Is the Progressive Takeover Real?

23:17Right. So just because you're winning the primary doesn't mean you're the TLDR is primaries aren't generals. Yeah, Blake Master won the primary. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, Mark Robinson won the primary down in North Carolina. Christine Emma Wich O'Donnell. I wonder, I'm always, like, galled by this, and I kind of wonder where you sit, because Donald Trump's making hay, as is every single Republican in the party, about the fact that Democratic Socialists are in the vanguard, and they're all commies, and they're going to be coming for your money and your children should they win in 2026 and 2028.

23:50At the same time that Donald Trump is, like, like nationalizing private enterprise and has these like federally run gas stations up and down the East Coast. Like he's practicing socialism. And like I'm not going to like maybe it's time for the federal government to like gas subsidies. I mean, there's a case to be made for a lot of this intervention. And I'm not saying we should be nationalizing private enterprise. But should Democrats point out the sort of socialist tendencies of this administration as hypocrisy? Or is it just too fraught to be aligning yourself in any way with the most questionable parts of the Trump agenda?

24:26Chris Hayes:Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, it's a really important intellectual point, which is that I have never seen a president in my lifetime who was more antagonistic to free markets, to the fundamental sort of like. He's like gas is too high. Chevron and Exxon are making too much profit. He does. He truly does not believe in free markets. And he truly is illiberal on that sense in the old classical like sense of the word. Like, remember, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is written as a polemic against what? Tariffs and mercantilism. Like Donald Trump is fundamentally authoritarian, illiberal and believes in a personalist controlled economy in which he makes all the choices and also believes like as a fund as one of his core ideological commitments, bizarrely, along with like women and people of color inferior, is that like tariffs are how everything works.

25:21Chris Hayes:works, like truly believes to his heart, like in his like the deepest part of him. So he's a mess. Ideologically, he is totally hostile to free markets. One of the things you've seen that's interesting in actually in the polling is that if you ask people about socialism and capitalism, socialism is gaining over capitalism. But people like the notion of free markets. And they also increasingly like the notion of free trade, including people who consider themselves the most sympathetic DSA, which is fascinating. I don't think the hypocrisy thing matters as much as just being like everything's expensive and he doesn't care about you.

25:54Chris Hayes:He's corrupt. No, I'm serious. Like, it's like there's no point in making an ideological argument against. I just mean as a rejoinder to like they're all commies and socialists. It's like, well, actually, you're the fucking socialist. But then that's sort of painting Donald Trump with a socialist brush, which is a turnoff to every. It's like a boner killer for everybody. That's right. He's something totally different. You know what I mean? Like he's in his own category. He's like a he's like a pre Adam Smith monarch. OK, well, then that settles that. No more mention of Donald Trump's socialist policies.

26:22I do. We have to get to the thing that is actually like that. Not that it's not the third rail. I don't know. It's like it is the thing that I think this this week has taught us and maybe this season is teaching us, which is Israel is. And I want to I want to get it something that Ryan Broderick over at Garbage Day writes, the Democratic 2026 Democratic Civil War is a rat's nest of different schisms. It's young versus old, labor versus capital, maybe, progressivism versus the status quo, populism versus elitism. Perhaps more than anything, though, it is a conflict between the Democrats that are willing to accept money from pro-Israel organizations and those who aren't.

26:56Is that fair, Chris?

26:57Chris Hayes:I think it's been one of the biggest fissures. And I do think that there's something about there's there's a few things. One is that I think AIPAC has made, and they don't care what I think, an enormous tactical error. I know. I agree. Just in service of their goals, yes. In service of their goals. And here's the argument I'm going to make. They have relied on a strategy of attempting to trick voters as opposed to making their case. So what they have done in all these cases, and it happened in Michigan, and the New York Times ran an analysis of this, is they have spent enormous amounts of money.

27:35Chris Hayes:Some of the most expensive primaries in history are all APAC primaries. Jamal Bowman, you know, before that the Cori Bush one was very expensive. The Cori Bush-Wellsley Bell one this time was spent$5 million in a relatively small, you know, house race. They spent 30 here. There's another 30 that we still don't know what it was because we don't have the disclosures yet. So like maybe it was that, maybe not. And in all the cases, the vast majority of the ads they ran were not about Israel. They were attempts to paint the person that they were attacking as often insufficiently loyal to the Democratic Party.

