Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] WVUA FM, Tuscaloosa. Any opinions expressed in this program are those of the host and do not represent the thoughts or opinions of 90.7 WVUA or the University of Alabama.
[00:00:19] Hello, everybody, and welcome to season three, episode two of Pole of the Nation. I'm Bernavik. I'm your host for the only politics podcast here at WVWAY FM. And a lot of stuff has happened over the past week, so let's get right to it. First off, we had elections across the country last Tuesday, February 13, there were about six special elections across the country. They happen in New York, they happen in Georgia, they happen in Oklahoma, and they happened in Pennsylvania as well. So let's start with the Georgia ones. And before I do, I do want to say, and I do want to emphasize this day of special elections was one of the weirdest, probably the weirdest special election day that I've had since I've been tracking this stuff. Been tracking this stuff for a couple of years now, and I have not seen a special election day that has been so decidedly mixed. Because if you just take a look at the Georgia results, you'd think Donald Trump was winning nationally by 30 points. And the reason I say that was because you had a couple of special elections, House District 125 and Senate District 30, which they are in ex urban to rural areas, mostly in Georgia, some suburban areas, especially with House District 125 and in Columbia county in particular. And the Republicans massively overreformed. Now, granted, these are jungle primaries. Georgia has the system where with these elections, they have the jungle primaries. And if no one gets above 50% and it has to run off or something, or something like that, at least in regards to federal races, do not believe this exists for these local races where you can just win first past the post. But you have these jungle Brad Marys that go ahead. They exist.
[00:02:10] And in these deeply democratic or deeply republican districts, multiple members of the state party that is dominant in that district, they're going to run because they see an opportunity to win. There's usually only going to be one member of the opposite party, the minority party, in that district, just so the party can say they put someone up. And that's what the Democratic Party did. I mean, clearly they had to, because otherwise, you can't exactly explain the 30 point swing to the right at this special election that you got in Senate District 30. Otherwise, you cannot explain the near 48 point swing right in House District 125 without giving up some of these factors. Like, if you just see this, if that replicated nationally, then Republicans would be in for probably the biggest landslide since the Great Depression, when FDR won nearly every state going up in 1932 and again in 1936.
[00:03:08] This was weird, because you usually don't see swings of this caliber in special elections ever. And granted, do not take one special election as a harbinger, that you're going to see massive red swings or massive blue swings or anything like that. This is why we throw them in the average, because every special election has its own story to tell. But if you combine them, and right now, we have 57 special elections in the time between the 2022 midterms. And now, when this podcast is getting updated and uploaded, that we have all these different stories combined together to create a national story, and if that are replicated even remotely nationally, then I would be up here exclaiming that Joe Biden and the Democrats are doomed. The Republicans are going to get a trifecta and all this stuff, but I'm not. And the reasons why, or, yes, throw it in the average, but also, you have elections in Oklahoma and in Pennsylvania that we were tracking. We're going by as the polls close. And I notice that Oklahoma's House District 39, this is in West Edmond, this is north of Oklahoma City, has high religiosity, high college education rate. I believe a 51% of the district's population has a bachelor's degree or higher. And this district went from. In 2016, it voted for Trump by 33, in 2020, voted for Trump by 26. So it's a lot trending. But republican district here I'm seeing the Democrat pulling within near 5% of pulling off the upset in this district. And I'm like, what is going on in Oklahoma? That's a 21 point swing left. And how does this compute, first off, with the Georgia special elections? How does this compute with the national environment we're seeing from the polls? Because if you believe a national polls, Donald Trump is leading not just the electoral college, but with the popular vote. And how do you reconcile the Pennsylvania House District 140? This is in southern Bucks county. This House election determined who was going to have the majority in the state house of Representatives. Were Democrats continued to have it, or were the Republicans pull into a draw? In House District 140, it's a Biden by ten district. It was stagnant from 2016 to 2020. And the Democrat in the district goes up and wins by 35 and a half points. And you have to just sit here and wonder, what were these other candidates doing to get such massive underperformances relative to the top of the ticket? This is a 25 point swing left. Like if this anywhere close to replicates nationally in America suburbs, then Biden's winning electoral college in a landslide. So you get all these conflicting factors and you have a couple of things. In New York, you have Assembly District 77 in the Bronx, which Republicans outperform the partisan margin in a rapidly rightward trending district by 17 points. Now granted, there are a lot of local conditions too. There were Republican in this race was quite a liberal Republican. He's the head of some public housing unit in which this was also an extremely low turnout election, even for the Bronx. Dear God, only like 1500 people voted in it or something crazy like that.
