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Speaker 1: This episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Chapter. Now, almost everything you hear about Medicare is somebody quietly trying to steer you somewhere. And you're skeptical of that, as you should be. I get it. I mean, there's a federal lawsuit going on right now over exactly this. Companies that branded themselves as unbiased while allegedly pointing people toward whatever would pay them the most as some sort of broker. So if your default is to distrust everyone in this space, honestly, I get it. I'm a bit distrustful these days myself. That's the whole reason I want to tell you about Chapter. They're independent Medicare advisors whose entire model is that their advisors are not paid to push any one plan. They're just trying to help. Yes, there's compensation that goes with it. but it's across the board is what they're trying to do. At the end of the day, they're advocating for you. They're not the insurance companies themselves. 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The whole point of this is to make this easier and less confusing. Okay, so look, take the skepticism you already have in all of this, point it at your own plan for 20 minutes. It's free. There's no pressure. And then call chapter today at 980-734-4255. Hello there. Happy Wednesday and welcome to the Chuck Todd cast. We are now under two weeks. We're getting really close. We're not quite there. We're measuring it in days. So we're 13 days until election day. And we're not that far away where we'll start measuring it in hours. If you will, let me give you a quick rundown of today's episode. I've got two big stories that I think are very connected that will that if this is the closing argument, we may be moving into something bigger than just simply a wave. But we'll get to that in a second. It is Wednesday, which means I'll give you an updated set. At this point, I'm just going back and forth. My updated Senate rankings. Last week, you got my updated gubernatorial rankings. And I make a few movements here and it will be a top 10, not just a top five. Because realistically, we've got probably 16 Senate races that are going to be decided by single digits. This cycle could climb closer to 20. But we have 10, arguably 10 right now, that have a chance of flipping. And really, you could expand that definition and say we're getting close to a dozen that have a chance of flipping. Most of them are Republican-held seats that Democrats have a shot at flipping, but there are at least three Democratic seats that at least are sitting in single-digit territory. But I want to begin with what could be the closing argument for Democrats. And if it's a successful closing argument, it could be how they take a good year and turn it into a generational wipeout of the party in power. So let me explain. I'm beginning to wonder whether corruption now is emerging as the closing argument of this election. And it is something I've been saying for a while that I thought one of the things that could turn what already was looking like a significant democratic wave into something considerably bigger is corruption. This idea that everything's pay to play, right? It's the kind of issue that can accelerate corruption. an existing political trend. We've seen it in previous election cycles because it gives voters who might otherwise be reluctant to vote against their own party a permission slip to do so because it's a temporary decision, right? And like I said, there's some real history here. If you just go back 20 years to 2006 midterms, directionally, we knew it was going to be a good Democratic year. The question was, could it be something bigger than what was anticipated? And they ended up with a big They won a big chunk of House seats. They were able to take control of the Senate. Turned out to be a bigger, more successful year. And it was about this time where they got a corruption issue, right? Democrats were in this very strong position. The Iraq war was going badly, right? Very similar. I've always said that 2006 cycle and this cycle have a lot in common. Unpopular war in the Middle East, unpopular war in the Middle East. An economy that wasn't working for everybody, an economy that wasn't working for everybody, right? And, you know, there was also a sense that Republicans have been in charge, particularly for Congress. They've been in charge for Congress for over a dozen years. Right. There hadn't been a flip. There had been a sort of a less than two year flip in the Senate thanks to a party switcher in 2001. But there hadn't been the voters hadn't flipped, flipped the party in some way. And then came the Mark Foley scandal. Now, Foley was a Republican congressman from Palm Beach County, Florida. He ended up resigning after revelations about some sexually explicit instant messages that he had sent to teenage congressional pages. And the scandal quickly became about something bigger than Foley himself. What did the Republican leadership know? When did they know it? And why hadn't they done more? And it allowed for a larger argument that, hey, this is what happens when a party's been in charge for too long. You know, they sort of, they sweep things under the rug. And suddenly in the final weeks of an election, that was already moving decisively towards the Democrats. Republicans had to deal with this scandal that reinforced every single negative impression that voters had already had about the party in that window, in that period of time. So it didn't create the wave. Essentially, it made the wave bigger, right? It was already there. It became one more reason for voters who were already unhappy with how Republicans were governing to conclude, maybe it's time to clean house. It's time to send a message. And that's what I mean when I talk about corruption being an accelerant here. You can be unhappy with the economy and still vote for your party. You can disagree with your party's handling of a war and still vote for your party. You can even be disappointed with a president you supported and still vote for his party. But corruption, that's a different story. Corruption allows you to say, I'm not abandoning my principles. I'm not suddenly embracing the other party's ideology. It's a permission slip, though, to vote against my party because because it needs to be cleaned up. And for voters who have spent their entire adult lives identifying with one political party, that distinction can matter enormously, right? It's not about persuading someone to change their mind. You don't have to persuade this voter to change their mind. You just have to persuade this voter, hey, the best way for you to clean up this mess inside of your party is to really punish the party and vote this person out, vote the party out of power. For two years, you can come right back and do what you want to do in two years. Now, I want to be careful. I'm not saying corruption has already become the dominant issue in this election. It hasn't. But we're starting to see it percolate. Right. And I think there's an opportunity here that Democrats can take the frustration about costs and lump them in with sort of the kleptocracy that essentially Donald Trump has tried to turn the Republican Party into. And I think we're beginning to see the ingredients that could make all of this work. And if it does, there are enormous implications for the size of this democratic wave. About a month ago, I'd laid out three broad scenarios for the midterms, the blue mirage, the blue wave, and the blue tsunami. Well, the blue mirage, of course, was the scenario where Democrats did well enough to win the House. Perhaps they picked up a Senate seat or two, but they couldn't quite break through in the more Republican states, in the more red-leaning states. Blue wave is something a bit more substantial, a national rejection of the governing party that reached into states and districts Republicans assumed were relatively safe. And then my blue tsunami scenario is where the bottom just falls out, you know, where wait a minute, they're sending money to Wyoming? Yes, they're sending money to Wyoming for that open house seat, meaning like they can't take anything for granted in a cycle like this. My goodness, the DGA is sending money to Oklahoma, right? They think they have a shot at winning Oklahoma government. So the political environment has become so difficult for Republicans and candidates who might ordinarily survive, may not survive in an environment like that. That's what a tsunami could mean. It's what happened you know, there was a big chunk of Democrats who lost in 94, who immediately saw new Democrats win those congressional seats back in 96, right? They were just sort of, but it was more of a, that was just where the momentum is. And that's what a tsunami looks like. 1994 was a tsunami against the Democrats. It was a red tsunami. And I think, you know, so I think at the moment, right, we are looking at some form of a democratic way. There's a reason all the markets prediction markets indicate that there's over a 50% chance that Democrats take the House and the Senate, right? The path to the Senate, but for Maine and Michigan, You know, I'd be very bullish. I'm still pretty bullish on Democratic chances to take control of the Senate. But I do think that the Democratic candidates in Maine and Michigan are struggling. And, you know, if Democrats got to win one of those two, they cannot afford to lose them both if they want to win the Senate here. But I digress. So look, on the tsunami front, I'm still a bit skeptical this turns into a 1994 style election. I do think at this point we're looking at either a 2018 wave or a 2006 wave, right? The 2006 wave was a bit bigger than 2018. 2018 allowed Democrats to win pretty much everywhere they could in swing districts and in blue states, but they couldn't really reach into Republican territory. 2006 allowed them to reach into Republican territory. And that's the big distinction between the two. And of course, this election cycle, because there's so many Senate seats in red territory, Democrats don't succeed in winning in red territory. They're not going to win the Senate. That said, the idea of a blue tsunami, I think that possibility is somewhere in the 15 to 20 percent category, right? This isn't a 5 percent chance. I think about, you know, you run this election, you know, 100 times and I think maybe in 15 to 20 of them. you get some sort of tsunami. And what do I mean by that? It's 30, 40, maybe more seats in the House. It's something like, you know, where they end up with over 250 House seats and they end up with, say, 53 or 54 Senate seats when all is said and done. But the reason I'm keeping the possibility of a tsunami on the table is that I think there's still room for this political environment to deteriorate further for Republicans. And we've gotten a few news stories over the last couple of days that indicate how that could happen. Which brings me back to the corruption issue, because there's another example, a much more recent one that I've been thinking about as well. I've brought it up with you in previous episodes, and that's Hungary. Peter Magyar's challenge to Viktor Orban was built in significant part around corruption. The idea that this government and power had created a kleptocracy. I mean, that's what Orban had built. That's what Donald Trump is turning the Republican Party into, which is a full on kleptocracy. And there are more and more Republicans uncomfortable with what Trump is doing. And in Hungary, what made the argument especially potent for Magyar was the connection that he took with the corruption to everyday economic life, right? It wasn't simply an argument that Orban and his political cronies had become too powerful or that the system had become too corrupt. It was the idea that a politically connected class had enriched itself while ordinary Hungarians were struggling with the cost of living. That's when a corruption issue becomes something more than a good government issue, right? This isn't about norms anymore, right? When voters believe that the people running their government are making themselves and their friends richer while everybody else is paying more for groceries, paying more for energy, especially while your cronies get to build data centers. more to get by, corruption becomes an economic issue, right? That's when it becomes really potent, right? I'm not doing well and these SOBs are making money off of my back, screw them, right? That's the mindset. That can reach voters who aren't particularly interested in debates about democratic institutions or constitutional norms, right? These are voters that aren't thinking that way, but instead they're like, Well, if they're just out for themselves, they're certainly not out for me. And corruption is almost an easier way to make that case than trying to lay it out with, hey, look, they got this donation, then they did this, et cetera, et cetera. Now, these voters may not follow every controversy involving the courts or the Justice Department. They may not care about the finer points of executive authority. They understand the idea that people in charge are taking care of themselves while everybody else gets stuck with the bill. Now, Are we beginning to see this argument develop into a full-on closing argument for the Democrats? I don't know yet. But I think the potential is there. I think the latest reporting involving Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Russia, and Ukraine makes the question considerably more relevant than it was even a week ago. Let's dig into Musk here a little bit. I want to return to something that I raised on the last podcast. Because the sequence of events involving Elon Musk deserves a ton of attention than it's getting And I think that this needs to be louder from some Democrats on this. Frankly, Republicans, this shouldn't be a partisan issue. The wealthiest man in the world is hijacking the United States foreign policy and the American government. That's a problem. That's a scandal. And that should be, you know, in blaring three-inch letters. So let's start with the money. Musk has become the most prominent financial benefactor of the Republican Party. And in September, he made two enormous contributions to the Senate Leadership Fund. The first was a $ 75 million check, and the second was an $ 83 million check. It was a total of $ 158 million. And in each instance, the following day, an equivalent amount was transferred to a Texas super PAC that was supporting Ken Paxton. Now, I've talked a lot about Paxton. And the fact that Senate Republicans spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to keep him from becoming their nominee was pretty telling. And so the idea that they spent all this money to try to stop him, that they were suddenly going to have to spend all this money to rescue him, seemed a bridge too far for some Senate Republicans. But once he became the nominee, they had a problem. They needed to help him, particularly if they cared about holding control of the Senate and because James Tallarico was raising enormous amounts of money. But they also had to deal with an entire Senate map that was starting to deteriorate. And along comes Elon Musk. This episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Quince. You know, the best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're heading to work, going out or keeping things a bit casual. And this time of year, Quince makes finding something great for everyone else just as easy. The holiday season is coming. That's right. We're under 90 days, folks. It's where I'm shopping for myself and everyone else on my list because I know Quince delivers. Nobody's ever disappointed in stuff they get from Quince. Why? Quince focuses on high quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14 karat gold and Italian leather. Their cashmere sweaters start at just 60 bucks. 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So when it comes to gifting, Quince is a lot more than clothing, too. By the way, they've got fine jewelry, leather bags, hotel-quality bedding, chef-grade cookware. People love a nice piece of equipment to play with in the kitchen these days. Five-star luggage. Plenty of ways to find something special for everyone on your list. So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. You get free shipping on your order, 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was the Chuck Todd cast. It's the best way to support the show and the best way to make sure you're getting every discount. This is the part of this arrangement that I find especially revealing, right? The Senate Republican leadership isn't particularly shy about explaining that the Texas money is essentially Musk's money. It's almost as though they're reassuring their traditional donors that don't worry, their contributions aren't being diverted away from other Senate races to rescue Ken Paxton, who probably doesn't deserve to be rescued, right? This unethical sort of just unworthy candidate for Senate. There are quite a few Republican donors who don't want to see their money wasted trying to rescue this unrescuable person. And it's almost like Senate Republicans, oh, don't worry, guys, your money, we're not wasting your money on Ken Paxton. We got somebody else that's going to pay this Ken Paxton bill. And of course, that somebody is Elon Musk. It's an extraordinary arrangement, right? Ken Paxton can't find anybody else to fund his super PAC other than Elon Musk. We know the Republican establishment didn't want to fund Paxton. Donald Trump has made it clear he does, but God forbid he ever spend his own money to help somebody else. So he gets his trillionaire buddy to do this. So the richest man in the world has effectively stepped in to finance the effort to save one entire Senate campaign. And what's funny is that in the last, and this is where I don't know what's connected here with our foreign policy, but the fact that all this is happening all at the same time. So Elon Musk is writing these checks to rescue Paxton clearly at the behest of Trump, right? Trump is desperate to help Paxton, not desperate enough to write his own checks, but desperate enough to get Elon Musk to write checks. Why do we know he's upset? Because he went on Truth Social and being moaned about John decided he was going to blame John Cornyn and Karl Rove for their handling of the Paxton. If it wasn't for them, Paxton would be in better shape. How about if it wasn't for Ken Paxton, the Texas Senate race would be in better shape? How about if it wasn't for Donald Trump that supporting a loser like Ken Paxton, a corrupt figure like Ken Paxton, that Republicans would be better shape? Now, we don't know whether any of this is a quid pro quo. The Musk donations happened in September. This slowdown of Starlink happened in October. You know, we're not sure what's connected. But guess what? That's what Congress's job is. But it's all part of this same political story, right? You've got the president. You got Senate Republican leadership. You got a candidate they didn't want. You got a man who is now providing an extraordinary amount of money being used to help elect them. And he wants to have an extraordinary amount of influence on the war between Ukraine and Russia. Wall Street Journal, they're the latest to report that this time, according to the journal, it was Musk who personally ordered the slowdown of the military grade version of Starlink that Ukrainian forces were relying on to operate drones, including drones used to intercept Russian attacks. The restrictions began on October 14th. Happened to be the day before we found out he was the sole funder of Ken Paxton. by the way, for what it's worth. This also happened after both Trump and Musk had publicly criticized Ukraine for attacking Russian energy infrastructure. I missed the part where Trump and Musk attacked Russia for everything it's been doing to Ukraine, but I digress. Trump is particularly angry about Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries because he he has manufactured... Remember, Donald Trump's decisions aren't what's harming the American people. He's always got to blame somebody else. His decision to be talked into a war with Iran by Israel apparently is not his fault and is not the reason why diesel prices have skyrocketed. He wants people to believe it's the war between Russia and Ukraine that explains the rise in diesel prices. Now, again, None of this, there's no evidence that supports that. All the evidence supports that what's happened in the Middle East is why energy prices have skyrocketed. But Trump needs a different foil, and it's very important to him. He always, right, he's got to self-soothe. It's never his fault, right? That's, you know, that's not what the narcissist believes. It is clear it's the Iran war that has done this. But Trump continues to want to blame Ukraine. There's a variety of reasons for this. Right. A week ago, he complained that he told Zelensky not to attack the refineries and that Zelensky had done it anyway. And Musk responded saying Zelensky had gone too far. Again, Russia has invaded this man's country, killed thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians. And somehow it's Ukraine's fault. This blame the victim mentality by Musk and Trump. It really it's borderline treasonous as far as I'm concerned. It's a traitor to the it's a traitor to American foreign policy. It just is, you know, it's it's it isn't supportive of democracy. And I know these are buzzwords and this will get aggregated and all of that and fine. Right. But this is I know we've run out of adjectives to describe the damage that Donald Trump has done to America's standing in the world. And if we're not going to stand up for democracies, then what the hell are we going to do? What's the point of the American experiment if we're not going to support democracies when they are threatened by thugs like Vladimir Putin? But here we are. So now we learn, according to the journal, that it was Musk who ordered the slowdown. Now, we still don't have a clear explanation of who authorized it. Musk publicly suggested that these decisions were technically up to the American military and the president. Trump said he didn't know who was responsible. Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon hadn't ordered any restrictions, but he acknowledged that Starlink could make decisions about its own terms of service. So Hegseth was kind of implying in his own way that Musk could do this if he chose to do this. And the journal reports the conflicting accounts about whether Trump knew about the decision beforehand or not. But here's the question that this all introduced. Who is actually making American national security policy? Is it the president? Is it the Pentagon? Is it the National Security Council? Or can the richest man in the world, who also happens to be the Republican Party's biggest political donor, make a decision that directly affects the battlefield in Ukraine? Bottom line is Congress ought to be asking some of these very specific questions about this right now. Who talked to whom? When did those conversations take place? What did the president know? What did the Pentagon know? Why did the administration initially seem so confused about who was responsible? By the way, who asked for this check to Paxton? Who made the request to Musk for this money? When was this request made? Did it come with strings attached? Did Musk say he'd give this money if he had more control over Starlink? All of these are questions that Congress has is obligated to ask on behalf of the American people, pure and simple. And if Congress isn't curious about this, then we've got a bigger problem than we realize. What was asked for? What was promised? Was there any relationship between the enormous financial support that Musk is providing to the president's party and the national security decisions being made around the same time? Just because we don't have evidence of a quid pro quo doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking questions whether there was. And that's the problem, right? The totality of moves that Donald Trump has made as president indicate that this is how he operates. We know there's a pay for play on pardons. We know he does this. In some ways, he advertises it because he wants people to know that if you want something from him, you have to write a check. Pure and simple. This is not like something he hides because he wants people to come with their check in hand before they show up in the Oval. So if Congress can't do oversight on something like this, then it is completely lost the plot. But there's another dimension to the story that may ultimately become politically pretty important. Let's go back to what I was saying about Hungary. The most potent corruption argument isn't necessarily that somebody broke a law. It's that the government has become a system in which the politically connected seem to have access and influence that ordinary people don't. And then you connect that to the cost of living. So think about the situation we have right now. Americans are paying more for energy. The president is blaming Ukraine's attacks on Russian refineries. His administration has been easing restrictions involving Russian diesel. And he's publicly pressuring Ukraine to stop attacking Russia's energy infrastructure, right? Which when, why does Russia need its energy so we can finance its war against Ukraine? Meanwhile, Donald Trump's most important political benefactor has made a decision that restricts Ukraine's ability to use a critical communications system. All of this is happening while Musk is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns. We have no idea what Musk is personally profiting from the price of diesel, or maybe he just needs certain relationships with Russia because of his space issue. Maybe you have a bunch of rich guys whispering into Trump's ear that they want to do business with Russia again, and he needs to hurry up and solve this thing. Whatever it is, something smells here, and it smells to Hayek. But the question I'm asking is whether voters are beginning to see a government that appears more responsive to the interests and preferences of powerful insiders and extraordinarily wealthy individuals rather than worrying about ordinary Americans. That is where the economic argument and the corruption argument begin to overlap. If voters start connecting those dots politically, that becomes an extraordinarily significant problem for the GOP generally. You have a president who promised to bring down prices. Voters are still unhappy with the cost of living. You have an administration filled with people who have enormous financial interests in industries affected by government decisions. You have a political system in which one individual can provide hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign financing while simultaneously exercising extraordinary influence over a matter of of national security. Is that how most Americans think government ought to work? And more importantly, are they beginning to see that those things are connected? That's the question I keep coming back to. Do they see the connection? I don't know that corruption is going to become the closing argument of this election, but I can see how it could. We've been hearing anecdotes all over that people keep bringing up. When you're not doing well, the corruption really pisses you off. If you were doing fine, you roll your eyes. So Trump 1.0 corruption, people eye rolled because they were doing OK. Trump 2.0 corruption is a different story. And it could become an accelerant that turns an already difficult election for Republicans into something considerably more consequential. Right. The economy has already created dissatisfaction. Trump's behavior has already created exhaustion and fatigue. The Iran war has created questions about his judgments. And there's a growing sense among voters that this administration hasn't delivered the stability or the lower prices that Trump promised were going to take place on day one. Remember, all of our economic instability is caused by Donald Trump. These are not Biden policies. Biden did not do Liberation Day tariffs, did not start the trade war with Canada, did not start a war with Iran. All of these things are Donald Trump decisions. And then what happens if corruption becomes the explanation voters settle on for why those promises by Trump have not been kept? What happens if the closing argument becomes that the president and his wealthy friends are doing just fine while everybody else is still struggling to pay the bills? And oh, by the way, the president wants to sell your land out from under you to these tech companies as well and make your energy bills go up even higher. It's a different kind of argument. from the usual red versus blue, D versus R, debate over taxes, spending, or immigration. And it's the one that could provide exactly the kind of permission slip to voters that I've been talking about. Voters don't have to be persuaded. They can still think the Democrats are too close to the socialist wing of their party. But a Republican voter doesn't have to decide that Democrats are right about any of this. They don't even have to like the Democratic Party. They just have to decide their own party has become too comfortable with the way power is being exercised, and that somebody needs to be able to hold it accountable. This is part of what happened in 06. The Foley scandal didn't cause the wave. It reinforced the sense that the Republican Party had been in power too long and didn't know how to police itself anymore. And I'm wondering if we're approaching a similar moment now. It is how Democrats could overperform in so many of these red states because it's voters who perhaps ideologically are more comfortable with the Republicans than the Democrats. But they may think the Republicans are, you know, that the Trump era is just so corrupt that they have to clean house. And I think the next 10 days are going to tell us quite a bit about whether corruption is simply one more issue in this election or whether it's becoming the issue that helps voters make up their mind. I'll just say this. I had somebody come up to me at the airport the other day and say that they had never voted for a Democrat before, but that they were likely going to vote Democrat on a number of races this time. They said they were from Texas. And it was it was the rationale was housecleaning. He was not becoming a Democrat. He was not becoming a liberal. He was not becoming a progressive. I think he believes he's not changed who he is. I think he thinks that Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party in a way he doesn't like and that it's time to clean house. How many of those voters exist? And are there enough of them that it has a significant impact on the psyche of whoever is left inside the Republican Party if this indeed is the type of election we're facing? I don't know if we're there yet, but I say we're closer. And I think the corruption issue is an interesting way I think now there's enough ways to connect it to the cost of living. All right, speaking of character and accountability, I want to spend a few minutes in Ohio because something happened in the governor's race there on Tuesday that I think deserves a lot of attention than just a typical campaign controversy. And it deserves a lot of outrage. It's as disgusting and despicable of an attack ad that I can think of any candidate ever coming up with In my adult lifetime. Now, look, I've been pretty bullish on Democratic prospects in Ohio than perhaps other people have. I was earlier on this that, hey, I don't think I think Vivek Ramaswamy is perhaps the worst Republican you could find to lead the ticket in Ohio in a campaign year like this. And this was before his his campaign did something that is just extraordinarily disgusting. And we're going to get there in a minute. You know, but I thought for a while that Ramaswamy was exactly the wrong kind of Republican candidate for this moment. Right. Simply because of what he represents. Here's somebody whose political identity was built around his success in the tech and biotech world. Somebody who became enormously wealthy and then used that wealth and the celebrity that came with it to enter politics. Kind of a poster child of, you know, it's kind of the poster child of the Republican Party that Donald Trump has built. Now, on the surface, there's nothing inherently wrong with what he did. We've had plenty of successful business people in our politics. Maria Cantwell struck it rich with, I think it was the real videos. I think it was what it was back in, used the money she made in stock options to finance a Senate race in 2000 to get back into politics. So again, people have done it, Democrats and Republicans. But I have been struck by how much of Ramaswamy's public reputation rests on the success of making money rather than on any. He doesn't really have a clear record of improving people's lives. He's made money, but he's not accomplished a lot. Right. His companies haven't solved problems. They haven't saved lives. They've just been vehicles to make him money. And I do think that that distinction matters in this election and that it was mattering even before this latest controversy. Because we're living through a period when Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical of the motivations of these wealthy tech execs. They're skeptical of the influence these individuals have of our government simply because they can write big fact checks to super PACs. They're skeptical of the data centers that are appearing in their own communities, skeptical of the idea that a handful of people who have made fortunes in technology ought to have somehow an outsized role in deciding public policy. And Ramaswamy is associated with precisely this world. He's associated with Elon Musk, right? He was the partner with Musk in the Doge effort at the beginning of Trump's second term. He's associated with the idea that government ought to be run more like a tech company. You think that's what Americans want? And I think that has become much more, it's a very difficult political identity to sell than Republicans had anticipated. And if you look at Ohio polling, right? I mean, Acton hasn't trailed Ramaswamy in a single poll in the last two months, to my knowledge. And she's been running further ahead of Ramaswamy, Amy Acton has, than Sherrod Brown has been running ahead of John Huston. And I think it's that Ramaswamy is just, you know, Huston is more of a known quantity in Ohio Republican circles than Ramaswamy in his own way. We're talking about a Republican candidate for governor who was already struggling. in a state Donald Trump carried comfortably three times. And in fact, I think Ramaswamy is part of the reason why the entire Republican ticket is struggling in Ohio. I mean, he is pretty much the worst nominee they could have come up with. And that's before he did this disgusting, egregious attack on Amy Acton. Because I think just Ramaswamy's presence, right? He's sort of a, cheap version of Elon Musk, right? A less successful version of Elon Musk. But if you don't like Elon Musk and Trump and the relationship with tech, you're not going to like Ramaswamy. He's got a likability problem, right? And now he got desperate. We have this extraordinary story involving Amy Acton and her mother. So if you haven't followed it, let me explain what happened. A video began circulating online this week featuring Acton's estranged birth mother, a woman named Donna Arthur. The last time that Acton saw her was in 1978 when she was a child. And this woman, who is Acton's birth mother, is in this video, it appears to be an ad paid for by Ramaswamy, accusing her daughter of lying about her childhood. Now, let me tell you something about Amy Acton's childhood. She's spoken publicly about growing up in some extremely difficult circumstances, including periods of homelessness, neglect, and abuse. The history here is deeply disturbing. When Acton was 12 years old, her stepfather was arrested and subsequently indicted on charges of sexually abusing her. Acton and her brother were removed from their mother's custody. Her stepfather fled prosecution and her mother remained married to this evil guy. Now, Acton has said she hasn't seen her mother since they were together in a courtroom in 1978. That's 48 years ago. Now imagine having that history. Imagine having spent your adult life dealing with what happened to you as a child, building a career, raising a family, serving your community, and eventually deciding that you want to run for governor. And then two weeks before election day, a video appears featuring the mother from whom you've been estranged for nearly half a century, publicly attacking your credibility and suggesting you've lied about your childhood. What are we doing here? What are you doing here, Vivek? The video has circulated among Ramaswami supporters and Acton and her brother have accused Ramaswami of being behind it. Now, as of this recording, the recording is not established who produced or financed the video, but it's, you know, the problem is Ramaswami's morals and ethics aren't exactly tip top shape, right? What do you believe? Now, the video itself doesn't carry a sponsorship disclosure, and we don't know whether Acton's mother was compensated for the video. But what do you think? What are you suspicious of? All of those are important facts, and I don't want to skip over them. But here's what we know. When Ramaswamy's campaign was asked about the video, it didn't simply say this was inappropriate or that the candidate wanted nothing to do with an attack involving an opponent's childhood sexual abuse. Instead, the campaign continued attacking Acton's credibility. The Ramaswamy campaign made a choice. They made a choice to go down this disgusting gutter, this horrendous gutter, vile gutter. It's a choice about the kind of campaign you're willing to run, the kind of political behavior you're willing to tolerate. It's quite revealing, right? Character reveals itself. And we now know Ramaswami is pond scum, pure and simple. If you green light an attack like this, trying to exploit the pain and hurt of somebody who was abused when they were in middle school, junior high, you're a piece of shit. You're a scumbag. Those words are worthy here. Just absolutely gross and disgusting. And if you're not denouncing this, if you're an Ohio politician and you're not denouncing this, then get out of politics. Look, I've covered campaigns for more than three decades. I know politics ain't beanbag. It's ugly. It's gross. It's terrible. We've seen candidates attack. Ex-wives, we've seen ex-wives exploited, ex-husbands exploited, families, finances, all of