7/29/26: Americans Demand Bibi Arrest, West Bank Violence, Elon AI Extinction, Data Center Revolt & MORE!

24:56Yeah.

24:56Emily Jashinsky:Well, look, I mean, there's this guy, Eisenkot, who is sort of the, I think a lot of people are considering him like the potential great liberal savior in Israel who's going to wrestle control away from the right-wing extremists like Netanyahu and Ben Gavir and Smotrich. I mean, putting aside his own sort of genocidal history, his own military doctrines of using like disproportionate force against the author of the Dohia Doctrine. He's the author of the Dohia Doctrine, which literally is like destroy civilian infrastructure in Lebanon or in Gaza to pressure the military. So even just putting all that aside, though, there is the popular liberal Zionist position, both in Israel and in the United States and elsewhere, is against the settlement movement because it is ostensibly – they want peace with the Palestinians.

25:51Emily Jashinsky:They want peaceful coexistence. And so you have to come out against these feral-looking, violent settlers who are attacking defenseless Palestinians. That is why even Netanyahu occasionally, like when he was on CNN a couple of weeks ago with Dana Bash, you know, uses this line about a handful of juvenile delinquents, which is obviously BS. I mean, we're talking about a massive organization run by grownups supported by the government. But again, if you take Eisenkot, a couple months ago, this made no headlines in the U.S., of course. He went out of his way to take a political trip to an outpost in the West Bank that is known as one of the more violent outposts.

26:33Emily Jashinsky:It is known to everybody in the region as a place where settlers are leaving from to attack Palestinians. I believe they have even attacked Israeli activists from there, actually. Eisencott goes to this outpost and he has a meeting with the leaders there and he basically signals his support to them. And that is it's very clear what he's doing. He's saying, listen, even if the government changes and you no longer have your Smotrich and you no longer have your Ben Gavir or your Netanyahu who are giving you all this sort of vocal support, don't worry. Like, I still got your back. I still support you.

27:10Emily Jashinsky:And, you know, that's also consistent with the fact that Eisenkot does not support a two-state solution, which is, you know, I think speaks to the just delusion that so many liberal Zionists in the United States are living with, which is that there is some other liberal version of Zionism of Israel that is actually against settler violence, that is actually, you know, for a two-state solution. Like that reality just simply does not exist in Israel in, you know, the political reality that is Israel today. Well, Jasper, thank you so much for your reporting and your bravery because you put yourself at great personal risk.

27:50I know there's been a lot of personal costs there. Everybody should go and subscribe to your sub stack because, you know, eyes have understandably been focused on the genocide in Gaza. But what is happening in the West Bank is horrifying and extremely consequential. So thank you so much for keeping your eye on that and helping to inform our audience.

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30:00Emily Jashinsky:for smart folk who care for their steed. So trust the instant oil change that starts with Valvoline. Valvoline Instant Oil Change. Change wisely. So we have some very interesting ideas being pushed by the nation's oligarchs as they see a rising populist revolt against them and increasing ideas of wealth taxes and things that they find completely unacceptable. Let's put this up on the screen. This is the Shopify CEO. The headline here from Fortune is why did$154 billion CEO just endorse stripping most Americans of voting rights and taking us back to the 19th century? I'll read you a little bit of some of Mr.

30:42Tobias Lutke's ideas here. He's CEO of Shopify. His company commands a market cap of nearly$154 billion. He told his social media followers this week that a tax tiered voting system, one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax, which is many millions of Americans, would be a, quote, Good system. The exchange began with a provocation from Mr. Lucky. Pension recipients should have their financial futures locked in and guaranteed, but in return would be reclassified as dependents and lose the right to vote the same way minors can't vote. So if you're someone who, you know, relies on Social Security, your right to vote would be taken away.

31:23Next, a reply from someone named Eric Thor, who claimed to be a retired banking executive, as well as armchair economist and policy wonk. Love that type. Proposed a sliding scale. Zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax. One vote for those earning$1 ,000 to$100 ,000. dollars, two votes for 100 to 200, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning$500 ,000 or more. The pitch was framed as fairness, reward, quote, representation for those who, quote, foot the bill through taxation. That was the good system that Lutke endorsed. So, Emily, as if it is not enough that these billionaires can flood the campaign system with cash, you know, such that Elon Musk can drop$250 million into the Trump campaign or Miriam Adelson or whoever, you know, George Soros or whoever your favorite boogeyman is, that these billionaires can drop all of this money in through their own direct contributions to dark money super PACs, through corporate contributions to dark money super PACs, and have an outsized and almost exclusive influence on our political system.

