Hey, Brian, Hi Katie, Brian, that song is for you because it's a wonderful day here at the pod because the mid term elections are right around the corner on Tuesday, November six and it's all about the mid terms today on our podcast. Brian and I couldn't be more excited. I'm like a kidna candy store, Katie. Most polls, as you know, are favoring Democrats to take control of the House and the Republicans will likely keep control of the Senate. But then again, after two thousand sixteen, who really knows, right nobody, Well, if that does happen, Katie, if the projections are right, it would really change the balance of power in this country. And on the off chance that the Democrats take the House and the Senate, well things will look a lot different for President Trump and for American politics. We've been hearing so much about the mid terms in the news the days, it's sometimes hard to cut through the opinions and memes and downright vitriol to actually understand what's happening in all these races. So today we've invited Claire Malone, a senior political writer at five thirty eight, to give us a picture of where all these races stand and which ones we should pay attention to on Tuesday, and also to give us her view on the big picture, Brian kind of what are the stakes of this election? And then we're going to talk to a wonderful author, Michael Lewis. He has a new book out called The Fifth Risk, which is actually very relevant to the election next week. Michael Lewis, of course wrote The Big Short, he wrote Moneyball, and now for The Fifth Risk, he spent months talking to former and current employees of the federal government and he believes that the Trump administration is wreaking havoc from within. In his view, either political hacks are in charge or appointees more concerned about self interests than the public interests. We've got a lot to cover today. So oh wait a second, Brian, are you hearing that or is it just in my head? It's just in your head. No, I'm actually hearing that. That's right, it's our new theme music. We've given our show sound a bit of a facelift. No funny remarks here, by the way, you should say to the tabloid reporters, that's the only facelift that's happened around here. But I'm pumpch and we want to say a big thank you to Jared Arnold, who composed the new music for us. Yeah. I really like it. It's it's sounding, it's sounding kind of groovy. What do you think? Well, I try to avoid using the word groovy. I haven't used that since, but I would give it a ninety eight for dancing. Anyway, enough about our new music, Let's get to our conversation with Claire Malone from five thirty eight. We began by asking her what's really at stake in next week selections for people who aren't like us, who haven't been glued to their seats paying attention to every healthy people, Yeah, normal people. In other words, what is its stake for these elections? Well, uh, midterm elections are pretty much always a reaction to the party who's in power, and the Republicans have a lot of control over the government. So they have the White House, they have the House of Representatives, and they have the Senate. And I think is is probably no surprise to anyone in America. Um, we're in a highly polarized partisan period of American life, and we have a president who has played into that quite a bit. And so, UM, I think when we talk about the stakes of this election, we are talking about, for getting nitty gritty, you know, the possibility that, you know, if Democrats theoretically retained control of both houses of Congress, they could potentially impeach the president or you know, try to remove him from office. So that's I think the if you're going for the thirty thousand foot up view of things, that's what's at stake. We're talking about all House seats, thirty three Senate seats, thirty six governorships, state legislatures, basically a lot of a lot of bots. Yes, I'm glad you brought up state legislatures, and there's also attorney general's racist. There's a lot of state level seats that are at play here that we don't talk as much about. Um. But right now, it's looking like the Democrats have a pretty good chance of taking back back the House of Representatives. So we have a forecasting model and we give them about, let's say, an eight percent shot of taking back the House of Representatives. The Senate is kind of flipped where the Democrats have about only chance of taking the Senate. And I think you can kind of if you want to look back two years to the split that we saw in the popular vote and the electoral college, they're sort of mirror in the patterns that we're seeing in the House of Representatives in the Senate. So the House of Representatives that's parallel is the popular vote, which the Democrat Hillary Clinton one by three million, and then you've got the Senate, which we can compare to the electoral college. And and it's interesting because the Senate sort of plays to Republicans advantages in these rural states where votes are I guess more effectively economically distributed. We talk a about that where people aren't clustering in certain places. Yeah, we will. You just explain that a little bit for people. Give us a quick civics lesson if you could clear on on Gerrymanderin and sort of why the Senate is so different than House races. Yeah, well, I think we always want to start and talk about the way that Americans have self sorted. Um, so Democrats have tended to in the past few election cycles, past couple of decades, be in big cities or in suburban areas surrounding big cities. And the reason why that why Republicans have um an advantage in the electoral College and in the Senate map is that their votes are in there all over, even in small states. So, uh, they might win a bunch of small counties in North Dakota and that counts for a lot. A Senate seat in North Dakota is worth just as much as a Senate seat in California. And the appeal right now of Republicans seems to be being received better by people in these x urban or you know, rural rural places, and that's a problem obviously the Democrats are trying to kind of claw their way back on. So if you want to think about it in terms of waves, people have talked about this election potentially being a wave election for the Democrats. There are a couple of sea walls that the Republicans have built up to protect themselves from these waves. One is just because of the way the House seats are drawn and in some cases jerrymander to benefit one party. The Democrats have to win the House popular vote by about six points, which is like a near landslide margin in order to win control of the House. And in the Senate, it's not jerrymandered because the state borders are what they've always been, But North Dakota has two Senate seats, Wyoming has two Senate seats, etcetera. And California has two Senate seats, and so there's a there's a bit of a bias there as well. But didn't things start to change a bit even just a couple of weeks ago for the Democrats? And why well, things have sort of as the as the last month of a campaign kind of comes in, you start to see basically partisanship kick in um so on the House side of things that that got kind of a little bit better for for Democrats, and it got a little bit worse for them in the Senate, where you saw states like Nevada, states like Tennessee where you have a pretty centrist Democrat, Phil Brettison, who's the former governor of Tennessee, running for a Senate seat, and he was a pretty popular guy and that race was pretty close. But you're starting to see voters sort of kick in and say, well, I kind of like the guy from the opposite party, but I'm gonna put on my team jersey and wear it and vote for that person in election day. And that's sort of what's showing up in polls. So you are seeing a little bit of a return to what we generally expect. If it's a red state, you're probably going to think