This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Jared and Nick discuss how Rupert Murdoch has his minions at Fox News pushing the Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on his viewers, as the right tries to move farther away from the toxic brand of Donald Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey, everybody. | |
| Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm Jerry D. Sexton. | |
| Nick Hausman, how you doing, buddy? | |
| I'm doing well. | |
| I'm doing well. | |
| It's been the third time this week we get to talk. | |
| It's great. | |
| I feel good about it. | |
| You know, I was getting ready for this Weekender, and I feel like we just ended our midterm livestream coverage, like maybe a half hour ago, something like that. | |
| Well, that's the benefit of being on the West Coast. | |
| It wasn't that late, but it was a long show, I'll tell you that. | |
| Yeah, we've got a big show, we've got to recap the midterms, we've got to talk about the state of American politics, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and an incredible, growing feud between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. | |
| I believe we had that a while back. | |
| We had that. | |
| But, yeah, I just want to go ahead and say, first of all, thank you everybody who came out on election night. | |
| We did four hours. | |
| Four hours. | |
| You, me, Nick, or you, Nick Hausman, me, Jared Hayes-Sexton, Danielle Moody, fantastic, Wajahat Ali showed up and killed it, your friend, friend of the pod, Dr. Jason Needleman, who was fantastic. | |
| I gotta tell you, Nick, And I gotta tell everybody this. | |
| First of all, the people reacting to the coverage of election night were so kind. | |
| I had people reaching out in the media saying, why don't, why don't, why aren't you on TV? | |
| Why has that not happened? | |
| Which made me think, by the way, why aren't there just a bunch of people sitting around, like, cursing and screaming about politics? | |
| How's that not a show? | |
| Well, they used to have that show, right? | |
| Wasn't that Crossfire or whatever that was? | |
| I mean, sort of, except for that was full of shit. | |
| You know, but I had people saying that and then on top of it, I had people who were like looking at this and they were like, Wow, your listenership is really engaged and understand things, which always happens whenever we have a guest, whenever people reach out to them after they've been on the show, but I felt really good. | |
| I don't know how you felt. | |
| Yeah, no, listen, and have everybody else come in, like Danielle and Waj and then my friend Jason. | |
| What a great conversation, and it really flowed and had terrific points. | |
| It's like, you know, we almost need one of those bells to ring when someone makes a really great point. | |
| It would have been ringing the whole time, you know what I mean? | |
| Like one of those. | |
| It never would have stopped. | |
| But we just want to say, again, thank you for that. | |
| Also, to give everybody a preview, because, again, this is a Patreon show, patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast. | |
| You want to listen to the whole thing. | |
| I'm going to tell you in a bit why I'm feeling pretty optimistic. | |
| I feel right now as if this is a moment that is really ... We're going to see this, I think, long-term as a really, really important moment. | |
| We're going to talk about ways to make that happen. | |
| And I'm not just talking about voting, sending money to people. | |
| I'm talking about, like, what you as an individual can do to make this better and to win this fight. | |
| But before we do, Nick, we gotta set the table. | |
| We gotta talk about what happened Tuesday night. | |
| What a snoozer of an election, am I right? | |
| Not really interesting. | |
| Like, just sort of went exactly as planned, right? | |
| I mean, you know what it looks like to me? | |
| It's like a slide rule, right? | |
| It doesn't necessarily matter where it starts. | |
| It's how much it slides to the one or side or the other. | |
| And obviously, this slide did not move nearly as much to the right as we thought it was going to be. | |
| And that is exciting. | |
| You are right. | |
| I have cause for optimism, especially because the exit polling, too, Seems to indicate a growing movement, if you will, and maybe movements that's been bastardized by the right too much. | |
| But whatever this is, I think that there's a notion that people are fed up with election denying. | |
| There's something happening in this country and what form it's taking. | |
| And I talked about this when we were finishing up on Tuesday night, it felt like, and again, The American electorate is a strange animal, Nick. | |
| It always has been. | |
| But it's becoming more and more obvious that like our electorate might be becoming a little bit more critical. | |
| It might be a little bit more nuanced, which suggests that this fever that is holding the country reached the point where it was boiling. | |
| And finally, maybe not. | |
| I'm not going to sit here and tell you the fever broke. | |
| Right. | |
| But I'm telling you that, like, maybe maybe some of it broke, maybe a couple of places here and there. | |
| Doesn't mean that the fight is over. | |
| There are things that have to happen. | |
| We're still in incredible danger. | |
| But I got to tell you. | |
| I, I walked into Tuesday not particularly certain where this thing was going. | |
