August 25, 2025 • 49 mins
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson examines why Democrats are failing to register voters.
Graham Platner details his run for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Maine against Senator Susan Collins.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds and Representative Nancy Mays canceled the speech
after just eight people showed up. We have such a
great show for you today. The Lincoln Project Zone Rick
Wilson joins us to discuss why Democrats are failing to
(00:22):
register voters. Then we'll talk to Graham Platner about his
run for the Democratic nomination in the main Senate race
against Susan Collins. But first we have the most important
stories that aren't getting the attention they deserve.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Sobali, mister Trump, and Governor Wes Moore are going back
and forth. Governor Moore is talking about also doing a
redistricting in the great state of Maryland to retaliate against Texas.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
What are you see in here?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
If you're a governor and you're a Democrat, and if
you want anyone to ever respect you ever again, you
need to join this arms race. I don't like it.
I don't think anyone likes it. But as Obama said,
as Eric Calder, who is the man who pretty much
is the most interested in nonpartisan redistricting, there are no
(01:19):
choices at this moment. Democrats need to fight fire with fire.
They need to redistrict just the way Republicans are doing.
So Texas is going to do it, California needs to
do it, Maryland's got to do it. New York needs
to do it. Every state needs to fight back. Democratic
states need to fight back. And look, there is a shot,
there's a chance that if Democrats fight back, that the
(01:43):
Supreme Court, which are huge cowards, will say that everyone
needs to stop doing this. But if Democrats don't fight back,
then the Supreme Court, which is delightfully trumpy, and by
delightfully I mean annoyingly that red Court will in fact
do what they're maying. Go God King wants. And so
it's really important to remember that. You know, Trump is
(02:05):
a bully and if you don't push back, you will
forever be in his grips. And so here we are
Wes Moore trades barbs with Trump over threat to send
troops to Maryland. You know, we are watching this federal
takedown of DC. There are armed guards on the street.
Let me tell you, restaurant reservations are down thirty percent.
People do not like having troops in their city. It
(02:29):
does not want to make them want to spend money
or do tourism. We're already hemorrhaging tourists because of Trump's
war against people who don't live in this country. We
need those tourists because consumer spending is a lot of
our GDP YEP.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So, speaking of things that are going to decrease tourism
all throughout America, which I should say, everyone I talk
to in New York who works in service all Greece
that it's unbelievably downb this year. The Pentagon has been
planning for a military takeover Chicago for weeks. At Chicago
is a very very popular tourist destination.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, not for long, I mean. And by the way,
this is I mean, this is Trump doing his trumpy
best to try to hurt all of us. You know,
Trump is at war with brettzgar who is the Illinois governor,
because he comes from a fancy family and is an
actual billionaire. He wants, you know, and is a liberal,
(03:26):
and so he's probably going to roll right into Chicago.
And look, the point of all of this is this
is not about crime. Right in the district of Columbia,
there is still a billion dollars that's meant to go
to cops and teachers and homeless services. That is being
held because Congress has not figured out how you know,
(03:47):
has not passed the legislation that is needed in order
for that money to be spent. So all of this
is happening not because of crime, but because Donald Trump
wants to show power, wants to scare people, wants to
do all of this stuff. So you know, he'll say
it's about crime. But just like with his war on
(04:07):
academic institutions, this was not about anti semitism. This is
about authoritarian takedown of academic institutions, and academic institutions create
thought that Donald Trump may or may not like, and
that's how we got here.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So judges blocked Trump from cutting funding from thirty four
cities and counties over their sanctuary policies, another one of
his performantive, moronic authoritarian tactics.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, so look, the judiciary, everything is going to eventually
go up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court
is very trumpy, but you know, maybe at some point
they decide they want to have some legacy. I mean,
John Roberts, I just I don't understand how the Supreme
Court won't be brave if they have security. They have
(04:53):
so many opportunities to do the right thing, and yet
they really you know, either Trump is the vessel for
what they want and they're using him for that, or
they're just scared of him. But either way, it's just
sort of shocking. So this is a preliminary injunction blocking
the administration from cutting off or conditioning the use of
federal funds for so called sanctuary jurisdictions. This will run
(05:16):
up to the Supreme Court and we will see what happens.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
So one of the characters we don't hear from all
the time, but I'm always disturbed by the presence of
in any upper rushelan is dn I Gabbert, and she's
slashing Intelligence Office workforce and cutting budgets by over seven
hundred million dollars, which feels ill advised even for a
woke liberal like me.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Well, what's funny about this Tulsa Gabbert stuff is that
Trump put her in the ADMIN. He's been really mad
at her because she hasn't been sufficiently sycophantic. Then she
went on television and was like, yes, Obama did everything.
Obama set this all up, which was clearly like just
a pathetic ploy to try to win Trump back. I
(06:03):
don't know that it's worked. My sense is that she's
still kind of on the out, so I'd be curious
to see reporting on that. But she's trying everything she can.
It's just sort of amazing to watch her try and
try and try to win him back. But you know,
the thing is this entire federal government, it's basically serves
(06:24):
at the pleasure of one guy who really cares about
ratings more than anything else, right, I mean, the mad
ratings King. It really is kind of amazing. He cares
about ratings, He cares about people seeing what he's doing.
He doesn't really care about you know, national I mean
even national intelligence, which in my mind, like I think
wars are bad, and so I don't think we should
(06:46):
be doing wars. And this is one of the very
few places where the Vinn diagram of what Donald Trump
wants to do and what Molly john Fast wants to
do aligne right, which is like, I don't think we
should be doing foreign wars. But even that, he's like
so disinterested in it that he's like, maybe we should
do form. You know, he's just It is really a
case of a person. And it's funny because as someone
(07:07):
who has really bad add you would think I would
relate to this more, but I really don't.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Okay, Molly, we got to get serious here. I'm going
to say my honest thoughts, which is that I think
every time quit not quit. Every time I hear Minority
Leader Hakeem Jeffries do an interview, it inspires no confidence
that he understands the feeling of the Democratic base and
the people on the ground, and that it feels like
(07:35):
the bad things that are happening to us, if they
can be stopped. I don't believe he is doing anything
to stop them, because he does not talk like he
is ever.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
This is the real question, is like where is democratic
leadership and why are why are voters so mad? Voters
are really mad? We see this in the polling. We
see this and then the fundraising. We see this in
the definitely worth listening to Wreck today because he talks
about these bad voter registration numbers, which were written about
(08:04):
in the New York Times and you know, was a
big news cycle last week, and actually he debunks it
in a way that made me feel a lot better.
But there is still a problem with the brand, and
the real question is how do Democrats fix their brand? Now,
Chuck Schumer has done some good stuff, which is he's
recruited some very runnable candidates for some of these Senate seats.
(08:28):
Not so easy. But Keem goes on television. It's just
he cannot for whatever reason, he is unable to connect
with voters. Then we have the problem with Ken Martin,
who is unable to raise the money that needs to
be raised. And we have this voter register, these voter
registration numbers. I think that Democrats are going to have
(08:53):
to push harder. I think what people want from what
we're seeing with the polls and what we're seeing with
the numbers, is they want their electeds to fight for them,
to fight, fight, fight, to push back. I think that's
why now Gavin Newsom like him, don't like him. It
doesn't matter, right, What matters is that this guy is
(09:14):
pushing back. Gavin Newsom is breaking through now again. I
would like to go back to the chief of staff
for pritz Girl who said it's not left versus Center,
it's fight versus cave. And Newsom is fighting and that
is making Trump furious. And that is breaking through. Rick
(09:36):
Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Product in the
host of the Enemy's List. Welcome to Fast Politics, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Welly, John Fast. How are you doing today?
Speaker 1 (09:44):
I am just great. Should we start with the arm
takeover of Washington, DC?
Speaker 4 (09:49):
Or should as as one as one does when arms
troops are now patrolling the streets of DC, a city
which has a lower crime rate than where most of
the troops came from. These days, these Southern governors like
Tate Reeves and Mississippi Jackson. Mississippi literally is as dangerous
as Mogadishu Samo. It is one of the most violent,
(10:10):
dangerous cities in the whole country per capita. And yet
somehow Tate Reeves does not deployed his own state National
Guard there, but in order to kiss Trump's ass, has
sent them to DC.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
So here's a question for you. This weekend, I was
somewhere listening to a member of Congress. This was like
off the record thing, so I'm not going to say
who it is, but somebody asked him a question which
is often asked members of Congress. Said basically, why do
they kiss up to Trump? Why do they do why
(10:42):
do they ruin themselves at the altar of Trump? Is
it because they are ambitious or is it because they're scared?
And he said that he thought it was absolutely because
they're scared.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
They're scared. Look, I learned this as far back as
twenty seventeen when the former client of mine did a
town hall and was asked, are you going to support
mister Trump one hundred percent? And he gave the correct
answer at the time. He said, you know, I want
to work with Donald Trump on tax cuts and this
and that and this and that, but if it's wrong
for our district, no, I'm going to stand with you.
And by the time he got off stage, he was
(11:15):
getting death threats and his family was getting death threats.
And so the fear of the mob, the fear of
the horde, the fear of the of the monster, that
is the MAGA base, is what motivates them to stay
in line. They don't want to lose their primaries. They
also don't want to have crazy people come into their
house with guns. That is the not subtle promise that
Trump delivered on on January sixth is if you fuck
(11:38):
with me, I will have people come to your place
of business or your home with violence in their hearts
to hurt you. And most of these people, you look,
a lot of them are ambitious, but you can also
be afraid as well as being ambitious. Those ven diagrams
can sort of overload.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Right, exactly as much as everything feels really really bad,
and there are certainly a life lot of reasons to
feel bad. There is the arm takeover of the district.
There is Trump's plan to go roll into Chicago. We
just saw. There are a lot of things to feel
bad about. Democrats under raising Republicans. This democratic You know,
(12:15):
what I want you to talk to us about is first,
I want you to talk to us about these democratic
these numbers, these voter registration numbers, because last week this
came out that Democrats are basically getting creamed when it
comes to voter registration.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
You know, I can tell you all about this.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I was surprised by that.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
I'm not you know why?
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Okay? Why?
