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In this weekly roundup, Brad and Dan prepare listeners for the 2024 election with insights into the latest election security concerns, voter dynamics, and political strategies. They discuss recent FBI and DHS warnings regarding voter intimidation and election-related violence, and examine the protections offered by the Electoral Count Reform Act against election fraud. Focusing on early voting patterns, Brad and Dan analyze key demographics, including female and minority voters, and how they may influence the outcome. They also address the rhetoric and strategies of figures like Donald Trump and JD Vance, whose approaches aim to appeal to specific voter bases. The conversation covers mental preparedness for election week, offering tips for staying safe and resilient. Ending on a hopeful note, the hosts emphasize voter enthusiasm and share positive perspectives on the election’s potential outcomes.
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AXIS Moondi AXIS Moondi The 2024 elections are upon us, y'all.
And no matter what happens, there's going to be a lot to process and a next chapter to prepare for.
That's why we're holding two live events in order to help you stay informed about what's happening and to get ready for what's coming.
On November 21st, we're holding an event with Americans United for Separation of Church and State at the University of Southern California.
We have an illustrious group of leaders and scholars, including Andrew Seidel, Rachel Lazar, Kyate Joshi, Diane Winston, and Dan Miller.
We're going to talk about what happened and prepare for what's next.
On November 22nd, we'll be talking about Christian extremism and the 2024 elections at the San Diego Convention Center.
Matt Taylor will be giving opening remarks, and we'll have a roundtable with familiar faces like Leah Payne and Lloyd Barba, not to mention me and Dan, and a few others.
Tickets are available now, and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
Join us in person or online.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are warning in this new intelligence bulletin of the heightened risk of lone wolf attacks by domestic extremists motivated by election-related conspiracy theories, including beliefs in widespread voter fraud and their hatred of their political opponents.
This will surprise no one who's been paying attention, but it's significant that these agencies are putting this out to local law enforcement a week before the election.
The new unclassified bulletin says the goal of these attacks would be to terrorize and disrupt the vote.
And to be clear, this document does not describe intelligence about any specific threat.
It talks about a general atmosphere of anger and misinformation that could prompt unstable people to engage in threats or violence.
And of course, we've already seen that in recent weeks with a series of arrests for election threats, including a man in Philadelphia who allegedly threatened to skin election workers alive.
And remember last week, police in Phoenix arrested a person in connection with a mailbox fire that damaged around 20 ballots.
The report identified potential targets of violence to include candidates, elected officials, election workers, members of the media, and judges involved in election cases.
The potential threats include physical attacks and violence at polling places, ballot drop boxes, voter registration locations, and rallies and campaign events.
That's MSNBC's Ken Delaney talking about the threats and violence that we're already seeing as we lead up to next week's election.
Today Dan and I break down what we think will happen as we head into election week, what the polls and early voting are saying regarding Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's chances in swing states and the stories that are taking shape as we go.
We'll also talk about the possibilities for Trump stealing the election through the House of Representatives or through Republican governors, what the mechanics are and the ways that he might attack soft tissue in our body politic, and what measures we have to prevent that.
Finally, we react to J.D. Vance's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast and the ways the Trump campaign has leaned completely into the bro vote and the ways that Harris' campaign is relying on women to turn out in big numbers to counteract the misogyny and hatred we're seeing from one side.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Here with Dan Miller after a week of hanging out in Utah and Spokane and everything else.
Dan, how are you?
How was your trip home?
How are you feeling?
Doing all right.
Trip home was fine.
It's good to be home.
Always nice to be back.
Anxious, Brad?
I don't know why this feeling of anticipation and some general anxiety and kind of nervous can't figure out any concrete reasons why, but yeah, okay, all things considered.
Yeah, same here.
I've talked about this, but gave a talk the other day and asked people to raise their hands and everyone said, I said, who's anxious?
And everybody almost dislocated their shoulder.
So I've said that before, but it's how we're all feeling.
We can't get away from it.
We're going to address that at the end, friends.
So today we want to talk about the fallout from Trump's New York Rally, I talked about that on Monday, but Dan will have some thoughts on that.
Definitely going to get to what's already happening on the ground in terms of voting shenanigans and things to be mindful of and watchful of in terms of people stealing I want to address something that I think is on everyone's mind after Donald Trump said that him and Mike Johnson have a little secret.
I think some of you noticed that the other day at the New York rally, the Madison Square Garden rally.
I want to talk about whether or not they can actually steal the election through the House and what that would look like mechanically in terms of the laws.
I think that will hopefully be helpful to many of you.
It will be scary, but it'll also, I think, be clarifying and clear up some of the uncertainty, and that, I think, itself will be helpful.
And then we'll look forward to what's up.
Finally get to J.D. Vance, talking to Joe Rogan, and it's amazing how this Trump campaign has leaned into bro-ness.
It's like, Dan, if 2016 it was like, hey, let's get the evangelicals and keep them, this year has just been bro culture.
Non-stop.
And there's one more example of that in addition to, I don't know, Trump saying Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.
So, hey, who knew?
All right, Dan, about your thoughts on Madison Square Garden, Puerto Rico, and the fallout from that, in addition to Joe Biden's trash comment and what that means.
I have some strong thoughts on that, but I'll throw it to you first.
Yeah, so I won't rehearse everything.
Everybody's heard, you know, the line by now, the line from, you know, about the floating pile of trash in the ocean.
It's Puerto Rico and all of that.
Just to sort of rehash some of this, right?
So some of what happened, the pieces to me that stand out, and then some of the takeaways from this.
One is the number one in the room.
There's nobody running for the exits.
It went over well in the room, and I think that's a key thing to remember.
You talked about bro culture.
I'll talk about this more as we go along, but Trump has continued to lean into the base.
That's continued to be kind of what he's looking for.
And if there's any notion of expanding the base, it's like a generational expansion in a way, trying to engage maybe younger white guys into this.
I think that that's just one piece.
The room loved it.
It's not like it went over like a lead balloon or something like that.
I think it's significant that you had the pushback that it did to start with, that you had all these people of Puerto Rican descent and that you had, you know, entertainers and others pushing back against this.
I think it was significant.
I think it's significant that you have, I think the numbers I've seen is something like half a million Puerto Ricans and people of Puerto Rican descent in Pennsylvania, right?
One of these target groups that Trump has.
So I think all of that's significant.
Does it change things?
I don't know.
But there had been all the talk of Kamala Harris maybe losing some of the Latinx votes and things like that and so forth.
So initially, Brad, I was excited that you had all this pushback, including people in the GOP sending out their tweets about how this is not with the GOP values and so forth, even though they've enabled this for, you know, like a decade now.
And enter Joe Biden.
So let's talk about Joe Biden, right?
The Joe Biden gap.
So this is what...
If you ever see a show with bad writing and you're like, things are going too well now, enter the point where they increase or introduce some sort of conflict or something to make it more exciting.
