Storming the Capital (with Abdul and JB)

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1:28Crooked Con is coming up right after the election, and we have just added a bunch more it really helps the website. Plus, more to come. Great list. Check out the full lineup and get tickets right now at CrookedCon.com. We'd love to see you there. That's CrookedCon.com. This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Okay, we've been talking about Kewpie mayo for a minute now, Bow, and wow, the feedback we're getting. I mean, so many of y'all love this stuff. You're stopping us in the street going, I love Kewpie. And if you're thinking, wait, what is Kewpie? Do you not have the internet? It's the OG Japanese mayonnaise,

2:01the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. Once you know it, you start seeing it everywhere. People ask what makes it different from basic mayo. Well, the answer, egg yolks. Yuppie is made with egg yolks only, giving it this incredibly rich umami flavor that elevates everything. Burgers, fries, sandwiches, chicken, noodles. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really love food and flavor use it. Whatever you're eating, Kewpie it. So if you haven't tried Kewpie yet, find the bottle with the red cap and see what everyone's talking about. You'll understand. Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. We're going to be so big. We're going to win by so much. I think it's going to be a red wave. There's no blue wave.

2:50I think Republicans are going to do pretty well. If my math is correct here, then Republicans are going to drop a seat. And that means that right now they have 53 seats in the Senate. That means they end with 52. The blue tsunami that has been promised is not materializing. We just had a great rally, as you know, in Iowa. They're always saying the Democrats have great enthusiasm. The Democrat is up more than a million votes right now. James Calarico will win the U.S. Senate seat. Gina Hinojosa makes history. We just took back Texas. Roy Cooper will win the Senate seat. Are we having a good time tonight or what? In a huge episode, Adam Hamilton, Amy Acton, Rob Sands, Troy Jackson will beat longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins.

3:31We did it! Working people did it! Chris Pappas, Sherrod Brown, Dr. Annie Andrews is going to win the Senate seat. You have shown the nation what is possible. Abdul El-Sayed will become the next senator. My name is Abdul El-Sayed will become the next senator. Josh Turek. John Osso. Fisha Lance Bottoms will become the governor. Georgia, this win is for all of us. CNN projects the Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives. Democrats will win control of the USA. Today, of course, is a day of celebration and it's a day of gratitude. What's up, TV? Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Alex Wagner. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vizor. I'm Dan Fabra. I'm Alex Wagner. I'm John Lovett.

4:46I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Dan Piper. How's everyone's week going? Yeah, that's pretty cool. We have a great show for you tonight. Governor J.B. Pritzker is here. And Crooked Con is almost here, which is really exciting. But we have some news to talk about first. On Tuesday, Donald Trump and the Republican Party suffered the biggest electoral defeat in 50 years. So, votes are still being counted, but when all is said and done, Democrats are on track to hit about 257 House seats. And 56 Senate seats. Once Alaska and Mississippi are finished, hopefully by next week, more than 75% of Americans will live in a state with a Democratic governor. More than half of Americans will live in a state with a Democratic trifecta.

6:06It is the beginning of the end of the Trump era. As we know it. And you know what? The president seems kind of fine. It's going to be not only one of the biggest, but it'll be the most beautiful ballroom I think in the world. Here is an over 50 feet high that's like a five story building. The marble is a really magnificent one. It's a cut, it's a vein that people have been after for 50 years. You can put as many helicopters as you want and you'd go to the same very powerful ceiling. And essentially, we beautified Washington, D.C. We had 83 monument statues. That was his mic feeding back, by the way, not ours. That was his shit. What's that mic? The way he holds the mic. Awful. Yeah. Yeah. So Donald Trump's answer to electoral annihilation

7:09is more ballroom. Alex, were you surprised? Like, not just by that, but he seems very chill so far. Well, John, I'm not a psychologist, but it seems to me from just anecdotally, the demented mind retreats to areas of safety, early memories, foundational memories. And for Donald Trump, that is being a real estate developer. He can no longer control Congress, but he can control a hot blue gun. And what we're seeing is that steel rebar is his rosebud. You know, this is someone's origin story is cement. It's a little like how, like, Lady Gaga could get Tony Bennett out there. And even though he didn't really know where he was, he still knew all the songs. Can I say, I'm fine with it. Like, if this is what's going gonna occupy grandpa for the next two years he needs to like focus on the you know further gilding the oval

8:17office or a helipad and not more war like let him do it put him out to pastor in the sandbox i'm fine with it like i am obviously fine if he wants to do his own hgtv channel for the next two years but just it's worth just taking a moment to think that the first thing the white house did after losing an election where the verdict of the voters was that the president was too distracted to focus on costs was to have him do a press conference about his corporate funded ballroom it's all he's got dan yeah it really answers the question of um does he not give a shit or did he not know how bad things were going to be because the electoral results punched him in the face and he still doesn't care so tommy i kind of there's part of me that thinks there's

9:01going to be a delayed reaction um and that like like Natalie has kept him from all the worst news. She's like ensconced him in a bubble and he's only getting some good. He's getting like old tweets. He's like, we lost Ohio. Yeah, right. Yeah. He doesn't even know they've called Texas yet. Yeah. Like right now, he's probably being told like, well, they're blaming like Ken Paxton and these bad candidates and it's not you. And he's going to tune in to something. Something's going to slip through and then he's going to blow his top. That's my that's my guess on this. And he also doesn't care about like he didn't lose. He's still president. Others. Yeah, he doesn't care. Trump has also been saying this about working with Democrats is what he told Jonathan Karl

9:42this morning. Quote, I think we can get along. It's good for the country if we do. The country has had enough. Where are you guys on the maybe Trump will work with Democrats and become friends as he sunsets? So I think, I think he actually does mean he wants to get along with Democrats in the sense that he would love to have Hakeem Jeffries and show him the ballroom and point out different things, right? And to your point, he's not, he doesn't really care about priorities. And he would love to be celebrated with a couple of bills and be, you know, get a couple of victories. And even if it fucks over his former the people that he that he doesn't whose majority he just lost. But you can't really square that with the fact that they're also also Democrats are going to launch a bunch of investigations.

10:40Right. So the idea that he wants to get along, he doesn't really care. I think that's true. so huge oversight fans here yeah we probably have some ranking committee staffers here yeah so i do think it's a little bit of a you know unstoppable force immovable object problem that's coming and so inevitably that leads to him losing his fucking shit yeah right where else can it go well this is a nice period right now yeah he said the same exact thing right after 2018 he's like maybe nancy and i can yeah right beautiful together like two days later he's like storming the capital or he was shot in the ear also he was a changed man for a week oh yeah say with me. Permitting reform. Permitting reform.

11:27No? Okay. Going to let that window close, I guess. Do you have something? I just feel like it's his body and mind have dissociated themselves from one another. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when he first came into office and there was suspicion that he might be more bipartisan. Oh, yeah. That shit's never going to happen. The question is whether he's so addled now that he doesn't actually realize that he's the president that everybody rejected resoundingly across the country a day ago. Yeah, it's going to hit him. So it seems like the rest of the White House isn't taking the loss quite as well. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, other outlets have been giving us some just incredibly satisfying accounts of how they blew it so badly,

12:10including the New York Times, like from a phone call that Trump aides have and had before the midterms. And they were talking about they were joking about cyanide and whether they could get asylum in Israel. Tommy, what were your... Israel's like, we don't want these war criminals. Full house. Tommy, what are some of your favorite revelations so far from all the TikToks on what went wrong? Oh, there's so many TikToks. But by the way, it sure seems like someone is recording all their conference calls, right? They like verbatim quotes from these things. Or someone's just getting off and off the call and like calling Maggie. Yeah, they've been patching Maggie Haberman. She's just like part of the team writing it down. So I liked the part of the story. There's a lot of these stories, and I liked a lot of parts of them.