that, Well, a lot of those undecided voters that were getting pulled in late September, they might be returning home and saying, well, I'm gonna vote for my party, even if I'm not loving what the president is doing. And I wanted to ask you about early voting because someone told me over the weekend that early voting wasn't looking great in terms of turnout for Latino voters and millennials. Is somebody just saying that to me without any any real knowledge helped me out here. So we have kind of a five thirty eight line where we say early voting there isn't actually any real proof that it gives us a lot of information about, you know, who's going to win an election, Democratic, Republican, because it doesn't. You know, all you know is the early voters. You can tell what their party registration is, we don't know who they voted for, and a lot of times, as we saw in where a lot of Democrats voted for Trump, people cross party lines. But I do think that we are probably going to see. I mean, unfortunately, certain demographics in this country haven't been reached by the political community. The outreach community. Latinos, I think, are one that Democrats had hoped in to really turn out and say the Southwest, and even with Trump's inflammatory rhetoric, they really didn't turn out. And I think that's sort of what people are thinking might happen this year. Although I will say in general it is predicted to be a high turnout election on both sides, Democrat and Republican. What about millennials. It seems to me that young people are so energized, at least from everything I see in my social media feed, which maybe I'm not getting a completely clear perspective. But what about those numbers. I don't think we really know um and I think we kind of have to rely this is the five eight thing. We kind of have to rely on historical trends, and generally younger voters aren't a constituency that you can necessarily count on to turn out in elections. I will say, going back again, I'm not going to make any predictions because it is going to be a high turnout election. That's what's being sort of forecasted from these polls where they you sort of posters ask about your enthusiasm to vote, and the enthusiasm to vote is extremely high, so perhaps we will see higher numbers of millennials voting. Are you a little gunshy because of two thousand sixteen over there at eight? No, I think, I mean, I think, I will say I think. The one thing that is annoying to interview people from the site is that we always kind of do this thing well where we'll say, well, we can't predict it, because but I will say that we did rethink some of the ways that we present our probabilities for people. Is kind of a big with Claire. Well we are we will say that we were the least wrong of anyone congratulation. We should fact check that, and we should actually also explain to our listeners what these forecasts really means. So two years ago, five thirty eight said Hillary Clinton had a seventy one percent chance to win the presidency. Now that was notably lower than some of the others. The New York Times said, Huffington Post really went out there and said, but how do these models work and how do they differ? Yeah? Sure, so, um, the way that the five thirty model works is that we take all of the public polling that's available and we put it together, and we waited based on how good we think the polster is, so better posters get a heavier weight in the model. So we take polls and so that's that's the poll component. Well, also add in whether or not their incumbent. That helps a person if they're an incumbent and they're running. We take into account how partisan a state is. We take into account fundraising, how much a candidate has raised. We smush all those things together in a model. And Um, what I always like to point out is was a really interesting election. Yes, we were, and all of the other models were off. And what was the reason why polls were so off in the election is that, if you'll remember, Donald Trump had huge media reach, he had name recognition, and he motivated a lot of people who had fallen off the voter rolls to come out and vote, and so polls missed a lot of those people. And so we did have a polling problem in And um, yeah, I think there's a lot of you know, a lot of us ineen who are trying to make people basically more I guess literate readers of polls and to know we're not pulling us out of nowhere. And we also want you to know that there is a possibility that this is wrong. This is how probabilities work. So but it is I think it's a learning process for for all of us to make people better news consumers more. Literally, what you meant two years ago was if you were to run this election with all the information and data we have ten times, seven out of ten times Hillary Clinton would win and three out of ten times Donald Trump would win. And so it's not like your quote wrong when you say seventy one percent chance to win and she loses. It's that this was one of those events where it was more likely than not that she would win, but she actually didn't. Yeah, And that's and so this year in our model, we've tried to switch it from making the big bold number instead of it having b oh, it's an eight percent chance, you know, we'll try to say, oh, it's a two and six chance, or it's a three and ten chance that this person will win, just to give people because I think that when we talk about gambling odds, that's kind of the vernacular that we use and so we want to try to make it clearer to people what we're saying. When we do that, Let's talk about recent events layer, because it has been a insane news cycle. As you know, we had the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. We have the pipe bombs that were sent to a number of Democratic officials, philanthropist George Soros CNN, and now most recently, the massacre at that synagogue in Pittsburgh. How do you measure the impact those events have on voters? Yeah, I guess I'll start with Kavanaugh, since it's a bit easier to parse the Kavanaugh hearing. Certainly senators who are voting on the Kavanaugh hearing, some of them in red states. Those red state Democrats had to make tough choices that I think probably for some of them, let's say Heidi hide Camp in North Dakota, probably endangered their their chances on the on the Senate map um and she's someone who's a pretty moderate Democrat. You know, she's from a state that really likes Trump, and she's one of those people that's really been trying to sort of say, run a campaign that says, listen, I'm first and foremost in North Dakotin. I'm not here for Pelosian schumers, a da right as a kind of a response to a lot of Republican tack ads that try to tie red state Democrats to unpopular figures um. And so Heidi hide Camp was sort of chugging along in a re election effort that was, you know, it's a hard state to win. And when the Kavanaugh vote came up, I think she would be open and saying it was a sort of a wrenching decision for her to have to make, because on the one hand, I think she's a woman who was not in favor of this guy who had been accused of um of sexual assault. And on the other hand, I think she knew it was a little bit of a you know, it was gonna it was gonna really diminished the chances that she would be able to win her race in that state, and she made the choice. She voted against Kavanaugh, and it has unleashed, you know, a string of basically attacks against her that says, listen, this this person is not who you are North Dakota. So do you all measure For example, you know, I I spent the weekend in Virginia with my daughter and we spent the night with a friend of mine from high school and we were talking about the Kavanaugh hearings and she was troubled by the way he was treated and felt, you know, sympathetic to his outrage when he testified. And I said, hey, you're one of those white suburban women growing up, you know, in