Speaker 4 (12:36):
Because Democrats think they can get volunteers to go do
voter registration. Republicans pay money.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
To do it.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Oh well, that makes sense, do it.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
So here's the deal. You got a lot of Democratic
groups sitting on a pile of money from last year,
you got a lot of Democratic groups have a lot
of money sitting around. Future Forward has two undred million
dollars sitting around, and they're all like, we've got to
fix the narrative, and No, what you have to do
first is go out and register fucking voters. When you
stop registering voters or you believe that you're going to
(13:06):
get allied groups to do it. And I've heard this
story from Democrats for ten years now of trying to
get them understand. The way Republicans do this is they
throw money at the problem. They're not sending volunteer like
young Conservatives out. They pay some fucking hobos to go
knock on doors and do voter registration. Democrats think that
(13:26):
they're going to get the union folks to do it,
or progressive groups to do it, or activist group. No,
stop it, pay the fucking money. Go out and pay
the money.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Is that really why? Because the Democrats are about behind
by about four million votes, Yes, in voter organization, pay
the money.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
Evangelical churches are the one group of Republicans that do
voter reds sort of on the come. They otherwise spend
the money. The state parties spend the money. This is
an explicable, simple, understandable process. There are people who do
this for a living and they should be using them.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
So I want you to talk us through this. Because
Shane Goldmacher had a piece in the New York Tims
say it said Democrats are just not as popular. But
that's not what this means.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
It's not what this is. That's not what it is.
That's not what it is. A lot of the drop
off with Democratic voters has been because there are a
lot of people frustrated with the Democratic Party for a
for a million reasons. We could spend days on this subject,
but most of them don't. We probably will, We probably will. Yeah,
they don't flip to Republican, they drop off to non
(14:36):
party affiliated. It is a lot cheaper and simpler to
convert a non party affiliated voter either to Democratic for
the first time or to bring them home to the
Democratic Party because you kind of know who they are.
This is not none of this is rocket science. There
are very good people with data and lists and approaches
(14:58):
to these things. They know how to do it. But
the Democratic Party has always sort of like, oh, we'll
farm this part out to the unions in this city
or this state. We'll farm this part out to the
College of Democrats. No, stop it professionalize.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
So who is in charge of this? Is this a
Ken Martin problem?
Speaker 4 (15:15):
It's Ken Martin problem. So it's also a state party problem.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Right, but he is the Ken Martin is the chair
of the DNC and vis.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Look when Michael Steele took over the Republican Party back
in the mid two thousands, he put the money in
to registering people and to winning state election stuff, and
that took voter redge. We pushed money out into the
parties like the Georgia Republican Party, Florida Republican Party, North
Carolina Republican Party and said here's two million dollars. This
(15:46):
grant is explicitly for you to do voter registration.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
So Ken Martin has also has these terrible fundraising numbers,
just horrendous. The DNC is getting their clock cleaned by
the RNC, despite the fact that Donald Trump is rolling
troops into states, despite the fact that they're.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
Doing it because he's rolling troops into states. They are afraid,
just like a lot of these members of Congress are afraid.
They now understand, and Trump has delivered this message very
coldly and as people have delivered it. If you're not
with us, we will come after you and hurt you.
If you don't do what we want, sell us ten
percent of your company. They will. They're like, will hurt you.
(16:29):
We'll use regulation, will use the DOJ.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Whatever.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
But so shouldn't. Ken Martin still try to raise money
for him crass money.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
He's still try to raise money. But when the Democrats
take power again, if they what when they take power again,
nothing lasts forever. When they take power again, they need
to do exactly what the Republicans have been doing for
a generation. They're the ones who got out and they
call these companies and go because right now the Republican
Campaign Committee people call right big companies so stations ago. Hey,
(16:59):
by the way, if you got one guy or two
guys Democrats in your state, that's okay, but you're going
to give a one hundred to one ratio to us,
and if you don't, we're gonna fuck you.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
And look, this is this idea of Democrats playing hardball.
I know, like makes the hair stand up on the
back of a lot of these soft, softer minded people
who like policy shit. But the reason what California is
doing is meaningful in response to Texas is because it's
the real politics. It's the fight we're really in, not
(17:31):
the fight we want to be in. Well.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
And also, if you can't win back the House, you're
going to be fucked.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
Oh yeah, as I've said this. I think I said
this on the last show. If there's a Republican majority
in twenty twenty eight and the Democrat wins the election,
they will not certify him.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
No, I think they're already saying that in a hundred
different ways. So I think there's also an argument to
be made for soft federalism, this idea that you are
the fourth largest economy and if you don't want it,
if you you know, why are you putting in tax
dollars if you're not getting the female release release, there's.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
A there's there's a piece of real talk here. California
is the fourth largest economy, not in the in the country,
but in the world. Yeah, and the economic power of
major states in this country is an underestimated political lever
and the red state donor the donor states, the blue
states giving to the red states. That is an equation
(18:31):
that has never been fully explored by any any Democratic
state leader. That I can think of off the top
of my head, and you know, we're starting to explore
these things now. I think in a way that reflects
on the precarious nature of the Republican's economic model. Part
of what they're relying on right now is that somehow
(18:51):
Powell is going to cut rates by some double digit
number and they're going to juice the economy and go
into twenty six with a glowing economy. Again, it's a
it's a big bet.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
There's no evidence to support none whatsoever.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
But if you're if you're a Republican right now, you
are worried. You're looking in the rearview about the economy.
You're looking at the rear view. But a lot of
Democrats are saying in these meetings that I that I
go to unless I go online. In these zooms, it's
like we're going to run on prescription drugs and medicare
once again. There are troops and tanks and armored vehicles
in the streets of our capital. We have a president
(19:26):
who is running a whorehouse at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.
We have a president who's about to free a convicted
child sex trafficker. And do you think he's going to Oh. Absolutely,
you read those transcripts from Blanche. That's a set up
for days, so explain. You go through those transcripts and
she's like, I admire President Trump and all he's a compey.
(19:48):
This was all pregamed. I bet you good money. Blanche
went to his attorney, her attorney.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Who's a friend of her, who's a friend of.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Blanche's, right, yeah, and said, hey, she's got to go
in the room and say the following things at minimum,
and she did. I never saw Trump anywhere near Jeffrey what.
I never saw him in the massage setting, which come
imad was an interesting sort of of gap because it's like,
so you never saw him getting a massage, but you
might have seen him with a teenage girl. Didn't ask any.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Questions when he just volunteered.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
This thing was a complete mess, and it's a pre game.
Nobody should be shocked, and it could happen as early
as this week, I think.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
But here's a question for you about the Epstein stuff,
because the pulling on the Ebstein step. Actually, I'm going
to tell you something even stupider than that. So on
this episode, I interviewed a guy called Graham Planter, who
was running for who is running to be the nominee
(20:48):
in Maine to run against Susan Collin. Yeah, and he
has you know, he like Jared Gold, has a lot
of Congressman Jared Gold, who has an r post for
the most rural district, has a lot of Trump or
people in his life. And so I said, you know,
did they lose have they lost interest in Trump? Are
they you know? What does it look like? And he
(21:09):
said to me, a lot of them are mad about
the tariffs. But he also said, and he's like, you're
going to think this is crazy. It's worth listening to
the interview because I think it's interesting. He said, you
didn't think it's crazy, but a lot of people are
mad about Epstein.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Yeah, they are. Look this and we've talked about this.
We've written about both of us have written about this,
the Epstein storyline and the idea that there's a global
democratic pedophile network storyline from twenty sixteen on. When Pizza
Jack started to invent it and it became a part
of their personalities, it became so they believed in fundamentally,
(21:46):
and now they thought they were going to get this
revelation that was going to take all these Democrats down.
And it turns out that Donald Trump put a thousand
FBI agents on the story so he could cover it up,
so we could take his name out of those files.
It turns out there they want to release seventy pages
out of over one hundred and fifty thousand pages of
testimony and documents, And so even his own believers are like,
(22:07):
what the fuck is this? Boss? Right, where's the good stuff?
Speaker 1 (22:11):
I think it's worth thinking about this for a second,
about what happens when like this comes back to this
fundamental question of twenty sixteen, when Bernie Sanders said this
system is rigged against you, right, he said, it's rigged.
There are these people who feel it's rigged. And I
(22:32):
feel like Trump again, somehow was able to make the
case that he was going to unrake the system. I
don't know how he made that case after having already
been reserved for four years, but he you know, I
think the fact that people weren't being offered anything, and
that he was at least offering them something was meaningful.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
I think you're right. And look, there was a reason
why about a quarter of Bernie's voters in twenty sixteen
went to Trump.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
That's crazy because.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
There is a there is a non ideological element in
American society today that feels like the system is rigged.
And the reason they went with Trump was, even though
they knew he was corrupt and scummy, they thought, well,
at least he's transgressive, at least he's gonna blow everything up.
At least he's gonna hurt people that I don't like,
(23:24):
and that I think that still existed in a probably
larger number in some ways by the end of twenty
twenty four then was president in twenty sixteen, there were
a lot of people who still looked at the choices
and says, Okay, she's a standard issue politician, and he's
still a terrorist, he's still a crazy man. He's still
(23:48):
the guy who's gonna blow shit up. And when you
don't have these deep sophisticated understanding of what's really going
on in the world, blowing shit up sometimes sounds awfully appealing.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Well.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
And also the reason is in that they thought the
system was rigged against them is because it is.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
Yeah, and look, the system now under Trump is being rigged.
The transfer of wealth under Donald.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Trump largest in history, largest.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
In history by an order of magnitude. You've shifted the
largest amount of wealth in the history of this country
from like the the the S and P five hundred
to seven tech firms, all of whom support Trump. You've
shifted trillions of dollars of government funding from the middle
(24:32):
or lower end of the spectrum to tax cuts for
about six hundred billionaires in this country. And this isn't
free market stuff. This isn't the market functioning in a
way that hurts poor people. This is crony capitalism be
run from the White House. There's a reason why Republicans
(24:53):
are fine with this, because they're not the or MAGA
voters excuse me, are fine with this because they're not
conserved on anything anymore. They're radical and Trump is a
radical for them. And you know, mom, Dommy says, I
want six publicly owned grocery stores in New York and
people shit a brick. Donald Trump says, companies not to
(25:14):
pay me vig that to pay me a percentage from
now on, or we're going to hurt them. And I'm sorry.