13:08The part in the Times story where the political geniuses identify that the Iran war is a problem, so their solution is to have a meeting in the Situation Room and talk about ways to hide all the bombing that's happening and all the fighting. So that's a good thing for the U.S. military to be doing. It's the CIA's job. There was, oh, Trump gave them so little clarity over how much PAC money he was willing to spend and where to spend it that they had to rush and make all their plans at the end of the day, which meant in practice, there was an anecdote about how the Democrats bought an ad slot in like Anchorage TV news or something like, you know, the nightly news for $2,700 and the Trump super PAC paid 30 grand for the same duration in the same time slot.

13:55Clap it up for money. There was a planning meeting at Camp David to plot out the midterms and they forgot to invite anyone from the NRSC. That seems like a bit of an oversight. I get like the $5,000 check thing was just Trump riffing. No one knew it was coming. They're all blaming Pete Hegseth. I like that. I think that's on the money. And also the joke about them all moving to Israel, it's just funny that they joked about that and then on election day, Trump announced that he'd be cutting off aid to Israel, making them all maybe a little less welcome. Like Cortez burning the ships. I mean, in the course of all of Trump's quote-unquote mid-term strategy, it's worth noting that he did this rally tour,

14:44which then forced every Republican to recommit their fealty to the very unpopular president. And then we've now seen studies which show that in counties where Trump did a rally, Republicans did five points worse than in counties where he didn't do a rally. That was my favorite. That was my favorite stat. If you want to know the stat that's going to ultimately cause him to lose his mind, he's going to see that in that article. Maybe it's already happened. It was so good. The other stat is Democrats overperformed by 26 points in counties that have a cheesecake factory. Wow. Yeah. That worked well for them. So speaking of polls and results, let's talk about how and why Democrats won now that we've all had a couple days

15:32to just nerd out in all the exit polls and the county results. Is that just me? No. You guys did too. Dan did, I know. So our friends at Searchlight Institute conducted a really comprehensive entrance poll in the Battleground States that they very kindly shared with us first just this afternoon. Dan, did you have a chance to get a look, and is there anything? Boy, did I, John. I will say, there was eight attachments, and the first one was 36 pages. So I was like, I'll read the first one. I would just say that the walk to this theater was the first time I've had fresh air all day. So it's a really fascinating study. It's going to be on the Crooked Media sub stack tomorrow. And I know all of you are signed up, obviously,

16:14or you wouldn't be here. But a couple of key takeaways from it. So they did a poll of the seven key battleground states in the two weeks before to see what voters were thinking as they went in to vote. And obviously, as we know, Trump's deep unpopularity and costs are the two issues that drove the election. But what it really looked at was, what can we learn from the Democrats who overperformed the most? And there are a couple takeaways there. One is the Democrats who were able to carve out a brand independent of the Democratic Party did the best. Like Rory Cooper, for instance, is 20 points more popular than the Democratic Party. James Tallarico and Josh Churk are 14 points more popular than the Democratic Party in their state,

16:55which it makes logical sense that these are red states. These are states Trump won by double digits. The Democratic Party is not going to have a natural popularity there. It also just reinforces the idea that this election was a repudiation of Trump and a validation of specific Democratic candidates, but not the Democratic Party as a whole. And, you know, it looks, they definitely thought that Democrats were more focused on costs than Republicans, but not as focused on costs as they want them to be. And that's a really important thing to think about as we think about what Democrats are going to do as we head into congress something i think is separate and apart from the study that i think is really important to focus on is turnout surges with three groups that drove this election the

17:35first is young voters voters under 35 turned out in huge numbers particularly in the races where the candidates engage those voters like Texas and Georgia, to across the Deep South, black voters turned out at a near presidential level. And in states like South Carolina, where one in four voters is black, and states like Mississippi, where more than one in three voters is black, that made a gigantic difference. There's no way without that. And then Latino voters. Obviously, there was this huge swing back of Latinos to Democrats in Texas, in particular, of the Senate seats. But the really important thing is that turnout among Latinos in Texas was up six points compared to 2022, which is why James Taylor, Virginia Hinojosa were able to win by such margins.

18:22I also thought it was interesting that the other turnout story was, turnout was just really far down with Republicans. Like, and J.D. Vance, we'll talk about that in a bit, but he had this whole poster. It was like, I talked to the pollster and they said, our people turned out, but just some of them voted for the other party. And it's like, actually, no, a lot of Republicans didn't turn out. And especially the group that didn't turn out, that had the worst turnout among Republicans was young Republicans, and especially some of those people who voted. So you wonder, like, did they vote for Trump in 24, and are they lost to Democrats? Did they just not turn out this election? So it's like a group to watch, but they did not come out this time.

18:57Especially in rural areas, too. A lot of the rural counties that have been basically the engine for Trump since 2016, you saw real, not just, they did not turn out high, but Democrats won higher vote share there because voters were so mad at Trump over costs, gas prices, et cetera. Yeah. Alex, you weren't with us on our Tuesday night pod, but what, if anything, do you think Democrats did to earn this victory aside from just not being Republicans? And were there like any campaigns like you thought were good examples? Well, I mean, I think it's meaningful that they weren't Republicans. I think it's meaningful that there's another party. And I think there's going to be a lot of parsing about whether it was a mandate. The reality is,

19:42and I think this is so essential, for years, if not decades, Democrats have existed in these red states as caricatures. They have not been real people with real governing abilities. And Republicans have been able to caricature Democrats as woke libs or people that are completely out of touch with real Americans. And now the people of North Carolina are going to see Democrats raise the federal minimum wage. They're going to see Democrats in Texas curb AI data centers. They're going to see Democrats in Kansas and Iowa end disastrous wars that have skyrocketed their fuel prices. It's no longer the sort of opposition party in the abstract. It's real, actual governance from human beings. And you know, we all know this. Like when a party is just an

20:32abstraction and a meme, it's easy to hate it. It's easy to dismiss it. But when it becomes real governance, when it's your real governor and your real attorney general or your real senator or your state senator or your legislator, then you understand the merits of that party, the humanity of that party, and the principles of that party. So I think, fuck parsing whether or not they won because they weren't Republicans. What you are seeing is a sea change in how people in deep red parts of the country understand the Democratic Party. Yeah. Love it. There's been a pretty cut and dry debate online that I'm hoping you can resolve for us fairly quickly. I'm on it. Which faction of the Democratic Party do you think came out ahead

21:18after Tuesday? So I think it's great that there is a sizable group of highly engaged, very smart political watchers that found their groove about how they talk about politics in the 2016 primary. Hey. It includes us. But, you know, there's this effort to claim different candidates, right? That, like, Abdul in Michigan is a candidate of the left, and Annie Edgrooms in South Carolina, she represents more the old center left, right? But in reality, I think, is if you kind of look at what happened in this election, the truth is, and this is going to be a very takey-take, this election is the kind of synthesis of Barack Obama-style politics and Bernie Sanders-style politics. These are the two most successful movement builders

22:17in our lifetimes, and I think every one of these victories kind of belongs to the best parts of both of those movements. Like, oh, Annie Andrews is center left because she's for a public option and doesn't believe in Medicare for all. But she ran a pretty hard campaign, a populist economic campaign, which really appealed to people. The conversation around Tallarico is about how he's sort of an Obama-like figure in the way he talks about faith and bringing people together. But he's sort of an Obama-like figure in the way he talks about faith and bringing people together, but he's an economic populist. Even in Michigan, where because of the debate around Israel, it's been sorted as a left campaign.