Here comes Joe Biden, I guess, feeling left out, whatever, trying to be like, hey, guys, I'm over here.
I'm still president.
And this is what he said.
He said, just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.
And I'm going to smooth this out a bit because it was bumpy.
Let me tell you something.
In my home state of death, the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.
His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it's un-American.
I think what he meant, or maybe was supposed to say, or meaning to say, or wanted to say, was the garbage out there are people like comedians making comments like this, are people like Trump surrogates who say these things, and so forth.
Instead, it turned into the, you know, breaking lesson, let's call it number 436 from the Clinton campaign.
Don't insult the people that you're trying to get votes from, right?
get votes from, right?
So Clinton famously called Trump supporters, you know, the basket of deplorables.
So Clinton famously called Trump supporters, you know, the basket of deplorables.
And I think a takeaway for politicians is you criticize the candidate, you criticize their surrogates, you don't demonize the people who vote for them directly and so forth, right?
And so the Trump campaign jumped all over this.
He called you garbage and they piled in with the Nazi stuff and the fascist stuff.
And so anything you've called Trump, you're now calling his followers and so forth, right?
So that was the big thing that I think blunted the force somewhat of some of those critiques.
So let me just throw out where I think we are and then other thoughts you might have on this.
The first is, Harris said, this isn't something new, it's just more of the same.
I think that that's true.
Trump or somebody attached to Trump saying this is par for the course at this point.
But I think it's interesting that people who endorsed Trump withdrew their endorsements.
People who've been kind of on the sidelines about saying anything came out vocally and so forth.
I'm not sure how much...
I just said the Biden gaffe blunted the force a little bit.
I'm not sure how much it actually moves the needle because at this point...
All the people who are going to rally around Trump when he wears his vest and rides around in a trash truck and all that sort of stuff, I don't know.
Are those people that weren't already going to vote for Trump?
Are those people who weren't already cheering this?
And I think it was reminiscent of the 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden.
Are people already, you know, is anybody who's seeing this saying, well, you know, I wasn't going to vote for Trump, but now I am because this happened.
So I don't know that it moved the needle a lot.
We can say more about this rally, which was about race baiting.
It was about misogyny.
People can look at the parallels of fascism and fascist discourse and this famous rally in 1939.
And to me, the parallels are there.
A lot of things we can say, a lot of takeaways, but some of mine were that I think Biden enters in, says something stupid, it blunts some of the force of this, but I don't know that it radically moves the needle or anything because I just don't know how radically anything can move the needle at this point.
So I'll throw it over to you.
Joe Biden is not running for president.
And Kamala Harris has issued a statement saying what she said.
So, Joe Biden is not the candidate.
That's, I think, the most important thing.
Might be worth noting this is part of why he's not the candidate.
This kind of thing, but yeah.
And here's what I think is worth commenting on is the New York Times and the Washington Post had lead stories on this front page.
I think the Times had two on the front page about Biden's trash gaffe.
Yeah, front clickbait stuff, USA Today, all the main, as you say, legacy media sources.
Yeah.
So, A, he's not the candidate.
And B, this is not great, Joe Biden.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, he should have said this or he should have said, I think he meant that.
Whatever.
Not great.
However, we're literally talking about a rally at Madison Square Garden where somebody called the island of Puerto Rico trash and where Donald Trump said people who don't support him are the enemy within.
So one thing to call someone trash, I think that's terrible.
You shouldn't do it.
That's not nice.
It's calling people names.
It's reducing them to garbage.
That's bad.
Trump is saying you're the enemy within.
And then we all know now that yesterday he said that Liz Cheney should face, what would happen if she faced the rifle?
What would happen if she had- She had a rifle and had nine pointed back at her head or her face or something like that.
It was like, yeah, the firing squad reference.
This is just one of those examples of Trump says something, everyone's like, oh, it's Trump.
Normie politician like Biden says something, and everyone loses it.
Now, I just want to make one point about this.
How can Trump supporters, including the Christian nationalists and the evangelicals who are in MAGA Nation, clutch their pearls, I can't believe you called me garbage, while the guy they love says people are enemy within, that they should Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.
And everything else that he says about, I mean, calling people scum, calling whole cities, you know, saying they smell.
I mean, how can they clutch their pearls and this is how?
I've talked about this many times on the show.
Lauren Kirby, a book called Saving History, says that evangelicals especially play two roles.
They alternate between founders of the country and the country's ultimate victims.
So they parade around like, this country's ours.
We have the American flags.
We have Trump.
But then when somebody says trash or somebody says deplorable, remember the whole deplorable thing?
It's like, you are victimizing us.
I can't believe you would do that.
This is a travesty.
And the mainstream media jumps on board and they're like, well, look at this.
Is this the October surprise?
Regardless of the fact that at the rally at New York, at Madison Square Garden, Trump said all kinds of things that were way worse or on par or whatever.
So my point is here, A, it's one of those things where Trump is an exception and Biden steps in it and it becomes national news.
They're not on the front page talking about the fact that Mike Johnson said they're going to repeal Obamacare.
They're not on the front page saying that Trump is calling people the enemies within.
You see what I'm saying?
And then second, his followers are so good at going between, this is our country, we demand you give it to us, and we're victims.
I can't believe you said that about us.
All of the F your feelings, all of the like, Snowflake stuff, right?
Somebody, you know, Biden, an old man who's not running for president because he's an old man, said they're garbage or whatever?
Yeah, not good.
I don't like it.
I don't like it.
Don't do it.
But it's just amazing to watch the pearl clutching from the MAGA set who thinks that an image of their supreme leader, who's a 34-time felon, Holding AR-15s with a Rambo body is appropriate and here they are like so hurt they can barely breathe because Joe Biden said this.
So that's my take on these comments.
Yeah, just a couple more points.
Number one, you know, we could both spend way more time on the MSG rally.
And, you know, Kamala Harris was called the Antichrist.
And, you know, we could just like layer after layer after layer.
The other piece of this, though, that I think ties in with it, because I agree with everything you're saying, the Biden gaffe and so forth.
I do think the broader context of this is still important, right?
I think there are two reasons Trump did this rally at Madison Square Garden.
One was just the ego thing of wanting to have a rally at Madison Square Garden.
But the other one, the more strategic one, I think, was that they were talking about, you know, the kind of closing argument thing.
And if he can get this nationally televised event at Madison Square Garden, it will go out everywhere and it will reach into all those battleground states and so forth.
And this was pitched as, you know, the so-called closing argument.
And it wasn't.
Once again, if I'm looking at this, everything he said is terrible.
All the dynamics you're talking about, about the Trump set and the pearl clutching, and we talked about it last week of McConnell and others coming out and saying that Kamala Harris needs to turn down the rhetoric here, and all of this, the double standards, all of that, all true.
And I think at this point, largely ineffective for Team Trump in actually winning the election.
I don't know that it motivates his base more than they were motivated.
I'm positive.
I'm really pretty positive that there are not...
