May 22, 2023 • 35 mins
We talk about the recurrent scam run by Democratic Party consultants in Texas to convince people to give money to doomed campaigns promising to "flip" the state and about how to actually make things better in the state.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
What are we recording? Yeah, yeah, yeah, what the episode started? Now,
I was, I was, I was going to say something
something to do with Texas. But to be honest, you know, why,
why why do we do this? Why do we let ourselves,
you know, get famous for for for saying a particular
bit and then just keep repeating it over and over again.
(00:28):
Are we so creatively bankrupt that there's there's nothing else
we can do but repeat our greatest hits in order
to recapture some of the some of the the excitement
that we felt as younger men. Anyway, my co hosts
on this episode, James Stout and me along, welcome to
it could happen here.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Hi, rob It. I'm glad you're doing so well.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
We're all doing great. James, You've just been having a
searing emotional experience at the border. Yeah mm hm. And
everyone else is busy living in the United States, which
is its own searing emotional experience.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Man.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Today, today we're going to be talking about the both
the most and least American state, Texas. Huzzah, Yeah, love you. Yeah,
who here has spent a lot of time in Texas. Garrison,
you lived in the Dallas area, right.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
A lot that I I've made my visit to Texas
over the years with you, even in the murder House.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
You and I have quaffed many a shiner bock together,
James Many. Okay, I guess we'll move into the fucking episode.
So uh, there was a There was a an email
sent out by Texas Democrats dot Org recently with the
title Texas moves from solid red to battleground. Sure, you know,
(01:54):
like clockwork. A lot of Democrats got very excited, and
I made a couple of people made posts being like, hey,
this is the same thing that happens every single election.
They are never right. Texas is never a battleground and
it always costs an insane amount of money. It is
a con by DC political consultants to get your money
(02:17):
and pump it into something that will fill up their
coffers and not achieve anything of value for the state
of Texas or for the Democrats nationwide. And this makes
people very angry for two reasons. One, they tend to
interpret it as saying abandon Texas and the people there,
which is not the statement I was making or anyone
else was making. And number two, everyone kind of obsessively
(02:39):
starts pointing out like, look, look at how over the
last thirty years, you know, the things have narrowed in
Texas and the proportion of like Democratic votes is raised.
This is winnable. We can do it. We can do it.
We're going to talk today about why anyone who talks
to you about flipping Texas as a political goal that
(03:02):
you should give money to is conning you, and not
only conning you, but making it actually more difficult for
Democrats to win, both in Texas and nationwide. That's that's
that's the premise of the episode, everybody.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Here's here's how Bernie can still win. Though at the
very end we will give you.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, We're gonna let you know he's got a shot. Look,
look if he if he is capable of putting another
three rounds of six point five into a dinner plate
sized target at one hundred and fifty yards, now that
was a that was anyway, he'd have to shoot a
(03:41):
lot of people to make.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
He's going to deploy bought a joy into a.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Name, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Person. So I want to talk about this because I
find it, like I think people tend to interpret this.
I've certainly gotten accused of like, oh, you're just kind
of being like a nihilist. This is you're being you know,
just an anti electoralist. You're not being practical. There was
a there was one particular guy who's like a local
Democratic candidate who responded seven times to my tweet being
(04:17):
like with variations, and his obsession was like, if we
win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to win national elections,
which is true. If theoretically the Democrats flipped Texas, the
GOP would have no chance at winning a federal election ever. Again.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah, and so simultaneous to this, right, if the Republican
there are more Republicans in California than there are basically
any other state in the Union, and if the Republicans
won California, they would they would win every election forever.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, happen. Not going to happen. I mean,
it's it's one of those things. I am not saying
Texas will never be a blue state. You know, that
is something that is possible, even likely, given enough time.
What I am saying, the argument that I'm making here,
and I'll provide you with evidence, is that number one,
(05:03):
focusing on these elections from the top down and when
you're saying, we want to flip Texas. That's a top
down approach, right. You are not focusing on we want
to fill up and win a bunch of different local elections.
We want to flip, you know, the state houses. We
want to flip a bunch of mayoralties and stuff. You
are saying, what matters is how Texas votes in the
(05:24):
national election. And if you were to get if you
were to kind of eke out a bear like in
Georgia right where you get a narrow victory in the
federal election, that would be great for the Democratic Party.
One of my issues with it is that kind of
focusing obsessively on flipping Texas isn't focusing on the stuff
that actually will help Texans, like Texans currently being targeted
(05:47):
by the state government, because flipping the state in a
federal election, but not taking the governor's seat, not taking
the lieutenant governor seat, not like actually taking the state house,
doesn't improve life for people in Texas. I think the
kind of the degree to which the federal government, Biden's administration,
has been unable to push back very effectively against kind
(06:11):
of a lot of the shit that DeSantis has been
doing in Florida. You know, they have started to make
some attempts. Is evidence of this, and kind of more
to the point, even if you don't agree with that, fundamentally,
these strategies that the Democratic Party has embraced in Texas
do not work. The Texas Democratic Party is incompetent. They
are bad at their job. They are worse. People bring
(06:33):
up Georgia a lot when I talk about flipping Texas,
and folks are like, well, we flipped Georgia, And it's like, yeah,
because the state elected officials and candidates in George number one,
the state party did a much better job of kind
of harvesting is a weird way to phrase it, but
of incubating talent to run for election in a number
(06:54):
of local offices then the Texas Democratic Party has ever done.
And that was a big part of what allowed them
to be competitive and eventually to flip the state. There's
a lot of like kind of dollar sign information on
how bad the state party in Texas is at this shit,
and I guess I should go ahead and provide some
(07:15):
of that now. So in the twenty twenty two election,
the midterms famously an unusually good showing for the Democratic
Party nationwide for a midterm election everywhere but Texas. O'Rourke
ran against Greg Abbott. He lost by eleven percent. This
(07:35):
is kind of to contrast the election that got everyone
excited when he was running against Cruise. I think they
were like three percent apart. And again, the only reason
there was this kind of mistaken belief and excitement among
dims that O'Rourke, because he was so close to Cruz,
had a real shot of winning Texas. No, he got
kinda close to beating Cruz because Ted even Republicans hate
(07:58):
Ted Cruz. No one is ever liked that man. His
own wife can barely stand to be in a room
with him. His political allies would turn the other cheek
if fucking somebody anyway, we shouldn't talk about political assassinations
on this podcast. It wouldn't anger anybody though, right. Lindsay
Graham has said that, like Lindsay Graham's like, what maybe
the only good joke a Republican elected officials ever told
(08:20):
is that if you were to shoot Ted Cruz on
the floor of Congress and the trial was held in Congress,
like nobody would vote to convict the murderer anyway. So
Beto lost quite badly to Greg Abbott and beyond that,
basically every statewide candidate that the Democrats ran lost in
(08:42):
that election. It was a bad election for the Democratic
Party and people who pay attention to Texas politics and
actually like aren't just trying to like grift your donation money.
Speaker 5 (08:52):
Know this.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Joel Montfort, a Democratic consultant in North Texas said, quote,
it's been one election after another where we ramp everybody
up and set these xpectations that we're going to finish
in first and then we finish in second. I don't
see any indication that we can win at state wide
levels or won't continue to bleed house seats to the
other party.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
I love these to finish in second.
