It's the Saturday before the Iowa Caucuses, which means it's time for some campaigns to panic and others to celebrate prematurely. Jared Yates Sexton is on the ground with inside information as to who's feeling good, who's pointing fingers, and some insight into how the chaotic picture is coming into focus. Subscribe to the podcast for up-to-the-minute coverage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Welcome, everybody, to a Saturday night special edition of the McRig podcast. | |
| I am your host Jared Yates Sexton. | |
| My co-host Nick Halseman could not be with us tonight as I am burning the midnight oil on this, the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses. | |
| For those unfamiliar with the action on the ground in Iowa, the Saturday night before is a really anxious time. | |
| And this is, I think for a lot of people, they spend so much time in Iowa on these campaigns and working for their candidates. | |
| Organizing and knocking on doors and going to rallies and convincing themselves of the possibility that their chosen candidate could become president or perhaps their careers are going to lead them to the White House or, you know, the halls of power. | |
| This is one of the nights where it becomes Increasingly obvious that the Day of Judgment is nigh. | |
| This is a moment for a lot of hand-wringing. | |
| This is a moment for a lot of entertaining of the more exciting, fulfilling parts of working on a campaign. | |
| Right now across Iowa, there are a lot of true believers who are readying themselves for the possibility that after Monday night, their candidate might be the front runner in an election to become the next president of the United States of America. | |
| And there are a lot of people who their anxieties tonight are getting the better of them. | |
| There is a lot of growing hope. | |
| And on the flip side of that, there's a lot of second guessing being done right now. | |
| And those are the messages. | |
| And I expected it to happen. | |
| It's like clockwork every four years, the way that this works and repeats itself. | |
| So I expected that to happen. | |
| I was not disappointed. | |
| I have been getting a lot of feedback, particularly from the Joe Biden campaign, from staffers and members of that campaign who are frustrated, and I think that they feel As if the results on Monday are not going to necessarily be the results that they were looking for to add to that concern, which we're going to get into here in a few minutes. | |
| And Iowa is a weird thing. | |
| Iowa is a weird contest in that there's always some sort of twist. | |
| There's always something that happens that puts everybody off balance and allows anybody who doesn't finish the way that maybe they were hoping to, to walk away from Iowa feeling some bruised feelings, feeling their fair share of resentment. | |
| Tonight was a pretty incredible curveball. | |
| The Des Moines Register, which is the paper of record in Iowa and sort of the bellwether of where trends are, usually releases its final poll. | |
| And that final poll is one of the drivers that gives a signal that a candidate is in the lead or is the de facto frontrunner. | |
| And tonight, for the first time, I believe, in 76 years, the Des Moines Register declined to release their poll. | |
| There was even like an hour set aside on CNN for the reveal of this poll. | |
| You know, this primetime special that was going to talk about the destiny of the Iowa caucuses. | |
| Immediately when it happened, I think you could hear throughout the state of Iowa every single eyebrow raise up in There are a lot of rumors flying right now as to what happened. | |
| It sounds like the official explanation is that a candidate's name was left off some surveys. | |
| It looks like on social media right now that members of the Buttigieg campaign are claiming that their candidate was left off of one of these surveys. | |
| And, um... | |
| It's just getting the attention of a lot of people. | |
| I'll just leave it at that. | |
| There's nobody right now in the Democratic race who doesn't have an opinion on why this poll isn't being released. | |
| If you ask people at the right time, obviously they think that their candidate is being shortchanged or is being kept from gaining momentum. | |
| There is a lot, lot, lot of suspicion and a lot of conspiracy theories that are making their rounds around Iowa tonight. | |
| But let's go ahead and let's talk about the Biden campaign and some of the information that is coming out. | |
| Because this is one of those moments, and I want people to keep in mind that the people who work on these campaigns are obviously people. | |
| They're human beings. | |
| Who have their own careers and their own interests. | |
| For anybody who works on a political campaign, they're judged by their last campaign. | |
| A lot of the times they're judged by their worst campaigns, and that will affect what kind of jobs they'll have in the future. | |