32:37That is not enough. We also need to directly strip votes from the poors so that the rich can guarantee their position in society permanently and not have to deal with the pesky working class rabble or poor rabble having ideas about how the country should be run.

32:55Emily Jashinsky:It's astoundingly anti-democratic and not in like a lowercase r Republican way, But that's what the tech oligarchs really are at their core is they believe that they should have a concentration of power because they do genuinely know better. This is not just in voting. This is also how they think the economy should be designed. They think that they can control a system that will be fair and just and will create peace and utopia for everyone. If you would just give them the chance to completely dominate, which, by the way, they basically already are. and they're suggesting things like taking away the vote from people who don't pay the income tax.

33:32Emily Jashinsky:Like while you're doing wild fantasies, while you're enjoying your wild fantasies, why not go in a different direction and be like, we should just get rid of the income tax. Why don't you come up with something that at least makes a modicum of more sense? No, they won't do that because they actually just want control. It's not about justice and fairness ultimately at the end of the day. I mean, they may have convinced themselves in some cases that they can be the facilitators of greater justice. But what they really want is control because they just think they're better. They don't think other people should have a say in the system because that's what gums up the works of the system is people who don't know as much as they do, who haven't worked as hard and innovated and created and built.

34:15Emily Jashinsky:This is the language that they use around these ideas. Those people, they're the ones who are causing the problems. Just let us, the builders, the superiors handle it and everyone else go about your lives. We'll give you universal basic income. You'll be fine. Universal high income. I'm sorry. Maybe. Maybe. If we're feeling generous. Yeah. I mean, imagine thinking that the problem in society is that the rich don't have enough control. Like, imagine holding that worldview. That is so incredibly insane. You know, there's a political science experiment going back years now. that found that the views and concerns of ordinary people have zero impact on their legislators, whereas the views of the wealthy have a lot of impact on legislators.

35:02They're able to dump money into campaigns. Corporations are able to hire lobbyists. I mean, we can see the impact in so many of these primaries. Look at what happened to Thomas Massey because of all of the multi-millions of dollars that were dropped into a primary against him. And, you know, in order to lie about him and convince boomers in his district he was having a throuple with AOC and Ilhan Omar. I mean, I'm not even kidding. That's literally what happened in this race. And you look at that landscape and say, yeah, the problem is rich people need even more control. This tiny, tiny bit of a say that normal people have through their vote.

35:37We need to take that away, too. And the reason that I highlight it is because, well, he's one dude with a weird idea. But to your point, Emily, these anti-democratic ideas are completely commonplace and endemic. within Silicon Valley at this point, because they do. They see themselves as better than. They think they should be the ones who are making all of the decisions. They have a completely, and it's kind of always been there underneath the surface in Silicon Valley. It was previously masked with sort of like liberal identitarian values. Now the mask is completely off. But when they thought about, you know, here, we're going to use this technology.

36:12We're going to absent ourselves from the democratic process. We're going to use this technology to foment a sort of revolutionary, our own revolution in our favor that we get to have control over. That has been the ethos in Silicon Valley among the elites for a very long time. Now it has just become more overt because the things that you can say in the public space has been so broadened to include just putting out there that you don't think we should have democracy anymore, we should have network states that we should have oligarchs who run these things basically as kings. This is all very commonplace ideas now with Silicon Valley, and obviously it's extremely dangerous.

36:50I also think that there is probably a bit of a panic right now because of a few developments. Number one, we have covered a lot, and we'll continue to cover, and about to cover a little bit more, the massive public backlash, which is truly bipartisan or cross-partisan against data centers and the abuses of the tech oligarchs. This is a very unifying position. So I think they have to see some of this pushback and start to get a little bit nervous that the rabble are starting to rise up. The rabble are starting to be discontented. You also have them freaking out over this very modest wealth tax that has been proposed in California and throwing a fit over that.

37:31And I think, again, it's a sign of, oh, my God, they might have some other ideas about how things go, they might actually do something to try to trim our sails. And then they also see the rise of democratic socialists who take very seriously the need to fight against the tech oligarchy and, you know, right the ship and make sure that ordinary people have a stake in our society. I think they see all of these things as truly like existential threats to their control, their absolute control over our country and over our politics.