28:14Yeah. That's not what they actually believe. And it's not the case they're trying to make to the public. I think it is both toxic for the discourse and also self-defeating to spend tons of money in the attempt to essentially trick the voters. I think it would have been better to spend the money being like, we think Israel is a good ally. What Hamas did was horrible. They're defending themselves or whatever you want to say. Right, right.

28:44Chris Hayes:Here's why Iron Dome is important. And in fact, having Iron Dome leads to less Israeli fatalities, which also does lead to better outcomes in the region. Whatever argument you want to make, they're not making that argument. And there is something insidious about the combination of all of this money where you're trying to trick the voters. And then when people call the money out, you're like, that's out of line. That's anti-Semitic. It's like there's this old expression I love, which is like throwing rocks and hiding hands. It is a lot of throwing rocks and hiding hands for me back at this point.

29:22And I sort of feel like, look, it's a free country and you've got a view.

29:26Chris Hayes:And that view is shared. There's a lot of Democrats that share that view. There's a lot of particularly Jewish Democrats in my life who share that view, who are defensive of the state of Israel. And they think it's under siege and under threat and they don't like the direction the Democratic Party is going on it. You have to make that argument and have the argument on its terms and not attempt to use the catastrophic Citizens United decision to pour a ton of money into races in the hopes of tricking voters into electing a person allied with you, but not on the terms of the thing you actually agree in.

30:00Chris Hayes:And I think that has been an absolutely poisonous, toxic. And it's not I want to be clear. It's not just them. Crypto has been doing the same thing. AI is doing the same thing. this idea that you're going to come in on primaries with this agenda and try to get voters to vote for your candidate, not by making an argument that crypto is good or AI shouldn't be regulated, but rather that like that person is not didn't vote for Kamala Harris or whatever, whatever you think is going to get the primary voter. I just think it's a really toxic way of doing politics. It's been incredibly destructive. It really pushes the debate off into completely different territory.

30:37Well, and it also it also ends up it is ended up connecting in the minds of people, the Israel law, the Israel interests and big money. Yes. And big dark, which is not a connection that you want to create. No, it's not a good connection for Israel. You want to say is like, look, there's actually a lot of people in the Democratic Party who agree with us. Like we're representing them. And again, that's fine.

31:01Chris Hayes:Like I I have different views than AIPAC does on the conduct of the war in Gaza and a bunch of other stuff. But it's true that there's a lot of Democrats who agree with them, right? Totally. You've got to make the case. You've got to make the case. Yes, no one's making that case. And instead, AIPAC is aligned with, like, nefarious outside spending and, you know, trickery, effectively. And so I guess—so the inversion of that is Abdul El-Sayed, you know, to great effect, talked about all the AIPAC money that was flooding his race. They overwhelmingly supported Haley Stevens. They are. AIPAC is now considering pouring millions of dollars into the general election race between Mike Rogers and Abdul Al-Sayed.

31:41Do you think that for a general election campaigning against AIPAC's outside spending is a useful tool for Abdul Al-Sayed or like where is the benefit? Who gets the upper hand?

31:55Chris Hayes:I think it probably is, actually. And again, I want to express some sympathy with the critique that there is something oogie about the like constant invocation of the dark. Yes. The very Jewish, dark Jewish money. Yeah, totally. There is a latent anti-Semitism or explicit. People getting uncomfortable with that, I don't think is crazy. The problem is that it is a fact of the matter that like and and the other thing is, if you're going to have 60 million dollars or 30 million dollars dropped on your head, the only thing that you could do is call it out. So it's like, do you think it meaningfully do you think El-Sayed's ability to use APAC's sort of weaponization against him is more useful to him in the general than the money that Mike Rogers could actually get from APAC?

32:54Chris Hayes:Well, I think because there's going to be an enormous amount of money dropped on his head in that race, that's going to be across the board. It's not like APAC will be a small fraction of it because it's going to be a ton of that Senate majority PAC stuff like the you know, I think calling out that is actually very useful, like just as a general thing. And in the general, most of the money won't be, you know, by and large, it's going to be outside money from corporate interests that have all given money to Donald Trump or to Mitch McConnell's PAC or whatever. And in that case, I think just taking the same line, which is like these people want to like jack up your oil prices and they want to put data centers in your backyard and they want to close down your hospitals so they can get tax cuts.

33:37And they're spending one hundred and fifty two hundred million dollars to beat me.

33:40Chris Hayes:And I think that's, you know, you use the same line there because, again, what else can you do other than, you know, he's not he's he's probably going to be outspent from the outside in this race because Republicans are going to put, you know, a lot of money into that race. Well, it could be the right. I mean, that in Maine, God forbid you are a television viewer in either one of those states in the coming months.