| And so, when things go south a little bit, there's always a lot of finger pointing. | |
| And usually it goes towards the candidate. | |
| The candidate mismanaged this, the candidate mismanaged that. | |
| Sometimes there's a lieutenant, a second in charge that gets some of the flack and you know there's a lot of these inner office conflicts that come to the surface whenever things don't look really great. | |
| It seems like, as of right now, February 1st, the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses, that there is an emerging opinion that Biden is going to underperform, particularly compared to where people thought he was going to be. | |
| It seemed like he was going to breeze into Iowa as the presumed nominee for the Democratic nomination, and now it appears that if that's going to happen, it's going to take a little while to manifest. | |
| Among his campaign staff, there is a feeling that Iowa has been shortchanged to a certain extent, that Biden or his brain trust, wherever you want to put the blame, you know, depending upon who you talk to, looked past Iowa, believing that he might ride Obama's coattails, considering that Obama | |
| Of course famously won the Iowa caucus and and turned his race against Hillary Clinton on its head That has not manifested There's been a lot of looking at other states and where the money and the attention has been focused, particularly in places like New Hampshire and South Carolina and some of the Super Tuesday states. | |
| But there are some grumbling, as there is oftentimes. | |
| Anytime a poll comes out and you see that a candidate isn't doing as well as maybe the candidate wants to be doing, it always ends up becoming a question of whether or not they're looking past Iowa. | |
| In this case, I'm hearing a lot that people feel like this operation has been pretty sparse. | |
| I went to a Biden rally today and I saw this for myself. | |
| It wasn't quite up to par with what a modern campaign looks like. | |
| These are data-driven campaigns. | |
| These are campaigns that you shouldn't be able to get into a door without being indexed and organized and pushed towards a canvassing spot and basically given not just a pitch but a pitch that you can give the people around. | |
| Uh, in your neighborhood and in your community. | |
| In this case, uh, it was just an open door and a lot of people, um, on Biden's team rushing from one point to another. | |
| So that, that felt, that felt true in the moment. | |
| And I was certainly surprised. | |
| Um, I was expecting for sure a situation where, um, you know, this would be a, not just a modern, but a high tech campaign that, that, Looked a lot more like Obama's campaign than what I saw. | |
| The other concern is that, in this case, Biden has relied really heavily on union support. | |
| And in the Iowa caucuses, you'll find that these unions sort of serve as unofficial vote whips, if you will. | |
| They'll go into the caucuses and, you know, they'll be very forceful. | |
| They have scripts that they have learned, persuasions that they've learned. | |
| They'll use their cultural and communal capital to push people towards candidates. | |
| And it's always had a really big part of the Iowa caucus. | |
| It's always played part of that process. | |
| But in this case, there's certainly a complaint growing that Biden and his team are relying way, way, way too heavily on unions, but also democratic resources and contacts. | |
| We're talking about roles. | |
| We're talking about the data that can get passed down through the party. | |
| And not necessarily homegrown data, but data that's coming from the top down. | |
| And there's been a concern that this has not served Biden or his interest as well as I think some people would have hoped for. | |
| By that same token, they were really hoping for sort of a carbon copy of the Obama campaign, the Obama primary campaign, which was statistics heavy. | |
| There was a lot of algorithm work done, a lot of online work done. | |
| Instead, I was told today by a Biden campaign member that this has felt a lot more like a Senate campaign, which isn't shocking. | |
| I mean, you know, that that's his background. | |
| Besides being a former vice president, Biden was a mainstay in the United States Senate, and he has always had a little bit of trouble running for president. | |
| And I say a little bit of trouble and I mean a lot of trouble. | |
| I mean he's run officially twice. | |
| One time he had to drop out of the race in 1988 under allegations of plagiarism. | |
| In 2008, he failed whatsoever to gain any traction and was eventually saved by Barack Obama and made into a really competent and talented vice president. | |
| But the fact still remains that Biden has trouble running for the presidency. | |
| And, you know, some people have it and some people don't. | |
