
| And the committees are for sale. | ||
| There's price tags next to them. | ||
| Now they're not. | ||
| The actual prices? | ||
| Actual prices. | ||
| Like who gets that money? | ||
| The parties. | ||
| So this is how you get on a committee. | ||
| You have to raise money to get on that committee. | ||
| They don't give you the committee because you're smart. | ||
| They give you the committee because you raise money to kick back to the party. | ||
| And that's what I mean, how the incentives are so broken here. | ||
| And so to get on a committee, you're already selling your soul. | ||
| And that's what I look at the problem with the swamp is it gets you before you are even sworn in because now you got to go raise all this money to go get on this committee. | ||
| The challenge I would tell this person is that people we're recruiting are going to have such a high moral authority putting them, you know, putting the country before partisan politics that they're going to have what we call the bully pulpit. | ||
| And when you have this nonsense of in the shutdown where people are just talking about who wins and not talking about the actual issues, that creates an opportunity for our folks to actually go in and talk about the issues. | ||
| And the people we're recruiting, we're recruiting people whose lives are better outside of Congress than inside. | ||
| So it's kind of like term limits. | ||
| We're kind of telling them we want you to come in for one or two terms and get out. | ||
| So a whole committee assignment is about getting money back to the party. | ||
| And then the committee assignment is about stay quiet, don't do anything, don't rock the boat. | ||
| And maybe 10 or 15 years, you too can be the committee chairman and part of the problem. | ||
| What we want is our people out of here before they become tainted. | ||
| So the idea is you come in, you don't need to be on a committee. | ||
| You can use the bullet pulpit. | ||
| You have your vote, and you can start showing model legislation on things like how we actually fundamentally redo health care, how we get ahead of our debt and deficits and actually reform entitlements. | ||
| I mean, the biggest serious issues, that's what these folks can dedicate themselves to. | ||
| Let's talk to Cladell, Jersey City, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I want to know how, as an independent person, how are you determining that you're truly getting an independent thinker that is going to maintain their integrity once they come in? | |
| Because it seems like you're about to set up the very thing that is currently in existence. | ||
| So how are you letting the public know that you really have somebody that's going to maintain their integrity and actually do a job of an independent thinker? | ||
| So that means your vote is going to swing from whether it's now Democrat, Republican, or whatever, but you're going to vote based on the integrity, the issue, and not worry about a blue or red. | ||
| You understand it? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| And ma'am, I think the first thing is like how they're going to get elected. | ||
| And they're going to get elected without going through either party. | ||
| So by doing that, they're going to kind of prove to the point that like, okay, by the way I got elected by talking directly to my voters and in a three-way race, we're talking about 100,000 votes. | ||
| So it's not an absurd amount of votes. | ||
| Like you can go and get 100,000 votes. | ||
| So by having those communications directly with the voter, again, I talked about how technology is lowering these barriers. | ||
| So that's step one. | ||
| Step two, and maybe actually, this is actually the step one part, is that the people we're recruiting, these are great people. | ||
| Like the people, I have the best job in the world right now. | ||
| I get to talk with people from California to Maine who are serious about running as an independent and the reasons why. | ||
| And then you look at their backgrounds. | ||
| They usually have done something of service, whether they've been in the CIA, the FBI, they've been in school teachers, they've been in the Army, they've done service jobs before and kind of proven with their life's work. | ||
| And again, when I go through the interview process, not everyone I come up with is like, okay, this is someone who sees that there may be an opportunity in independence or the next big thing. | ||
| But you get in the room and you just kind of build up this trust. | ||
| And ultimately, it's going to be up to the voter to decide. | ||
| And then how they act when they get into office. | ||
| That's the big question is how do you know their true independence without a platform? | ||
| Because this isn't a party that has a platform. | ||
| But there's guidelines. | ||
| Remember, I kind of said on the social issues, we're a big tent. | ||
| We're not trying to find like, you know, you have to agree with us 100% on all of these things. | ||
| I mentioned, I'll give you an example on debt and entitlements. | ||
| We all talk about how spending is a problem in this country. | ||
| But what we don't talk about is the fact of what actually drives our spending. | ||
| And what is driving our spending right now is not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. | ||
| It's a demographic problem. | ||
| Our system is designed with a lot of workers and not a lot of retirees, and we've inverted that. | ||
| We have a lot of retirees and not as many workers. | ||
| So we need to have an intergenerational conversation between older Americans and younger Americans, between Republicans and Democrats, between independents. | ||
| And how are we going to do this? | ||
| So we take care of the promises we made our older Americans, but we're not just telling younger Americans, we're going to jack your taxes up to take care of the older folks, and then you're going to be left with nothing. | ||
| We need to have a whole conversation. | ||
| So when we start to engage with this, what people want to see is a process. | ||
| More than the solution is like, how are you going to arrive at that solution? | ||
| And so an independent has that opportunity to be like, look, these are our basic values. | ||
| We all can kind of agree on more or less on the social side, more or less on the goals on the fiscal. | ||
| But what's going to require is us getting in a room for a couple years and doing that hard legislative work, which doesn't happen today. | ||
| When you govern by omnibuses, and we're going to throw it all into one bill at the end of the year, you can't think long term. | ||
| And a problem like our entitlements and debt and deficit, it requires years of thinking and work. | ||
| And so that's why we think you get these independents in there who are going to be dedicated to that process and who do not care about their reelection. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| They're getting in here knowing they're only going to be here for a very short period of time. | ||