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35:37But as a longtime journalist, I am not interested in the noise or the fear mongering. I'm interested in the stories at the heart of the headlines. That is why every week on my show, Runaway Country, I'm joined by folks in the middle of the crossfire. From disillusioned Maha moms to newly fired immigration judges to Epstein victims themselves to understand what it means to live through this political chaos as an actual human being. And now I'm excited to tell you that Runaway Country is available ad-free to Friends of the Pod subscribers. Friends of the Pod is the subscription that supports the work Crooked does as an independent media company and gives you a ton of great bonus and ad-free content.

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37:03I want to ask about the flip side of all this, which is, let's talk about it, Hassan Piker. This is what Hassan Piker had to say after Abdul Al-Sayed won Michigan, and people began talking about what he needed to do next. Here's that clip.

37:17Alex Wagner:Like everyone being like, Abdullah's a fuck ton of work to do, mending bridges. Here's the fucking take nuke for you, okay? You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of shit, okay? You literally called the dude a fucking terrorist for months on end and like called him a sexist, misogynist, terrorist, bad candidate, doesn't fake doctor when he has like two fucking degrees. And now you're going to sit there and be like, well, you know, you've really got to come to me now. Like, what are you talking about? Do you want to fucking win or not? Lock the fuck in, okay? Lock the fuck in. And I do worry that there are some out there who in an effort to make sure that this narrative that a progressive can win in a state like Michigan doesn't take root will literally either subtly or, you know, not so secretively endorse Mike Rogers.

38:10OK, it is some deep paranoia that people, Democrats, so in so threatened by the rise of Democratic socialists and hardcore progressives on the left wing would support Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed. We can unpack that in a second, but just more broadly, like what the fuck should happen here with Hassan Piker? Like, what should Democrats do? I mean, is this the case where it's like, don't talk about it? Should Abdul El-Sayed continue to campaign with him? We're going to get to like his reach in a second. But just as a specific political actor, like should other Democrats be talking about him? I was on deadline White House with Nicole Wallace and she wanted to ask Mallory McMorrow about Hassan Piker.

38:51And I was just like, this just is not good for anybody. Like what should happen here, Chris?

38:58Chris Hayes:I don't really know. I mean, at one level, like I think there's a little irony in like every the whole discourse being like the left needs a Joe Rogan and then like getting the closest thing to it and being like, not like that, not like that, not like that. No, no, no. Not anyone who says incendiary things. It's like, do you ever watch Joe Rogan's show and he says crazy stuff all the time? Like, it's like, and I do think, I mean, the difference in this case, I think there's a difference between going on someone's show and campaigning with them hugely, right? So, like, I think you can go on lots of people's shows.

39:28Chris Hayes:I've been on a Bill Maher show. Bill Maher says all sorts of things. I know. Not only do I disagree with you, he says some things I really, like, find pretty wrong. And more often with greater frequency. Yeah. So, but, you know, again, it's a free country. So the big question is campaigning with. I don't think it makes a ton of sense in a general election, frankly, to campaign with Hassan Piker. I think you also can't control what a 35-year-old streamer is going to say. I also think that he is learning the lesson that, like, with great power comes great responsibility. And, like, no, seriously.

40:03Chris Hayes:I mean, it's one thing. It's one thing to be like. Like, look, this is a dude who streams like seven days a week for years. Do you know the amount of words he said? Like, you're going to say some stuff. And part of the part of the genre of what he's doing is saying stuff. I'm reminded a lot of Marcos Milica, who was who played a somewhat similar role a generation ago. He's the founder of Daily Kos and was would say pretty like, you know, provocative things and would would curse and be like, F these people. And there was also an attempt to sort of tie him. I also sort of feel like I don't know how much the guilt by association works in the era of Donald Trump.

40:52Chris Hayes:Like the man had dinner with Nick Fuentes. Yeah. Like, not even for any purpose other than, like, let's break bread. I just think let's hang out. Let's hang. I want to hear what you're trying to get his can't help on a campaign. What are you thinking about these days, Nick? I'm interested in your point of view, Nick. So I do think there's a little bit of, like, the associational politics have have lost a little bit of their sting. But the other thing is, like, if Hassan Piker wants to contribute to the success of the movement, like, he's probably going to have to watch what he says a lot more.

41:28And, like, that's not that fun for him. And I get that, like, he's been in a different lane. But one of the things that all of us, I think, with public platforms start to learn is that, like, your words have consequences. Yeah. And it doesn't mean that you like say things you don't believe.

