Marc Elias & Shane Goldmacher

**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 Congressman Chuck Edwards has dropped his re-election bid after being censured. We have such a great show for you today, Democracy Docket's own Marc Elias stops by to talk about Trump's lawless plans for the midterms. Then we'll talk to The New York Times' own Shane Goldmacher about how the primaries are shaken out and a little trouble at the DNC. But first, the news.

**Shane Goldmacher** (0:36)
So, Molly, big, big night of elections last night. I think there's some pretty interesting things here that will really actually be consequential come both November and the shape of the party here. I'm curious though, I think the most interesting one is what happened in Kansas since you and I have been talking about how much this is going to be an election about data centers. We saw a massive, massive political upset last night.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (1:01)
Yes. So, let's talk about this.
Data centers are, you and I both know, we have traveled this country, or at least I went to Arizona, and I'm planning to go to New Orleans. So, I've been to places and people are not happy with data centers, and you know why they're not happy with them? Because they're terrible. They use water, they use electricity, they make noise, they're huge, they don't employ that many people. Voters hate them and they make your electricity more expensive. I mean, there's literally no case for data centers. And the woman who ran for the Democratic nomination of the Kansas governor, and I want to add that, you know, you think Kansas is a red state, but the governor they have now is also a Democrat. So having a Democratic governor in Kansas is not unheard of. In fact, it may repeat. But this woman is called Cindy Hulshur, and she is a state senator, and she is endorsed by the current Democratic governor, Laura Kelly. So data centers are an 80-20 issue, and really, really just the kind of thing Democrats can win on. Data centers.

**Shane Goldmacher** (2:22)
Well, I think last night showed that they can win on saying, we're going to put money back into your community and not send it to foreign wars. One of the lessons of this primary, though, is, I think Medicare for All is one in the same with, we're going to put the money back into your communities, that we're not sending your money to you getting denied care that you should get just so that there could be higher corporate board earnings.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:43)
Yeah, no, exactly.

**Shane Goldmacher** (2:45)
So speaking of the other big shakeup, Shri Thanedar, a long time US congressman, lost their seat and of course, Dr. Abdel Al-Sayed won the Michigan Senate by much less than we expected but did to have a victory that I think is going to really shake things up. He's already said he will not support Chuck Schumer as majority leader and will support Chris Van Hollen. And he seems very contrary to what some people say, he seems very, very well suited to beat Mike Rogers in the general sense. Mike Rogers ran 900,000 votes behind Donald Trump in the last election.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:20)
Yeah, I'm more anxious about Dr. El-Sayed because I think that it's just a hard road. But there is a question of like, you know, whether running as running a center's candidate is in a swing state works better than running a progressive in a swing state. Like that's the real question is like, do you lose crossover voters if you do that? And do you suppress your left base? Because the reality is like, in Michigan in 2016, Bernie won, right? So that is a real thing.

**Shane Goldmacher** (4:00)
Yeah, I should correct myself. I'm sorry. Rogers ran 122,000 votes behind. But to your point with Bernie won, Abdul has a very interesting thing where he's talked about the trend in Michigan has been to vote for somebody who will do change. One of the reasons that many people have observed that Kamala didn't do as well in Michigan as people would have thought is that on the ground there, they thought it was going to be a continuation of Biden and they had grown very, very, very tired of Biden's policies in Michigan.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:29)
Yeah.

**Shane Goldmacher** (4:29)
But it seems that also they did not buy Rogers' bullshit by a much bigger margin than they did buy Trump's bullshit. And I don't think that that's gotten any better as he's just sold himself to whoever will pay for him, which is he's done throughout his career and helped cause the opioid crisis.