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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down how the Democrats strategy in Kansas showed that people are motivated to come out to protect a woman's right to health care, plus Jon Stewart's angry pleas literally got a bill passed to provide health care to our veterans.
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Hey everybody, it's Nick Hauselman here, and I just wanted to tell you that this is an excerpt from our Weekender podcast.
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And now, on to the show.
Hey everybody.
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Eyestone.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
We have a jam-packed show.
We got good news everywhere.
We got good news in Kansas.
We got good news in court with Alex Jones.
We got good news with veterans.
We got good news everywhere, Nick.
There's nothing at all that is going wrong in the world.
It's all coming up Muckrake.
Yes, well it makes my COVID diagnosis a little bit easier to swallow, I suppose.
Oh no!
Yeah, yesterday.
I can't believe it, Jared.
I was going to be the last guy in the United States to have not gotten it, and that was going to be on Stephen Colbert.
I was going to do all the whole daily, you know, the daytime talk shows.
I had it all planned out.
I had a suit picked out.
I can't believe that it got me.
It's I mean you were basically I don't know if anybody's ever seen this movie maybe I'm the only one a boy and his dog with Don Johnson like you were going to be out wandering the landscape like holding up like your your your pride and joy that you you had never gotten.
Oh more like the boy in the plastic bubble.
That was like I felt like until but my wife it was my wife who brought the sickness into our house And it was from a hospital event.
She went to a hospital event outside.
Here's the thing, when we open ourselves up to intimacy, we open ourselves up to so much good, but also so much disease.
I believe in sickness and in health is the phrase we're looking for, and I'm here to prove it.
Well, as always, McRikers play Hurt, and that's what we do.
We come out here, we give it our all, and on behalf of the entire community, Nick, get well soon, bud.
Thank you.
And by the way, I'm about 6.5, 7 out of 10.
I'm not, you know, being floored with this.
Okay, and let's try and not get the rebound case.
Right?
Let's not do that.
Well, I don't know.
I'm going to go on Pax Lovade.
So Pax Lovade is the rebounding thing, and Lisa took it, and she's actually fine.
Completely fine.
And I am not, but I don't know if I want to take it because I'm worried about the rebound, so.
Yeah, I'm a little worried about the President of the United States, who is currently on, I believe, his fourth, fifth trip with COVID at this point.
So, Nick, you avoid that, yeah?
Yeah, OK.
All right, so let's get into the good news.
Listen, I...
I'm going to be honest, Nick.
Sometimes we get painted with the wrong brush, that we're naysayers, that we're cynics, that we're skeptics.
You know what we do on this show?
We celebrate the victories.
We tell it like it is.
We talk about things as they are.
We do the good, we do the bad.
Nick, massive, massive victory in Kansas this week.
It turns out that the citizens of Kansas that I've been told are called Kansans.
Kansans.
Yeah, that works.
Yeah, it doesn't roll off the tongue the way Hoosier does.
They went out to the ballot box and just overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion rights.
The final numbers that came through, the protection of abortion rights came out to 58.8 percent.
That's 534,268 people who voted to protect these rights.
A nearly double turnout to a similar ballot initiative in the last election.
It is a massive win in Kansas of all places.
When I saw this was coming up, I thought it was doomed.
I thought maybe it'd be close, but I thought that they would repeal the protection of abortion in the Constitution.
We say all the time, savor the victories where they are, and this is a huge one.
Sure.
70% of people who registered after the Dobbs case came in were women.
So clearly there was a huge push by women who wanted to protect their rights to choose leading up to this election.
So I was worried.
I thought that perhaps the 70 plus percent of the country that is in favor of Roe v. Wade might not be in favor of it enough to get off their butts and actually go vote in a, you know, one of these kind of special elections.
And it turns out that, no, they, at least in Kansas, they were willing to.
And I am completely encouraged now because Kansas, right?
Kansas is Kansas.
It's the middle of the country.
It is indicative of a lot of red states.
Yeah, and Kansas is an interesting case.
I mean, there's a reason why political scientists are always focusing there.
I mean, if you actually look at, of course, they have two Republican senators.
I don't think the Democrats have controlled the state legislature, I believe, in 30 years.
Like, it has been absolutely dominated by the Republican Party, but it is also In many ways, a bellwether state.
It kind of shows us where energies are lying, where they're going.
And listen, we're going to talk about the implications regarding the Democrats, the Republicans, the midterms here in just a second.
I wrote about this on my Substack this week.
This is a victory of the people.
This is not that those two major parties came in and battled it out.
We're talking about local organizers.
We're talking about pro-abortion, pro-rights groups that got into this scrum.
and made this thing happen.
A lot of this was on the ground, grassroots organization.
And I mean, you literally have to give it to the people here.
And we can say, yes, they voted for it, but again, it's not always just voting.
You have to go out there, you have to organize, you have to put these things together, you have to engage in this solidarity.
And my God, Kansas showed us how to do it.
Yeah, I mean, the thing, the problem is there's enough states that have these trigger laws, I suppose, that are ahead of time, so they're not faced with a referendum that people can vote for.