[00:06:29] And you shouldn't take one special election with about one 5000 hundred votes cast as gospel for what the national trends are going to be. But it was still something interesting to watch. But the big thing that everybody was watching was the third congressional district in New York. A little bit of backstory about this. If you've been following any sort of politics, you'll know this is George Santos's district. George Santos won this district in 2022, flipping it from the Democratic Party as a result of a red wave that was striking New York at the time. This crime wave Lee Zelda was running, he was a Long Islander. Lee Zeldin got to about within 7% of flipping the governorship from the Democratic Party and didn't end up winning, but helped the New York Republicans win a lot. A lot, a lot of competitive House districts, a lot of competitive assembly and senate districts at the time. One of them was the third congressional district. That's the district that had gone from Clinton by five to Biden by eight from 2016 to 2020. And now you see Republicans winning this by high single digits, by in the double digits, even as part of Long Island's in particular rightward shift over the time as it pertains to not just crime, but also the migrant cris which Republicans in the state and nationally have seized upon. And thus Long island has shifted rightward. It also has a very high italian population, particularly in the south of third district around which usually is republican these days, but now has gone even more Republican because of this crime wave. So the third congressional district, George Santos, I think I've already said my piece on him in previous episodes on poll senation. He got expelled. And thus you have a special election that's scheduled for February 13. So what you have is that in New York, the local democratic parties pick the candidate. So in this case, the Nassau County Democrats and the Nassau County Gops. And I would say my piece about the Nassau County Democrats and Jacobs, but that is for another time. But they ended up picking conservative Democrat Thomas Wasi. He's an Italian. That obviously helps in a district like this.
[00:08:49] He has more conservative viewpoints in regards to immigration, in regards to the border. And the Republicans ended up putting up a. She's a black Nassau county legislator.
[00:09:04] And Republicans had hoped to make this an election about support for Israel. Pillop was a former IDF soldier, ethiopian jew who migrated to the United States. And they were looking to flip this district with her. But there were a few problems. For one, Swazi's campaign was a lot more, I think, well run than had, you know, a coherent message that he was running. Know, sort of having his own brand. And that is, of course, certainly helped by the fact know he has a lot more name recognition in the district. People already know he was a former representative for this district until he retired to run for governor in 2022 against Kathy Hoke. I think he only ended up getting 10% or something in regards to the vote he got in the New York democratic primary.
[00:09:58] So he had retired from that district, went to run. The governor's race flopped miserably, and Sancho said, ended up flipping it. But he's back now, and he wants to get his old job back. And so he runs, think a pretty coherent campaign. Pillop runs a sort of disheveled campaign where I'm not even sure she knew which events were and weren't in her district. And when you're having to ask a major congressional candidate that that's getting funded by a national party, that's when you know that the campaign is not exactly in the best mean. Her last events of the cycle were all in the fourth congressional district, which is held by Republican Anthony Des Lacito. And if you're not holding your events in the third district, the third district is pretty big. As far as New York standards go. As far as Long island standards go, you can't miss it. It contains parts of queens in the northern part of county. Like, I'm not sure how you can miss that if you're.
[00:11:01] I mean, yeah. What also didn't help know Mossy Phillip is a registered doesn't mean a. This doesn't mean too much in Long island because there are a lot of registered Democrats who ended up voting know, let's say the Persian Jews on great Neck, for example. A lot of them are registered Democrats, but they're put in the bank as republican votes. But this draws in criticism from a lot of online conservatives like, well, she's a registered Democrat. How can we rely on her to be a reliable conservative voice for the third congressional district? And so there's not a lot of local enthusiasm behind Philip. There is a lot of enthusiasm behind Swatzi and what ends up happening in the streets, which was polled as being very competitive. Swatzi was only up by a few points in the polls. And what ends up happening is that Swatsi ends up winning by about eight points, by about the partisan lean of the third congressional district at the time of the 2020 presidential election.
[00:12:05] Right now, he's at 7.7%, which should be a slight underperformance of President Biden. However, we will maybe see when these late arriving mail ballots come in. Maybe Swatze adds to his margin, overperforms Joe Biden slightly, and he ends up winning very convincingly, flipping the district to Democrats. And what does this mean? First off, for the House of Representatives? This is not good, obviously, for Speaker Mike Johnson. Last week I talked about a lot of the problems that he's had with his caucus. And now that his House majority is going thinner, these problems are only going to be exacerbated. Had Tom Swatzey been there for the majorcas to the second attempt at the Myorcus impeachment, it would have failed, because right now, where things are in the House, if the Republicans lose three votes, it's a tide vote and the vote would fail because you need a majority in the House in order to pass anything.
[00:13:05] And Swatze's democratic vote is also not going to help Mike Johnson's rule vote problem, which again, rule votes are being defeated at pretty historic know in regards to this Congress as compared to other congresses. And so Swansi's addition is not exactly going to be the most welcome news to national Republicans who had spent millions of dollars on this issue. However, they could not even come close to going band for ban with the Democrats, which they spent even more. They spent like I think they had and sword into the tv ads. They spent about like 63, 64% of the money, pretty much doubling up the Republicans in terms of spending and the tv time they were getting because a lot of the difference in this race was Tom Swatzey was getting a lot more the money himself than Mazi Pillop was getting. Like Pillop was being funded more by national Republicans, the NRCC, than Swansea was being funded by the DCCC. So the one thing to note about advertising is that candidates get a lot better rates on ads than national groups do. And so when you have more of the money going to yourself personally, you're able to run more ads with less money. And this is especially important when you consider that New York City is probably the most expensive media market to run it. And you can't really focus your ads on a particular district. You have to run them nationally, or at least in realm of media market itself. So Swazi gets a majority of TD time.