38:00Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. And they're especially disillusioned right now that they see people on the right freaking out about data centers as well. Like it's pretty much across the board. Even Republicans are upset about data centers. And that is a surprise to some of them. And that's why they've been trying to go in overdrive in some of these communities and start paying tons of money to convince the communities to let them do whatever they want to do with the data centers. And maybe some of that money is very much needed in the school systems of the local infrastructure. sure, but it's becoming—I mean, Producer Mack and I were talking before we started the show about how some of these apartment buildings, you have to have a smartphone in order to, like, get into your apartment.

38:39Emily Jashinsky:And that's a silly example, but it's an example of how anti-democratic our economy is right now. You basically have to have a smartphone then to live in this apartment building. And if you want to have a smartphone and live in this apartment building or many apartment buildings in major cities, you have two choices. You can do Apple or you can do Android for the most part. It puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of two companies. And so it's an anti-democratic economy already. Obviously, it's an anti-democratic economy already. And the point you were making about how it used to be kind of masked, this mentality used to be masked in Silicon Valley by progressive identitarianism or liberal identitarianism is interesting because that's also what I was talking about when we were just or I was riffing on like, why not come up with an idea that's abolished the income tax?

39:23Emily Jashinsky:I use that example specifically because the mentality of Silicon Valley and like Web 1.0 and for some of Web 2.0 was this like libertarian utopianism that tech was taking us to a better and freer place for the human condition. all of these tech guys, some of them will still mask it with that language, but all of these tech guys became eager oligarchs. And they realized that their technology was creating such concentrated power that I think, as we acknowledge, inevitably, inevitably, that concentrated power is going to end up in the hands of a couple of people. And rather than coming up with solutions that diffuse the power democratically, they're saying, well, there's just nothing we can do about it.

40:07Emily Jashinsky:So let the smart people take the wheel. You will be fine. Well, to me, there's not much difference between libertarianism and a sort of corporate authoritarianism because libertarians always have a – I shouldn't say always. I'm sure there are some exceptions. There are a lot of idealists. But frequently have a blind spot when it comes to corporate power, right? They're very attuned to potential abuses of government and I think serve a useful purpose there in terms of, you know, checking potential government abuses. but then have a complete blind spot when it comes to the mass amount of power that, let's say, an Elon Musk can accumulate.

40:42You know, throwing$250 million into an election and then being handed over the keys to the entire federal government and making literal life or death decisions for millions of people around the globe. That just, like, doesn't exist for them. So, and if anything, they think that's good because these are the winners. They're the ones who deserve their place in society. So to me, it's no surprise that you go from a sort of generic libertarianism to an overt corporate authoritarianism, which is the ideology that many of these people embrace. So, you know, for me, those things are entirely consistent.

41:19And speaking of Elon Musk, you know, there's no one who better represents the casual psychopathy of this class of people than our nation's first trillionaire, although SpaceX has taken a big old hit since their IPO. And I think Elon is no longer for the moment a trillionaire. But don't worry, folks, he's doing just fine. He still has more wealth than the human mind could ever begin to comprehend, let alone deploy. In any case, Elon had this very interesting, contentious interview with someone from The Economist. A lot of the focus was on, and understandably so, was on his Islamophobia and this whole debate about grooming gangs and all of this sort of stuff.

41:59But I also paid very close attention to his discussion of AI. And he's someone who has long thought there is a pretty solid chance that AI is an existential risk to literally destroy all of humanity. She asked him about this. And just take a listen to how casual he is about the prospect of, yeah, what I'm doing, it might destroy all of humanity. But what are you going to do?

42:23Emily Jashinsky:Do you think there's still a 10 to 20 percent chance that killer robots mean the end of humanity? that's a high p doom as they say well in the long run we're all dead of course um you know um so i mean so i mean like according to the standard model of physics the end of the universe is um a long, boring, sort of thin gray soup of gradual cooling. Meaning it's sort of the heat death of the universe is called. So if the heat death of the universe is in fact the outcome for our reality, then it really is all about the journey. Because the destination is terrible. Yeah, but 10 years is not very...

43:12We're all going to die anyway, Emily. So whatever. If I'm the one that causes it, well, that'll be more exciting than the long, slow death of the universe, I suppose.