that. We've seen plenty of this that arguably is indefensible. And I know there are political professionals who will tell you that sometimes the ugliest attacks, they work. That voters may tell pollsters they don't like negative campaigning, but they still absorb the information. Okay. This doesn't feel like one of those. I think there are moments when the public's tolerance for this kind of behavior is misjudged. I think this is going to be one of them. I think Ramaswamy just got himself canceled from polite company. I wouldn't stand next to this man under any circumstance. I wouldn't want to do business with somebody who goes down this gutter unless he is a full, if he's going to just candidate to camera, apologize for this type of intolerable behavior. Because think about the calculation involved in using somebody's estranged mother to question her account of a childhood that included documented sexual abuse. What is the political theory here? That Ohio voters are going to watch this ad and decide that Amy Acton's greatest vulnerability is that her mother, who remained married to the man accused of sexually abusing her, now says she wasn't telling the truth about her childhood? Is that where we are? We spend a lot of time in this country complaining about the quality of people who run for public office. We complain that good people don't want to enter politics. Well, that we don't have enough public servants who are motivated by something other than ambition, money, or celebrity. It's moments like this that's part of the reason. If you know that running for office means somebody may go digging through your most traumatic experiences of your childhood and look for a way to weaponize them and use them in political ammunition. They knew this story and they went with it anyway. They wanted to go down this road of trying to weaponize somebody's childhood trauma. The number of people who greenlit this, whoever is involved in this, I hope they never get hired in American politics ever again. The people who run campaigns decide, if we sit here, if we decide there are no boundaries at all anymore, then don't be surprised when the people most reluctant to enter politics are often the people we'd like to see participate. I wanted to see Admiral McRaven run. It's my understanding that his spouse said, no way. They didn't want that type of scrutiny or whatever it was. I've had people ask me if I'd run for office. I won't do it because I'm not going to put my family through something like that. So in some ways, the bad guys are winning, right? The bad guys are chasing away good people from running for office. Now, look, I think there is an electoral question here. Ramaswamy was already dealing with a difficult race before this video surfaced or before he chose to surface this. First of all, if you needed more proof that the polls are accurate on this one or that Ramaswamy thinks the polls are accurate, then the mere existence of this tactic is proof that the polls are accurate in Ohio. But I think this thing is so gross, so disgusting, that this could drag down the entire Republican ticket in Ohio. I think it's that awful. And I don't think anybody wants to be caught supporting this kind of garbage. This isn't going to stay in the governor's race. It's about what kind of behavior Republicans in Ohio are prepared to defend, condemn, or simply ignore. What does Mike DeWine think about this? What does my friend John Kasich think about this? What does John Husted think? I bring up Husted specifically because he's trying to win a Senate race in an environment where the Republican brand is already facing significant problems. Does he want to spend the final two weeks of his campaign answering questions about a video, about the decision of Ramaswamy to exploit child abuse that took place when Amy Acton was a child and the victim of child abuse? Does he want to be asked whether he thinks this is an acceptable way to campaign? And if he doesn't think it's acceptable, is he prepared to say so? There are legitimate questions. He's running on the same ticket as Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy has done this to Houston. And I've seen like the Trump people want to blame John Houston, please. John Husted is 10x better of a candidate than anybody else on that ticket right now. His problem is he's just not Trumpy. He doesn't fit their definition of what they want to see in a candidate. You want more Ramaswamis? Is that what this MAGA world wants? More shitbags who think this is an appropriate way to conduct politics? And this goes directly at what I've made this whole intro about today. Corruption, character, accountability, the willingness to hold people on your own side to the same standards you would demand of your political opponents. So we'll see. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe I'm Pollyannish and this thing won't have any impact on the governor's race. We don't know yet. We haven't had a lot of time. We don't have the voter reaction. And obviously, social media outrage does not always translate into real voter outrage. But this raises a bigger question that goes beyond Ohio. Have we reached a point in American politics where campaigns believe there is virtually nothing they can't do, provided they think it might help them win? And if that's where we are, what responsibility do the other people in the party have to draw a line? Is anybody going to draw a line? The only people that can draw a line on this are the voters. Politicians are going to do whatever it takes, whatever they think they can get away with. The fact that Ramaswamy, think about the cocoon he lives in, that he and his cronies thought this was appropriate. Think about the information bubble he lives in that he thought, yeah, this is a good idea. We're going to go down this road. Let's traumatize a fellow human being simply because we want to win a governor's race because he failed at everything else he'd done in his life. He's failed to have a successful business, but he's cashed in on it. He's successfully made money, but he's failed at actually translating that business into helping other people. But this is what the Trump era has brought. Donald Trump has done to American politics. This is what he's done. He's bankrupted it on the morality front completely. He's changed the incentives for people who work around him. I mean, look what he's done to the Republican Party. There are people still left in it. They used to care about character. We've watched politicians who once claimed to care deeply about personal character, honesty, and standards of public conduct, that they should decide that those things should matter to voters. Donald Trump comes along and half of those people said, what standards? Winning is everything. So now what's the result? The result is behavior that might once have ended a political career now gets defended rationalized or simply ignored. This is not healthy for the system, folks. I don't care what party you're in. It's not healthy for the country. And it brings me back to the question of this closing argument. This is one of those things where the unintended consequence here is that Ramaswamy, this thing blows up and it helps crystallize that the Republican Party has just gone off. Trump has driven it into a ditch. And the only thing in that ditch are a couple of termites, one named Elon Musk and one named Vivek Ramaswamy. And they have absolutely eaten away at the core of what used to make up the Republican Party. And now it's just rot. Who knows? But that's the connection I see between Musk, Ramaswamy, and what we're seeing in Ohio. They're different stories. One involves enormous sums of political money and a national security decision. The other involves an attack on a candidate's deeply painful family history. But they raise a question about power, accountability, about what the political actors are prepared to justify in pursuit of power. So corruption and character. They haven't mattered in, they haven't really mattered in the Trump era. Right? In the Trump era, corruption issues haven't hit. And neither is character issues. But boy, are we testing the voters' patience on this. Trump is testing the voters' patience. Elon Musk is testing the voters' patience. Vivek Ramaswamy is testing the voters' patience. So I, I'm so, it's just so, it's another level of gross and disgusting and awful what Ramaswamy's doing. Again, I think it, it, it ends his political career. I mean, I think this thing is over. I think this is gross and disgusting and this thing is going to boomerang and they're going to regret ever doing it. And the after on effect. I know in our fragmented media ecosystem, you don't know what's going to break through. But the political party that once cared about Jeffrey Epstein, until they realized there were too many people on their own side that might be connected, is playing games like this. If a Democratic campaign can't connect these dots and turn this into a closing argument, then there's some competency issues on that side of the aisle that we may talk about post-election. But for now, I think we've seen this has not been a good, you know, good gets better, bad gets worse. I think when it comes, if the fact that corruption and character are creeping into the top tier of this conversation, that's how a wave becomes a tsunami. All right. It is. We are two weeks down as I'm literally going to alternate back and forth. We did governors last week. This week we'll do senators and you will see. I have messed around with my arrangement a little bit. So we start with my top 10. Look, number one is still number one. And that is North Carolina. It is. Republicans have pulled money out of North Carolina. Apparently, Donald Trump feels sorry for Michael Whatley and his super PAC. threw them, I think, a little bit more than a million dollars. So they're not totally dark on the air, but they're getting close to being dark on the air. I think the real question is, does Cooper's victory have coattails in North Carolina? Right. There's a couple of House seats that Democrats think, you know, they're reach seats because the state's pretty gerrymandered. But does Cooper's ability to fund a bigger ground game and sort of be at the top of the ticket? Do you see, does it have trickle-down effect down the ballot? That's one thing to look for in North Carolina. Number two, Ohio. I don't know if I need to talk more about what's happened in Ohio, but bottom line is The fact that you have Washington operatives trying to blame the candidate rather than the environment, rather than Trump, rather than Ramaswamy. Right. Bottom line is John Husted has everything going against him and not a lot going for him at this point, other than the weird admiration of his physical looks by Trump, which is just I'm I'm sure years from now, John Husted is going to say, did the president of the United States really objectify my ass? Yes, Mr. Husted, I think the president really objectified you. But keep an eye on Husted. You know, I think, you know, here's the irony to John Husted. He'd been looking to run for governor and he sort of got boxed into the Senate seat, you know, the advance, the appointment, all of those things. Had Husted been the Republican nominee for governor? They might have dodged all things Ramaswami. But now Ramaswami could lead the entire ticket to one of its worst showings in 20 or 30 years. Number three on the list is Texas. I mean, I think it's I think the I don't think Elon Musk helps Paxton here. The money may help. But the fact that it's so public, the fact that it's there, the closing Tallarico's closing argument is pretty strong. He's closing on corruption. It's allowed Gina Inosin, the gubernatorial race, to bring up Greg Abbott's connections to Elon Musk. The fact that he's made himself a main character in this race, again, I just don't think that's good politics. Americans on both sides of the aisle don't like tech execs right now, don't like big tech in general. Elon Musk is not a very well-liked individual. There are those that love him. I'm not saying he doesn't have his fans. He does have his fanboys. Don't get me wrong. But I think he's becoming... politically toxic. And I don't think that I don't think his his attachment to Paxton improves Paxton's image that much. So Texas is number three. But I'll tell you, those are the three I'm most confident in for Democrats. And then I'm going to be honest with you that I would draw a line on my list on the top 10. Right. So I'm pretty confident they're going to net those three. Everything else, my confidence wanes a little bit. Let's start with Alaska. I think Democrats are the favorite here, but it's a narrow margin. Polo Sullivan is going to be really close. It's going to go to rank choice voting. If we're waiting on Alaska to find out who controls the Senate, it's already been a better night for Republicans than expected. That's another way to look at this list. But they're in my number four slot. My number five slot is Maine. I've said this before. I think the debates did not go well for Troy Jackson. I think the debates have helped Collins. I think she certainly has found her comfort zone on how to campaign in this cycle. It may be it doesn't matter. It may be just having the R next to her name is enough for her to lose. But Jackson has not run the greatest campaign. And this is one of those where if she wins, I think you have to say, well, Democrats really just, you know, had a massive candidate problem. Right. They went through to two nominees. Neither one of them. Probably. I don't know if either one of them. If Collins wins in this environment, then perhaps neither one of them could have won Plattner or Jackson. And then there's– it could be that she just knows– she just has a better relationship with the state than Jackson does. But we'll see. I think she's– again, we could– and here's the thing about Maine. They take forever to count their vote. So– it's possible we know which party controls the Senate before we know the result in Maine. Number six, Kansas. And so I clump Alaska, Maine, Kansas, and Michigan is in my next tier, right? If I put in North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Maine, Kansas, Michigan, I think these are pure toss-ups. Pure, pure toss-ups. I've already said the reason why Maine, Kansas, You know, he's Roger Marshall's campaign has decided, hey, they just are going to try to make this a red versus blue. If they can just get enough turnout out, they can survive this. Marshall has not tried to pivot. He's not tried to seek distance from Trump. I think that's been a strategic mistake. We'll find out. Right. He sort of got into the rally. I don't know if I would have. I certainly don't think that is necessarily good politics for him. But we'll see. Right. There's certainly some super red areas of Kansas, but the the reddest areas have been hurt the most by Trump's economic policies. So and I think it's interesting. Adam Hamilton has been you know, his his tone in this has been, hey, Trump voters, we welcome the president and you've got a home in this campaign. He is not trying to necessarily run against Trump voters other than just Trump policies. So. We'll see. But I'm I definitely think that's turning a pure toss up. And then last on my pure toss up list is Michigan. Look, Abdul Al-Sayed is a very good campaigner, but I think he's missed a ton of opportunities to do what needs to be done to outreach in the African-American community and outreach in the skeptical Jewish community. But I also think Mike Rogers could have done more to distance himself from Trump and And he hasn't done that. So you sort of have neither campaign is doing what I think the opportunity they have to do, they should be doing. Maybe it's a pure environmental play. Maybe Abdul El-Sayed gets dragged across by Jocelyn Benson. Maybe for every vote he loses to Rogers, he gains with a bigger turnout among Arab-Americans that we've ever seen before. And then the other wild card is the youth vote, right? If youth turnout is up, if voters under 30 show up in a bigger percentage than they would show up in a normal midterm, well, that's the secret sauce for Abdul El-Sayed, right? And that would be the difference between him narrowly winning and narrowly losing. My final three in the top 10, eight, nine, and 10 are Iowa, South Carolina, and Nebraska. All of these are close and all of these right now have the Republican slightly favored. Right. Ashley Hinson, slightly favored over Turek. Darlene Graham, slightly favored over Annie Andrews. Although I do think what Donald Trump has done with Putin in Ukraine and the sort of gutting of Lindsey Graham's legacy and the Lindsey Graham sanction act that was supposed to be the heart of the sanctions against Russia. Do enough voters care about that in South Carolina? Can Annie Andrews exploit that? I don't know. But you got to ask. I mean, it is she is running on her brother's legacy and Donald Trump is eviscerating that legacy in foreign policy. That's got to matter to some Charleston Republicans. Right. So, look, there's a reason the National Party. Republican Party's putting more effort in this race. There's a reason Trump's going twice, doing two different rallies for her. He's got to drag her across the finish line. This, after all, was his idea, right? It's funny, all the places that Trump has gotten more involved in the Senate race than the party wishes it had, that Senate races are either already done or close to it, right? North Carolina, Georgia, he personally handpicked South Carolina. Now that's a problem. Texas. That's a problem, right? Wherever Trump has done his magic, it has cost the Republican party millions and millions of dollars that they otherwise could have spent trying to play a little bit of offense. Uh, and then number 10, uh, if you're keeping score at home, I basically swapped South Carolina, Nebraska. Um, I just don't see the path yet for Osborne. I see the path to 48. I don't see the path to 50. And I do think Osborne's a bit... It's tough to run the trick play twice. It's tough to run the Philly special twice in a row and think you're going to score touchdowns each time. But it is remarkable that something's happening out there in Nebraska. The governor's race is tight. So everything is going to be tight and it's going to be a while before we call it. But I... The fact that he had apologized for using the B word to describe Deb Fischer, not exactly the best headline in a state like Nebraska. That's a question I have. There's a there's a is Osborne. I know in the Trump era, you think somebody is coarse and is and is undignified as Donald Trump. If he can do well in Nebraska, then what's the big deal if Dan Osborne curses like a sailor? Yeah. But there's sort of a I just think that that isn't I don't buy that Nebraskans want that in their elected officials. So I wonder if that did a little bit more damage than it would have, say, to a Donald Trump. Right. Which we know, you know, he's sort of in some ways immune to those things. But there you go. That's my top 10. Like I said, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, I think, frankly, are in the lean already lean category. Alaska, Maine, Kansas, Michigan, my pure toss ups in my top 10 at the moment. Right. Numbered four, five, six and seven. And then Iowa, South Carolina, Nebraska's, you know, very close. But right now tilting to the GOP, not sort of also receiving