Trump's actually the one seizing the fucking means of production here, right.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
If you are someone who is doesn't like this, yes, yes,
I mean, do you think like we have. We've gotten
some polls, but nobody trusts polls we have certainly there
are some evidence that people are not happy with this.
I mean, like, what do you think you know? We
(25:50):
only know what we know, right we only see what's
what is in our silo. But what do you really
think is happening on the ground right now?
Speaker 4 (25:59):
Look, I think the economic damage that Trump is doing,
and it's a combination of the tariffs, of the big
bad Bill, and of this of this shift in our
overall economic model where it's where where fewer and fewer
companies are controlling more and more stuff, right where things
like home ownership have completely disappeared as a as a
(26:22):
goal for young people, where the trap of student loan
debt and the trap of low paying jobs have combined
to put a generation Gen Z and and you know
a lot of millennials into a into a into a
trap where they're never going to financially.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Escape unless they join Ice.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
Right, Well, there is that d K man.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
He can't Ice is offering The reason I made that
joke is that ICE is offering like a sixty thousand
dollars student loan debt forgiveness, which is ironic because the
Supreme Court said that Biden's loan for you.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
I was told that loan forgiveness was unconstitutional court, but yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know, the rules are different for the and me,
as they say.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Thank you, Rick Wilson Graham Platner is running for the
Democratic Party nomination for Senate in the Great State of Maine.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Graham.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me so.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Chuck Schumer has done extremely good job recruiting Democrats to
run for the Senate. We have Cooper in North Carolina.
We have basically the dream team. We got share of
back in Ohio everyone. But there's one state that I
was like, that fucking state. It's such a good state.
It's filled with so many smart people, academics. Interesting Purple state.
(27:51):
I mean, like Susan Collins is the white whale of
the Democratic Party. Yes, she pretends to be a moderate
and then votes as a Trumper every fucking time. By
the way, so when I heard that you were running,
I was like, oh, thank god. So talk to me
about how you decided to run for the United States
(28:13):
Senate in the Great state of man.
Speaker 5 (28:15):
Yeah, for the records. I mean, I'm sure people know
this already. I do not hold elected office, nor have
I run for elected office. I'm the harbor master of
my small town of Sullivan Bank, and I've been the
chair of the Sullivan Planning Board for about five years.
I'm very proud of that, but we have it with
the town of one thousand people.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Planning boards, though, are a little bit like being a
federal employee.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
I mean there's a lot of reading through policy and ordinances.
Even small towns have lots and lots of ordinances. In
figuring it out, and then in many ways then you
see like the material outcomes of policy because you have
to kind of like make it happen. About a month ago,
some friends of mine from some community organizations, some friends
of mine from I do I am involved with with
(28:59):
some community organizing in eastern Hacott County, very small scale
stock They came to me and said, hey, listen, we're
afraid we think this Yeason Collegs is uniquely weak, which
I of course agree with.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
We're also afraid.
Speaker 5 (29:11):
That the Democratic Party is going to run kind of
the same kind of playbook. And this is what happened
back in twenty twenty, which is essentially fine candidate that
comes out of establishment politics and has a campaign that
has a lot of pressure from above to run kind
of your sort of all like at this point corporate, yeah,
(29:31):
corporate campaign. And they're like, we think that that might
be like, like, even though we think we've got a
real shot at finally getting the seat flipped, we're afraid
that it may not flip.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
It may we may run into the exact same problems
that we've had in the past.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
And they're like, and we think that you might be
a really good candidate to do this. And this was
weird for me because like, well, I agree with all
of these assessments, and I had held them myself that
had the same exact fears, and I never envisioned myself
doing it. It's I mean, I haven't aspired to be
a you of the I live a very very simple life.
I don't have a lot of money. My wife and
I have two dogs and a cat, and we work
(30:05):
really hard. It's kind of me now, we living a
little tiny town on the.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Coast of met What kind of dogs do you have?
Speaker 3 (30:10):
They're both sleeping on the couch right now.
Speaker 5 (30:12):
We have a year and nine month old black lab
and we have like a little mutt that looks like
a tiny Belgian malin law.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
So okay, so I want to just pause and talk
about So in twenty twenty, Collins was up. She ran
against Sarah Gideon. Sarah Gideon raised millions upon millions of dollars.
She was a goodish candidate. Fine, you know, corporate, very
much like someone who could come and talk at an
(30:39):
Uber board meeting, right represented, you know, the kind of corporatist,
not a person who represents the working man. So now
Maine and I want to talk about There's a member
of Congress from Maine who I bet you know who
represents the most district that Democrats represent. And his name
(31:04):
is Jared Golden.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Golden and he's my I live in district too, so
he's my rut.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Okay, So Jared is a Democrat, but he's really like
a Diane Osborne Bernie Sanders. So talk us through sort
of your district, how he is able to run there
and how he keeps speeding the Republicans.
Speaker 5 (31:24):
We're very rural district, it's very spread out. There are
a lot of people that work very hard, view themselves
as kind of hard scrabble, blue collar working class, and
Jared has done a great job of like being a Democrat.
It's still appealing to that kind of in many ways,
it's cultural, it's it's an esthetic in some ways, people
see themselves in him, and he's been able to hold
(31:47):
onto that seat which is which is no small feet.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
It's an R plus ten or fifteen or something.
Speaker 5 (31:53):
Yeah, I can't remember the exact number, but it's a
lot that being said, like you know, for me, like
that's on the electability side. I think that was what
really was hard for the Gideon campaign in District two,
where you'd have a lot of kind of dispersed rural
conservative voters. You need to have somebody who can talk
to them. You need to have somebody who can like
(32:14):
interact with them. And like for myself, who lives in
District two and many of my friends are Trump letters,
many of my neighbors are Republicans.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
I don't have to like do.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
Some kind of like mental math on how to have
these conversations because I have these conversations. I mean they're
like it's just part of my daily life is talking
to people who are technically on the other side of
the of the political divide. But you know, like the
big thing, the thing that I think my candidacy brings
to the table that I'm just not really seeing in
(32:44):
other kind of campaigns, both for this race and elsewhere
in the state, is that there is a deep anti
establishment angst going on. People really do feel like the
system has left them behind, and you need to be
able to speak to that. But you need to be
able to speak to in a way that's not kind
under sending, it's not patronizing.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
It's more just like being able to talk about.
Speaker 5 (33:04):
The material realities that we're all currently living in, with
like a collapsing rural healthcare system, with a housing crisis
that is I mean utterly insane around here, although I
can't it's insane everywhere, but I mean it's bad, it's
real bad here, and a general affordability crisis. And if
you can't, if you if you can't be approachable, and
if you're not interested in approaching those voters, it will
(33:26):
just continue to lose them. And well they'll can and
then we have the whole element of there's a lot
of people in the state who are like Maine is
like a third Democrat, a third Republican and a third
independent or unenrolled.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
And that's what I wanted to ask you about. The
governor of Maine is an independent or was an independent,
and you have Angus King, who is maybe an independent
but caucuses with the dams right, he.
Speaker 5 (33:52):
Was the independent governor and then he be our independent senator.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
So there absolutely is for sure independent streak in your state.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
Very manors very much see themselves as as not being
easily put into these sort of political buckets that we've
all created, myself included. I mean, I feel like I'm
very It's the life that I live. I don't think
people would look at it and be like, yeh, guys,
obviously a Democrat even though I am. There are a
lot of folks in the state, and there have been
because of this. It has been very easy for a
(34:23):
lot of voters in the state to just walk away,
to just look at everything that's happening and just kind
of be like, this whole thing is not built for me,
and I Am not going to engage in it anymore.
And my fear is that that can happen again. What
gives me hope, though, is that I have lots of
friends are who are of that who. When I talk
(34:45):
about the policies that I want to push and I
talk about the kind of systemic problems as they truly exist,
those people always respond positively. They always think like, yeah,
I mean the system is in many ways broken. It
isn't representing me, and I want to see something in
it that does represent me.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
I mean, we need to have people of like.
Speaker 5 (35:07):
The working class of Maine, representing the working class of Maine.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
It's just people can connect with that.
Speaker 5 (35:13):
It's hard to connect with somebody who you just see
is like a political animal.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
So let's talk about that, because the thing I've been
struck by is like one party wants to give you healthcare,
one party wants to take it away. One party wants
to give you child tax credit. One party wants to
pretends it wants to give you that. One party wants
to raise taxes on the wealthy. One party pretends it
wants to raise taxes. Like this seems pretty honous to me,
(35:39):
But part of the situation is it strikes me your
job is to break through, right, to get on the
media outlets that Harris couldn't not her fault. She had
one hundred days and she did an incredible job, and
a lot of those places were not open to her
for any number of structural reasons that nothing to do
(36:00):
with her talent. But I wonder, You've got to get
in the right spaces, You've got to talk to everyone,
and then you also have to talk to people in
the state. But I do feel like because you really
are a manor doing things that are actual main jobs,
you know what I mean, like a harbor master. Like
that's not a New York City job.
Speaker 5 (36:22):
I mean, there is the New York City harbor master,
but I think probably a bit bigger than mine.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Right exactly. That's a good point. Sorry, it's not a
McKinsey job. It's a job job.
Speaker 5 (36:30):
Yeah, anyway, and like it to be fair, Like I
work in a small harbor. So my real job, I'm
an oyster farmer. I mean that's what I do. And
I have a small I have a small like diving business.
And yeah, I mean I think again, I mean, like
just much easier for me to connect with normal working
maners because I'm obviously a normal working mainer. I also
haven't been like picked, you know, like this whole thing,
(36:51):
we've built this from the floor up. If we've built
this on our own. We've built this kind of in house.
I'm lucky enough to have gotten support from people who
are very effective. I mean, obviously the roll out on
Tuesday just extremely competently done, and I can take absolutely
no credit for it. But truthfully it's a Yeah, it's
a because we're building it from the ground.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Up, and because that's pretty obvious at this point.
