The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast.
[1] I'm Tim Miller in for Charlie Sykes.
[2] It is his birthday.
[3] Very special 39th birthday for Charlie today.
[4] You can all wish him well on Twitter.
[5] So I've been brought up from the basement and I'm taking over for the day.
[6] I have a super exciting guest.
[7] But before we get to her, there's been a bunch of stuff that has happened since I last talked to y 'all.
[8] We have had a wonderful Dem midterm, which we're going to be talking about today and the Twitter apocalypse.
[9] And so if you don't want to give you a little $8 to Elon Musk, I just want to let you know where you can find.
[10] our bulwark stuff that's not on Twitter.
[11] We've an awesome Reddit community, Reddit slash the Bullwork.
[12] You should go hang out there.
[13] Some of the Lib Bullwork fans are there, I do have to say.
[14] You know, and I get nagged over there from time to time.
[15] But I go and check in anyway.
[16] Over on Instagram at The Bullwork on Instagram, I'm at Tim ODC Picks.
[17] I've been posting more work and less videos of my child to my mother's chagrin.
[18] So, you know, make that worthwhile.
[19] And most importantly, we have a new deal, the Twitter Apocalypse deal, $8 a month for Bullwark Plus.
[20] You can come over to our Bullwork Plus page on Substack.
[21] You can comment on the articles.
[22] You can boo.
[23] You can cheer.
[24] We can have a thoughtful exchange of ideas.
[25] Whatever, whatever you guys are into, whatever the mood strikes that day.
[26] It's been very cool, very vibrant.
[27] Come hang out with other bowlwork people over on Substack.
[28] One more thing before I get to the guest.
[29] I've been traveling this week for the circus on Showtime.
[30] You can see me on Sunday.
[31] Our guest is going to be on too.
[32] And I just want to share an observation from where I'm taping from now here in Arizona.
[33] For all the good stuff that happened on Tuesday, we are still in the midst of a pretty volatile situation here in Arizona.
[34] And I flew from a bunch of Kerry Lake and Black Masters events here in the state across the country to Virginia where I saw Abigail Spanberger, who just won, which was wonderful, and then up to Philly where I saw Dr. Oz.
[35] And I have to say, the contrast between the Oz events, which were directionally couldn't have been that much different from a Mitt Romney event.
[36] And what is happening here in Arizona?
[37] You know, couldn't be more stark.
[38] The Carrie Lake Blakmasters, Mark Fincham events are like one part church revival, one part oathkeepers meeting, you know, one part WWE rally.
[39] It is the energy is intense, dangerous, maybe overstatement, but slightly menacing.
[40] And there's also a lot of excitement and enthusiasm.
[41] And so what we have here is a protracted count.
[42] I was at the Maricopa County facility yesterday, you know, talking to the, counting our quarter.
[43] And, you know, they're only going to count about 60 ,000, 70 ,000 votes a day, which means we're not going to know the result of Lake and Hobbs into the middle of next week.
[44] So for all the good stuff, for all the wins for democracy the last week, you know, one of the biggest races is still going to be in flux.
[45] And we might be heading to a very narrow recount situation here, at least in the governor's race.
[46] Over on the Senate race and the Secretary of State's race, we are looking at a Blake Masters loss and a Mark Finchum loss.
[47] So wins for Democrats in both those.
[48] But Lake and then on the Attorney General's race, Abe Homiday, you'd probably rather be them than the Democratic opponents today, but they're both very, very close, and we're really not going to know until the results come in.
[49] So that's my update.
[50] That's what you've been missing from me. I want to get to our exciting guest next.
[51] She's amazing, and we'll focus on her.
[52] So with a brief interlude from my friends of Goose, next, Senator Mallory McMorrow.
[53] I couldn't find a Michigan magic song for you.
[54] Mallory, but we had some Michigan magic this week.
[55] Tell us about it.
[56] What's happening there?
[57] I'm really, first of all, sad that you didn't pull the Yes, Michigan 1980s tourism promo video.
[58] That song is excellent.
[59] I got a YouTube it.
[60] You can find it on my Twitter account many, many, many times.
[61] I always take an opportunity to post it.
[62] But Michigan, oh my goodness, Governor Whitmer got reelected by almost 10 points.
[63] A .G. Dana Nessel got reelected.
[64] Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, got reelected, and we flipped the Michigan Senate blue for the first time in nearly 40 years and flipped the House.
[65] So Michigan is a Democratic trifecta.
[66] Unbelievable.
[67] I want to go really deep on that.
[68] For folks that don't know Mallory, she's a state senator up in Michigan.
[69] She represents a district in the northern suburb of Detroit.
[70] No panic in Detroit this week.
[71] And you might have seen her when.
[72] one of her Republican colleagues called her a groomer in a fundraising email, Groomer, and she spoke on the Michigan Senate floor and just gave an amazing viral speech, which we're going to get to in a second.
[73] I wrote this week for the bulwark about one of it, for me, the main takeaways from the election was that the Republicans were punished for their crazy.
[74] There's been a lot of frustration around these parts that, like, it doesn't feel like the Republicans are getting punished enough for the crazy on the election denial stuff, on the, you know, gender and sex stuff, on, you know, abortion.
[75] And it seems like Michigan was kind of ground zero for the fact that this wasn't true.
[76] People did have legitimate concerns about the, you know, economy and democratic governance, but that was overshadowed by the fact that they didn't want to give the keys to these freaks.
[77] What do you think about that?
[78] That's exactly right.
[79] It feels like we finally reached the limit on crazy.
[80] And that's a good thing.
[81] You know, Michigan, it was a perfect storm of things that happened in 2018 voters created an independent citizens redistricting commission.