[00:14:47] You also have some unforced errors by Monsie Pillop herself. But with the comments about Swazi being the godfather of the border crisis, which I thought was more hilarious than anything, just because you have italian american organizations in the Swazi campaign itself saying, hey, this is probably discriminatory against italian Americans, especially considering Godfather and the Godfather movie and the connotations with italian american mafia culture and whatnot. And so with that, with the debate performance being very good for Swazi, not so much for Philip, you have a situation, know, Swazi wins. And thus, you know, another decent sign for know, even though the polls are saying that Biden is losing, what the elections have shown us is that right now we're looking at a similar environment to what we were looking at in 2020. And given what we've seen, I don't see any reason why the trends that we saw in 2020 wouldn't continue in 2024 with wider, more college educated voters, more suburban voters shifting to Democrats. Meanwhile, you have less college educated, more non white voters shifting to the Republican Party thanks to ideology, thanks to religiosity being a huge factor, sort of overall, social, cultural issues of the time as well, being a major factor in this as well. And this is a story that we are going to end up seeing play out over the next nine months, election days, eight weeks? Well, if it was eight weeks away, I will say that we'd be doing a lot more breathless coverage of the presidential election. We'd have our nominees at this point, conventions would have already passed. And this is a time where we would be breathlessly analyzing the polls. Where are the candidates at in the polls? Where are the parties at in regards to how they're performing in the special elections and the story that this would be telling for 2024. Because at this point, if eight weeks out from an election, the vast majority of people will have already decided who they're going to vote for, the partisans on both sides, like, okay, yeah, I'm voting for my party's nominee, and we will be focusing on both campaigns uses of their money.
[00:17:20] Are the Republicans going to be able to go ban for ban with Democrats right now? As I was talking about last week, right now they're not able to right now the Democrats have the money spread, and that is going to be something major to focus on as the Biden campaign right now, we are eight months, three weeks out from an election, looks to make up the polling gap, and there's going to be probably over a billion dollars spent on this election. I would not be surprised to see that, given how expensive elections have become, given the stakes of this election in regards to future american leadership and the other things that you would be focusing on at the time, the issues regarding abortion, issues regarding Donald Trump's legal cases, because as I've said earlier, a lot of that money that Trump has been raising is going towards his legal fees. The first of his trials is going to start with jury selection at the end of March, about 40 days from now.
[00:18:25] And that wind up dominating a news cycle. And to wrap off this segment, we don't know what's going to happen between now and election day. There's a lot of things that can go on, a lot of things that will end up changing the character of the race, who is favored, and for what reasons. One of those things that probably would have been if we weren't nearly nine months out from a presidential election was the document situation regarding Joe Biden. This was one of the biggest stories in the news, and I promised last week I would get to this, and now here I am. We're going to go for about half an hour on this, so bear with me. It's going to be sort of a long ride. So I want to focus first on the legal exoneration, because what special counsel Robert here ended up finding as evidence is that he didn't have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to charge Joe Biden with any crimes related to the documents. Because one thing to know about federal prosecutions more than anything is that they're not going to bring a case to trial. They're not going to bring a case before federal court if they're not absolutely 100% sure that they've got a slam dunk case.
[00:19:41] If there is any doubt that they might not be able to convict someone based upon the evidence that they have, they're just not going to bring it up. And, Robert, here's job is to sort of explain in this report to Attorney General Merrick Garland, why are you not charging by him? What is the evidence that you presented? What are some of the doubts you might have with a case going forward? Why are you not charging them?
[00:20:09] And so there were a multitude of reasons for this.
[00:20:13] One was that for a lot of the cases where there were misplaced documents, they may not have been willfully know. The special counsel raises the possibility that President Biden might not have known where these documents were. Know, maybe the staff might have put that there without President Biden's knowledge. Maybe President Biden just sort of forgot that they were there, whether it was at the Biden home in Delaware, at the Penn Biden center, or another know, maybe in regards to the Afghanistan documents which were classified at the know. Robert Hugh thought know there might be a case for the defense to make that President Biden thought that when he was vice president, that those documents were personal because they contain personal notes about then Vice President Biden's doubts about continuing to put troops on the ground in Afghanistan and his doubts about the United States even having a presence in the country.
[00:21:15] And he thought that the defense might have a case to make that would provide a reasonable doubt.
[00:21:23] And there were a lot of other things that Pierce said that essentially cast doubt on them for being able to get a conviction for this case.
[00:21:34] But what was focused on in national reporting by media, by political pundits everywhere, was the part in the executive summary about Robert here sort of theorizing what the defense might for Biden might be. And the defense for Biden, Robert here theorized, might. They might say that President Biden was a well meaning elderly man with a poor memory, and that is what was seized upon. And some of the details about their memory, we all know. I think if we're following, we all know things about. Okay, you didn't know when you were. The year when you were vice president. You didn't know the year when Biden's son Bo died of cancer that President Biden believes was caused by the burn pits in Iraq in service of the US military.
[00:22:30] Then some of the other details that were reported on the media. But in regards to the memory itself, your support is mixed on that. You have those details. You also have details about President Biden being able to have cogent and interviews where you could remember a lot of the events that happened at that time.