Speaker 6 (09:12):
There is if there's like a podium on election libertarians. Yeah,
the text Democratic Party to take the l to like
giald Stein.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, there were some kind of site. There were some
wins by Democrats in Texas. They managed to hold onto
two out of three seats congressional seats in the battleground
regions in South Texas, but they still lost one. They
did what they did, still lose one, and you know,
the GOP had to spend a lot of money to
do that. But like one of the one of the
(09:45):
points is that so they they held onto two of
those seats, and they won a contested seat in the
suburbs of Dallas. Uh. And you know, like but basically
in all of these areas, Uh, these were like super
narrow wins, like these the big successes, and they were
narrow wins in areas that Joe Biden had carried by
double digits two years ago. And Joe Biden is a
(10:06):
historically like that is part of some of them. Some
of it will show you how bad the Texas Democratic
Party is. Joe Biden is not a popular president, and
the fact that he carried a lot of these areas
by more than the candidates who narrowly won in twenty
twenty two could is not a great sign for the
way things are trending.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, It's probably also worth pointing out that like those
southern Texas seats, like in the Rio Grande Valley, right, like, yeah,
those people are normally Democrats. Yeah, but you have guys
like Henry is it Quella Quala, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
who is opposed to abortion rights are yeah yeah and
extremely hawkish on the border, and like yeah, yeah, what
do we gain by having like, yeah, blue team good,
(10:46):
Like not really if this person's going to take away
your bodily autonomy and brutalize people for coming to this
country for one day about a life.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, it's it's like a lot of the some of
these wins are kind of like marginal at best, given
the compromises or just given the kind of Democrats who
can win it. It's like a Joe Manchin kind of situation. Yeah, exactly.
And more to the point, like it's not only is
this like evidence kind of that the Democrats strategy isn't
(11:13):
isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something and
it failed. They tried something and it was so expensive
that it stopped them from trying things in other areas
where the money could have gone better. For example of
how fucking wasteful, particularly the Beto wort campaign was. Right,
he loses by eleven points to Greg Abbot. He raised
seventy seven million dollars to lose by that much. A
(11:34):
few years earlier, Lupe Valdez ran against Greg Abbot. She
spent raised like two million dollars and lost by thirteen points,
So seventy five million dollars may have bought Beto two percent.
You know, like if you assume that national trends had
nothing to do with that gap closing by a tiny amount, Like.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
With seventy five million dollars, I could take control of
a moderate at least is Texas City.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah that is like, yeah, I could buy my chunk
of Texas specific Like you could purchase a large chunk
of Fort Worth with that much money. No, yeah, that's
how I'll go here at cools the own media.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, yeah, to own fort Worth. Finally my dream completed.
I'll be able to be I'm gonna buy those horse
statues that los kalitas. Finally be happy.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Let's get blucifer as well. It's probably a good time
to pivot to ads that help us pay for a
piece of food.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Sure, yeah, you know, who isn't a waste of money
these fucking ads. So overall, we just talked about it.
You know, Beto raised seventy seven million dollars. The gubernatorial
(12:49):
race cost in total something like one hundred and forty
million dollars, which is a huge amount of money for
something that fails that badly and doesn't there's no evidence
that Beto's campaign, like he was he's obviously good at fundraising, right,
And there was kind of this belief among a lot
of dims, an errant belief that this meant that he
would be good for down ballot races. Right, He's going
(13:11):
to bring the entire because of how much attention he gets.
He's going to raise the entire Democratic Party up. The
poor showing of the Democratic Party in Texas in twenty
twenty two suggests that that's not the case. And the
money like there are there are fights that could have
been won and probably weren't because the money wasn't being
invested in those fights. It was going to bettle. And
I'm gonna quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here.
(13:32):
This year, the party ran Rochelle Garza, a civil rights
lawyer with little political experience, against Attorney General Ken Paxton,
who was widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent.
But Garza struggled to raise money or gain traction in
Auric's shadow and lost by ten percentage points against Paxton,
who has been indicted on felony security fraud charges and
is being investigated by the FBI for abuse of office accusations.
(13:56):
And it's what maybe she couldn't have won no matter
what you did. But one of the rules of politics
in this country is that the money you spend at
a big race, like a gubernatorial race, like a like
a like a Senate or a congressional campaign at the
federal level, like a presidential campaign, goes less far per
dollar than the money you spend in smaller local elections. Right,
(14:18):
ten million bucks going into that election might have done something,
you know, as opposed to seventy five million going into
Bedo O'Rourke and accomplishing very little. This has been not
just a problem in Texas in previous elections, throughout the
Trump area and a little before in particular, this was
a problem the DIMS had kind of from the middle
(14:39):
of the Obama years until the last couple of like
really the last midterm at twenty eighteen is when it
started to turn around nationally, and the DIMS have learned
a lot in other regions about like not spending stupid
amounts of money on hopeless contests, but not like comprehensively. Example,
(15:00):
in twenty twenty two, the second most expensive house race
was the fourteenth Congressional District of Georgia, where Marcus Flowers
raised sixteen million dollars and lost by thirty two points,
not a great return on the investment. And it was like,
the reason why he raised so much money is because
he was running against Marjorie Taylor Green and nationally, DIMS
(15:21):
outside of Georgia wanted to put in money because they
hate her. And it's a trend that relies a lot
on social media on kind of the way in which
like hardcore dims, the dims that do a lot of
the small dollar donations think about politics where it's like
Marjorie Taylor Green bad donate money to opponent, Well, her
opponent had no chance of winning in that district, Like
(15:42):
no amount of money would have flipped that, and you
just wasted sixteen million dollars that could have helped somewhere else.
Like maybe that's an insane thing and it's not as
bad as it used if you want to look at
like the like the kind of the dumbest it ever was.
In twenty twenty, so Lindsay Graham's seat was up in
South Carolina and Jamie Harrison ran against Lindsay Grant and
(16:05):
dims again because Lindsay Graham evil, you know, raised one
hundred and thirty million dollars and he lost fight ten points.
Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell, who is another Like
you can always get a shitload of money to fight
Mitch McConnell ninety four million dollars lost by twenty points
either of the like one hundred and thirty million, ninety
four million, that's two state legislators. You could have flipped,
(16:28):
or at least made progress on flipping, right, Like that
amount of money could potentially do that or at least
help set up, you know, get a couple of people
elected who have a chance at kind of broadening a
base of support and becoming you know, leaders in states
that are currently like dominated by red legislators, Like there's
a chance at least here.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
And that like specifically the state legislature. Thing is this
has been a problem with the Democrats for fucking ages,
which is that they just yet like it is only
genuinely in the last years the Democrats are started giving
a ship about state legislatures, like and this is this
is one of the things from the Obama era, Like
one of the reasons everything sucks so much is that
the Democrats managed to lose, Like, oh god, I forget.
(17:11):
It was like they I think I think the total
they lost like a thousand seats. It was like yeah,
and and and you know, on the we were seeing
the product of this right like this like like Wisconsin
was sort of just a hell hole for the last decade.