Speaker 5 (37:12):
I think it's being it's fairly clear that people can
tell that this isn't just coming out of the standard
like political machine. That's just a lot more approachable and
it's and and it's and it keeps people I think,
a lot more open minded than they might be, even
though like the policies I'm pushing for like pretty you know,
like democratic policies. I'd want people to get healthcare. I
want to protect social security, I want it. Like those
(37:35):
are all the things that I believe in. We didn't
do them, but like there is an aesthetic element to
our politics that I think is unhealthy, but it is
a reality. I can really appeal across the electorate and
main in many ways that I just think for for
reasons that have nothing to do with like frankly me
or anybody's personal capacity.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
They're just there. They're structural reasons, but they but they're real.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
We're watching in a solitarian takeover of our country. We
got guys getting their cars wrapped, the ice. Guys that
would say protect the homeland. Okay, the homeland. That's not
you know, that is not what we call Amerca.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Right, this is language that we've all heard before in history.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
So right, So you have an opportunity in a state
that is very purple. So what does that look like
for you? How do you win in Maine?
Speaker 3 (38:21):
What we do is that first we're building a ground game.
Speaker 5 (38:25):
And I'm just going to use this moment to plug
grahamfirsenate dot com. We need help to do this both
with donations because we're not taking corporate pac money. We're
not taking it's all small dollar stuff. But we also
need people. We're not going to be able to outraise anybody,
and we know that. But we do have a theory
of change that is mostly built around building out old
school campaigning, shoe leather campaigning, knocking on doors, building out
(38:48):
like volunteer capacity, building out offices, and doing like a
fully statewide coordinated campaign to get as many people in
Because if we can't beat them with money.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
We have to beat them with people, and we can
beat them with people. I'll just say this.
Speaker 5 (39:03):
If you don't live in the state of Maine and
this sounds like something you want to get involved in,
you can donate and we need that, but you can
also phone back. You can also sign up as a volunteer.
We've got volunteer opportunities that are not just main based.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
So this in many ways.
Speaker 5 (39:19):
Like because of the visibility, because I mean, this is
our best shot to get rid of Sustan Collins finally
and forever. This is been doing this for a long time,
and we can we can do this. I mean we
we really do have I think a very clear path
to victory. But I can't do it by myself. Is
mostly what it comes.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Down when you talk to Jared, what does he say,
sort of this secret He is in an R plus
four district, but it's the most rural. He's the Democrat
that represents the most rural district. One of the problems
that Democrats have had is speaking a rural voter, speaking
a working class voters, speaking a non college educative voters.
Main part of the state is very liberal, a very
(40:01):
college educated, lots of universities. Part of the state is
much more like a rural state. So talk us through
how you meet people there.
Speaker 5 (40:11):
I mean, this is going to suck, kind of goofy,
but I'm forty. I run an immense amount of energy.
I'm a former bartender who likes talking to people. And
They've run a Toyota tundra that's got at least four
hundred thousand miles left on it.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
If I do the oil changes right.
Speaker 5 (40:24):
So the way that I do it is that I
go out and talk to people and I can. These
are conversations that for me are not difficult to have
because I, in many ways just have them all the
time with my neighbors, with my friends. I have a
lot of friends who are not remotely aligned with me politically,
but when we talk, they all feel like the system
(40:45):
is shrewing them. They all feel like the billionaires in
the oligart class is stealing everything from them. They feel
like there's a political establishment that serves those interests and
they're mad about it, and they're right. I'm like, yeah,
we're right there. And when you talk about things like
Medicare for all, when you talk about things like ending
the foreign wars that I thought in that costs so
(41:08):
much money and did nothing, nothing for the American working class.
When we talk about that stuff in language that kind
of divorces it from politics. In some ways, everybody agrees,
everybody understands. And so for me, I'm just going to
go out and have those conversations. I'm going to go
out and drive everywhere and talk to everybody, and I think,
(41:28):
you know, just I'm not. There are going to be conversations,
there are going to be topics that we are not
going to align on. But my opinion is that until
we've built a healthcare system that takes care of people,
until we've come up with housing solutions that put people
in homes and don't bankrupt folks, then we come up
with a solution to the wages versus the rising cost
(41:49):
of goods problem. Everything else is down the road in
the better world that we have to build.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
We're going to have.
Speaker 5 (41:55):
Those conversations and at that point we can all argue
about it. But right now, right now, we got to
focus on the big stuff, and the big stuff is
what counts, and it's also what win. That's my plan,
and I want to do it with as many other
maners as I can, who want to come out and
take part in this.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
What is it like on the ground in Maine? Are
people are they still maga? Are they like, let's give
my man a chance? I mean, like, we see the polls,
but who even knows if the polls are right. We
see Donald Trump's anxiety, but who knows.
Speaker 5 (42:22):
I will just say this anecdotally, most of my friends
who voted for Trump are.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Disgusted really already.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
Alrighty, So a lot of them are builders, a lot
of them are.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Are get fucked by the terrorf That's right.
Speaker 5 (42:35):
And luckily, like the people they buy goods from are
telling them, hey, this is up thirty percent because this
tariff shit is driving me insand like we don't know
that's why the prices are up. And like they take
that and they go home. They're like, well, this is
fucking bullshit.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
And it is.
Speaker 5 (42:47):
And there's also an element this isn't as much, but
there is also an element in this where you know,
a lot of these folks they voted for.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
The thing I hear the most is the Epstein thing.
I hear this all the time, unbelievable all they talk about.
They're like they told us.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
He told us blah blah blah, and then they went
up there and now they're up there and suddenly, oh,
it's nothing other and like this is on everybody's lips.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
It's all that. I mean, it's not all the gets
talked about.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
But I mean we Joe Rogan, right, I mean, they're
clearly mad about Epstein, which is in my mind so insane, right,
Like the guy is screwing you six ways to Sunday
and you're like, I just need to know about this
dead billionaire.
Speaker 5 (43:29):
But I will just say, for me, that's just indicative
of this like deeper skepticism of the of the structure itself.
I mean, in some ways, I think it has less
to do with like the details of it, but more
it's just like the perfect thing to encapsulate this sort
of mistrust of our system. And they thought that they
were gonna get answers, and I think in many ways,
(43:50):
I mean, that's why they voted for Trump.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Trump.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
Trump told them one thing, one thing that they knew
was true. He told them that the system was screwing them,
and that was it.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
That was a that was the ballgame, because nobody ever
offered them anything. I mean, now something in twenty sixteen
I saw again and again was he was like, I'm
gonna make things cheaper. The system is rigged, you got screwed.
I'm gonna, you know, do this, do that. And it
wasn't possible. That's why other politicians didn't offer it.
Speaker 5 (44:19):
But that's the thing, though, is I think you need
to offer guess why I got to offer big stuff
and they're gonna be honest about it, Like I want
Medicare for all, and I'm gonna go to Washington. I'm
gonna fight for Medicare for all. I'm also gonna tell
people that it's going to be a swog and my
vote is not gonna get us Medicare for all. But
we're not gonna get Medicare for all if nobody goes
up there to fight for it. Politics is about compromise,
(44:41):
but it's also about being uncompromising for a while, Like
you gotta fight for a while, you gotta hold out,
you gotta believe that the thing you're pushing for matters,
and you got to go to the match, like you
gotta fight for it. And I firmly believe that for
my community in rural Maine, that is one of the
huge that's one of those big structural projects we need
(45:01):
to undertake to fix the crisis we have in this country.
And it's one of the only mechanisms we have right
now to like fix our broken rural healthcare system, because
clearly the system we have it's not doing it. And
so you can message on that stuff as long as
you're honest, I think people believe. I mean, look, there's
a people just want to know that you're not full
of shit. I think that's what it comes down to.
(45:22):
There's sick and tired of being lied to. They're sick
and tired of getting just like this kind of like
your standard politician that's focus grouping everything. And I'm not
gonna do that because I have no in I mean,
I'm not trying to be a politician, so I can
go be a politician. I want to go to the
US Senate so I can fight for the stuff that
I think is necessary to keep my community alive.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
So I'm just gonna keep fighting for that stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Graham, thank you for coming on. I hope you'll come.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Back Molly anytime. Also, the fact that they get to
swear here just makes me very happy. So thanks for that.
No moment.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Rick Wilson, Molly Johns asked, is that moment? It's that
moment from when we used to have a podcast together.
Do you miss having a podcast together?
Speaker 4 (46:07):
I do.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
I do really fun.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
Let us know people, should we because I don't have
enough podcasts right now?
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Yeah? And Rick needs more podcasts. How many podcasts do
you have? For? Not enough? All right? Rick Wilson, what
is your moment of fuck ray?
Speaker 4 (46:21):
My moment of fuckery is that no matter how you
feel about John Bolton, who is a very hard man
to love, a hardman to love the bullshit that's going
on right now with Cash MATEL and Danny Bingbong and
Pam Bondi and Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
No man is above the law.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
The law.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
Donald Trump. But this is a preview of bad stuff
to come. This is an overt signal that the Department
of Justice is Trump's personal revenge machine. It's an overt
signal that anybody who's criticized him, who's gone after him,
who has who has confronted him, who presented evidence of
his corruption or of anything regarding Russia or the classified
documents or the fraud case, They're going to go after
(47:05):
everybody who touched those things, and it's criticized them publicly.
I will not be surprised to see Jim Comey or
Michael Hayden, or Jim Clapper or Brennan or Miles Taylor
or Olivia Troy or god knows up or down the
food chain further raids like this to intimidate Trump's political enemies.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
And it's much easier to do these raydown people who
worked in Trump's administration. Can you explain why that is?
Speaker 4 (47:31):
Well, Look, most of these people signed an NDA with
Trump foolishly, which you know indias don't hold up in
court these days, but most of them did, so they
use that as part of their excuse set. The second
part of it is they are trying to rely on
a belief that a guy like John Bolton would be
like Trump and try to save valuable secret documents. I've
(47:53):
known John for thirty plus years. I can tell you
again you don't have to love John, but he was
a national security professional who is not going to go
steal classified docs. At the end of his term wherever
he was, he would know that that leads to a
lifetime in prison. And I got to tell you John
didn't want to go to prison.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Right I mean, I really dislike profoundly John Bolton.
