Will 2024 Be Our Last Election? with Andrew Yang & Stephen Marche

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0:32Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians, to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

1:06Anyways, let's get to it.

1:15The last election, that title alone is chilling. If no candidate can amass the 270 170 electoral vote majority, who wins? Is the stage then set for a corrupt seize of power? Would that be the end of the American democracy? As you'll hear in this interview with Andrew and Stephen, given our political climate, this book is as much a warning as it is a political thriller, and that's frightening. America is in danger, and we need to be honest with ourselves and each other to find a way to fix it.

1:54Joining me now on Open Book, Andrew Yang and Steve Marche. They are authors of The Last Election. Man, what a book. I mean, this book is scary and it's entertaining. How did you guys come to work together? Why don't we start there? Then we'll go a little bit into the book, but I don't want to break any spoilers. Sure thing. I interviewed Stephen on his book, The Next Civil War, on my podcast. And we connected on our shared concerns about what's coming out of Pike, the US. So then when I hatched the idea, it's like, you know, we should try and put an alarm bell out in a story format that people can sink their teeth into.

2:32And Stephen said, I write fiction as well. And I have a bunch of research that didn't make it into the next civil war. So let's team up. And Stephen, what do you think of Mr. Yang, right? He's the everybody politician, though, no? I mean, I mean, because he's not even a politician, which makes it so refreshing when he had great ideas, Mr. Yang. So let's talk about Mr. Yang for a second and pretend he's not here. I mean, he's been a marvelous collaborator. I really like the guy. Like, I mean, it's it's definitely been one of the great pleasures of this process, getting to know Andrew. He is truly a patriot with a practical mindset.

3:04I mean, we like what we don't like aesthetically is the screaming and the rage and the pointlessness of American politics, the non-policy aspects of American politics. So it was quite a natural fit that way. And then the collaboration itself was just peanut butter and jelly. Like it just worked from the beginning. I mean, it's the easiest collaboration I've ever done. I think it was the same for Andrew. Yeah, same. Andrew, I want to test something. I was out with Dan Abrams last night. I think we both know Dan. He's on Newsmax. He's an anchor there. Also does some work at ABC. He said to me that in polling, and again, I don't know if this is true because I didn't look at it myself, but he said in polling, two thirds of America agrees on about 85 % of the issues.

3:45If you went down gun control, all the major issues, two thirds of America agrees with that. The majority of the Americans do not want to vote for Joe Biden or for Donald Trump, the majority of the Americans. And they feel frozen in this stasis of boomerism, aging boomerism. And they feel frozen in this like sclerotic political process that is unshakable, unmovable. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree with any of that? What's your reaction to that? And if you agree with that. How do we change it, Andrew? Yeah, Dan's numbers are spot on. Two thirds of Americans don't want Biden or Trump. Two thirds of Americans can find common ground on just about any issue you can name immigration, climate, abortion, even.

4:27So why are we so stuck? I mean, you can look at each party and explain it pretty readily. The Democrats aren't having a genuine primary, in part because they want to insulate Joe from any real competition, which I think is a calamitous mistake. I think that they should open him up to competition. And if they don't do that, they should at a minimum have a vice presidential primary and say, hey, we all know that my VP might take over for me. So let's actually have a bit of a debate as to who that should be. So the Democratic Party is frozen. And then the Republican Party is frozen in Trump world until he gets ushered off the stage, which, you know, you and I hope is right now, but it doesn't look like it's happening prior to the 2024 general.

5:11Yeah, no, exactly. But I mean, here's the thing. I mean, Kamala Harris, she sucks. I mean, just be honest. Okay. And she may be the nicest person in the world. And I don't know her personally, but I'm just talking about you've had a two and a half, three year run as VP. You're nowhere to be found. And nobody has any confidence that you can take over. Franklin Roosevelt said, you know what, we're getting rid of John Nance. We're getting rid of Henry Wallace. And I'm going for the fourth time for the presidency with Harry Truman. And again, we know that sausage was made to do that. But come on, guys, this is virtue signaling now because of her color and because of her sex, they are not going to call this stuff out.

5:45And I got to tell you, that is damaging America that we're losing our meritocracy. What's your reaction? No, I mean, I'd say, too, I mean, you can also throw Joe Biden's age into the mix. And the fact is, if you have those issues, then you kind of owe it to the American people to get up there and compete and say, hey, guys, don't worry about it. So I do want to dig in for a minute. And Anthony, this is going to be my pitch to you and to people listening to this. Like I have a feeling people listening to this feel somewhat politically adrift or homeless. They're probably in the two third zone. They can't believe that this might be the matchup in 24.