| That frees them up to do the same thing. | ||
| But you can't assure that. | ||
| You can't make somebody not run for re-election. | ||
| So here's our ultimate challenge with these folks. | ||
| And this is when I get into the conversation with them. | ||
| We're changing all the incentives because normally if you're a Republican or a Democrat and you recruit someone, what is the first question you ask them? | ||
| How much money can you raise? | ||
| Money, That's the most important thing. | ||
| Your values are okay. | ||
| Oh, but you can raise that money. | ||
| You're on the ticket. | ||
| We don't have to do that because we need about $2 million per race. | ||
| We're going to raise that primarily, hopefully through listeners and through smaller dollars to fund these candidates. | ||
| And we're going to talk directly to the voters. | ||
| So that's where we get to this $2 million number. | ||
| And so what our hope would be is that when that person gets elected, they know that if they turn on those 100,000 independent voters that got them elected, they're as good as gone. | ||
| And so they have to keep their word with these people. | ||
| It's going to be more important than, say, a normal politician. | ||
| So that is the challenge. | ||
| And this is also why I want to get 567 because someone's always going to break my heart. | ||
| But the question also is, it's not who's going to break my heart. | ||
| It's going to be how many of these will not break my heart. | ||
| How many of these people have done incredible things in their lives and service and wanted just one more opportunity to come to this country and solve a big problem? | ||
| Here is Matthew in Silva, North Carolina, independent line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thank you for having me. | |
| First off, an independent is a person who thinks for themselves. | ||
| We don't categorize ourselves by a title. | ||
| We don't go to a certain camp. | ||
| We fall between party lines. | ||
| If we can agree with Democrats on certain things, and we can agree with Republicans on other things. | ||
| Now, what I hear from you, it just sounds like another camp and one that you get to cherry pick. | ||
| You talk about candidates. | ||
| You talk about using AI. | ||
| You're talking about selecting people that might fall into a line of that one Democrat lady who said, well, I don't feel like I have anybody that represents me. | ||
| Well, I'm sorry, man, but to find your exact clone who's going to run for office, that's a very rare thing. | ||
| So I think this is very disingenuous. | ||
| And what I like from independents, and I would have hope is that somebody runs independently for themselves so that they don't get found, that they don't get picked, that they have a goal and they find a way to reach that goal. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| Matthew, can I ask you, what are you, what, like, who did you vote for? | ||
| Matthew's gone. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| Well, what I would just say is, I understand what he's saying, but the point, there is an infrastructure. | ||
| And if there's something that I've learned in 20 years working here in Washington, is how deep and how strong that infrastructure is. | ||
| And no one is going to get elected without it. | ||
| I keep coming back to these incentives. | ||
| The reason that we keep getting is that Einstein quote, you try and do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. | ||
| Well, that's American politics. | ||
| We keep electing these same people who are going to come to Washington and change things, but the incentives don't allow that to happen. | ||
| So to be an independent, you do have to have some sort of infrastructure that is going to help you with fundraising. | ||
| It's going to help you with policy support. | ||
| It's going to help you organize and be able to communicate back to your district. | ||
| And so that's what we're trying to build. | ||
| And what's fun about this project is in most of my career, I never once ever reached over to talk to anyone on the other side of the aisle. | ||
| I was stuck on my little team. | ||
| And that was the part I disliked about my job the most: I never, ever really spent time hearing what those strange people over there were saying. | ||
| And I think what happens is you're creating a system right now that is going to incentivize that to actually happen, where people have to start talking to the other sides, but you still have to have an infrastructure that allows that person to communicate and to be effective. | ||
| Do you think that currently voters reward compromise? | ||
| You know, you talked about you were on your side and you didn't really reach out to the others. | ||
| It's because voters don't like it. | ||
| Isn't that true? | ||
| But it's also, if you go back to this, if you remember, we were talking a little bit about gerrymandering. | ||
| These districts are designed with the primary that that is the incentive. | ||
| So there is no, it's a closed loop. | ||
| There is no incentive to change. | ||
| But that's when we saw these 40 districts. | ||
| It was just like, you know, the light shined out of the bucket when you're looking down in and you see these numbers, like, oh my goodness, what is going on here? | ||
| Because those are the only districts in the country that we feel would actually support an independent. | ||
| That's why this isn't a scatter shop. | ||
| This isn't trying to run for president. | ||
| What I am talking about only works in a few places. | ||
| But where it works, it has the power to change everything. | ||
| I want to play for you a portion of Vice President Cheney's, former Vice President Cheney's funeral. | ||
| This is his daughter, Liz Cheney, talking about him and his relationship to his party. | ||
| Though he was inspired to service by President Kennedy, Dick Cheney became a Republican. | ||
| But he knew that bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans. | ||
| For him, a choice between defense of the Constitution and defense of your political party was no choice at all. | ||
| When he was vice president, he wrote in this letter to all of his grandchildren, As you grow, you will come to understand the sacrifices that each generation makes to preserve freedom and democracy for future generations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can see this program in its entirety if you go to our website, cspan.org. | |
| We're going to lead this here and take you live now to remarks from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy talking about the state of U.S. air travel heading into the Thanksgiving holiday. | ||
| This is live coverage. | ||
| That's part of the airline industry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tomorrow will be the busiest day. |