22:55If you listen to his longer conversations, he's a capitalist. His support for Medicare for All is about building a capitalism that works for people. And so I think what we're actually seeing is a really positive development because we get to figure out new things to fight about, right? Like we get to, let's get mad at each other, but not about the stuff we were mad about in 2016 and 2020. Let's figure out new things to be mad about in 2028. Yeah. I mean, I do want to, a point you made there, it's like speaking of Michigan, we haven't really dug into those results yet. And I do think we might be able to have someone here who could help us maybe talk about Michigan a little bit more. Abdul, are you,

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26:46So they're great. Visit blinds.com right now for an exclusive $50 off when you spend $500 or more with code crooked. That's blinds.com with code crooked. All right. Thanks for coming. Good to see you. I've heard you. I've heard you were doing a live tape of the American Secretary. I was going to say, I wanted to start with some pretty significant history that you made on Tuesday. And I just want to know what does it feel like to know that you are going to be the very first Crooked Media podcaster to serve in the United States Senate? I'm so very honored. To serve in the United States Senate. I'm so very honored. You know, it's funny, but a lot of, I mean, what is it that politicians do? We market public policy.

28:01That's the job. You take the most boring, arcane thing and then try to figure out how to market it so that people think yeah that's actually what i want and modern communications has evolved in a way where there's so many different ways to talk about what you do and i actually think that like somebody's asking me what's the what is the most essential form of public communication, I actually think it's podcast. And here's why. Because there is no length. There's no expectation for you to have like 30 seconds and get out. You can follow up a question as many different ways as you want. And so it really forces you to become an expert on the thing you're talking about and be able to defend it. And so all that time hosting podcasts, I actually, when I think about it, it was a really,

28:52really good way to start thinking about how do you start talking about the things that you talk about every day. So when you're on a town hall and people ask a question, it's like a podcast conversation. So in all ways, I actually think that like, you know, being a crooked host was pretty good prep for running for U S Senate. There you go. Said it once. I've said it a thousand times. Podcasts are the hero's medium and will be the source of our salvation. Back over to you, John. So long ago, uh, you predicted that you would win this race by seven points, which at the time seemed like a pretty cocky and maybe ill-considered thing to say in the middle of a competitive Senate race. Then you won the race by seven points.

29:47And, you know, people are still calling you cocky. I keep thinking about the headline of Jonathan Martin's Politico story about you when he sat down with you, which is Washington isn't ready for Hurricane Abdul. At least he didn't call it a sandstorm. What's that? What's it called? What's that term? It's a habub. Yes. I knew you were going for it. Yes. There you go. That's dumb. There's literally an Arabic name for a sandstorm that only happens in the Gulf. At least he didn't go there. But like, it made me wonder, because I've known you for a while. And like this whole perception of you that has like developed over the campaign. I'm like, he's like, do you see yourself as Hurricane Abdul coming to Washington? How do you see yourself? So you know, we...

30:54There is this expectation for decorum that for whatever reason, Democrats seem to want to keep up. And I think it's because all of us, all of us came up watching the West Wing. And then Donald Trump rolls in and is the most unserious fool. And then we're still out here trying to be like, well, he doesn't fit into an episode of the west wing yeah and i think i think there is a a responsibility that we have to engage with him as the unserious fool that he is and i say that because if you've ever watched a bully in a room if you don't stand up to the bully it's not like the bully will just go away if you don't stand up to the bully, it's not like the bully will just go away. If you don't stand up to the bully, the bully just gets stronger for two reasons.

31:50Because they think they can get away with it and they always want more. Like they don't bully because they take what they want. It's because they like to oppress people. And so they get stronger. And then other people around them who might be willing to stand up to see nobody standing up and say, well, it's impossible to do. And I just think there's a responsibility for us to walk out of the West Wing episode my name is Abdul and I've seen all the things that somebody named Abdul will see that you you have to stand up to the bully. And so I think that's the part of things people wanted to fixate on, because it's so uncommon in our politics that you're like you're being crass and obnoxious. So I'm just going to be crass and obnoxious back because you're an asshole.

32:44It's not to be crass and obnoxious because that's how you want to do politics. It's that you have to be crass and obnoxious back because otherwise what happens is that that system of politics will persist. And when you stand up to a bully, what tends to happen is they will back down. And when they back down, we all get to decide where we want to go I would rather I mean you all know me well I'd rather have an extensive policy conversation about the monopsony power of Medicare for all but if we if they want to do schoolyard politics all right let's throw it on one of the ways I'd say they tried to schoolyard politics was around you being a Muslim, turning your criticism into Israel as a way to attack you more broadly, a lot

33:35of charges of anti-Semitism. But also, this is a very contentious issue, and you've been unabashed in your views. At the same time, you're about to go into the Senate. This is a debate that's very heated, obviously. It's also the last Democratic president was basically incoherent in explaining his policies. A lot of people that I think are of other things. Yeah. But a lot of people who are, I think, are sincerely defenders of Israel are kind of stuck in a worldview that I think is pretty old, talking points that are pretty old. You're about to be in the Senate. Yes! Beyond just a change in policy around military aid for Israel, beyond just trying to figure out how to stop the ways in which the policy has been contributing

34:26to something destructive. What do you view as your role in using America's power in the region for actual good, both for the sake of Palestinian sovereignty and human rights, and also an ultimate solution? I appreciate, this is why podcast is the queen of all forms. Because you can ask me a nuanced question about this issue and we can step back and ask, what is our goal here? Very simply put, if I have one political philosophy, it's what would we build if we treated all of our kids like all of our kids. If you take seriously that a Palestinian child in Gaza and a Jewish Israeli child in Tel Aviv deserve the same right to grow up, look forward at their future and think, I have a clear way forward and violence isn't going

35:27to curtail my opportunities. That's what you want to build. What then can we do? And the challenge that we have right now is we've told ourselves a series of lies. We've told ourselves that we are in pursuit of a two-state solution. The problem though is that we've been actively aiding, arming, and abetting the very people who are trying to foreclose on a second state. And even then, their idea of a second state does not start from the premise of equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination. It is essentially unjust. It's like saying, you know, you and I are going to split a meal. And so you get the meal first, you eat what you want, and then you give me the rest. But we split the meal.

