'Pod Save America' hosts Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor join WIRED to answer your burning questions about American democracy and elections. Does the United States have honest elections? Could we have a 51st state by the time we have our 51st president? What's Project 2025 and why are we hearing more about it? Are technology and social media undermining democracy? How can a presidential candidate win the popular vote but still lose the presidency? Jon and Tommy answer these questions and many more on Democracy Support.Democracy or Else: How To Save America In 10 Easy Steps is available now: https://crooked.com/crookedmediareads/Check out Pod Save America at:http://apple.co/podsaveamericahttps://www.youtube.com/@podsaveamericaDirector: Lisandro Perez-ReyDirector of Photography: Ben DeweyEditor: Richard TrammellTalent: Jon Favreau; Tommy VietorLine Producer: Joseph BuscemiAssociate Producer: Brandon WhiteProduction Manager: Peter BrunetteProduction Coordinator: Rhyan LarkTalent Booker: Paige GarbariniCamera Operator: Caleb WeissSound Mixer: Sean PaulsenProduction Assistant: Cerina ShippeyPost Production Supervisor: Christian OlguinPost Production Coordinator: Ian BryantSupervising Editor: Doug LarsenAdditional Editor: JC Scruggs; Paul TaelAssistant Editor: Andy Morell
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TechTranscript
00:00I'm Jon Favreau.
00:01I'm Tommy Vitor.
00:02We're co-hosts of Patsy of America.
00:03Let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:05This is Democracy Support.
00:11At56BlackCat asks, America is the greatest democracy in the world, right?
00:16I mean, look, we f***ing rule.
00:18It's a great country.
00:19I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
00:20But when it comes to the health of our democracy, we are not number one on the list.
00:24The Economist does a Democracy Index ranking.
00:26The United States is currently 29th.
00:29Because of a series of challenges to voting rights, voting access, the insurrection in
00:352020.
00:36So, yeah, we've got some work to do.
00:37In the Democracy Index, where the United States scores the lowest is functioning of government,
00:41which is obvious to anyone who turns on the news.
00:44This question's from atsunflowersreebreeze.
00:46I might be wrong, but don't presidents have their speeches written for them?
00:50Like a PR agency or their spokesperson writes it out for them?
00:53Presidents have speechwriters.
00:55I was one of them.
00:56I will say that with President Obama, he did write a lot of his own speeches.
01:00In fact, before I was a speechwriter for him, he first became famous giving a convention
01:04speech in 2004 that he wrote entirely himself.
01:08And then as he became a senator and then ran for president, we collaborated together on
01:12a lot of speeches.
01:13Usually the big speeches we'd meet with Obama and he would tell us what's on his mind and
01:16we would just type out everything that he said and then go back, do a draft, send the
01:21draft back to Obama.
01:22It would either come back with just a ton of edits on it and he'd have small little
01:26handwriting which would just be marking up the entire speech.
01:29That was the good outcome because that's how you knew that he liked the draft, but he just
01:32wanted to really edit instead of write some on his own.
01:35Then sometimes the draft would come back with no markings on it, and that did not mean that
01:38he loved the draft.
01:39That meant that he wanted to start from scratch.
01:41Atreginaldward3 asks, am I the only one getting a headache trying to understand undecided
01:45voters in 2024?
01:47What are they undecided about?
01:49Those people don't pay very close attention to politics.
01:53Those people have political positions that don't necessarily line up with each party.
01:57So you could have someone who is very pro-choice but very anti-immigration.
02:01That can be anywhere from 5 to 25 percent of the population in any given election and
02:06those people tend to decide in the last month or even in the last weeks of the election.
02:10A lot of undecided voters are just frustrated with the two choices in front of them.
02:15A lot of undecided voters just literally haven't had time to think about the election and will
02:18figure it out in the last weeks.
02:20Undecided voters will tune in perhaps to the conventions and more likely they'll tune into
02:25the debates.
02:26And so whatever the political environment is and the media environment is in the final
02:29weeks of the campaign, that can really sway undecided voters who just tune in at that
02:33point.