| And there's been a lot of concern that Biden just doesn't have that part to him. | |
| not just retail politics, but this ability to sort of transcend a large space. | |
| I mean, the Iowa model is going all across the state and making one stop after another and making these emotional and communal contacts and really getting in touch with voters. | |
| And Biden has a good touch with the retail part of it, but like spanning all of that space and doing all of these events and keeping on message and not really having any mistakes has never been his brand. | |
| I mean Biden is notorious for going off script, he's notorious for gaffes, and and I think that that's hampered everybody. | |
| Now, the other word that has been floating around really, really heavily lately, particularly with the Biden campaign, is the word snakebit. | |
| And anybody who isn't familiar with this term, just to get people up to speed, this is the idea that something can be just hampered from the very beginning. | |
| Right, you had an idea and maybe it was a good idea, but for whatever reason, the execution from the very, very beginning was flawed and things just kept going wrong. | |
| And for whatever reason, those things going wrong got people out of rhythm and it made things sort of fall apart. | |
| I had this conversation today with a member of Biden's campaign. | |
| Who said that there is a real fear that this thing was snakebit from the very beginning, whether it's the rollout of what Biden coming out for the campaign. | |
| You might remember that there for a while there was a lingering story about Biden touching women who didn't want to be touched. | |
| You know, his sort of like rubbing their shoulders and just sort of being familiar with voters. | |
| And of course the story that nobody really wants to talk about, which is the Trump-Ukrainian conspiracy theory, which has been focused on Joe Biden and his son this entire time. | |
| In these rallies, and when Biden talks about it, they always talk about the thing, or the attacks, or these things that he's saying about me. | |
| They never come out and really define what it is. | |
| Because they don't really want to make this story about Trump's conspiracy theory and have to, you know, constantly answer these questions or grant it any legitimacy. | |
| But there is a belief in the Biden campaign that this has hobbled his campaign since it made the news. | |
| And how could it not? | |
| I mean, The entire political atmosphere and ecosystem has been revolving around Donald Trump committing crimes to try and stop Joe Biden from becoming the nominee. | |
| And in some cases you would think that maybe that would make Biden's numbers rise, but it seems like as this story has evolved, this story has definitely hurt Biden's numbers. | |
| The other big puzzle piece of this, and I think that I think this is going to get lost a little bit, both in the finger pointing and sort of the way we look at this race. | |
| I think Biden expected Obama to have endorsed him by now, and I think it's hurt Biden because he's a very sentimental, emotional person, and I think he puts a lot of emotional stock in his relationship with Barack Obama. | |
| I know politically, he thinks it's a win for him. | |
| There's not an ad or a speech that goes by where Biden doesn't tout his close personal friendship with Obama and partnership with Obama. | |
| And I think by now he I think he expected Obama to have endorsed him. | |
| But I think Obama also has a more large view of his role in the party and I think you know if Biden started picking up speed and won one contest after another and was the presumed nominee I think Obama would have jumped in and would have went ahead and endorsed him but I think Obama wants to keep from putting his fingers on the scale and you know looking like he's being improper in his behavior. | |
| I think that has hurt Biden And then there's just the small things. | |
| And like I said, his staff has seemed really sparse and very harried and there's just a lot of unforced errors that have taken place. | |
| I saw him today in North Liberty in Iowa in a small, small little room that seemed like it was underbooked. | |
| I mean, I would say there were probably 250 people there. | |
| They probably could have got up to 400 or 500 with just a bigger venue. | |
| It was a really uncomfortable room, and that's small. | |
| But then you have other things that start piling on, and this is the idea of snakebit, right? | |
| First of all, When Biden came out to give his speech, immediately he almost face-planted, you know, tripping over a wire that should have either been taped down or shouldn't have been in his walking path, or somebody somewhere should have warned him about that wire. | |
| And that seems small, but these things add up. | |
| At the rally, there were two protesters at really, really bizarre moments. | |
| One guy got up in the very, very beginning of Biden's speech and I don't know. | |