41:47Chris Hayes:It doesn't mean you don't say things you do believe. But it does mean that like how you select your words and the way that you communicate really does matter. And I think that's going to be true across the board. The other thing I'll just say on the substance of what he was saying was the Democratic Party is not dumb. They need him to win so they could have power. Like they're all going to they've all consolidated behind him. They're not so anti DSA that they would literally cede control of this. They want to control the United States Senate. Believe me. Like, very badly. Believe him. They truly do want that.

42:21So. So probably not, Hassan. But the other thing I'll say, too,

42:25Chris Hayes:in the same way that I said it's like a little bit of buy the ticket, take the ride, where it's like AIPAC spent that money and the cost of that is that you're going to get called out. Yeah. Like, Abdul El-Sayed made a choice to campaign with Hassan Piker. I think it probably helped in the primary. And the cost of that is people are going to criticize that. And you got to, like... That's by the ticket to the ride. And you got to come up with a way that you're going to talk about it. I thought that I thought the two best responses to this was Debbie. Did you see Debbie Dingell talking to Greta Van Soster?

42:53Yes. Where she's just like, he's a way to reach a lot of young people who we have a hard time reaching. And he looks good when he works out. This is this is the Debbie Dingell thing. And I was like, you know what?

43:05Chris Hayes:This is a person who is a conduit to reach people who are outside the system that I want to reach. and that's important to me. And that doesn't mean that I agree with everything he says, nor does it mean that he doesn't say things I think are really gross and wrong. Right, you do not have to endorse, in turn, the values of every person that interviews you. That's right, or endorses you, or even works, you know what I mean? And I also thought that the AOC's response to the TMZ's reporter, I can't believe I just said that sentence, who said the AOC's response, the TMZ reporter who was like, aren't you worried about, like, it's not just socialists and there's going to be communists.

43:40And she's like, I'm not the belief police. People can believe what they want to believe. I believe what I believe. I'm going to try to do what I'm going to do.

43:48Chris Hayes:Like, and I do think that, like, that's another way of of sort of threading the needle here. I think it's also just I mean, I think what I'm hearing in your response is it's like about frankness. It's about honesty. It's about not apologizing, but also not glossing over the rougher parts. And don't get defensive. The other thing, though, too, is and this is the thing Mondani is good about is like you got to pivot to what you want the election to be about. Yeah. And right now there's like both the both the sort of mainstream media and the right wing media are like, this is an election about what Hassan Piker said about 9-11 seven years ago.

44:22Chris Hayes:By the way, can I just say this? Ron Johnson, the sitting senator from Wisconsin, is a fully avowed 9-11 truther. and somehow this is like not a story. I'm going to do, I think I'm going to do it either day or soon because I've got a whole thing about this. It's the craziest thing. His, he has gone to conferences. He has said basically he thinks Building 7 was a controlled demon, like the full like control demolition, yeah. Jet fuel doesn't melt steel. Like all the stuff that you and I 20 years ago were hearing from like kooky people outside like an anti-war rally. Like, and I mean, legit, like straight down the line, like, and people have been run out of public life.

45:02They have been hounded. Van Jones had to leave his job in the White House because he signed something that was like very tangentially related to 9-11 truth about we need an investigation, yada, yada. And Ron Johnson's like sitting center just being like, yeah, we think probably, I don't know, but looks like it might've been an inside job. And they want to have these crazy 9-11 discussions. Anyway, it's just, I can't get over that. A good note, good note. But just I mean, as a reminder, the depravity and delusion on the right far outweighs literally anything. Ron Johnson's a 9-11 truth or someone talk to him about that.

45:38Like Mike Rogers was talking about this. I'm like, go call up Ron Johnson and get his takes on 9-11. Totally. What do you think about that? Speaking of alternative facts. No, not alternative facts, but alternative egos. We were talking about Hassan Piker largely because of his sphere of influence. And there is a real kind of gut check happening inside Democratic politics right now about what kind of media matters, what kind of messaging is resonant. Ryan Broderick, who I quoted before from Garbage Day, is like lays out the two axes as he sees them. One is the institutional axis, which includes cable news, podcasts hosted by former Obama and Biden bros.