36:05That's bullshit. An actual splitting of the meal is saying, okay, we got a burger and some fries. Here, you take half the fries, I'll take half the fries. You take half the burger, I'll take half the burger. And maybe you like the ketchup, so take the ketchup. Sometimes the rule is whoever cuts goes second because the person who cuts chose the size of each side. And I don't think if you should apply what I'm saying to a very complicated region and I regret who said couldn't figure this thing out. Look, sort of a veil of ignorance thing you could do. Sorry, continue. No, but, but the point that I'm making is this right? Is that we are right now in a cul-de-sac where we keep going around and around and around

36:47and nobody wants to back out and ask, all right, like, where do we really want to go? It is an unstable equilibrium because if you start from the premise that both of these kids deserve the ability to live a good life, neither of them have that. One, because of state violence and one, because of the risk of terrorism. So I want to start there and then ask ourselves, where do we go? You have a government that is actively foreclosing on the possibility of a second state that has not been good faith. We are actively funding their military. We're selling them the equipment that they're using to do genocide, maintain apartheid, and take us to wars we have no business fighting, the attempted annexation of southern Lebanon, and then we use the argument that if you push back on this state of affairs, it must be

37:30because you hate somebody. No, it is because I love both that Jewish Israeli child and that Palestinian child to the same degree. And so I think we just have to go back to our principles. What is it that we want? How do we get what we want? And then what our principles. What is it that we want? How do we get what we want? And then what is it, how is it that we want to behave in the world? We've allowed a certain kind of realpolitik since Kissinger to goad us into thinking that we can somehow dictate the future by just figuring out what's in our best interest in the next five minutes. I believe international law. We built a lot of that international law after World War II, and we have become the chief violator believe international law. We built a lot of that international law after World War II,

38:06and we have become the chief violator of international law. So how is it that we should be engaging with a country that is using our money to do terrible things, war crimes at the minimum, genocide at the maximum, that we are running cover for at all of the institutions that are supposed to enforce international law. My approach is simple. Treat the government of Israel the way you would treat any other government that did the same thing. And my family comes from Egypt. And I want to do the same thing with Egypt. Egypt violates human rights law. Egypt shouldn't be getting $3.3 billion of our tax dollars. And I would hate if somebody would be like, well, because you share the ethnicity of 95% of the people in Egypt, for us to say that the Egyptian government is doing terrible things must be anti-Egyptian. No, it is just applying our principles evenly everywhere. So I feel like the biggest challenge for Democrats in Congress over the next two years is that

39:12you were all elected because people want you to focus on putting money in people's pockets. But because Trump is in the White House, it's going to be very difficult to do that. And you can already feel that with this Democratic majority and the way that you won on Tuesday, expectations are very high. And so, like, what is your top priority as senator over the next two years in terms of, like, actually getting something done for the people of Michigan? The number one most important thing we can do is protect people from the healthcare nuclear bomb that's about to go off in our system with Medicaid cuts. And I actually think we may be able to pass it in a bipartisan fashion. I actually think we

40:03might be able to get to a veto-proof majority. And here's why. We all know the structural failure of the Senate is that it allocates a lot more representation to rural communities. Well, who's going to get hit the hardest by these Medicaid tax cuts? It's rural communities. So I'd love to sit down with my colleagues from South Dakota and Idaho and say, what do you think is about to happen to your hospitals if these Medicaid tax cuts go through, why to give a billionaire based in Delaware, some more money. And I actually think that we need to have that conversation. That's number one, number two, and the stupid fucking war. It makes no sense. We're paying for it in the lives of our service men and women. We're paying for it at the gas station. We're

40:42paying for it in the grocery store. We're paying for it at the gas station we're paying for in the grocery store we're paying for in our tax dollars we need to have a war powers resolution we need to hold them accountable they are not allowed to make war on their own and this war needs to end we go back to the diplomacy that had contained the nuclear threat in the first place and the third one is how are we picking a fucking tariff war with canada like i'm from michigan is the only place in america where you can go South to get to Canada. And Canadians are nice people. Like they're the only people who preemptively apologize, prophylactic apologies, right? You meet them and they're like, sorry.

41:14You're like, for what? They're like, for whatever I'm going to do, that's going to offend you. You're like, so if you're picking a tariff war with Canada, you're the asshole. And so, and we're paying a tremendous amount of money for this. Tariffs are taxes that we pay on Canadian goods. And so those three policies alone, right, would improve the quality of healthcare for a lot of people, or at least keep it where it is. Put a lot more money back in people's pockets. And they also highlight exactly the folly of the role that money plays in our politics this war i just want to be clear about it and president obama wrote about this in his most recent book promised land there is one person in the world that has been trying

41:58to get this war fought for nearly all of our lifetimes it is the prime minister of a foreign government gets invited to the situation room where he gets to dupe the dumbest fucking guy, whoever was president. And then, and then now we're, now we're in a war that everybody could have told you was a dumb idea to fight, which is why every other president was like, yeah, no, I'm not doing that. And so I just want us to understand how that operates. It operates because when you have a $100 million super PAC that will play in every single congressional race, you are able to manufacture a bipartisan consensus about where our public policy should go. It's the truth when it comes to healthcare. It's the truth when it comes to union rights. And it's the truth when it comes to foreign policy it's the truth when it comes to union rights,

42:48and it's the truth when it comes to foreign policy. And I just think it's important for us to connect the dots there. So when they spend $42 million to beat me, AIPAC spends $42 million to beat me, it is because I have the audacity to say what I said, which is that a Palestinian child and a Jewish Israeli child get to have equal rights of peace, dignity, self-determination, and maybe we shouldn't be fighting wars that are not in our best interest so that another country can annex territory of another country inconsistently with international law. But like most people are like, well, you can't say that. Why not? Well, because I don't want AIPAC playing in my next race. Yeah. So, look, there's a lot of people that have said

43:30there's some pretty nefarious motivations going on with you, that there are things about you that we don't know. And I've talked to some people that have known you behind the scenes. And we're just going to get to the bottom of a couple things. Do you disavow yeah I'm not who do we I wasn't even going to do the joke look I have a brother he's Muslim and he and I have a Muslim brotherhood alright he's just because we're both muslims my brother do you have four that's about to show up in the next attack ad in six years now we're i just wrote the attack yeah hi jesse uh like we told you hmm four double shots of espresso a day plus usually some cold brew Like, we told you! Four double shots of espresso a day, plus usually some cold brew.

44:31Truth. You make your own dangerously strong cold brew in a five-gallon bucket. Truth. It's a funny story on that. I started making cold brew for my staff and when you make cold brew you actually brew cold brew concentrate so this poor guy on my team drinks it straight and then it's like so he he was my call time manager and we're we're on phone calls calling folks asking them for. And he's like, Abdul, I can't keep going. I was like, what's wrong? He's like, I can't stop shaking. I was like, what happened? Are you okay? Like, what's wrong? He's like, I had some of your coffee and I can't stop shaking. I was like, did you cut it with water? He's like, no. I was like, you may be having a caffeine overdose.

45:21Like, just go lay down, my guy. Should have hooked him up to like a heart rate monitor. So he starts to have like a paranoid, I think, I think Mike Rogers is in my house. Hey, are you still guzzling Gatorade Zero and Quest protein chips? Yes. Hey, we know that those chips are in defiance of sort of science and God's law, right? Like it doesn't actually make sense. Like everything can't be made of protein, right? So what is going on? I like those. It doesn't make any sense. So you know what they are? They basically take whey and then crisp it and then put whatever the magic powder that makes chips say, like, chips on it. Wow. But, like, I'm, like, they're a cheat code. Like, really, Quest chips are a cheat code.