| We talked on our preview show that many things could go many different ways. | |
| But, and by the way, I don't know if you're, are you superstitious? | |
| Are you the type that like when your team's playing do you wear like the same shirt or something? | |
| Oh, I mean I would be if I was like more organized and had remembered what I would wore that did help them at one point. | |
| So, so I would be. | |
| You don't grow playoff beards or anything? | |
| Yeah, but I guess in practice I'm not, no. | |
| I'm growing superstitious because every time there's an election and we do a live stream, I'm spending my time telling people, hey, the numbers look, like, decent. | |
| And all of a sudden something, it's running counter to whatever I thought. | |
| Of course, the idea, and we'll get more into what Fox News and the Republican media has said afterwards, this was going to be, of course, a red wave, or a red tsunami, or the red wedding, or whatever it is these people were talking about. | |
| And it not only didn't materialize, it turned into a pretty widespread rejection of Trumpism. | |
| It turned into a lot of split ballots, a lot of different sort of choices that showed that the temperature of the country is, it's strange. | |
| But also hopeful in a way, and I kind of feel like, and we'll get into the particular races in a second, I kind of feel like heading into 2024, it's becoming more and more obvious where we need to go, what we need to do, and what direction we need to head in. | |
| Do you agree? | |
| I agree. | |
| I feel like this is the death rattle, perhaps, but it's still breathing and there still is a presence there. | |
| But yes, I think that there is some progress and maybe even... Ken, is it possible that maybe my mind can be changed and that I could think that people on the right would be willing to vote for somebody based on their character? | |
| Versus the rubber stamp of a Republican agenda. | |
| It's possible that maybe I'm thawing a little bit on that one. | |
| So yeah, there's something to feel, you know, decent about today. | |
| Yeah, so let's get into, again, just to reset the table and talk about what happened on Tuesday. | |
| You know, there's a couple of notable things. | |
| J.D. | |
| Vance won in Ohio and is going to be the next Senator from Ohio, which was an unforced error by the Democratic Party. | |
| By not helping out Ryan even more, and just basically dropping as much money as he wanted, you know, into Ohio to try and defeat it. | |
| That was deflating. | |
| Ron Johnson winning in Wisconsin, deflating, right? | |
| But then all of a sudden, we start looking at a couple of things, right? | |
| Like, New York was supposed to be competitive. | |
| Not competitive. | |
| Like, at all. | |
| You look at, like, New Hampshire, it's supposed to go a different way. | |
| All of a sudden, you know, you look around some places and it's like, Yeah, Brian Kemp, of course, walked over Stacey Abrams, which we gotta get into later. | |
| But also, I mean, right now Raphael Warnock is heading into the runoff with a lead. | |
| It was obvious that a bunch of Georgian voters decided that they didn't want to put their name next to Hershel Walker, split their ballots. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| We'll get into Fetterman in a second, which I think is the highlight of the night. | |
| Kerry Lake right now, Nick, is trailing. | |
| And by not a small margin in the Arizona governorship, Blake Masters just ate shit. | |
| Which is how it's supposed to be. | |
| Doug Mastriano, ate shit. | |
| Mehmet Oz, ate shit. | |
| Like, these are all, like, in a sane world, that's what's supposed to happen. | |
| But again, Nick, in a sane world, they wouldn't have been the candidates in the first place. | |
| Well, let's not forget the Democrats helped some of these people get past the primaries on the Republican side. | |
| So, you know, they reaped what they sowed. | |
| So it did work a little bit, right? | |
| Don't say that! | |
| no no some of these guys that got through lost but then again you know they maybe what they would have won those races anyway and they could have saved some of that money but without question yes there is a little bit of rejection of the insanity if Boebert loses and it doesn't look like that's going to be the case that would really give me a little bit of an icing on the cake here if we That's a spicy meatball is what it is. | |
| Yeah, because it's like that was supposed to be a completely utterly safe district for her. | |
| Like, no way she would have lost that. | |
| It might still happen that way, but the fact that it's this close really tells you something at least about her. | |
| God darn it, why couldn't Marjorie Taylor Greene be in the same situation? | |
| At least to make her think for a minute about where her position is. | |
| Yeah, I really wish that they could have gotten some OANN Special streaming network show, you know, basically like Thelma and Louise, except for it's just over the cliff, over the cliff, over the cliff. | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| You know, why couldn't that have happened, right? | |
| But I will say, you know, we had talked about it, and we talked about it on the livestream, too. | |
| Like, this broke every rule of the midterm. | |
| People showed up to vote, Joe Biden, who has a really, really low approval rating, 40 to 42, 43 percent, depending upon who you're looking at. | |
