'Pod Save America' Hosts Answer Democracy Questions From Twitter

I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Tommy Vietor.

We're co-host of Pod Save America.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Democracy Support.

[upbeat music]

@56blackcat asks,

America is the greatest democracy in the world, right?

[Jon groans]

I mean, look, we [beep] rule.

It's a great country.

I wouldn't wanna live anywhere else,

but when it comes to the health of our democracy,

we are not number one on the list.

[Jon] The Economist does a democracy index ranking.

The United States is currently 29th

Because of a series of challenges to voting rights,

voting access, the insurrection in 2020.

So yeah, we have to work to do.

In the Democracy Index

where the United States scores the lowest

is functioning of government,

which is obvious to anyone who turns on the news.

It's questions from @SunflowerSriBrz.

I might be wrong, but don't presidents

have their speeches written for them?

Like a PR agency or their spokesperson

writes it out for them?

Presidents have speech writers.

I was one of them.

I will say that with President Obama,

he did write a lot of his own speeches.

In fact, before I was a speech writer for him,

he first became famous giving a convention speech in 2004

that he wrote entirely himself,

and then as he became a senator, and then ran for president,

we collaborated together on a lot of speeches.

Usually with the big speeches, we'd meet with Obama

and he would tell us what's on his mind,

and we would just type out everything that he said,

and then go back, do a draft, send the draft back to Obama.

It would either come back with just a ton of edits on it,

and he'd have small little handwriting

would just be marking up the entire speech.

That was the good outcome,

because that's how you knew that, like, he liked the draft,

but he just wanted to, like, really edit instead

of write some on his own.

Then sometimes. the draft would come back

with no markings on it,

and that did not mean that he loved the draft.

That meant that he wanted to start from scratch.

@reginaldward3 asks,

Am I the only one getting a headache

trying to understand undecided voters in 2024?

[laughing] What are they undecided about?

Most people don't pay very close attention to politics.

Those people have political positions

that don't necessarily line up with each party.

So you could have someone who is very pro-choice,

but very anti-immigration.

That can be anywhere from 5 to 25% of the population

in any given election, and those people tend

to decide in the last month

or even in the last weeks of the election.

A lot of undecided voters are just frustrated

with the two choices in front of them.

A lot of undecided voters just literally haven't had time

to think about the election, and will figure it out

in the last weeks

Undecided voters will tune in perhaps to the conventions

and, more likely, they'll tune into the debates.

And so [chuckles] whatever the political environment is

and the media environment is in the final weeks

of the campaign, that can really sway undecided voters

who just tune in at that point.

This is why working on campaigns can be so frustrating,

because you spend two years trying to reach these voters

and they decide in the last week,

and, sometimes, you're captive to whatever

the last kind of big news event was,

whether it's the Access Hollywood Tape

where Trump was caught on camera

saying some horrible things, or the Jim Comey letter,

which suggested that Hillary Clinton's problems

with her email server were not yet over.

It's really challenging for these campaigns.

Undecided voters will decide the election,

especially an election that in 2020 was decided

by 40,000 votes across three states.

Candidates run campaigns basically to target those voters.

This one is from @DanDudeVR.

Why am I getting texts from politicians,

especially those outta state?

Who sold my phone number?

Dan, I don't know, but I feel your pain.

I think if you donate to any democratic politician ever,

you somehow get on a list that gets sold to other campaigns,

and it sucks, and it's super annoying, and block them all.

Yeah, some of these texts could very well be scams.

There's organizations that pop up that are just looking

to grift off of people's donations.

We worked for Barack Obama

and, usually, you're not gonna get a text from him

that's in all caps that says,

We will lose this election

and America will be over unless you give me $5 right now.

I think multiple exclamation marks.

If it says like, Patriot, we're all gonna die.

Maybe unsubscribe from that one.

Yeah, if you get a politician sending you

a picture of themself that looks like it was posed,

people don't communicate that way.

No. That's might be a sign

that it's an automated message.

This is from @YouCanOwnInNYC.

I live in a predictably blue state

and I wanna support congressional candidates nationally

that have a chance at being flipped.

How do I strategically pick where to donate?

You wanna look at each race

and figure out how conservative

or liberal the district or state is.

If it is very, very red, very conservative,

good for that democratic candidate for running,

but probably not gonna have much of a chance

and your money would be better spent

with a democratic candidate, or a republican candidate

if you're into that, in a much more competitive district,

The Cook Political Report, they give you ratings

for each district so you can know

how competitive each state or district is.

If in the last election, a republican or democrat

won that district by more than five points,

it's probably gonna be pretty hard for a candidate

of the other party to win that district.

If, however, the race was under five points,

then there's a really good chance

that either candidate could win

and your donation will make a real difference.