Arlington, Virginia, and that's where we were. Who is you know, supporting perhaps Republican candidates because of what happened to Brett Kavanaugh? Do you are you able to to get that specific in terms of how you're looking at at segments of the electorate, so that doesn't go into the model per se, but you you've hit that nail on the head when you when you bring up demographics that we watch as ones that are shifting post So if we take I'm gonna I'm gonna make a wild guest that your your friend might be college educated, she might be white, and those people, white college educated women are kind of the new swing voters. They used to vote Republican pretty steadily, and now I think post Trump, there maybe in the middle like true into Pennant voters or their trending Democratic. So we I think we'll be watching for women in general and how they vote on election day, but college educated white women in particular, because their constituency that was traditional Republican that more and more seemed to moving over to the Democratic side of things. Well, this was a reality check for me, though, because I think that there are a lot of women who sympathized with him and Brian. I'm curious in Los Angeles, you know that hotbed of conservativism, if you've run against run up against um women who share my friend's point of view. I actually had a conversation with one woman I know who wouldn't tell me what her personal views are, but said that she was convinced that other women would sympathize with Kavanaugh because we've all seen women who make false allegations to get something, and it was hard for me to imagine what Dr Ford would get in this situation. And I mean, last time I checked, she wasn't even allowed to or able to go back to her own home. But I think we've seen in the data that the Kavanaugh hearings energized a lot of Republican voters who might not have voted or and motivated some right leaning independent voters to stick with the Republicans. Yeah, I think that's fair because women, these these you know, college educated white women were probably already a more activated constituency to begin with. So the perceived mistreatment of Kavanaugh, I think, yeah, that certainly has played a factor. Now we kind of have the X factor of these really terrible events of the past week basically, and I we're not quite sure how these are going to affect things. I mean, you know, potentially they could have an effect on Trump's approval rating, and that is often a sign of how people might vote in their congressional races. But it's just you know, I don't mean this is sound flip, but model does not take into account I hate crimes. You know how that factors into American elections, And unfortunately that's something that's happening right now. And doesn't that also, Claire, take a while to seep into the public consciousness and to be reflected in polling data. It does take a little while to seep in. So we're recording this the week before the election. I'm guessing that pollsters will be putting out polls into the field. They probably started last week after the bombings, and so we might see some some data on how people are perceiving those events visa VI the election. Trump's comments in the wake of the synagogue shooting were I found them totally odd, um, And I'm not sure how how people will react to that. But you're right, it does take a little bit of time for these things to seep in, and um, you know, the election is a week away, so we might end up seeing some of those results. Frankly, the day of aren't politics local? I mean, do they really? Is it really a direct reaction to the presidency? In other words, if I live in a state, couldn't I say, I don't really like Donald Trump, but I do like that, you know, my senator. That happens less and less. We call it ticket splitting, um, And because Americans are so much more partisan, we see a lot more people just voting straight down the ticket, Republican or Democratic. There is the old truism, right that all politics is local, but I think more and more it's become nationalized, in part because this was happening pre Trump. But I do think Trump is a He has a talent for driving new cycles, and I think that that is something that that propelled him into office and continues to dominate our politics new cycle. Overwhelmingly, we've become much more like a parliamentary system where people aren't paying attention as they used to a generation ago, to local factors, local candidates. They're really just voting for what team they want and charge in Washington, particularly in these House and Senate races, I want to ask you about one candidate in particular who's been perhaps the star of this cycle, better or Rourke. In Texas, he has just a one in five chance to win. I haven't seen a single poll with him in the lead. He's usually mid to high single digits behind. Have journalists given voters a false sense of his chances, and especially donors who poured more than seventy million dollars into his campaign. Yeah, So I wrote a piece about Beatto about a month ago that was a little bit premised off this Brian and in my lead was basically the number of times he's been compared to a Kennedy And I think it was a hilarious piece. Everybody should read it, by the way, But I think that there's something real there, which is the midterm elections are I guess, distinctly unsexy as far as there's tons of races, there's not one, one or two candidates that you could follow along with. And O'Rourke is young, He's a Democrat making a play in Texas, so there's sort of a substantive political story there. But I do think he is a telegenic person running against Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent, who is not a particularly beloved figure even by Republicans. Lindsay Graham had a great line that you know, you could you could shoot him on the floor of the Senate and none of his colleagues would would convict the person who shot him. So he's it's it's a he's not a popular guy, let's say. But I think that the media has a little bit hyped up his chances, perhaps to the to the regular reader or media consumer, because of these attractive telligen he's kind of the it guy of the campaign. Yeah, and I think what I do think is really real and something to be taken seriously about Beata o rourke. Listen, I think that he probably won't win the Senate election, but he's raised huge, huge amounts of money Barack Obama two thousand seven financial quarter kind of money, and the comparison to a former president is on purpose because I think a lot of people say, listen, Donald Trump is a celebrity. He was a celebrity before he was the president. Maybe you need someone who has that kind of ineffable our power if you want to beat Trump. I mean, you know, as much as people want to say that voters care more about policy than they do about politics and the things that seem superficial, it's not true. I think people I think politics is a lot more fairmonic, and more like like dating or tribalism than it is referring to pair mony. I am, I am Katie. But but what I mean by that is people vote for the person that they like, the person that they think is kind of like, you know, the person they have a beer with, right, yeah, exactly. And I think that the person I think they want to watch on on a screen, or the person or the person for Democrats who they find inspiring. And I think that the one thing about a Rourks campaign is it has been a positive campaign. You know, he's a demographically a person who could perhaps be more appealing to people outside of Texas. He's a young white man with progressive values, which which might be more palatable to you know Obama Trump voters, which is what we refer to, you know, voters who voted for President Obama but then switched voted for Trump. So there's a lot of a lot of things to think through with bouto Rourke, and I think he represents more than just his Senate