Uh and you know, I mean like and these are
like Minnesota to like the like there are lots of
these states that like that, like not Minnesota or am
(17:33):
I talking about Michigan?
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, Michigan.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, And there's a lot of these stats and you know,
like and both of these places were winnable right, like
like they're like the Democrats are winning there now, right,
but they just like fucking left, like you know, they
they they fucking left Flint to get poisoned by lead
because they just not like the only the only things
that the problem is there's there's no money for consultants
in in sort of like downbout like state and like
(17:57):
local races just just jack ship, right, and the Democrat
the Democrat Party like is not run by sort of
like it's it's not a party in like an actual
real sense. It is a it is a collection of consultants,
and those consultants only care about senates about Senate races.
Sometimes they care about house races, and they care specifically
they spend all of their fucking money in presidential races.
And you know, it's like again, and the Republicans don't
(18:18):
do that because they have a bunch of like people
they you know, because they have a bunch of like
part of their base, right is these like small and
mid scale capitalists in you know, in cities, in rural
areas who have like immediate concerns about like, you know,
there's like there there are specific workers who they want
like lives to be worse. And so because of that,
the Republican machine is like seize the entire fucking country.
(18:40):
And the Democrats have been sitting around like spending like
a trillion dollars on Wendy Davis losing by twenty points.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, yeah, And it's like you get these you get
these like cases where you know, you're looking at thirty
million being spent, you know, failing to uns seat Marjorie
Taylor Green or somebody thirty three million something like that.
But what you don't like, at the same time as
(19:09):
like that's happening, is all of these massive amounts of
money are being devoted to these, like to the races
that get attention because there's famous names involved. You have,
like in twenty twenty I think it was you have
or no, it's twenty twenty two. You have the election
between Ted Budd, a Republican against the Democrat Sherry Beasley
in North Carolina where the Democratic Party decided not to
(19:33):
prioritize this election because it wasn't winnable, and then Bud
won up wound up winning by just four points. That's
a seat you can flip with money. That's not an
unreasonable thing as opposed to again, the races where it
went to and people are losing by like thirty something
fucking percent. And if you want to know who a
serious candidate is, who is not just trying to do
(19:54):
the sexy thing or not just trying to like again
flip the states so that we can win the federal election,
but actually wants to help their state. And this is
again there's very nice things about Beto O'Rourke. I was
in Texas during the ice storm. He did good work
during the ice storm, like actual community defense kind of
stuff that I do have some respect for. He is
(20:15):
not and has never been a serious politician, and I
will tell you why he went from winning an election
to losing a state election against Ted Cruz, to losing
a presidential race to losing the governor seat. That is
so fucking scattershot. That is not building a base of power,
That is not building from the ground up and like
(20:37):
encouraging the growth of other personalities. You're just darting from
whatever the sexiest and most like pr driven race is.
That's not serious. I want to talk about what number one,
(20:59):
the Democratic Party, the ship that like, as we've said,
they're getting better. The National Party got a lot better
at this, particularly in twenty twenty two. It was less
stupid than the previous couple of elections had been.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Really difficult to be more dumb than that. But you
know it is British British labor et cetera, et cetera.
Labor actually is the big one. Oh my fuck.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
I want to talk what has what has worked, and
what I think could work again. And to do that,
I'm going to talk about a guy named Howard Dean,
who here knows who Howard Dean was? Garrison simply yeah
a little bit.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
Have you?
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Have you all heard the video of him screaming that
gotten like his career is before. Okay, well, James, would
you load that up for us so we could play
that in a second to the Deans. Coward, Jamie, pull
it up. Howard. Howard Dean ran for president and was
He was the first national political candidate to use the
(22:01):
internet effectively to raise money in the in the history
of US politics. He's kind of pre Obama. Worked out
a lot of the strategies that Obama's people wound up
using to very successfully raise money for him. He was
really good at it. He was a reasonably intelligent candidate.
And then he gave the speech that we're about to
play for you, and it completely created his and ended
(22:22):
him as a as a candidate. You know, I always
says the thing about Dean.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Dean is stunningly unlucky that he ran in the time
that he did, because the clip you're about to hear
is one thousand times less weird than anything DeSantis has
ever done. Like he he ran in it. I mean
there was there was dan Quayle, right, but like he
ran in an era where like the seriousness and like
non weirdness of politicians was so much higher.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
I mean, it's in the chat so you can.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Up. This is a good shit straight to that beautiful scream.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
In North Dakota and New Mexico.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
We're going to California and Texas and New York.
Speaker 5 (23:05):
We're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
And Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, d C.
To take back in the White House.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
That's it. That ended his career as a candidate. And
like it's a little silly, but that doesn't that doesn't
that wouldn't be a twelve second news cycle today. But
after kind of failing out as a presidential candidate, he
became chairman of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and
(23:38):
he was a pretty good one. His kind of primary
strategic vision was what he called the fifty state strategy,
which is, don't focus just on swing states, never write
a state off at unwinnable. Instead, spread the money that
the DNC has around two campaign throughout the country everywhere,
particularly to fund local dncs, so that they can start
(24:00):
building a stable of candidates that can attract voters and
eventually win local elections. It's not like an easy It's
not a sexy strategy because a lot of it is
focused on like the slow, kind of grueling fight to
build up a base of support and unfriendly terrain. But
it worked like really well. Actually in twenty or so states,
(24:23):
those that had voted solidly Republican in private previous recent
presidential races, Democratic candidates like won elections that had previously
like in the like gone against them like it had.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Like.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
There were about like twenty states where it the kind
of slide to red was arrested and pushed back to blue.
These are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska,
North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah,
West Virginia, and Wyoming. Special list of yeah, there we go.
(25:02):
So basically, Deans strategy led to a net gain of
thirty nine state House seats and a two percent increase
of all seats in the states analyzed. They lost two,
you know, state Senate seats net, but it worked great
in the House and gained an attorney generalship, gained three
House seats, gained a Senate seat, and in fifteen of
(25:25):
the twenty seats the Democratic nominees on increase in vote
share between two thousand and four and two thousand and eight,
which was the years that so again not super sexy.
These aren't like we flipped Texas suddenly, but it's like, oh,
we started to see real gains and like a lot
of pretty red states. Now it didn't work everywhere. It
was not particularly successful in a large chunk of the South,
(25:48):
like it did not arrest the slide into the red everywhere.
But in a lot of the Midwest, particularly the states
that were like the Hillary Clinton so called firewall that
went for Trump in twenty twenty, it was extremely effective.
And of course it got mixed immediately after Obama won election,
and this is a big part of why in twenty
ten the dims lost disastrously. But like the basic idea
(26:10):
of we should be putting money into local democratic parties
in order to like number one, have like a big
part of winning any conflict, whether it's a war or
a political election, is having the resources available reserves to
take advantage of opportunities that present themselves in the moment.
(26:30):
So you have a solidly read state house seat or
judge ship or something like that, or governorship or mayor mayoralty,
and a candidate has a health scare or has a scandal,
you know, they get caught fucking a thirteen year old
or something, and suddenly this seat that was solidly read
is in play. And if you have no one who
(26:54):
can like get votes, who can get voters excited, who
can run for that, well, then you're probably not gonna
win it. It's just going to like go to whoever
the RNC you know, picks to pick up the seat next.