46:13I mean, they're amazing. They taste delicious. God bless Quest. You got me through this campaign. Chips secretly made of milk? Anti-Semitism. We were almost there. And do you make art in the foamed milk of the espresso, of the lattes you make in your own home? Are you capable of doing that? Not well, but I do attempt it. You can do that thing. Do the little pour, yeah. Gay. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, I think you've been exposed. Over to you, John. That's all we got. Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed. For stopping by. Thanks, buddy. Thank you. same trusted online nursery with a simpler name. Trees.com is America's largest online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over 3 million happy customers. They have all the plants

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50:01meals just for you. Go to cookunity.com slash crooked or enter code crooked before checkout to get 50% off your first order. That's 50% off your first order by using code crooked or go to cookunity.com slash crooked. That's a nice visitor. Young man really going places. I think he's going places. You could be the next podcaster in the Senate, Alex. Representing the great state of Washington, D.C. All right. Let's talk about what's on the agenda for the biggest Democratic majority in 15 years. We've already gotten some hints from the man who is on the verge of becoming the first black speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries. He told Punchbowl that their priorities are to reverse the Medicaid cuts, stop the harmful Trump tariffs,

50:58and end this reckless and costly war of choice. Wow, sounds like they're already on the same page. He also mentioned banning stock trading, going after corruption. Jeffries was also asked about investigations on Morning Joe and said, quote, the American people don't want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf. There you go, There you go. You doubted the audience, love it. I'm sorry. How many of you were cheering for get even? I know my country. We can have both. Alex, let's talk about it. Not everyone has been thrilled with that answer, at least on the internet. How do you think Democrats should view what accountability should look like? And do you think that they can go after Trump's corruption

51:52without those investigations overshadowing everything else that they want to achieve? If I were in the room, I'd say, Mr. Speaker, Hakeem, if I might, accountability and affordability are related. Yeah! The architect of the disastrous war is Pete Hegseth. It's nominally Donald Trump. Impeaching the architect of a disastrous war is the first step to bringing down the price of gas. Right? You can't think of this as an either-or proposition. The reason the home construction market has bottomed out in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas is because Mark Wayne Mullen and his ICE goons have been rounding up and destroying the lives of black and brown construction workers. You want that sector to rebound?

52:53Hold Mark Wayne Mullen and ICE policies accountable. The idea that affordability exists without policing the corruption at the top levels of the government that have taken us into this economic spiral is the most short-sighted thing I can imagine. And to allow this to be an either-or proposition is totally foolish and not addressing the problems at its root concern. So Democrats need to do both. Nice. All right. Dan, if you were running the message calendar for the new House majority, in case you're in the market for a job. I might need one. We'll see how you answer the question. What does that first month look like in terms of bills uh you'd want to introduce and like and what did you think about what abdul said about the

53:45possibility of actually being able to reverse the medicaid cuts i think that we have to recognize that voters picked us because they believed with some skepticism that we would do a better job of dealing with affordability than the Republicans. Two years ago, they picked Trump with some skepticism that he would do a better job of dealing with affordability than the Democrats. He did not deal with affordability, did not try to take it on, and they switched. And if we don't demonstrate right away that while setting expectations that we are not in charge of actually signing bills, but we're going to fight like hell to try to lower your costs. If we don't do that, these voters are going to flip right back the other way.

54:30And so I don't think we should do some giant HR1 affordability omnibus bullshit. It has to be a series of votes that are spread out over one a week for several weeks. And I think it begins with, you can do this in any order, but Abdul is exactly right. Repeal the tariffs, end the war, ban stock trading, restore the Obamacare tax cuts, raise the minimum wage, repeal the Medicaid cuts, and then pass a bill that requires the data centers to pay for all of their own energy. I think that is an agenda that is directly responsive to the reason why voters put us in office. And I think to the Hakeem Jeffries point, I 100% agree that corruption should be a part of this because one of the reasons why voters

55:22turned on Trump was they believed that his corruption was raising their costs. So we should not shy away from that. But I think it's incredibly important that we not make investigating Trump our entire personality as a party, because that's one of the things that showed up in focus groups was that the swing voters who came to us, these rural voters, some of the younger voters who were more apolitical or less engaged, is they think we're too obsessed with Trump. And you see, and that's why Democrats, other than the ones who were in pretty blue states, never mentioned Trump in their ads. It was about other stuff. And I think the Trump era is over. Voters have turned the page and we should do the same.

55:59So as far as what's next for Republicans, they already seem to be looking beyond the next two years in a way that's actually been deeply satisfying to watch. Let's take a look. Well, that was a disaster. I am the only statewide elected Republican who knows in Texas. We can't win in places like Texas or Kansas or Iowa. You know, we are not viable nationally. Big picture, the Trump era is over. The American people, young men, white Americans said screw you to Donald Trump, said screw you to the Republican Party in places in the deep south. Is woke coming back? This is the end of an hour. You can sort of mark it on your calendar. Trumpism gone. The coalition's totally collapsed. I mean, we lost whites. Whites!

56:52I gotta say, Jesse Waters is exclaiming in horror, we lost whites. I got Adderall in my veins, Trump derangement syndrome in my heart. I'm like, I'm amped. We lost whites? So, what does come after the Trump era? J.D. Vance thinks the answer is J.D. Vance. So he posts this. Yeah, no, I know. He sucks. So he posts this 600-word Twitter essay, as one does, where he blames the midterm loss on the Iran war, calls for a new focus on cost of living issues and changing our relationship with Israel. And this is part of his apparent plan to, quote, forge a new alliance with disaffected Trump voters ahead of 2028. According to Fox, this is his grand strategy. Ted Cruz, who also might run, said we should have attacked Iran even harder. Ron DeSantis hit Republicans

57:58for stonewalling on the Epstein files and running too many anti-trans ads. And then there are now two reports from The Independent and Bloomberg that Marco Rubio is considering leaving the administration maybe for a possible presidential bid. He did knock down those rumors, but they said that sources close to Rubio said that he's been thinking about stepping down. So that's a lot. Tommy, let's start with the Marco rumors because we deserve to have fun. What do you think about that? And is leaving soon like a good move or a bad move if you're Marco and you want to be president? So if you're a little Marco, which is his legal name now, the argument for quitting is the Iran war is a historic disaster.

58:45People are really pissed at Trump. His approval rating is in the tank and dropping. So maybe you quit early. You take a couple months off. You charge your battery to start running in, what, two, three months max? Or, you know, you just like quit, you go whole hog, you start going to early states, start campaigning, you start raising money, you try to get ahead of JD Vance, and you just decide like, I need to get as much running room as I possibly can. And I think the hole in that argument is that Donald Trump wants to play kingmaker in the primary and probably will. And so, you know, you probably just want to stay as close to him as humanly possible. There's also just the practical fact that Trump will continue, I think, to blot out the sun in terms of just like political coverage and TikToks and just like, you know, the ability to get noticed.

59:34And right now, Marco is at the heart of the action. He's a part of everything. And I saw you doing like a speech at the Federalist Society next week, right? Like, that will get a lot of coverage given his current position and because of the assumption that he is going to run for president. So, like, I guess if I were him, I'd stick around. I'd stay in the White House. I'd do what he's already doing, which is pretending he doesn't work on Iran policy. You know what I mean? Maybe you pursue one of your passion projects, like toppling the Cuban government or whatever, you know, the things you really care about, like Trump does with decorating. And you kind of bide your time and then you just like knife JD

1:00:11then. Also, going from like being the national security advisor, the secretary of state, and the guy who's in the mix all the time on Air force one and Mar-a-Lago doing all the things to like leaving your events at a Dunkin donuts in, you know, like Ipswich or Peterborough or something to go to your next event. Yeah. Ipswich. Is that what I got? Um, you know, it will feel a little bit small. So I think he's going to stick around for a minute. Don't you think it's weird and probably hard for him to do, to act like he's the Secretary of State for Venezuela and nothing else? Viceroy. He's the National Security Advisor. He's not just the Secretary of State, he's the National Security Advisor. All of these people, and this goes to Vance too,

1:00:56they're all trying to pretend like Iran war. How did that happen? I don't, who's responsible for the Iran war? It's not JD Vance. It's not Marco Rubio. Think about it for a second. It's like, okay, what is our biggest political problem? The worst conflict going on in the world, the thing upending the global economy, Iran. Who should we throw at that problem? Steve Witkoff had a building in Harlem in the 80s and used to go to 54 with Trump. Have him do it. Yeah, they're just like pretending that they have no, like they just want any piece of this. Yeah, it's like, well, Marco's not out front on this. It's like, okay, does he work there? Like he's got all the jobs. I think he genuinely just wants to topple the Cuban government and then he'll leave.