[82] So this was the first election that we ran with new lines that actually matches the partisan makeup of the state, believe it or not.
[83] Crazy concept.
[84] But beyond that, yeah, Michigan, you know, the fact that people around the country know me now from the fact that I was called a groomer and a pedophile by a sitting colleague who was not my opponent, by the way, just a sitting colleague trying to fundraise for herself, really set the tone.
[85] This was the route that the entire Michigan GOP followed from Tudor Dixon, who made her campaign all about quote unquote parental rights and claiming to protect girls' sports.
[86] She kept having these press conferences.
[87] She held one actually on the same day that we passed the state budget.
[88] So I was taking a break from session.
[89] I walk out and there was a press conference going on where Tudor Dixon announced that she would allow parents to sue their school district if their school district held a drag queen story time.
[90] And when she was pressed by reporter, she couldn't provide a single example of that ever happening in the state of Michigan.
[91] And she kept doing this.
[92] In the last few days, she invited out a swimmer from Kentucky as her kind of main speaker.
[93] And this was a woman swimmer who tied for fifth with Leah Thomas.
[94] So, you know, I looked at that and I made a snippy comment on Twitter that was, you know, in the final days, Republicans are presenting their plans to fight inflation.
[95] And, and that felt real.
[96] And we saw this all the way down ballot.
[97] We're in the state Senate.
[98] This is a central issue to voters.
[99] Central issue to voters.
[100] In its place and women swimming competitions, you know, I like that they care about women's sports now all of a sudden.
[101] All of the sudden, you know, shocker, they, they didn't seem to care about it until this year, weirdly.
[102] But yeah, it really just felt like voters are a lot smarter than the current Michigan GOP gave them credit for.
[103] And you can see right through all the bullshit.
[104] And I think that it was that combination of redistricting.
[105] We got out early with our candidates in the legislature.
[106] We finally had financial resources to go first and define our candidates in really positive ways to voters, which was just such a great counter to all of the ugliness coming out of the GOP.
[107] And I just saw a report a few minutes ago, actually, Of the Moms for Liberty, parents' rights school board candidates around the state, 76 % of them lost.
[108] So we're doing good.
[109] We're saying no more crazy, please.
[110] Well, at least 25 % of them are still out there monitoring for the litter boxes.
[111] Have you found any litter boxes and any Michigan clusters?
[112] I did a big investigation on this from the moms in Colorado that were pushing the litter box thing.
[113] And we couldn't find any, but any sign of them?
[114] No litter boxes.
[115] Just for a quick background from people who don't know what we're talking about, that these moms groups, after COVID, needed to find something else to complain about and, you know, went through CRT and all this other stuff.
[116] But one of the key points that this urban legend went around that kids were identifying as cats and dogs in the schools, this was a rampant problem, and that as a result, some of the school districts, some of these woke liberal school districts were putting litter boxes in the classrooms so they could relieve themselves rather than using, the stall, but we, we haven't identified, we haven't found any of them.
[117] What about Michigan?
[118] No, they don't exist.
[119] I haven't found any.
[120] There are none in my district.
[121] But it's just, you put any resources from the state's Senate into looking into it, though?
[122] Like, how thorough is the state's investigation?
[123] As I, just to remind all of my constituents for purposes of fiscal responsibility, no, I did not expend any tax dollars looking for litter boxes in schools.
[124] I want to get to this speech, and I think it'll be a lead in to talk you about democratic messaging and what's working, what's not what's maybe could be improved.
[125] But so just give people the background.
[126] What did you do to earn the title of Groomer?
[127] You know, what happened in the lead -up to the speech that kind of, you know, thrust you into the national eye?
[128] So Michigan, we've got Republicans in the legislature who really want to be in Florida, which is shocking to me. You know, I think, again, going back to Tudor Dixon, I think she said in one of her early rallies, how about we Florida are Michigan?
[129] And I think so many people were like, no, thank you.
[130] I want to get back to that.
[131] Yeah, we go back to that.
[132] But we've started to see this uptick in our legislature of bills to ban trans kids playing sports, the don't say gay bill.
[133] So it started with a Republican colleague of mine using the invocation, which is supposed to be, you know, a non -offensive intention -setting moment of prayer.
[134] And she used it as a really thinly veiled moment to talk about don't say gay.
[135] under the guise of a prayer, she said something like there are dark forces that seek to have our kids hear and know and see things against their parents will.
[136] And any of us on the floor who know this colleague know exactly what she was doing.
[137] This is the woman who chairs the Education Committee who continues to introduce bills and hold hearings trying to ban the 1619 project and talk about CRT.
[138] And it's whatever Christopher Rufo is doing is what she's doing in our committee.
[139] And we walked out, three of us, Democratic side walked out.
[140] I then took to Twitter and just said, you know, I'm not going to repeat the words that were said under the guise of a prayer today.
[141] But I want to reiterate to every kid in the state of Michigan that you are seen and heard and welcome for whoever you are.
[142] And this colleague took offense to that.
[143] And she the next day sent out a fundraising email.
[144] So you're grooming them into a life of self -confidence in their identity.
[145] Yeah, grooming them into caring about themselves.
[146] I don't know.
[147] So she sent out a fundraising email for herself.
[148] And she said, Mallory McMorrow D. Snowflake is angry that she can't groom or support pedophilia and wants eight -year -olds to believe they were responsible for slavery.
[149] So that was a fun Monday morning.
[150] Well, let's hear, we're not going to do the whole epic five minutes.
[151] If you never did listen to it, you should go to on YouTube.
[152] But I want to play one clip in particular and talk to you about.
[153] I am a straight, white, Christian, married suburban mom.