Whatever sliver of possible, persuadable voters there are out there, I don't think that this wins them.
If this is your selling point, you are already voting for Trump, and you've been there for a long time.
So I do also think that regardless of the news media of Biden, The events of Trump, they're all terrible.
We could talk about that, but I don't think in terms of just the logistics of, we've got an election in like four days.
I don't think that this helped Trump get closer to winning that election, because I think there are people that are still legitimately not sure, or maybe they're just not sure they can vote for Kamala Harris because they're quote-unquote not comfortable with her, which usually is code for she's black or she's a woman, but they're not actively opposed.
I don't know that this helped him.
And again, I think that's the same reason why I don't think the Biden piece hurt that much, despite the sort of inflating of it by the media, which, again, I don't intend to take anything away from anything you said.
I think it's all true.
But I think at this point, that's how close we are to this election, that we have to look at the logistics and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, final comments on this.
A, I think it does move the needle the wrong way.
I really do believe that when you have Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin and so many other Puerto Rican and or Latinx, Latino, Latina superstars basically now stumping for Harris, you are in a...
I mean, the leader of the Republican Party in Puerto Rico threatened to unendorse Trump.
I do think it makes a difference.
There's a lot of talk right now in the political ether about low propensity voters.
Can Trump go get that 19-year-old frat bro who probably wasn't going to vote because whatever.
Yeah, does he like screaming Trump and let's go Brandon?
Sure.
But on election day, was he going to go stand in line for two hours or was he going to play video games and play beer pong?
Can he get that guy to go?
That's what Charlie Kirk's trying to do.
That's what Joe Rogue, you know, anyone who can get the bros out is trying to get them out, okay?
That's what Cernovich is doing, Jack Possobeak.
But think about another low propensity voter, that young Puerto Rican person, that young Puerto Rican who lives in New York City or who lives in Pennsylvania.
I mean, New York City is one thing, but Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Folks who did not plan to vote saying, oh, I'm going to go vote because you don't get to call Puerto Rico trash.
Dan, that's not...
I've talked a lot on this show about my family's history in Hawaii.
If somebody just came out and said Maui is a garbage island floating, all of my cousins...
The group text would be insane.
I wouldn't be able to keep up with the group text from all the cousins and aunts and uncles Many of whom don't care about politics.
It would break through.
This was a breakthrough moment, so I think that's important.
Yeah, so what I meant was, when I say it doesn't, I don't think it moves the needle positively for Trump, right?
Oh yeah, no, I know what you mean.
I just want to be clear that folks, I agree with everything you're saying, but yeah, so my point is, I think that there are some of those maybe low propensity voters, or people that were like, we were going to vote for Trump, because a pop star we love was there at the GOP convention and so forth.
Yeah, what I'm saying is, you know, if Trump was trying to solidify some Latinx vote or hold on to a sliver he might have had and or expand his base, I don't think it moved the needle for him.
I do think it's a breakout moment.
And fortunately, I don't think that the Biden gaffe piece Is it is an effective counterweight to that if we're viewing it from the perspective of potentially Puerto Rican and like Puerto Rican ally votes, let's call it right other people either in those communities or just white people who are like that sucks like why would you say something like that and go out and vote so I know you I want to make sure that people don't hear me saying that it was all irrelevant.
Oh, no, no, no.
I didn't think you were saying that at all.
And I guess it's really easy for us because we are doing this show.
There's a lot of people listening to this who listen to like three or four politics podcasts.
They read books.
They follow newsletters.
Think of your cousins.
And I have these cousins who really don't care about politics.
I have like a 23-year-old cousin who I'm sure knows nothing about what we're talking about right now.
And she was born and raised on Maui.
And if somebody came out and was just like, Maui is a garbage island in the middle of the ocean.
She would maybe, for the first time in this election cycle, wake up and be like, wait, what did they say?
Okay, what now is going on?
All right, I'm voting, and I'm voting against Trump.
They'll be like, no, they didn't say that.
And you play the clip, and they're like, they did.
And then Trump calls it the next day, right?
His first chance to back off from it.
Says it was a love fest.
It was beautiful.
It was fantastic, right?
Yeah, all of that.
So I think that, whereas if I present to that cousin, hey, did you know Joe Biden said this trash thing?
She'd be like, I don't know, what does that have to do with me?
Is he talking about me, Maui, Japanese people, Asian people?
Is he talking about California, your grandma, my grandma, cousins, whatever?
But you see what I'm saying?
That thing is...
Biden's trash comment gets the MAGA-ites to wear trash bags around themselves and go to rallies.
yay, good for you.
Yeah, and that's my point where I was like, yeah, so well-played Trump, but where were the MAGA people going to go?
Were they ever going to not vote for Trump?
They were already going to the rallies.
Yeah, I think that this is big and I don't think that Biden undermined it, despite the fact, as you say, I think the media fell back into its both sides kind of thing that, oh, we've been critical of this rally.
We talk about J-Lo and everybody else coming out and now we got to have something to balance it.
So let's talk about Biden.
I don't think that blunted all that force, yeah.
Last thing is he, in the wake of this, he famously goes to ride a trash truck, which again, you know, a great, good one.
You rode a billionaire riding around in a trash truck going nowhere.
Good job.
And he stumbles getting in.
He looks like an old man who can't climb stairs getting in.
Everyone's seen the video now.
Dan, we're going to take a break.
I'm not going to expand on this, but just everybody go look up the comments, the stories, the headlines about Hillary Clinton's health This day, eight years ago.
Go look it up.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, everybody at Hillary's health.
Hillary fainted.
Hillary did this.
Hillary can't be president because Hillary doesn't have the stamina.
And here this 80-year-old man clearly stumbles getting into a trash truck, looking like a person who is 80 years old and needs help, like getting up and down stairs or a big truck to take a ride.
Nah, nothing.
Just leave it there.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back.
Talk about some other things.
Okay, Dan, here I want to just go through kind of a list of things that are happening at the moment or have happened, I guess, already.
And then I want to use that to jump into like what could happen.
I think a lot of you are just, you're listening to this and it's the day before the election.
It's the Sunday before the election.
And you're just like, what's going to happen?
And I think both of you, both of us are hopeful.
About Kamala Harris winning.
And I do think there's reasons to think Kamala Harris is going to win.
I really do.
But I want to talk about the kind of legal things that might happen because I think there's a lot of uncertainty of like the shenanigans, the violence, the uprising, the Trump lying, so on and so forth.
So let's just talk about some things that have already taken place.
We have Brad Raffensperger in Georgia asking Elon Musk to take down a fake video purporting to show Haitian immigrants gaming the voting system in Georgia.
It's entirely fictional.
It's false.
This is coming from Sean Lindegas, or Lindegas, excuse me, at CNN. Experts have attributed the fake video to a Russian troll farm, and yet Elon Musk is sharing it and has posted it.
So Brad Raffensperger, famously the guy that did not fine Trump 11,000 votes, is like, please take that down.