6:20And I've kicked off the forward party with some people, you know, Governor Christy Todd Whitman, Kerry Healy, who is Mitt Romney's lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, Chris Novoselic, who co-founded Nirvana with Kurt Cobain. And we're creating a new home for people. I dare say that you, Anthony, would be right at home because there are a bunch of people who are just straight up the middle, rational business owners and operators. And where do they belong in today's political environment? You need more than these two parties. You know, Miles Taylor hit me up for a donation for you guys. So I've dropped money.

6:52Miles Taylor, sure. Yeah, throw it in there. Yeah. Anthony, you're already one of us. What am I talking about? So just throwing it out to the rest of the country. I'm a big believer in what you're doing, Andrew. I'm a huge fan of yours. Obviously, you know I supported your mayoral candidacy, including the PAC that you were involved with. All right, let's get to the book, though, because this is a phenomenal book. It is a cautionary tale. It's entertaining. It's scary. There's a doomsday leading up to the 2024 election, if you will. It seems like the third-party candidate, Cooper Sherman, will upset the balance between the two parties.

7:25Tell us what's going on. So Steve and I were trying to game plan what the heck happens if a major independent runs for office. So there's some of me in there, some of Mark Cuban in there, some of Dan Gilbert in there, not to give too much away. But the party is called the Maverick Party, which is a bit of a Cuban call out. And we tried to tell as realistic a story as we could as to what that campaign actually looks like from the inside and then what impact that would have. Yeah. And we wanted to, the frame of it as a contingent election, which is a sort of a little known historical phenomenon.

8:00If no one gets to 270 electoral college votes, that goes into effect. And that would be a, that was a sort of warning about what a constitutional election would look like. That's very much not democratic, right? And where it fits what the constitution says, but the winner hasn't won the popular vote or the Electoral College vote. And sort of that was the imagining of how America, the Republic would end. So I have a theory. I want to test it on both. You get your reaction. I think Ross Perot killed the third party movement in the country back in 1992. And for our young listeners, Perot ran in 92.

8:39Clinton and Bush, Bush the elder were running. He took 19.9 % of the vote. Bill Clinton won that election. He got to the 270, but he won the election with only 43 % of the popular vote. And I think Ross Perot scared the living daylights, guys, out of the oligopoly or the duopoly. The Republicans and the Democrats got together and said, okay, let's lock and load and block a third party. They need XYZ number of petitions. They need ZYX legal things. And they put up all of these major guardrails, obstacles, and barriers so that you could barely get into all 50 states if you were a third-party candidate.

9:172012, there was a gentleman, you may remember him, I'm going blank on his name, but he tried to start a movement over the internet to create a third party. Peter Ackerman, Americans Elect. Yeah, Americans Elect. There you go. And he came to see me and he explained to me what he was doing. It seemed like a great thing, but Andrew, it felt like web vans. Okay. And web vans went bankrupt. We know that web vans is Instacart. Web vans 25 years ago got started with bankrupt. Instagram became a success, has now gone public in the past couple of days. I guess my question to you guys is, did they do it?

9:49Did they freeze themselves into this duopoly where you can't see a third party really entering the mix, making seismic change to the country? Or is there a icebreaker in there that you guys are working on? Oh, we're working on it. And what's fascinating is that the number of self-identified independence is just about doubled since Ross Perot ran in 92. Back then it was 25 % and he got 19%. Today it's 49%. And if you had, I think the right candidates and the right process, you could really win. You know, if you just look at those numbers, cause you don't need 51 % to win, you need the right 37, 38%.

10:26It's a very, very high bar, but I think it's very realistic. I do think that you're going to have multiple candidates run outside of the two party system this cycle, in part because two thirds of Americans don't want Biden or Trump. And so other people are going to look at that and say, oh, this is this is my chance. The obstacles are real, but the opportunity is getting bigger and bigger. And Peter Ackerman's Americans elect was going to be over the Internet. One of the things I'm going to put out to you all right now, which is not in the book, though, we could have put it in the book, is imagine a process where you can vote for a presidential candidate on your smartphone.

11:01It gets verified via a personalized QR code that gets sent to your mailing address, which is very hard to defraud. And then you have, let's say, The Rock, Mark Cuban, me, Justin Amash, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Nina Turner, whoever your favorite candidate is who would be ill served by the two party system. By the way, we're a country of 330 million people. We're going to get Biden versus Trump. It makes no sense. But if you think about a lot of the excellent people out there who would make great presidents, a lot of them know that they're going to get done dirty by one of the two parties that they decide to run.

11:35I mean, heck, again, the Democrats aren't even having a primary. So imagine a genuinely open lowercase d Democratic primary that everyone can vote for on their smartphones, it would leave the legacy parties leapfrogged because they would say, no, no, no, this internet primary, your vote isn't real. What is real is waiting to hear what 7 % of Iowans think and, you know, 20 % of South Carolinians. And then the people around the rest of the country would be like, what are you talking about? I'm finally in the 21st century. So this is 100 % on the table, Anthony. It may not come to pass in 24, but it can as soon as 28.