campaign in Texas. Let's just run through a few more campaigns. O'Brien is going to be so excited. I'm excited about the first one. And this is the Senate race in in Tennessee, and Marcia Blackburn may have to shake it off. Do you like that? You guys? That was very clever. I just pulled that out him. Well. Taylor Swift made a big difference when she finally came out of her a political cocoon and spoke very candidly about her feelings on Instagram, my favorite social media platform. Tennessee. Yes she lives in Tennessee. And then all these people yes, and all these people came out and registered to vote. So what's happening there? Claire. I mentioned Phil Brettison, the Democratic candidate running against Marcia Blackburn a little earlier. That's a really interesting race because Tennessee is a super red state. It's very Republican. Marcia Blackburn has been a longtime congresswoman and she really well she actually goes by Congressman Marsha Blackburn. That's her official title. UM, and she sort of took on the Tea Party mantle. So she's a very sort of popular, super conservative candidate. UM. And Phil Bretta is in is you know, he used to be the mayor of Nashville. He brought the Tennessee Titans in into the state. He was governor, and he was a sort of popular moderate governor Bill Clinton we're running in the mid terms, he'd probably be something like Phil Breda is in, like a southern moderate Democrat. You know, we've we've got it as a pretty close race for a red state and part because of Bret is is basically an incumbent. He's really well known to the state. UM and he's a popular guy. And so we're basically it's almost like the forces of partisanship, super red, super Republican versus the forces of I guess personality and all politics is local? Can bretas in win on all politics is local platform in a state that is very very partisan. Well, and another interesting little wrinkle in Tennessee. As red as the state is, it is never elected before a right wing Republican to statewide office, to the Senate, or for good. I think it's a good point. Yeah, let's talk about Missouri Claire McCaskill versus Josh Holly. Claire McCaskill is the incumbent Democrat and Josh Holly is the the attorney general in that state. It's an interesting one. I mean, Claire McCaskill has had some luck that's come her way. Uh. The last time she ran, she ran against Todd Aiken And if you remember Todd Aikin's name, it's because you remember he talked about legitimate rape, which did not play well. Uh. And she won that election against the ultimate oxy moron, Yes exactly. Um. And then she had a little bit of quote unquote luck this year because Missouri had a governor scandal. Eric Grayten's who was the governor, had to resign because of a potential sexual assault that he was accused of. So Missouri has had a weird political year. Um. And so I think Claire McCaskill was doing pretty well because the Republicans in the state, frankly weren't looking good. They weren't a good light, but it has. It's a red state. Trump won that state and Josh Holly and Clara McCaskill have basically been battling it out over healthcare. We did a podcast in five last week where we talked about, you know, the number one campaign ad topic is healthcare, and that's what Claire McCaskill is running on in that state. And Josh Holly is one of the attorneys general who is signed on to this make Obamacare illegal, and so he is in a bit of a tight spot in a state where where healthcare is a big issue. But a lot of Republicans O'Brien, right, I mean, I've been reading increasingly that Republicans have co opted the healthcare conversation are basically, uh, presenting themselves as the candidates who are going to preserve and save healthcare and pre existing coverage for pre existing conditions, etcetera. And on the other hand, they want to dismantle Obamacare. So frankly, I'm confused, Well, they're attempting to do that because healthcare has turned from a good issue for them in all ast mid term four years ago to a really bad issue for them this time. Under the category of you don't know what you've got until it's gone. A lot of voters are Mitchell just pandering the always seemed to go Brian UM. So a lot of voters are concerned about the protections that they've come to enjoy under the Affordable Care Act going away, and so the Republicans are making a big effort to say no, no, no no, we're for preserving UH protections for people with pre existing conditions. If Claire mccaskell can't win in Missouri, probably no Democrat can win for federal office, at least in this environment in Missouri. Because she's run a really effective campaign. Um. She's a very good senator, and I think if she were to lose, it would be basically just that they want a supporter of Donald Trump's in the Senate. Claire. Let's talk about the governor's race in Florida between Andrew Gillam and ron De Santis. Andrew Gillam is doing pretty well, so so the background. Andrew Gillam is the is the Democrat, he is the black mayor of Tallahassee. UM, and Rhonda Santis is a pretty right wing Republican and they are locked in a race that is looking increasingly bad for De Santists, I think in part because of his his pretty far right policies. Florida is a purple state. Gil Him and De Santis were both kind of surprises in their primaries. Then the Democratic side there were a lot, you know, a lot of centrists that people thought would win. And gil Him is kind of trying to run as an outsider. So I think that's appealing to a lot of people. And actually the governor's race might have cascading effects on the Senate race because Bill Nelson is the Democratic and coming in the Senate and he's running against Republican Governor Rick Scott for the seat. And some people are saying these are both older white men. Some people are saying that gill Him might actually turn out certain constituencies that wouldn't that Bill Nelson, the white older man, wouldn't necessarily be able to get on his own. What's interesting, immediately out of the gate, as the general election began, De Santis mixed up um in racial politics um and arguably it was his own fault because he used the phrase, let's not monkey up the progress that we've made in Florida with a liberal governor and a lot of people took that to be a racial attack on Andrew Gilham, and it's basically not gone very smoothly for de Santis since then. Well, Andrew Gillham was so effective I think in the debate and that sound bite got played over and over again where he said, I'm not saying you're a racist, I'm saying racist, think you're a racist. Good line. Let's talk about Georgia, the race between Stacy Abrahams, who would be the first black female governor in history, and Brian Kemp. There's been so much debate. I saw that President Carter spoke out about this and said that Brian Kemp, who is the Secretary of State for the State of Georgia, should step down from that role during the campaign because he controls a lot of the vote. Dean and how it's carried out. Um, so help us understand that, Claire. Yeah, So that the controversy in Georgia is that it has a pretty restrictive voting law and a lot of African American voters that their registrations now have problems and they might not be able to vote in the election. And what President Carter was saying is basically that Brian Kemp is not an impartial administrator of this election and that he shouldn't be able to administer it. Now, what's interesting about Georgia is one it's got these racial dynamics, both in the voting stuff but also in the in the candidates themselves, with Stacy being black and Brian Kemp being a pretty far right Republican. He's also white, white guy. What I think is interesting about this campaign is she is trying to win a southern state as a black woman with a kind of new proposition, which is she's saying, I am going to register and turn out a whole bunch of minorities in addition