votes. If we're playing the AP poll game here, Minnesota, Mississippi, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Idaho, Montana. That is my order of likelihood to flip. I think all of these could be single digit races. Right. You know, Michelle Tafoya is running a very good race. She's keeping her distance from Trump. But this is a tough national environment for her to run in. Mississippi, it's interesting. You're seeing individual Democrats try to help Scott Collum. I'm pretty bullish on this, but I don't have the polling to prove that it belongs in the top 10 yet. My gut is that Mississippi flips before Nebraska. But there's more data to support Nebraska flipping before Mississippi. South Dakota, we've seen. I wanted to talk earlier. I left this on the cutting room floor, but the Matthew McConaughey sort of pledged that, hey, guess what? Voting for an independent is not a wasted vote. As he argued, what's a wasted vote? Vacillating between these two parties and watching them both screw things up when they control Congress. So I still think that Mike Rounds is going to and Jim Risch in Idaho are going to be in some seriously close reelection battles to independent candidates. And then there's New Hampshire and Montana, which I suspect will be close. But in New Hampshire's case, I think Sununu is going to come up short. In the Montana case, the independent just, there's just, there's too many guys on, too many people on the ballot for the independent to overtake the Republican in that one. This next question comes from somebody who actually I've been friendly with. I've appeared on his show at times. It's Andrew Zee in Toledo. And he lets me know he's from Ohio's 43rd Statehouse District. I love that, Andrew. He had a fun question for me and I decided to share it with you. He'd actually texted it to me, but he had said, I answered him and then he had said, oh, I thought you were going to answer this on the pod. So here it is. He goes, Chuck, I know you've been a big supporter of a viable third party, but let me throw a different idea at you. Why do we need political parties at all? Why not eliminate the parties altogether and make elections about individual candidates, their ideas and their positions on issues instead of Republican versus Democrat, put an idea on the table, debate its merits and vote on it? No party loyalty, no red team versus blue team. Instead of fighting for a third party, why not fight for a no party system? Is that completely unrealistic or could something like that actually work in America? So as I told Andrew, I wanted to look into this a little bit more. We sort of have one, we have a few experiments with what I would call less party, not quite no party. You have the unicameral legislature in Nebraska, which technically is nonpartisan. Now, do people know which way people lean? Yes. It's like in some of these state Supreme Court races that are supposed to be nonpartisan. People identify themselves as liberal or conservative or this or that. But I will tell you this, it is less, the unicameral legislature gets more done They get along a little bit better. There is less pressure. What you eliminate, what you're describing here, Andrew, you're eliminating that sort of party pressure. right? This group think that can be that party caucuses, right? The pressure you feel, well, if the entire party's voting one way, I may feel another. Do I want to take the incoming from the party's base when they find out I'm not with where everybody else is, right? where if there isn't a formal structure, then being somebody that's an outlier on one issue, but maybe is with the majority on another issue, that's not that distinctive. So I will say that the experience in Nebraska is that it's a less ideological and less partisan acting body, which to me, uh, gives, gives you some ammunition about your idea. The other is how we elect mayors in this country. Most mayors are elected in, um, in, uh, nonpartisan races where there is no party label next to the candidate. I've often, you know, you talk about, um, I've had on here, the mayor of Oklahoma city, he happens to be a Republican, but he talks about that when you're on an all party ballot, all party primary ballot, um, You're just you're going to talk to the to the to the voter, you know, to the consensus voter, which is a bit more somewhere in between. Right. Where where the extremes actually are. And, you know, I saw it firsthand in Miami. Carlos Jimenez, you know, you tell me how your election is run and I'll tell you how partisan your elected official will be. Carlos Jimenez, as mayor of Miami-Dade County, was not an extraordinarily ideological or partisan actor as mayor. because the race itself had no party label. It was technically a nonpartisan race. Did Republicans know who the Republican-leaning candidate was? Yes. That is, it's not like it's a mystery. They don't pretend that they don't have proclivities of being on the left or the right or whatever. But once he became, when he ran for Congress, he put an R next to his name, and he got elected in 2020. And one of the first things he had to decide was whether to vote to certify the election on January 6th. And he chose not to. And I remember being a bit surprised. And then somebody pointed out this, you know, he carried it. He was in a district that Donald Trump carried and he won his primary thanks to Trump voters and that his district was very concerned about this. And if he didn't vote the way his district wanted, he'd have been primaried. He probably made the right political decision at the time. But it goes to Right. Had he been elected without party, the pressure to worry about what the party was going to think would have lessened. But because he got elected via the political party mechanism, he had to worry about what the party thought, not just what his constituents thought. So I've helped provide it. So we the bottom line is you're not wrong. So you and by the way, you're in good company. Right. George Washington. It's not a bad. Not a bad person to share an idea with. Thought parties were terrible and were only going to lead to more problems than any good that comes with it. Look, you know, the question is, can you organize a legislative body without party? Well, guess what? Nebraska's figured it out. So we have there are a few models that sort of prove that if we wanted to get out of the political party business, we could and just had political parties. You know, I'm a member of the Elks Club. I'm a member of the Republican Party. I'm a member of the Working Families Party, whatever it is. Right. It can certainly be on your resume. But as a as a label on the ballot, it is it is sort of it is almost like is it. we're trying to insert the parliamentary system when we actually made a, we made a decision not to be a parliamentary system. So, um, I love the thought. Um, I will just tell you this, you know, I, this is why we should have all party primaries, you know, everybody on the same ballot and yeah, it'd be great. If you didn't have party labels, you'd make people have to learn more about the candidates themselves. And maybe candidates would feel more comfortable being more nuanced or being more, um, being more honest about their positions and what they support. All right, next question comes from Andrew K. in Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft. Andrew from Redmond, Washington's first district, long-time listener, first-time writer, avid solo hiker also. Well, if you live in Northwest, that's a good place to be a hiker. I play your podcast out loud on Washington's backcountry trails to avoid startling bears and cougars as you've accompanied me on quite a few adventures. Wow. Well, I appreciate that. I just hope you don't ever have to gnaw off your arm if you get stuck anywhere. When prediction markets favor Roger Marshall in Kansas, but polls show a tight race with Adam Hamilton, what do bettors know that pollsters don't? Also, wouldn't expanding the Supreme Court from 9 to 13 just invite Republicans to expand it again when they regain power, creating an endless cycle? Kind regards, Andrew Kaye in Redmond, Washington. Hey, two fun questions there. Well, I think it's because the look, one of the things that many betters, if you want to call them betters, traders. Right. I think my friends at Kalshi would prefer if I use the word trader on this than betters. But what I would tell you is, you know, a lot of times when you see a candidate overperforming in a state that their political party doesn't normally do well in. you see a, you know, their number in the poll will be their number and the undecided vote will all end up back being in the incumbent party. And I think that's what folks are assuming is going to happen in Kansas, that somehow, while, you know, Hamilton's sitting at 45, 46, that that'll be his number, maybe he gets to 47, 48, and all of the undecided vote ends up in Kansas. in Marshall. So I think that explains that phenomenon. I think that's more likely something you might see in a Mississippi. I think Kansas is, I think the worm has turned on Kansas, right? And I think Kansas is genuinely swingier than frankly what the prediction markets are saying. You know, if I were making an investment, I think you have an idea of where I would invest because where I think the thing, where I think a certain stock price is going with Team Hamilton there. But that would be my explanation as to why you're seeing that distinction. Look, as for the expansion of the Supreme Court, thank you for writing it that way. I've often thought the same thing. Like, you know, I don't know if expanding the Supreme Court isn't going to fix the Supreme Court. You know what fixes the Supreme Court? If we change the way we nominate judges in this country, if we change the way the confirmation process for judges works, right? If 50 plus one is how we decide judges in the United States Senate, then we're going to get partisan hacks in the judiciary, left and right, hard stop. If you want more referee-like justices, then raise the threshold of confirmation to 60, 65, 70. In fact, I certainly think for Supreme Court, it ought to be 75. It should be three quarters of the Senate. You should have to get a significant chunk of the other party's support in order to sit on the Supreme Court. Hard stop. These are choices. Senators can make this choice. You don't need a constitutional amendment. Senators can decide this. They at one time had the threshold basically at 60, and then they chose to get rid of it. All it's done is made the judiciary less trusted and more partisan. Good job. Way to go. United States Senate. Thanks for ruining the judiciary for us and creating this. Look, trying to just expand the Supreme Court as a workaround on this fails to deal with the problem of the confirmation process itself. That, if you want to reform, if you want to try to departisanize the judiciary, reform the confirmation process. It's not about expanding the Supreme Court. So thank you for the question. Next question comes from Mark N. Greetings from an American expat living in Austria. Potential first timer here. Well, congrats and welcome. And by the way, Vienna is one of my bucket list cities as a classical music fan and wannabe musician, French horn player. There's lots of things I'd like to visit in Vienna in that realm that I would miss. So I'd love to. So if you could figure out Mr. Expat, how to sort of get me hired to do something out there in Vienna. Count me in. Anyway, he goes, I thought defense contractors were barred from making political donations, considering Elon Musk was contracted to provide Starshield for the U.S. government. Why has he been exempt from this? It's a great question, Mark. It's an amazing question. Obviously, we have no rules. And I guess he can, you know, he's individual citizen rather than the The donation didn't technically come from Starlink. It came from an individual. Look, there's all sorts of ways that this Elon Musk money is dirty, is unethical. And you might be able to make a case that it's illegal on this front. But this is why the calls for campaign finance reform are coming left and right now. because a single individual is essentially propping up a Senate candidate in a way that, that, that frankly isn't, you can't really call democracy. That's a change that we ought to, we ought to be startled about. So, but that's a fair point, you know, and it certainly means it's like, how do you trust anything Elon Musk touches, right? Everything in his orbit is about in either enriching himself or his company or giving his company more access to something. He is not interested in helping the greater good here. He is interested in helping himself here. Melanie in Sparks, Nevada, 2nd Congressional District, which, by the way, you want to talk about the upset? It really looks like... Nevada's lone Republican congressional district might temporarily flip because of a bad, flawed nominee. Somebody with stolen valor in their background. Anyway, your question, though, is not about that, I believe. If it were proven that someone in the White House or Pentagon deliberately interfered with Starshield for Ukraine, could that constitute a war crime? I know charges are unlikely, but it feels like a really big deal. And I'm trying to understand just how serious it would be. Also, has there ever been a secretary of state less visible during a war than Marco Rubio? I honestly keep forgetting he's even in the cabinet. Really enjoy your long form interviews and the Super Tuesday podcast. Thank you, Melanie. Yes. I mean, you know, it's funny. I hope I've satisfied you on some of these questions with what's going on with Musk. But I do think that Elon Musk being the main character here You know, is that the October surprise? Donald Trump siding with Putin. Is this the October surprise that basically cements the Republican repudiation that might be coming? I could just tell you if you were if you were a campaign running against Washington, running against Trump, running against big money. Isn't this exactly what you would want to see happen in the last few weeks of the campaign? I mean, in many ways, what Musk and Trump are doing are only helping to write the closing argument television commercials for the party out of power. So I'm certainly convinced this is going to backfire on them, but we'll see. As for Rubio, it has been a gift, right? A talent. I mean, we're involved in a war and you wouldn't know he's involved. He is... Constantly Homer Simpson backing into the bushes and disappearing. And then suddenly he reappears to let you know, I don't know why Starlink wasn't working, but it's working now. Right. And he's in a baseball hat, too, by the way, which is there. Look, Rubio made it. Made a decision. He's kept his political career alive. For the rest of his life, he's going to be finding out whether it's worth it. Right. If he has a political career following Trump, he'll probably feel like this was worth it. If he doesn't, then maybe he goes back and quotes himself. Right. The infamous Marco Rubio quote that years from now, people are going to have to ask themselves how they got taken by this con man. Don't don't quote me. Quote Marco. All right. Last question here. Chris in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Virginia's seventh district. Yes. The swing district of Virginia. I really enjoy your perspective and appreciate all you do. Do you think voters are starting to grow tired of Trump, even if his MAGA base remains loyal? I wonder if he's becoming like a television series that's been on for seven or eight seasons where even new storylines and cast members can't stop viewers from losing interest and eventually canceling the show. Could voters finally be ready to change the channel? Thanks for all you do, Kristen and Frederick, Virginia. Well, I can't tell you, you know, I'm going to use a line that I've used so many times that it's no longer funny or effective. And that is, I used to say, and I've said this before, I think we're in the Gary Busey stage of the Trump era. But I think I've said that like so many times that, no, I guess it got renewed, right? Look, one of the things I've said about Trump over the years that has been true is that everybody has a line on Trump, but everybody's line is in a different spot. But over time, Trump eventually alienates everyone. He's done this throughout his entire business career. Every circle of advisors he's had has never survived more than about six years. And you can go all the way back to 1974. And whoever has been in his circle rarely, I mean, there's a handful of people that have been able to sort of come back into his circle. Roger Stone is probably the most prominent of those. But, you know, rarely do people go in and out. Right. They just sort of in. He tires and he tires in such a way that he alienates all these people. They end up walking away hating the guy. Right. When people leave Trump, they seem to leave him for good. Right. It's never a it's never a, you know, a breakup. And then you go running back with the with the exception of Michael Cohen. Right. Who probably has his own motivation. Maybe he wants pardon. Maybe you want something else. Um, who knows, but, um, for the most part, once people just, you know, leave Trump, they never go back, but everybody's on their own timeline. And I do think that the voters are catching up to where some of us may have been sooner. Um, and it's also why I try to tell people don't judge people, um, Don't judge people that leave Trump for when they left Trump. Judge the people that don't leave Trump. Save your disdain for those that don't leave. Save your disdain for people like Vivek Ramaswamy who choose to take a Trump method and exploit it. But those that eventually realize that this is, that's what, you know, welcome them. It's better for the country. It's better for the future. So I think we're going to learn a lot on November 3rd about whether how many people have grown tired of this. I think they have. Right. I think they were exhausted in 2020, which is why they threw him out once. I think this this feels even more acute than it did just before the 2020 election. But, you know, I am self-aware that I'm in my own information bubble. But boy, the anecdotes are piling up. The polling numbers are piling up. The examples of people wanting to being done with this are piling up. The people not showing up to his rallies are, you know, there's, there's certainly a ton of evidence indicating that perhaps after me using this joke, probably three years ago, the first time I used it, um, that we may finally be at the Gary Busey portion of the Trump era, where it is, you know, I would think ranting about a golf course two weeks before an election, you know, it almost feels like the exclamation point of, hey, dad, how did the Trump era end? Sit down, son, let me tell you the story, all right? All right, with that, I'm gonna take a break for 24 hours, but we will be right back here. In fact, I've got, A special episode for you. It will be the four things that if I knew right now, I'd know for sure what was going to happen in the midterms. I'll be sharing that with you on Thursday's podcast. So with that, until we upload again, thanks for listening. Don't forget to like and subscribe, whether it's this podcast, Dynastic, Super Tuesdays, the entire empire that we're building here. All of it. I appreciate your support. And remember, I know some of you have sent me some emails. You feel like, oh, there's too many ads. Well, guess what ads allow me to do? Bring you all this content for free. So look, I appreciate my advertisers because I want to make sure this is free. I do not want to make you pay for another subscription. So thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting me. My advertisers, and even if you don't support the advertisers, I appreciate you understanding why they do advertise. And with that, I'll see you in 24 hours.