Speaker 4 (48:14):
I get you, John, and I disagree on a lot
of shit. But I got to tell you they picked
him in part because he's a disagreeable hard man. They
picked him in part so that they could say, well,
nobody likes this guy well.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
And they picked him in part because he was criticizing
Trump about Russia, and Trump was watching it on television
and complaining to his people. And there's reporting in the
Washington Post that says exactly that that he didn't like
seeing on television criticizing him, so he said, let's go
after him. And again, that is not how any of
this is supposed to work.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
Well, let's keep John in our thoughts here, because he's
not the last one. They're going to be more. Rick
Wilson by John Fast A pleasure as always.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds and Representative Nancy Mays canceled the speech
after just eight people showed up. We have such a
great show for you today. The Lincoln Project Zone Rick
Wilson joins us to discuss why Democrats are failing to
(00:22):
register voters. Then we'll talk to Graham Platner about his
run for the Democratic nomination in the main Senate race
against Susan Collins. But first we have the most important
stories that aren't getting the attention they deserve.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Sobali, mister Trump, and Governor Wes Moore are going back
and forth. Governor Moore is talking about also doing a
redistricting in the great state of Maryland to retaliate against Texas.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
What are you see in here?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
If you're a governor and you're a Democrat, and if
you want anyone to ever respect you ever again, you
need to join this arms race. I don't like it.
I don't think anyone likes it. But as Obama said,
as Eric Calder, who is the man who pretty much
is the most interested in nonpartisan redistricting, there are no
(01:19):
choices at this moment. Democrats need to fight fire with fire.
They need to redistrict just the way Republicans are doing.
So Texas is going to do it, California needs to
do it, Maryland's got to do it. New York needs
to do it. Every state needs to fight back. Democratic
states need to fight back. And look, there is a shot,
there's a chance that if Democrats fight back, that the
(01:43):
Supreme Court, which are huge cowards, will say that everyone
needs to stop doing this. But if Democrats don't fight back,
then the Supreme Court, which is delightfully trumpy, and by
delightfully I mean annoyingly that red Court will in fact
do what they're maying. Go God King wants. And so
it's really important to remember that. You know, Trump is
(02:05):
a bully and if you don't push back, you will
forever be in his grips. And so here we are
Wes Moore trades barbs with Trump over threat to send
troops to Maryland. You know, we are watching this federal
takedown of DC. There are armed guards on the street.
Let me tell you, restaurant reservations are down thirty percent.
People do not like having troops in their city. It
(02:29):
does not want to make them want to spend money
or do tourism. We're already hemorrhaging tourists because of Trump's
war against people who don't live in this country. We
need those tourists because consumer spending is a lot of
our GDP YEP.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So, speaking of things that are going to decrease tourism
all throughout America, which I should say, everyone I talk
to in New York who works in service all Greece
that it's unbelievably downb this year. The Pentagon has been
planning for a military takeover Chicago for weeks. At Chicago
is a very very popular tourist destination.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, not for long, I mean. And by the way,
this is I mean, this is Trump doing his trumpy
best to try to hurt all of us. You know,
Trump is at war with brettzgar who is the Illinois governor,
because he comes from a fancy family and is an
actual billionaire. He wants, you know, and is a liberal,
(03:26):
and so he's probably going to roll right into Chicago.
And look, the point of all of this is this
is not about crime. Right in the district of Columbia,
there is still a billion dollars that's meant to go
to cops and teachers and homeless services. That is being
held because Congress has not figured out how you know,
(03:47):
has not passed the legislation that is needed in order
for that money to be spent. So all of this
is happening not because of crime, but because Donald Trump
wants to show power, wants to scare people, wants to
do all of this stuff. So you know, he'll say
it's about crime. But just like with his war on
(04:07):
academic institutions, this was not about anti semitism. This is
about authoritarian takedown of academic institutions, and academic institutions create
thought that Donald Trump may or may not like, and
that's how we got here.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So judges blocked Trump from cutting funding from thirty four
cities and counties over their sanctuary policies, another one of
his performantive, moronic authoritarian tactics.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, so look, the judiciary, everything is going to eventually
go up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court
is very trumpy, but you know, maybe at some point
they decide they want to have some legacy. I mean,
John Roberts, I just I don't understand how the Supreme
Court won't be brave if they have security. They have
(04:53):
so many opportunities to do the right thing, and yet
they really you know, either Trump is the vessel for
what they want and they're using him for that, or
they're just scared of him. But either way, it's just
sort of shocking. So this is a preliminary injunction blocking
the administration from cutting off or conditioning the use of
federal funds for so called sanctuary jurisdictions. This will run
(05:16):
up to the Supreme Court and we will see what happens.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
So one of the characters we don't hear from all
the time, but I'm always disturbed by the presence of
in any upper rushelan is dn I Gabbert, and she's
slashing Intelligence Office workforce and cutting budgets by over seven
hundred million dollars, which feels ill advised even for a
woke liberal like me.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Well, what's funny about this Tulsa Gabbert stuff is that
Trump put her in the ADMIN. He's been really mad
at her because she hasn't been sufficiently sycophantic. Then she
went on television and was like, yes, Obama did everything.
Obama set this all up, which was clearly like just
a pathetic ploy to try to win Trump back. I
(06:03):
don't know that it's worked. My sense is that she's
still kind of on the out, so I'd be curious
to see reporting on that. But she's trying everything she can.
It's just sort of amazing to watch her try and
try and try to win him back. But you know,
the thing is this entire federal government, it's basically serves
(06:24):
at the pleasure of one guy who really cares about
ratings more than anything else, right, I mean, the mad
ratings King. It really is kind of amazing. He cares
about ratings, He cares about people seeing what he's doing.
He doesn't really care about you know, national I mean
even national intelligence, which in my mind, like I think
wars are bad, and so I don't think we should
(06:46):
be doing wars. And this is one of the very
few places where the Vinn diagram of what Donald Trump
wants to do and what Molly john Fast wants to
do aligne right, which is like, I don't think we
should be doing foreign wars. But even that, he's like
so disinterested in it that he's like, maybe we should
do form. You know, he's just It is really a
case of a person. And it's funny because as someone
(07:07):
who has really bad add you would think I would
relate to this more, but I really don't.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Okay, Molly, we got to get serious here. I'm going
to say my honest thoughts, which is that I think
every time quit not quit. Every time I hear Minority
Leader Hakeem Jeffries do an interview, it inspires no confidence
that he understands the feeling of the Democratic base and
the people on the ground, and that it feels like
(07:35):
the bad things that are happening to us, if they
can be stopped. I don't believe he is doing anything
to stop them, because he does not talk like he
is ever.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
This is the real question, is like where is democratic
leadership and why are why are voters so mad? Voters
are really mad? We see this in the polling. We
see this and then the fundraising. We see this in
the definitely worth listening to Wreck today because he talks
about these bad voter registration numbers, which were written about
(08:04):
in the New York Times and you know, was a
big news cycle last week, and actually he debunks it
in a way that made me feel a lot better.
But there is still a problem with the brand, and
the real question is how do Democrats fix their brand? Now,
Chuck Schumer has done some good stuff, which is he's
recruited some very runnable candidates for some of these Senate seats.
(08:28):
Not so easy. But Keem goes on television. It's just
he cannot for whatever reason, he is unable to connect
with voters. Then we have the problem with Ken Martin,
who is unable to raise the money that needs to
be raised. And we have this voter register, these voter
registration numbers. I think that Democrats are going to have
(08:53):
to push harder. I think what people want from what
we're seeing with the polls and what we're seeing with
the numbers, is they want their electeds to fight for them,
to fight, fight, fight, to push back. I think that's
why now Gavin Newsom like him, don't like him. It
doesn't matter, right, What matters is that this guy is
(09:14):
pushing back. Gavin Newsom is breaking through now again. I
would like to go back to the chief of staff
for pritz Girl who said it's not left versus Center,
it's fight versus cave. And Newsom is fighting and that
is making Trump furious. And that is breaking through. Rick
(09:36):
Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Product in the
host of the Enemy's List. Welcome to Fast Politics, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Welly, John Fast. How are you doing today?
Speaker 1 (09:44):
I am just great. Should we start with the arm
takeover of Washington, DC?
Speaker 4 (09:49):
Or should as as one as one does when arms
troops are now patrolling the streets of DC, a city
which has a lower crime rate than where most of
the troops came from. These days, these Southern governors like
Tate Reeves and Mississippi Jackson. Mississippi literally is as dangerous
as Mogadishu Samo. It is one of the most violent,
(10:10):
dangerous cities in the whole country per capita. And yet
somehow Tate Reeves does not deployed his own state National
Guard there, but in order to kiss Trump's ass, has
sent them to DC.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
So here's a question for you. This weekend, I was
somewhere listening to a member of Congress. This was like
off the record thing, so I'm not going to say
who it is, but somebody asked him a question which
is often asked members of Congress. Said basically, why do
they kiss up to Trump? Why do they do why
(10:42):
do they ruin themselves at the altar of Trump? Is
it because they are ambitious or is it because they're scared?
And he said that he thought it was absolutely because
they're scared.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
They're scared. Look, I learned this as far back as
twenty seventeen when the former client of mine did a
town hall and was asked, are you going to support
mister Trump one hundred percent? And he gave the correct
answer at the time. He said, you know, I want
to work with Donald Trump on tax cuts and this
and that and this and that, but if it's wrong
for our district, no, I'm going to stand with you.
And by the time he got off stage, he was
(11:15):
getting death threats and his family was getting death threats.
And so the fear of the mob, the fear of
the horde, the fear of the of the monster, that
is the MAGA base, is what motivates them to stay
in line. They don't want to lose their primaries. They
also don't want to have crazy people come into their
house with guns. That is the not subtle promise that
Trump delivered on on January sixth is if you fuck
(11:38):
with me, I will have people come to your place
of business or your home with violence in their hearts
to hurt you. And most of these people, you look,
a lot of them are ambitious, but you can also
be afraid as well as being ambitious. Those ven diagrams
can sort of overload.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Right, exactly as much as everything feels really really bad,
and there are certainly a life lot of reasons to
feel bad. There is the arm takeover of the district.
There is Trump's plan to go roll into Chicago. We
just saw. There are a lot of things to feel
bad about. Democrats under raising Republicans. This democratic You know,
(12:15):
what I want you to talk to us about is first,
I want you to talk to us about these democratic
these numbers, these voter registration numbers, because last week this
came out that Democrats are basically getting creamed when it
comes to voter registration.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
You know, I can tell you all about this.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I was surprised by that.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
I'm not you know why?
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Okay? Why?