[154] I want my daughter to know that she has loved, supported.
[155] and seen for whoever she becomes.
[156] I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind.
[157] People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that health care costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession.
[158] I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight, white, and Christian.
[159] We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people's lives.
[160] And I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.
[161] So I want to be very clear right now.
[162] Call me whatever you want.
[163] I hope you brought in a few dollars.
[164] I hope it made you sleep good last night.
[165] I know who I am.
[166] I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment.
[167] We will not let hate win.
[168] Pretty good, Valerie.
[169] Before that, you had talked kind of about your growing up and your background and humanizing yourself and not, you know, going to the soup kitchen with your mother.
[170] But the thing that I liked about this, the thing that the Democrats, you know, have at times struggled with and did well this cycle was to kind of kind of recapture this, you know, these terms that the Republicans like to use.
[171] You know, in Virginia, they have to admit, in 2021, they had success about we're the party of parents' rights, you know.
[172] We are the party that cares about suburban parents and, you know, wants their kids to succeed and Christian values and blah, blah, blah.
[173] And your pushback was to kind of recapture those kind of identities and those brands and say, no, I'm a white Christian mom.
[174] And being a white Christian mom does not mean that I want kids that are struggling to deal with their sexuality or their gender identity to hate themselves.
[175] It means I want to foster an environment where they can feel loved, right?
[176] And by flipping the script on them, you know, again, kind of felt like the Democrats were able to sort of retake this broad middle, the types of people that just want, you know, what's best for their families and don't want to care about the culture War bullshit.
[177] Is that kind of how you saw how you were framing what you wanted to talk about?
[178] Yeah, it is.
[179] And to give it a little bit of context, so I flipped a Republican district when I ran for the first time in 2018.
[180] So I, for the past four years, have represented a nearly 50 -50 split Republican and Democratic District.
[181] I had had a long conversation with a mom from one of the more Republican parts of my district well before this speech happened, where she had told.
[182] She had told, me that she had been frustrated with her school district.
[183] She had been frustrated with school closures and learning loss.
[184] And she had joined this parents group and initially they had wanted better communication with the administration.
[185] But she reached out to me and she said, you know, she's noticing that this group that she's joined is starting to go after the LGBTQ community or starting to talk about CRT.
[186] And one of the things she said to me was, I'm not that person but I don't feel like I have anywhere to go.
[187] And that really stuck with me because I think about what happened in Virginia all the time where part of it is timing.
[188] You know, Glenn Yonkin won election on the heels of school closures and the COVID -19 pandemic and just kind of coming out with them.
[189] It's very different in Michigan where schools haven't been closed for a long time.
[190] We haven't had any COVID shutdown protocols for well over a year, probably two years now.
[191] So the timing was different, but also thinking about the idea that people like Lana Tice, the woman who called me a groomer, and this iteration of Moms for Liberty and the GOP, somehow claim that they speak in a unified voice for Christians for white suburban moms, and then they use that supposed moral authority to target gay kids is just disgusting.
[192] I mean, you can't claim to stand up for protecting kids and parental rights if all you're doing is targeting kids who are not exactly like your kid.
[193] So a lot of what I thought through doing was in my speech, I didn't say Democrats or Republicans once.
[194] I wrote a lot of things down.
[195] Initially, I had talked about the hypocrisy on the Republican side of the aisle.
[196] There's somebody here called Lee Chatfield, who was the ex -speaker of the House, who was currently under investigation for grooming and raping his sister -in -law starting when she was 50.
[197] So I had some of that in there.
[198] But I took all of that out because I recognized that if I started down that route, that nobody would listen to it.
[199] It would just be Democrats are yelling at Republicans and Republicans are yelling at Democrats.
[200] So I really, I flipped the script.
[201] And I talked about myself and my own identity and wanted people like this mom who reached out to me to see a different way forward.
[202] Yeah.
[203] And I think that that is so important.
[204] And when I was talking to Abigail Spanberg, about this just this week, right?
[205] And her message out of Virginia in 2021 was, you know, you do have to listen to people and what they care about, right?
[206] I mean, like, I think that there was a little bit of a dismissiveness sometimes on the left about the complaints from parents.
[207] Some of them were quite legitimate, frankly, about the school closures, you know, and some of them were illegitimate.
[208] But there were reasonable reasons why people were upset about that, right?
[209] And so rather than just kind of dismissing and mocking those people, right, to listen to them and kind of capture the mantle of their concern and say, no, I'm, I'm a mom too, right?
[210] I'm a dad.
[211] I'm trying to address these concerns, but we're not going to do it like on the backs of families that are different than, you know, the standard white straight Christian families.
[212] Like, that's not what people want.
[213] And I think that that reframes things and really kind of takes back this big center, right?
[214] Because that's what most parents think, right?
[215] Yeah.
[216] I think especially for moms, any working mom who went through COVID -19, it was brutal.
[217] It was absolutely brutal.
[218] We don't have a system that supports working moms to begin with.
[219] But then when your schools are shut down or they're kind of waffling back and forth between being open and closed and you're suddenly trying to manage work and school and your kids' education and sometimes being a teacher and sometimes being a parent, I think we just all had to acknowledge we all went through hell for two years.
[220] how, you know, I think reframing that message to say, we all have to move forward.
[221] There's a lot of loss that we have to gain back.
[222] It was really hard for kids, especially if you've got a kid with special needs who didn't do well with virtual learning.
[223] Every kid has gone through something traumatic right now, and so have their parents.
[224] So to be able to say, we hear you, you have every right to be frustrated.
[225] I'm frustrated too.
[226] And that's something that I talk about is I had a baby during COVID -19.