02:34This is why working on campaigns can be so frustrating because you spend two years trying
02:39to reach these voters and they decide in the last week and sometimes you are captive to
02:43whatever the last kind of big news event was, whether it's the Access Hollywood tape or
02:48Trump was caught on camera saying some horrible things, or the Jim Comey letter which suggested
02:52that Hillary Clinton's problems with her email server were not yet over.
02:56It's really challenging for these campaigns.
02:58Undecided voters will decide the election, especially in an election that in 2020 was
03:01decided by 40,000 votes across three states.
03:04Candidates run campaigns basically to target those voters.
03:07This one is from AtDanDudeVR.
03:09Why am I getting texts from politicians, especially those out of state?
03:13Who sold my phone number?
03:14Dan, I don't know, but I feel your pain.
03:16I think if you donate to any Democratic politician ever, you somehow get on a list that gets
03:21sold to other campaigns and it sucks and it's super annoying and block them all.
03:25Yeah, some of these texts could very well be scams.
03:27There's organizations that pop up that are just looking to grift off of people's donations.
03:32We worked for Barack Obama and usually you're not going to get a text from him that's in
03:36all caps that says, we will lose this election and America will be over unless you give me
03:39five dollars right now.
03:40I think multiple exclamation marks.
03:42If it says like Patriot, we're all going to die.
03:45Maybe unsubscribe from that one.
03:46If you get a politician sending you a picture of themself, it looks like it was posed.
03:51People don't communicate that way.
03:52That might be a sign that it's an automated message.
03:55This is from AtYouCanOwn in NYC.
03:57I live in a predictably blue state and I want to support congressional candidates nationally
04:01that have a chance at being flipped.
04:03How do I strategically pick where to donate?
04:06You want to look at each race and figure out how conservative or liberal the district or
04:12state is.
04:13If it is very, very red, very conservative, good for that Democratic candidate for running,
04:18but probably not going to have much of a chance and your money would be better spent with
04:22a Democratic candidate or a Republican candidate if you're into that.
04:24In a much more competitive district, the Cook Political Report, they give you ratings for
04:29each district so you can know how competitive each state or district is.
04:32If in the last election, a Republican or Democrat won that district by more than five points,
04:38it's probably going to be pretty hard for a candidate of the other party to win that
04:42district.
04:43If, however, the race was under five points, then there's a really good chance that either
04:47candidate could win and your donation will make a real difference.
04:50AtPrincessKimK asks, what other country has a former president of theirs on trial for
04:56anything?
04:57Do you think it's actually Kim K?
04:59I'm hoping.
05:00The Israelis are currently dealing with the same situation.
05:02Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is being prosecuted for corruption.
05:05There has been an Israeli Prime Minister who did time in jail for corruption.
05:09In France, former President Nicolas Sarkozy has been prosecuted.
05:13It's happened in Italy.
05:14It's happened in Brazil.
05:15So this idea that this is some sort of a banana republic thing, holding former leaders accountable
05:20for breaking the law, is nonsense.
05:23It's something that healthy democracies should do because no president or prime minister
05:26is above the law.
05:28At SilflatironsSG asks, Alexa, is technology undermining democracy?
05:33Yes.
05:34Yes, it is.
05:35I think it's destroying democracy because we no longer live in a shared reality.
05:38We had algorithms that are giving people all the information that they want to hear, confirming
05:42our own biases and not exposing us to anything that we don't like or exposing us to things
05:47that make us really angry.
05:48Yeah, I mean, one of the best ways to get around this problem is to actually talk to
05:51people face to face, knocking on doors, calling them, canvassing, going to community meetings.
05:56That is the way we deal with this challenge, which is just to be human beings again.
06:00I will vote for any candidate that will ban gender reveals and robocalls.
06:04This question is from AtArcadianKnight.
06:06Given the American penchant for gaming the system, is it even possible for them to have
06:10an honest election?
06:11We got a Canadian here, I believe.
06:13Yes, it's very possible for us to have an honest election.
06:16There is some voter fraud, but it is like .0000001% of the votes.
06:22The decentralized nature of American elections makes it extremely difficult to rig them in
06:27any significant way.
06:28Think back to 2020.
06:29I mean, even Donald Trump's own attorney general looked to see if there was widespread voter
06:34fraud that could have influenced the election, and he said no.
06:37All 50 states run their own election.
06:39Within the state, counties and cities run their own elections.