43:20Emily Jashinsky:He's giving teal when Ross Douthat was like, was there a chance that you're the Antichrist? And he answers. He takes like that long pause. And then it's like, no, but you're right. What did you say? The casual psychopathy? That's a perfect description of Silicon Valley. Crazy. I mean, and the other part of his AI discussion, he's basically like, well, look, originally I was concerned about this. That's why I was doing open AI and I wanted to control it. Then I realized that all the things I was doing were just leading to more acceleration. So I just sort of threw my hands up and joined the party.

43:54And I want you to think about that. Like this man is genuinely one of them, unfortunately, one of the most powerful people on the entire planet. right? When he decided that we should destroy the entire USAID budget and subject, you know, kids dying of malaria to actual death in Africa, he was able to figure out how to do that. You're not going to use any of that influence and power. And I see no evidence that he's used any of his influence and power at the Trump administration to try to have some sort of, you know, global cooperation agreement with regard to AI development, to put some sort of testing or guardrail system in place, to try to, at the very least, slow down and manage the rollout of this incredibly powerful technology.

44:34I see zero evidence that any of his immense wealth and power with the Trump administration specifically has been spent in that direction. Instead, he's just like, well, the first thing I tried didn't work out. So I guess I'm just going to join the race and perhaps myself be the person who destroys all of humanity. These are the people who right now are in control. You don't need to take away our votes. They already are running the show. But you want to make sure, you want to guarantee that the Elon Musk of the world can have infinite power forever and all of their completely insane and bananas ideas.

45:08And their, you know, frankly, like death cult that they're participating in to try to destroy this planet and make sure that they and, you know, a few people that they see as worthy can flee and escape to Mars or whatever their crazy plan of the day is.

45:22Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. And he's, again, one of those people who started with this, this like web 1.0 idealism. And to your point, like open AI going from nonprofit, like he fought that. But here we are, 2026, he, the Starlink influence over the conflicts in Israel and Ukraine is a great example of concentrated power. Like Elon Musk, in his hands, in his hands, he had the power to have dramatic influence over both those wars, because the U.S. government had to turn to him, or Ukrainian government, Israeli government had to turn to him on Starlink. And that's a big deal for a drone-based war, essentially like looking at Ukraine, where that war ended up going.

46:09Emily Jashinsky:He's massively, massively powerful. And right now, I mean, we're not talking about the future. We're talking about literally right now, Crystal, the amount of power that's in his hands is astounding, and nobody is doing anything about it. So it's not surprising that you have Democrats and Republicans across polling upset about data centers. It's not just that they're mad about data centers on the merits. It's a proxy issue, too, for the concentration of power and the control of the economy and the control of the culture in the world. Well, that's a great segue to some new polling, some new evidence of just how disgusted Americans are with their lack of democratic control, specifically around data centers.

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48:47Emily Jashinsky:change. Change wisely. So a wild new infographic shows exactly how Francesca Hong has taken the lead in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary. We had her on the show yesterday. She is a DSA aligned candidate who, according to the pollings, is kind of running away with this thing at this point. Put this image up at the screen. So this is a they use the state of Wisconsin here to fill in as a sort of word cloud what voters say they are voting based on. And this is specifically Democratic voters in the Democratic primary. And Emily, the two things that jump out are health care and data centers.

49:30Just below that is affordability, then economy, then Trump, then I would say rights. And after that, every electability is a little bit smaller after that, and education. But the big one that really stands out here is data centers. And in a previous earlier debate, there was a debate last night, but this is from an earlier debate in this race. The candidates for the Democratic nomination were all asked if they would support a one-year moratorium on data center construction. And Francesca Hong was the only person who raised her hand and said that she would. Let's take a look at that.

50:07Emily Jashinsky:Do you support a one year or longer moratorium on data center construction in Wisconsin?

50:16Right.

50:17Emily Jashinsky:Thank you. We talked to Francesca some about this yesterday. This has really been a centerpiece of her campaign, Emily, and I bet a number of those candidates would like to go back and have that have a redo on how they answered that question. I mean, that's—Kathy Hochul just did the one-year moratorium, and none of these other Wisconsin Democrats—Wisconsin has been actually a pretty hot spot of this debate. The Man Talk Minute guy was leading the charge against the developing data centers in the southeastern part of the state. Like, this is—actually has rallied people in Wisconsin. So to be that either bought and paid for or ignorant of where people stand on this issue is truly ridiculous.