This is not happening.
But here's Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, a man we've talked about a lot on this show, sending to his followers, 200 million on Twitter and so on and so forth, this thing.
Okay, that's not good.
That's not good for election, faith in our elections and our system, okay?
There's gonna be a lot of people out there that are gonna say, well, did you see the video of the Haitians and the Georgia?
People just believe this stuff.
They do, period, okay?
A Trump supporter was arrested after antagonizing voters with a machete at the Neptune Beach polling location in Florida.
So, we have somebody threatening violence at our polling places.
This is a direct result of the kind of rhetoric Trump uses.
It's a direct result of the kind of big lie that has been in our ether for going back to 2020.
Kyle Griffin reports, a Minnesota woman was charged with three felony counts of voter fraud after authorities say she forged her dead mother's signature on an abstinent ballot to vote for Trump.
So this is punishable by five years in prison and a hefty fine.
We have a former Republican candidate for an Indiana seat in the U.S. House who's been arrested and charged with stealing several election ballots during a recent voting machine test.
Larry L. Savage Jr., a candidate in the Republican 5th District primary held earlier this year, was arrested Tuesday morning by Madison County authorities in charge with destroying slash misplacing a ballot and theft.
So here's a sore loser.
He lost his election, now he's stealing ballots.
Trump is suing Bucks County, alleging that it's turning away voters.
Now, there does not seem to be evidence that this is happening.
There are actually videos out there that purport to show this, and they are fictional with actual fake cops and fake security, but they're meant to depict this whole idea that they're turning away voters.
I just want to stop.
I'm going through this whole litany, Dan.
Where we are right now is a lot of Americans have already voted.
And what we're seeing is the fact that there are tears in our fabric.
Because Dan, and I'll be curious to hear what you think.
My guess is when you were growing up, you don't remember instances where somebody was like threatened with a machete at a voting site.
Where somebody was stealing ballots, where people were voting, like some normie woman in Minnesota voting like twice using her dead mother's forged signature.
We have ballot boxes that have been set on fire, drop boxes I should say, and that's not good.
This is Philip Lewis reporting for the HuffPost.
Burning ballots were pulled from inside a smoking ballot box in Vancouver, Washington this morning, hours after police responded to an arson at a Portland ballot box.
So there are places, and Vancouver is right across the river from Portland, and Portland is obviously one of the most liberal places in the country.
And this is where ballot boxes have been set on fire.
We have violence.
We have fires.
We have arson.
We have machetes.
We talked about it before, but we have a guy punching election workers in Texas because they asked him to take his MAGA hat off.
There are several instances of this happening.
That's all a result of the tearing of the fabric in our public square, and it shows you where we are.
That the big lie and the idea that it's all been stolen and that it's not fair and that it's rigged, it leads people to do things they would not normally do.
Dan, I'll just be really honest.
I don't remember any of this as a kid.
And I'm talking when I was not just 10 or 12, when I was 15, 16, 18.
The idea that you would be afraid of going to vote, the idea that you would have to kind of worry about this kind of thing if you were an election worker, not normal for this country, and yet here we are.
Tess Owen for Wired has been reporting on how They've been expecting this.
They've been expecting arson at drop boxes because all the chatter on far-right messaging boards and social media sites has been pointing to this.
So this is all something that in some sense that we knew was coming and yet it's here and it's scary.
So on one hand, I want to just tell everyone listening, take care of yourself, be safe, cast your vote the best way you can.
And A, don't fall for false stories, but B, just have a plan for the ways that you're gonna be with your family members over the next week.
Like, what are you all gonna do?
How are you gonna talk to your kids about this?
What are the ways for you to cope as news comes in?
How are you gonna deal with the inevitable more and more cases of instances like these?
Because that is where we are.
It's time to start preparing yourself for the mental kind of onslaught That is going to come over the course of election week and whatever happens after that.
I want to jump into something else, Dan, that I think is really important, and that's the Electoral Count Reform Act and what it does or does not do to prevent Trump from stealing the election via Mike Johnson.
But thoughts on the little fires everywhere that we're already seeing.
Yeah, so, excuse me, a couple things.
One, you know, you also had election workers or election officials saying they can't keep up with Musk, right?
Like, for example, on the disinformation piece, just saying this week that they can't match the power of X and a billionaire who's committed to this disinformation.
So, you know, the scope of this can just get worse and worse and worse.
What I would say to people about this is the same thing with the polls, right?
People can read the polls.
And we know that they've been unreliable for the last couple election cycles, but they can be demotivating, right?
They can be really motivating.
I think people need to just go vote as you're going to vote and don't worry about the video you saw that said this or that or the poll that you read or whatever.
Just cast your vote because they matter and it's important to do that.
I think part of what you're highlighting, because you're right, I don't remember these things either, you know, in the first elections that I voted in.
I think I missed, my birthday is right after the election, so I remember when I turned 18, I didn't get to vote because the election had been like four days earlier or something.
So I guess I was in college when I was able to cast my first vote.
No, there was nothing like this.
You know, it'd be kind of weird sometimes.
People might ask who you voted for or something, or, you know, you'd really hear somebody who's opinionated and you're afraid to say something.
But it was because it was socially awkward, not because you were afraid they were going to have a machete or, you know, something like that.
I think the dynamics of this are multiple.
One, and we've talked about this before, I do think that there is this pattern on the right, and Trump embodies it, but I think others do it.
I've talked about it before, where I think they project onto others what they themselves are willing to do.
So all the language of, like, you know, weaponizing the Justice Department and so forth.
We know that they want to do that, so every time the Justice Department comes after somebody in MAGA, they'll not hesitate, many of them, to rig the election system if they thought it would.
There's also the sense that because they talk about it all the time, that narrative...
I think if they truly believe that the election is rigged against them, that they're cheating, that it's not fair, what are they going to do?
They're going to take matters into their own hands.
We're going to get people not to vote.
We're going to destroy ballots that might have been cast illegally.
We're going to threaten other people.
We're going to help counterbalance what we believe is You know, election fraud on the left.
We're going to counterbalance that on the right.
So we're going to take a stack of ballots home or we're going to sign our dead mother's name or whatever.
I think there's that.
I think it also, the last piece, and this is just like really basic, I think it has given people ideas.
Like, I think people who are like, you know, wouldn't have thought of doing things like setting, you know, the mail-in ballot drops or whatever they are, the different boxes around different places.
We've got one here in Amherst where I dropped my ballot the other day.
They would not have thought of setting those on fire.
They grew up in the same world, Brad, that you and I did a lot of times where nobody heard about this kind of stuff.
They would not have thought of showing up with a machete to dissuade people from voting.
And now they do because of this narrative.
So I think there are a lot of dynamics that we could just drill into if we have more time to get at the point that you're making, which is this narrative is what has virtually guaranteed this kind of stuff is going to happen.
It's a permission structure for violence.