12:08And by the way, a political party can design its own primary process however it wants. Everything I just said is 100 % legit. It's just the two current parties don't want us to have a say. They want to lock down the process, control it, and make sure that their chosen candidate is the only candidate. I mean, when I was, you know, I came at this, I'm not an insider like you guys. I was like, I'm an outsider. But when I came to sort of write the book and get the details of the, of even things like how debates are set up, very basic functions of like how the process is run. It really is a cartel between the two parties.

12:39They intentionally exclude other people. And that by doing that, incidentally, the incentives that are created for the parties are are, you know, that is a major problem here that they create this partisanship. I mean, it's like you said before, like two thirds of Americans could come to some kind of reasonable compromise. But the system is actually set up to prevent them from doing that because the loathing and fury fuels these these parties and raises money for them and essentially keeps them, you know, outside of competition. And that's actually like that's actually built into the structure of American politics.

13:15It's not the problem isn't the people. The problem is actually these structures. So so I have two theories. Again, I want to test on both. You get your reactions. OK, theory number one, the gerrymandering is now completely outrageous. You know, Operation Red Map for the Republicans, the blue state project for the Democrats. It's absolutely outrageous. I submit rhetorically, are we in a democracy? Are we in a democracy if the candidates themselves are picking the voters? I thought the voters were supposed to pick the candidates. That's number one. The second theory I have is I think Citizens United has by and large destroyed the country because Citizens United, to understand constitutional law, is the Plessy versus Ferguson for the democracy.

13:55And so let me just go to Plessy quickly. Supreme Court said in Plessy that you could have separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites. It led to widespread segregation in the South. It took 80 years for the court to go back on that with Brown versus the Board of Education, which caused the formal integration of the education system. But this Citizens United has funneled the money into it. These politicians are now bought and paid for. If you look at the tax breaks, the corporate welfare, and you look at the indifference to middle and lower middle class people, they don't need them anymore.

14:28They screen out their enemies from their districts. They take the money in from the very, very rich, and they do exactly what the very rich want and the defense contractors want. And we're in this stasis. And the people that you're supporting and the people that Andrew's working for are left out. What is your reaction to those two? Yeah, it's spot on. We're in something of a fake democracy at the moment. One of the numbers I give, and this speaks to your gerrymandering point, the congressional approval rating as we're having this conversation is about 20 percent. The reelection rate for incumbent members is 94 percent.

15:02Think about that. That's a better win rate than the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls for people like you and me, Anthony. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so you look at that and say, how the heck can that be so divergent? And it's because 90 percent of the districts are drawn to be either quite blue or quite red, because if there's anything the two parties can agree on is we don't like to compete. The fact is 75 percent of Americans live in a one party state where one party controls the trifecta. There are only a sliver of competitive races around the country because the lines have been drawn that way. And it's making more and more Americans angry and frustrated.

15:35Again, imagine if you were pissed off like four to five of us are apparently and you can't do anything because your district has been drawn to be noncompetitive. Then what are you left with? You end up being left with really only one race, the presidential race. That's the only one you can touch. And that's how we got Donald Trump, in my opinion, is that there's no real pressure release valve for the will of the vast majority of Americans right now. And so it's going to lead us last election style up to something very, very negative and dark. Or we're going to modernize and innovate our way out of this.

16:11I'm grinding away to make the second thing happen. But when I was at the event with you this past week, Anthony, some young people came up to me and they said to me, it's like, hey, are we going to do the reforms before or after? And I said, this being America, probably after, you know, like after the what, though, you know, and is there an after? And that in many ways is the big question. Let's go to some of the characters in your book, guys. And it's a phenomenal read. I read it very quickly. You have Mikey, the independent campaign manager for Cooper. You have the New York Times journalist, Martha.

16:44Who would you compare them to in the real world? Andrew, don't do it, man. Well, I mean, they're both composites and they're both like they're drawn from, you know, we interviewed lots of people. I interviewed lots of people and we talked to lots of people. I mean, the Martha, you know, I felt like Andrew really gave me this sort of scuttlebutt on how politics actually works. And I asked for honesty about it and he gave me honesty. So I figured I owed him the same thing with journalists. Like I just I just wanted an accurate portrayal of like what how conflicting it is and how difficult it is to be a New York Times journalist and how that leads to sometimes difficult moral choices.

17:22And similarly with Mikey, there's like a bunch of campaign people that that could be. I guess because I've been up and down the political spectrum and obviously had my rough and tumble in politics and saw some of the garishness of it. I mean, it's a rough crowd. Am I wrong? I mean, one thing Trump said to me in the Oval Office, I could tell you guys, he said it to me on a Wednesday. I know that because I was only there for one Wednesday. Okay. I was sitting there with him. And he said to me, you know, these people are nuts. He goes, I thought I was a killer and I was working with these real estate people, these titans, and I thought they were killers.