50:59Emily Jashinsky:Like, there's just no excuse for that at this point politically. Now, I doubt that they have, like, really great arguments on the merit against the one-year moratoriums. You know, people can make those arguments, but I doubt that's what they're doing. It seems to me like they're just completely out of touch with their own voters because they're all cynical politicians, or politicians are by nature cynical. No offense to the politicians out there who watch Breaking Points. I'm sure there are many of you, but you're making cynical political calculations in a gubernatorial election. So that to look at her being the only one saying she would support a one year moratorium in a world where Kathy Hochul just did that because she's seen this up close in her own state.

51:40Emily Jashinsky:Amazing to see that. I have to give some credit to Kathy Hochul, not only on this, but on other issues. She has read the polls. She sees where the wind is blowing And she has proven herself to be a very adept politician in terms of moving to where the public is, recognizing the power of Zoran's movement, the energy there, repositioning herself to be less adversarial. And she did that early. You know, I don't know if you remember, she appeared at a rally for him in advance of his, you know, his election battle against Cuomo in the general election. So she has proven to be relatively nimble and her finger much more on the polls than a lot of other Democratic politicians who are out there.

52:23Let's put F2 up on the screen. You can see what the fallout is here for the rest of Francesca Hong's competitors. This is pretty wild. This is a state navigate poll for the Wisconsin governor Democratic primary. and Francesca Hong now is at 44%, nearing a majority, David Crowley at 15, Mandela Barnes at 14, and the other competitors, you know, down below 5%. Now the undecided is just at 13%. So in prior polls, Emily, there were, and this is what Francesca actually told us yesterday, in prior polls, the undecided number was really quite large. And I'm sure her competitors, both David Crowley and Mandela Barnes, were hoping that those undecideds were going to hear about Francesca Hong and how radical she was, and they were going to flip to them, and that would help them make up the gap.

53:10Well, people are now deciding their votes, and they're overwhelmingly, according to this poll anyway, going for Francesca Hong. And I think it does come back to something you and I briefly discussed yesterday, which is if you are a DSA-aligned candidate, if you have that worldview, more or less, you have a worldview. you. You're not afraid to take a stand and say, yeah, I support a one-year moratorium on data centers. That's easy for you all day long. If you're one of these centrist candidates who's trying to sort of pick your spots and placate donors and use the standard talking points and avoid really taking a stand on anything, that is just not cutting it in a Democratic primary this year.

53:50Voters know where they stand and they want to know that their political representation stands alongside of them. So the fact that she's been able to be very clear on a host of issues that are truly, truly centrally important to Democratic voters, I think has set her apart. And she's running away with it. Keep in mind, she's a state rep, okay? Probably the vast majority of people in the state have never heard of her until very recently. Many of them still haven't heard of her up to this point. Mandela Barnes is the lieutenant governor. So he's someone who has statewide name recognition. And it doesn't matter.

54:23It reminds very much of Graham Plattner coming out of nowhere to just wipe the floor with Janet Mills, who was the sitting governor of the state, because people saw what he had to say and his very clear vision and said, that's the view that I share that view. And I want my political representation to hold that view as well.

54:38Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. And I don't know if we can put the numbers back up on the screen, but look at this math. This shows that there's no South Carolina Clyburn option here in Wisconsin, meaning the plot to you totally undermine Bernie Sanders. So Hong is at 44 percent and don't know is at 13 percent. So what you would need is everyone except for Crowley or Barnes, one of them, to drop out. And then you would need to win most of those undecided voters over if this poll is accurate. And it does track with some other polling that shows her with a pretty significant lead. So it's looking like the election's in about two weeks.

55:15Emily Jashinsky:It's looking like she's running away with this and there is no option to consolidate. Actually, Michigan is a good example. There's no McMorrow dropout option on the table here to try and boost Crowley or Barnes. Again, at least if this poll is tracking with their internals, which when you have a race that looks like this, you have so many different candidates, it's a state-based primary, polling can be difficult, but this looks like it's hers to lose at this point, clearly hers to lose at this point. And your point about moral clarity and the politics of moral clarity right now, when you have people who are just fed up with the system, Donald Trump proved this in 2016.