[227] So, you know, trying to find child care in the middle of a pandemic was a nightmare.
[228] But blaming one or two trans kids in the state of Michigan who want to play on a sports team every year, because that's the numbers.
[229] Out of a state of 10 million people, there are two trans kids who go through the process to play on the sports team that matches their gender identity.
[230] That's not going to fix any of your problems.
[231] It's just scapegoating.
[232] And it's just to get you angry so that you don't notice that the Republicans don't have any plans to help either.
[233] And this is something I think Governor Whitmer has done a really, really good job of is acknowledging the issues.
[234] She talks about record investment in education, record investment in expanding child care.
[235] And she also talks about COVID -19.
[236] And we have a lot of work to do.
[237] And do we want to keep moving forward?
[238] Or do we want to vote for people who have no plans at all except to gut public education and to blame somebody else?
[239] I want to get into the Whitmer and DeSantis of it all in a second, but just on the substance of this, the one frustrating thing for me during the whole don't say gay situation, is DeSantis really kind of somehow managed to claim the mantle of the big middle on this, right?
[240] And sort of position this very hateful, insane bill that frankly, you know, was written so vague that my kid, you know, who is doing a homework assignment, writing about her two dads, like that might have violated the bill depending on what you what you determine as instruction right and so this was a totally unnecessary, totally over the top purposefully incendiary and hateful bill and yet didn't suffer any political consequences versus obviously severe political consequences in Michigan so maybe that's just the floor of man of it all and there's nothing that can be telling about Florida man but I don't know what you guys kind of had to respond to that a similar type of legislation is there anything that can be learned on the on the substance of it that you think helped push back you know Yeah look I think part of it is is Florida is Florida but beyond that so I think one of the things that I think about all the time is is how do we make the connection for everybody because part of the reason why don't say gay was successful and DeSantis was successful is you know the percentage of kids who are gay or have gay parents or are trans or whatever it is is a small percentage It's a minority group.
[241] It's really easy to kind of target a minority of the population.
[242] So if you are, let's say, the 80, 90 % of people who are not directly impacted by it, you're like, well, this isn't about me. I'm still okay.
[243] I like my tax cuts or whatever it is.
[244] And you're going to step back.
[245] Something that was really important to me was really making that direct connection.
[246] And there's a reason that in the speech that I gave back in April, I said, you know, people who are different around not the reason why health care costs are too high or why the roads are in bad shape.
[247] because we get regular calls to my office.
[248] There's a woman who we lovingly refer to as a frequent flyer who calls every few weeks.
[249] She leave messages.
[250] She's older.
[251] She lives alone.
[252] But you can tell that she's watching Fox News all day long.
[253] And whatever the talking point is that week is, is kind of her complaint to our office.
[254] And I recognized that for this woman, who is a constituent of mine, if you legitimately believe that the 2020 election, was stolen, you legitimately believe that somehow every single teacher out there is trying to change kids' gender identity or whatever it is.
[255] It's a horrifying reality.
[256] So one of the things that is really horrifying for me about this whole moment is the GOP is taking advantage of women like her too because they don't care that she's vulnerable.
[257] She lives alone.
[258] They are lying to her and creating a horrifying reality for her, too.
[259] So I wanted to make that direct connection and say, you know, things like don't say gay, do nothing to make your life any better.
[260] It's just going to devastate the lives of these kids and these families for what?
[261] To channel their grievance to make them feel better, right?
[262] Like, that's it, right?
[263] So to make it to allow an outlet.
[264] It's just to redirect your energy and anger towards somebody else, which doesn't solve the problem.
[265] Right.
[266] You and I are so mind -melding on this.
[267] I think that's a frustrating part, and I'm happy that you're saying that, and sometimes doesn't get said enough, is that, like, literally the people, this forgotten man, forgotten woman that are showing up to these Carrie Lake Rally's that I've been going to, they don't care about them either, right?
[268] Like, they're not doing anything.
[269] I just think about the people whose lives have been ruined by election conspiracy and vaccine conspiracy.
[270] You know, forget not there's the, you know, there's the not actually caring and wanting to do anything, which you're talking about.
[271] But then there's the act of harm, right?
[272] Like people whose lives have been ruined because they, you know, went to the capital, you know, because they believed their, you know, their president or decided not to get a jab, you know, because they believed that whatever, Bill Gates wanted to put microchips in their body.
[273] You know, the whole thing is actively harming the people that they actually care about.
[274] Oh, just on the Florida thing, I want to get to abortion and a couple other things, too.
[275] But, you know, a lot of buzzed.
[276] I think part of it is just the nature of just media.
[277] and the fact that we all have like two second attention spans.
[278] I'm like Florida vote comes in first and fast, right?
[279] There's this big victory.
[280] And so there's this kind of buzz around this big night that Ron DeSantis has.
[281] And, you know, as now the numbers have settled, we still don't know what's happening here in Arizona and California, a couple other places.
[282] But, you know, Gretchen Whitmer has as big, if not bigger of a night than DeSantis, that you're a total sweep there.
[283] You know, talk about that kind of contrast, you know, what you think it was that made her, successful, you know, in the face of really tough opposition, in addition to, obviously, the kidnapping threats, et cetera, but, but, you know, a lot of money and effort put in to try to tear her down as a rising star.
[284] And, you know, she comes out, you know, looking very strong as a national democratic figure.
[285] So you're seeing her much more up close than me and us.
[286] So what's your kind of take on that in the contrast with DeSantis?
[287] You know, I think there's a lot that goes into it.
[288] And number one, I don't think you can possibly discise.
[289] count just how much of a normal person Gretchen Whitmer is.