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The whole point of this is to make this easier and less confusing. Okay, so look, take the skepticism you already have in all of this, point it at your own plan for 20 minutes. It's free. There's no pressure. And then call chapter today at 980-734-4255. Hello there. Happy Wednesday and welcome to the Chuck Todd cast. We are now under two weeks. We're getting really close. We're not quite there. We're measuring it in days. So we're 13 days until election day. And we're not that far away where we'll start measuring it in hours. If you will, let me give you a quick rundown of today's episode. I've got two big stories that I think are very connected that will that if this is the closing argument, we may be moving into something bigger than just simply a wave. But we'll get to that in a second. It is Wednesday, which means I'll give you an updated set. At this point, I'm just going back and forth. My updated Senate rankings. Last week, you got my updated gubernatorial rankings. And I make a few movements here and it will be a top 10, not just a top five. Because realistically, we've got probably 16 Senate races that are going to be decided by single digits. This cycle could climb closer to 20. But we have 10, arguably 10 right now, that have a chance of flipping. And really, you could expand that definition and say we're getting close to a dozen that have a chance of flipping. Most of them are Republican-held seats that Democrats have a shot at flipping, but there are at least three Democratic seats that at least are sitting in single-digit territory. But I want to begin with what could be the closing argument for Democrats. And if it's a successful closing argument, it could be how they take a good year and turn it into a generational wipeout of the party in power. So let me explain. I'm beginning to wonder whether corruption now is emerging as the closing argument of this election. And it is something I've been saying for a while that I thought one of the things that could turn what already was looking like a significant democratic wave into something considerably bigger is corruption. This idea that everything's pay to play, right? It's the kind of issue that can accelerate corruption. an existing political trend. We've seen it in previous election cycles because it gives voters who might otherwise be reluctant to vote against their own party a permission slip to do so because it's a temporary decision, right? And like I said, there's some real history here. If you just go back 20 years to 2006 midterms, directionally, we knew it was going to be a good Democratic year. The question was, could it be something bigger than what was anticipated? And they ended up with a big They won a big chunk of House seats. They were able to take control of the Senate. Turned out to be a bigger, more successful year. And it was about this time where they got a corruption issue, right? Democrats were in this very strong position. The Iraq war was going badly, right? Very similar. I've always said that 2006 cycle and this cycle have a lot in common. Unpopular war in the Middle East, unpopular war in the Middle East. An economy that wasn't working for everybody, an economy that wasn't working for everybody, right? And, you know, there was also a sense that Republicans have been in charge, particularly for Congress. They've been in charge for Congress for over a dozen years. Right. There hadn't been a flip. There had been a sort of a less than two year flip in the Senate thanks to a party switcher in 2001. But there hadn't been the voters hadn't flipped, flipped the party in some way. And then came the Mark Foley scandal. Now, Foley was a Republican congressman from Palm Beach County, Florida. He ended up resigning after revelations about some sexually explicit instant messages that he had sent to teenage congressional pages. And the scandal quickly became about something bigger than Foley himself. What did the Republican leadership know? When did they know it? And why hadn't they done more? And it allowed for a larger argument that, hey, this is what happens when a party's been in charge for too long. You know, they sort of, they sweep things under the rug. And suddenly in the final weeks of an election, that was already moving decisively towards the Democrats. Republicans had to deal with this scandal that reinforced every single negative impression that voters had already had about the party in that window, in that period of time. So it didn't create the wave. Essentially, it made the wave bigger, right? It was already there. It became one more reason for voters who were already unhappy with how Republicans were governing to conclude, maybe it's time to clean house. It's time to send a message. And that's what I mean when I talk about corruption being an accelerant here. You can be unhappy with the economy and still vote for your party. You can disagree with your party's handling of a war and still vote for your party. You can even be disappointed with a president you supported and still vote for his party. But corruption, that's a different story. Corruption allows you to say, I'm not abandoning my principles. I'm not suddenly embracing the other party's ideology. It's a permission slip, though, to vote against my party because because it needs to be cleaned up. And for voters who have spent their entire adult lives identifying with one political party, that distinction can matter enormously, right? It's not about persuading someone to change their mind. You don't have to persuade this voter to change their mind. You just have to persuade this voter, hey, the best way for you to clean up this mess inside of your party is to really punish the party and vote this person out, vote the party out of power. For two years, you can come right back and do what you want to do in two years. Now, I want to be careful. I'm not saying corruption has already become the dominant issue in this election. It hasn't. But we're starting to see it percolate. Right. And I think there's an opportunity here that Democrats can take the frustration about costs and lump them in with sort of the kleptocracy that essentially Donald Trump has tried to turn the Republican Party into. And I think we're beginning to see the ingredients that could make all of this work. And if it does, there are enormous implications for the size of this democratic wave. About a month ago, I'd laid out three broad scenarios for the midterms, the blue mirage, the blue wave, and the blue tsunami. Well, the blue mirage, of course, was the scenario where Democrats did well enough to win the House. Perhaps they picked up a Senate seat or two, but they couldn't quite break through in the more Republican states, in the more red-leaning states. Blue wave is something a bit more substantial, a national rejection of the governing party that reached into states and districts Republicans assumed were relatively safe. And then my blue tsunami scenario is where the bottom just falls out, you know, where wait a minute, they're sending money to Wyoming? Yes, they're sending money to Wyoming for that open house seat, meaning like they can't take anything for granted in a cycle like this. My goodness, the DGA is sending money to Oklahoma, right? They think they have a shot at winning Oklahoma government. So the political environment has become so difficult for Republicans and candidates who might ordinarily survive, may not survive in an environment like that. That's what a tsunami could mean. It's what happened you know, there was a big chunk of Democrats who lost in 94, who immediately saw new Democrats win those congressional seats back in 96, right? They were just sort of, but it was more of a, that was just where the momentum is. And that's what a tsunami looks like. 1994 was a tsunami against the Democrats. It was a red tsunami. And I think, you know, so I think at the moment, right, we are looking at some form of a democratic way. There's a reason all the markets prediction markets indicate that there's over a 50% chance that Democrats take the House and the Senate, right? The path to the Senate, but for Maine and Michigan, You know, I'd be very bullish. I'm still pretty bullish on Democratic chances to take control of the Senate. But I do think that the Democratic candidates in Maine and Michigan are struggling. And, you know, if Democrats got to win one of those two, they cannot afford to lose them both if they want to win the Senate here. But I digress. So look, on the tsunami front, I'm still a bit skeptical this turns into a 1994 style election. I do think at this point we're looking at either a 2018 wave or a 2006 wave, right? The 2006 wave was a bit bigger than 2018. 2018 allowed Democrats to win pretty much everywhere they could in swing districts and in blue states, but they couldn't really reach into Republican territory. 2006 allowed them to reach into Republican territory. And that's the big distinction between the two. And of course, this election cycle, because there's so many Senate seats in red territory, Democrats don't succeed in winning in red territory. They're not going to win the Senate. That said, the idea of a blue tsunami, I think that possibility is somewhere in the 15 to 20 percent category, right? This isn't a 5 percent chance. I think about, you know, you run this election, you know, 100 times and I think maybe in 15 to 20 of them. you get some sort of tsunami. And what do I mean by that? It's 30, 40, maybe more seats in the House. It's something like, you know, where they end up with over 250 House seats and they end up with, say, 53 or 54 Senate seats when all is said and done. But the reason I'm keeping the possibility of a tsunami on the table is that I think there's still room for this political environment to deteriorate further for Republicans. And we've gotten a few news stories over the last couple of days that indicate how that could happen. Which brings me back to the corruption issue, because there's another example, a much more recent one that I've been thinking about as well. I've brought it up with you in previous episodes, and that's Hungary. Peter Magyar's challenge to Viktor Orban was built in significant part around corruption. The idea that this government and power had created a kleptocracy. I mean, that's what Orban had built. That's what Donald Trump is turning the Republican Party into, which is a full on kleptocracy. And there are more and more Republicans uncomfortable with what Trump is doing. And in Hungary, what made the argument especially potent for Magyar was the connection that he took with the corruption to everyday economic life, right? It wasn't simply an argument that Orban and his political cronies had become too powerful or that the system had become too corrupt. It was the idea that a politically connected class had enriched itself while ordinary Hungarians were struggling with the cost of living. That's when a corruption issue becomes something more than a good government issue, right? This isn't about norms anymore, right? When voters believe that the people running their government are making themselves and their friends richer while everybody else is paying more for groceries, paying more for energy, especially while your cronies get to build data centers. more to get by, corruption becomes an economic issue, right? That's when it becomes really potent, right? I'm not doing well and these SOBs are making money off of my back, screw them, right? That's the mindset. That can reach voters who aren't particularly interested in debates about democratic institutions or constitutional norms, right? These are voters that aren't thinking that way, but instead they're like, Well, if they're just out for themselves, they're certainly not out for me. And corruption is almost an easier way to make that case than trying to lay it out with, hey, look, they got this donation, then they did this, et cetera, et cetera. Now, these voters may not follow every controversy involving the courts or the Justice Department. They may not care about the finer points of executive authority. They understand the idea that people in charge are taking care of themselves while everybody else gets stuck with the bill. Now, Are we beginning to see this argument develop into a full-on closing argument for the Democrats? I don't know yet. But I think the potential is there. I think the latest reporting involving Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Russia, and Ukraine makes the question considerably more relevant than it was even a week ago. Let's dig into Musk here a little bit. I want to return to something that I raised on the last podcast. Because the sequence of events involving Elon Musk deserves a ton of attention than it's getting And I think that this needs to be louder from some Democrats on this. Frankly, Republicans, this shouldn't be a partisan issue. The wealthiest man in the world is hijacking the United States foreign policy and the American government. That's a problem. That's a scandal. And that should be, you know, in blaring three-inch letters. So let's start with the money. Musk has become the most prominent financial benefactor of the Republican Party. And in September, he made two enormous contributions to the Senate Leadership Fund. The first was a $ 75 million check, and the second was an $ 83 million check. It was a total of $ 158 million. And in each instance, the following day, an equivalent amount was transferred to a Texas super PAC that was supporting Ken Paxton. Now, I've talked a lot about Paxton. And the fact that Senate Republicans spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to keep him from becoming their nominee was pretty telling. And so the idea that they spent all this money to try to stop him, that they were suddenly going to have to spend all this money to rescue him, seemed a bridge too far for some Senate Republicans. But once he became the nominee, they had a problem. They needed to help him, particularly if they cared about holding control of the Senate and because James Tallarico was raising enormous amounts of money. But they also had to deal with an entire Senate map that was starting to deteriorate. And along comes Elon Musk. This episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Quince. You know, the best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're heading to work, going out or keeping things a bit casual. And this time of year, Quince makes finding something great for everyone else just as easy. The holiday season is coming. That's right. We're under 90 days, folks. It's where I'm shopping for myself and everyone else on my list because I know Quince delivers. Nobody's ever disappointed in stuff they get from Quince. Why? Quince focuses on high quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14 karat gold and Italian leather. Their cashmere sweaters start at just 60 bucks. 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So when it comes to gifting, Quince is a lot more than clothing, too. By the way, they've got fine jewelry, leather bags, hotel-quality bedding, chef-grade cookware. People love a nice piece of equipment to play with in the kitchen these days. Five-star luggage. Plenty of ways to find something special for everyone on your list. So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. You get free shipping on your order, 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was the Chuck Todd cast. It's the best way to support the show and the best way to make sure you're getting every discount. This is the part of this arrangement that I find especially revealing, right? The Senate Republican leadership isn't particularly shy about explaining that the Texas money is essentially Musk's money. It's almost as though they're reassuring their traditional donors that don't worry, their contributions aren't being diverted away from other Senate races to rescue Ken Paxton, who probably doesn't deserve to be rescued, right? This unethical sort of just unworthy candidate for Senate. There are quite a few Republican donors who don't want to see their money wasted trying to rescue this unrescuable person. And it's almost like Senate Republicans, oh, don't worry, guys, your money, we're not wasting your money on Ken Paxton. We got somebody else that's going to pay this Ken Paxton bill. And of course, that somebody is Elon Musk. It's an extraordinary arrangement, right? Ken Paxton can't find anybody else to fund his super PAC other than Elon Musk. We know the Republican establishment didn't want to fund Paxton. Donald Trump has made it clear he does, but God forbid he ever spend his own money to help somebody else. So he gets his trillionaire buddy to do this. So the richest man in the world has effectively stepped in to finance the effort to save one entire Senate campaign. And what's funny is that in the last, and this is where I don't know what's connected here with our foreign policy, but the fact that all this is happening all at the same time. So Elon Musk is writing these checks to rescue Paxton clearly at the behest of Trump, right? Trump is desperate to help Paxton, not desperate enough to write his own checks, but desperate enough to get Elon Musk to write checks. Why do we know he's upset? Because he went on Truth Social and being moaned about John decided he was going to blame John Cornyn and Karl Rove for their handling of the Paxton. If it wasn't for them, Paxton would be in better shape. How about if it wasn't for Ken Paxton, the Texas Senate race would be in better shape? How about if it wasn't for Donald Trump that supporting a loser like Ken Paxton, a corrupt figure like Ken Paxton, that Republicans would be better shape? Now, we don't know whether any of this is a quid pro quo. The Musk donations happened in September. This slowdown of Starlink happened in October. You know, we're not sure what's connected. But guess what? That's what Congress's job is. But it's all part of this same political story, right? You've got the president. You got Senate Republican leadership. You got a candidate they didn't want. You got a man who is now providing an extraordinary amount of money being used to help elect them. And he wants to have an extraordinary amount of influence on the war between Ukraine and Russia. Wall Street Journal, they're the latest to report that this time, according to the journal, it was Musk who personally ordered the slowdown of the military grade version of Starlink that Ukrainian forces were relying on to operate drones, including drones used to intercept Russian attacks. The restrictions began on October 14th. Happened to be the day before we found out he was the sole funder of Ken Paxton. by the way, for what it's worth. This also happened after both Trump and Musk had publicly criticized Ukraine for attacking Russian energy infrastructure. I missed the part where Trump and Musk attacked Russia for everything it's been doing to Ukraine, but I digress. Trump is particularly angry about Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries because he he has manufactured... Remember, Donald Trump's decisions aren't what's harming the American people. He's always got to blame somebody else. His decision to be talked into a war with Iran by Israel apparently is not his fault and is not the reason why diesel prices have skyrocketed. He wants people to believe it's the war between Russia and Ukraine that explains the rise in diesel prices. Now, again, None of this, there's no evidence that supports that. All the evidence supports that what's happened in the Middle East is why energy prices have skyrocketed. But Trump needs a different foil, and it's very important to him. He always, right, he's got to self-soothe. It's never his fault, right? That's, you know, that's not what the narcissist believes. It is clear it's the Iran war that has done this. But Trump continues to want to blame Ukraine. There's a variety of reasons for this. Right. A week ago, he complained that he told Zelensky not to attack the refineries and that Zelensky had done it anyway. And Musk responded saying Zelensky had gone too far. Again, Russia has invaded this man's country, killed thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians. And somehow it's Ukraine's fault. This blame the victim mentality by Musk and Trump. It really it's borderline treasonous as far as I'm concerned. It's a traitor to the it's a traitor to American foreign policy. It just is, you know, it's it's it isn't supportive of democracy. And I know these are buzzwords and this will get aggregated and all of that and fine. Right. But this is I know we've run out of adjectives to describe the damage that Donald Trump has done to America's standing in the world. And if we're not going to stand up for democracies, then what the hell are we going to do? What's the point of the American experiment if we're not going to support democracies when they are threatened by thugs like Vladimir Putin? But here we are. So now we learn, according to the journal, that it was Musk who ordered the slowdown. Now, we still don't have a clear explanation of who authorized it. Musk publicly suggested that these decisions were technically up to the American military and the president. Trump said he didn't know who was responsible. Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon hadn't ordered any restrictions, but he acknowledged that Starlink could make decisions about its own terms of service. So Hegseth was kind of implying in his own way that Musk could do this if he chose to do this. And the journal reports the conflicting accounts about whether Trump knew about the decision beforehand or not. But here's the question that this all introduced. Who is actually making American national security policy? Is it the president? Is it the Pentagon? Is it the National Security Council? Or can the richest man in the world, who also happens to be the Republican Party's biggest political donor, make a decision that directly affects the battlefield in Ukraine? Bottom line is Congress ought to be asking some of these very specific questions about this right now. Who talked to whom? When did those conversations take place? What did the president know? What did the Pentagon know? Why did the administration initially seem so confused about who was responsible? By the way, who asked for this check to Paxton? Who made the request to Musk for this money? When was this request made? Did it come with strings attached? Did Musk say he'd give this money if he had more control over Starlink? All of these are questions that Congress has is obligated to ask on behalf of the American people, pure and simple. And if Congress isn't curious about this, then we've got a bigger problem than we realize. What was asked for? What was promised? Was there any relationship between the enormous financial support that Musk is providing to the president's party and the national security decisions being made around the same time? Just because we don't have evidence of a quid pro quo doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking questions whether there was. And that's the problem, right? The totality of moves that Donald Trump has made as president indicate that this is how he operates. We know there's a pay for play on pardons. We know he does this. In some ways, he advertises it because he wants people to know that if you want something from him, you have to write a check. Pure and simple. This is not like something he hides because he wants people to come with their check in hand before they show up in the Oval. So if Congress can't do oversight on something like this, then it is completely lost the plot. But there's another dimension to the story that may ultimately become politically pretty important. Let's go back to what I was saying about Hungary. The most potent corruption argument isn't necessarily that somebody broke a law. It's that the government has become a system in which the politically connected seem to have access and influence that ordinary people don't. And then you connect that to the cost of living. So think about the situation we have right now. Americans are paying more for energy. The president is blaming Ukraine's attacks on Russian refineries. His administration has been easing restrictions involving Russian diesel. And he's publicly pressuring Ukraine to stop attacking Russia's energy infrastructure, right? Which when, why does Russia need its energy so we can finance its war against Ukraine? Meanwhile, Donald Trump's most important political benefactor has made a decision that restricts Ukraine's ability to use a critical communications system. All of this is happening while Musk is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns. We have no idea what Musk is personally profiting from the price of diesel, or maybe he just needs certain relationships with Russia because of his space issue. Maybe you have a bunch of rich guys whispering into Trump's ear that they want to do business with Russia again, and he needs to hurry up and solve this thing. Whatever it is, something smells here, and it smells to Hayek. But the question I'm asking is whether voters are beginning to see a government that appears more responsive to the interests and preferences of powerful insiders and extraordinarily wealthy individuals rather than worrying about ordinary Americans. That is where the economic argument and the corruption argument begin to overlap. If voters start connecting those dots politically, that becomes an extraordinarily significant problem for the GOP generally. You have a president who promised to bring down prices. Voters are still unhappy with the cost of living. You have an administration filled with people who have enormous financial interests in industries affected by government decisions. You have a political system in which one individual can provide hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign financing while simultaneously exercising extraordinary influence over a matter of of national security. Is that how most Americans think government ought to work? And more importantly, are they beginning to see that those things are connected? That's the question I keep coming back to. Do they see the connection? I don't know that corruption is going to become the closing argument of this election, but I can see how it could. We've been hearing anecdotes all over that people keep bringing up. When you're not doing well, the corruption really pisses you off. If you were doing fine, you roll your eyes. So Trump 1.0 corruption, people eye rolled because they were doing OK. Trump 2.0 corruption is a different story. And it could become an accelerant that turns an already difficult election for Republicans into something considerably more consequential. Right. The economy has already created dissatisfaction. Trump's behavior has already created exhaustion and fatigue. The Iran war has created questions about his judgments. And there's a growing sense among voters that this administration hasn't delivered the stability or the lower prices that Trump promised were going to take place on day one. Remember, all of our economic instability is caused by Donald Trump. These are not Biden policies. Biden did not do Liberation Day tariffs, did not start the trade war with Canada, did not start a war with Iran. All of these things are Donald Trump decisions. And then what happens if corruption becomes the explanation voters settle on for why those promises by Trump have not been kept? What happens if the closing argument becomes that the president and his wealthy friends are doing just fine while everybody else is still struggling to pay the bills? And oh, by the way, the president wants to sell your land out from under you to these tech companies as well and make your energy bills go up even higher. It's a different kind of argument. from the usual red versus blue, D versus R, debate over taxes, spending, or immigration. And it's the one that could provide exactly the kind of permission slip to voters that I've been talking about. Voters don't have to be persuaded. They can still think the Democrats are too close to the socialist wing of their party. But a Republican voter doesn't have to decide that Democrats are right about any of this. They don't even have to like the Democratic Party. They just have to decide their own party has become too comfortable with the way power is being exercised, and that somebody needs to be able to hold it accountable. This is part of what happened in 06. The Foley scandal didn't cause the wave. It reinforced the sense that the Republican Party had been in power too long and didn't know how to police itself anymore. And I'm wondering if we're approaching a similar moment now. It is how Democrats could overperform in so many of these red states because it's voters who perhaps ideologically are more comfortable with the Republicans than the Democrats. But they may think the Republicans are, you know, that the Trump era is just so corrupt that they have to clean house. And I think the next 10 days are going to tell us quite a bit about whether corruption is simply one more issue in this election or whether it's becoming the issue that helps voters make up their mind. I'll just say this. I had somebody come up to me at the airport the other day and say that they had never voted for a Democrat before, but that they were likely going to vote Democrat on a number of races this time. They said they were from Texas. And it was it was the rationale was housecleaning. He was not becoming a Democrat. He was not becoming a liberal. He was not becoming a progressive. I think he believes he's not changed who he is. I think he thinks that Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party in a way he doesn't like and that it's time to clean house. How many of those voters exist? And are there enough of them that it has a significant impact on the psyche of whoever is left inside the Republican Party if this indeed is the type of election we're facing? I don't know if we're there yet, but I say we're closer. And I think the corruption issue is an interesting way I think now there's enough ways to connect it to the cost of living. All right, speaking of character and accountability, I want to spend a few minutes in Ohio because something happened in the governor's race there on Tuesday that I think deserves a lot of attention than just a typical campaign controversy. And it deserves a lot of outrage. It's as disgusting and despicable of an attack ad that I can think of any candidate ever coming up with In my adult lifetime. Now, look, I've been pretty bullish on Democratic prospects in Ohio than perhaps other people have. I was earlier on this that, hey, I don't think I think Vivek Ramaswamy is perhaps the worst Republican you could find to lead the ticket in Ohio in a campaign year like this. And this was before his his campaign did something that is just extraordinarily disgusting. And we're going to get there in a minute. You know, but I thought for a while that Ramaswamy was exactly the wrong kind of Republican candidate for this moment. Right. Simply because of what he represents. Here's somebody whose political identity was built around his success in the tech and biotech world. Somebody who became enormously wealthy and then used that wealth and the celebrity that came with it to enter politics. Kind of a poster child of, you know, it's kind of the poster child of the Republican Party that Donald Trump has built. Now, on the surface, there's nothing inherently wrong with what he did. We've had plenty of successful business people in our politics. Maria Cantwell struck it rich with, I think it was the real videos. I think it was what it was back in, used the money she made in stock options to finance a Senate race in 2000 to get back into politics. So again, people have done it, Democrats and Republicans. But I have been struck by how much of Ramaswamy's public reputation rests on the success of making money rather than on any. He doesn't really have a clear record of improving people's lives. He's made money, but he's not accomplished a lot. Right. His companies haven't solved problems. They haven't saved lives. They've just been vehicles to make him money. And I do think that that distinction matters in this election and that it was mattering even before this latest controversy. Because we're living through a period when Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical of the motivations of these wealthy tech execs. They're skeptical of the influence these individuals have of our government simply because they can write big fact checks to super PACs. They're skeptical of the data centers that are appearing in their own communities, skeptical of the idea that a handful of people who have made fortunes in technology ought to have somehow an outsized role in deciding public policy. And Ramaswamy is associated with precisely this world. He's associated with Elon Musk, right? He was the partner with Musk in the Doge effort at the beginning of Trump's second term. He's associated with the idea that government ought to be run more like a tech company. You think that's what Americans want? And I think that has become much more, it's a very difficult political identity to sell than Republicans had anticipated. And if you look at Ohio polling, right? I mean, Acton hasn't trailed Ramaswamy in a single poll in the last two months, to my knowledge. And she's been running further ahead of Ramaswamy, Amy Acton has, than Sherrod Brown has been running ahead of John Huston. And I think it's that Ramaswamy is just, you know, Huston is more of a known quantity in Ohio Republican circles than Ramaswamy in his own way. We're talking about a Republican candidate for governor who was already struggling. in a state Donald Trump carried comfortably three times. And in fact, I think Ramaswamy is part of the reason why the entire Republican ticket is struggling in Ohio. I mean, he is pretty much the worst nominee they could have come up with. And that's before he did this disgusting, egregious attack on Amy Acton. Because I think just Ramaswamy's presence, right? He's sort of a, cheap version of Elon Musk, right? A less successful version of Elon Musk. But if you don't like Elon Musk and Trump and the relationship with tech, you're not going to like Ramaswamy. He's got a likability problem, right? And now he got desperate. We have this extraordinary story involving Amy Acton and her mother. So if you haven't followed it, let me explain what happened. A video began circulating online this week featuring Acton's estranged birth mother, a woman named Donna Arthur. The last time that Acton saw her was in 1978 when she was a child. And this woman, who is Acton's birth mother, is in this video, it appears to be an ad paid for by Ramaswamy, accusing her daughter of lying about her childhood. Now, let me tell you something about Amy Acton's childhood. She's spoken publicly about growing up in some extremely difficult circumstances, including periods of homelessness, neglect, and abuse. The history here is deeply disturbing. When Acton was 12 years old, her stepfather was arrested and subsequently indicted on charges of sexually abusing her. Acton and her brother were removed from their mother's custody. Her stepfather fled prosecution and her mother remained married to this evil guy. Now, Acton has said she hasn't seen her mother since they were together in a courtroom in 1978. That's 48 years ago. Now imagine having that history. Imagine having spent your adult life dealing with what happened to you as a child, building a career, raising a family, serving your community, and eventually deciding that you want to run for governor. And then two weeks before election day, a video appears featuring the mother from whom you've been estranged for nearly half a century, publicly attacking your credibility and suggesting you've lied about your childhood. What are we doing here? What are you doing here, Vivek? The video has circulated among Ramaswami supporters and Acton and her brother have accused Ramaswami of being behind it. Now, as of this recording, the recording is not established who produced or financed the video, but it's, you know, the problem is Ramaswami's morals and ethics aren't exactly tip top shape, right? What do you believe? Now, the video itself doesn't carry a sponsorship disclosure, and we don't know whether Acton's mother was compensated for the video. But what do you think? What are you suspicious of? All of those are important facts, and I don't want to skip over them. But here's what we know. When Ramaswamy's campaign was asked about the video, it didn't simply say this was inappropriate or that the candidate wanted nothing to do with an attack involving an opponent's childhood sexual abuse. Instead, the campaign continued attacking Acton's credibility. The Ramaswamy campaign made a choice. They made a choice to go down this disgusting gutter, this horrendous gutter, vile gutter. It's a choice about the kind of campaign you're willing to run, the kind of political behavior you're willing to tolerate. It's quite revealing, right? Character reveals itself. And we now know Ramaswami is pond scum, pure and simple. If you green light an attack like this, trying to exploit the pain and hurt of somebody who was abused when they were in middle school, junior high, you're a piece of shit. You're a scumbag. Those words are worthy here. Just absolutely gross and disgusting. And if you're not denouncing this, if you're an Ohio politician and you're not denouncing this, then get out of politics. Look, I've covered campaigns for more than three decades. I know politics ain't beanbag. It's ugly. It's gross. It's terrible. We've seen candidates attack. Ex-wives, we've seen ex-wives exploited, ex-husbands exploited, families, finances, all of that. We've seen plenty of this that arguably is indefensible. And I know there are political professionals who will tell you that sometimes the ugliest attacks, they work. That voters may tell pollsters they don't like negative campaigning, but they still absorb the information. Okay. This doesn't feel like one of those. I think there are moments when the public's tolerance for this kind of behavior is misjudged. I think this is going to be one of them. I think Ramaswamy just got himself canceled from polite