[00:22:53] And another thing to note is that President Biden. Two things. President Biden gave these interviews on October eigth and October 9. The most recent ones remember, this is the case that goes back years to the 2023. Interviews were conducted in October eigth and October 9.
[00:23:08] I have a theory that the events of the past few days in regards to Hamas conducting its attack into southern Israel and the IDF's response now going into today, they might have been on his mind, like President Biden had an international crisis to respond to, and that could be a possibility as to why maybe President Biden wasn't remembering things as he might have normally been because there may have been a lot of other things on his mind. Granted, there are always a lot of things on someone's mind in regards to being president of the United States, but they're usually not as urgent as one of America's major allies in the Middle east suffering the attack that Israel did on October 7. And so maybe you say that might be a reason why by his memory in regards to the years that things might have happened, might have been a little bit hazier than expected. The other thing to remember is that bias sat in these interviews for several hours, about three to 5 hours, I think, combined. I think 5 hours combined on October eigth and October 9.
[00:24:27] Granted, maybe his memory is not that hazy, but his interviews as regards as by the hear report, were cogent enough to where you sat there for several hours at a time giving the interviews to the DOJ's investigators.
[00:24:44] And so what was reported on the memory, that's what got national news. That's what got the national attention. And to say that the Democratic Party and its officials didn't exactly like what that Robert here was going on about Biden's memory, it is an understatement. Not so much so than President Biden himself, because he saw what Robert here said about Biden not remembering when Bo Biden died.
[00:25:16] And to say that Biden was ticked off is a massive understatement because he ended up calling a press conference to respond to the allegations. So just to know that he thanks the DOJ for conducting investigation, Biden was legally exonerated.
[00:25:41] But Joe Biden, what he said about Robert Hugh, quote, how in the hell dare he mention the whole Bo Biden situation? That's what really, I think got him emotional. That's what got him ticked off. There were reports that, you know, cussed out the report to House Democrats because at the same time this report was being released, President Biden was attending a House Democrats retreat in Leesburg, Virginia, which know in the DC metro in.
[00:26:17] So you have a situation where now Democrats are attacking a special counsel for what they believe know. The term that they use is gratuitous. And granted, I think that's a term, that's a term that people like in the wilds communications room and probably Joe Scarborough of born and Joe ended up coming up with. But that's the term that they ended up running date in the days to come. I really do have a theory that Joe Scarborough's use of the word really just sort of preceded Democrats using that word.
[00:26:58] Democrats believed that Robert here talking about Biden's memory like that was not relevant to the investigation at hand. And they believe that over these couple of days that this was a Comey like political hit job. Now, James Comey, now, what they're saying about the Comey thing in 2016 in regards to Clinton's emails, Democrats will tell you, democratic officials will tell you that Comey couldn't legally indict Clinton, so he decided as a Republican to politically indict the democratic nominee for president at the time. They believe a similar thing is happening with Robert here. He was appointed by Donald Trump to the Department of Justice. He's a Trump appointed attorney. And what this now boils down to is now a lot of Democrats think that Robert here was acting on the service of the political movement of which he is a part of in order to try and assist the Trump campaign in winning in 2024. That is sort of the line. The line is that here's reports about Biden's memory, our political hit job, and Biden's press conference sort of alluded to his thoughts on that and Biden's issues with the national media in general, because Joe Biden and national media have not gotten along for a few decades. This goes back to when Joe Biden was serving the Senate, like, in the 80s or something, even when he was running for president, like three decades ago in his failed presidential campaign. I think going on to, I think, the plagiarism scandal that ended up sinking his campaign. There were reports that Biden might have plagiarized from college papers and that ended up sinking his campaign. Biden's not like the national media ever since. Clearly, that trickled down to his staff. And I think there is a story to be told about how President Biden dealt with the national media in that diplomatic meeting room in the Oval Office.
[00:29:11] He was a lot more combative against the national media and the reporters that were there than I've ever seen him.
[00:29:22] Some of the lines that he gave to one reporter, I can't remember her name, but it's like, well, he's elderly, like, he's 81, and he knows what he's doing or something related to that.
[00:29:37] Just sort of pointed remarks to sort of say, hey, I'm an old man. I'm 81 years old. I'm well meaning. But I know what I'm doing here, like, trying to refute sort of the questions about his mental acuity that have dogged his campaign that have dogged presidency for the past couple of years. Now, at this rate. And the other exchange that I remember vividly was one with Fox News reporter Peter Ducey. Now, Pete Ducey and Biden do not get along. They have a mutual dislike of one another. And I think that was made very clear a couple of years ago when Joe Biden called Peter Ducey under his brought the stupid sob. I can't say the full term because I'm pretty sure that would violate WBOFM and or FCC guidelines. And I'll be honest, I want to make sure that this podcast remains on the year in its entirety. So we're going to go ahead and leave it like so. In short, they don't like each other. Biden doesn't like Fox News. Democrats don't like Fox News because they believe, well, this is just a republican media front.
[00:30:52] Mean. They don't believe that Fox News is a news organization. They believe it's a GOP propaganda outfit.