[290] She's very likable.
[291] You know, she ran on Fix the Damn Roads in 2018 and I am convinced, because she curses like a sailor if you actually get her like talking.
[292] So I'm convinced her staff gave her like one curse word that she could use regularly.
[293] And we saw this a few years later when she kind of went viral for a hot mic moment when she said, it's Shark Week motherfuckers, right?
[294] And that got turned into merchandise and candles.
[295] People who like Gretchen Whitmer love her.
[296] And what this showed is there are significantly more people who love her than don't.
[297] I mean, on the flip side, the people who don't like her want to kidnap and kill her.
[298] But she is very Michigan.
[299] She loves Michigan.
[300] She loves football.
[301] She loves tailgates.
[302] She loves dive bars.
[303] She talks like a normal person.
[304] She talks about her family and her daughters.
[305] She talked about that during COVID.
[306] You know, at the beginning of COVID -19, Michigan got hit hard fast, especially in the metro Detroit area where it's almost hard to remember now, but we had body bags piling up in closets in hospitals in the Detroit area.
[307] You know, I know friends and colleagues of mine who lost dozens of people in their life.
[308] And she took decisive action quickly and saved lives.
[309] And there was, you know, within Detroit, the Detroit community presented her with some buffs.
[310] They coined her Big Gretch.
[311] And I think that that goes a long way to see somebody who stood up and fought to protect, especially people who were hardest hit by a global pandemic.
[312] That wasn't anything small.
[313] And then she came out of it, you know, the fact that she was the focus of an attempt to kidnap and kill her.
[314] And she has gone all over the state over the past few weeks on the campaign.
[315] And she talks about it very openly and says, you know, people ask why I keep doing this, but it's because of all of you.
[316] And she says, you know, I'm no matter what they throw at me, I'm going to get up and dust my shoulders off and keep going as long as you have my back.
[317] And it's created this culture where, you know, Donald Trump called her that woman from Michigan in a negative way.
[318] And she took it as a badge of honor and she owned it.
[319] And now every woman I talk to feels like that woman.
[320] from Michigan.
[321] Like, it has become a rallying cry for all of us to stand up and say, you don't mess with those women from Michigan.
[322] And it's also not a coincidence that we have women in all of our top offices, governor, secretary of state attorney general in the state legislature now that are Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.
[323] Both Democratic caucuses are majority women.
[324] This is a state with some seriously powerful women.
[325] And she's aggressive.
[326] She came out on the issue of abortion before anybody else in governorship positions.
[327] She made it a signature issue of her campaign, and she did it well before the Dobbs decision.
[328] So people saw she's not waiting for us to lose our rights.
[329] She's fighting for us.
[330] And that gave her the freedom and flexibility to talk about education, child care, the economy, expanding manufacturing and battery plants in Michigan in a way that felt very authentic and not just responding to the latest polling data.
[331] love that you started there we got to the policies which are important but a lot of times the democrats avoid you know the vibes element of this um which does matter in politics right maybe it shouldn't right but likeability seeming like you're a normal person like that matters look at the inverse so just it's just a start because i'm sitting right here in phoenix but you know why is carey lake may be going to win while blake masters is getting crushed in arizona like they don't disagree on anything like all of their issue positions are the same It's just that Carrie, well, I find her pretty weird.
[332] It's like a local TV person who seems like an Arizonan.
[333] And Blake, you know, seems like American Psycho coming from California, a weird tech guy.
[334] Like, and people just, that's enough for three points.
[335] You know, that just is on the margins.
[336] It's the same thing in Georgia.
[337] I wrote about this when I went down to Georgia.
[338] You know, Warnock and Abrams.
[339] Eight point gap there.
[340] Part of that was Herschel Walker, of course, versus Kemp.
[341] Part of that, though, is that Warnock specifically branded himself as like a dad.
[342] You know, a normal guy, a pastor, right?
[343] And I think that is what worked, you know, it's a little different than what you were talking about with Whitmer, but this, she can go to dive bars.
[344] She says, motherfucker, you know, she likes football.
[345] That makes people think that, like, okay, this person gets me, right?
[346] This isn't someone in some, like, liberal elite, you know, coastal bubble.
[347] Out of touch.
[348] Yeah, this is such a small detail, but to me it sticks with me all the time.
[349] So, you know, one of the most infuriating things is on football rivalries.
[350] Michigan State game every year.
[351] Every single politician has asked, who are you rooting for this weekend?
[352] And like 90 % of politicians say like, oh, I hope everybody wins and has a great game.
[353] It's the dumbest, like pick aside.
[354] Whitmer, so the lieutenant governor went to the University of Michigan, Garland Gilgrest, Whitmer went to Michigan State.
[355] They have a rivalry.
[356] They bet, you know, they bet like the opposite person is going to wear the other team's colors.
[357] And they make it a fun rivalry.
[358] And it's just like so relatable.
[359] And it's so infuriating when you see people in political roles refuse to pick aside on something so inconsequential.
[360] It's a football game.
[361] Just pick one.
[362] Your worry, you're going to lose a couple votes in Ann Arbor, you know, because you said you were from Michigan State.
[363] Who cares?
[364] I was speaking of which, whether, did you see, I wish I had the numbers in front of me?
[365] Did you see the University of Michigan vote results, like, from campus?
[366] Oh, it was, wow.
[367] It was literally like $5 ,400 to 94.
[368] I don't know if I'm going to try to pull it up really quickly when we talked.
[369] But you kind of sense that energy coming from younger voters when you were there?
[370] Yeah.
[371] I mean, so Michigan puts it like some more context in this.
[372] We legalized same -day voter registration back in 2018, along with no reason absentee voting and a few other things.