46:16So we are guilty as charged. The New York Times, Axios, Politico, The Washington Post, blah, blah, blah. the related substacks and X accounts with those folks. And then new media, which is leftist streamers like Hassan Piker, YouTube essayists, he calls them, dark, woke podcasters, Ryan Grimm and DropSite News, Blue Sky users, short-form video content from the DSA, random shit posters. You are an expert in the attention economy. Where do you see, like, if you're mapping out your 2028 presidential campaign, Or even your next three months in your midterm election campaign. Like, where, who matters?

46:57Where is the, like, what is most relevant in terms of, you know, speaking to the voter?

47:06Chris Hayes:I do think one frustration that I had that I expressed in one of the chapters in The Sirens Call, my book about the attention economy, that had a chapter of politics, and that I said a lot when I was doing the book tour when it came out is, the risk aversion of Democratic political class, consultant class around interviews had to go away. Like Haley Stevens, she never came and got her interview. Thank you very much. Well, she was a good example, right? She was a great example, like repeated entreaties, begging. What can we make work? Nothing. Nothing can ever work. Go talk to people. I think that is actually a big thing.

47:43Chris Hayes:You got to go talk to people. And I think actually that's it actually connects to one of the things we're seeing in the Democratic primary electorate, which is that people want good talkers because they felt like they didn't get them. And I like Joe Biden, who in his prime was a great I mean, a truly Fidel Castro level talker. I mean, the man, the man could talk truly the gift of gab. That was not the case of the Joe Biden that was, you know, in the White House. Basement or Basement Joe, the campaigner. And like Kamala Harris is, I would say, a perfectly proficient communicator as a politician, but she is not a particularly great one.

48:23I would I would go one step further. I think she's remarkably risk averse and that she wants very, very controlled environments. And that's and that's not politics. That's just not politics.

48:31Chris Hayes:Very risk averse and very wary in extemporaneous settings. And so I think there is a desire. Dave Weigel has made this point. I think I even I sort of thought of this, but he's kind of articulated of like. We want a really good talker and it's like Barack Obama was great talker, really good at talking. And again, talking is not I talk for a living, so I read it. I sort of both read it highly. And I also look for it because I'm, you know, literally this phrase good talkers, I think that we use in our booking meetings in our booking. And it's like, is good talker correlated with Donald Trump? I hate to say it in his own weird way.

49:18He's a good talker. Less so now. But I mean, I went to so many Trump rallies and that guy could just do a routine for an hour and a half like and loved it.

49:26Chris Hayes:So does it mean that the person is like going to be good at the job? No. Unfortunately, those two things don't have a great correlation. But it's also the case that and so the reason this all relates back to your question about where you go is I think you got to be willing to go everywhere. And I think you got to get your reps in and you got to be good at talking. And I think you got to be good at talking. I mean, this is one of the things that got us, you know, Vance Vance will go goes everywhere. He went everywhere and his reps and he liked and he liked he likes to mix it up with like goes on the view.

50:01Chris Hayes:He got like all of that, I think, is actually really important. And again, the other thing about volume is the more of it there is, the less people obsess over a single gaffe. Like, yeah, you just go do another interview. It's like, remember when he said the dumb thing about, you know, cat ladies like and that was, you know, he's still talking about the cat ladies and that hurt him for sure. That hurt him. But also it kind of ended up being swallowed by the sheer volume. I mean, Trump is the sheer volume of shit that's coming out of his mouth. Well, true. But I also think that, like, that's kind of partly the way it works.

50:41So I do think that I don't know, like, how you rank. But the other thing I would say is I talked to someone the other day said of an electorate that you're dealing with.

50:53Chris Hayes:the sort of operative rule of thumb these days is about 50 percent you can reach through TV and 50 percent are just like completely off TV. And that to me is like the fundamental structural thing that people have to reckon with. And part of what I wrote about in my book is that in the kind of TV dominant era that sort of starts really in the 60s and sort of extends, I think, all the way through for like the next 40 or 50 years of American politics, it's like you raise money and the money is used to buy TV ads. Yeah. And that is most of what a campaign is. raising money, running the ads. And when you're down to only 50 % of the electorate being reached that way, you still got to do that part.

51:32Chris Hayes:Like we saw this actually, I think, with the Stevens race. I mean, I think part of the reason those numbers, there's a bunch of reasons that her numbers in rural areas were... Not as bad as they should have been. Well, no, they were higher than anticipated, partly because that was the place that was getting TV. Yeah. Like, no, people weren't doing... Those are the people that are watching TV too. I mean... Both, I think. Like you're not you're not doing a lot of there's not like a bunch of local press there. You're not doing a bunch of events there. And so it's like there's huge swaths of your electorate that like the way they're going to learn about this race is like they're watching TV and they're getting that.