If you think that the Democrat or the person who doesn't vote like you is the enemy within, if they're the Antichrist, if they're demon possessed, you have a permission structure.
And this is not an homage, but I will say that if John McCain or Mitt Romney had heard about this kind of thing, I think there would have been a statement saying, don't do that.
I condemn that.
If you ask Trump about it, he'd be like, I haven't heard about it.
I don't know those people.
Yeah.
Who are they?
What are you talking about?
Same thing he said about his rally, right?
He's like, I don't know who that guy was.
He just happened to get up at the rally.
You know, that kind of thing.
Yep.
But if this had been McCain or Romney, they would have both been like, do not do this.
I condone violence.
We should be able to vote in safety.
We should be able to go to the polls as Americans and exercise our right to vote without having to worry about these things.
So that's not an homage to Romney or McCain.
Do not email me.
I'm just saying that would happen.
It is not going to happen with Donald Trump.
Now, I want to address something that I think I mentioned in somewhat passing on Monday, but I want to address further.
All right.
So, A, I think, Dan, we can expect more of this.
And look, friends, I'm going to tell you right now, if Kamala Harris wins, if like on Wednesday, Or Thursday, the race has called for Kamala Harris.
Expect more of this.
And that's what I mean by preparing.
You might live in a small town in Ohio.
You might live near somewhere in central Washington or far northeast California where there's going to be people who think they need to now take things into their own hands.
Prepare for that.
Be aware of what's happening.
What's being said at your kid's school?
What are local politicians doing?
How are they reacting?
Who is stoking the fires of violence or of unrest?
And just be aware, because the reason I bring up that whole list of things that's already happened, that list is going to grow if and when Kamala Harris is pronounced to be the next president of the United States.
Okay, so the next question then is, well, what's Trump going to do?
If he loses, can he steal the election?
What's the way to do that?
And I think it's worth just going through, Dan, the Electoral Count Reform Act that passed in 2022.
This is basically all our government has done to protect us after the insurrection.
I mean, don't get me wrong, the government has put a bunch of people in jail, but in terms of policy and law, this is what we have.
Donald Trump's still running.
Donald Trump's somehow still eligible to be president.
Donald Trump's still somehow not in jail.
So this is what we got.
So let me go through what it does, Dan, and I want to point out the ways it protects us and the ways it doesn't.
So this is the Electoral Account Reform Act that passed in 2022, okay?
Number one, it requires that states appoint electors on election day in accordance with pre-existing law and eliminates the concept of failed elections.
So the electors have to be set on election day.
They cannot be chosen later, which is obviously a protection.
It also does something else.
Excuse me.
And it says that Let me read here.
If a state has held an election but somehow failed to make a choice on election day, then the state legislature could choose the manner of appointing electors on a subsequent day.
That was the previous law, okay?
Now this provision was meant to accommodate runoff elections and extreme weather.
So if you go back to the 19th century, the 18th century, that's what that was for.
The ECRA eliminates this provision entirely and instead provides that states must appoint electors on a designated date, the same date as previous law, except that a state that holds a popular election may modify the period of voting as necessitated by force majeure events that are extraordinary and catastrophic.
As provided under the laws of the state, enacted prior to election day.
In doing so, the legislation eliminates the failed election loophole and the potential for partisan actors to exploit it.
So basically, Dan, there was a loophole that was like, if the election is not decided on the day, then there's a chance that the state legislature could swoop in and be like, failed election, we're going to have to choose for everybody.
This clause basically protects us from that scenario, okay?
That voting can be modified, voting can be extended if there's events like a pandemic or other things, so on and so forth.
Okay.
What else does this Electoral Count Reform Act do?
Number two, it adds clarity to the process by which state officials ascertain and certify their election results to Congress.
the ECRA makes clear that the executive of each state is required to certify the state's appointment of electors, in essence, its election results, to Congress no later than six days before the date on which the electoral college meets and that he or she must do under and in pursuance of state law enacted prior to election to Congress no later than six days before the date on
So it basically means that the election results need to be certified ahead of time and there's nothing left to chance when it comes to a later date a la January 6th or anything else.
Number three.
It gives federal courts a clear and expedited role in ensuring that states send lawful certifications of election results to Congress.
So basically, it really streamlines the process.
So if there's any question about the results, if there's any question about the votes in any state, There's kind of a direct line to get an emergency reading from the judiciary.
Now, this is a place that is, for many folks, a kind of soft point of tissue, given the fact that Trump appointed so many federal judges, and we know how the Supreme Court has been looking.
We've talked about it a lot.
This is good news in some ways.
It also is scary news in others because the ECRA allows for direct appeal to the Supreme Court via petition for writ of sutieri, and it requires that if the Supreme Court hears the case, it do so on an expedited basis.
So, things could go to the courts in a state if there is a dispute, and that's an issue, okay?
Now, it makes absolutely clear, number four, that the vice president's role in the electoral vote counting process is ministerial.
So there is no question now whether or not Mike Pence could have stopped the election.
All the thing, Mike Pence didn't do the right thing.
Mike Pence wouldn't stand up for Trump, blah, blah, blah.
Not going to happen.
Number five, it makes it more difficult for members of Congress to make frivolous objections.
You now have to have a certain number of folks in order to make that objection, and it provides other provisions.
The first objection that it allows, the ECRA, is that electors of the state were not lawfully certified under a certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors.
By its term, this objection applies only to the appointment of electors.
So that's just about the electors that were appointed.
I'll slow down because this is not actually where I want to hover.
But it just means, are you questioning the electors that were appointed to certify the result?
That's one thing you can do if you're a congressperson.
The second thing you can do is object to the vote of one or more electors has not been regularly given.
All of that to say, I don't think this is the Trump plan.
You have to have a certain number of Congress people.
This is one way it could go, but this is not what keeps me up at night.
One of the major things this does, Dan, number six, is it clarifies how a majority of appointed electors will be calculated.
So one of the things that was happening in 2020 was the Trump coup team, the Trump insurrection team, the anti-democratic Trump lawyers were like, if you can get states that went for Biden, not counted.
If you can get Pennsylvania, not counted.
Then you take those votes off the table.
So Biden didn't get X amount of votes, and maybe we end up with both guys getting 260 and 263 in 2020.
The reason that that works in the anti-democratic coup insurrection favor is it's still calculating the need to get 270 votes to become president.
We have 538 electoral college votes, meaning you need 270 to be president.
If you take Pennsylvania out and nobody gets it, but you still need 270, you're at a disadvantage if you're Joe Biden because that's a place you won, and yet those 28 votes or whatever, I can't remember, 33 votes that Pennsylvania has don't go to you, but everybody's still working on got to get to 270.
Now if you take Pennsylvania out, The denominator changes.
So you don't need 270, you actually need 258, 256, because you're taking out certain votes from what you need on the top of the fraction, and you're taking out those votes on the bottom of the fraction.
I hope that makes sense.
If you're not a math person, you can email me or whatever.