to winning the moderate swing voters. Those white college educated women said my friend like your friend, um, And that's that's kind of a new proposition for the South a little bit. I mean, you saw a little bit with Doug Jones in in Alabama and that special election, and I went and hung out with him in the spring and for a profile I did, and Jones is, you know, he's really trying to maintain ties to the black community because they turned out in huge Obama level numbers for him. Black women, Yes, exactly, And in order for him to, you know, when he's when he's up for re election again in he's going to need to have that huge turnout of those black voters. So the South we're seeing, you know, potentially with Abram's a bit of a new dynamic of the kind of candidate that Democrats see as winnable. Because I think that's what's different with Southern Democrats in those Deep South states is often I think black populations have felt like they don't have a viable candidate on a state level that they want to turn out for and vote for um And so I think that's what those are the that's the different dynamic that you're seeing with Stacy Abrams. When you say problems with their registration or with something associated with their ability to vote, what do you mean by that? So Georgia's law has it that if anything on your registration card doesn't match your I D. So it could be a typo in your name or a number is off on your address, then it invalidates the voter registration. So if you're thinking that that has echoes to old Southern poll laws, you are you are right. It's an incredibly restrictive law, and I believe Kemp was, you know, basically caught on tape at a fundraiser saying I'm gonna lose if if all these people vote, which I think is probably where President Carter's comments come from. A bit that's quite a quite a skewed thing for a Secretary of State to say. So. So, Georgia certainly has a long history of restrictive voting laws and it continues in well, and restrictive voting laws could be to go back to my metaphor from the beginning, that the kind of the third Sea wall against a democratic wave that Republicans have put up that particularly in states that they've controlled for some period of time, they can shape the electorate based on who's allowed to vote and who isn't um. But you know, those two governors races are really interesting because they go to a larger debate that's happening within the Democratic Party about where the party should go. Particularly in advance of Gilham and Abrams are both considered sort of mobilization candidates. That is, they're more about exciting the base, getting large numbers of millennials African Americans to turn out, with a more explicitly progressive agenda and that's been kind of the way they've been covered by the media. But I would say I think there's a piece that's missing, which is that Gilham and Abrams have both also spent a lot of time and effort trying to win over white, moderate swing voters because they both have to do that because the Democratic base alone is not big enough to win in either of these states. And so I think it's a little bit of a kind of a misperception that they're just doing one and not the other. But anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now. Finally, Claire, if Amocrats win the House, which it looks fairly likely, is that a yes, How will it change Washington? I mean, you know, Washington has had basically one party rule during the Trump administration, which means Republicans have controlled the House, the Senate, in the White House. So I think if Democrats win the House, they will be going gung ho on oversight, so you know, looking into Trump's taxes, looking into abuse at certain agencies. The e p A jumps to mind with Scott Pruitt's uh sort of financial mismanagement. I think there's going to be a lot more vocal oversight of what the Trump administration is doing, and perhaps you know, investigations will be open. So I think that's one thing. I mean, I think that Nancy Pelosi, if she were sitting here at this table, would say, we do not want to impeach the president. And this goes to, you know, Brian's point about alienating voters. I think people remember or how divisive the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton were. I think people feel impeachment would almost be a bridge too far. There will certainly be Democrats who will be calling to bring articles impeachment against President Trump, but I'm not sure that the Democratic leadership wants to go that far and alienate a bunch of people that they need to win over in twice. So the Senate has to convict, right, convict. I mean, so isn't it sort of just um kind of a pr stunt. Yeah, it's a base it's a base rally. I think it's a base rallying effort. Pre that would be the argument for for bringing up impeachment, and I think the counter argument, which again Pelosi vouches for, is listen, we can't do this right now. We need to win. Yes, we need to win the base, but we also need to win Obama Trump voters in the Midwest. Claire Malone from Claire, thanks so much. This was so much fun. I haven't seen Brian this happy in months, honestly, Oh my god, it was. This was very big for me. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. It was very fun. From my into. Before we take a break, a quick announcement. This week is our pre mid terms show, so naturally next week will be our post mid term show. Gosh, Brian, I don't know what you're gonna do with yourself as part of that show. By the way, we want you, our listeners, to call in and tell us what you think. We really want to know what's on your mind, what questions you have about what it all means. So if you'd like to talk with Katie or me, which is hard to believe, but mostly if you'd like to talk to Katie, call nine to nine to two four four six three seven, leave a voicemail anytime between now and Wednesday morning, and we'll select a few of you to be on next week's show. In your voicemail, make sure to tell us where you're from, why you're hauling, and your phone number. So that we can call you back. We can't wait to hear from you again. That number is nine to nine, two to four, four, six, three seven, and we'll be back with Michael Lewis to talk about the decay of the federal government. Yep, b that's right after this. Now, before we talk with Michael Lewis, we have an important message for you, and that message is it's fun when everybody v O T S. That's my new voting song. Brian, Yeah, Katie, I think what you're saying is it's really important that everybody votes and that they sing along with me. Research shows that the majority of young people still are not sure whether they'll vote. Can you believe that? What is wrong with you people? Brian? Does that mean you're not sure yet? Well, I don't think I'm still considered a young person anymore. Sadly, anyway, if I am, I'm in the minority because I am already a positive that I'm going to vote, and I even have a plan to do so. And how self confident do I sound? You sound very confident and I am as well. I plan to vote. But I get it some of you young people don't know where to vote. You're not sure what's on the ballot. You don't want to vote the wrong way, or maybe you just think your vote doesn't matter. Well, surprise, surprise, We're here to tell you it does matter. Look at two thousand, look at one vote per precinct can make all the difference. And lucky for all of us, our friends at Crooked Media have launched votes save America, a step by step guide to answer all of your questions. On votes save America dot com, you can check if you're registered and register if you're not. You can see what the rules are in your state about registration deadlines and voter i D. You can learn more about candidates and close races, and you can look at a ballot guide that explains what is on your specific ballot in plain English. So visit votes save America