But if you've got someone waiting in the wings, they
have a chance at winning it. And a good example
of this is what just happened in Jacksonville, Florida. Right
you have DeSantis make go like lunge to the fucking
(27:15):
most fascist end of the right and pass this abortion
build that something like seventy five percent of the state
doesn't like. And the Dims had a decent candidate there
that was able to run against the Republican mayor of
Jacksonville and win. And in that election, the dim spent
two million and the Republicans spent nine million. You were
not talking about the kind of resources expended that you're
(27:36):
seeing in some of these dumb races we're talking about.
So anyway, like this is most of what I wanted
to get into. Is just like you can win and
you can improve things in Texas and you can build
a base from which to actually change things electorally in
that state, but you can't do it by just like
focusing on whoever is at the top. Like it has
to be smarter. It's not just about shoveling money into
(27:57):
a pit.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Yeah, And like I think there's there's a couple of
things that wants to add. One was that like oh god, okay,
Like so Tim Kye, Yeah, Tim Kaine got put in
after they ran out Dean and Jesus, like Tim Kane
might be is a is like a once in a
generation terrible politician, like one of the worst, you know, but.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Like like you would see ship like he is the Winston
Churchill of making me bored.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Like yeah, like like like you would see I mean,
and this still happens, right, but like there are there
are seats that are winnable that the Dems like just
literally won't even bother finding people to run for because
they're just fucking too lazy and they don't give a shit.
And you know this this happens if this happens in
a fucking lot of races, and you know, and part
part of the other thing that that happens in this
(28:47):
sort of period that like, you know, is the reason
why the top down is okay. So this is like
if if we're gonna actually do this sort of like
complicated electoralism, like this is why Bernie Sanders lost two
elections in a row, is that you can't actually like
like actual sort of like substantive political change like doesn't
happen from the top down. It's it's like it happens
(29:08):
on bottom up organizing. And you know, the the democratic
waves in like the last two years were basically like
them eating actual social movements. It's you know, like they
it's it's them basically like they're there. There's a sort
of rejuvenated anti abortion movement that they just sort of consume. Right,
They've been doing a very very good job of sort
of like eating like whatever sort of queer rights like
(29:29):
movements exist alive. And they had kind of stopped doing
that for a while because they chose to just like
destroy occupy whether rather than like try to co opt it. Yea,
And you know, I mean there were reasons for that, right,
but like part of part of the thing like if
if you if if you're a Democrat and you want
to actually like win Texas, you need to have like
(29:50):
actual you to have actual sort of social movements that
you know, the Democrats can eventually take over and destroy
but in the time between they destroy them destroying them
and then and you know, like like in the brief
time while they both exist and are control by Democratic Party,
that's how you actually sort of like build the kinds
of the build the kinds of coalitions to build the
kinds of organization that win these races. And the Democratic
(30:12):
Party has just no interest in doing that like almost
anywhere basically outside of Minnesota, where I don't know, those
in the Minnesota devs are fucking built different. I don't,
I don't, I don't know, I don't. I don't have
another explanation for that, but like, yeah, it's I don't know,
it's it's.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
It's like one of the things that you have the
opportunity to do at the local level is and this
is you know, this is a big factor in like,
uh politics in Georgia. You've got people who are motivated
because of a specific political issue that Dems are strong on,
like abortion, and you can you can get people registered,
you can get people out organizing, you can get people
(30:55):
donating money, and more most important that you can get
people voting and voting in numbers that they haven't before
and make if you're able to kind of harness that
sort of thing. But being able to harness that, again,
part of it is this is not sexy. This is
not something we can say this is going to flip
a state in twenty twenty four. But putting in the
money and the resources to have people who are being
(31:18):
supported to go out and make attempts and to build
like a reputation and a base of support and networks
in the state. Like, that's the non sexy thing that
the number one the Republicans are really good at. If
you're asking yourself looking at all these horrible anti trans bills,
anti gay bills, anti abortion bills, how do they do
(31:39):
this well? Because church is organized at the local level
to build up the kind of support and the kind
of human infrastructure that allowed them to take advantage of
the kind of broader social trends that drove some of
those states more deeply read and that kind of like
made made it possible for them to do things that
ten years before people had said, like there's no way
(32:01):
to make this happen. That can work on the left
side of things, but you have to have the groundwork
in They started with like school boards. Yeah, they started.
Speaker 4 (32:10):
They started with going after school boards, going after books.
Then you get up base people riled up that you
can go after healthcare for miners, and you can go
after health care for adults. It was a very easy path,
and it started by like going to the most accessible
places to have public comment on issues, which was complaining
about books inside of school Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Yeah, yeah. And another thing I'd say about the church
thing is like the thing that you used to do
that for the Democrats was unions, but then they destroyed
them all. And but you know, but like you can
actually you can actually see what this looks like like
in the places where something like this. This is why
the state level Midwest Dems are so much further to
the left than the Dems everywhere else, because like the
people in Minnesota, the people in Wisconsin are like the
(32:51):
the only reason they're even so remotely in power is
because and you know, you're seeing this like at like
in Chicago too with Brandon Johnson, is that like these
those people are like functionally dependent on like that they're
on their teachers unions to exist as like a political coalision. Yeah,
and so you know, like like union organizing is a
is a like we're just like fucking just giving money
(33:12):
to a strike fund is even even if the thing
that you want to do is win elections, that is
a more effective way of winning of winning elections than
fucking giving money to Beto Auroric like a seventh time.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yeah and again when we the thing I want to
get across here is the right thing to do is
not say, and no one is suggesting this here, fuck Texas.
It can never be fixed. The right thing is saying,
if you're focused on one famous guy running in Texas
(33:43):
or this like top level thing of flipping Texas, you
don't actually care all that much about the problems being
faced by people in Texas because that's not really going
to fix them. Right, Beto's not going to win. And
even if Texas flips for an election, that doesn't mean
the state legend your flips. It doesn't mean the governor flips.
It doesn't mean that things get better for people doing
(34:05):
these kind of bottom up approaches. Number one will eventually
flip the fucking state. Right, there is a demographic trend happening.
Part of how you flip the state, by the way,
if you're actually responsible, is like proving that you can
make people's lives better. If you want to flip the state.
That's maybe more ethical than just being like, what if
we dump one hundred and seventy million dollars to try
(34:29):
to make this guy who goes viral on YouTube or
Twitter sometimes look better? Right, maybe one of those is
more ethical than the other. Anyway. I don't want to
rant about electoralism anymore, but as a as a transplant
in Texan, I get frustrated by this, so I felt
like we had to say something.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
Yeah, I also get frustrated by Better claiming to be punk,
which is the least punk thing in the fucking whether
that's a now repisode.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
No, we have one. We have one elected leader who's
gotten anywhere close to being punk, and it was Bernie
Sanders when he got into that cold book depository that
November morning with a manliquor carcano rifle. Extremely punk.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Anyway, cutting the feed here, it could.