17:55He goes, the goddamn secretary's down here. We'll pick your eyeballs out and put it in a martini glass. You know, he was like, this is a totally different set of rules, a totally different operation down there. As much as I dislike him, it was an interesting observation about the incentives and the culture in politics. What do you think of that? I think there are certainly people who represent and reflect that kind of culture and mentality where they have a place in the machine and they will fight for it with their life and they will do very, very dark things on behalf of the machine and not think twice about it.

18:30I think that's real. I also think that there are well-intended, noble people who get into those sorts of roles and then are like, what the hell do I do? I think that's actually one of the major themes of the book. But if we don't upend this machine, we're ruined. And that's one of the things that is, And when I say the machine, you could say this corrupt duopoly that's going to keep us from solving any problems and turn us against each other. You could say the media industrial complex that will take anyone and try and twist it to their ends in like a funhouse mirror. You can talk about this layer of bureaucratic types who will just look up and say, hey, I'm just going to wait you out because I've been here 20 years and I'll be here 20 years more and you're going to come and go.

19:19I mean, there are layers to the machine. You can pretty much pick whichever one is your least favorite. And one of the interesting things, Anthony, is when I ran for president, I was running on automation, AI, UBI, a bunch of things. And our slogan was humanity first. It was like, you know, it's essentially humanity versus the machine. I still think that's what we're doing with Forward Party and with this book, which is trying to say, look, guys, you know, we need to get our shit together versus the machines, plural. What was that line from Ezra Klein, Andrew, that we thought about all the time?

19:53Because that to me is like how people are affected by the machine. Like, that's what the book is about. It's like you can be good people, but if you're in this machine, it doesn't really matter. Yeah. So Ezra Klein said, corrupt systems compromise good individuals with ease. And that is in many ways the best summary of where we are. Well, I mean, here's, you know, I think he's right as well. And I listened to him. I read that book. I guess what I'm super worried about is that there's nobody in elected politics that I can point to. You guys, and Andrew's a great advocate, but I'm talking about there's an elected official in the United States, a national figure that's willing to speak the truth about all this and then come up with a prescription to change it.

20:35If I'm wrong about that, tell me who is the elected official in the Congress, he's in the Senate, he's a governor of prominence, and he's like, you know, or she's a governor of prominence, you know, we got to change this. There are elected officials who are aligned and privately sympathetic. The one who's most public about it is Congressman Dean Phillips out of Minnesota. He recently made the news by saying, guys, we need to have a competitive primary against Joe. And as you can imagine, he got shib pretty bad immediately thereafter. He's the only person I know in Congress who said, I'm not going to dial for dollars.

21:14My constituents deserve someone who's actually going to focus on legislating and not fundraising. You can imagine how that endears him to the party. He's a business person who has some means. So that kind of liberates him from the fundraising nonsense. but he's the person who comes to mind for me. Okay. I have to admit that I missed him, you know, and maybe he's just not as well known because you're probably closer. They're trying to suppress the shit out of him, Anthony, honestly. Like he, but he, but he's a good dude. He's like, he's one of us really. And when I met him, I was like, holy shit.

21:51Like, you know, you're, you're the real deal. He came to DC and was like, this is even worse than I thought. It's like that situation. You think that the loop between the journalist and the political candidate, they do favors for each other? They drop dimes on each other? A hundred percent. Like journalists and political, you know this, Anthony. When I got into the White House, Priebus absolutely hated my guts. Of course, he was like, howdy doody. You know, he's like Kenosha, Nostro, you know, the mafia from Wisconsin. hated my guts, but he was all like howdy doody and trying to pretend he was nice to me.

22:24But then he was dropping dimes on me to journalists trying to get them to write nasty articles about me. You know, what's your reaction on that? A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, I never really knew that world, but yeah, access journalism works that way. And of course, I mean, part of the problem that this book is trying to identify, I think Andrew's nonfiction and my nonfiction both identify is that, you know, horse race politics is mostly a bunch of tinsel being shaken in your face, right? Like it's, it's mostly a distraction, like some kind of like melodramatic distraction from the deep structural problems that actually need to be addressed.

22:57Right. I mean, when you say like, who's working on this stuff, there's only one guy that we're immediately going to suppress when everybody knows everybody, everybody who has eyes to see knows that the system is not working and is getting worse. To me, like this, this little game that is played around creating these narratives and dropping these narratives that usually last a few days is so pointless. I mean, it's really one step up from reality television, maybe not even a step. Yeah, which is one reason why we end up with a reality TV star as president. You know what I mean? No question. Well, we're in the entertainment business now.