dot com and remember to vote. On November six, we turned out to Michael Lewis. He's written bestsellers like The Blindside, The Big Short, and Moneyball, all of which were adapted for the big screen. By the way, Michael has a knack for taking a topic that seems boring or complicated, like statistics in baseball, for example, and making it very exciting and relevant and that's exactly what he's done in his latest book, which is called The Fifth Risk. The new book tackles the decay of the federal government under the Trump administration. So we'll talk with Michael about why this could be really, really dangerous for the world, for our country, and how it could be stopped. Michael Lewis, Welcome to the podcast. We're thrilled to have you here. Pleasure to be here. I know that your book tries to pull back the curtain and really show people with the impact of two years of the Trump administration has had on the federal government. And you really talk about the importance of the transition from the very beginning as there's a transition from one administration to another. So tell us why the this period of time is so critical. Well, the United States government, unlike most governments in the world, has a layer of leadership. It's politically import appointed four thousand or so people who are actually run the place are appointed by the president. And what you have after a presidential election, assuming that the incumbent doesn't win, is someone's leaving with their four thousand people who have been running the place for a while, and someone's coming in with their four thousand people, many of whom have never been there before. There's this transfer of knowledge that is absolutely critical, and it is has nothing to do with political ideology. It's so sort of how to So you go into the Department of Energy and they say, we managed the nuclear arsenal. Here's how you test stomic weapons without actually blowing one up. Important. In fact, you can think of the federal government as like this huge portfolio of risks that are being managed, and many of which we don't even think about. And the idea is that you know, before the election, well before the election, the candidates of both major parties have hundreds of people waiting to rush in the day after the election, because you really only have from from that day until the inauguration. And then by a law, the people who have left are not allowed to get in touch with the people who are there. They can be solicited. And the thing that interested me in the story in the first place, because I did not have a native interest in the Department of Agriculture, you know, I mean, they didn't occur to me that would be material, was that the Obama administration, partly because there was a law requiring them to do it, but partly because Bush at handed the government off so well to Obama had to go on to great links to create essentially the best course ever created in how the government works. Thousand people across the government for the better part of the year putting together briefings. So if you got made secretary of the Interior, you would be briefed by people who really understood how the Interior Department worked, and you would be hit the ground running. They were expecting the day after the election for hundreds of people to come in. So let's let's back up one day before that, those meetings uh to election night, and you tell this really incredible story about Mike Pence and his wife, which is really indicative of how the Trump people felt about their chances of winning and may explain the chaos of the transition. So this is actually right. The key to the whole thing is that they weren't running to win. They didn't think they were going to win. Bannon would take exception to this. Bannon may have actually, in his heart of hearts, believed it, but most everybody involved with it thought, including Trump, was not prepared to win. So they had not written an acceptance speech. They had written a concession speech. That explains why a lot of people are willing to go along for the ride, and how they go along for the ride because they aren't thinking this man is going to actually run the federal government. They're thinking he's building a brand. I think it's what they were thinking. And I'm I'm building my brand being associated with it for some period of time. I'm not actually preparing to govern in the country. The Mike Pence story was I mean Karen Pence, Mike's wife. Mike apparently leaned over to kiss her when Pennsylvania was called for Trump and it was clear Trump's could be president, and and and she says, pushed him away and says, you got what you wanted, Mike, leave me alone. And yeah, no, I don't. She was the people in the room. It's something that really makes feelings about winning. And Trump himself had been playing the game. It's like he really is a guy whose bluff is called. He had not taken seriously the idea he had to take over this operation. But Chris Christie had been appointed head of the transition, and what happened right after election night to him. So we really need to know is what happened before because Christie had seen in the newspaper that they were required to prepare for the transition and that there were federal resources of ail able to do it. And he called Trump and said, let me do it, because he said, I'm not gonna be president, but the next of us thing that's kind of planned to be president. And this isn't my view, this is a view of just independent referees like that. Christie did a superb job. He got lots of really qualified people ready to go into the agencies, and had also vetted a lot of the people who might have be plausible candidates for the top jobs in the government. So they vetted out Mike Flynn, for example. And it's all ready to go in spite of Donald Trump's actual hostility to the whole operation because they were he thought they were spending his money and then and that he wasn't gonna win, and he wasn't gonna win, right, so why bother right? And Bannon said to Trump, well, if you fire the transition, how's that gonna look on Morning Joe. It's gonna look like you're given up already. And so he said, all right, I just don't spend very much money. But ultimately he did fire Chris Christmas, So the day after the election they fired him. So it was only for show. They built this great operation. It turns out only for show that the minute they said, oh, we're gonna do this, Trump got rid of him. And the natural next question is why, uh and Christie would tell you that it's because he put Jared Kushner's father in jail back when he was a prosecutor for I think that didn't help. Jared clearly wanted Christy gone, but you had to have Trump's approval of that. And why would Trump? If I were Donald Trump, I would have somewhere deep in my soul a sense that I don't really know how this thing works, that I'm gonna be taking over and it would be nice to have all these people who kind of know the thing, and they can I don't have to pay attention to it then right, and it'll all just kind of run. I think he had positive reasons for one in chaos. I think that they were friends of his people who were and people have connections to Russia, like Mike Flynn, who he wanted to be able to put in important positions. I think he functions better. I think he thinks he functioned better if it's not things are not orderly. So I think he was just kind of attracted to, like, let let the chips fall or they may. I'll take care of all this. I'll decide who's going to be in the cabinet mainly by casting them by appearance. And it wasn't sufficient that Jared Kushner wanted Christie out. Trump also had to say, I'm I want this whole thing gone. You're saying that he wanted Mike Flynn in there because of his connections with Russia. I can't imagine why else? Like why else? Go to that trouble? Christie's operation had said Mike Flinch did not be national security