@princess_kim_k asks, What other country

has a former president of theirs on trial for anything?

You think it's actually Kim K?

[laughs] I'm hoping.

The Israelis are currently dealing

with the same situation.

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu

is being prosecuted for corruption.

There has been an Israeli prime minister

who did time in jail for corruption.

In France, former president Nicholas Sarkozy

has been prosecuted.

It's happened in Italy, it's happened in Brazil.

So this idea that this is some sort

of a a Banana Republic thing

holding former leaders accountable

for breaking the law is nonsense.

It's something that healthy democracies should do,

because no president or prime minister is above the law.

@SilFlatironsSG asks,

Alexa, is technology undermining democracy?

Yes!

Yes it is. Nah, it's going fine.

I think it's destroying democracy,

because we no longer live in a shared reality.

We had algorithms that are giving people all the information

that they want to hear.

Confirming our own biases and not exposing us

to anything that we don't like or exposing us

to things that make us really angry.

Yeah, I mean one of the best ways

to get around this problem is to actually talk

to people face to face, knocking on doors,

calling them, canvassing, going to community meetings.

That is the way we deal with this challenge,

which is just to be human beings again.

I will vote for any candidate

that will ban gender reveals and robocalls.

This question's from @Arcadian_Knight.

Given the American penchant for gaming the system,

is it even possible for them to have an honest election?

We got a Canadian here, I believe.

Yes, it's very possible for us to have an honest election.

There is some voter fraud,

but it is like 0.000001% of the votes.

The decentralized nature of American elections

makes it extremely difficult

to rig them in any significant way.

Think back to 2020.

I mean, even Donald Trump's own attorney general look

to see if there was widespread voter fraud

that could have influenced the election and he said,

No.

All 50 states run their own election within the state.

Counties and cities run their own elections.

So you just have so many checks in place

with so many different people

and so many different officials,

and then, of course, we have a judicial system.

If you do think there was voting fraud

or you do think there was cheating,

people bring cases to courts and then courts decide them,

and so there's just a lot of lot of checks.

Our problem in this country is people don't turn out

to vote, not that there's widespread fraud.

This question from @thinking_panda.

Why can candidates be allowed to spend unlimited funds

on elections and campaigning?

Doesn't that mean a qualified able candidate

who can't raise money can't win?

On the last election cycle in the midterms in 2022,

the house candidate with more money won 93% of the time

and the senate candidate

with more money won 86% of the time.

Candidates are allowed to spend unlimited money

because of a Supreme Court decision in 2010

from a conservative Supreme Court called Citizens United,

which says that corporations

are people. [wheezes] Are people.

And because of free speech, can spend as much money

as they'd like on an election.

Efforts at reforming the system would have

to happen in Congress.

Republicans are against reforming the system.

So there is not enough support in Congress

to pass any kind of meaningful campaign finance reform,

and we still have a very conservative Supreme Court.

So as of right now, there's nothing

to do about a lot of money in politics.

That said, even though the candidate

with the most money tends to win the election,

there are plenty of examples of candidates who were outspent

and still won the election, like Donald Trump in 2016.

So it's not necessarily that a candidate

with more money would definitely win,

but I think it really hurts first-time candidates

who don't have a lot of money and wanna break into politics.

And if you can't raise the money then it's really hard

to even get your foot in the door

to run for office in the first place.

You have mega donors that can give massive amounts

of money to campaigns, party organizations, and super packs.

To put some data behind it, 12 mega donors accounted

for one of every $13 in politics between 2009 and 2020.

@MaxP3rc3ntag3 asks,

If your vote mattered,

how could a president lose the presidency

but win the popular vote?

Thanks to something called the electoral college.

The reason we have the electoral college is

because the founding fathers needed to have a compromise

between large states and small states.

The presidency is not decided by the national popular vote,

which means that whoever gets the most votes wins.

It's a state by state contest.

Each state gets electoral based on

how many senators they have, which is two.

Every state has two senators.

And then how many representatives in the house

that they have.

For each state, that's determined by population.

So large states like California have 55 electoral votes.

Very small states like Wyoming has three electoral votes

'cause it only has two senators and one house member.

If you get 270 electoral votes, you win the presidency.

So here's a map of the 2016 election.

Hillary Clinton got a lot of votes in states like California

and New York where a ton of people live.

So she won the popular vote but lost pretty convincingly

in the electoral college.

Donald Trump won with 306 electoral votes.

Basically, if you live in a small state

that's sparsely populated, your vote

for the presidency is going to count more

than if you live in a state that is very densely populated,

like California or New York.

The only way to get rid of the electoral college is

with a constitutional amendment.