1:01:38That is his passion project. Lovett, as for Vance, Trump speculated openly on Wednesday that maybe he won't run. And there's reporting that Trump doesn't plan to endorse him at least anytime soon. What is your overall assessment of this week's unofficial Vance 2028 rollout? So, first of all, I do think it's like an extraordinary document, like the sitting vice president a few days after an election. He doesn't say it out loud. He writes it down on a social media platform, basically saying, I've crunched the numbers. We've got to do opposite folks it's opposite time and I just want to and I have a message to anyone out there who thinks the answer is opposite on the things the base doesn't like

1:02:29no that's bad opposite we've got to only do the things that the base likes and stop doing the things the base doesn't like. And that means doing opposite on everything except immigration. And one day we will figure out who's responsible for all this, but that's not my job. That was Rubio's job. Rubio did this. Actually, you can't run for president while being Secretary of State. It's very hard. It's why he probably, he can't really go campaigning because his job requires, like, that's a real job. You've got to kind of be in that job. Normally, yes. Absolutely. He's like three jobs. He's an archivist. He's a national security advisor. He's got a lot of jobs. Vice-Roy of Venezuela. But, like, what DeSantis is doing,

1:03:18by the way, he keeps this trans, that's the trans, we're too anti-trans. Trump's gonna call him Rhonda DeSantis before the week is out. Just getting ahead of that one. But they're all still doing this dance, which is that like Trump can't fail, he can only be failed, right? That like it was Pete Hegs' fault. But we all know the truth. Like Donald Trump is responsible. He's the one that, that, that got bamboozled by Netanyahu. He's the one that wanted to do the tariffs. We see all these stories about how he was making them do these fucking charts with, uh, for, for, for tariffs where they didn't have time for anything else. He's the one that's coming up with these $5,000 schemes. Donald Trump is responsible.

1:03:58So you can play games on social media and you can do these backgrounders with the press, but eventually you have to stand in front of people and talk to them. And it's just not possible to stay in Trump's good graces while running against Donald Trump. There's no way to do it. You guys think any of these other yahoos who do not work in the Trump administration, Cruz, DeSantis, like have a real chance if they decide to run again for one second oh yeah of course jd vance's strategy for running for president is so fucking stupid jd vance has run for office once in his life. He underperformed every single other Republican on the ballot in Ohio at the time. And he thinks he's gonna pull off some fucking trick

1:04:43where he serves as Trump's vice president but also separates himself. It's like watching a fucking elephant walk on a tightrope. Like, what are we doing? It's like, there is only one way in which J.D. Vance can become the Republican nominee. It is Donald Trump picks him. That is the only way.ance can become the Republican nominee. It is Donald Trump picks him. That is the only way, and the only way he can become president is Donald Trump picks him and he gets fucking lucky and Democrats nominate the wrong person. Well, there's a second way. Yeah. I thought that's where he was going. Stop it. You're referring to the 25th Amendment, I assume, correct? I am referring to the 25th Amendment. Yes correct i am referring to the 25th amendment yes

1:05:19thank you but it's just he it's idiotic he has no idea what he's doing it's so stupid okay i'm done you should keep posting through it um rest of the field any any outsiders tucker carlson says it's the end of Trump and the end of Fox News and the beginning of Trump of Tucker Carlson as a podcaster presidential candidate. I mean, I think that is distinctly on the horizon. Chris Christie sees everybody else. I'm telling you, man, this is the heat. He was feasting on the returns on Tuesday like a king and like eating a lamb chop. I don't even know what that means. And then there's always the Don Jr. Omar Kremlev ticket. Don't boo me. This is what's happening in Republican politics. I think the question is, can someone else run and win?

1:06:12I think the answer is yes. Besides Marco, JD. Especially if both marco and jd run and then someone can absolutely run because they're like the same lane i mean the interesting sort of the most interesting thing about jd vance's statement to me besides seeming to break from trump on iran all that the white house is spinning that they did not as he was like uh iran war was bad also cost of living by the way, Israel sucks was like point four in his thing. He's like, this is the top four things that came up in polling were these four issues. There's absolutely no way that the number four issue from the smartest data scientist he knew was Israel. Like we've all seen the same data. It was like 15 on a list.

1:06:52Obviously, it's wrapped up in the Iran war and inflation and cost of living. This is J.D. Vance trying to play to the Tucker Carlson audience, to the Nick Fuentes audience, the kind of groiper far right. And those people hate him. They hate him. And that is not ever going to change. They hate him because of his identity. They hate him because of his ties to Peter Thiel and the fact that Peter Thiel basically created him in a little VC lab and then birthed him onto all of us. Like, it's not fucking happening. He could have kept him in there for a little bit longer. Yeah, cook out too early. Bake him. He came out a little underbaked. He came out undercooked, yeah. A little soft, a little raw in the middle.

1:07:31And part of the reason they hate him is they have his number, which is that he's a cipher, right? He'll go where the wind takes him. I will say though, you know, Franco led Spain for a very long time and it was fascist for a very long time and he died. And then everyone was like, boy, that was crazy. All right. Well, speaking of speaking of 2028, maybe when we come back, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. How was that? Pods of America is brought to you by Wild Horse 9. From Academy Award winner Martin McDonough, director of The Banshees of Inchurin, and three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, comes Wild Horse 9, a sharp, blood-thumping comic thriller starring two-time Oscar nominee John Malkovich.

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1:09:12A John Malkovich dark comedy set in about a Chilean coup. With giant Easter Island heads everywhere. Are you kidding? I'm in. Also, I've seen the trailers and a lot of the early reviews have been fantastic. Are there a lot of wild horses? Yes. Don't miss the year's most talked about film. Now playing only in theaters. Get tickets today. Corrupting our democracy works best when we forget that we, the people, are in charge. I'm Stacey Abrams, voting rights advocate and host of Assembly Required. In my podcast, I'm talking with some of the sharpest minds in politics and in civic activism to help us figure out how to fight authoritarianism and win. My podcast doesn't just diagnose problems. We give actionable steps to help you feel a little

1:09:58more connected and a lot more empowered to make change in your communities. So check out my podcast, Assembly Required. New episodes drop every Tuesday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Okay, we've been talking about Kewpie Mayo for a minute now, Bow. And wow, the feedback we're getting. I mean, so many of y'all love this stuff. You're stopping us in the street going, I love Kewpie. And if you're thinking, wait, what is Kewpie? Do you not have the internet? It's the OG Japanese mayonnaise. The one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle.

1:10:44Once you know it, you start seeing it everywhere. People ask what makes it different from basic mayo. Well, the answer, egg yolks. Kewpie is made with egg yolks only, giving it this incredibly rich umami flavor that elevates everything. Burgers, fries, sandwiches, chicken, noodles. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really love food and flavor use it. Whatever you're eating, Kewpie it. So if you haven't tried Kewpie yet, find the bottle with the red cap and see what everyone's talking about. You'll understand. Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Our guest tonight was just re-elected for a third time. The governor of the great state of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker. Great to see you.