All right, here's what keeps me up at night, Dan, and I know I'm talking a lot.
Just let me make one more point, okay?
The ECRA does state that the electors have to be...
Let me just read it so I get it right.
The ECRA makes clear that the executive of each state is required to certify the state's appointment of electors.
This is the point where I think we've hit on what Donald Trump might try and what he meant by the little secret between him and Mike Johnson and so on and so forth.
Here's Ellie Mistel writing at The Nation, and then I'll be quiet, Dan, and see what you think.
I think the plan is to steal the Electoral College outright by getting states Trump loses to refuse to certify the results of their election.
That's because the 12th Amendment provides that the president is the person who wins the majority of the whole number of electors appointed.
That whole number is supposed to be 538.
But one potential reading of the amendment is that Trump doesn't have to win 270, but just a majority of however many electors show up.
Trump's goal, I believe, is to decrease the number of electors appointed until he wins.
Well, how do you do that?
The first step in such a process is to get Republicans in states Trump loses to contest the certification of their own elections.
In 2020, Trump and his team illegally tried to get slates of alternate electors submitted.
They could try that again, but for this scheme to work, they don't even have to get fake electors submitted, but just to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors not to submit their valid slates of electors before statutorily imposed deadlines.
That's what keeps me up at night, Dan, is thinking about governors.
Who will not certify the electors, the slates of electors, by the deadline?
That you can imagine a governor coming out for weeks and being like, well, we need to check into some things, and there's some irregularities in this county, and that happened over in that county, and we're going to get it right, don't worry.
And then they miss the deadline.
And then again, you've got 30 electoral votes that should have gone to Kamala Harris.
They don't.
Even though you've reduced the number you need to win, even though you no longer need 270 to win, you only need 240 to win, you're taking votes away from Harris.
And if Trump has a majority of those 250 or 300 or whatever electoral votes are left, then he's president.
That's how I think this is gonna play out and I think this is where you'll see the pressure on our system.
Last time it was fake electors.
Last time it was Brad Raffensperger.
Last time it was the courts.
This time it will be the governors.
And then it'll also be the state legislatures pressuring the governor and also, perhaps, according to Mistel, trying to wait out the clock.
So, that's a lot.
I'm happy to slow down, throw it to you.
What do you think about all this?
I think it's, you know, it's a sort of scary constitutional and, you know, legal thought experiment, right?
That it can, it can keep you up at night.
Pieces of it that I think are complicated, like just further complicated, is...
I was looking, I looked it up today because I can't remember these things, right?
So of like, say, seven battleground states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, right?
Let's just consider all of those.
Five of them have Democratic governors.
Only one of them has Democrats across the board, governor, both houses, and that would be Michigan.
Yeah.
Nevada has a Republican governor, but a Democratic House and Senate.
So, you know, I think that adds some things to it.
But places like Arizona has a Democratic governor, Republican House and Senate, Georgia is Republicans across the board.
North Carolina also has a Republican legislature and Democratic governor.
You get the idea.
It gets messier here where you have sort of split government.
I think you also...
We don't know what happens with different states and different things with the role of their secretary of state and their attorney general, because typically, if you have a Democratic governor, you have a Democratic secretary of state and a Democratic attorney general.
What is the role of those people going to be in...
Fighting with the legislature, if need be, and tying things up in court, and on and on, all of which just to say it's going to be a mess.
I don't know how it would play out.
Hopefully, obviously, if Kamala Harris can win the election and win enough battleground states, it becomes less and less likely that that happens.
In other words, the more you have to have these really long-shot legal and constitutional things happen, the less likely it is to happen.
Obviously, if Trump just wins the Electoral College outright, none of that's going to matter because Democrats are not going to play this game, I don't think, and I hope that they don't, of legally rigging an election, if that's a way of phrasing this.
What I think it highlights is the point that you had earlier, where the one thing I know will be true is that Republicans are going to try to make this as messy as possible.
Regardless of where we are, and I think it may be Wednesday afternoon to Thursday before we've got a clear view of who looks like they actually won this election.
Republicans are already going to be doing this.
They're going to be talking about this.
They're going to be talking about lots of irregularities.
We need to look at the same rhetoric we heard last time.
I still have this discussion with people when they say, well, there were so many irregularities.
And my question is always like, okay, but like, why didn't they ever show that?
Why were people willing to sacrifice their law licenses or go to prison instead of just showing all this evidence that they supposedly had that would have exonerated themselves, right?
We're going to hear that.
And it's a game of delay, as you say.
I think it's also a game of trying to win the public, you know, the sort of public sphere, sow doubt, create enough of a kind of maelstrom around this that everything just feels sort of loose.
The other biggest...
Sorry, I guess all that to say, let me rewind before this, I don't know what the hell this is going to look like.
And I don't think that anybody does.
And I think knowing that, going in, is part of being prepared for it, if that makes sense.
The other piece of this, the other really loose piece blowing in the wind, and I don't know how it will play out, is we don't have a President Trump exerting pressure on all of these different levers.
We've got a guy named Trump who, if, lots of ifs, if it's clear that he didn't win a majority of the electors, if it's clear that he didn't win the popular vote, What happens to his ability to exert pressure on Wednesday or Thursday of next week?
Does it change the calculation in state houses?
Does it change the calculation in governor's houses?
Do they look and say, man, this is a really long shot and this dude's not the president.
I'm not...
This is just all going to blow back on me.
There's going to be no cover if this doesn't work.
I don't know.
And I'm not saying that it does.
I'm not saying it doesn't.
I'm just saying that the more I look at this, the more I hear these kinds of analyses, the more unsettled it feels, and the more I think we just have to be prepared to do what we can, go out, vote, try to make this as clear-cut as it can be, try to cut through the noise, try to see what's really going on, and try to help people hold the course.
To navigate the waters that are going to be really, really rough, I think, starting, you know, whenever Trump declares victory next Tuesday night, that's what I think he's going to do.
He's going to have a speech where he says that he clearly won the election before anybody's called anything, I think, nationally speaking.
And I think it's going to be really, really, really messy.
I think there are worst case scenarios.
I think there are best case scenarios.
I don't know what is actually realistic and what isn't.
Which is not very helpful analysis, I realize.
No, no, no, no, no.
But let me give you one more paragraph from Ellie Mistel at The Nation, and then we can take another break.
Let's say Vice President Kamala Harris wins the bare majority of electoral college votes necessary, 270.
Okay, so Kamala Harris gets 270.
Great.
However...
The Republican legislature in Wisconsin refuses to submit the state's 10 electors by the deadline.
So this is basically, Dan, just to like, we're not going to file the paperwork.
The electors might have been chosen, but we're just not going to submit them.
We're not going to send in the paperwork.
In this scenario, the new total number of electors becomes 528, not 538 because Wisconsin has 10 electors.
So if you have 538 total electoral college votes and you take Wisconsin out, you have 528.
That means that Donald Trump needs only 264 electoral votes to win, not 270.