Speaker 4 (12:36):
Because Democrats think they can get volunteers to go do
voter registration. Republicans pay money.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
To do it.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Oh well, that makes sense, do it.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
So here's the deal. You got a lot of Democratic
groups sitting on a pile of money from last year,
you got a lot of Democratic groups have a lot
of money sitting around. Future Forward has two undred million
dollars sitting around, and they're all like, we've got to
fix the narrative, and No, what you have to do
first is go out and register fucking voters. When you
stop registering voters or you believe that you're going to
(13:06):
get allied groups to do it. And I've heard this
story from Democrats for ten years now of trying to
get them understand. The way Republicans do this is they
throw money at the problem. They're not sending volunteer like
young Conservatives out. They pay some fucking hobos to go
knock on doors and do voter registration. Democrats think that
(13:26):
they're going to get the union folks to do it,
or progressive groups to do it, or activist group. No,
stop it, pay the fucking money. Go out and pay
the money.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Is that really why? Because the Democrats are about behind
by about four million votes, Yes, in voter organization, pay
the money.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
Evangelical churches are the one group of Republicans that do
voter reds sort of on the come. They otherwise spend
the money. The state parties spend the money. This is
an explicable, simple, understandable process. There are people who do
this for a living and they should be using them.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
So I want you to talk us through this. Because
Shane Goldmacher had a piece in the New York Tims
say it said Democrats are just not as popular. But
that's not what this means.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
It's not what this is. That's not what it is.
That's not what it is. A lot of the drop
off with Democratic voters has been because there are a
lot of people frustrated with the Democratic Party for a
for a million reasons. We could spend days on this subject,
but most of them don't. We probably will, We probably will. Yeah,
they don't flip to Republican, they drop off to non
(14:36):
party affiliated. It is a lot cheaper and simpler to
convert a non party affiliated voter either to Democratic for
the first time or to bring them home to the
Democratic Party because you kind of know who they are.
This is not none of this is rocket science. There
are very good people with data and lists and approaches
(14:58):
to these things. They know how to do it. But
the Democratic Party has always sort of like, oh, we'll
farm this part out to the unions in this city
or this state. We'll farm this part out to the
College of Democrats. No, stop it professionalize.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
So who is in charge of this? Is this a
Ken Martin problem?
Speaker 4 (15:15):
It's Ken Martin problem. So it's also a state party problem.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Right, but he is the Ken Martin is the chair
of the DNC and vis.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Look when Michael Steele took over the Republican Party back
in the mid two thousands, he put the money in
to registering people and to winning state election stuff, and
that took voter redge. We pushed money out into the
parties like the Georgia Republican Party, Florida Republican Party, North
Carolina Republican Party and said here's two million dollars. This
(15:46):
grant is explicitly for you to do voter registration.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
So Ken Martin has also has these terrible fundraising numbers,
just horrendous. The DNC is getting their clock cleaned by
the RNC, despite the fact that Donald Trump is rolling
troops into states, despite the fact that they're.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
Doing it because he's rolling troops into states. They are afraid,
just like a lot of these members of Congress are afraid.
They now understand, and Trump has delivered this message very
coldly and as people have delivered it. If you're not
with us, we will come after you and hurt you.
If you don't do what we want, sell us ten
percent of your company. They will. They're like, will hurt you.
(16:29):
We'll use regulation, will use the DOJ.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Whatever.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
But so shouldn't. Ken Martin still try to raise money
for him crass money.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
He's still try to raise money. But when the Democrats
take power again, if they what when they take power again,
nothing lasts forever. When they take power again, they need
to do exactly what the Republicans have been doing for
a generation. They're the ones who got out and they
call these companies and go because right now the Republican
Campaign Committee people call right big companies so stations ago. Hey,
(16:59):
by the way, if you got one guy or two
guys Democrats in your state, that's okay, but you're going
to give a one hundred to one ratio to us,
and if you don't, we're gonna fuck you.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
And look, this is this idea of Democrats playing hardball.
I know, like makes the hair stand up on the
back of a lot of these soft, softer minded people
who like policy shit. But the reason what California is
doing is meaningful in response to Texas is because it's
the real politics. It's the fight we're really in, not
(17:31):
the fight we want to be in. Well.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
And also, if you can't win back the House, you're
going to be fucked.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
Oh yeah, as I've said this. I think I said
this on the last show. If there's a Republican majority
in twenty twenty eight and the Democrat wins the election,
they will not certify him.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
No, I think they're already saying that in a hundred
different ways. So I think there's also an argument to
be made for soft federalism, this idea that you are
the fourth largest economy and if you don't want it,
if you you know, why are you putting in tax
dollars if you're not getting the female release release, there's.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
A there's there's a piece of real talk here. California
is the fourth largest economy, not in the in the country,
but in the world. Yeah, and the economic power of
major states in this country is an underestimated political lever
and the red state donor the donor states, the blue
states giving to the red states. That is an equation
(18:31):
that has never been fully explored by any any Democratic
state leader. That I can think of off the top
of my head, and you know, we're starting to explore
these things now. I think in a way that reflects
on the precarious nature of the Republican's economic model. Part
of what they're relying on right now is that somehow
(18:51):
Powell is going to cut rates by some double digit
number and they're going to juice the economy and go
into twenty six with a glowing economy. Again, it's a
it's a big bet.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
There's no evidence to support none whatsoever.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
But if you're if you're a Republican right now, you
are worried. You're looking in the rearview about the economy.
You're looking at the rear view. But a lot of
Democrats are saying in these meetings that I that I
go to unless I go online. In these zooms, it's
like we're going to run on prescription drugs and medicare
once again. There are troops and tanks and armored vehicles
in the streets of our capital. We have a president
(19:26):
who is running a whorehouse at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.
We have a president who's about to free a convicted
child sex trafficker. And do you think he's going to Oh. Absolutely,
you read those transcripts from Blanche. That's a set up
for days, so explain. You go through those transcripts and
she's like, I admire President Trump and all he's a compey.
(19:48):
This was all pregamed. I bet you good money. Blanche
went to his attorney, her attorney.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Who's a friend of her, who's a friend of.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Blanche's, right, yeah, and said, hey, she's got to go
in the room and say the following things at minimum,
and she did. I never saw Trump anywhere near Jeffrey what.
I never saw him in the massage setting, which come
imad was an interesting sort of of gap because it's like,
so you never saw him getting a massage, but you
might have seen him with a teenage girl. Didn't ask any.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Questions when he just volunteered.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
This thing was a complete mess, and it's a pre game.
Nobody should be shocked, and it could happen as early
as this week, I think.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
But here's a question for you about the Epstein stuff,
because the pulling on the Ebstein step. Actually, I'm going
to tell you something even stupider than that. So on
this episode, I interviewed a guy called Graham Planter, who
was running for who is running to be the nominee
(20:48):
in Maine to run against Susan Collin. Yeah, and he
has you know, he like Jared Gold, has a lot
of Congressman Jared Gold, who has an r post for
the most rural district, has a lot of Trump or
people in his life. And so I said, you know,
did they lose have they lost interest in Trump? Are
they you know? What does it look like? And he
(21:09):
said to me, a lot of them are mad about
the tariffs. But he also said, and he's like, you're
going to think this is crazy. It's worth listening to
the interview because I think it's interesting. He said, you
didn't think it's crazy, but a lot of people are
mad about Epstein.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Yeah, they are. Look this and we've talked about this.
We've written about both of us have written about this,
the Epstein storyline and the idea that there's a global
democratic pedophile network storyline from twenty sixteen on. When Pizza
Jack started to invent it and it became a part
of their personalities, it became so they believed in fundamentally,
(21:46):
and now they thought they were going to get this
revelation that was going to take all these Democrats down.
And it turns out that Donald Trump put a thousand
FBI agents on the story so he could cover it up,
so we could take his name out of those files.
It turns out there they want to release seventy pages
out of over one hundred and fifty thousand pages of
testimony and documents, And so even his own believers are like,
(22:07):
what the fuck is this? Boss? Right, where's the good stuff?
Speaker 1 (22:11):
I think it's worth thinking about this for a second,
about what happens when like this comes back to this
fundamental question of twenty sixteen, when Bernie Sanders said this
system is rigged against you, right, he said, it's rigged.
There are these people who feel it's rigged. And I
(22:32):
feel like Trump again, somehow was able to make the
case that he was going to unrake the system. I
don't know how he made that case after having already
been reserved for four years, but he you know, I
think the fact that people weren't being offered anything, and
that he was at least offering them something was meaningful.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
I think you're right. And look, there was a reason
why about a quarter of Bernie's voters in twenty sixteen
went to Trump.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
That's crazy because.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
There is a there is a non ideological element in
American society today that feels like the system is rigged.
And the reason they went with Trump was, even though
they knew he was corrupt and scummy, they thought, well,
at least he's transgressive, at least he's gonna blow everything up.
At least he's gonna hurt people that I don't like,
(23:24):
and that I think that still existed in a probably
larger number in some ways by the end of twenty
twenty four then was president in twenty sixteen, there were
a lot of people who still looked at the choices
and says, Okay, she's a standard issue politician, and he's
still a terrorist, he's still a crazy man. He's still
(23:48):
the guy who's gonna blow shit up. And when you
don't have these deep sophisticated understanding of what's really going
on in the world, blowing shit up sometimes sounds awfully appealing.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Well.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
And also the reason is in that they thought the
system was rigged against them is because it is.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
Yeah, and look, the system now under Trump is being rigged.
The transfer of wealth under Donald.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Trump largest in history, largest.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
In history by an order of magnitude. You've shifted the
largest amount of wealth in the history of this country
from like the the the S and P five hundred
to seven tech firms, all of whom support Trump. You've
shifted trillions of dollars of government funding from the middle
(24:32):
or lower end of the spectrum to tax cuts for
about six hundred billionaires in this country. And this isn't
free market stuff. This isn't the market functioning in a
way that hurts poor people. This is crony capitalism be
run from the White House. There's a reason why Republicans
(24:53):
are fine with this, because they're not the or MAGA
voters excuse me, are fine with this because they're not
conserved on anything anymore. They're radical and Trump is a
radical for them. And you know, mom, Dommy says, I
want six publicly owned grocery stores in New York and
people shit a brick. Donald Trump says, companies not to
(25:14):
pay me vig that to pay me a percentage from
now on, or we're going to hurt them. And I'm sorry.
Trump's actually the one seizing the fucking means of production here, right.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
If you are someone who is doesn't like this, yes, yes,
I mean, do you think like we have. We've gotten
some polls, but nobody trusts polls we have certainly there
are some evidence that people are not happy with this.