Speaker 5 (35:20):
Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at
cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
What are we recording? Yeah, yeah, yeah, what the episode started? Now,
I was, I was, I was going to say something
something to do with Texas. But to be honest, you know, why,
why why do we do this? Why do we let ourselves,
you know, get famous for for for saying a particular
bit and then just keep repeating it over and over again.
(00:28):
Are we so creatively bankrupt that there's there's nothing else
we can do but repeat our greatest hits in order
to recapture some of the some of the the excitement
that we felt as younger men. Anyway, my co hosts
on this episode, James Stout and me along, welcome to
it could happen here.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Hi, rob It. I'm glad you're doing so well.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
We're all doing great. James, You've just been having a
searing emotional experience at the border. Yeah mm hm. And
everyone else is busy living in the United States, which
is its own searing emotional experience.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Man.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Today, today we're going to be talking about the both
the most and least American state, Texas. Huzzah, Yeah, love you. Yeah,
who here has spent a lot of time in Texas. Garrison,
you lived in the Dallas area, right.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
A lot that I I've made my visit to Texas
over the years with you, even in the murder House.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
You and I have quaffed many a shiner bock together,
James Many. Okay, I guess we'll move into the fucking episode.
So uh, there was a There was a an email
sent out by Texas Democrats dot Org recently with the
title Texas moves from solid red to battleground. Sure, you know,
(01:54):
like clockwork. A lot of Democrats got very excited, and
I made a couple of people made posts being like, hey,
this is the same thing that happens every single election.
They are never right. Texas is never a battleground and
it always costs an insane amount of money. It is
a con by DC political consultants to get your money
(02:17):
and pump it into something that will fill up their
coffers and not achieve anything of value for the state
of Texas or for the Democrats nationwide. And this makes
people very angry for two reasons. One, they tend to
interpret it as saying abandon Texas and the people there,
which is not the statement I was making or anyone
else was making. And number two, everyone kind of obsessively
(02:39):
starts pointing out like, look, look at how over the
last thirty years, you know, the things have narrowed in
Texas and the proportion of like Democratic votes is raised.
This is winnable. We can do it. We can do it.
We're going to talk today about why anyone who talks
to you about flipping Texas as a political goal that
(03:02):
you should give money to is conning you, and not
only conning you, but making it actually more difficult for
Democrats to win, both in Texas and nationwide. That's that's
that's the premise of the episode, everybody.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Here's here's how Bernie can still win. Though at the
very end we will give you.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, We're gonna let you know he's got a shot. Look,
look if he if he is capable of putting another
three rounds of six point five into a dinner plate
sized target at one hundred and fifty yards, now that
was a that was anyway, he'd have to shoot a
(03:41):
lot of people to make.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
He's going to deploy bought a joy into a.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Name, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Person. So I want to talk about this because I
find it, like I think people tend to interpret this.
I've certainly gotten accused of like, oh, you're just kind
of being like a nihilist. This is you're being you know,
just an anti electoralist. You're not being practical. There was
a there was one particular guy who's like a local
Democratic candidate who responded seven times to my tweet being
(04:17):
like with variations, and his obsession was like, if we
win Texas, it's impossible for the GOP to win national elections,
which is true. If theoretically the Democrats flipped Texas, the
GOP would have no chance at winning a federal election ever. Again.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah, and so simultaneous to this, right, if the Republican
there are more Republicans in California than there are basically
any other state in the Union, and if the Republicans
won California, they would they would win every election forever.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, happen. Not going to happen. I mean,
it's it's one of those things. I am not saying
Texas will never be a blue state. You know, that
is something that is possible, even likely, given enough time.
What I am saying, the argument that I'm making here,
and I'll provide you with evidence, is that number one,
(05:03):
focusing on these elections from the top down and when
you're saying, we want to flip Texas. That's a top
down approach, right. You are not focusing on we want
to fill up and win a bunch of different local elections.
We want to flip, you know, the state houses. We
want to flip a bunch of mayoralties and stuff. You
are saying, what matters is how Texas votes in the
(05:24):
national election. And if you were to get if you
were to kind of eke out a bear like in
Georgia right where you get a narrow victory in the
federal election, that would be great for the Democratic Party.
One of my issues with it is that kind of
focusing obsessively on flipping Texas isn't focusing on the stuff
that actually will help Texans, like Texans currently being targeted
(05:47):
by the state government, because flipping the state in a
federal election, but not taking the governor's seat, not taking
the lieutenant governor seat, not like actually taking the state house,
doesn't improve life for people in Texas. I think the
kind of the degree to which the federal government, Biden's administration,
has been unable to push back very effectively against kind
(06:11):
of a lot of the shit that DeSantis has been
doing in Florida. You know, they have started to make
some attempts. Is evidence of this, and kind of more
to the point, even if you don't agree with that, fundamentally,
these strategies that the Democratic Party has embraced in Texas
do not work. The Texas Democratic Party is incompetent. They
are bad at their job. They are worse. People bring
(06:33):
up Georgia a lot when I talk about flipping Texas,
and folks are like, well, we flipped Georgia, And it's like, yeah,
because the state elected officials and candidates in George number one,
the state party did a much better job of kind
of harvesting is a weird way to phrase it, but
of incubating talent to run for election in a number
(06:54):
of local offices then the Texas Democratic Party has ever done.
And that was a big part of what allowed them
to be competitive and eventually to flip the state. There's
a lot of like kind of dollar sign information on
how bad the state party in Texas is at this shit,
and I guess I should go ahead and provide some
(07:15):
of that now. So in the twenty twenty two election,
the midterms famously an unusually good showing for the Democratic
Party nationwide for a midterm election everywhere but Texas. O'Rourke
ran against Greg Abbott. He lost by eleven percent. This
(07:35):
is kind of to contrast the election that got everyone
excited when he was running against Cruise. I think they
were like three percent apart. And again, the only reason
there was this kind of mistaken belief and excitement among
dims that O'Rourke, because he was so close to Cruz,
had a real shot of winning Texas. No, he got
kinda close to beating Cruz because Ted even Republicans hate
(07:58):
Ted Cruz. No one is ever liked that man. His
own wife can barely stand to be in a room
with him. His political allies would turn the other cheek
if fucking somebody anyway, we shouldn't talk about political assassinations
on this podcast. It wouldn't anger anybody though, right. Lindsay
Graham has said that, like Lindsay Graham's like, what maybe
the only good joke a Republican elected officials ever told
(08:20):
is that if you were to shoot Ted Cruz on
the floor of Congress and the trial was held in Congress,
like nobody would vote to convict the murderer anyway. So
Beto lost quite badly to Greg Abbott and beyond that,
basically every statewide candidate that the Democrats ran lost in
(08:42):
that election. It was a bad election for the Democratic
Party and people who pay attention to Texas politics and
actually like aren't just trying to like grift your donation money.
Speaker 5 (08:52):
Know this.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Joel Montfort, a Democratic consultant in North Texas said, quote,
it's been one election after another where we ramp everybody
up and set these xpectations that we're going to finish
in first and then we finish in second. I don't
see any indication that we can win at state wide
levels or won't continue to bleed house seats to the
other party.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
I love these to finish in second.