52:05Chris Hayes:So you can't give up on that. But you got to have a theory of the case. The other 50 percent. I'm going to I'm going to interpret what you're saying slightly differently, because what I'm hearing is and I would probably put it more like 60, 40, like 40 percent of the people are getting it on TV, just because if you look at those numbers, which I'm I'm sure you don't actually. in order to survive your day. Like the demographic numbers are, it's just an increasingly old audience. Yeah, yeah. Right? But that social media and shitposting and shitposters and those accounts are now equally as important as broadcast television.

52:39And that is actually a sea change from even like eight years ago or four years ago. And that it actually really does matter. And that doing more media is in some ways less impactful, but also is a little bit of an insurance policy against the mistakes that you're inevitably going to make by doing long form interviews, which is, I think, the real essential fear. It's not that I'm going to do an interview that doesn't matter. It's like, I'm going to fucking how do I fill an hour and a half with Alex Cooper without having to talk about whatever, Willie Brown? I don't fucking know. You know, something that's like uncomfortable for me.

53:13Yes. Yeah. But also learning how to talk about uncomfortable things is kind of an important skill. Well, and if anybody's shown you, I mean, if there's one lesson for Democrats to take away from the Trump years, it's like you can do some crazy shit. And as long as you are authentic about it. And I'm not saying anybody should try and model Donald Trump's fucking behavior.

53:32Chris Hayes:It's like how many bad interviews that that guy give that like were like these. I mean, the moment where, you know, Heilman and Halpern ask him for his favorite passage of the Bible. All of them. Kim telling Chris Matthews that you got to punish the woman on abort. I mean, you know, there's a million. And they don't even like, those aren't even at my fingertips in terms of his worst moments. Like there's so many. No, I'm reaching back to the archives. Of course, they're like, I like people that weren't captured, like, which was the original one. Or I don't really care about Americans' financial situations.

54:00That wasn't a podcast interview. But anyway, that's just him fucking talking.

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55:15Alex Wagner:Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot capable device required availability. Speeding coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. Hi, I'm Alex Wagner. I do not need to tell you that being an American right now is a wild ride. But as a longtime journalist, I am not interested in the noise or the fear mongering. I'm interested in the stories at the heart of the headlines. That is why every week on my show, Runaway Country, I'm joined by folks in the middle of the crossfire, from disillusioned Maha moms to newly fired immigration judges to Epstein victims themselves, to understand what it means to live through this political chaos as an actual human being.

55:54And now I'm excited to tell you that Runaway Country is available ad-free to Friends of the Pod subscribers. Friends of the Pod is the subscription that supports the work Crooked does as an independent media company and gives you a ton of great bonus and ad-free content. With the midterms approaching, you are going to need more content to keep you sane. And now you can find Runaway Country right there. Subscribe now at crooked.com backslash friends.

56:22Create the deck of your dreams with Menards. Build your outdoor project from the largest in-stock selection of AC2 lumber and thick decking. All pressure treated for enhanced durability. And it's easy to load in our drive-through lumber yard. Plus, get free estimates with our easy-to-use deck design program. Available in-store or on Menards.com. Save big on AC2, pressure-treated lumber and thick decking. Plus, check out our weekly flyer online for all the great deals happening now. All right, I have two more for you. One is, you know, we began this conversation talking about expectation setting and how if you're trying to understand where the sort of zeitgeist is at in terms of Democratic politics, like maybe leave the polling out of it because polling distorts expectations and therefore also results.

57:12You know, Nate Silver, the great statistician, was talking about the polling that led up to primary day in Michigan that that showed Abdul El-Sayed with like a very, very healthy lead. He, of course, goes on to win by like a point. And I think everybody had flashbacks to the Ann Seltzer poll, which was off in 2024 by a whopping 16 points and had showed Kamala Harris winning the state. Abdul is now saying he's going to beat Mike Rogers by seven points. His campaign has a history of releasing internal polling. All of this seems like highly sus, maybe something you don't want to do. If you're, you know, as someone who follows all this stuff closely, should everybody just shut the fuck up about polling?

57:53Should we stop looking at polling numbers entirely. Like, what do we do about polling?

57:58Chris Hayes:Well, I think that primary I think primary polling is always hard and particularly Michigan, where people don't register for a party. We've seen a bunch of these cases. The the both the Obama Clinton one was a surprise. And then the Bernie Hillary one was a big surprise. So there There's been a real history of specifically Michigan Democratic primary polling misses. Yeah. So I think there's there's partly that. Again, I think it's like the thing about polling is. It's best in just the general aggregate as like a directional point. Is it, though? I feel like 16 points. Abdul was up by a 17 point.