[00:30:59] And so that's where part of this distrust comes from. And so when Peter Ducey asked him, a mean President Biden equipped quote, that his memory was so poor that he let Ducey speak. And that I think is kind of hilarious. What I first heard, like, oh, lord, this just again shows that Biden does not like Peter Dooce, Pete Ducey doesn't like Biden. And I think it also, this episode just sort of reveals that now in the Biden campaign, and this has been brewing for a while, like, if you follow Andrew Bates on know and other communications officials with the White House, with the campaign, like they've had their issues with national media in the past. But to see it out in the open like this, I think goes into the sort of narrative that Joe Biden has had as the comeback kid, as the person who always gets doubted, but it has to fight through in the end, sort of the underdog from the underground story, if you know WWE, similar to a Sammy Zane type of story. And that's the sort of narrative that Biden believes that he's been able to construct for himself. And that's a story that the Biden campaign has sort of run with sort of, everyone doubts us. People don't think that we're going to be able to do this, but we go out and do it, prove everybody wrong. And this sort of episode kind of confirms that self built narrative that the Biden campaign has, that the polls have Trump up.
[00:32:46] And a lot of political pundits, mainstream analysts are saying, are questioning whether Biden can beat Trump so it's this sort of spite against the national media that I think drives a lot of what a Biden campaign might do, like spite against the doubters. Like, you don't think I can do this? Watch me go ahead and do it. Watch me prove you wrong.
[00:33:11] And that sort of attitude, it's been with Biden since the have to say, been with Biden since the 70s because remember, his first Senate campaign in 1972, I believe it was, it was against a republican incumbent senator by the name of J. Caleb Boggs.
[00:33:30] And Boggs was the favorite in that race. Nobody thought that a Newcastle county councilman was going to be able to go ahead and defeat J. Caleb box, but Biden narrowly won that race and he's been in federal elected office ever since, barring a four year break between 2017 and 2021.
[00:34:01] So this narrative has been built up for decades. And with this episode confirming it, President Biden and his campaign's media strategy is really interesting. And I have a few thoughts about this, is that they like to hit up local media because President Biden, he's been a politician for decades. He's a retail politician. He's cut from the cloth of going to a place and meeting the voters in person, sort of talking to them on the ground as they see fit. We've seen these episodes in, like, superior, Wisconsin. We saw it in North Carolina. We've seen it in Detroit, Michigan as well, where President Biden wants to meet with the voters directly meet with them one on one. I think this also happened in South Carolina, where President Biden sort of ate dinner with this one family, this one black family in South Carolina that I think ended up going viral on TikTok and on other social media sources. So Biden wants to speak to and build up sort of personal relationships with these voters, sort of looking them in the eyes and say, hey, I've got your know, you have a friend in me in the White House that sort of know, telling them, know what the administration has done in regards to unemployment, in regards to low black unemployment, in regards to labor rights, in regards to sort of the other accomplishments that President Biden will want to tout in his general election campaign.
[00:35:36] And I have a few questions about this. Chiefly, is that going to work in an age where all politics is national?
[00:35:47] Because I can understand wanting to focus on the seven swing states. You think you have the best shot at winning in Nevada and Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and in North Carolina and understand, you know, wanting to absolutely focus on those seven swing states, because if you're not winning them, then you lost the election a long time ago.
[00:36:09] But in an era where local media is dying, in an era where local newspapers are getting either bought up by major corporations or are just flat out ceasing to exist because the people who own them are either unable to sell them to a local owner who can afford to run it at a loss, or they're running at so much of a loss that it simply wouldn't be feasible to run them.
[00:36:37] And as regards to local tv stations, most of them aren't locally owned, like they're owned by national corporations, Nextstar Media Group, Sinclair, or some of the ones that own Alabama news stations in particular.
[00:36:53] And so you have a situation where politics is more nationalized than it has ever been and people don't like, especially younger people, we are not picking up newspapers and reading them back in the olden days. We're going on our phones, we're looking at the news app we have in arrivals. We're going on social media, and we're getting news that way.
[00:37:17] And in regards to even the older people, the local tv sources that you do get, they focus a lot on national news stories like Facebook news groups and getting it on Twitter, TikToks and YouTube.
[00:37:38] People get their news from a lot more places now because we are so globalized, we are so interconnected now. And this isn't to say that Biden campaign hasn't recognized that they're not running a campaign straight out of the 90s. They have a TikTok account.
[00:37:53] They have gotten over 100,000 followers, which I think they're at close to three times more followers there than they have in their campaign's Instagram account.
[00:38:03] The followers are still mostly on Twitter, let's be completely honest. But they are going to be using TikTok.
[00:38:13] You're going to have Biden reaching out sort of these other media outlets through streaming services, running ads there. You're going to be running your general tv ads, but running your social media ads, running social media campaigns. And I will say that this is more opinion than analysis. I believe more so than ever, especially for the low info voters, that media shapes the narrative that voters are going to have. Media can either confirm it, what the voters are already thinking, or media can help sort of change perceptions.
[00:39:00] And it's just this sort of, and it's this sort of media narratives that end up building up over years and years and years know, could end up helping.