Speaker 6 (09:12):
There is if there's like a podium on election libertarians. Yeah,
the text Democratic Party to take the l to like
giald Stein.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, there were some kind of site. There were some
wins by Democrats in Texas. They managed to hold onto
two out of three seats congressional seats in the battleground
regions in South Texas, but they still lost one. They
did what they did, still lose one, and you know,
the GOP had to spend a lot of money to
do that. But like one of the one of the
(09:45):
points is that so they they held onto two of
those seats, and they won a contested seat in the
suburbs of Dallas. Uh. And you know, like but basically
in all of these areas, Uh, these were like super
narrow wins, like these the big successes, and they were
narrow wins in areas that Joe Biden had carried by
double digits two years ago. And Joe Biden is a
(10:06):
historically like that is part of some of them. Some
of it will show you how bad the Texas Democratic
Party is. Joe Biden is not a popular president, and
the fact that he carried a lot of these areas
by more than the candidates who narrowly won in twenty
twenty two could is not a great sign for the
way things are trending.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, It's probably also worth pointing out that like those
southern Texas seats, like in the Rio Grande Valley, right, like, yeah,
those people are normally Democrats. Yeah, but you have guys
like Henry is it Quella Quala, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
who is opposed to abortion rights are yeah yeah and
extremely hawkish on the border, and like yeah, yeah, what
do we gain by having like, yeah, blue team good,
(10:46):
Like not really if this person's going to take away
your bodily autonomy and brutalize people for coming to this
country for one day about a life.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, it's it's like a lot of the some of
these wins are kind of like marginal at best, given
the compromises or just given the kind of Democrats who
can win it. It's like a Joe Manchin kind of situation. Yeah, exactly.
And more to the point, like it's not only is
this like evidence kind of that the Democrats strategy isn't
(11:13):
isn't working. It's not simply that they tried something and
it failed. They tried something and it was so expensive
that it stopped them from trying things in other areas
where the money could have gone better. For example of
how fucking wasteful, particularly the Beto wort campaign was. Right,
he loses by eleven points to Greg Abbot. He raised
seventy seven million dollars to lose by that much. A
(11:34):
few years earlier, Lupe Valdez ran against Greg Abbot. She
spent raised like two million dollars and lost by thirteen points,
So seventy five million dollars may have bought Beto two percent.
You know, like if you assume that national trends had
nothing to do with that gap closing by a tiny amount, Like.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
With seventy five million dollars, I could take control of
a moderate at least is Texas City.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah that is like, yeah, I could buy my chunk
of Texas specific Like you could purchase a large chunk
of Fort Worth with that much money. No, yeah, that's
how I'll go here at cools the own media.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, yeah, to own fort Worth. Finally my dream completed.
I'll be able to be I'm gonna buy those horse
statues that los kalitas. Finally be happy.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Let's get blucifer as well. It's probably a good time
to pivot to ads that help us pay for a
piece of food.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Sure, yeah, you know, who isn't a waste of money
these fucking ads. So overall, we just talked about it.
You know, Beto raised seventy seven million dollars. The gubernatorial
(12:49):
race cost in total something like one hundred and forty
million dollars, which is a huge amount of money for
something that fails that badly and doesn't there's no evidence
that Beto's campaign, like he was he's obviously good at fundraising, right,
And there was kind of this belief among a lot
of dims, an errant belief that this meant that he
would be good for down ballot races. Right, He's going
(13:11):
to bring the entire because of how much attention he gets.
He's going to raise the entire Democratic Party up. The
poor showing of the Democratic Party in Texas in twenty
twenty two suggests that that's not the case. And the
money like there are there are fights that could have
been won and probably weren't because the money wasn't being
invested in those fights. It was going to bettle. And
I'm gonna quote from an article by the Texas Tribune here.
(13:32):
This year, the party ran Rochelle Garza, a civil rights
lawyer with little political experience, against Attorney General Ken Paxton,
who was widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent.
But Garza struggled to raise money or gain traction in
Auric's shadow and lost by ten percentage points against Paxton,
who has been indicted on felony security fraud charges and
is being investigated by the FBI for abuse of office accusations.
(13:56):
And it's what maybe she couldn't have won no matter
what you did. But one of the rules of politics
in this country is that the money you spend at
a big race, like a gubernatorial race, like a like
a like a Senate or a congressional campaign at the
federal level, like a presidential campaign, goes less far per
dollar than the money you spend in smaller local elections. Right,
(14:18):
ten million bucks going into that election might have done something,
you know, as opposed to seventy five million going into
Bedo O'Rourke and accomplishing very little. This has been not
just a problem in Texas in previous elections, throughout the
Trump area and a little before in particular, this was
a problem the DIMS had kind of from the middle
(14:39):
of the Obama years until the last couple of like
really the last midterm at twenty eighteen is when it
started to turn around nationally, and the DIMS have learned
a lot in other regions about like not spending stupid
amounts of money on hopeless contests, but not like comprehensively. Example,
(15:00):
in twenty twenty two, the second most expensive house race
was the fourteenth Congressional District of Georgia, where Marcus Flowers
raised sixteen million dollars and lost by thirty two points,
not a great return on the investment. And it was like,
the reason why he raised so much money is because
he was running against Marjorie Taylor Green and nationally, DIMS
(15:21):
outside of Georgia wanted to put in money because they
hate her. And it's a trend that relies a lot
on social media on kind of the way in which
like hardcore dims, the dims that do a lot of
the small dollar donations think about politics where it's like
Marjorie Taylor Green bad donate money to opponent, Well, her
opponent had no chance of winning in that district, Like
(15:42):
no amount of money would have flipped that, and you
just wasted sixteen million dollars that could have helped somewhere else.
Like maybe that's an insane thing and it's not as
bad as it used if you want to look at
like the like the kind of the dumbest it ever was.
In twenty twenty, so Lindsay Graham's seat was up in
South Carolina and Jamie Harrison ran against Lindsay Grant and
(16:05):
dims again because Lindsay Graham evil, you know, raised one
hundred and thirty million dollars and he lost fight ten points.
Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell, who is another Like
you can always get a shitload of money to fight
Mitch McConnell ninety four million dollars lost by twenty points
either of the like one hundred and thirty million, ninety
four million, that's two state legislators. You could have flipped,
(16:28):
or at least made progress on flipping, right, Like that
amount of money could potentially do that or at least
help set up, you know, get a couple of people
elected who have a chance at kind of broadening a
base of support and becoming you know, leaders in states
that are currently like dominated by red legislators, Like there's
a chance at least here.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
And that like specifically the state legislature. Thing is this
has been a problem with the Democrats for fucking ages,
which is that they just yet like it is only
genuinely in the last years the Democrats are started giving
a ship about state legislatures, like and this is this
is one of the things from the Obama era, Like
one of the reasons everything sucks so much is that
the Democrats managed to lose, Like, oh god, I forget.
(17:11):
It was like they I think I think the total
they lost like a thousand seats. It was like yeah,
and and and you know, on the we were seeing
the product of this right like this like like Wisconsin
was sort of just a hell hole for the last decade.
