Will Your Vote Count In The Midterms?

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2:41Jessica Huseman: By the time you hear this, it's going to be a Wednesday. But you know what? In my world, this episode still qualifies as a Super Tuesday.

2:53Jessica Huseman: Super Tuesday is our weekly midterm check-in. It's a must-listen, if I do say so myself. In the hot seat this week, Jessica Huseman, the editorial director of VoteBeat, and Greg Blustein, chief political reporter over at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Greg, Jessica, I am so happy to have you on the show. Welcome. Thank you.

3:13Greg Bluestein: I'm just sad there's no cake this time.

3:16Jessica Huseman: Jessica's in Texas, Dallas specifically. Greg's in Atlanta, obviously. Greg is so beloved in his neck of the woods that during one of our last chats, a reader sent him a Bundt cake, like in the middle of the conversation.

3:29Greg Bluestein: Like the doorbell rang and it's like, here's a Bundt cake. Here's a lemon bun cake.

3:35Jessica Huseman: At no point in my career has a reader ever given me a bun cake. I wanted to talk to each of you because I have been mulling this question, which is, how far do you think Republicans, some Republicans, I should say, are prepared to go this midterm to retain power? Do you have an answer to that, either of you?

4:01Greg Bluestein: Jessica, you want to go first?

4:03Jessica Huseman: Oh, sure. Yeah, I'll go first. You know, I think that it depends on how big the margin is, right? I think that if it is an overwhelming victory, it's going to be pretty difficult to do anything, regardless of your motivations or what you want to do. If it is closer, that opens the possibilities up, I think, much more broadly and in sort of a way that makes me quite nervous. Yeah.

4:32Greg Bluestein: So you've got to remember here in Georgia, Jessica's right. Everyone's voting for a blowout. A blowout would make everyone's life easier because 2020 is still looming over everything that happens in Georgia. And I can also tell you that most Republican officials, they're saying, oh, let's focus on the future, not on the past.

4:49Jessica Huseman: I mean, I wanted to start off there because it's been a really weird few days in politics. Like just a few things that have happened. A rumor started going around on right wing media that Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Tallarico was hospitalized for his mental health. And this was not true at all and disproven like almost immediately. But it did catch fire for a hot second. The Justice Department initiated a raid on a sitting congresswoman's home, Ilhan Omar. I feel like even the news last week about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wanted to hold a public execution. I put these things together because these moves seem calculated to make Americans anxious, to tarnish opponents to the Republican project, and also to like cement power by brute force, like sometimes brute force that honestly the administration may not have, but it's sort of these demonstrations of force.

5:45Jessica Huseman: It sets a tone. I don't know. Did it feel like that to you guys at all? Yeah, it does feel like that to me. And I would not forget in that list of the things that you've just listed, which all belong on that list. The the prosecutions, the voting related crime prosecutions, especially related to non-citizen voting and non-citizen voter registration that the Trump DOJ is rolling out, sort of like dribbling out over time. I think that that's also intended in the way that these other things are intended to sort of spike anxiety and sort of reduce trust in the system in the immediate days before the election.

6:25Jessica Huseman: Like people are voting right now.

6:27Greg Bluestein: Exactly. Early voting in Georgia started a couple days ago. And it is already, there's already messaging from Democrats saying, put aside the anxiety, put aside all those concerns, make a plan to vote, go vote early.

6:42Jessica Huseman: Greg, do you think people are listening to that advice? Yeah, I do. Today on the show, around the country, voting has begun. But the drama might not end at the ballot box. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

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8:42Jessica Huseman: Okay, I want to drill down into your states if we can. And Greg, I'm wondering if I can start with you and Georgia. Just talk about the state of the races you're covering, because there are a couple of them that I think I want to focus on. You've got the Senate race between John Ossoff, the incumbent, and a guy named Mike Collins. And then there's the gubernatorial race, which is Atlanta, previous Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms versus Republican Rick Jackson. Where do these races stand and what does it tell you?

9:10Greg Bluestein: Yeah, they're very different races. On the Republican side, you've got Congressman Mike Collins, who was seen, who is sort of the more MAGA friendly candidate in this contest. He embraces the name MAGA Mike. He's been running on a really MAGA pro-Trump platform. And it's sort of a throwback to campaigns we've seen in the past in Georgia. He's betting the whole house, the whole farm, I should say, on the bet that like MAGA voters will show up for him. And he's not really trying to appeal to the middle. Well, of course, he's, you know, of course, he's he's he is campaigning all over the state. But his messaging is more geared towards the party's core.

9:47Jessica Huseman: But you're saying Rick Jackson is running for governor is kind of doing the opposite. He's like, I'll be sort of a moderate.