[00:39:13] You know, it's not just one newspaper. It's not just the New York Times. It's not just the Washington Post. It's things that get echoed in national media and things that get repeated over and over and over again until they stick in someone's mind. Those are the things that I think will end up going to shape what a voter thinks about when they end up voting in a primary or how they end up voting in the general election, more specifically.
[00:39:49] And it's the job of the Biden administration to create the positive media, because you have to operate under the assumption that they're not going to create positive medianaires for you. Like the media is going to get the stories that get the most clicks, that end up bringing in the most money.
[00:40:15] Because, again, the news media is a profit making industry now. They're focused on being able to run, focused on being able to provide new products, being the biggest media conglomerate in the nation, biggest and best. So they're going to make decisions that, whether editorially or whether it's up top of the executives like David Sloslav and sort of the others that have been helping running things at CNN recently, you have a situation in which you're going to report on the stories that draw in the most eyeballs.
[00:40:58] Maybe it's not because there might not be the most newsworthy, but they're going to be the things that draw people the most. And concerns about Biden's age and sort of this concern reporting that draws eyeballs, that draws readers, that draws clicks. And so you have to assume that negative reporting about Joe Biden is going to draw people in more than negative reporting about Trump, because we've had that for years, even going back so far as 2015 when Biden, when Trump actually first ran for the republican nomination in 2016. Granted, there was a potential movement for Joe Biden to run in 2016.
[00:41:40] Potentially. That would have been very interesting considering some of the campaign themes he was going to hit on would have been very similar to Bernie Sanders in 2016, before Sanders sort of just rocketed up as a national figure in left wing and in democratic politics, it would have been very interesting to see if Biden ran what he would have been running on. But that's a conversation for another time. The conversation you have to have right now, if you're the Biden campaign, is, what news stories are you going to be able to create? How are you going to seize upon the opportunities that you have been given? Take the House Republicans, for example. They can't pass bills to save their lives.
[00:42:29] And are you able to seize upon that? Are you able to borrow that in a voter's head to say, the Democrats are the party of governance and the Republicans are the party of chaos. They're trying to do that. But is it working?
[00:42:44] That will be something that we will be seeing over the next nine months. If these efforts are working, that's a good sign for the Biden campaign. If they're not, ring the four alarm.
[00:42:55] You know, we're talking about the sort of impeachment processes of Alejandro Mallorcus and for Joe Biden. Then there's other stories you could say about republican parties. Only focus in regards to passing stuff is to make political statements that Republicans usually would make. Like you're not impeaching Alejandro Mallorcus for high crimes and misdemeanors. You're impeaching him for not implementing your preferred policy at the border. And you needed two tries to do it because you've gambled both times and you didn't know Al Green would be returning the first time. And the second time you got lucky because Judy Chu, the democratic representative from California, got Covid. If she didn't get Covid, that bill, that process would have died again in the House.
[00:43:49] And so you gambled twice and you got lucky on the second try.
[00:43:56] That impeachment process is deader than dead in the Senate. And so if you're able to help borrow that in people's minds through know, which is sort of a major liberal leading news outlet, you go on CNN, you go on all these different national media outlets and sort of just keep telling people over and over again the narrative that you want the voters to have in their heads when they go out to the polls, then that will be a part of the thoughts of the voter. It's like, okay, you're going to have concerns about Biden's age, concerns that he might not make it through his second term. But if you're able to also burrow in the voters heads, know what you want them to believe about the Republican Party, they're going to be a lot more likely to hold a nose and vote for you because you might get them to think, oh, I don't want any of these candidates to be president, but given the choices that we have, I'd rather have person X than person Y. And if the campaign of person X is able to do that across the country, then you might be in a very good position to go ahead and win. The other thing I want to mention right now, and something that we'll go into much more detail in next week, is that the star witness for the House GOP's impeachment against Joe Biden or attempted impeachment. Alexander Smirnoff, he was found by the Department of Justice to be making a lot of the story up. And he got charged by the Department of Justice for lying to investigators. I mean, granted, I don't exactly think it's the best situation for House Republicans to be in. If your star witness was found by the DOJ, was found by another Trump appointed special counsel, mind you, to say, oh, yeah, this guy's lying through his teeth.
[00:45:53] That does bring into question about what Representative James Comer, the Republican of Kentucky, is doing. And that is something that will be developing throughout the week. And that is something know we'll be talking about next week. So on to the conclusion of my segment on the here thing.
[00:46:15] He's going to be testifying on March twelveth. It'll be nationally televised, and it's going to be going on in three to four weeks.
[00:46:26] That will be a very interesting story to tell once we get to that episode on that week.
[00:46:33] And that episode would probably be coming out March 16. So exactly one month from now, pretty much on the dot, I'll be talking about what was said there and sort of the political machinations at display and whether I think that here was doing what he did in order to politically indict Joe Biden. I'm not sure about that right now. There's a lot of things going for and against that line of thinking for me.