Uh and you know, I mean like and these are
like Minnesota to like the like there are lots of
these states that like that, like not Minnesota or am
(17:33):
I talking about Michigan?
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, Michigan.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, And there's a lot of these stats and you know,
like and both of these places were winnable right, like
like they're like the Democrats are winning there now, right,
but they just like fucking left, like you know, they
they they fucking left Flint to get poisoned by lead
because they just not like the only the only things
that the problem is there's there's no money for consultants
in in sort of like downbout like state and like
(17:57):
local races just just jack ship, right, and the Democrat
the Democrat Party like is not run by sort of
like it's it's not a party in like an actual
real sense. It is a it is a collection of consultants,
and those consultants only care about senates about Senate races.
Sometimes they care about house races, and they care specifically
they spend all of their fucking money in presidential races.
And you know, it's like again, and the Republicans don't
(18:18):
do that because they have a bunch of like people
they you know, because they have a bunch of like
part of their base, right is these like small and
mid scale capitalists in you know, in cities, in rural
areas who have like immediate concerns about like, you know,
there's like there there are specific workers who they want
like lives to be worse. And so because of that,
the Republican machine is like seize the entire fucking country.
(18:40):
And the Democrats have been sitting around like spending like
a trillion dollars on Wendy Davis losing by twenty points.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, yeah, And it's like you get these you get
these like cases where you know, you're looking at thirty
million being spent, you know, failing to uns seat Marjorie
Taylor Green or somebody thirty three million something like that.
But what you don't like, at the same time as
(19:09):
like that's happening, is all of these massive amounts of
money are being devoted to these, like to the races
that get attention because there's famous names involved. You have,
like in twenty twenty I think it was you have
or no, it's twenty twenty two. You have the election
between Ted Budd, a Republican against the Democrat Sherry Beasley
in North Carolina where the Democratic Party decided not to
(19:33):
prioritize this election because it wasn't winnable, and then Bud
won up wound up winning by just four points. That's
a seat you can flip with money. That's not an
unreasonable thing as opposed to again, the races where it
went to and people are losing by like thirty something
fucking percent. And if you want to know who a
serious candidate is, who is not just trying to do
(19:54):
the sexy thing or not just trying to like again
flip the states so that we can win the federal election,
but actually wants to help their state. And this is
again there's very nice things about Beto O'Rourke. I was
in Texas during the ice storm. He did good work
during the ice storm, like actual community defense kind of
stuff that I do have some respect for. He is
(20:15):
not and has never been a serious politician, and I
will tell you why he went from winning an election
to losing a state election against Ted Cruz, to losing
a presidential race to losing the governor seat. That is
so fucking scattershot. That is not building a base of power,
That is not building from the ground up and like
(20:37):
encouraging the growth of other personalities. You're just darting from
whatever the sexiest and most like pr driven race is.
That's not serious. I want to talk about what number one,
(20:59):
the Democratic Party, the ship that like, as we've said,
they're getting better. The National Party got a lot better
at this, particularly in twenty twenty two. It was less
stupid than the previous couple of elections had been.
Speaker 3 (21:10):
Really difficult to be more dumb than that. But you
know it is British British labor et cetera, et cetera.
Labor actually is the big one. Oh my fuck.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
I want to talk what has what has worked, and
what I think could work again. And to do that,
I'm going to talk about a guy named Howard Dean,
who here knows who Howard Dean was? Garrison simply yeah
a little bit.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
Have you?
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Have you all heard the video of him screaming that
gotten like his career is before. Okay, well, James, would
you load that up for us so we could play
that in a second to the Deans. Coward, Jamie, pull
it up. Howard. Howard Dean ran for president and was
He was the first national political candidate to use the
(22:01):
internet effectively to raise money in the in the history
of US politics. He's kind of pre Obama. Worked out
a lot of the strategies that Obama's people wound up
using to very successfully raise money for him. He was
really good at it. He was a reasonably intelligent candidate.
And then he gave the speech that we're about to
play for you, and it completely created his and ended
(22:22):
him as a as a candidate. You know, I always
says the thing about Dean.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Dean is stunningly unlucky that he ran in the time
that he did, because the clip you're about to hear
is one thousand times less weird than anything DeSantis has
ever done. Like he he ran in it. I mean
there was there was dan Quayle, right, but like he
ran in an era where like the seriousness and like
non weirdness of politicians was so much higher.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
I mean, it's in the chat so you can.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Up. This is a good shit straight to that beautiful scream.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
We're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
In North Dakota and New Mexico.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
We're going to California and Texas and New York.
Speaker 5 (23:05):
We're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
And Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, d C.
To take back in the White House.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
That's it. That ended his career as a candidate. And
like it's a little silly, but that doesn't that doesn't
that wouldn't be a twelve second news cycle today. But
after kind of failing out as a presidential candidate, he
became chairman of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, and
(23:38):
he was a pretty good one. His kind of primary
strategic vision was what he called the fifty state strategy,
which is, don't focus just on swing states, never write
a state off at unwinnable. Instead, spread the money that
the DNC has around two campaign throughout the country everywhere,
particularly to fund local dncs, so that they can start
(24:00):
building a stable of candidates that can attract voters and
eventually win local elections. It's not like an easy It's
not a sexy strategy because a lot of it is
focused on like the slow, kind of grueling fight to
build up a base of support and unfriendly terrain. But
it worked like really well. Actually in twenty or so states,
(24:23):
those that had voted solidly Republican in private previous recent
presidential races, Democratic candidates like won elections that had previously
like in the like gone against them like it had.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Like.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
There were about like twenty states where it the kind
of slide to red was arrested and pushed back to blue.
These are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska,
North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah,
West Virginia, and Wyoming. Special list of yeah, there we go.
(25:02):
So basically, Deans strategy led to a net gain of
thirty nine state House seats and a two percent increase
of all seats in the states analyzed. They lost two,
you know, state Senate seats net, but it worked great
in the House and gained an attorney generalship, gained three
House seats, gained a Senate seat, and in fifteen of
(25:25):
the twenty seats the Democratic nominees on increase in vote
share between two thousand and four and two thousand and eight,
which was the years that so again not super sexy.
These aren't like we flipped Texas suddenly, but it's like, oh,
we started to see real gains and like a lot
of pretty red states. Now it didn't work everywhere. It
was not particularly successful in a large chunk of the South,
(25:48):
like it did not arrest the slide into the red everywhere.
But in a lot of the Midwest, particularly the states
that were like the Hillary Clinton so called firewall that
went for Trump in twenty twenty, it was extremely effective.
And of course it got mixed immediately after Obama won election,
and this is a big part of why in twenty
ten the dims lost disastrously. But like the basic idea
(26:10):
of we should be putting money into local democratic parties
in order to like number one, have like a big
part of winning any conflict, whether it's a war or
a political election, is having the resources available reserves to
take advantage of opportunities that present themselves in the moment.
(26:30):
So you have a solidly read state house seat or
judge ship or something like that, or governorship or mayor mayoralty,
and a candidate has a health scare or has a scandal,
you know, they get caught fucking a thirteen year old
or something, and suddenly this seat that was solidly read
is in play. And if you have no one who
(26:54):
can like get votes, who can get voters excited, who
can run for that, well, then you're probably not gonna
win it. It's just going to like go to whoever
the RNC you know, picks to pick up the seat next.