They're already stuck with their anti-abortion laws.
It seems like they were prepared for this for decades to do this.
So that is the question, is can other states get this kind of thing on the ballot and then have them vote?
Because it seems like, okay, you're gonna have Ten states who easily will just, in a landslide probably, vote against abortion.
Maybe ten, eleven, whatever that is.
It certainly won't be half.
And that's encouraging, because now suddenly poor people that would need this choice would not have to drive an average of five, six hundred miles to get care.
That is encouraging, but I think we still need a federal law that controls all this.
Oh, absolutely.
Through threads of today's episode, particularly in these first couple of stories, is that there is starting to show some fractures, not just within the Republican coalition, but weaknesses of the Republicans.
We're starting to understand a couple of things.
And we're going to take a listen to an ad here in a second.
There was an absolute blitz of ads and appeals that were put out by these groups.
And I wanna take a listen to this, and then I wanna talk about why these things worked, because there was some actual genius reasoning and appeals and rhetoric that took place here. - This confusing constitutional amendment is a slippery slope for Kansas.
It gives government more power over your privacy and your personal medical decisions.
Don't let politicians take away your freedom.
Send a message.
Vote no.
Unbelievable.
And here is the reason why that was so successful.
So the Republican Party and a lot of people throughout history have always called this a fusion project, right?
So basically you have, we talked about it before, we got the country club Republicans who are just interested in tax cuts and the market and all that.
They're interested in accumulating wealth.
You've got the evangelicals who, you know, as I talked about with Catherine Stewart, are totally interested in creating a theocratic society.
But you also have another group.
And this other group are a bunch of libertarians who literally believe in small government.
They literally do not want the government coming into their houses, telling them what to do with, I don't know, guns in their bodies.
And they do go along with the Republican Party a lot of time because there has been this fusion.
That fusion is starting to fracture a little bit as the Republican Party has overreached, particularly with these abortion bans.
I know you were probably counting, so tell me how many times you heard the word abortion mentioned in that ad.
Didn't hear it a lot.
Nope.
So that's another one of those things.
Obviously, consciously, they're not going to mention the word.
It's not being mentioned a lot across the board.
They are looking at this exactly like you said, glad you put it that way, as a libertarian model where You can tap into that.
There's a knee-jerk reaction, right, against government interference for anything.
And no matter what that issue can be, if you can get the right keywords out there, the right music in the background, yeah, you can sway a lot of people for a very specific vote like that.
And so, you know, kudos to that.
I know people probably would have been upset saying, like, how can we talk around this?
Like, this is such an important issue, but this is what you got to do in today's landscape.
And I got to tell you, if you actually look at how this was put together, it is absolutely laser focused on, and by the way, we talk all the time about Democrats wanting to go after the quote unquote median voter.
Let me tell you what the median voter in America wants.
They want the government to leave them alone unless they're going to fund something that helps them or fund something that they care about.
That's what they want.
In one case, they don't want the government in your bedroom unless they are reactionary zealots.
Those are the people who care or the people who are, again, like reactionary people who believe some people need to be controlled, right?
That's what the state should do.
Otherwise, you can basically move these things around and change your focus, which says, guess what?
We're not going to tell you what to do, but the government is here to help you in this case.
And the Democrats, by the way, there is not just a Mack truck-sized hole here for the Democrats to drive through.
It's the size of the space station.
This is old school Democratic politics.
And what Kansas has shown here is that that fusion, that coalition we're talking about, there are cracks in it, especially as the Republicans, you know, hit the gas really, really hard and keep coming after rights and are rolling this stuff back.
And I got to tell you, if this worked in Kansas, Nick, Nick, that tells you everything you need to know about what this could possibly do nationally.
Yes, you sound a little corny like Kansas in July right now, but we're actually in August unfortunately, but yes.
Let me tell you this though, because here's another thing that's encouraging and directly connected to the result.
CBS News Poll had a tracker at the end of the month, July, saying that the percentage of 18 to 29 registered voters who will definitely vote, in 2018, that younger group, 18 to 29, was at 49% would definitely vote.
vote in 2018, that younger group, 18 to 29, was at 49% with definitely vote.
Now it's 60%, which is a really significant increase when you're talking about from one midterm to the next.
In the generic ballot, Democrats in 2018 were 50%.
Now it's 66% with an increase of people in that age who want to vote.
That, especially when you're talking about abortion or you're talking about progressive ideals, should give us more reason and more fuel to that fire to feel like, you know what, this might be one of those times where the midterms do not follow every other midterm we've seen for hundreds of years.
So three things on this.
First of all, I want to say, Nate Silver came out and said the Democrats have a 55% chance to keep the Senate.
And the only reason I bring that up, because Nate Silver is absolutely full of shit, is to remind people, don't care what Nate Silver says about anything, first of all.
Second of all, the Republicans have absolutely given the Democrats a get out of jail free card.
all of this if they would have held off on this abortion overthrow if they would have held off on this thing and of course they saw it you know they had all their cards in a row they were ready to do it and they were like you know screw it we're gonna do it be legends at this point the numbers that you just read off Nick those numbers have absolutely nothing to do with Joe Biden whatsoever And I'll tell you what you're supposed to do when you have a Democrat as President of the United States.