[00:47:09] But the only thing that I do know is that this not only accentuates concerns that the voters might have about Biden's age because it's national media repeating the same thing that they've repeated for months on repeat at this point. But this also might mark a shift towards the Biden campaign maybe being a bit more combative with the national media. It will be very interesting to see if they do, considering they admonish Donald Trump for also being combative with the national media. But it's something that we'll have to see in the months ahead because as I said earlier in this episode, we have nearly nine months to go before the presidential election. One of the only good things for the Biden campaign about this report, this wasn't in September, this wasn't October, this was in February.
[00:47:58] And you have a lot of time to work on changing voter perceptions to the point where you would be in a favored position to win and you have the money to do it, you're going to have the money to do it. You're going to be able to have quite the money spread against the republican party in the 2024 elections. It's just, are you going to be able to use it because you had the money spread in 2016 and you still lost. The Republicans got a trifecta in 2016. You have to make sure that at the very least, the republican party isn't able to turn water entwined for the second presidential election in three tries. So that's all I'm going to say about this whole robert here documents thing.
[00:48:47] We're going to go ahead and transition to some of the bills that the Alabama legislature has been advancing. So the first thing I want to talk about is Senate bill one. Garland Gudger, the republican senator from Coleman, sort of introduced this, and it would essentially criminalize some forms of assistance in absentee voting. This ended up getting amended a little bit, but still largely the same bill that was originally filed. It passed the Senate on a strictly party line vote, I think 26 to eight, I believe was the vote with the Republicans in favor of Democrats against. Garland Gudger says that this is about election integrity, preventing voter fraud and all that stuff. Democrats saying that. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says that there's basically no voter fraud in Alabama, and they believe that this is an attack on older, more rural voters who might not be able to make it to the polls, whether it's because they might not have gas money or whether just might not be able to stand out there in that line, whether they might not be able to walk over there.
[00:49:53] And so when this bill becomes law, because this is going to become law, Governor Radley supports it, and I see no reason for the House GOP to trash this bill.
[00:50:07] It will essentially be another restriction on the franchise in the state of Alabama, state that, by the way, absentee voting is not exactly the easiest, one of the hardest states to do absentee voting in. And this would only provide further restrictions upon an option which is already limited to so few Alabamians.
[00:50:32] There's also another Senate bill, a few Senate bills. I'm getting it after. Senate bill four is the thing that bans all non government flags from getting flown on public property. That's been delayed because the original bill filed by Senator Gerald Allen from Tuscaloosa, it got stricter, then it got delayed in committee. For whatever reason.
[00:50:56] It's not advanced out of committee yet, but over the next couple of weeks, we tracking it. The state legislature resumes session on Tuesday, I believe, so they'll be out of session for five days before they come back. So next week we'll probably have an update on Senate bill four. But critics of the bill say that this is only going to essentially ban privilege being flown on public property without the consent of the owner of said public property, which that's going to be something that will be following in the weeks to come. Senate bills seven and Senate bills ten also have something to do with democratic critics of these bills saying that this is just an attack on local libraries. In the case of Senate bill ten and the Alabama Department of Archives and History and Senate Bill seven, in acknowledging that queer people exist in Alabama and that Alabama does have an underrated queer history, and Senate bill seven essentially makes appointees at the Alabama Department of Orchasm history serve with the pleasure of the governor, making them political appointees pretty much, and allowing them to be fired at will and all this sort of stuff that ended up, I believe, passing Senator bill ten also did, which would essentially allow local governments to fire library appointees. Again, democratic critics politicize, I think this is politicizing the whole issue. They believe that Republicans are trying to move towards book bans in certain areas, especially considering the conflicts we've seen in Madison, in Prattville and Foley and Fair hope.
[00:52:44] There's been this talk about what is and what isn't adult content, what is and isn't suitable for children, and it's a sort of fight that we've been seeing for centuries. But it's definitely ramped up in regards to queer history and queer authorship in the past few years. And it's something that is, again, something we're going to be continuing to track, something that we're going to be continuing to follow in the weeks to come.
[00:53:16] Now, there has been something out of the House. It's not just the Senate that's in China legislate. There are a couple of house bills that ended up passing, I think, 151 and 152. And these bills passed out of the House with, I believe, over half the republican caucus in support and the entirety of the democratic caucus in support of such a bill, which would essentially legalize gambling and open a state lottery in the state of Alabama, I think 151, which would establish the state lottery, which would establish the legalization of sports betting and casino gaming. That passed on a 70 to 32 vote. And it was a similar passage for 152, which regards sort of the regulations in regards to this sort of thing, creating a gaming commission and whatnot. And what this bill does is put this up to a vote in November, constitutional amendment, which will legalize the sort of thing, put it up to the people of Alabama. It's up to the Senate now. And the interesting thing about this gambling thing, it's usually with the state law, it's like it's passed the Senate, but it's not been able to pass the House. Now it's past the House advocates on both sides.