55:54Emily Jashinsky:You had all these other candidates saying they were going to, like, tinker around the edges of the system, and you didn't really know where they stood on Iraq and Afghanistan. Jeb Bush was running. So what would a Jeb Bush foreign policy look like versus a George Bush foreign policy? Trump comes out, and he's like, nope, we're done. No new wars. No new dumb wars. He said different variations of it. He says, we're building a wall. That was totally different than what Rubio was offering. It was totally different even than what Ted Cruz was offering. And it was like he's gone back on no new wars.

56:28Emily Jashinsky:That's a huge problem for him and whoever inherits his movement. And part of why it feels like such a betrayal to people is that there was this, for him, sense of like moral clarity. As funny as that sounds to people, it's compared to the others. It's compared to the establishment. it comes across as like a clear sense of direction because it is an indictment of the establishment. And that is very attractive to voters right now. It's why populists are doing well across the board on the left and on the right. And if you're not picking up on that, like if you're not even Kathy Hochuling right now, you're pretty far behind.

57:01And one thing that is really different here from the Trump dynamic is Trump is very singular, to use the word that you used earlier. He is very singular and he doesn't actually have a coherent worldview. He has a forceful view, depending on the day. It can be in any number of directions. Whereas what we're seeing now is truly a sort of coherent movement ideology that is succeeding in, you know, a lot of variety of places across the country. So you can no longer just say, well, Zoran's a kind of a one-off because he's so talented and he's so charismatic and it's New York City. And then you go, OK, well, we have these other candidates in New York City are associating themselves with Zoran and they're all winning.

57:42OK, and by the way, it's not just New York City. Let's take a look at Colorado and Milat Kuros being able to unseat a relatively progressive, except on Israel, incumbent there in Diana DeGette. OK, let's take a look at Maine. And even with Graham Plattner being pushed to the side because of a credible sexual assault allegation, the guy who replaced him and won overwhelmingly, Troy Jackson, he was backed by DSA in his gubernatorial candidacy and is a longtime Bernie Sanders aligned candidate. it. Then you take a look at the Midwest. Not only do you have Francesca Hong in Wisconsin appearing to run away with it, you have another heated battle between Peggy Flanagan and Angie Craig.

58:20Angie Craig being the establishment pick in Minnesota. It's looking very much like Peggy Flanagan is going to be able to win that battle and then put F6 up on the screen. Abdul Al-Sayed, this is really a marquee race. This is coming down to the wire next week. This is F6, guys. Guys, new poll has him up by 10 points here on Haley Stevens and gaining ground, by the way. And when you push the what they call leaners, so people who aren't sure and you say, OK, but if you had to pick right now, who would you pick? He's up by double digits. He's up by 11 points in that scenario, 48 percent to 37 percent.

58:55He has a much higher favorability than Haley Stevens does in this poll. And this is in spite of the fact that AIPAC has really wanted to make an example of Abdul. You know, the mailboxes have been flooded with these mailers, making it seem like Haley Stevens was endorsed by Barack Obama, even though she wasn't smearing Abdul El-Sayed as some sort of a secret sexist. The airwaves are absolutely blanketed. And yet in spite of that, he still has the edge here. I mean, that is absolutely extraordinary that in the face of that wave of money that would have undoubtedly been successful in the past, was successful in the past against Jabal Bowman, was successful against Cori Bush.

59:34This time around, Democratic-based primary voters in the state of Michigan, a key swing state with a very rural, urban, all sorts of demographics, races, religions, the whole gamut in Michigan, they are not buying it.

59:50Emily Jashinsky:And if you look at that poll, it also had undecideds at 14%. And so that's with a week. yeah, less than a week now to go before Election Day. And the Al-Sayed momentum is going—or the momentum, I should say, is going with Al-Sayed. So that's really, really bad news for Haley Stevens, who potentially looking at in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the upper Midwest, primary victories by the DSA-aligned candidates, like, across the board. So as soon as those primaries are wrapped up in the next couple of weeks, the table's going to be set in all likelihood for some real battles with DSA-aligned candidates for the populist left going forward.

1:00:32Emily Jashinsky:I mean, that's—if you're here in Washington at the DNC, you're looking at those numbers and thinking to yourself, I was going to say something that I should not say, but that is why you're thinking to yourself. You're like, oh my gosh. I was just reminded there's this great Twitter account that's 10 years ago today. It posts pictures from 10 years ago today. Oh, yeah. And it reminded me of my favorite picture from the 2016 DNC, which is Susan Sarandon shaking her head, watching what's happening on the floor, just completely seething, which if you were a Democrat in 2016, many people were completely seething watching this coronation of Hillary Clinton.