| It was a weird moment that he basically said that Biden wasn't a good candidate. | |
| Biden had to verbally spar with both of these guys. | |
| It ruined any energy and movement he had in the speech. | |
| He had John Kerry there and we're going to talk a little bit about that in a minute about what What happened there and what the news was coming out of this event. | |
| But John Kerry was visibly sick. | |
| You know, I'd come down with the crud that is just kind of going around here. | |
| And by the way, I apologize for coughing every now and then. | |
| I'm trying really, really hard to stave off that Iowa crud that I think a lot of people are suffering from right now. | |
| And so, just knock on wood. | |
| That I can keep away from that so send some energy my way in that regard. | |
| But so John Kerry was sick and that was obvious and he wasn't able to bring the energy that I think he and Biden were kind of hoping for in his speech or in his presence and and that wasn't great. | |
| And then you know there's there's other little things like there was a nice moment at this rally where There was this precocious little boy in the front row and he was just all over the place and for whatever reason his family wasn't really keeping track of him and he just kept like wandering over by the podium and Biden would notice it and sort of get off track and then uh the same thing happened with Kerry. | |
| Kerry even had to stop speaking and sort of address the the child and the family and then there was this nice moment while Kerry was speaking where Biden called for the kid to come across the the area to him And the kid came over to Biden, and they had a little moment. | |
| And Biden gave him a vice presidential coin. | |
| And it was really, really sweet. | |
| And I have to tell you that the photographers in the place just ate that up. | |
| I mean, like, nobody's business. | |
| And how could they not? | |
| I mean, that's the kind of thing that's made for American politics. | |
| But when the kid went back over to his family, he kept playing with the coin and sort of, again, wandering over by the podium. | |
| He kept dropping the coin to the point where it got distracting. | |
| And again, that's nothing against the kid, and it's nothing against anybody involved. | |
| Like, these things happen. | |
| But the feeling with the Biden campaign is that these things just keep happening. | |
| You know, Biden has had these really uncomfortable confrontations with Iowa voters, and these things just keep happening. | |
| So it feels, I think, to a lot of these people. | |
| on the campaign that this thing has just sort of been hampered from the start. | |
| And there is a hope that as soon as they get to New Hampshire, that things will restart. | |
| And depending upon what happens, I mean, there's still a possibility that they win. | |
| I mean, there is a strategy in place where the hope is in these Iowa caucuses that people, they go in, excuse me, there's that crud I was worried about. | |
| They go in with their communities, and they will announce what candidate they are for. | |
| And if a candidate doesn't get 15%, they become unviable, and those people are released, and they can join other groups and denominations. | |
| The idea here is that Biden can win a lot if he can pick up some of the unviable candidates, the ones who aren't siding with people like Warren and Sanders, and Or Buttigieg. | |
| If there's places where Buttigieg goes down, it makes sense that they would come over to Biden. | |
| So the hope there is that that will work out. | |
| Or, and this is one of the reasons I think that Kerry was there, John Kerry is I think that Biden is looking to sort of replicate what happened in 2004 here in Iowa where John Kerry took the primary or the caucuses after it looked like Howard Dean, Vermont, Vermont Governor Howard Dean was the presumptive front runner and had all the momentum. | |
| And then what happened was Iowans decided, faced with George W. Bush and the Iraq War, that they wanted the quote-unquote safer, more electable candidate. | |
| I have my misgivings with that. | |
| I was a diehard Dean supporter and was actually out here in Iowa trying to help the Dean campaign in 2004. | |
| But that's what happens. | |
| Sometimes they will go with the safer candidate or what they think is the more electable candidate, and I think Biden is still holding out hope that that could possibly happen. | |
| The news coming out of John Kerry being here today, a lot was said in this rally. | |
| It was a pretty rowdy, eventful thing. | |
| Biden A lot of times brought up the impeachment trial. | |
| The Republican decision to vote to not allow witnesses, and he referred repeatedly to it as a cover-up, which is a really, really harsh way to put it. | |
| I mean, I think it's accurate, but he definitely appeared to take the gloves off in how he dealt with it. | |