I mean, like, what do you think you know? We
(25:50):
only know what we know, right we only see what's
what is in our silo. But what do you really
think is happening on the ground right now?
Speaker 4 (25:59):
Look, I think the economic damage that Trump is doing,
and it's a combination of the tariffs, of the big
bad Bill, and of this of this shift in our
overall economic model where it's where where fewer and fewer
companies are controlling more and more stuff, right where things
like home ownership have completely disappeared as a as a
(26:22):
goal for young people, where the trap of student loan
debt and the trap of low paying jobs have combined
to put a generation Gen Z and and you know
a lot of millennials into a into a into a
trap where they're never going to financially.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Escape unless they join Ice.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
Right, Well, there is that d K man.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
He can't Ice is offering The reason I made that
joke is that ICE is offering like a sixty thousand
dollars student loan debt forgiveness, which is ironic because the
Supreme Court said that Biden's loan for you.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
I was told that loan forgiveness was unconstitutional court, but yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know, the rules are different for the and me,
as they say.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Thank you, Rick Wilson Graham Platner is running for the
Democratic Party nomination for Senate in the Great State of Maine.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Graham.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me so.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Chuck Schumer has done extremely good job recruiting Democrats to
run for the Senate. We have Cooper in North Carolina.
We have basically the dream team. We got share of
back in Ohio everyone. But there's one state that I
was like, that fucking state. It's such a good state.
It's filled with so many smart people, academics. Interesting Purple state.
(27:51):
I mean, like Susan Collins is the white whale of
the Democratic Party. Yes, she pretends to be a moderate
and then votes as a Trumper every fucking time. By
the way, so when I heard that you were running,
I was like, oh, thank god. So talk to me
about how you decided to run for the United States
(28:13):
Senate in the Great state of man.
Speaker 5 (28:15):
Yeah, for the records. I mean, I'm sure people know
this already. I do not hold elected office, nor have
I run for elected office. I'm the harbor master of
my small town of Sullivan Bank, and I've been the
chair of the Sullivan Planning Board for about five years.
I'm very proud of that, but we have it with
the town of one thousand people.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Planning boards, though, are a little bit like being a
federal employee.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
I mean there's a lot of reading through policy and ordinances.
Even small towns have lots and lots of ordinances. In
figuring it out, and then in many ways then you
see like the material outcomes of policy because you have
to kind of like make it happen. About a month ago,
some friends of mine from some community organizations, some friends
of mine from I do I am involved with with
(28:59):
some community organizing in eastern Hacott County, very small scale
stock They came to me and said, hey, listen, we're
afraid we think this Yeason Collegs is uniquely weak, which
I of course agree with.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
We're also afraid.
Speaker 5 (29:11):
That the Democratic Party is going to run kind of
the same kind of playbook. And this is what happened
back in twenty twenty, which is essentially fine candidate that
comes out of establishment politics and has a campaign that
has a lot of pressure from above to run kind
of your sort of all like at this point corporate, yeah,
(29:31):
corporate campaign. And they're like, we think that that might
be like, like, even though we think we've got a
real shot at finally getting the seat flipped, we're afraid
that it may not flip.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
It may we may run into the exact same problems
that we've had in the past.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
And they're like, and we think that you might be
a really good candidate to do this. And this was
weird for me because like, well, I agree with all
of these assessments, and I had held them myself that
had the same exact fears, and I never envisioned myself
doing it. It's I mean, I haven't aspired to be
a you of the I live a very very simple life.
I don't have a lot of money. My wife and
I have two dogs and a cat, and we work
(30:05):
really hard. It's kind of me now, we living a
little tiny town on the.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Coast of met What kind of dogs do you have?
Speaker 3 (30:10):
They're both sleeping on the couch right now.
Speaker 5 (30:12):
We have a year and nine month old black lab
and we have like a little mutt that looks like
a tiny Belgian malin law.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
So okay, so I want to just pause and talk
about So in twenty twenty, Collins was up. She ran
against Sarah Gideon. Sarah Gideon raised millions upon millions of dollars.
She was a goodish candidate. Fine, you know, corporate, very
much like someone who could come and talk at an
(30:39):
Uber board meeting, right represented, you know, the kind of corporatist,
not a person who represents the working man. So now
Maine and I want to talk about There's a member
of Congress from Maine who I bet you know who
represents the most district that Democrats represent. And his name
(31:04):
is Jared Golden.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Golden and he's my I live in district too, so
he's my rut.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Okay, So Jared is a Democrat, but he's really like
a Diane Osborne Bernie Sanders. So talk us through sort
of your district, how he is able to run there
and how he keeps speeding the Republicans.
Speaker 5 (31:24):
We're very rural district, it's very spread out. There are
a lot of people that work very hard, view themselves
as kind of hard scrabble, blue collar working class, and
Jared has done a great job of like being a Democrat.
It's still appealing to that kind of in many ways,
it's cultural, it's it's an esthetic in some ways, people
see themselves in him, and he's been able to hold
(31:47):
onto that seat which is which is no small feet.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
It's an R plus ten or fifteen or something.
Speaker 5 (31:53):
Yeah, I can't remember the exact number, but it's a
lot that being said, like you know, for me, like
that's on the electability side. I think that was what
really was hard for the Gideon campaign in District two,
where you'd have a lot of kind of dispersed rural
conservative voters. You need to have somebody who can talk
to them. You need to have somebody who can like
(32:14):
interact with them. And like for myself, who lives in
District two and many of my friends are Trump letters,
many of my neighbors are Republicans.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
I don't have to like do.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
Some kind of like mental math on how to have
these conversations because I have these conversations. I mean they're
like it's just part of my daily life is talking
to people who are technically on the other side of
the of the political divide. But you know, like the
big thing, the thing that I think my candidacy brings
to the table that I'm just not really seeing in
(32:44):
other kind of campaigns, both for this race and elsewhere
in the state, is that there is a deep anti
establishment angst going on. People really do feel like the
system has left them behind, and you need to be
able to speak to that. But you need to be
able to speak to in a way that's not kind
under sending, it's not patronizing.
Speaker 3 (33:02):
It's more just like being able to talk about.
Speaker 5 (33:04):
The material realities that we're all currently living in, with
like a collapsing rural healthcare system, with a housing crisis
that is I mean utterly insane around here, although I
can't it's insane everywhere, but I mean it's bad, it's
real bad here, and a general affordability crisis. And if
you can't, if you if you can't be approachable, and
if you're not interested in approaching those voters, it will
(33:26):
just continue to lose them. And well they'll can and
then we have the whole element of there's a lot
of people in the state who are like Maine is
like a third Democrat, a third Republican and a third
independent or unenrolled.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
And that's what I wanted to ask you about. The
governor of Maine is an independent or was an independent,
and you have Angus King, who is maybe an independent
but caucuses with the dams right, he.
Speaker 5 (33:52):
Was the independent governor and then he be our independent senator.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
So there absolutely is for sure independent streak in your state.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
Very manors very much see themselves as as not being
easily put into these sort of political buckets that we've
all created, myself included. I mean, I feel like I'm
very It's the life that I live. I don't think
people would look at it and be like, yeh, guys,
obviously a Democrat even though I am. There are a
lot of folks in the state, and there have been
because of this. It has been very easy for a
(34:23):
lot of voters in the state to just walk away,
to just look at everything that's happening and just kind
of be like, this whole thing is not built for me,
and I Am not going to engage in it anymore.
And my fear is that that can happen again. What
gives me hope, though, is that I have lots of
friends are who are of that who. When I talk
(34:45):
about the policies that I want to push and I
talk about the kind of systemic problems as they truly exist,
those people always respond positively. They always think like, yeah,
I mean the system is in many ways broken. It
isn't representing me, and I want to see something in
it that does represent me.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
I mean, we need to have people of like.
Speaker 5 (35:07):
The working class of Maine, representing the working class of Maine.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
It's just people can connect with that.
Speaker 5 (35:13):
It's hard to connect with somebody who you just see
is like a political animal.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
So let's talk about that, because the thing I've been
struck by is like one party wants to give you healthcare,
one party wants to take it away. One party wants
to give you child tax credit. One party wants to
pretends it wants to give you that. One party wants
to raise taxes on the wealthy. One party pretends it
wants to raise taxes. Like this seems pretty honous to me,
(35:39):
But part of the situation is it strikes me your
job is to break through, right, to get on the
media outlets that Harris couldn't not her fault. She had
one hundred days and she did an incredible job, and
a lot of those places were not open to her
for any number of structural reasons that nothing to do
(36:00):
with her talent. But I wonder, You've got to get
in the right spaces, You've got to talk to everyone,
and then you also have to talk to people in
the state. But I do feel like because you really
are a manor doing things that are actual main jobs,
you know what I mean, like a harbor master. Like
that's not a New York City job.
Speaker 5 (36:22):
I mean, there is the New York City harbor master,
but I think probably a bit bigger than mine.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Right exactly. That's a good point. Sorry, it's not a
McKinsey job. It's a job job.
Speaker 5 (36:30):
Yeah, anyway, and like it to be fair, Like I
work in a small harbor. So my real job, I'm
an oyster farmer. I mean that's what I do. And
I have a small I have a small like diving business.
And yeah, I mean I think again, I mean, like
just much easier for me to connect with normal working
maners because I'm obviously a normal working mainer. I also
haven't been like picked, you know, like this whole thing,
(36:51):
we've built this from the floor up. If we've built
this on our own. We've built this kind of in house.
I'm lucky enough to have gotten support from people who
are very effective. I mean, obviously the roll out on
Tuesday just extremely competently done, and I can take absolutely
no credit for it. But truthfully it's a Yeah, it's
a because we're building it from the ground.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Up, and because that's pretty obvious at this point.
Speaker 5 (37:12):
I think it's being it's fairly clear that people can
tell that this isn't just coming out of the standard
like political machine. That's just a lot more approachable and
it's and and it's and it keeps people I think,
a lot more open minded than they might be, even
though like the policies I'm pushing for like pretty you know,
like democratic policies. I'd want people to get healthcare. I
want to protect social security, I want it. Like those
(37:35):
are all the things that I believe in. We didn't
do them, but like there is an aesthetic element to
our politics that I think is unhealthy, but it is
a reality. I can really appeal across the electorate and
main in many ways that I just think for for
reasons that have nothing to do with like frankly me
or anybody's personal capacity.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
They're just there. They're structural reasons, but they but they're real.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
We're watching in a solitarian takeover of our country. We
got guys getting their cars wrapped, the ice. Guys that
would say protect the homeland. Okay, the homeland. That's not
you know, that is not what we call Amerca.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Right, this is language that we've all heard before in history.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
So right, So you have an opportunity in a state
that is very purple. So what does that look like
for you? How do you win in Maine?