[373] So this was the first midterm where we saw that in effect.
[374] And the lines at University of Michigan at Michigan State, the number of pizzas and, you know, pops and things that were sent out to these kids, I think the last kid at U of M voted at like two or three in the morning just stayed in line.
[375] And it was amazing.
[376] And you talk to a lot of kids.
[377] You know, there's a bunch of people who were interviewing why they were there.
[378] And you can't underestimate people were there to vote for Whitmer.
[379] They were there to vote for Prop 3, which added constitutional protections for abortion and reproductive rights.
[380] And it matters.
[381] When I started seeing videos early in the day, I was like, oh, this is going well for us.
[382] Let's talk about Prop 3.
[383] And, okay, here it is.
[384] kid's name is at you mish voter yes i don't know if you follow at umish voter it's a great twitter account 88 42 to 573 yeah 94 percent 6 percent i mean i think that some of those 573 kids are just trolling i don't i don't know that's above saddam hussein numbers there in an arbor talk about prop three you know the the degree to which you think that abortion you know played a role here you know was that the whole deal just part of the deal and you know how to kind of strike a ground here where you're protecting people's rights, but not, you know, playing into kind of Republican hands.
[385] Yeah.
[386] Talk about how that all worked, both on the policy and politics.
[387] Absolutely.
[388] So prop three, as, as I mentioned, so this was a citizen -led petition ballot initiative that amended our state constitution to guarantee access to abortion and reproductive rights also included things like maternal health care, sterilization, if there are families who choose that and a number of other things.
[389] And it made such a huge impact, not just on election day, but throughout the course of the election.
[390] And I'll tell you why.
[391] So I remember and I relate to on the day the Dobbs decision came down, I think it was CNN or somewhere, they interviewed a young woman a college student who was just so furious because she said, you know, we just lost Roe.
[392] We lost the right to my own body.
[393] And somehow national Democrats just texted me and asked for five bucks.
[394] And it felt like such a slap in the face.
[395] Meanwhile, in Michigan, the day the Dobbs decision came down, I went to a rally in Detroit.
[396] And I was able to tell everybody there that we have been fighting on this issue proactively for years now.
[397] In the legislature, my colleagues and I introduced legislation back in 2019 to repeal our 1931 abortion ban and effectively caught a row in statute.
[398] Governor Whitmer filed a lawsuit months before the Dobbs decision came down that led to abortion still being legal in Michigan because of one judge basically standing in the way of our ban going into effect after Dobbs.
[399] And Planned Parenthood, ACLU and Michigan Voices, which is a coalition of black women, got together and introduced this petition initiative months before the Dobbs decision, you know, back in the spring.
[400] And it started circulating.
[401] And the amount of the amount of of energy, especially the day the Dobbs came down, that people who came to these rallies who were angry, who were livid, had something very tangible that they could do.
[402] This felt like such a greater impact than national Democrats texting you and saying, give me five bucks.
[403] We were able to lay out a cohesive plan to say between the governor, the legislators on the ballot, and this petition initiative, you can take action and fight back in a meaningful way.
[404] We saw tens of thousands of people sign up on the day Dobbs came down to circulate this petition initiative.
[405] They turned in nearly 800 ,000 signatures, which is almost double what is required to get on the ballot and the most signatures for any initiative in state history.
[406] And then it drove people directly to the polls.
[407] I mean, this is anecdotal, but I talk to a lot of people who I know from my gym or my yoga studio who have never volunteered on a Democratic campaign, but came out hard for this.
[408] I think because it was so simple, because it was a single issue and because it was a very meaningful way to fight back.
[409] And then that allowed those of us who are on the side of supporting this issue to also lay out, you need a legislature who's going to support what you just voted for on the ballot.
[410] So I don't think you can discount how big a deal it was to have this on the ballot.
[411] And as pundits kept saying, oh, abortion's not the top issue anymore, that's not what we felt on the ground.
[412] I think that a lot of people, yes, inflation is real, gas prices were real, but there was a huge understanding that gas prices go up and down, but losing a fundamental right to decide if and when to get pregnant that you've had for 50 years is not just a summer blip of an issue.
[413] That's right.
[414] And I think that the other big kind of pundit question was this democracy part, right?
[415] Like how much did that matter?
[416] And so I'm interested in your kind of take and it's not like, oh, it was 70 % abortion, 30 % democracy but you know is this really the two things that kind of explain this um you know the fact that you know the the the dob's overturning and so you're looking at the people in michigan tutor dixon karamo and it's like these are these people want to put in not middle of the road abortion reviews but extremely restricted restrictive abortion laws and and they also have basically pledged that they would make Donald trump an unelected autocrat next time they had the chance and and this kind of democracy, Trump, and abortion, you know, ends up kind of outweighing, you know, people's other concerns.
[417] Is that kind of your feeling of it at the ground or were there other issues or, you know, what was prime out of all that?
[418] Yeah, I do think democracy did play a big role here, but it's really hard to wrap your mind around democracy as an abstract construct versus really breaking down what it means.
[419] So in Michigan, it was the perfect storm.
[420] In the wake of the 2020 election, many of my Republican legislative counterparts flew to D .C. met with the Trump administration and were trying to overturn Michigan's 2020 election results.
[421] Matt DiPerno, who is the Republican nominee for Attorney General, was also working with the Trump administration to try to overturn Michigan's 2020 election results.
[422] He became a name based on filing many, many failed lawsuits about the 2020 election.
[423] And then, you know, Jocelyn Benson has been a very outspoken defender of democracy and voting rights and election protection, and Christina Karamo, who was the Republican nominee for Secretary of State, two weeks before the election, she filed a lawsuit against the city of Detroit in an attempt to throw out all of Detroit's absentee ballots.