company. I wouldn't stand next to this man under any circumstance. I wouldn't want to do business with somebody who goes down this gutter unless he is a full, if he's going to just candidate to camera, apologize for this type of intolerable behavior. Because think about the calculation involved in using somebody's estranged mother to question her account of a childhood that included documented sexual abuse. What is the political theory here? That Ohio voters are going to watch this ad and decide that Amy Acton's greatest vulnerability is that her mother, who remained married to the man accused of sexually abusing her, now says she wasn't telling the truth about her childhood? Is that where we are? We spend a lot of time in this country complaining about the quality of people who run for public office. We complain that good people don't want to enter politics. Well, that we don't have enough public servants who are motivated by something other than ambition, money, or celebrity. It's moments like this that's part of the reason. If you know that running for office means somebody may go digging through your most traumatic experiences of your childhood and look for a way to weaponize them and use them in political ammunition. They knew this story and they went with it anyway. They wanted to go down this road of trying to weaponize somebody's childhood trauma. The number of people who greenlit this, whoever is involved in this, I hope they never get hired in American politics ever again. The people who run campaigns decide, if we sit here, if we decide there are no boundaries at all anymore, then don't be surprised when the people most reluctant to enter politics are often the people we'd like to see participate. I wanted to see Admiral McRaven run. It's my understanding that his spouse said, no way. They didn't want that type of scrutiny or whatever it was. I've had people ask me if I'd run for office. I won't do it because I'm not going to put my family through something like that. So in some ways, the bad guys are winning, right? The bad guys are chasing away good people from running for office. Now, look, I think there is an electoral question here. Ramaswamy was already dealing with a difficult race before this video surfaced or before he chose to surface this. First of all, if you needed more proof that the polls are accurate on this one or that Ramaswamy thinks the polls are accurate, then the mere existence of this tactic is proof that the polls are accurate in Ohio. But I think this thing is so gross, so disgusting, that this could drag down the entire Republican ticket in Ohio. I think it's that awful. And I don't think anybody wants to be caught supporting this kind of garbage. This isn't going to stay in the governor's race. It's about what kind of behavior Republicans in Ohio are prepared to defend, condemn, or simply ignore. What does Mike DeWine think about this? What does my friend John Kasich think about this? What does John Husted think? I bring up Husted specifically because he's trying to win a Senate race in an environment where the Republican brand is already facing significant problems. Does he want to spend the final two weeks of his campaign answering questions about a video, about the decision of Ramaswamy to exploit child abuse that took place when Amy Acton was a child and the victim of child abuse? Does he want to be asked whether he thinks this is an acceptable way to campaign? And if he doesn't think it's acceptable, is he prepared to say so? There are legitimate questions. He's running on the same ticket as Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy has done this to Houston. And I've seen like the Trump people want to blame John Houston, please. John Husted is 10x better of a candidate than anybody else on that ticket right now. His problem is he's just not Trumpy. He doesn't fit their definition of what they want to see in a candidate. You want more Ramaswamis? Is that what this MAGA world wants? More shitbags who think this is an appropriate way to conduct politics? And this goes directly at what I've made this whole intro about today. Corruption, character, accountability, the willingness to hold people on your own side to the same standards you would demand of your political opponents. So we'll see. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe I'm Pollyannish and this thing won't have any impact on the governor's race. We don't know yet. We haven't had a lot of time. We don't have the voter reaction. And obviously, social media outrage does not always translate into real voter outrage. But this raises a bigger question that goes beyond Ohio. Have we reached a point in American politics where campaigns believe there is virtually nothing they can't do, provided they think it might help them win? And if that's where we are, what responsibility do the other people in the party have to draw a line? Is anybody going to draw a line? The only people that can draw a line on this are the voters. Politicians are going to do whatever it takes, whatever they think they can get away with. The fact that Ramaswamy, think about the cocoon he lives in, that he and his cronies thought this was appropriate. Think about the information bubble he lives in that he thought, yeah, this is a good idea. We're going to go down this road. Let's traumatize a fellow human being simply because we want to win a governor's race because he failed at everything else he'd done in his life. He's failed to have a successful business, but he's cashed in on it. He's successfully made money, but he's failed at actually translating that business into helping other people. But this is what the Trump era has brought. Donald Trump has done to American politics. This is what he's done. He's bankrupted it on the morality front completely. He's changed the incentives for people who work around him. I mean, look what he's done to the Republican Party. There are people still left in it. They used to care about character. We've watched politicians who once claimed to care deeply about personal character, honesty, and standards of public conduct, that they should decide that those things should matter to voters. Donald Trump comes along and half of those people said, what standards? Winning is everything. So now what's the result? The result is behavior that might once have ended a political career now gets defended rationalized or simply ignored. This is not healthy for the system, folks. I don't care what party you're in. It's not healthy for the country. And it brings me back to the question of this closing argument. This is one of those things where the unintended consequence here is that Ramaswamy, this thing blows up and it helps crystallize that the Republican Party has just gone off. Trump has driven it into a ditch. And the only thing in that ditch are a couple of termites, one named Elon Musk and one named Vivek Ramaswamy. And they have absolutely eaten away at the core of what used to make up the Republican Party. And now it's just rot. Who knows? But that's the connection I see between Musk, Ramaswamy, and what we're seeing in Ohio. They're different stories. One involves enormous sums of political money and a national security decision. The other involves an attack on a candidate's deeply painful family history. But they raise a question about power, accountability, about what the political actors are prepared to justify in pursuit of power. So corruption and character. They haven't mattered in, they haven't really mattered in the Trump era. Right? In the Trump era, corruption issues haven't hit. And neither is character issues. But boy, are we testing the voters' patience on this. Trump is testing the voters' patience. Elon Musk is testing the voters' patience. Vivek Ramaswamy is testing the voters' patience. So I, I'm so, it's just so, it's another level of gross and disgusting and awful what Ramaswamy's doing. Again, I think it, it, it ends his political career. I mean, I think this thing is over. I think this is gross and disgusting and this thing is going to boomerang and they're going to regret ever doing it. And the after on effect. I know in our fragmented media ecosystem, you don't know what's going to break through. But the political party that once cared about Jeffrey Epstein, until they realized there were too many people on their own side that might be connected, is playing games like this. If a Democratic campaign can't connect these dots and turn this into a closing argument, then there's some competency issues on that side of the aisle that we may talk about post-election. But for now, I think we've seen this has not been a good, you know, good gets better, bad gets worse. I think when it comes, if the fact that corruption and character are creeping into the top tier of this conversation, that's how a wave becomes a tsunami. All right. It is. We are two weeks down as I'm literally going to alternate back and forth. We did governors last week. This week we'll do senators and you will see. I have messed around with my arrangement a little bit. So we start with my top 10. Look, number one is still number one. And that is North Carolina. It is. Republicans have pulled money out of North Carolina. Apparently, Donald Trump feels sorry for Michael Whatley and his super PAC. threw them, I think, a little bit more than a million dollars. So they're not totally dark on the air, but they're getting close to being dark on the air. I think the real question is, does Cooper's victory have coattails in North Carolina? Right. There's a couple of House seats that Democrats think, you know, they're reach seats because the state's pretty gerrymandered. But does Cooper's ability to fund a bigger ground game and sort of be at the top of the ticket? Do you see, does it have trickle-down effect down the ballot? That's one thing to look for in North Carolina. Number two, Ohio. I don't know if I need to talk more about what's happened in Ohio, but bottom line is The fact that you have Washington operatives trying to blame the candidate rather than the environment, rather than Trump, rather than Ramaswamy. Right. Bottom line is John Husted has everything going against him and not a lot going for him at this point, other than the weird admiration of his physical looks by Trump, which is just I'm I'm sure years from now, John Husted is going to say, did the president of the United States really objectify my ass? Yes, Mr. Husted, I think the president really objectified you. But keep an eye on Husted. You know, I think, you know, here's the irony to John Husted. He'd been looking to run for governor and he sort of got boxed into the Senate seat, you know, the advance, the appointment, all of those things. Had Husted been the Republican nominee for governor? They might have dodged all things Ramaswami. But now Ramaswami could lead the entire ticket to one of its worst showings in 20 or 30 years. Number three on the list is Texas. I mean, I think it's I think the I don't think Elon Musk helps Paxton here. The money may help. But the fact that it's so public, the fact that it's there, the closing Tallarico's closing argument is pretty strong. He's closing on corruption. It's allowed Gina Inosin, the gubernatorial race, to bring up Greg Abbott's connections to Elon Musk. The fact that he's made himself a main character in this race, again, I just don't think that's good politics. Americans on both sides of the aisle don't like tech execs right now, don't like big tech in general. Elon Musk is not a very well-liked individual. There are those that love him. I'm not saying he doesn't have his fans. He does have his fanboys. Don't get me wrong. But I think he's becoming... politically toxic. And I don't think that I don't think his his attachment to Paxton improves Paxton's image that much. So Texas is number three. But I'll tell you, those are the three I'm most confident in for Democrats. And then I'm going to be honest with you that I would draw a line on my list on the top 10. Right. So I'm pretty confident they're going to net those three. Everything else, my confidence wanes a little bit. Let's start with Alaska. I think Democrats are the favorite here, but it's a narrow margin. Polo Sullivan is going to be really close. It's going to go to rank choice voting. If we're waiting on Alaska to find out who controls the Senate, it's already been a better night for Republicans than expected. That's another way to look at this list. But they're in my number four slot. My number five slot is Maine. I've said this before. I think the debates did not go well for Troy Jackson. I think the debates have helped Collins. I think she certainly has found her comfort zone on how to campaign in this cycle. It may be it doesn't matter. It may be just having the R next to her name is enough for her to lose. But Jackson has not run the greatest campaign. And this is one of those where if she wins, I think you have to say, well, Democrats really just, you know, had a massive candidate problem. Right. They went through to two nominees. Neither one of them. Probably. I don't know if either one of them. If Collins wins in this environment, then perhaps neither one of them could have won Plattner or Jackson. And then there's– it could be that she just knows– she just has a better relationship with the state than Jackson does. But we'll see. I think she's– again, we could– and here's the thing about Maine. They take forever to count their vote. So– it's possible we know which party controls the Senate before we know the result in Maine. Number six, Kansas. And so I clump Alaska, Maine, Kansas, and Michigan is in my next tier, right? If I put in North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Maine, Kansas, Michigan, I think these are pure toss-ups. Pure, pure toss-ups. I've already said the reason why Maine, Kansas, You know, he's Roger Marshall's campaign has decided, hey, they just are going to try to make this a red versus blue. If they can just get enough turnout out, they can survive this. Marshall has not tried to pivot. He's not tried to seek distance from Trump. I think that's been a strategic mistake. We'll find out. Right. He sort of got into the rally. I don't know if I would have. I certainly don't think that is necessarily good politics for him. But we'll see. Right. There's certainly some super red areas of Kansas, but the the reddest areas have been hurt the most by Trump's economic policies. So and I think it's interesting. Adam Hamilton has been you know, his his tone in this has been, hey, Trump voters, we welcome the president and you've got a home in this campaign. He is not trying to necessarily run against Trump voters other than just Trump policies. So. We'll see. But I'm I definitely think that's turning a pure toss up. And then last on my pure toss up list is Michigan. Look, Abdul Al-Sayed is a very good campaigner, but I think he's missed a ton of opportunities to do what needs to be done to outreach in the African-American community and outreach in the skeptical Jewish community. But I also think Mike Rogers could have done more to distance himself from Trump and And he hasn't done that. So you sort of have neither campaign is doing what I think the opportunity they have to do, they should be doing. Maybe it's a pure environmental play. Maybe Abdul El-Sayed gets dragged across by Jocelyn Benson. Maybe for every vote he loses to Rogers, he gains with a bigger turnout among Arab-Americans that we've ever seen before. And then the other wild card is the youth vote, right? If youth turnout is up, if voters under 30 show up in a bigger percentage than they would show up in a normal midterm, well, that's the secret sauce for Abdul El-Sayed, right? And that would be the difference between him narrowly winning and narrowly losing. My final three in the top 10, eight, nine, and 10 are Iowa, South Carolina, and Nebraska. All of these are close and all of these right now have the Republican slightly favored. Right. Ashley Hinson, slightly favored over Turek. Darlene Graham, slightly favored over Annie Andrews. Although I do think what Donald Trump has done with Putin in Ukraine and the sort of gutting of Lindsey Graham's legacy and the Lindsey Graham sanction act that was supposed to be the heart of the sanctions against Russia. Do enough voters care about that in South Carolina? Can Annie Andrews exploit that? I don't know. But you got to ask. I mean, it is she is running on her brother's legacy and Donald Trump is eviscerating that legacy in foreign policy. That's got to matter to some Charleston Republicans. Right. So, look, there's a reason the National Party. Republican Party's putting more effort in this race. There's a reason Trump's going twice, doing two different rallies for her. He's got to drag her across the finish line. This, after all, was his idea, right? It's funny, all the places that Trump has gotten more involved in the Senate race than the party wishes it had, that Senate races are either already done or close to it, right? North Carolina, Georgia, he personally handpicked South Carolina. Now that's a problem. Texas. That's a problem, right? Wherever Trump has done his magic, it has cost the Republican party millions and millions of dollars that they otherwise could have spent trying to play a little bit of offense. Uh, and then number 10, uh, if you're keeping score at home, I basically swapped South Carolina, Nebraska. Um, I just don't see the path yet for Osborne. I see the path to 48. I don't see the path to 50. And I do think Osborne's a bit... It's tough to run the trick play twice. It's tough to run the Philly special twice in a row and think you're going to score touchdowns each time. But it is remarkable that something's happening out there in Nebraska. The governor's race is tight. So everything is going to be tight and it's going to be a while before we call it. But I... The fact that he had apologized for using the B word to describe Deb Fischer, not exactly the best headline in a state like Nebraska. That's a question I have. There's a there's a is Osborne. I know in the Trump era, you think somebody is coarse and is and is undignified as Donald Trump. If he can do well in Nebraska, then what's the big deal if Dan Osborne curses like a sailor? Yeah. But there's sort of a I just think that that isn't I don't buy that Nebraskans want that in their elected officials. So I wonder if that did a little bit more damage than it would have, say, to a Donald Trump. Right. Which we know, you know, he's sort of in some ways immune to those things. But there you go. That's my top 10. Like I said, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, I think, frankly, are in the lean already lean category. Alaska, Maine, Kansas, Michigan, my pure toss ups in my top 10 at the moment. Right. Numbered four, five, six and seven. And then Iowa, South Carolina, Nebraska's, you know, very close. But right now tilting to the GOP, not sort of also receiving votes. If we're playing the AP poll game here, Minnesota, Mississippi, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Idaho, Montana. That is my order of likelihood to flip. I think all of these could be single digit races. Right. You know, Michelle Tafoya is running a very good race. She's keeping her distance from Trump. But this is a tough national environment for her to run in. Mississippi, it's interesting. You're seeing individual Democrats try to help Scott Collum. I'm pretty bullish on this, but I