advisor. He's got shadowy problems you don't want to know about, but just don't put him in any important position. The Trump's are insistent that Mike Flynn be in, and to the point where they want to get rid of the entire transition operation, which would prevent it from happening. Why else, I mean, it's it's hard to it just it seems I don't know this for a fact, but it seems a plausible explanation. And to what end, you know? I wonder about this that I think that we will find out eventually when we untangled Donald Trump's finances and his relationships to the Russians. What he's thinking in the back of his lizard brain is if this proceeds normally, and the State Department is run normally, for example, it could be harder to cloud my relations with these people. People are gonna know things, find out things people who aren't allies. Um, I want allies. I want loyalists around this issue, because loyalists will keep the trap shut that if I had to bet, But again, I don't know that. But never mind the motive for a second. Just the fact of it is astonishing. You know, in a normal society that understood the value of its government that had been a revolt, we're not going to show up for the briefings. It's crazy. I mean three months ago when I was finishing, I was still getting briefings from very important people in the government that had never been given because no one had ever showed up to hear it. And it's just a loss of knowledge. Who run anything that way? It's just there's no decent argument for not learning about the thing you need to run, which leads perfectly to the title of the book, the fifth risk. Can you go through the first four risks and then we'll talk about the fifth one. Well, there's something that's not in the book that informed the title. When I first started, I was talking to people in the White House and they had planned a exercise which was going to happen between the outgoing Obama cabinet and the incoming Trump cabinet. They would scheme out what happens is several terrible things happened. One was a pandemic, another was a terrorist attack inside the United States with a nuclear weapon. Another was a hurricane that surprised some part of the country. The fourth was an earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. And I said, what's the fifth and said, we hadn't thought about the fifth. And I realized that what I was writing about at that moment was the stuff that nobody's thinking about because there's so much of it within the federal government. It's sort of like the risk we're not attending to sufficiently. This then happens again when I go into the Energy Department and I'm sitting down with a guy who had never given his briefing, the chief risk officer, and he worked in the Obama ministry. He worked in the Obama administration. He was brought in by Ernie Monies, m I T physicist who had run the Energy Department. His name is John McWilliams, and John said, he said, actually, I came up with a list of hundred and forty two basically existential risks. I said, I don't have time pretend I'm like a Trump guy who's bored. Give me five. And he says, I think in no particular order, but he says one, Uh, that a nuclear weapon will go off when it's not supposed to think. He said then the Iran, that the Iran deal would come unraveled, that the next administration would not appreciate how important it was and how good a deal it was, because they wouldn't bother to listen to the physicists who would explain to them that now Iran cannot build a nuclear bomb. And that's exactly what happened. Uh. North Korea was I think the third. The failure of the nation is in the electrical grid, which is a monitor. And you think, oh, well, that's just the lights go out, that's a disaster. People die, And then we get the fifth and actually he said, let me think a little bit, and I thought, well, we have a pattern. When we get to five, we've got to think a little bit. And then he finally said, very kind of innocuously program management. And when he meant by that, which sounds incredibly tedious, and in some ways it is incredibly tedious, but what he means by that is that the government is managing really dangerous situations that are very long term situations. And the example I plucked out of the Department Energy to use to illustrate the point in the book was, Uh, the nuclear waste clean up in hand for Washington. Eastern Washington is where the plutonium was created for the Adam bombs that were dropped on Japan. In the course of creating it, they were in such a rush they didn't pay attention what they were doing. The waste materials hundreds of millions of gallons filled with with stuff you don't want to touch. Uh. Beer anywhere near I mean anybody. A lot of people who have worked at this side of die of cancer. Uh. But just poured into the into the soil, and there's this plume of it moving through the earth to the wards the Columbia River and it's being managed by the Department of Energy. They're spending three billion dollars a year to clean this up. If we just don't do that right and the stuff gets to the Columbia River, it's catastrophic for the Pacific Northwest. He said that was just one example. That's professional technical management. That's got to be there. People who know about things, and that's what the Trump people didn't bring in. They didn't bring anybody who knew about anything. It sounds like you really outline a lot of disasters waiting to happen, and not just at the Department of Energy, but in other very frankly unsexy agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce. The whole point was to take things that nobody's paying attention to, which is kind of your area of expertise. I feel like you always take these sort of arcane, dry subjects and you kind of make them fun and entertaining. You have to hear three or four times that you should read the book before you actually think I better read the book, because it really do I want to read a book about the Department Agriculture, but talk about the Department of agriculture and Commerce, and I think a lot of listeners Michael will be surprised to hear what they have per view over and how important they are. They're all misnamed, these departments. I mean, we've gotten so detached from our government. That's so the reason I picked the ones I picked was I just wanted to dramatize how little we all know about what our government does. But the Department Agriculture, it does subsidize farming. It was created by Lincoln during the middle of the Civil War UH with the explicit mission to turn agriculture into a science so farming could be very more efficient, so we need fewer farmers, so those people could go then go do other things, and the economy would grow. The enterprise has been spectacularly successful. Farmers used to feed a few people, and now they feed each heeds a few hundred people who we need many fewer farmers. It is now expanded into a science project that UH that just distributes about three billion dollars a year in grants to researchers, almost all of them one way or another related to how we secure the food supply UH in the face of climate change, UM and food safety by the way, I just want to interject food. Yeah, you know, how do we make sure that our chicken doesn't poison us? Among other things, the Department of Agriculture inspects the nine billion birds a year that are killed in America so we can eat them, not to mention cows and all kinds of others, all kinds of other things. Now, if you're hiring someone to pass out three billion dollars a year in grants, too, you would want to probably want to hire someone who knew about agricultural research. And that's usually who occupies the job of scientists, someone who's done their own research, is respected in the field. Uh. And that's who was there when Trump came in and Trump nominated to replace her, uh, a right wing talk show radio host from Iowa who