| He said multiple times that Republicans were not respecting the Constitution, that they were endangering them. | |
| But also one of his campaign talking points has been that he can be a uniter that could bring the Republican Party back from the abyss. | |
| He said that again today while also intimating that Republicans had betrayed the Constitution. | |
| John Kerry echoed that. | |
| He said that Republicans were afraid of the truth and that's why they voted not to have witnesses. | |
| He made the claim that Donald Trump has worked closely with Vladimir Putin and seemed to insinuate that there's a conspiracy between the two. | |
| And at one point John Kerry, who some of you might remember, was a war hero of Vietnam. | |
| George W. Bush and his little crony group with Karl Rove had a bunch of veterans basically claim that John Kerry had lied about his war record. | |
| and drug him through the mud in a thing that's since been called swift boating. | |
| And John Kerry said that he believes the Ukrainian conspiracy theory by Donald Trump is its own instance of swift boating. | |
| So a lot of things took place from this rally. | |
| And I will say that I had a lot of conversations with the people in the crowd. | |
| And it was a usual Iowa mixture of people. | |
| There were a lot of people there who had already made up their minds about who they were going to support. | |
| There were a lot of diehard Biden fans there, people who have loved him for years. | |
| And then there were others there that I was a little surprised by. | |
| There were a lot of people who told me that they, until recently, were registered Republicans. | |
| These were people who had supported the Republican Party for years and years and years. | |
| I talked to people who had voted for George W. Bush, for George H.W. | |
| Bush, for Mitt Romney. | |
| I mean, just all across the board. | |
| And they told me that they were so disgusted by Donald Trump and the behavior of the Republican Party That they've actually switched parties. | |
| And a lot of them were supporting Joe Biden, but others were actively searching for their own candidates and were feeling their own political philosophy evolve. | |
| I also talked to one guy and I was a little surprised. | |
| This was one of the more surprising conversations I've had on the campaign trail in a long time. | |
| And he told me that he was actually a Donald Trump supporter, a really, really dedicated Donald Trump supporter. | |
| And he told me that he supported Trump 100% and that he believed Trump should be acquitted in the impeachment trial and believed it was a stunt by Democrats to try and take him down. | |
| But he told me that the Republican vote not to allow witnesses was not just disappointing, but also a really, really blatant cover up. | |
| And he resented it. | |
| He said that he wasn't sure why somebody would hide something if they didn't have something to hide. | |
| And he actually came to the Joe Biden rally because he didn't trust Biden. | |
| And at this moment with what Republicans were doing, he wanted to hear Biden's side of the story. | |
| And when I asked him how he felt, he said that he was reconsidering everything. | |
| So there's some odd stuff happening, I think, with the political spectrum right now. | |
| And, you know, I think there are going to be some consequences to the behavior that's taken place with the impeachment trial. | |
| So that's where the Biden world is. | |
| There's certainly a lot of gnashing of teeth, but for all the gnashing of teeth with the Biden campaign, there are soaring hopes among the Bernie Sanders campaign. | |
| I said last night in our special episode, the conversation with Nick and me, that Right now Iowa revolves around Bernie Sanders. | |
| He is at the center of all the discussions and the real question I think that everybody has right now is what type of turnout is he going to bring to the caucuses? | |
| And what is that turnout going to look in conversations with communities and neighbors and with all these people who have been coached up for these caucuses? | |
| I went to his rally tonight in Cedar Rapids in the U.S. | |
| Cellular Center, and there were thousands. | |
| I mean, it was a gigantic, monumental rally, which was really odd for me. | |
| I first saw Bernie Sanders speak four years ago in the 2016 primaries, and I saw him in this little town, Marshalltown, Iowa, in a union hall, and there couldn't have been more than 200 people there. | |
| It was so cramped, so, so tiny. | |
| And it was the kind of place that like a real, real long shot shows up to maybe try and steal a little bit of press. | |
| And I'll never forget it. | |
| Out walked Bernie Sanders, this rumpled little guy who came out and he grabbed the podium and he started speaking and he was speaking so forcefully. | |