06:42So you just have so many checks in place with so many different people and so many different
06:46officials.
06:47And then, of course, we have a judicial system.
06:48If you do think there was voting fraud or you do think there was cheating, people bring
06:51cases to courts and then courts decide them.
06:54And so there's just a lot of, lot of checks.
06:56Our problem in this country is people don't turn out to vote, not that there's widespread
07:00fraud.
07:01This question from AtThinkingPanda.
07:02Why can candidates be allowed to spend unlimited funds on elections and campaigning?
07:07Doesn't that mean a qualified, able candidate who can't raise money can't win?
07:11In the last election cycle, in the midterms in 2022, the House candidate with more money
07:15won 93% of the time, and the Senate candidate with more money won 86% of the time.
07:20Candidates are allowed to spend unlimited money because of a Supreme Court decision
07:24in 2010 from a conservative Supreme Court called Citizens United, which says that corporations
07:31are people and because of free speech can spend as much money as they'd like on an election.
07:36Efforts at reforming the system would have to happen in Congress.
07:40Republicans are against reforming the system, so there is not enough support in Congress
07:43to pass any kind of meaningful campaign finance reform, and we still have a very conservative
07:47Supreme Court.
07:48So, as of right now, there's nothing to do about a lot of money in politics.
07:52That said, even though the candidate with the most money tends to win the election,
07:57there are plenty of examples of candidates who were outspent and still won the election,
08:02like Donald Trump in 2016.
08:04So it's not necessarily that a candidate with more money would definitely win, but I think
08:08it really hurts first-time candidates who don't have a lot of money and want to break
08:12into politics, and if you can't raise the money, then it's really hard to even get your
08:16foot in the door to run for office in the first place.
08:18You have megadonors that can give massive amounts of money to campaigns, party organizations,
08:22and super PACs.
08:23Here's a list of data behind it.
08:2412 megadonors accounted for one of every $13 in politics between 2009 and 2020.
08:31At Max Percentage asks,
08:32If your vote mattered, how could a president lose the presidency but win the popular vote?
08:36Thanks to something called the Electoral College.
08:38The reason we have the Electoral College is because the founding fathers needed to have
08:41a compromise between large states and small states.
08:44The presidency is not decided by the national popular vote, which means that whoever gets
08:49the most votes wins.
08:51It's a state-by-state contest.
08:53Each state gets electoral votes based on how many senators they have, which is two.
08:58Every state has two senators.
08:59And then how many representatives in the House that they have.
09:02For each state, that's determined by population.
09:05So large states like California have 55 electoral votes.
09:08Very small states like Wyoming has three electoral votes because it only has two senators and
09:12one House member.
09:13If you get 270 electoral votes, you win the presidency.
09:17So here's a map of the 2016 election.
09:19Hillary Clinton got a lot of votes in states like California and New York, where a ton
09:23of people live.
09:24So she won the popular vote, but lost pretty convincingly in the Electoral College.
09:28Donald Trump won with 306 electoral votes.
09:31Basically, if you live in a small state that's sparsely populated, your vote for the presidency
09:35is going to count more than if you live in a state that is very densely populated like
09:39California or New York.
09:40The only way to get rid of the Electoral College is with a constitutional amendment.
09:45A constitutional amendment requires not just a majority in Congress, not just 60 votes
09:49in the Senate, two-thirds of the votes in each the House and the Senate, or three-fourths
09:53of the state legislatures.
09:55And so it's really hard to enact a constitutional amendment, and that's why we still have the
09:59Electoral College.
10:00This one's from at Sapphire Avellino.
10:01WTF is this Project 2025 shit?
10:04Project 2025 is this very long document from the Heritage Foundation, which is a right-wing
10:09think tank.
10:10Basically, they have an entire set of policies that are going to be all ready for Donald
10:14Trump if he wins the presidency again.
10:16They're going to do mass deportations and set up mass deportation camps.
10:19They also want to have a national abortion ban.
10:22They want to ban porn.
10:23They want the Attorney General to be controlled by the President and to target his political
10:28enemies.
10:29And they want the President to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow the President
10:31to use the military against American citizens who are protesting, or to fight crime in cities,
10:37or to carry out deportations.