You're supposed to make the midterms a referendum on that president.
That is as old as modern politics.
And at this point, you said the youth vote.
At this point, they don't want to go out and vote to support Joe Biden.
And matter of fact, they don't want to go out and support Democrats all that much because they don't like what they're doing on climate.
They don't like what they're doing in terms of student debt, you know?
But now they have a reason, which is you are not going to roll back progress as we're getting older and getting ready to take our place.
Number three, and this is the final thing I'll say on this.
I know that you know this as well as I do.
There are so many Democratic strategists and consultants who saw what happened in Kansas and they're like, you know what, we don't even have to talk about abortion.
We don't even have to talk about reproductive rights.
It's everybody already knows.
So let's just not do that.
Those people have no clue what they're talking about.
And there should not be an ad or a speech or anything from the Democratic Party from now until November that isn't about Republican extremism.
And you have to nail that to the wall because this is one of your last few chances to actually make this case before everything is gerrymandered and rigged to death.
So I do want to address number two because We were shitting on Biden for months and months in his entire presidential existence in office.
His approval ratings are in the tank, as worse as Trump's have ever been.
But let me just give you a list of the things that they've accomplished, some of them extremely recently, and obviously some during the course of this administration.
So I got this from Sahil Kapoor, who is on Twitter.
He had a nice little thing I wanted to make sure I gave everybody.
He's an NBC News senior national political reporter.
But he laid it out.
I saved it because I thought it was a good point.
If this deal passes, which they were talking at that point about the climate change and shit, you know, the one they just signed, they were about to sign, climate change and Chips.
Thanks.
Chips.
All those.
Here's what he's inked wins on.
Drug pricing.
The climate ACA money.
Higher taxes on corporations.
1.9 trillion COVID rescue plan.
1.2 trillion infrastructure law.
New gun law.
Chips China bill.
KBJ on SCOTUS.
73 plus lower court judges.
These are all, you know, things that are terrific feathers in your cap for your first four years.
I mean, he actually is getting some stuff done.
It might have taken him a little while.
And he might have said shit that really pissed us off and didn't think it worked.
But hey, that's not a bad record to run going into the midterms.
No, it's not.
And I want to point out, this is something that we were talking about.
I mean, my God, Nick, it was only a couple of months into the administration when it became very clear that our media was going to, first of all, prove that they're not partisan by going after Joe Biden.
That happened immediately.
They gave him a quick little honeymoon.
They ran, I don't know, six or seven articles.
They were like, this might be the new FDR.
And then immediately they were like, well, I don't know if things are going great.
He got dealt, and this is the thing that we've talked about multiple times, and again, I stand by it.
I still do not think that Joe Biden is the president for the moment.
I don't.
I think there are still problems here, and we're not going to sit here and sugarcoat it.
He got dealt a bad hand with COVID.
He got dealt a bad hand with the economy.
He got dealt one bad hand, Afghanistan, you name it.
He got dealt one bad hand after another.
And we said this earlier, which is the narrative constantly changes, and the narrative has to change because this isn't just a matter of politics.
It's a matter of showmanship.
It's a matter of selling a TV program that is, all caps, America, and the way that our media profits off of this.
I do think that the momentum has shifted leading to November, but as you and I know, a lot can happen in a day or a week.
We have no idea what's going to be going on in November.
The only thing we know for sure and that we can control is this, that is that the Republican Party stole the Supreme Court in order to overturn a fundamental right And you can hang your hat on that.
It doesn't matter what else happens.
We have now seen people are not putting up with this shit.
Right.
We can also guarantee that Trump will be endorsing more and more candidates in the future.
And if we're so lucky, maybe he'll include the last name in the endorsement.
Best of luck, Eric!
I was like, Eric Clapton?
Who is he endorsing?
I don't know.
Eric Carman?
These are all, you know, Trumpy people now.
That was hilarious.
And what was even more hilarious about that, and I don't know if you want to even spend any time on this, but, is that it was on purpose.
He literally takes this so unseriously that he was like, fuck it, I'm just gonna write Eric and then let them... And by the way, it makes sense.
It makes it...
This is my COVID brain.
It guarantees that he gets a win in his endorsement.
Yeah, I believe there's three Erics involved.
And by the way, while we're on the subject, a quick segue, we've got to talk about people who do not take serious things seriously.
We do have to talk about this recent development in the Alex Jones trial.
Basically, to get people up to speed, and we need to talk about the implications because there are some actually large implications from Walmart King Ready to talk about.
Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist, mogul and just absolute blight on humanity, has been found guilty in this trial in which he basically told everybody that Sandy Hook was a false flag, which led to ungodly harassment of the surviving parents.
And it's not just like his viewers, like people within his institution were like stalking these people.
I mean, like really disgusting stuff.
At this point we're in the settlement part of it in which he's having to take the stand so the jury can figure out how much money they're going to give him and I want to talk in a second about what has led up to this because I've been paying attention to this because I actually think this is going to be Probably a landmark case.
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