[424] And at that point, tens of thousands of Detroit voters had already sent in their ballots.
[425] So, you know, I think you look at the issue, but then you also look at the fact that all of the candidates on the Republican side, to your point, were not just moderate on the issue.
[426] They were extreme.
[427] They were made it very clear they were going to turn over election results that they didn't like them.
[428] And they were trying to take people's votes away.
[429] And that is a way that takes the issue of democracy and brings it down to a very granular level that people on the ground understood.
[430] And they understood what's at risk.
[431] You know, Michigan is a place where we will decide the 2024 election.
[432] We are a key battleground state and you've got to have people in office who are, A, going to let you vote for the next president, respect the popular vote instead of just anointing, you know, fake electors they want to put in.
[433] And it matters.
[434] People really get it here because we've seen on the ground really blatant attempts to just strip people's votes away.
[435] So in all the buzz now, you know, it's a lot of sad Republicans out there these days.
[436] I have to tell you, like Sarah Longwell, I always talked about after the 2016 election, how we used to sit in rooms with sad, normie Republicans, and, you know, how we dealt with that.
[437] And I was in a room with sad MAGA Republicans on Tuesday night monitoring the race.
[438] And so there are a lot of sad MAGA Republicans out there that they're turning their lonely eyes to Ron and his Wellington boots.
[439] You mentioned earlier that Tudor Dixon said she wanted to Florida, her Michigan.
[440] That didn't turn out that great.
[441] What, you know, are you concerned about the prospect of Big Ron sweeping through the Midwest and bringing Republicans back to glory?
[442] What's your political assessment of Florida -ing the Upper Midwest?
[443] Well, I think Michigan pretty loudly rejected the idea of Floridaing the Midwest.
[444] And also, you know, I know that DeSantis won in one -handily, but just watching him completely dear in headlights in his debate with Chris when asked if he would even serve a four -year term.
[445] I mean, this is a guy who's not prepared for any pushback and just seemed just wholly unprepared at all for that debate.
[446] But it didn't matter in Florida.
[447] Well, Charlie Chris, and my friend Anna Navarro did a rant on this on CNN.
[448] Charlie Chris is not exactly the strong, you know, we've been talking about the strengths of your messaging and Gretchen's normal, you know, Brandy's normal.
[449] Charlie doesn't really pass the vibe check.
[450] We don't need to hit somebody while he's down.
[451] But, you know, I think that it's safe to say maybe not the strongest competition.
[452] Yeah, I could see that.
[453] But I think, so Alyssa Slotkin in her election night speech where she won, you know, what was the most expensive congressional race, I think, in the country.
[454] She said something that I really loved.
[455] She was like, look, I can't fix the Republican Party, even if I wanted to.
[456] But if they're going to keep putting up election denying extremists, I'm going to keep beating them.
[457] And I think that's exactly right.
[458] And that's a lot of what I've been talking about is, is even to independent and moderate Republican voters is, If we want to get back to a place where there are two functional parties, Democrats have to keep winning and keep beating these extremists, and the Republican Party will be forced back to a place where they're not running on lies in conspiracy theories and insurrectionists, and instead talking about tax policy.
[459] I mean, that's genuinely my hope.
[460] You know, Michigan went a long way towards that effort.
[461] We're already watching Tudor Dixon live tweeting her frustrations with the GOP, who put out a report basically throwing Tudor Dixon under the bus for why they lost.
[462] So we're seeing the Trump faction already fighting amongst itself.
[463] I've heard Matt DiPerno is going to run for the chair of the Michigan GOP.
[464] So I don't know.
[465] I mean, they could double down on crazy.
[466] Yeah, I don't think that there's a lot of, you know, old line John Engler Republicans walking through that door in Michigan.
[467] It seems to me like the bench is pretty mega.
[468] Okay, I do, we're just going to end with it.
[469] Just a couple where I just want to maybe.
[470] We have a lot of agreement, Mallory, you know, a lot of agreement, a lot of celebration.
[471] So maybe let's, you know, you mentioned that maybe Republicans could get back to disagreeing on issues sometime.
[472] And I noticed that the Michigan trifecta, they said the first thing that they were going to do is repeal the right to work law.
[473] I like right to work.
[474] I used to be a Republican, okay?
[475] So tell me why I'm wrong.
[476] Why do we have to get rid of the right to work lot.
[477] So first of all, the entire caucus did not say that.
[478] I did see that a member of the caucus tweeted that out.
[479] But look, the reality is in Michigan, and we talked about this as our incoming caucus for the first time yesterday.
[480] This has only happened with a Democratic trifecta in Michigan four times in the past hundred years.
[481] There is a lot of pent -up interest and energy and a laundry list of things that people want us to do.
[482] And we have to be really, really smart and strategic because this is ours to lose.
[483] So, you know, I am somebody who Michigan is a union state.
[484] What are your thing?
[485] What do you think are the priorities for them?
[486] I think we got to start with the low hanging, right?
[487] Like people voted overwhelmingly on Prop 3.
[488] So I think in the legislature, we have to repeal the 1931 abortion ban and just get it off the books because that's how we got into this mess in the first place.
[489] I think we have to expand our Civil Rights Act to protect the LGBTQ community, shore up voting rights, protect public school funding, because one thing that we can stop now is Betsy DeVos had been running a ballot initiative to create vouchers here in Michigan, which would have stripped a billion dollars from our public school aid fund over the next five years if it had gone through.
[490] We can end that now and make sure that we're shoring up, you know, our constitutional ban on private funds going to public schools or public funds going to private schools and go from there.