1:11:37Good to see you. Thank you. I don't know.'ll sit here this is fine thanks for having me on after Abdul listen they you. I can see it in their eyes. They're living out. Okay, big picture. What's kind of your elevator pitch for people who ask you, why do Democrats do so well on Tuesday? Well, interestingly enough, if you go back to the beginning of the season, I think everybody was saying that there was no common message. I kept hearing across the country, what do Democrats stand for? This is from Democrats. What do Democrats stand for? You know, we just lost a terrible election in 24. We don't have any message. How are we going to possibly move forward? What does Democratic Party stand for? And of course, we set our message as Democrats in presidential years.

1:12:36That's typically what happens. Whoever it is that runs and wins is really the messenger. And and that's who we are. And of course, after we lose nothing. So coming into the election, that was kind of where we were. But as you know, like 2018, when I got elected governor, I think there was a common view that Donald Trump is terrible for the country, and that was something that we could all gather around. And so that was kind of the beginning of 2026, or at least 2025 going into 2026. I think what we all discovered separately, but I think listening to one another,, there was a common message that we'd all developed and that the Republicans had no reply for, which is your gas prices have gone up by a

1:13:23buck fifty, your diesel prices have gone up by two bucks, grocery prices are through the roof. We all understand what we can do, which is end the war, which is to make sure that we're ending the trade wars. And we've gone into a trade war with Canada, for goodness sakes. These are our friends. So these are all things I think commonly everybody talked about across the country, and even governors who are like, I mean, we're burdened by all of those problems and others coming from the Trump administration, taking away SNAP and Medicaid and so on. So this was kind of a message that got developed in common, despite the fact that we were all in separate states, you know, and dealing with the separate populations of our states and different views. Yeah. So you've talked about being on team

1:14:08fight. So I want to unpack what that means. You put out this 200 point national agenda. You've talked about, you know, the need for the people who were just elected to Congress to fight Trump from Congress. What does that look like over the next two years when we know that Donald Trump is going to be able to veto things? Like, what are the fights that are worth taking? And at what point is there a risk that we, you know, screw up people's expectations if they think that Democrats can deliver them a big policy agenda with Donald Trump still in the Oval Office? Let's start with the idea that we should not create one bill that has every bit of the agenda in it. And instead, what the Congress should do, the Democrats in Congress, is put one by one,

1:14:54start with raising the minimum wage. Put that on Donald Trump's desk. Make him veto it if he's going to veto it. We ought to put on his desk universal paid leave for every worker in the United States. And one by one, without going through the entire agenda, and you can start, those are easy. I think those are easy things for us to gather around and get past. And once again, Donald Trump will choose, is he going to stand against every working person in the United States by vetoing these things or not? And so I think that that's the way to go about this. I do think that there are fights worth fighting that, and then there are some that are worth negotiating about. I can tell you as a governor

1:15:37of a state, I've got 150,000 people that are losing their SNAP benefits. I've got half a million people that will, as a result of the Medicaid cuts, lose their health insurance. And this is not something we can sustain. We can't replace that at the state level. I need the Congress to go deal with that. Trump is not going to reverse his big, ugly bill unless we're willing to stand up and fight against some of the things that he might like to have done. So, and then by the way, just in December, there's going to be a CR related to the, you know, to, to appropriations. And I think, I mean, I have never been for backing down in those fights. And I think this is a moment when he's got to understand that we are in control of the Congress now. And so he

1:16:25needs to back down on SNAP and Medicaid at least. Yeah. We could do him a huge political favor and end the war too. That'd be another way to do it. There's a lot of chatter right now about Democrats using our wins in states to circumvent the electoral college by enacting what's called the National Popular Voter Vote Interstate Compact. They know. It's basically an agreement among states to give all the electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote, no matter who wins the individual states. It only kicks in, though, once there are enough states in the compact to reach 270 electoral votes. Illinois is already a member of the compact. Do you want to see other states really fight for this idea and push it forward? And do you worry at all about the constitutionality

1:17:10one, but also a backlash of being a person who lives in a state when you feel like this kind of gets foisted upon you? I'm not sure how to answer that, except that, I mean, you've got to start solving the problems that we face, particularly electoral problems, because this is a challenge, I mean, for those of us who are long enough in the world to have seen the Gore-Bush fight. I mean, Al Gore won that election. And we, I mean, I should also add that we should be going after a nationwide redistricting. We should have independent commissions in every state, but not do it individually by state. And so these are, you know, not easy problems to solve, but actually that last one is one that should be relatively easy if we elect a Democratic president.

1:18:06Can we follow up on that? Oh, I'm sorry, when we elect a Democratic president. Another sort of team fight question is about redistricting. Donald Trump, his effort to gerrymander his way to a permanent congressional majority did not work. No. It didn't totally backfire, but they didn't win all the seats they thought they would. Now, there was a map floating around today of the Republican proposal for how they would have drawn up the map in Indiana. Had that passed, we would have won either nine to zero or eight to one in Indiana. So they dodged a serious bullet there. When you see shit like that, does it make you rethink redistricting at all? Is it a good idea? Do you still support it? Well, we had the option.

1:19:00There was a lot of discussion in Illinois about having an independent commission and drawing the districts in a different way. The reality is that you can't unilaterally disarm. And so there was no chance. And by the way, despite the fact that we now could look at that map and say we would have done much better in Indiana at the time, there was a push for Illinois to redistrict. We have 14 Democrats and three Republicans out of our map. And Indiana, of course, was looking at redistricting. And basically what I said was, if they're going to redistrict, I'm going to redistrict. And, you know, they can maybe find two seats. And again, we didn't know the outcome was going to be as it was. But at the time, anyway, my view was like if they're going to redistrict and take away two seats from Democrats, I can redistrict and just take three.

1:19:43And so that was my threat to Indiana. And I'm not suggesting that I was the reason that Indiana didn't actually redistrict, but it was at least a factor. They had to be in their Republican cloakrooms saying, like, why are we doing this? If Illinois is going to just turn around? And we could. We have super majorities. I'm a Democratic governor. We could have done that. And I would have done it. Real bummer they didn't, though, over. Real bummer they didn't do it over there in Indiana. I do. You talk about team fight. I just want to remind, and redistricting. I want to remind you that the Texas House Democrats, you remember before all the redistricting happened everywhere else, it was the Texas House Democrats who broke quorum in August of 2025.

1:20:35And they came to Illinois and we protected them in Illinois because, I mean, they were literally planning to send the FBI, the Texas Rangers, and so on. But I mention this because, just FYI, James Tallarico and Gina Hinojosa were in that delegation coming to Illinois. So I got to know them when they were with us, right? But what we didn't know was they were doing more than just trying to stop the Texas redistricting. They were actually alerting the rest of the country as a result of the attention that they got that this was going to happen all over the country. And so they really are deserving of a hell of a lot of credit for the fact that people stood up and fought back. Speaking of Texas,

1:21:26Jeannie Hinojosa is now the governor of Texas, the governor-elect. At a time when the National Democratic Party was not giving her campaign a lot of money or resources, you stepped up. And I talked to a bunch of folks on her team who were very frustrated at the lack of support they got from the DGA. But you wrote a million-dollar check, and one of them said to me, Pritzker really threw down for us. I will love him forever so first of all shout out to Governor Pritzker for putting some chips in the table I know you're a poker guy um my question is though you know talk about your political strategy but also when you kind of look at the near misses the states we won, does it make you angry that the DNC fundraising was so anemic that there weren't additional resources to push into the table later?