supported him, who has no science background whatsoever. I mean, just this kind of stuff. It's like like I don't know about agricultural science, but I stayed it in a holiday in express. It is like happened across the government. Uh So that's three billion dollars a year. I think the Agriculture Department budget is close to two hundred billion, and much of that if you follow just the money, it's feeding people. It's feeding poor kids, it's feeding old people. It's food stamps, and it's school nutrition programs. That's where the bulk of the money goes. And those programs, when you actually dig into them and talk to the people who administer them, the Trump people would love to cut them. But you're what you're doing is you're you're leaving kids hungry and old people hungry. I describe how ignorance is actually a tool for Trump that if you do remain ignorant of the of the thing, you can you can do all sorts of brutal stuff and positiblemility you can put if as long as you don't meet a kid who's going hungry and as a result can't concentrate at school as a result, one thing leads to another and the life ends and tragedy. You can say, oh yea Alice has cut the school lunch program. In fact, when you get into it, you find these dedicated public servants who really understand the programs and understand that, like the problem with the programs isn't fraud, which is what some people have you believe, they're very little fraud and and they work very hard to eliminate it. The problem is if they're not as heavily used as they should be, that the people who need them don't have too much trouble getting access to them, and the people who really care about them solve those problems so on a state by state basis, When you don't we don't acknowledge any of that. When you say, oh, just get rid of the government is too big, what you're doing is just ignoring the problem altogether. And when you say that government workers are these incompetent bureaucrats who don't know what they're doing, you sort of support the idea of just cutting off all these programs, no matter how valuable they are. I think that's absolutely right. And what I found in talking to these people, bureaucrats, civil servants, public servants, was that they were, as a rule, extraordinarily dedicated, hard working, mission driven people operating in a hugely dysfunctional system. And the fact that system is dysfunctional is our fault, not theirs. It's because we've resisted any kind of decent reforms of government. If you want to make the argument that our society is disintegrating and in decay, you might start by looking at what we've done with the government five times as many people in the federal workforce over the age of sixty then under the age of thirty, ninety billion dollars spent on i T in the federal government. Seventy billion is spent just on these ancients just maintaining these ancient, decrepit systems from the sixties. It's it's a system that's almost built at this point to fail. And in spite of that, people want to come in and do stuff and sometimes do. Did President Obama when he was in charge, do anything to try to fix these problems you've identified? Not enough. The Bush administration had been beginning to engage with how you reform the government, and the Obama administration has kind of started over. The world's authority on this is Max Styre, who runs something called a Partnership for Public Service, which is this extraordinary nonprofit started by one guy who basically said, I'm going to try to fix the government. I'm gonna start by trying to get young, talented people into the government. The only way I can do that is if I fixed this thing. He's managed to get the laws passed that require people to prepare for the transition, and he's got a lot of ideas about ways you might reform the place so it is more agile, responsible, responsive, and and just works better. Uh. And he would tell you that Obama was disappointing to him this way, but nothing like Trump, I mean really responsible and the kind of people he put into the government for example, that that he said, you never seen anything like Trump. We're two years into the Trump administration. Do you see it getting any better? At if the Democrats Michael take the House, will they have any control over the current state of disarray? So the answer is no, and no. Trump is symptom, not just cause here we don't elect someone who is so ignorant and negligent unless we have got to the point where were so misvalue and misunderstand the thing he's running. If the society understood the government, we all had a good civics lesson, we'd all say that person shouldn't be running that because that's going to be a catastrophe, because that that enterprise the government is really important. The narrative needs to change first. I mean, that's why I wrote the book. I mean, if they just try to start to change the narrative so people stop seeing the government as the problem and start seeing it as a tool as a solution. But you know, it's if this society is gonna survive, that's got to happen. So it's a big deal. I think it actually could happen. But you can change narratives. You know this, You've told stories. But yeah, we have to stop undermining this institution and starts trying to be constructive about it and understanding it. And meanwhile, if the Democrats take the House, they don't really have any power to do this, do they. If Trump is removed, that would help, but uh, it wouldn't solve the core problems. What's really needed is a political leader, probably will come out of the Democratic Party, but could easily come out of the Republican Party who can make the positive case for government, which is with caveats, which we need to change this thing. We have a nineteen forties automobile on a twenty one century highway. Someone who can sell that case. I think you can get elected selling that case. They just have to be good at it. And this is something that Obama. President Obama may try to sell because he's optioned the book to come up with the series for Netflix to help people better understand the government. Yes, it's just as a civics lesson, that's right. And I did three departments because it would be the work of many lifetimes to do the whole government. But you could do this in a fun way across the entire government. Well, Michael Lewis. The book is called The Fifth Risk. Thank you so much for coming into and talking to us about It's always great to see you. Thanks for having me. So that's all for today, and a reminder one more time, please vote on Tuesday, November six in the midterm elections. It is really important and on next week's show we'll be taking your calls and making sense of all the election results, or at least trying to. Emma Morgan Stern is our producer, Nora Richie is the associate producer, and Jared O'Connell is our audio engineer who makes every show sound like a dream. Ryan Connor is our audio engineer here in l A. I'd also like to shout from the rooftops about my team at Katie Kirk Media, my assistant Beth Dems and Julia Lewis my social media mix and a saucy one at that. Jared Arnold wrote our new theme music you can find me on Twitter I'm at Goldsmith b and you can follow Katie on Twitter, Facebook, at especially Instagram under Katie Kurk. Those Instagram stories are really something to follow. I notice you do, Brian, because I see your name all the time, so don't mock me too much. One more reminder. If you want to call in to ask us a question or share your thoughts about the mid terms, you can reach us at four four six three seven. Just leave a voicemail with your name, where you're calling from, and what you'd like to tell us, or leave us a message about something other than the mid terms, or you can always email us at comments at current podcast dot com. Thank you, as always for listening. We really appreciate your support and we'll talk to you next week.