1:01:07Emily Jashinsky:2026, maybe people just had to be patient, Crystal, because this is a route. It's shaping up to be a total route in 2026. The establishment is thoroughly discredited. Their strongest weapon against the left was electability. Oh, and also this like weird identity racial resentment politics that they're still trying to use. And I think it's just been the electability piece has just been so thoroughly discredited. I think the identity racial resentment piece has been fairly discredited as well. It doesn't seem to be landing in the same way it did when Hillary Clinton was using this against Bernie Sanders back in 2016.

1:01:39How are you going to say, oh, we can tell you who's electable? Donald Trump's in the White House. You told us you knew what you were doing. This man is back here again. You were not able to vanquish him. We've been doing it your way. We don't believe you anymore. And there's a new media ecosystem that, you know, is able to break through. And it's not just, you know, like lefty lefty shows, but, you know, Midas Touch is very progressive. And a lot of people who used to be MSNBC watchers are now like Midas Touch watchers. And they're very favorable towards candidates like Bernie Sanders, candidates like Abdul Syed.

1:02:10So it is a very new dynamic in the Democratic Party. Question now is how much that translates into the general election. And I did want to put this F3 up on the screen. This is the white whale for Democrats trying to win Texas. You've got Tallarico here in a new poll up by five points. What's interesting is that both he and Ken Paxton lost a little bit of ground from the last time. But this is Texas Public Opinion Research did a survey in the field. So in any case, Tallarico up five in this. Not sure what the margin of error here is, but this would be probably just outside of the margin of error.

1:02:48Could put F4 up on the screen. I'm not sure that I fully buy this because this just seems like too much of a shift. But according to this pollster, there has been a mass shift of Latino voters away from Paxton, who in May, just months ago, was leading among Latino voters in Texas by four points. two Tallaricos now winning by 46 points. Like I said, I'm a little bit skeptical that there have been that many minds change, but surely that represents some sort of a shift towards Tallarico. And then, you know, we were talking yesterday. I don't remember if this was on camera or off camera about whether or not Dems had a shot in Texas.

1:03:27And you were saying you thought Beto had a little bit more juice. It is interesting if you compare the polls, we can put F4B up on the screen. In terms of the polling, which we all know to take with a lot of grains of salt at this point, at this point in 2018, according to the average of four polls, Ted Cruz was up on Beto by six points. It was the kind of polls that people were looking at and go, okay, well, maybe you got a shot, but Ted Cruz still has an edge. Now, in an average of five polls, you've got Tallarico, actually, with a narrow margin over Ken Paxton. So like I said, grains of salt for polling all around.

1:04:00But that did kind of catch my attention here just because it was different from what I recalled. You know, in my mind, the polls were a little bit different for Beto at this point in the race. But, you know, he was not in any sort of consistent way showing he was in a tie or even in a lead. And he ended up coming extraordinarily close to Ted Cruz. So I don't know. What do you think?

1:04:21Emily Jashinsky:Well, believe it or not, I think that Ken Paxton in 2026 is a worse candidate than Ted Cruz in 2018. Extraordinary accomplishment for him, by the way, on that. Truly, truly, yes. So I actually just think Ken Paxson is such a flawed and difficult candidate for Republicans to sell in this race that it wouldn't surprise me if Tallarico gets a boost because of that in a way that like Beto versus Cruz, like Ted Cruz is Ted Cruz, but at least in 2018, it wasn't really until after the 2018 election that he started becoming much more aligned with the McConnell wing of the Republican Party, much closer to Senate leadership.

1:04:57Emily Jashinsky:It was after that election that Ted Cruz started making that transition. And beforehand, he was still kind of—he had a little bit of his Tea Party juice left in him. So there was something that he could make a slightly more coherent kind of populist right case in a way that he couldn't now. And Ken Paxton tries to make a populist right case, but he's Ken Paxton. Like, he just—Ted Ted Cruz has won elections in Texas, so people can decide how they feel about Ted Cruz. Like, I'm sure most of our viewers don't like Ted Cruz, but for a while he was really popular with conservative voters. He was seen as somebody who was deeply anti-establishment.