9:53Greg Bluestein: Yeah. Rick Jackson, he talks more about governing like Brian Kemp than governing like Donald Trump.

9:58Jessica Huseman: So is this like an A-B test to you where it's like you see these two guys running in very different ways? And I know there are races, too, with different Democratic opponents, but very different ways.

10:08Greg Bluestein: Yeah, we're seeing basically the biggest form of this sort of experiment on the Georgia stage because we have candidates running in very different strategies. Rick Jackson running more towards the middle, at least trying to appeal to swing electorate. We call them the deciders, the same folks who split their ticket in 2022 between Governor Kemp and Senator Raphael Wormack, Republican and Democrat. But also, you know, Trump is coming to town this week. Rick Jackson will be with him. So he's not holding Trump at the distance that you're seeing some Republican candidates hold the president at nationally.

10:42Greg Bluestein: He is still embracing him. He's still not shying away from him. He's also just trying to appeal to those middle voters who Governor Kemp won in 2022 so decisively. Now he has some differences with the president, but nothing sharp, nothing as big as like the war against Iran or something like that.

10:58Jessica Huseman: Well, it's not just Trump either, right? Like we're seeing debates between people like John Ossoff and Mike Collins. And, you know, John Ossoff is pleased to bring up the fact that Mike Collins has been known for having hired people who had really racist, very obvious racist pasts. And that's the problem, Mike. It's not just that you've hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online. It's that you're robbing your constituents to subsidize your donors. And John Ossoff, of course, used to work with John Lewis. So like has this history himself of like who he's aligned with.

11:36Jessica Huseman: And he's been happy to bring that up at a debate.

11:39Greg Bluestein: Oh, yeah. I mean, there's the whole sort of global Trump politics, but then there's also the very, very personal. And the moment Mike Collins won the nomination, like within microseconds, Senator Ossoff's campaign put out a blistering statement, essentially calling him a bigot and unfit for office and all that. And we were all kind of looking around like, OK, he's got something that we don't know yet. We have our research. The Republicans who are running against Collins had their research. But what ended up coming out over the next few weeks was his son-in-law.

12:11Jessica Huseman: Mike Collins' son-in-law, the Senate candidate.

12:14Greg Bluestein: Yeah, with a history of spreading neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic propaganda. Staffers who worked to, former staffers now, but who worked to help a Holocaust denier get released from prison. Grassroots activists with ties to the KKK, you know, who say they now regret it. But grassroots activists who are part of his convoy captains, who are part of his grassroots team who have those affiliations. And Ossoff keeps on saying there's more to come.

12:41Jessica Huseman: Oh, wow. So we haven't even heard it all.

12:44Greg Bluestein: I mean, maybe not. According to him. It's three weeks out.

12:47Jessica Huseman: He's incentivized to say that, but yeah. Okay. I mean, we started off with this question of how far could Republicans go this midterm? And this is where I want to bring Jessica in because I think Georgia is a really interesting place to ask that question. There's a lot of funky things going on in Georgia, not with the candidates. I mean, well, maybe with the candidates, but like, I think when we're talking about what could happen come November, it's really looking at things like the election board. So it's like the race is one thing and where that stands and what the polling shows, which is John Ossoff seems to be in good standing.

13:21Jessica Huseman: Keisha Lance Bottoms, it's a little closer if you're looking at the Democrats for the gubernatorial race. Once the race is over, I do think there's this question of where are those ballots counted? Who has authority over them? So Jessica, can you talk about this a little bit? Because I know you've really dug into what's going on in Georgia and why it looks different than it did in 2020, when everyone will remember Donald Trump was, you know, calling up whoever he knew in Georgia to ask for them to wrestle up a few more votes for him. Yeah. I mean, where do you want to start in Georgia? Should we start with the state election board or?

13:58Jessica Huseman: Please, tell me. So, you know, I mean, I think it's important to note up top, and Greg, you should jump in at any point if I am not as specific as I should be. But the state election board doesn't have a whole heck of a lot of direct authority over election operations in the state. And so it's important to note that from the outset, right? So it's like a ceremonial board? No. Greg's sort of nodding to himself. Why don't you jump in here?

14:22Greg Bluestein: I think you'll probably - They have like advisory regulatory roles, but also they can be overruled. It's a five-member body that used to be chaired by the Secretary of State, but Republicans were upset at Raffensperger kind of stripped him of that power. So right now they're kind of in this sort of liminal zone

14:43Jessica Huseman: in a sense, right? They're assembling the plane while flying. Like we'll find out after November 3rd how powerful they are. They can recommend that Secretary Raffensperger do things and Secretary Raffensperger can say, no, thank you. And that is basically, you know, the end of it. You know, I think so. So I think Greg's right. Right. They have very little power, but they make all of this news all of the time because of the way that the people who sit on the board have chosen to insert themselves and assert their authority over this space. Right. Who are these people? Do we know? They're really interesting people.