58:44It's not wasn't good for his support. Like, just what is the utility of it? That's a lot off.

58:50Chris Hayes:Yeah. I mean, I think when right when something's off by that much, there's no utility. But I don't think that's usually the standard miss. You know, I mean, like even like if you look at what the you know, what was the 2024 presidential like a close race decided by a few points in either direction? Yeah. Right. It was like, I mean, you know what I mean? Like part of the problem is here's my general thing about polling. And this doesn't really respond to Michigan. This is more about broader stuff and presidential polling. In a country as polarized as ours, we want a level of specificity that it can't deliver.

59:26Chris Hayes:Because in our country, a point or two matters a ton. In frontline swing races, in the state Senate, in the statewide Senate races, a point or two is probably determinative. Polling is not going to be great at telling you. Right. A point. So, like, my general takeaway is that, like, the Paxton-Talorico race right now is close. in anyone's race. My general takeaway of the polling that we've seen is that Michigan's going to be close, very close. You know, that Maine is going to be really close. Nothing more than that. So, like, ignore the numbers, take the vibe. Like, what's the generalized vibe of this?

1:00:06Yes, and like, yes. Now, again, if it's off by 13, there's nothing you can do with it, but it is rare. That is a pretty rare polling. Okay, fine. So whoever commissions that poll does not need to leave their job like the poor and Seltzer.

1:00:20Chris Hayes:Let me just say that there were multiple internals they released, which I think was like a weird psyop that I think blew back and was. Yeah, not a good. But there were also public independent polls, including Emerson, which is a highly rated pollster that has that double digits. And I still haven't seen the like full autopsy of what went wrong there. The Seltzer one is that she just completely modeled the elect. Here's a big problem, too. Something that pollsters have been dealing with since 2016 is that the kinds of people who are highly involved and highly educated are the most likely to respond to polls.

1:00:54And those people are also the most liberal. Right.

1:00:58Chris Hayes:And this is a this is a fact about the world that every pollster has been trying to model and and methodologically get their way out of. But there's a fact about the world that wasn't true in the past. It was not true in the past that your likelihood to respond to a poll correlated with your ideology in any way. It is increasingly the case it is. And so now you have to model your way out of that. And that leads to a lot of modeling assumptions that introduce a lot of uncertainty. That was very judicious, that assessment, Chris. Now we're going to return to the man who sits before me in a gold chain and a pink tank top for this last one, which is we're sitting at this moment.

1:01:38I feel like so much of this season of Democratic politics has been defined by the questions around masculinity and power. Right. There's Plattner. Yep. There's Swalwell in California, gubernatorial race, obviously, main Senate race. Max Miller is currently in a House race, refuses to drop out despite like very serious allegations of abuse and otherwise. Representative Chuck Edwards is out with some ridiculous reporting about what he's been doing. We went to Brown University, which we're prone to bring up all the time. And I think I sound like a Brown graduate when I start talking about the essence of sort of like the fall of the patriarchy, defining the kind of chaos in the political landscape.

1:02:20But I do think it has a lot to do with why we had Barack Obama and then Donald Trump and then Donald Trump again. And this sort of crisis of like how to be a man. And like Donald Trump has come up with one modality of masculinity, which is real fucking vile, if you ask me, but is intoxicating to both men and women, especially if they're white. And Democrats have had a really hard time figuring out like what is what is manhood look like coming from the left? and like you see these attempts at finding new models, whether it's Hassan Piker or I guess to some degree Gavin Newsom or Graham Plattner.

1:02:56And like it hasn't really they haven't found the shoe that fits, I don't think. Yeah. And I'm not saying that Gavin Newsom's chances aren't significant, but like do you have a theory about how the Democrats should begin to try and answer like what is our what is the rejoinder to like the vile masculinity of the right? Because that's going to be, I think, essential in figuring out who should lead the party or be part of the leadership of the party in the coming years.

1:03:21Chris Hayes:I don't have a good answer to that, but it's something that I puzzle over a lot. I do think Abdul El-Sayed is kind of interesting because he is. He has been charged with being a misogynist, though, in talking the way that he did about Haley. Oh, he rolls his eyes in his pink tank top. Well, well, but I think that there are women that don't agree with you, even on the left, that like the way he talked about Haley Stevens was misogynistic and, you know, some of his attitudes. Listen, I'm just a vessel for. Yes. I mean, I think that charge, I guess what I would say is I think it's probably useful to separate out charges that happen in the context of a heated primary.