1:05:32Emily Jashinsky:This is why he was the second to Trump in 2016, is he was seen as somebody who was both this kind of conservative movement figure and very deeply opposed to the GOP establishment, which was the combination that people were looking for, or some people were looking for back in 2016. So it is—I think Paxton is just going to run behind Cruz, probably. I'm looking at the RCP average in this race. Paxton is only up 0.6, plus 0.6. 45.2 in the RCP average is where he is. Tallarico is at 44.6. The latest New York Times-Siena poll from the end of June had them in a dead heat, just an absolute tie at 47 percent of the electorate.

1:06:15Emily Jashinsky:So it'll be interesting to see how Tallarico runs compared with the rest of the country, because obviously Dems had a huge advantage in the generic congressional ballot in 2018, bigger than Dems have at this point in the cycle right now. But is Tallarico going to outrun Dems around the country in Texas? I don't think he's going to—honestly, I don't think he's going to win the race. It could happen, of course. I don't think he's going to. I think it's still Texas. But I do think Ohio, North Carolina, those potentially Maine, although I don't think it's going to be nearly as close as it probably would have been.

1:06:48Emily Jashinsky:Those are going to be Nebraska, Dan Osborne in Nebraska. I think those are going to be more nail biters than Republicans realize right now. And obviously, they have a race on their hands in Texas. They're going to have to spend a ton of money on it. Last thing I wanted to say, Crystal, just as we're talking about 2018, is if we could put that Wisconsin map up on the screen again. This is F1. Look at how small—you pointed this out—look at how small Trump is compared to health care, data centers, affordability. That, in 2018, polling still found something similar. But Democrats on the campaign trail, they were talking about health care, and they were talking about Trump and Russia.

1:07:25Emily Jashinsky:The 2018 election was run by Democrats on health care, mostly. But a lot of it was this cultural signaling against Trump. And that is, I think, the big difference between probably Beto at his point when he ran and a lot of 2018 candidates. And right now what you're seeing from Democrats is that you don't hear the constant Trump, anti-Trump virtue signaling. There's more focus on, I think, the policy. And that makes it much harder for establishment Democrats who want to confuse voters about who they are and the way that they'll fight, etc. Because it's very easy. I mean, this is Haley Stevens. She's got her yard signs that say, stick it to them, right?

1:08:06And they want to be able to run campaigns that are just like generic. I'm going to fight Trump. Well, what does that mean? And voters aren't having it. They have very specific policy concerns, and they want to hear those clearly expressed and reflected in their political leaders. I do think that is an extraordinary change. And the last comment I'll make about the tennis vote, the Texas vote, is that you're right about Ted Cruz being a stronger candidate because he also has been, I think, still able to kind of straddle the divide in the Republican Party between, which is really evident in Texas, between the like Trump mega types and the, in Texas, like the Bush wing of the party.

1:08:46And John Cornyn, who Paxton was able to be, was much more emblematic of that Bush wing of the Republican Party that really kind of hates the Ken Paxton's of the world. I mean, this is the wing of the party that literally impeached him in the House in Texas. They hate him more than,

1:09:02Emily Jashinsky:John Cornyn hates Paxton more than he hates Mark Warner, right? Yes, absolutely the case. And Paxton is a genuinely odious criminal figure, like corrupt, personally odious. Like there is so much there with him. And so you also have a possibility of, There's a good number of voters for Cornyn who said, I'm not voting for Ken Paxton. That is another issue for Republicans here. And Democrats, obviously, very unified behind Tallarico. There is a lot of excitement for him from the people I know in Texas on the ground among the Democratic base. I think Latinos are the swing demographic in the state to watch.

1:09:39You know, are they going to stay more with Republicans or are they, you know, disgusted with the economic decline, with the war, with some of the absolute cruelty with regard to the deportation efforts? Does that swing them more towards a James Tallarico? I don't know. It's going to be an interesting one.

1:09:56Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, that's where I think some of the culture war stuff is going to the Hispanic voting bloc. I think that's going to be a big deal. Tallarico's faith is going to, he's going to play it up and Republicans are going to attack it in different ways. So definitely they have a race on their hands, no question about it. They're going to have to spend a ton of money. The polling is like obvious on that point. So man, what a cycle. We're excited to keep covering it here, Crystal. Absolutely. All right. Well, that does it for us here today. Tomorrow, I will be in again with Sagar. So look forward to that.

1:10:29And Emily and I are going to jump onto an AMA live now. If you want to participate in those, become a premium subscriber at breakingpoints.com. We will see you guys soon.

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