Jane Coaston: Pod Save Michigan

**Tim Miller** (0:12)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A few scheduling notes. The pod was out a little late yesterday, and I think it might be out a little bit late today. We're back from vacation. We're working out the kinks.
Today's guest had a personal issue. We're scrambling. It's like, who do I call in an emergency, a big Michigan moment, many people, but who answers the phone at 630 a.m. Pacific time? Jane Coaston, host of What A Day podcast, friend of the show.
Thank you, Jane. Greatly appreciate it. Go Blue.

**Jane Coaston** (0:42)
Absolutely.
Great to be back. And yeah, it is the first week of August, which I think we forget about in terms of like, you know, that summer, that's like, you know, if you are like chomping at the bit for a politics podcast on August 5th.

**Tim Miller** (0:59)
At 3.3 in the afternoon.

**Jane Coaston** (1:00)
Well, we salute you and we're really excited about you.

**Tim Miller** (1:04)
We appreciate all of the listeners to The Bulwark Daily, every day, it's daily.
But, you know, 3.3 comes out of 4.30. It's okay. We're gonna do our best. We'll get it back going once school's in, you know, cause you're gonna need it for school pickup. Cause you need to listen to a real human podcast during school pickup instead of the Sam Altman at GBTAI podcast, you know? So we gotta make sure.

**Jane Coaston** (1:26)
I still love that he's at no point has he been like, you could talk to your kids. Like all of his proposals sound kind of like, you know, on the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, how like the Calvin's dad is always like, we'll just set up the Christmas tree in the garage and you can pretend it has lights. Like all of Sam Altman's suggestions sound like that.

**Tim Miller** (1:43)
It's concerning.

**Jane Coaston** (1:44)
It's very worrying.

**Tim Miller** (1:45)
But you know, it wouldn't be that concerning if he was just weird. There are a lot of weirdos that are a little weird out there in the world. It's just, it's a little concerning when they hold the future society in their hands. Obviously, the big news of the morning here of the day is the results in the Michigan Senate race yesterday.
People were expecting because of the polls, a significant win from a dual said, maybe double digits.
I was expecting that. That did not happen. There was an Ann Seltzer style poll error in Michigan. The way that these polls control the narratives, the discourse is probably something we should reflect on as commentators. It's like had the polls been showing Haley up and Abdul wins, it would just be like progressive DSA, shock, earthquake and now it's like, is there some weakness? But anyway, Abdul is up by 1 percent at the time of this taping. There has been called the AP, but it's just going to be a much narrower victory than expected. I've got a bunch of takeaways. What are yours?

**Jane Coaston** (2:41)
I've got some micro and some macro thoughts. Micro thoughts is that Michigan is a weird state.
It's a state in which Democrats can hold a trifecta and Trump can win it. That's the state of Michigan. I expected this race to be tight, especially with so much attention and as much money going into it.
I think that, again, to your point, I think polling does us a disservice in how we talk about this race, and especially how we talk about what this race means for people in the state of Michigan. The most majestic, wonderful state that there is. What does this mean for Michiganders? What does this mean going forward? I'm interested to see the pivot towards the general election. You have a Republican Mike Rogers who told Semaphore that he, no one asks me about the Iran War and I don't know how I'd vote on anything, because I don't care. I mean, I do.
So I'm interested to see what that pivot looks like. But I think overall, the challenge we have is, and this is the macro, and this is more of a meta point, is that we love storylines. We want there to be a story of how this is all happening, and the story has an obvious beginning, middle, and end. There's kind of heroes and villains. Yeah, exactly. So we want a story of progressive big win or progressive loss to establishment. I think the top three stories on political right now are like, progressives are anxious. I'm like, well, I mean, everybody's anxious all the time, that's how we are. But is that actually what we should take away from this particular moment? I don't know. I think that what I'm getting from this is a anti-establishment rhetoric. I think it's, Abdul spent a lot of time talking about how he wanted to get away from democratic politics as usual. His opponent was being supported by Chuck Schumer, who now has come out with a statement being like, we're all united in fighting Trump, which is the right way to be. Whoever it is. You also saw that from Pete Buttigieg talking about like, we're all coming together, we've got 90 days to go beat Trump and beat the Republican Party, that's what matters. But I see this less as progressive versus establishment, and more about the establishment being everybody in politics right now, who everybody seems to hate.