10:38So while this isn't a Trump campaign policy document, these are people that are incredibly
10:42close to the Trump administration, and these are the things they are likely to do.
10:45And the way they get this all done is to fire every single non-partisan employee in the
10:50federal government and replace them with Trump loyalists.
10:53One challenge in running against Trump is that he doesn't really put out his own affirmative
10:57policy agenda, so it's hard to know exactly what he would do in a second term, but this
11:00is what they are likely to do from day one of the Trump administration.
11:04Be Cool asks,
11:05Most Americans want tougher gun laws.
11:07Why is it so hard to change?
11:08Gun violence killed 41,000 Americans in 2020.
11:12Democrats have not had the votes in Congress to pass common sense gun reform that is supported
11:17by an overwhelming majority of the American people.
11:2087% of Americans want to require background checks.
11:2381% of Americans improve enforcement of existing gun laws.
11:2781% support raising the legal age to buy a gun from 18 to 21.
11:32Mental health checks, 80% support.
11:3430-day waiting periods, 77% support.
11:36This is also an area where the courts have been incredibly harmful.
11:39For example, the Supreme Court just struck down a Trump-era effort to ban something called
11:44bump stocks, which turns semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic weapons.
11:48The NRA has had a series of scandals and leadership problems that have really hobbled the organization,
11:53so they are less powerful than they once were, but the legacy of the work they did over the
11:57last few decades still exists.
11:59At Garrett Holmes asks,
12:00Podsave America, question for your next mailbag.
12:02Do you think we will have a 51st state by the time we have our 51st president?
12:08Hope so.
12:09Two candidates here are Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
12:12Neither D.C. nor Puerto Rico are represented in Congress.
12:16Most Republicans are blocking any legislation to give people in D.C. and Puerto Rico the
12:21right to have representation, and in order to admit them as states, you need 60 votes
12:27in the Senate.
12:28I don't know if we'll have them by the time we have a 51st president, but it sure would
12:31be nice.
12:32Yeah, to answer your question, Garrett, I think we're going to have a 51st president
12:34before we have a 51st state.
12:36Because the way that the Senate works out is that it's going to be extremely hard to
12:39have a filibuster-proof majority in the United States Senate any time soon, which is why
12:44the best way to get a 51st state is to eliminate the filibuster, and then you would only need
12:4951 votes in the Senate, and that we could probably do.
12:52At Martin Nutley, question for the Podsave America family.
12:54Could Joe Biden solve some of the voting issues by making Election Day a national holiday?
12:58If so, how would it be done?
13:00Executive order, Congress, Senate, et cetera.
13:02It's a great idea.
13:03A lot of people don't vote because they're working, or they don't have time, they don't
13:08have childcare, so we should make it a national holiday to make it easier for people to vote.
13:11But it would require an act of Congress, they would need to pass a law.
13:14The only reason our Election Day is currently on a Tuesday is because it was good for farmers.
13:18Clearly not something that we have to worry about as much anymore.
13:20Election Day should be a day that everyone, no matter where you work, who you are, should
13:23be able to get the day off and go vote.
13:26At StanTheGuy2000 asks, anyone else think that election integrity is just a code word
13:30for voter suppression?
13:32Yes.
13:33Stan, you are right.
13:34That is not to say that it's not important to have election integrity.
13:37You do want to make sure that people who are voting are eligible to vote.
13:42But fortunately, people who vote, like 99.99999% are voting legally, so when Republicans often
13:49talk about election integrity, it's just an excuse to restrict people from voting.
13:53Democrats want to make it easy to vote early over the course of several days, maybe several
13:57weeks.
13:58You want to let people vote by mail so that you can just fill out your ballot at home
14:00and send it in.
14:01Republicans used to support some of those efforts.
14:04Donald Trump has voted by mail many, many years in a row in Florida.
14:08In Georgia, for example, they passed a law where when there's a long line of people voting,
14:12it is illegal for someone else to come and give you a drink of water or food.
14:16One measure that states have taken, like New Hampshire, is you can register to vote the
14:20same day as the election, but if you're in college, the second you graduate, they kick
14:24you off the voter rolls because they say that you're no longer a resident of that state.
14:28So those are all the questions for today.
14:29Thanks for watching Democracy Support.