[491] So we're going to be meeting over the next few weeks as a caucus, figuring out what are all of our priorities from all across the state and really calendaring out, okay, what do we introduce and when so that we, you know, this is our challenge to show people that when Democrats are in charge and governing, we keep the state moving forward.
[492] Yeah, there's always this push and pull when you have total control, right?
[493] Which is like, we have total control, so we want to get all these things done.
[494] But at the same time, you know, the reason why you have total control really is, well, three.
[495] And so you're right to deal with that.
[496] But also, you know, because the Democrats really retook the big middle in Michigan, right?
[497] And the Republicans pushed out into the extreme, right?
[498] So you don't want to give them an opportunity to kind of claw some of that back.
[499] So that's always the challenge, right?
[500] Right.
[501] And we see the Republican, and I love saying this, the Republican minority leaders.
[502] Feels good.
[503] Already, you know, they're posting on Facebook about the laundry list of things like here are all the, extremist Democrat things that they're going to run right away.
[504] So, you know, it's on us to prove them wrong, put them on defense, make them have to take tough votes on things that are overwhelmingly popular with a majority of Michiganders.
[505] Yes, dividing them.
[506] This was my big problem with the incoming Democratic Congress that they finally got their act together in 2022.
[507] In 21, they were putting up a lot of stuff that divided their own caucus, right?
[508] You know, the original BBB.
[509] It was all the Republicans were against it was the Democrats who were in fighting it's like no put up stuff where all the Democrats agree and where you divide the other side this is politics 101 so exactly that's my little uh that's my that's my that's my that's my tip for you I do have to admit on the schadenfreude side of things I did spend a decent portion of yesterday driving on Arizona listening to my favorite Republican podcasts just just having them just hearing about their analysis you know ooh oh yeah Dr. Oz didn't happen for him anyway okay I have my last hard question and then one fun question.
[510] What's your nerve level about Joe Biden 2024 and kind of that whole debate?
[511] I mean, I think if he runs, that he runs.
[512] And especially if it's Trump running, that's a decision that he's going to have to make.
[513] I am not as worried about that as I think a lot of people are because I've been the one out there probably louder than anybody saying, we're a big 10 party.
[514] We've got to uplift the rest of the voices, not just the person in the White House.
[515] So I'm really excited about the team.
[516] got in Michigan, and I'm going to keep pushing for us to be building that bench.
[517] And this was my last question.
[518] So you are kind of part of this bench that have come out of rising stars that maybe some people hadn't heard earlier in the year.
[519] Are there other folks either in Michigan or nationwide on the Democratic side that you think that should be getting more attention that we should be following?
[520] You like their kind of political instincts.
[521] That's the first part of the question.
[522] And the second fun part of the question is it's a dunk tank here.
[523] So what Republican, besides Tudor Dixon, were you most happy to see go down on Tuesday?
[524] Oh, man. I like the second part of the question.
[525] Okay.
[526] You can take them in either order.
[527] Yeah, okay.
[528] Now I'm going to start with the first one because otherwise we'll never get back to it.
[529] So there are people like me all over the country.
[530] You know, your state legislators are never in national news or on TV, but there are great dynamic people.
[531] Malcolm Kenyatta in Pennsylvania.
[532] Chevron Jones in Florida.
[533] Poor Florida.
[534] He's fighting the good fight down there.
[535] And just so many good people doing so much good work.
[536] And that's one of the things that I want to help focus on is I've been working with the DLCC, basically the legislative version of the DCC, to highlight and be a spokesperson for state legislators.
[537] So going into my next term, you know, one of the things that I want to focus on, too, is introducing more people to all of the other amazing legislators we have on the ground so that we get out of just looking only at the top.
[538] Because, you know, I look back to Donald Trump saying, I alone can fix this.
[539] And Democrats have to get away from thinking that one race somewhere at the top is going to fix everything because it's not.
[540] And if I can use this weird moment that I'm in to help uplift to those people and introduce them to folks, I'm going to be really excited to do that.
[541] Okay, Republicans who I'm really excited are out.
[542] The Republicans in Michigan.
[543] So Mike Shirke, our Senate Majority Leader, who would have been out of it.
[544] office anyway because he's turned out.
[545] Just horrible.
[546] He has said no shortage of misogynistic, horrific things about the governor.
[547] He said he wanted to wrestle her on the front lawn of the capital.
[548] He couldn't stop talking about the dress she wore the first time she did a state of the state address or how beautiful she looked the first time she gave a COVID briefing and she took a mask off.
[549] I mean, just like cringe -worthy stuff.
[550] And this is somebody who has promised me many times that we would get a hearing on red flag laws or common sense gun reforms and lie for four years.
[551] He is somebody in the wake of the Oxford high school shooting here in Michigan.
[552] The day after the shooting, he was asked if the legislature would do anything to prevent this from happening ever again.
[553] And he said no, because if we did, we would turn into a country we don't recognize.
[554] And then he took a meeting with a young woman who lost her sister in the Oxford High School shooting, told her that he promised her a hearing on red flag laws and lied to her.
[555] So I have no patience for that, and I'm glad he's out of office and that we're in charge now.
[556] Good riddance.
[557] Mallory, thank you so much for spending this time.
[558] I want to just congratulate you on winning on the state of Michigan, on the Michigan magic that we saw in the midterms.
[559] And I want to thank all of our listeners for joining us today.
[560] Charlie, we'll be back in the hot seat on Monday.
[561] Thanks to my friends at Goose for the musical interlude to Jonathan Tiri Moes and Katie Cooper for producing it.
[562] And we'll be back on Monday and do this all over again.
[563] Go democracy.
[564] Peace out.