So let's say originally Harris had 270.
And Trump had, what would that mean?
268?
Am I doing my math right?
Who knows?
If Harris now only has 260, because she lost Wisconsin, and Trump has 264, he wins.
If you take Wisconsin and Nevada's six electors out of the mix, Trump needs only 262 electoral votes to win.
So now Mistel's like, what if you take Wisconsin and Nevada out of here?
He'll likely achieve those numbers without having to win one of the quote, blue wall states.
It's possible to play with the numbers until you find a tie scenario, at which point the contingent election goes to the House of Representatives.
So, that's how we could get to the Mike Johnson piece, is if you have a tie, then it goes to the House.
But as Mistel writes, the far more likely situation is that Trump decreases the overall number of electoral votes, takes it from 538 to 528, 518, 508, 500, until he can claim a majority of the ones remaining.
I think the one, again, just to come back, so let's take the Wisconsin example.
Wisconsin has a Democratic governor, so they have a Democratic attorney general, and they have a Democratic secretary of state, who no doubt would then go to court and say that the legislature is compelled to have to do this, and it's going to get messy because there'll be separation of power stuff.
The legislature will say, you've got no business telling us what to do, executive.
The executive branch will say, of course, well, sure, but we're the ones that run the election.
And are responsible for doing all of this.
And so, you know, there isn't a strict separation of powers.
And then we're into all of that.
So yeah, not to even like counter that, just to say that all the mechanisms are super messy and unsettled at best and kind of apocalyptic at worst, you know, with these different kinds of scenarios.
If I have an area, like a glimmer of light when I read the piece in The Nation, which is worth a read.
Everybody should go read it, I think.
It's that there are so many Democratic governors and so many Democratic secretaries of state and attorneys general in those same states.
And I think that that's the one thing that keeps me from just sort of absolute despair at this, is that you do have, you know, divided power in these states.
The only exceptions there are in Georgia and then Michigan's all Democratic, but Nevada and Georgia are all Republican.
So I think it, I think it's not, I think people shouldn't read this and see this as inevitable.
But I think it is showing a pathway of trying to legally take the election from the people who actually vote for president.
Just muck it up.
Get it messy.
Get everybody to doubt the results.
Nobody know what's going on.
Everyone's confused.
What's happening, judges?
The legislature's claiming autonomy.
The legislature's claiming authority.
The governor, the attorney general are like, sorry, no.
Then we got the courts involved.
That's what they want.
I'll just make one more thing is even if the Republicans lose the House, Johnson will still be in charge on December 11 when the deadline is for states to submit their electors and then December 25 is for the deadline for those electors to vote.
Johnson would still be in charge on both of those days until the new house is sworn in on January 3rd.
December 11th, the deadline for appointing the electors.
December 25th, the deadline for voting.
Ellie Mistel makes the point that if this was Nancy Pelosi, she would extend the deadlines and just be like, well, get your paperwork in while going on MSNBC and telling them to get their paperwork in.
Mike Johnson's not going to do that.
So this is where it is.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and finish up with J.D. Vance, the bro vote, and why we are hopeful going into next week.
All right, Dan, we're going to run out of time.
Give us a quick rundown of what J.D. Vance said on Joe Rogan, and then let's talk about why we're hopeful for this election as it stands today.
Yeah, so J.D. Vance, for me, this has everything to do, again, as you say, with a bro vote, with masculinity and a vision of masculinity and so forth.
Vance appears on the Joe Rogan podcast.
We know that Trump was on there recently.
And he said more offensive things than we can list.
It's three hours.
It's three hours of really offensive stuff.
But in particular, he went after trans individuals and the whites and middle class and upper middle class voters that the GOP isn't getting.
So this was his way of targeting them.
And this is what he said.
He said, think about the incentives.
If you are a, you know, middle class or upper middle class white parent and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper middle class kids, but the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.
And is there a dynamic that's going on where if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege?
That's the social signifier.
That's the one that's available in the hyper-woke mindset if you become gender non-binary.
So basically he said that middle-class people are going to make their kids trans So that they can get into college.
Now, we can fact check this and CNN did this very effectively highlighting the studies that find that based on, you know, discrimination, harassment, lack of support, kids who are actually trans are way less likely to be able to go to college.
It's not any kind of advantage to claim trans identity when it comes to getting into college and so forth.
But what matters more to me is you say the bro vote, so how does this play out?
Number one, I think trans folk are the other right now that can be effectively demonized to unsettle people who are anxious about notions of gender, notions of masculinity, and so forth.
That's why the concern is always men who transition to female identity or non-binary.
They never talk about people who are identified women at birth who transition to a masculine.
And just to feed into that later in the interview, he has this weird thing where he talks about testosterone and conservatism.
And he says something weird.
He says that Democrats want Americans to be in poor health and overweight because that makes them liberal.
I'll just ask people, just go look at, like, obesity rates in states and so forth.
The top 10 unhealthiest states are all red states.
But he goes on to say this.
He says, have you seen all these studies?
He doesn't cite any, of course.
Have you seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics?
Maybe that's what's going on.
Maybe that's why the Democrats want us all to be, you know, poor health and overweight is because that means we're going to be more liberal.
Got to move fast here.
Tie it all together.
What's the point?
The point is Vance is explicitly playing this line that says real men vote Republican.
If you're a real man, if you really have testosterone and do manly things, you're conservative.
You vote Republican.
And if you're a trans person, you aren't really anything.
If you're a man who transitions to a feminine presentation or non-binary, you were never a real man, quote unquote, to begin with, we don't care about this, this is all this is.
And it ties in, I think, to a lot of anxiety that that bro vote has that somehow or another America isn't masculine enough, that there's something wrong with being the kind of man they want to be, the narratives that have been spun out.
This is what the Trump campaign continues to pitch coming into these final four days of trying to tap into, I think, a very insecure vision of masculinity and a portion of the American electorate that we've talked about.
The electorate portion that now is more likely to go to church and go to all those like churchy military training camps that you've talked about and do all of those things front and center this week, keeping that notion present.
And it's the last point to point out with this.
We don't even have time to get into it, but we've talked a lot.
Analysts have talked a lot about the gender gap in this election.
It's clear that the Trump campaign, in my view, knows that they're not really going to win over suburban women.
They're not going to close that gap.
So they are trying to drive up those same low propensity voters you highlighted earlier.
In this case, the bros who aren't normally going to vote, they're going to play to all of their fears, all their insecurities, and try, I think, to close that gender gap by getting that group of voters to come out and vote for Donald Trump.
So this is...
This is why I have hope, and I'm going to explain why.
It's not because of J.D. Vance being a complete transphobe and just a complete jerk, to say it nicely.
The reason I have hope is because, Dan, for months I've been saying that I think the characters and the issues of this whole narrative arc have been set.
And one of the ones that I have come back to every time is reproductive rights, abortion, and so on.
We also now have a closing message from Trump of like, I'm going to shoot a political opponent who happens to be a woman in the face.