| You know, party in power, particularly Democratic Party, is supposed to just absolutely get wiped out. | |
| This is a new one for the history books. | |
| You know, and you also take a look, we were talking about this with Jason Needleman, like you've now seen like the political sort of landscape in Ohio and Florida completely change. | |
| This was also, and we'll get more into this, this was also the election where the next generation showed up. | |
| These are people who are suddenly coming of age after Donald Trump's presidency. | |
| They watched that trauma of it. | |
| They watched this thing unfold. | |
| They wanted nothing to do with it. | |
| And we're talking, we're not just talking a majority of them voting against the Republicans. | |
| We're talking about a vast majority of young voters saying, we want nothing to do with this. | |
| It was, it was kind of a seismic midterm. | |
| I would say it's one of the most important midterms Since, again, the so-called Republican Revolution. | |
| Right. | |
| Without question, the midterms are no longer going to be considered some sort of, you know... Can't take them off. | |
| Right. | |
| They are vital and important, and people are willing to come out and vote. | |
| So they're not going to be down-ballot things anymore. | |
| These are all going to be things that people are going to rally around. | |
| And I feel like it's almost like they realize this, oh shit, there's been all this room we could have used all these years to like, you know, make inroads. | |
| It's kind of like, You know, there's an advertising calendar that people follow online that is based in the 1960s Mad Men era scheduling of when they will invest money in their advertising. | |
| And you have to figure at some point someone's gonna say, you know, July, not a lot of people are advertising. | |
| I bet you we could get some value there, you know? | |
| So they're figuring this out with the midterms, too, and there's no question. | |
| I mean, and the New York's debacle really is troubling that they would have lost, I think, four seats, which might very well mean the difference between keeping the House. | |
| That's right. | |
| But correct me if I'm wrong. | |
| New York did some fancy finagling with their with their districts recently to redraw them a little bit. | |
| And I think that hurt them. | |
| And that was a Republican thing that they did, you know, in places like Wisconsin, which we could also talk about. | |
| Yeah, a lot of finagling. | |
| And you know what you just brought up is really important because, you know, it is this antiquated idea of what politics are, right? | |
| Like, politics have changed so much over the past couple of decades, but in a lot of ways, like, you still have, you have a president right now who's been around for not just decades, many decades, you know? | |
| Like, you have a lot of people Who have been in politics for a while. | |
| And back in the day, Nick, midterms weren't that big of a deal. | |
| Like, you know, maybe you went home once to do like a meet-and-greet over a baked bean dinner. | |
| And that was it! | |
| Like, it was just sort of like this old boys club where you all hung out, you know, at the Capitol Grill. | |
| And like, it's like, how'd it go? | |
| Well, I won by 50 points. | |
| You know, that's the way it was. | |
| And it's been treated that way for a while. | |
| That sort of mindset has seeped not only through the political class, but also in the media class. | |
| Like they, you know, very recently, like you could barely you would you would turn on something like a CNN and like They would try and act like they cared about the midterms. | |
| You know, they would trot out the holograms and all of that a little bit, but like, their heart wasn't in it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know? | |
| And now, it's like, no. | |
| And this is a prelude to what we're gonna talk about in a second, about why I'm optimistic and I think you are. | |
| Americans are like, Holy shit, these people are monsters. | |
| I'm not going to just not vote. | |
| Like, I have to vote. | |
| And not only that, but you see, rejecting these idiot Republicans, rejecting Trumpism, you look at ballot measures, Nick. | |
| You're looking at ballot measures in states where people are voting for the ballot measures against their party affiliation. | |
| They're voting for weed. | |
| Thank God. | |
| Legalize the shit out of it. | |
| They're voting for abortion. | |
| Thank God. | |
| Legalize the shit out of it. | |
| And people are saying, wow, you know, things have gotten so bad and this party over here is infringing on my rights. | |
| I don't think I like that. | |
| So I'm going to vote. | |
| And so it's, you're going to give me a chance every two years to vote. | |
| I'm going to fucking vote. | |
| Period. | |
| And you have been listening to a free preview of our Patreon-exclusive Weekender Show. | |
| If you want to get in on all the fun and get that bonus episode every week, not to mention exclusive content, live hangouts, question and answer sessions. | |
| We're even going to do some of these live so you can come and watch how the sausage is made. | |
| All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast On top of that, you get to hang out with the Muckrake community, which are a really good group of people. | |
| So you should do that. | |
| That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. |