[00:54:24] Sides. Whether you're Democrat or Republican, if you're advocating for this sort of thing, you're hoping that it could pass a senate. The governor supports these bills. And maybe Alabama can join a lot of the rest of the states in having a state lottery because I can tell you from know, people go to Mississippi and Florida to play a lottery, especially where, you know, from Mobile county, people go to Mississippi all the time, not just to grocery shop, especially where I'm from in, but you know, go play the lottery. When you're taking your vacations to Pensacola or to Disney World, you play the lottery there because you don't have that option in the state of Alabama. Maybe next, by this time next year when I'm speaking here, we might have that option. Who knows? But that's just sort of the update I wanted to give on the Alabama legislature and I'm going to go ahead and end this off with redistricting. Yes, there's been more redistricting news. I'm not going to focus on the New York stuff because let's be honest, the map that was proposed by the Independent Redistricting Commission is getting tossed by the House and Senate legislative Democrats. I should say assembly because New York has an assembly, not a house. But they're getting tossed because Democrats are trying to fight fire with fire. Let's be honest. They're trying to gerrymander the state even more than it already is. They're trying to draw out a lot of republican representatives in order to cancel out what the Republicans have done in North Carolina. It's just a brazen power grab.
[00:55:56] But that's the justification they'll give. They'll give a justification about upstate people needing better representation and whatnot. But I think everyone knows the Democrats know that they are trying to draw Republicans, but they view it as sort of if North Carolina Republicans can do it, then we can do the same thing. I want to focus on Wisconsin because there's been a couple of interesting developments that have gone on in this case. So I believe I've discussed earlier that the state legislative maps were ruled against Wisconsin state constitution for three vote partisan lines. And so they sent it back to the legislature to make new maps. But they also recommended an outside agency say, hey, look at all these different proposals and tell us which ones we've best suited to be constitutionally eligible.
[00:56:51] As far as the different requirements, which considers fairness, VRA, which proportionality, compactness, they view all the proposals by certain Democrats and democratic affiliated groups as not being that different from one another. They viewed the two republican maps as just being stealth gerrymanders, especially the one from one of the outside groups.
[00:57:16] I was like, hey, this looks clean, but this is still a partisan gerrymander in favor of the republican party. So the legislative Republicans, because Wisconsin's legislature is controlled by Republicans, ever since Scott Walker came in, they did a red map. They gerrymandered the state to, oh, lord, those maps are not pretty. And completely gerrymandered, like 2018. I think a lot of people who follow politics will know, like, Democrats won the popular vote in the Wisconsin legislature very easily, but Republicans got like 63 seats compared to Democrats 35 or something like that. That's the sort of thing that you're able to see.
[00:57:55] And as far as Wisconsin goes, they've not exactly had a full democracy in their state government for a while now. And a lot of people are now trying to change that. Wisconsin Supreme Court is trying to change that. And Robin Voss, the speaker of the House, Wisconsin state House, you see, it's the writing on the know, they're like, okay, they're going to try and pass Tony Eavers's maps because those are the maps out of any democratic backed map that are most favorable to Republicans to where Republicans could still maybe win a, could still be favored to win a majority in the, all these. You would have all these competitive districts that Democrats would have to go inch perfect in in order to get a majority. And the Republicans think, okay, we can fight them on that.
[00:58:46] And so Republicans like, okay, we're going to go ahead and pass these maps.
[00:58:57] And Democrats are like, you've not been fighting for fear maps for all this time, and now you want to pass eavers as maps. That's why a lot of Democrats voted against it, like, pretty much all but a few did, because they're like, okay, they think this is just a ploy to say, okay, these vats are passed. Then Wisconsin Republicans would immediately sue and try to get them delayed for the 2024 elections.
[00:59:20] And so there is a push now by Democrats to say, hey, this is just Robert Voss trying to play his dirty tricks again. Please veto these maps. Tony Evers, I know these are your own, but please let the court decide, because they believe that the courts would give a map that would be more favorable to Democrats and would allow Democrats a very good opportunity to flip the state house and to flip the state senate in particular. And so that's where we are right now. I'm recording this at a time where we just got news that this is not related to anything that we've been discussing. But I do want to give this news, and it's sort of a live reaction, that Alexey Navalny has died in prison. According to the prison service of Russia, he was an opposition politician that he's just been jailed. He had been serving sentences in a penal colony. This is to the Wall Street Journal. He'd been serving in the penal colony, amounting to more than 30 years on various charges.
[01:00:27] He's been subject to torture from the russian government and all this stuff. He had died at 47 years old. According to the russian news agency tasks, the cause of his death was still being established. We're probably going to find out that he was probably beaten or poisoned to death or something like that, or a diast starvation or any of these other issues that often happens in russian prisons, especially considering the political prisoners. But, yeah, just wanted to give my live reaction on that because that news just broke as I was about to end this podcast. But, yeah, just a little quick reaction there that Alexey Navalny, the most famous russian opposition politician who has been jailed for his opposition, has now passed away at the age of 47. So we're going to be finding a lot more probably in the weeks to come, in the hours to come.
[01:01:25] By the time this podcast gets released, we might know how Navalny died. But this has been season three, episode two of Pulse of the Nation. We'll be back every week. We'll be back every Saturday at 04:00 p.m. To publish everything, all the happenings in local, state, and national politics over the course of a week. I'm Brayden Vick, and this is the pulse of the nation.
[01:01:57] Any opinions expressed in this program are those of the host and do not represent the thoughts or opinions of 90.7 WVUA or the University of Alabama W v UAFM Tuscaloosa.