Constitutional amendment requires not just a majority

in Congress, not just 60 votes in the Senate,

two thirds of the votes in each the House and the Senate,

or three fourths of the state legislatures.

And so it's really hard to enact a constitutional amendment

and that's why we still have the electoral college.

This one from @sapphireavelino.

WTF is this Project 2025 shit?

Project 2025 is this very long document

from the Heritage Foundation,

which is a right wing think tank.

Basically, they have an entire set of policies

that are gonna be all ready for Donald Trump

if he wins the presidency again.

They're gonna do mass deportations

and set up mass deportation camps.

They also want to have a national abortion ban.

They wanna ban porn.

They want the attorney general to be controlled

by the president and to target his political enemies.

And they want the president to be invoke

the Insurrection Act, which would allow the president

to use the military against American citizens

who are protesting, or to fight crime in cities,

or to carry out deportations.

So while this isn't a Trump campaign policy document,

these are people that are incredibly close

to the Trump administration

and these are the things they are likely to do.

And the way they get this all done is

to fire every single nonpartisan employee

in the federal government and replace them

with Trump loyalists.

One challenge in running against Trump is

that he doesn't really put out his own

affirmative policy agenda.

So it's hard to know exactly

what he would do in a second term,

but this is what they are likely

to do from day one of the Trump administration.

BCOOL asks,

Most Americans want tougher gun laws.

Why is it so hard to change?

Gun violence killed 41,000 Americans in 2020.

Democrats have not had the votes in Congress

to pass common sense gun reform that is supported

by overwhelming majority of the American people.

87% of Americans want to require background checks.

81% of Americans improve enforcement of existing gun laws.

81% support raising the legal age

to buy a gun from 18 to 21.

Mental health checks, 80% support.

30-day waiting period, 77% support.

This is also an area where the courts

have been incredibly harmful.

For example, the Supreme Court just struck down

a Trump era effort to ban something called bump stocks,

which turns semi-automatic weapons

into fully automatic weapons.

The NRA has had a series of scandals and leadership problems

that have really hobbled the organization.

So they are less powerful than they once were.

But the the legacy of the work they did

over the last few decades still exists.

@Garrett__Holmes asks,

Pod Save America, question for your next mailbag.

Do you think we'll have a 51st state

by the time we have our 51st president?

[Tommy exhales]

Hope so. That'd be great.

Two candidates here are Puerto Rico

and Washington DC.

Neither DC nor Puerto Rico are represented in Congress.

Most Republicans are blocking any legislation

to give people in DC and Puerto Rico

the right to have representation,

and in order to admit the mistakes,

you need 60 votes in the Senate.

I don't know if we'll have them by the time we have

a 51st president, but it sure would be nice.

Yeah, to answer your question, Garrett,

I think we're gonna have a 51st president

before we have a 51st state.

Because the way that the Senate works out is

that it's going to be extremely hard

to have a filibuster-proof majority

in the United States Senate anytime soon.

Which is why the best way to get a 51st state is

to eliminate the filibuster,

and then you would only need 51 votes in the Senate,

and that we could probably do.

@martinuttley.

Question for the Pod Save America family.

Could Joe Biden solve some of the voting issues

by making election day a national holiday?

If so, how would it be done?

Executive order, Congress, Senate, et cetera?

It's a great idea.

A lot of people don't vote,

because they're working, or they don't have time,

they don't have childcare.

So we should make it a national holiday

to make it easier for people to vote.

But it would require an act of Congress.

They would need to pass a law.

The only reason our election day is currently on a Tuesday

is because it was good for farmers.

Clearly not something that we have

to worry about as much anymore.

Election day should be a day that everyone,

no matter where you work, who you are should be able

to get the day off and go vote.

@Stantheguy2000 asks,

Anyone else think that election integrity

is just a code word for voter suppression?

Yes.

Stan, you are right.

That is not to say that it's not important

to have election integrity.

You do wanna make sure that people

who are voting are eligible to vote.

But fortunately, people who vote, like 99.99999%,

are voting legally.

So when republicans often talk about election integrity,

it's just an excuse to restrict people from voting.

Democrats want to make it easy

to vote early over the course of several days,

maybe several weeks.

You wanna let people vote by mail

so that you can just fill out your ballot

at home and send it in.

Republicans used to support some of those efforts.

Donald Trump has voted by mail

many, many years in a row in Florida.

In Georgia for example, they passed a law

where when there's a long line of people voting,

it is illegal for someone else to come

and give you a drink of water or food.

One measure that states have taken, like New Hampshire,

is you can't register to vote the same day as the election,

but if you're in college, the second you graduate,

they kick you off the voter rolls,

because they say that you're no longer

a resident of that state.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching Democracy Support.

[cymbal crashes]