So, you know, he didn't say that.
He said, let's have her face the rifles.
Okay, sorry.
Yeah, he was also a Republican.
Don't email me.
He didn't say he was going to shoot her, but he did say, let's see what happens when she faces the rifle.
He also said the other day, I'm going to do it even if women tell me not to.
And he was talking about protecting them and so on.
And we have talked and I know you could talk for the next hour about how that's patriarchal and misogynist to the core.
So the final message has not been anything but Puerto Rico is garbage and I want a woman to face the firing squad and I'll do what I want even if women don't want me to.
Dan, here's the thing that gives me hope.
And I'll give you stats and then I'm going to give you takeaway.
There is, according to, get out the vote, one in eight women say they've secretly voted differently than their partners.
One in eight women say they've already voted differently than their partners.
Okay.
Data from CNN shows that women are significantly outvoting men in critical swing states.
That includes Arizona, 52 to 46 percent.
Nevada, PA, they're outvoting them by 12, 56 to 44.
Georgia, 56 to 44.
North Carolina, 55-45.
Wisconsin, 55-44.
There is an existential reason for women to vote for Harris.
If you are a woman, and we've talked about it all the time, what Trump and Vance are proposing does not matter who you are, your race, your ethnicity, your religion, they're proposing a United States government that is not safe for you.
Dan, there is a heartbreaking story breaking today about a woman in Texas, a teenager, who on the day, and I'm going to try not to cry, on the day of her baby shower, had a miscarriage.
She went to three emergency rooms and they would not help her because they had to be sure that the fetus was not viable or had demised, is the word, and by the time they were, quote, able to help her, she had died.
There's an existential reason that the 20-year-old women, the 30-year-old women, the 60-year-old women, and anyone who can get pregnant are voting Against Donald Trump.
And it's clear.
Now, the question I would ask is, if there's low-propensity voters in that group, if there's a 20-year-old college woman in there who doesn't care about politics, if there's my cousin who I just mentioned, who's 23 and doesn't care about politics, you can see why she might go vote, might wait in the line, might take the afternoon off from work, whatever she needs to do.
I want to ask about those men.
All right, Vance.
All right, Trump.
You're leaning into the bros.
Cool.
The reason you have to use such hateful and violent rhetoric is you've got to convince them that there's an existential threat so they will go vote because a lot of them are not going to.
They're going to yell at football games.
They're going to yell, let's go Brandon.
They're going to say that they're for Donald J. Trump all day, every day.
And a bunch of them actually won't make it to the polls.
There's also a bunch of women who are going to vote in ways that are different than their husbands and they've told their husbands nothing or that they're with Trump.
I'm hopeful Also, and I'll just throw it to you after this, we have NPR Marist poll from just a bit ago that has already voted.
So for those who've already voted, Harris is up 28 in Pennsylvania, 27 in Michigan and up 14 in Wisconsin.
Now, for those who are yet to vote, Trump is plus 10, plus 21, plus eight in those three states, not enough to make up the difference.
I'll also say we have data that shows voter enthusiasm among Democrats is 10 points higher than Republicans.
Dems have higher enthusiasm than any time in the past 24 years, including 2008.
So, all of that to say, I think Kamala Harris is going to win this election, and I also think, and I said this on another show the other day, That all this horse race stuff, all this it's close stuff, it's for legacy media, it's for pollsters, it's for the drama.
Now, that doesn't mean anything.
It means she could lose.
It could be close.
It doesn't mean you should not vote.
It doesn't mean you should not make those phone calls.
It doesn't mean you should not try to get your little cousin and your friend and your colleague to the polls.
It just means I think we're going to see how many Americans do not want Trump back as president, including Republicans, including Haley voters, including Republican women, when it comes time on Wednesday and the results are in.
But it doesn't mean to do anything but keep going.
All right, Dan, what do you think?
What's your reason for hope?
I might have stolen yours.
Well, it dovetails, but the first thing to say is, you know, there's a saying in sports, right?
You play to the whistle, like always play to the whistle.
So just to reiterate your point, If people are feeling great about the election, if you're confident, go vote anyway.
Do the phone calling.
Do all the stuff.
If you're in a state and you're helping give seniors a ride to polling places, whatever it is that you're doing, do that until the polls close, right?
Do it to the whistle and then, you know, we'll see where we are.
My reason for hope ties in with some of yours.
I think there are a lot of unknowns and hypotheticals in this election.
You highlighted some of those at the early voting and the patterns and things.
I think that if you add all of those up, more of them break for Harris if they happen.
So things like another poll showing that it appears in Pennsylvania that more seniors voting early are going for Harris than for Trump.
And that was not really what was expected.
If that continues, that helps Harris.
Will abortion continue where it's on a ballot measure in all of these states?
Will it continue to have the effect it's had?
We don't know.
But if it does, that helps Democrats.
Will the anti-Puerto Rico statements help those low propensity voters to go to the polls and vote?
We don't know.
But if it does, it helps Democrats.
What is the size of what I was calling the hidden woman vote?
And that's what you're describing.
Women who have maybe told pollsters or a partner or whomever that they're going to vote a particular way and they don't.
Stuff on Fox News this week where a guy saying that if his wife pulled the lever for Harris, it'd be like her having an affair.
It's like...
Of course they're not going to tell you that they're doing that.
How big is that number?
We don't know.
But it goes for Harris.
Does it matter that Trump continues to unravel and gets more and more extreme?
We don't know.
He's been this way for years.
But are there still people who are like, I've just had it.
I can't do this.
And they go there and they're like, you know what?
I'm going to tick the box for Kamala Harris.
If that happens, obviously it goes for Harris.
How big is the gender gap?
Is it bigger than we think?
How pronounced will it be?
We don't know, but it goes for Harris.
So I guess what I'm saying is we have all of these possible things, none of for sure, but I think many more of them, if they come into play, break for Harris than break for Trump.
Will the number of African American men voting for Democrats be smaller?
Maybe.
That might break for Trump.
The same thing with Latinx voters, but I think the Puerto Rico thing might offset that.
So that's my reason for hope, is there's a lot we don't know.
But if you game these things out, I feel like there are a lot more variables that, if they come into play, help Harris than help Trump.
All right, y'all.
Keep your feet on the ground.
Don't stare into the abyss.
Don't get caught up in a doomed spiral.
Hug your loved ones.
Execute your plan.
Take people to the polls.
And just hang tight.
And we're going to get through this.
We will see you on the flip side next week.
But for now, we'll say we're thinking of all of you as we head into this election week and what is promising to be a really difficult ride regardless of what happens.
We appreciate your support.
We hope to see you in November in San Diego and Los Angeles.
You'll hear more about that in a minute.
For now, we'll say thanks for being here.
Have a good day.
Thanks, Brad.
Don't forget, y'all.
Two live events coming in November.
Some straight white American Jesus.
One at the University of Southern California in LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
