Andy Levy & Skye Perryman

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And acting Attorney General Todd Blanch says, I love working for President Trump. It's the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I'll say, thank you very much. I love you, sir. We have such a great show for you tonight. As The World Churns, Andy Levy stops by to talk about MAGA's anger at Trump over the chaos of the Iran war. Then we'll talk to Democracy Forward's Skye Perryman about how they are pushing back against the Trump agenda. But first, the news.

**Jesse Cannon** (0:45)
Molly, another beautiful night of seeing Democrats outperform insane numbers no one would expect against Republicans in these special elections and in the primaries.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:56)
Yeah. So here's what's going on.
Donald Trump is on the ticket. And even when he's not on the ticket, he's on the ticket. And so we're seeing these kind of insane, like Democrats are winning. The great example is Marjorie Taylor Greene. She gave up her seat in Rome, Georgia. That is a seat she won, I don't know. Is it 28 points? I mean, some crazy, crazy number. Trump won Marjorie Taylor Greene's district by 37 points. So now, here we are, and it's not even two years later. This is a seat now that the Democrat, I mean, the Democrat lost, but not by 38 points, just by 12 points. So it's a real, if you think about that, that's like a 20 point, little more than 20 point shift. That's crazy. That's what we're seeing around the country. That's what we're seeing everywhere. And so that's what we're seeing in Wisconsin. So Wisconsin, this is the state Supreme Court race. Remember, we had a lot of these people on this podcast because it was a very tight Wisconsin Supreme Court. You know, it's an elected judgeship, and we had been back and forth on this, and Democrats were running. It was really tight. There was going to be a majority, a Republican majority. Democrats flipped it, and now it's about to be a Democratic majority. This is a state, Wisconsin, that is really one of the most evenly split states. If you think about it, it's like the governor is a guy, Tony Ivers, who is just a really nondescript. He's a Democrat, but you might not know he's a very nondescript white guy, and he barely won real. This is a really, like if the voters of Wisconsin are saying this, then the voters of Texas and California, and this is the canary in the coal mine, so this is what we're seeing, and we're going to see more of this, and good because Donald Trump is a complete lunatic, and no one is running a check on him.

**Jesse Cannon** (3:10)
Yeah. The thing that you really pointed out well, it was how much in the midterms last time to remind people, that people said that these four-point spreads are not worth sinking our money into, and people didn't donate to these candidates, and then they'd lose by a point because of all the voter enthusiasm, and we could have not had Senator Ron Johnson was something you pointed out that was really astute if we had just not felt like the Cook PVI is what it was in the midterms and things like that, and we got to see right now that there is huge, huge possibilities to flip a lot of these seats, so we really, really got to go in.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:46)
Huge. And Mandela Barnes, let me tell you about Mandela Barnes, who was running a Wisconsin for that Senate seat. I was told by even very smart white guys that it was too much to hope that Wisconsin would not elect a black senator. FYI, he lost by like one point.

**Jesse Cannon** (4:04)
Yeah, so small.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:06)
Ronanon just poured money into that race.

**Jesse Cannon** (4:09)
And poured money into junk polls.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:11)
Right, exactly. And so, you know, the Democrats abandoned Mandela Barnes. That would have been a really easy pick up. It's such a good example of like why it's what Mandela Lipman says. You have to run everywhere. And especially in a landscape like this, where Republicans are getting significant headwinds.
And it just is just a moment where Democrats need to run at every seat. Because the thing is, like we all know there will be a time. And I know it feels like it's not true. OK, I'm going to tell a story here. So last night, I went to a dinner with people who are working on safeguarding democracy. And there's lawyers and judges and all sorts of things. And the most important thing is, first of all, the elections are not run by the federal government. They are decentralized. So everyone needs to stop thinking they're going to cancel the elections. There is no there. They cannot do that. OK, will Donald Trump try to do a lot of hooey? Undoubtedly. But we all need to be sane and not panic until it's time to panic. Because if everyone is at 11 right now, then when we really need to be at 11, we're going to miss it. And so what I'm here to tell you is there are a lot of people trying to keep your election safe and secure. There are a lot of lawyers and a lot of democracy watchers and a lot of people focused on making sure that your vote is counted, that it is free and fair. So we all have to do our part by knowing that we're going to have free and fair elections and just making sure that we show up and we register voters and we do all of these important democratic works. I really think there are some people who are resistance heroes who are saying things like Trump's going to cancel the election. You need to tell those people no, because it is voter suppression to six months before the election believe that Donald Trump has the power to unilaterally cancel the elections.