| That one of the speakers actually blew out and then while they fixed the speakers he just kept going and it was a really bizarre spectacle of oration that I'm just never gonna forget and now seeing him up in front of a crowd of thousands in an arena and he was surrounded by so many notable people it was it was a rock concert | |
| political rally, Vampire Weekend put on a free show after him, Michael Moore was there, Cornel West was there, Congresswoman Omar was there, and excuse me again I really really hope I'm not coming down with something because it is going to make the next couple days miserable if I am so here here's here's hoping. | |
| Anyway so this big giant spectacle It felt very, very large and and felt like, like maybe the momentum and the things people are saying about that momentum are true. | |
| The story right now is that the momentum is going to carry Sanders to not just a victory in Iowa but a convincing victory and that he will walk out of this state as the presumptive nominee and the possibility that he wins Iowa and then New Hampshire and then goes into South Carolina where presumably he won't win and then into Super Tuesday. | |
| There are a lot of people right now who are making the prediction that this This race could be over by Super Tuesday. | |
| I I don't know that I believe that yet You know, I I don't know that I've seen enough and I have some concerns that we'll talk about here in a second But I'll just throw this out there So the talk in the Bernie Sanders world right now is just unbridled optimism the idea is that | |
| Not only are they going to grow the electorate and that's important for anybody who thinks that perhaps the socialist message will be his undoing or that he won't be able to get anything done. | |
| He's promising a lot of executive orders tonight. | |
| He promised to legalize marijuana and rolled out, I haven't heard this so maybe it's made the rounds, but Rolled out the idea that he would give preferential treatment to mistreated minority populations to try and make money off the legalization of marijuana. | |
| You know, some really large, ambitious, green energy and technologies and these rollouts that have been making the rounds. | |
| You know, promising that a lot of these would be by executive order. | |
| The argument that they're making, or at least among the internal crowds, is that You can make a giant change if you change culture in a giant way. | |
| Of course right now in the time of Trump this all seems very pie-in-the-sky, like there's no way that this could possibly work. | |
| But the idea is if you grow enough of a movement and you gain enough momentum that you can use a bully pulpit to effectively change the face of the country. | |
| That remains to be seen. | |
| There's been a lot of people who have pushed that idea and have sold that idea to the country. | |
| That check hasn't come through. | |
| The last person to make a big, giant, sweeping, leftward change for America was FDR. | |
| You can go back in time and look at Ronald Reagan and say it was possible with a conservative revolution, but that's a completely different thing. | |
| A lot of things had to fall into place for that to happen, and whether or not Bernie Sanders can enjoy a movement like that or a revolution like that, that's anybody's guess. | |
| So what they're watching, and this was my concern walking out of this really impressive rally, is it's unclear whether Sanders' momentum is based on Iowans or if what we're talking about right now is it's unclear whether Sanders' momentum is based on Iowans or if what we're talking about right now is based on out-of-state volunteers who come into the state | |
| This is a phenomenon that happens in Iowa all the time, especially for really, really leftward candidates. | |
| Again, I mentioned this. | |
| In 2004, I came out here to help out with the Dean campaign because I was so inspired by his anti-war message and his liberal views that I got up and came out here and absolutely froze my ass off, and I joined this thing. | |
| They called it the Perfect Storm, which was this giant organizing push, which basically was the brainchild of Howard Dean and Joe Trippi, and he was raising so much money online and gaining so much buzz online that they thought that they could just have all of these young people converge on Iowa and the thousands and thousands of young people would knock on doors and just be a show of strength and support and that would just sort of win over the Iowans. | |
| Well, that sort of annoyed the Iowans. | |
| They did not care for the perfect storm. | |
| I think it just really bothered them to have their doors knocked on every couple of minutes, to look everywhere, and to see these people in Dean shirts, and we had these telltale bright orange toboggans. | |
| And I think it sort of backfired in its own way. | |
| Well, Sanders is currently enjoying the support of a move like this, a movement like this. | |