Speaker 3 (38:21):
What we do is that first we're building a ground game.
Speaker 5 (38:25):
And I'm just going to use this moment to plug
grahamfirsenate dot com. We need help to do this both
with donations because we're not taking corporate pac money. We're
not taking it's all small dollar stuff. But we also
need people. We're not going to be able to outraise anybody,
and we know that. But we do have a theory
of change that is mostly built around building out old
school campaigning, shoe leather campaigning, knocking on doors, building out
(38:48):
like volunteer capacity, building out offices, and doing like a
fully statewide coordinated campaign to get as many people in
Because if we can't beat them with money.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
We have to beat them with people, and we can
beat them with people. I'll just say this.
Speaker 5 (39:03):
If you don't live in the state of Maine and
this sounds like something you want to get involved in,
you can donate and we need that, but you can
also phone back. You can also sign up as a volunteer.
We've got volunteer opportunities that are not just main based.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
So this in many ways.
Speaker 5 (39:19):
Like because of the visibility, because I mean, this is
our best shot to get rid of Sustan Collins finally
and forever. This is been doing this for a long time,
and we can we can do this. I mean we
we really do have I think a very clear path
to victory. But I can't do it by myself. Is
mostly what it comes.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Down when you talk to Jared, what does he say,
sort of this secret He is in an R plus
four district, but it's the most rural. He's the Democrat
that represents the most rural district. One of the problems
that Democrats have had is speaking a rural voter, speaking
a working class voters, speaking a non college educative voters.
Main part of the state is very liberal, a very
(40:01):
college educated, lots of universities. Part of the state is
much more like a rural state. So talk us through
how you meet people there.
Speaker 5 (40:11):
I mean, this is going to suck, kind of goofy,
but I'm forty. I run an immense amount of energy.
I'm a former bartender who likes talking to people. And
They've run a Toyota tundra that's got at least four
hundred thousand miles left on it.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
If I do the oil changes right.
Speaker 5 (40:24):
So the way that I do it is that I
go out and talk to people and I can. These
are conversations that for me are not difficult to have
because I, in many ways just have them all the
time with my neighbors, with my friends. I have a
lot of friends who are not remotely aligned with me politically,
but when we talk, they all feel like the system
(40:45):
is shrewing them. They all feel like the billionaires in
the oligart class is stealing everything from them. They feel
like there's a political establishment that serves those interests and
they're mad about it, and they're right. I'm like, yeah,
we're right there. And when you talk about things like
Medicare for all, when you talk about things like ending
the foreign wars that I thought in that costs so
(41:08):
much money and did nothing, nothing for the American working class.
When we talk about that stuff in language that kind
of divorces it from politics. In some ways, everybody agrees,
everybody understands. And so for me, I'm just going to
go out and have those conversations. I'm going to go
out and drive everywhere and talk to everybody, and I think,
(41:28):
you know, just I'm not. There are going to be conversations,
there are going to be topics that we are not
going to align on. But my opinion is that until
we've built a healthcare system that takes care of people,
until we've come up with housing solutions that put people
in homes and don't bankrupt folks, then we come up
with a solution to the wages versus the rising cost
(41:49):
of goods problem. Everything else is down the road in
the better world that we have to build.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
We're going to have.
Speaker 5 (41:55):
Those conversations and at that point we can all argue
about it. But right now, right now, we got to
focus on the big stuff, and the big stuff is
what counts, and it's also what win. That's my plan,
and I want to do it with as many other
maners as I can, who want to come out and
take part in this.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
What is it like on the ground in Maine? Are
people are they still maga? Are they like, let's give
my man a chance? I mean, like, we see the polls,
but who even knows if the polls are right. We
see Donald Trump's anxiety, but who knows.
Speaker 5 (42:22):
I will just say this anecdotally, most of my friends
who voted for Trump are.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Disgusted really already.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
Alrighty, So a lot of them are builders, a lot
of them are.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Are get fucked by the terrorf That's right.
Speaker 5 (42:35):
And luckily, like the people they buy goods from are
telling them, hey, this is up thirty percent because this
tariff shit is driving me insand like we don't know
that's why the prices are up. And like they take
that and they go home. They're like, well, this is
fucking bullshit.
Speaker 3 (42:47):
And it is.
Speaker 5 (42:47):
And there's also an element this isn't as much, but
there is also an element in this where you know,
a lot of these folks they voted for.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
The thing I hear the most is the Epstein thing.
I hear this all the time, unbelievable all they talk about.
They're like they told us.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
He told us blah blah blah, and then they went
up there and now they're up there and suddenly, oh,
it's nothing other and like this is on everybody's lips.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
It's all that. I mean, it's not all the gets
talked about.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
But I mean we Joe Rogan, right, I mean, they're
clearly mad about Epstein, which is in my mind so insane, right,
Like the guy is screwing you six ways to Sunday
and you're like, I just need to know about this
dead billionaire.
Speaker 5 (43:29):
But I will just say, for me, that's just indicative
of this like deeper skepticism of the of the structure itself.
I mean, in some ways, I think it has less
to do with like the details of it, but more
it's just like the perfect thing to encapsulate this sort
of mistrust of our system. And they thought that they
were gonna get answers, and I think in many ways,
(43:50):
I mean, that's why they voted for Trump.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Trump.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
Trump told them one thing, one thing that they knew
was true. He told them that the system was screwing them,
and that was it.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
That was a that was the ballgame, because nobody ever
offered them anything. I mean, now something in twenty sixteen
I saw again and again was he was like, I'm
gonna make things cheaper. The system is rigged, you got screwed.
I'm gonna, you know, do this, do that. And it
wasn't possible. That's why other politicians didn't offer it.
Speaker 5 (44:19):
But that's the thing, though, is I think you need
to offer guess why I got to offer big stuff
and they're gonna be honest about it, Like I want
Medicare for all, and I'm gonna go to Washington. I'm
gonna fight for Medicare for all. I'm also gonna tell
people that it's going to be a swog and my
vote is not gonna get us Medicare for all. But
we're not gonna get Medicare for all if nobody goes
up there to fight for it. Politics is about compromise,
(44:41):
but it's also about being uncompromising for a while, Like
you gotta fight for a while, you gotta hold out,
you gotta believe that the thing you're pushing for matters,
and you got to go to the match, like you
gotta fight for it. And I firmly believe that for
my community in rural Maine, that is one of the
huge that's one of those big structural projects we need
(45:01):
to undertake to fix the crisis we have in this country.
And it's one of the only mechanisms we have right
now to like fix our broken rural healthcare system, because
clearly the system we have it's not doing it. And
so you can message on that stuff as long as
you're honest, I think people believe. I mean, look, there's
a people just want to know that you're not full
of shit. I think that's what it comes down to.
(45:22):
There's sick and tired of being lied to. They're sick
and tired of getting just like this kind of like
your standard politician that's focus grouping everything. And I'm not
gonna do that because I have no in I mean,
I'm not trying to be a politician, so I can
go be a politician. I want to go to the
US Senate so I can fight for the stuff that
I think is necessary to keep my community alive.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
So I'm just gonna keep fighting for that stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Graham, thank you for coming on. I hope you'll come.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Back Molly anytime. Also, the fact that they get to
swear here just makes me very happy. So thanks for that.
No moment.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Rick Wilson, Molly Johns asked, is that moment? It's that
moment from when we used to have a podcast together.
Do you miss having a podcast together?
Speaker 4 (46:07):
I do.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
I do really fun.
Speaker 4 (46:09):
Let us know people, should we because I don't have
enough podcasts right now?
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Yeah? And Rick needs more podcasts. How many podcasts do
you have? For? Not enough? All right? Rick Wilson, what
is your moment of fuck ray?
Speaker 4 (46:21):
My moment of fuckery is that no matter how you
feel about John Bolton, who is a very hard man
to love, a hardman to love the bullshit that's going
on right now with Cash MATEL and Danny Bingbong and
Pam Bondi and Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
No man is above the law.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
The law.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
Donald Trump. But this is a preview of bad stuff
to come. This is an overt signal that the Department
of Justice is Trump's personal revenge machine. It's an overt
signal that anybody who's criticized him, who's gone after him,
who has who has confronted him, who presented evidence of
his corruption or of anything regarding Russia or the classified
documents or the fraud case, They're going to go after
(47:05):
everybody who touched those things, and it's criticized them publicly.
I will not be surprised to see Jim Comey or
Michael Hayden, or Jim Clapper or Brennan or Miles Taylor
or Olivia Troy or god knows up or down the
food chain further raids like this to intimidate Trump's political enemies.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
And it's much easier to do these raydown people who
worked in Trump's administration. Can you explain why that is?
Speaker 4 (47:31):
Well, Look, most of these people signed an NDA with
Trump foolishly, which you know indias don't hold up in
court these days, but most of them did, so they
use that as part of their excuse set. The second
part of it is they are trying to rely on
a belief that a guy like John Bolton would be
like Trump and try to save valuable secret documents. I've
(47:53):
known John for thirty plus years. I can tell you
again you don't have to love John, but he was
a national security professional who is not going to go
steal classified docs. At the end of his term wherever
he was, he would know that that leads to a
lifetime in prison. And I got to tell you John
didn't want to go to prison.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Right I mean, I really dislike profoundly John Bolton.
Speaker 4 (48:14):
I get you, John, and I disagree on a lot
of shit. But I got to tell you they picked
him in part because he's a disagreeable hard man. They
picked him in part so that they could say, well,
nobody likes this guy well.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
And they picked him in part because he was criticizing
Trump about Russia, and Trump was watching it on television
and complaining to his people. And there's reporting in the
Washington Post that says exactly that that he didn't like
seeing on television criticizing him, so he said, let's go
after him. And again, that is not how any of
this is supposed to work.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
Well, let's keep John in our thoughts here, because he's
not the last one. They're going to be more. Rick
Wilson by John Fast A pleasure as always.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!