1:22:27I'm not going to give you the answer that you want to hear. Look, we got outspent everywhere and we do on a regular basis. It's just true. I mean, when you've got Elon Musk spending $240 million like in Texas, we're going to get outspent everywhere and we do on a regular basis. It's just true. I mean, when you've got Elon Musk spending $240 million, like in Texas, we're going to get outspent. He lost. And I felt like, you know, he spent $240 million, I spent a million dollars. I figure like pretty good to return on investment, right? Yeah, yeah. But not taking credit because Gina Hinojosa was a great candidate. She didn't get a lot of attention because James Tallarico is such a unique talent and he got a lot of attention.

1:23:06But she really was a great candidate and she was doing a hell of a job getting outspent like 20 to 1. And so when I think about the challenge, I really think, look, we Democrats don't, we've never been able to raise as much money. And they've got the trillionaires. I mean, I realize I'm wealthy and I'm doing my part, but I'm just saying they've got people who can like the turnips that fall off the truck or like hundred million dollar checks for them. And so we're never going to be able to catch up in that regard until we have campaign finance reform and end Citizens United. And that would be fair. But I don't want to place blame because it's really not fair. I do think that there were places like Florida where we could have had that governor's race possibly if more money had been put into Florida.

1:24:02But I got called about it and like with four days left in the election, you know, saying, can you, you know, fix it? And, you know, my view was I can't be there. I can't do all of them. I did. You know, I was like I put a million seven to the Kansas. You know, I mean, I was involved in Kansas, Mississippi and South Carolina, and everybody thought I was crazy. I should have played the lottery. You should have been on Cal Sheet. Final question for you. The Chicago Bears are 6-2. You just beat the brakes off of the Super Bowl winning Seattle Seahawks. Yep. You have a quarterback who looks like he could be a generational talent. Will you promise right here and right now that you will not allow the Chicago Bears to move to

1:24:50Indian? I will promise you this, that we are working our tails off to make sure that the Chicago Bears have the option of staying in the state of Illinois. And they have to make a good decision. Because the reality is that they shouldn't be on a slag heap in Hammond, Indiana. They should be either in the city of Chicago or in Arlington Heights or somewhere in the state of Illinois. We are the ones who put the equity into that team. Look, we're going to give them what we do for other businesses. We're going to build the infrastructure. We're going to build the utilities, you know, the underground utilities, all the things that they need. It's going to cost us a lot of money to do that. We do that for other businesses. You know, we're in charge of

1:25:27infrastructure. But I will say, you know, they haven't always made great decisions, the Chicago Bears, about... And... Although Caleb Williams was a great decision. So I do think they're going to stay in the state of Illinois, but we need to pass a bill that's actually later this month and early in December that will get that done. The Gary Bears? What are we talking about here? The Chicago Bears. Governor J.B. Pritzker, everybody. I think the governor is going to display a game with us. Hopefully. Here we come. We'll come back on. We, um... We promise we won't bite. Is it a drinking game? You know, I will tell you something. We can get you a beer. I wanted to force all of us to take a Malort shot.

1:26:24But let me just tell you something. The enthusiasm was not there. Oh, Malort, yeah. I would drink almost anything with that. So now it's time for a game we call Two Takes and a Fake. We have two teams. It'll be John and Tommy versus the governor, Alex and Dan. I will read you three political takes about the midterm elections. Two of them are real. One of them is fake. I will flag that this game is particularly difficult this time around because they are crashing out. All right. First up, let's start with the governor's team. Which of these three takes is fake? A, I'm not trying to crash out, but we nominated Hitler with Down syndrome. And guess what? He lost. He lost. And now he loses Supreme Court justice. It is a fucking disaster.

1:27:20Or B, it's funny how Democrats spent the last few months crying about how hard we made it for black people to vote. If anything, we made it too easy. Or C, Texas, there is a lesson here. Don't be so welcoming. The first one is real. The first one's definitely real. I agree. The Hitler one is real. Yep. That was a GOP organizer at an election night party at Butterworth's. I think C is fake. Okay, all right. C. C was real. That was Lawrence Jones, Fox & Friends co-host. Sure was. It was a tweet. Next up for John and Tommy. They're going to know all the takes. You guys are up against two of the real sickos. A. Well, that was a disaster. And not like a metaphorical disaster, but a real disaster.

1:28:17More like the Lusitania sinking than rain at a wedding reception. This is the end of the Trump era. It may not be what we deserve, but it's definitely what the Republican Party deserves. B, it physically hurts me to see the state of Texas colored blue on a map. It actually makes me feel sick. It's like Texas is my strong, handsome son, and he just came home from school and said, hey mom, hey dad, I'm actually a woman now. Or C, Trump is still your president. Jesus is still Lord. Knowledge is power. Maybe now our people will wake up. That one's right, I think. I feel like the B one about the Texas is a woman. Yeah, I feel like Lusitania is something Lovett would write. I thought that too, but then B also seems like something he would write.

1:29:02Do you want to go with Lusitania? I don't know, whatever. Dealer's choice. B. B is fake. You got it. B is fake. A was Tucker Carlson. We've always said you guys are a lot alike. And C was... Yeah. And C was... We've always said you guys are a lot alike. And C was... Yeah. And C was... Fuck you. And C was... Nicki Minaj. Yeah. Yeah. All right, next up. A. I hate to say it, but America is over. The communists and jihadists are going to open our borders and replace our votes with votes from illegal aliens. We now have reps who openly speak about their hatred of America. We won't be able to undo the damage they caused to our country. America 250 was a funeral. B. I agree with President Trump. Conservative media, especially Fox News,

1:29:58bears a hell of a lot of responsibility for what went down. Or C, okay, screw it, I'll say it, this election is yet again a reminder of why we need to seriously revisit the 19th Amendment. They could all be real, honestly. All sound real. You think B or C? You're going to make me pick this time? You're the governor. Executive decision. You're going to call balls and strikes in your job. What do you think? I think B. Yeah, I want to phone a friend. What does the audience think? B. You think it's C? B. B? C was fake. B was a Newsmax host was Greg Kelly. Wow. Yeah. It's crazy out there. I'm sorry, but to figure out the fake ones, I had to challenge, I had to channel the, we had to channel the darkest

1:30:57part of the human soul just to find something that was extreme enough. Next up for John and Tommy. A, I'd rather have Iran have a nuke than my country be run by communists. B, now I want to read the Quran. I want to try to understand what it is that Michigan and New York and Minnesota find so goddamn compelling. Or C, I think he's a Democrat. I've tried to salvage Trump. I've not been sure. I've invested so much. Maybe I was blind to it. He is the ultimate Democrat sleeper cell and he works for them. And he was a Democrat before. He's not that R word. I think B is fake. Yeah. A, I heard. C just sounds real. Yeah. You got it. You guys are crushing. A was Matt Walsh. C was Alex Jones. And I have to tell you, Governor, you guys got crushed.

1:31:54All right. You got both questions wrong. Tommy and John got both questions right they've won the game and we should have put some money on it I got a billionaire on the fucking stage I should have said yes to the Malort because they would have taken the shot that's the thing if you guys had done the Malort shots we would have done a lot better yeah you're right yeah totally and that's our game that's our show for tonight. Thank you to Governor Fritzger. Thank you, Immanuel said. And thank you all. See you at CricketCon. Pods of America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, Thank you. and Naomi Singel. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Corrupting our democracy works best when we forget that we, the people, are in charge.

1:33:07I'm Stacey Abrams, voting rights advocate and host of Assembly Required. In my podcast, I'm talking with some of the sharpest minds in politics and in civic activism to help us figure out how to fight authoritarianism and win. My podcast doesn't just diagnose problems. We give actionable steps to help you feel a little more connected and a lot more empowered to make change in your communities. So check out my podcast, Assembly Required. New episodes drop every Tuesday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.