| There are tons of out-of-state people here right now who are knocking on doors and are doing the Bernie Sanders business. | |
| Whether or not that translates into a caucus showing is a different story. | |
| There are a lot of Iowans who support Bernie Sanders, and there are certainly a lot of socialists in Iowa who support Bernie Sanders. | |
| There's a lot of farmers, a lot of working class people who will show up to caucus for him. | |
| Whether or not the momentum that we've been talking about is an illusion or if it's real, we're not going to know until, I was going to say Monday night, but we don't even know if we're going to know by the end of Monday night. | |
| The Sanders team, they think they have this. | |
| You know, they'll say that they'll answer your questions with a smile at this point because they don't want to just go ahead and say that they definitely have it, but You can tell that they think that they have it. | |
| They think that however it plays out and I think in their minds the list probably would look something along the lines of Sanders 1, either Biden or Warren 2, maybe Buttigieg jumping up to 2 or 3, and then maybe a surprise 4th. | |
| I think that's the ballot or the finish that they think might be coming. | |
| Now whether that's true or not, I don't know. | |
| There's a lot of thought out there that Sanders and Warren are going to cancel each other out and we're gonna see someone like a Buttigieg come up completely out of nowhere and shock everyone. | |
| And you know that might happen. | |
| Or, for all we know right now, while I'm sitting here talking to you, Elizabeth Warren is out there building a momentum of her own. | |
| But the Warren campaign has told me that they feel like that they haven't been able to make up the ground that they need to make up. | |
| So, who knows? | |
| This whole thing is a crapshoot and is about as unpredictable as anything gets. | |
| But I will say that tonight, on the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses, it certainly feels like the story is taking its own shape. | |
| It's a weird shape and it's a bizarre shape. | |
| And I can tell you that, like clockwork, they immediately started getting very hopeful and they started Pointing their fingers and and assigning a lot of blame. | |
| So this is all par for course, but But again, like that par for course is going to lead to absolute total chaos Tomorrow I'm gonna be out there again. | |
| I'm gonna be doing a lot of talking and I've got some discussions planned with the Buttigieg campaign I'm going to a Klobuchar event, which we'll see how that turns out There that organization has pretty much been impenetrable Not really sure what they have or what they're working with. | |
| They're playing their cards very close to the chest. | |
| If you talk to them, they will basically intimate that they think they're going to shock the world. | |
| But that's what everybody says unless they are certain that things are sort of falling apart, which is where we find ourselves again tonight, the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses. | |
| Thank you for hanging out for a little bit and for the support for this special coverage of the Iowa Caucuses. | |
| I have to tell you, I've really enjoyed being out here and not just covering it, but the conversation I'm having with people who are supporting this podcast. | |
| We are just overjoyed by the feedback we've been getting and the support we've been given. | |
| It really means a lot. | |
| And that's not just, you know, late Iowa talking. | |
| Like, it's been so, so nice and so needed, especially in a really hard time. | |
| And I just want to say personally that I have appreciated it beyond words. | |
| So, uh, we will be back tomorrow with more special coverage from the Iowa caucuses. | |
| If you have not subscribed to the podcast, I don't know what you're doing. | |
| You should subscribe because you're going to be getting the special, uh, special coverage every time they come out. | |
| That way it goes directly into your phone or device or whatever it is you're listening to the podcast on. | |
| I don't, I don't know. | |
| There might be stuff out there I'm not familiar with. | |
| But go ahead and subscribe and remember on themuckrake.com the website I am posting dispatches from the road with my own exclusive coverage. | |
| Please go ahead and go check that out. | |
| I think For whatever reason, I think a lot of these media outlets are dropping the ball. | |
| I've got some thoughts on that. | |
| Maybe we'll talk about it tomorrow night. | |
| Maybe me and Nick will break that down. | |
| But go ahead and subscribe to this and go over and check out the website and continue rating it and telling people about it and leaving comments. | |
| Spread the word. | |
| We're trying really hard to do something special here and we want you to be a part of it. | |
| Alright everybody, I am Jared Yates-Saxton and I will talk to you tomorrow from Iowa. |