1:03:58Chris Hayes:Yeah. With with broader things about the person's like lifestyle. You know what I mean? Like, sure. This is a different thing than like Plattner, you know, like. Oh, yes. I'm just saying that like there's just different categories of what people say against each other when they're running against each other in a primary. There was a lot of allegations that Barack Obama was being sexist towards Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton. And I don't think it was true of Sarah Palin. I don't really think it was true of Hillary Clinton. Some people maybe felt that it was. But I think those those exist in a different space than people that are attesting to your character who have been with you outside the campaign.

1:04:33Chris Hayes:You know, the whole like he can bench 315 and he's but he's also like a doctor and he also seems like a person who, you know, I don't know who said the interview he did with his mother that I thought was really interesting, who is an engineer, came here from Egypt, was often the only woman in a room sort of talking to her about what that felt like, which I thought was interesting. and also, I think, speaks to them recognizing they have some work to do on that front. The way that I solve for this is the same way that I think about how to think about patriotism and how to talk about patriotism from a center-left progressive standpoint, which is like my version.

1:05:07Chris Hayes:I think Barack Obama is the best example of this, but I also felt this way about the World War II Museum in New Orleans, which is a great museum if anyone ever goes, which is a sort of like progressive pluralistic patriotism. Like, we are a great country because we are this place that is built out of all these different people from all these different experiences. And we've screwed it up a million different ways in a million times. But we have also kept trying to figure out how to make all these people together work. And I think that the version of masculinity is to be a man is to be a person who is strong in a sort of inner and deep sense.

1:05:42Chris Hayes:And who, like, looks out for people. And can bench 350. And looks out for people. And does the right thing. And people can look towards and depend on. And to me, it's like in the same way that like you take this Venn diagram of some of the attributes that we learn in our civic culture about America with the attributes that we as progressives cherish. And you're like, that's the thing I'm going for. I think you take the aspects of masculinity that I do think have a root in the culture, which is like strength or leadership or dependability or, you know, looking out for people, even protecting people that like that you cultivate those in a broader sense of like looking out for people, looking out for people that are being bullied or being marginalized, like being the one that stands up for them.

1:06:25Chris Hayes:That to me is like the vision of what of where you kind of find the sweet spot to this answer. And I don't know how you communicate that, but that's the way my own conception of it is. I think one of the things that Democrats could really do is kind of wrap their arms around like someone who's loving, like and has shown themselves capable of great love, whether for children or their mother or their spouse or their partner. because that's something that Trump doesn't have at all. And that is, I think, really aspirational, especially to see, if we're talking about a guy, like men being comfortable showing the fact that they can be lovers.

1:07:05And I don't mean that in like a sexy way.

1:07:07Chris Hayes:No, no. But it's a real important reminder that like that's what most people are looking for in life is to be loved and to feel loved and to belong. And Trump's found the inverse of that. Like he's found unity through hate and like love and affection is always in season. Sometimes it might come, arrive at your doorstep and a hot pink tank top and a gold chain. Kate Shaw. Sometimes not. You are one of my favorite people on the planet. We have known each other for 30 fucking years. I know, it's wild. And every conversation is better than the last. Oh, that's sweet. That was really fun. I'm so glad we did it.

1:07:49But you're the best, Chris Hayes. Everybody watch Chris Hayes on MS Now. Always listen to his podcast. Why is this happening? And consume all books he writes because they're really good. Working on the next one.

1:08:02Chris Hayes:I'm very excited about this next one. My favorite project ever. Of course you are. Oh my Jesus. Okay, well, thank you for doing this in between writing drafts. And thanks to everybody for listening.

1:08:12Alex Wagner:Pods of America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Farrah Safaris with Reed Gerlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Kirill Pell-Aviv, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

1:08:49on my show, Runaway Country, I'm joined by folks in the middle of the crossfire. From disillusioned Maha moms to newly fired immigration judges to Epstein victims themselves to understand what it means to live through this political chaos as an actual human being. And now I'm excited to tell you that Runaway Country is available ad-free to Friends of the Pod subscribers. Friends of the Pod is the subscription that supports the work Crooked does as an independent media company and gives you a ton of great bonus and ad-free content. With the midterms approaching, you are going to need more content to keep you sane.

1:09:24And now you can find Runaway Country right there. Subscribe now at crooked.com backslash friends.