But if you've got someone waiting in the wings, they
have a chance at winning it. And a good example
of this is what just happened in Jacksonville, Florida. Right
you have DeSantis make go like lunge to the fucking
(27:15):
most fascist end of the right and pass this abortion
build that something like seventy five percent of the state
doesn't like. And the Dims had a decent candidate there
that was able to run against the Republican mayor of
Jacksonville and win. And in that election, the dim spent
two million and the Republicans spent nine million. You were
not talking about the kind of resources expended that you're
(27:36):
seeing in some of these dumb races we're talking about.
So anyway, like this is most of what I wanted
to get into. Is just like you can win and
you can improve things in Texas and you can build
a base from which to actually change things electorally in
that state, but you can't do it by just like
focusing on whoever is at the top. Like it has
to be smarter. It's not just about shoveling money into
(27:57):
a pit.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Yeah, And like I think there's there's a couple of
things that wants to add. One was that like oh god, okay,
Like so Tim Kye, Yeah, Tim Kaine got put in
after they ran out Dean and Jesus, like Tim Kane
might be is a is like a once in a
generation terrible politician, like one of the worst, you know, but.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Like like you would see ship like he is the Winston
Churchill of making me bored.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Like yeah, like like like you would see I mean,
and this still happens, right, but like there are there
are seats that are winnable that the Dems like just
literally won't even bother finding people to run for because
they're just fucking too lazy and they don't give a shit.
And you know this this happens if this happens in
a fucking lot of races, and you know, and part
part of the other thing that that happens in this
(28:47):
sort of period that like, you know, is the reason
why the top down is okay. So this is like
if if we're gonna actually do this sort of like
complicated electoralism, like this is why Bernie Sanders lost two
elections in a row, is that you can't actually like
like actual sort of like substantive political change like doesn't
happen from the top down. It's it's like it happens
(29:08):
on bottom up organizing. And you know, the the democratic
waves in like the last two years were basically like
them eating actual social movements. It's you know, like they
it's it's them basically like they're there. There's a sort
of rejuvenated anti abortion movement that they just sort of consume. Right,
They've been doing a very very good job of sort
of like eating like whatever sort of queer rights like
(29:29):
movements exist alive. And they had kind of stopped doing
that for a while because they chose to just like
destroy occupy whether rather than like try to co opt it. Yea,
And you know, I mean there were reasons for that, right,
but like part of part of the thing like if
if you if if you're a Democrat and you want
to actually like win Texas, you need to have like
(29:50):
actual you to have actual sort of social movements that
you know, the Democrats can eventually take over and destroy
but in the time between they destroy them destroying them
and then and you know, like like in the brief
time while they both exist and are control by Democratic Party,
that's how you actually sort of like build the kinds
of the build the kinds of coalitions to build the
kinds of organization that win these races. And the Democratic
(30:12):
Party has just no interest in doing that like almost
anywhere basically outside of Minnesota, where I don't know, those
in the Minnesota devs are fucking built different. I don't,
I don't, I don't know, I don't. I don't have
another explanation for that, but like, yeah, it's I don't know,
it's it's.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
It's like one of the things that you have the
opportunity to do at the local level is and this
is you know, this is a big factor in like,
uh politics in Georgia. You've got people who are motivated
because of a specific political issue that Dems are strong on,
like abortion, and you can you can get people registered,
you can get people out organizing, you can get people
(30:55):
donating money, and more most important that you can get
people voting and voting in numbers that they haven't before
and make if you're able to kind of harness that
sort of thing. But being able to harness that, again,
part of it is this is not sexy. This is
not something we can say this is going to flip
a state in twenty twenty four. But putting in the
money and the resources to have people who are being
(31:18):
supported to go out and make attempts and to build
like a reputation and a base of support and networks
in the state. Like, that's the non sexy thing that
the number one the Republicans are really good at. If
you're asking yourself looking at all these horrible anti trans bills,
anti gay bills, anti abortion bills, how do they do
(31:39):
this well? Because church is organized at the local level
to build up the kind of support and the kind
of human infrastructure that allowed them to take advantage of
the kind of broader social trends that drove some of
those states more deeply read and that kind of like
made made it possible for them to do things that
ten years before people had said, like there's no way
(32:01):
to make this happen. That can work on the left
side of things, but you have to have the groundwork
in They started with like school boards. Yeah, they started.
Speaker 4 (32:10):
They started with going after school boards, going after books.
Then you get up base people riled up that you
can go after healthcare for miners, and you can go
after health care for adults. It was a very easy path,
and it started by like going to the most accessible
places to have public comment on issues, which was complaining
about books inside of school Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Yeah, yeah. And another thing I'd say about the church
thing is like the thing that you used to do
that for the Democrats was unions, but then they destroyed
them all. And but you know, but like you can
actually you can actually see what this looks like like
in the places where something like this. This is why
the state level Midwest Dems are so much further to
the left than the Dems everywhere else, because like the
people in Minnesota, the people in Wisconsin are like the
(32:51):
the only reason they're even so remotely in power is
because and you know, you're seeing this like at like
in Chicago too with Brandon Johnson, is that like these
those people are like functionally dependent on like that they're
on their teachers unions to exist as like a political coalision. Yeah,
and so you know, like like union organizing is a
is a like we're just like fucking just giving money
(33:12):
to a strike fund is even even if the thing
that you want to do is win elections, that is
a more effective way of winning of winning elections than
fucking giving money to Beto Auroric like a seventh time.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yeah and again when we the thing I want to
get across here is the right thing to do is
not say, and no one is suggesting this here, fuck Texas.
It can never be fixed. The right thing is saying,
if you're focused on one famous guy running in Texas
(33:43):
or this like top level thing of flipping Texas, you
don't actually care all that much about the problems being
faced by people in Texas because that's not really going
to fix them. Right, Beto's not going to win. And
even if Texas flips for an election, that doesn't mean
the state legend your flips. It doesn't mean the governor flips.
It doesn't mean that things get better for people doing
(34:05):
these kind of bottom up approaches. Number one will eventually
flip the fucking state. Right, there is a demographic trend happening.
Part of how you flip the state, by the way,
if you're actually responsible, is like proving that you can
make people's lives better. If you want to flip the state.
That's maybe more ethical than just being like, what if
we dump one hundred and seventy million dollars to try
(34:29):
to make this guy who goes viral on YouTube or
Twitter sometimes look better? Right, maybe one of those is
more ethical than the other. Anyway. I don't want to
rant about electoralism anymore, but as a as a transplant
in Texan, I get frustrated by this, so I felt
like we had to say something.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
Yeah, I also get frustrated by Better claiming to be punk,
which is the least punk thing in the fucking whether
that's a now repisode.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
No, we have one. We have one elected leader who's
gotten anywhere close to being punk, and it was Bernie
Sanders when he got into that cold book depository that
November morning with a manliquor carcano rifle. Extremely punk.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Anyway, cutting the feed here, it could.
Speaker 5 (35:20):
Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at
cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
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