don't have the polling to prove that it belongs in the top 10 yet. My gut is that Mississippi flips before Nebraska. But there's more data to support Nebraska flipping before Mississippi. South Dakota, we've seen. I wanted to talk earlier. I left this on the cutting room floor, but the Matthew McConaughey sort of pledged that, hey, guess what? Voting for an independent is not a wasted vote. As he argued, what's a wasted vote? Vacillating between these two parties and watching them both screw things up when they control Congress. So I still think that Mike Rounds is going to and Jim Risch in Idaho are going to be in some seriously close reelection battles to independent candidates. And then there's New Hampshire and Montana, which I suspect will be close. But in New Hampshire's case, I think Sununu is going to come up short. In the Montana case, the independent just, there's just, there's too many guys on, too many people on the ballot for the independent to overtake the Republican in that one. This next question comes from somebody who actually I've been friendly with. I've appeared on his show at times. It's Andrew Zee in Toledo. And he lets me know he's from Ohio's 43rd Statehouse District. I love that, Andrew. He had a fun question for me and I decided to share it with you. He'd actually texted it to me, but he had said, I answered him and then he had said, oh, I thought you were going to answer this on the pod. So here it is. He goes, Chuck, I know you've been a big supporter of a viable third party, but let me throw a different idea at you. Why do we need political parties at all? Why not eliminate the parties altogether and make elections about individual candidates, their ideas and their positions on issues instead of Republican versus Democrat, put an idea on the table, debate its merits and vote on it? No party loyalty, no red team versus blue team. Instead of fighting for a third party, why not fight for a no party system? Is that completely unrealistic or could something like that actually work in America? So as I told Andrew, I wanted to look into this a little bit more. We sort of have one, we have a few experiments with what I would call less party, not quite no party. You have the unicameral legislature in Nebraska, which technically is nonpartisan. Now, do people know which way people lean? Yes. It's like in some of these state Supreme Court races that are supposed to be nonpartisan. People identify themselves as liberal or conservative or this or that. But I will tell you this, it is less, the unicameral legislature gets more done They get along a little bit better. There is less pressure. What you eliminate, what you're describing here, Andrew, you're eliminating that sort of party pressure. right? This group think that can be that party caucuses, right? The pressure you feel, well, if the entire party's voting one way, I may feel another. Do I want to take the incoming from the party's base when they find out I'm not with where everybody else is, right? where if there isn't a formal structure, then being somebody that's an outlier on one issue, but maybe is with the majority on another issue, that's not that distinctive. So I will say that the experience in Nebraska is that it's a less ideological and less partisan acting body, which to me, uh, gives, gives you some ammunition about your idea. The other is how we elect mayors in this country. Most mayors are elected in, um, in, uh, nonpartisan races where there is no party label next to the candidate. I've often, you know, you talk about, um, I've had on here, the mayor of Oklahoma city, he happens to be a Republican, but he talks about that when you're on an all party ballot, all party primary ballot, um, You're just you're going to talk to the to the to the voter, you know, to the consensus voter, which is a bit more somewhere in between. Right. Where where the extremes actually are. And, you know, I saw it firsthand in Miami. Carlos Jimenez, you know, you tell me how your election is run and I'll tell you how partisan your elected official will be. Carlos Jimenez, as mayor of Miami-Dade County, was not an extraordinarily ideological or partisan actor as mayor. because the race itself had no party label. It was technically a nonpartisan race. Did Republicans know who the Republican-leaning candidate was? Yes. That is, it's not like it's a mystery. They don't pretend that they don't have proclivities of being on the left or the right or whatever. But once he became, when he ran for Congress, he put an R next to his name, and he got elected in 2020. And one of the first things he had to decide was whether to vote to certify the election on January 6th. And he chose not to. And I remember being a bit surprised. And then somebody pointed out this, you know, he carried it. He was in a district that Donald Trump carried and he won his primary thanks to Trump voters and that his district was very concerned about this. And if he didn't vote the way his district wanted, he'd have been primaried. He probably made the right political decision at the time. But it goes to Right. Had he been elected without party, the pressure to worry about what the party was going to think would have lessened. But because he got elected via the political party mechanism, he had to worry about what the party thought, not just what his constituents thought. So I've helped provide it. So we the bottom line is you're not wrong. So you and by the way, you're in good company. Right. George Washington. It's not a bad. Not a bad person to share an idea with. Thought parties were terrible and were only going to lead to more problems than any good that comes with it. Look, you know, the question is, can you organize a legislative body without party? Well, guess what? Nebraska's figured it out. So we have there are a few models that sort of prove that if we wanted to get out of the political party business, we could and just had political parties. You know, I'm a member of the Elks Club. I'm a member of the Republican Party. I'm a member of the Working Families Party, whatever it is. Right. It can certainly be on your resume. But as a as a label on the ballot, it is it is sort of it is almost like is it. we're trying to insert the parliamentary system when we actually made a, we made a decision not to be a parliamentary system. So, um, I love the thought. Um, I will just tell you this, you know, I, this is why we should have all party primaries, you know, everybody on the same ballot and yeah, it'd be great. If you didn't have party labels, you'd make people have to learn more about the candidates themselves. And maybe candidates would feel more comfortable being more nuanced or being more, um, being more honest about their positions and what they support. All right, next question comes from Andrew K. in Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft. Andrew from Redmond, Washington's first district, long-time listener, first-time writer, avid solo hiker also. Well, if you live in Northwest, that's a good place to be a hiker. I play your podcast out loud on Washington's backcountry trails to avoid startling bears and cougars as you've accompanied me on quite a few adventures. Wow. Well, I appreciate that. I just hope you don't ever have to gnaw off your arm if you get stuck anywhere. When prediction markets favor Roger Marshall in Kansas, but polls show a tight race with Adam Hamilton, what do bettors know that pollsters don't? Also, wouldn't expanding the Supreme Court from 9 to 13 just invite Republicans to expand it again when they regain power, creating an endless cycle? Kind regards, Andrew Kaye in Redmond, Washington. Hey, two fun questions there. Well, I think it's because the look, one of the things that many betters, if you want to call them betters, traders. Right. I think my friends at Kalshi would prefer if I use the word trader on this than betters. But what I would tell you is, you know, a lot of times when you see a candidate overperforming in a state that their political party doesn't normally do well in. you see a, you know, their number in the poll will be their number and the undecided vote will all end up back being in the incumbent party. And I think that's what folks are assuming is going to happen in Kansas, that somehow, while, you know, Hamilton's sitting at 45, 46, that that'll be his number, maybe he gets to 47, 48, and all of the undecided vote ends up in Kansas. in Marshall. So I think that explains that phenomenon. I think that's more likely something you might see in a Mississippi. I think Kansas is, I think the worm has turned on Kansas, right? And I think Kansas is genuinely swingier than frankly what the prediction markets are saying. You know, if I were making an investment, I think you have an idea of where I would invest because where I think the thing, where I think a certain stock price is going with Team Hamilton there. But that would be my explanation as to why you're seeing that distinction. Look, as for the expansion of the Supreme Court, thank you for writing it that way. I've often thought the same thing. Like, you know, I don't know if expanding the Supreme Court isn't going to fix the Supreme Court. You know what fixes the Supreme Court? If we change the way we nominate judges in this country, if we change the way the confirmation process for judges works, right? If 50 plus one is how we decide judges in the United States Senate, then we're going to get partisan hacks in the judiciary, left and right, hard stop. If you want more referee-like justices, then raise the threshold of confirmation to 60, 65, 70. In fact, I certainly think for Supreme Court, it ought to be 75. It should be three quarters of the Senate. You should have to get a significant chunk of the other party's support in order to sit on the Supreme Court. Hard stop. These are choices. Senators can make this choice. You don't need a constitutional amendment. Senators can decide this. They at one time had the threshold basically at 60, and then they chose to get rid of it. All it's done is made the judiciary less trusted and more partisan. Good job. Way to go. United States Senate. Thanks for ruining the judiciary for us and creating this. Look, trying to just expand the Supreme Court as a workaround on this fails to deal with the problem of the confirmation process itself. That, if you want to reform, if you want to try to departisanize the judiciary, reform the confirmation process. It's not about expanding the Supreme Court. So thank you for the question. Next question comes from Mark N. Greetings from an American expat living in Austria. Potential first timer here. Well, congrats and welcome. And by the way, Vienna is one of my bucket list cities as a classical music fan and wannabe musician, French horn player. There's lots of things I'd like to visit in Vienna in that realm that I would miss. So I'd love to. So if you could figure out Mr. Expat, how to sort of get me hired to do something out there in Vienna. Count me in. Anyway, he goes, I thought defense contractors were barred from making political donations, considering Elon Musk was contracted to provide Starshield for the U.S. government. Why has he been exempt from this? It's a great question, Mark. It's an amazing question. Obviously, we have no rules. And I guess he can, you know, he's individual citizen rather than the The donation didn't technically come from Starlink. It came from an individual. Look, there's all sorts of ways that this Elon Musk money is dirty, is unethical. And you might be able to make a case that it's illegal on this front. But this is why the calls for campaign finance reform are coming left and right now. because a single individual is essentially propping up a Senate candidate in a way that, that, that frankly isn't, you can't really call democracy. That's a change that we ought to, we ought to be startled about. So, but that's a fair point, you know, and it certainly means it's like, how do you trust anything Elon Musk touches, right? Everything in his orbit is about in either enriching himself or his company or giving his company more access to something. He is not interested in helping the greater good here. He is interested in helping himself here. Melanie in Sparks, Nevada, 2nd Congressional District, which, by the way, you want to talk about the upset? It really looks like... Nevada's lone Republican congressional district might temporarily flip because of a bad, flawed nominee. Somebody with stolen valor in their background. Anyway, your question, though, is not about that, I believe. If it were proven that someone in the White House or Pentagon deliberately interfered with Starshield for Ukraine, could that constitute a war crime? I know charges are unlikely, but it feels like a really big deal. And I'm trying to understand just how serious it would be. Also, has there ever been a secretary of state less visible during a war than Marco Rubio? I honestly keep forgetting he's even in the cabinet. Really enjoy your long form interviews and the Super Tuesday podcast. Thank you, Melanie. Yes. I mean, you know, it's funny. I hope I've satisfied you on some of these questions with what's going on with Musk. But I do think that Elon Musk being the main character here You know, is that the October surprise? Donald Trump siding with Putin. Is this the October surprise that basically cements the Republican repudiation that might be coming? I could just tell you if you were if you were a campaign running against Washington, running against Trump, running against big money. Isn't this exactly what you would want to see happen in the last few weeks of the campaign? I mean, in many ways, what Musk and Trump are doing are only helping to write the closing argument television commercials for the party out of power. So I'm certainly convinced this is going to backfire on them, but we'll see. As for Rubio, it has been a gift, right? A talent. I mean, we're involved in a war and you wouldn't know he's involved. He is... Constantly Homer Simpson backing into the bushes and disappearing. And then suddenly he reappears to let you know, I don't know why Starlink wasn't working, but it's working now. Right. And he's in a baseball hat, too, by the way, which is there. Look, Rubio made it. Made a decision. He's kept his political career alive. For the rest of his life, he's going to be finding out whether it's worth it. Right. If he has a political career following Trump, he'll probably feel like this was worth it. If he doesn't, then maybe he goes back and quotes himself. Right. The infamous Marco Rubio quote that years from now, people are going to have to ask themselves how they got taken by this con man. Don't don't quote me. Quote Marco. All right. Last question here. Chris in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Virginia's seventh district. Yes. The swing district of Virginia. I really enjoy your perspective and appreciate all you do. Do you think voters are starting to grow tired of Trump, even if his MAGA base remains loyal? I wonder if he's becoming like a television series that's been on for seven or eight seasons where even new storylines and cast members can't stop viewers from losing interest and eventually canceling the show. Could voters finally be ready to change the channel? Thanks for all you do, Kristen and Frederick, Virginia. Well, I can't tell you, you know, I'm going to use a line that I've used so many times that it's no longer funny or effective. And that is, I used to say, and I've said this before, I think we're in the Gary Busey stage of the Trump era. But I think I've said that like so many times that, no, I guess it got renewed, right? Look, one of the things I've said about Trump over the years that has been true is that everybody has a line on Trump, but everybody's line is in a different spot. But over time, Trump eventually alienates everyone. He's done this throughout his entire business career. Every circle of advisors he's had has never survived more than about six years. And you can go all the way back to 1974. And whoever has been in his circle rarely, I mean, there's a handful of people that have been able to sort of come back into his circle. Roger Stone is probably the most prominent of those. But, you know, rarely do people go in and out. Right. They just sort of in. He tires and he tires in such a way that he alienates all these people. They end up walking away hating the guy. Right. When people leave Trump, they seem to leave him for good. Right. It's never a it's never a, you know, a breakup. And then you go running back with the with the exception of Michael Cohen. Right. Who probably has his own motivation. Maybe he wants pardon. Maybe you want something else. Um, who knows, but, um, for the most part, once people just, you know, leave Trump, they never go back, but everybody's on their own timeline. And I do think that the voters are catching up to where some of us may have been sooner. Um, and it's also why I try to tell people don't judge people, um, Don't judge people that leave Trump for when they left Trump. Judge the people that don't leave Trump. Save your disdain for those that don't leave. Save your disdain for people like Vivek Ramaswamy who choose to take a Trump method and exploit it. But those that eventually realize that this is, that's what, you know, welcome them. It's better for the country. It's better for the future. So I think we're going to learn a lot on November 3rd about whether how many people have grown tired of this. I think they have. Right. I think they were exhausted in 2020, which is why they threw him out once. I think this this feels even more acute than it did just before the 2020 election. But, you know, I am self-aware that I'm in my own information bubble. But boy, the anecdotes are piling up. The polling numbers are piling up. The examples of people wanting to being done with this are piling up. The people not showing up to his rallies are, you know, there's, there's certainly a ton of evidence indicating that perhaps after me using this joke, probably three years ago, the first time I used it, um, that we may finally be at the Gary Busey portion of the Trump era, where it is, you know, I would think ranting about a golf course two weeks before an election, you know, it almost feels like the exclamation point of, hey, dad, how did the Trump era end? Sit down, son, let me tell you the story, all right? All right, with that, I'm gonna take a break for 24 hours, but we will be right back here. In fact, I've got, A special episode for you. It will be the four things that if I knew right now, I'd know for sure what was going to happen in the midterms. I'll be sharing that with you on Thursday's podcast. So with that, until we upload again, thanks for listening. Don't forget to like and subscribe, whether it's this podcast, Dynastic, Super Tuesdays, the entire empire that we're building here. All of it. I appreciate your support. And remember, I know some of you have sent me some emails. You feel like, oh, there's too many ads. Well, guess what ads allow me to do? Bring you all this content for free. So look, I appreciate my advertisers because I want to make sure this is free. I do not want to make you pay for another subscription. So thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting me. My advertisers, and even if you don't support the advertisers, I appreciate you understanding why they do advertise. And with that, I'll see you in 24 hours.