15:21Jessica Huseman: I think the executive director of the board is a fellow named James Mills, who's been a Republican, sort of very conservative Republican leader in the state for a long time. And he was put in charge of the board because, or is sort of taken on as executive director because of the power struggle that's sort of been going on within this board for some time. They have a chair who is appointed by Brian Kemp and is basically a moderate Republican of at least of the kind that we have today. Right. Like we would consider him moderate. So there's a chair and an executive director and they do not agree.

16:02Jessica Huseman: They hate each other. I mean, it is it is both very entertaining and quite sad to watch in meetings. A few months ago, they had a dispute about each other's manhood for a small amount of time. They were like, stop questioning my manhood and be a man, right? Like this is the kind of rhetoric that you're hearing even inside of the board. So we're talking about a board that doesn't have a ton of power. Sounds really normal and positive. Very well adjusted, I think, is how I would describe it, certainly. And so we're talking about a board that does have a lot of power that is also at war with itself.

16:35Jessica Huseman: So on the 28th of September, this board voted to adopt this resolution that sort of recommended a variety of actions and light investigations into things like expressing discontent with various parts of Georgia's election system. And it also called for the executive director to take some action to implement all of these grievances. And one of those is going to be sending a letter to the DOJ asking for some assistance. But also included in the resolution was that all of the the board members would get to sign off on any communication that was ultimately sent. Well, did that happen? Mr. Mills did not do that.

17:19Jessica Huseman: And so Mr. Mills wrote it and sent it off, did not communicate that in my understanding to the commissioners, at least the ones that I've spoken to. And if you read the resolution and you read the letters, you can see that they're not identical, right? The letters go pretty far beyond what the resolution called for and make some like pretty crazy assertions. I mean, not crazy in the sense that they're new, right? Like the same old assertions about Brad Raffensperger that are in so much of their communications before find their way into this letter. It's been six years. Like we're still fighting over Brad Raffensperger.

17:59Jessica Huseman: Like, wow, it's amazing how fresh that wound seems to be in Georgia.

18:03Greg Bluestein: Yeah, and I don't think there's any state where 2020 looms so large over everything that happens, like Georgia. And if you look back to the Georgia primaries, it was a litmus test in many of these primaries. What would you have done in 2020? And your sort of mainstream Republicans want the answer, which is, I'm focused on the future, not the past. That's what Kemp said throughout 2022. But some not-so-mainstream Republicans certainly went the other way. And most of them lost, like in 2022. But there are a few, especially in some down-down ticket races that won. I can tell you, too, this at the Atlanta Press Club debate for the Secretary of State's job, because Raffensperger's seat is open.

18:42Greg Bluestein: He ran for governor. He lost. So that seat is open. But Republican Tim Fleming is going up against Democrat Penny Brown Reynolds. And, you know, the Democrats running as someone who would be a stop to all this, who would say no, who would sort of reimpose force over what the state election board is doing. The Republicans saying, look, I'm going to help negotiate sort of truce between the state election board and the Secretary of State's office. That's Tim Fleming. I asked him after the debate, hey, remember that phone call in 2021 between Raffensperger and Trump right after the election? Whose side would you take?

19:14Greg Bluestein: I asked him twice, and both times he basically said, Greg, I'm not answering that question. I want to focus on the future. So that's been the sort of mainstay sentiment from a lot of Republicans. I will say Mike Collins, he not so long ago said that Trump, quote unquote, Trump won 2020. So there is still... This is the Republican Senate candidate. The Senate candidate we were just talking about, yeah, who says that he still says Trump won 2020. So look, it has not gone away in Georgia.

19:42Jessica Huseman: I feel conflicted about this because listening to you guys, it sounds like the state elections board doesn't necessarily have a ton of power. But at the same time, the secretary of state is on his way out. Um, and it feels like even just putting doubts about the election infrastructure into the ether creates a question in voters' minds. And it's a question that you could return to, say, on November 4th or 5th and say, remember, we were asking questions about all of this. It just feels like we're putting the gun on the table and we just don't know what's going to happen with it post-election day.

20:20Jessica Huseman: But I don't know if you think I'm being too panicky and weird. I don't think you're being too panicky and weird. You know, I think the one concern that I've sort of heard commonly throughout the folks I've spoken to in Georgia about this is not that, you know, the state election board could haul off and do something crazy and that it would affect voters because that probably can't happen. Right. But what could happen is that the letters themselves could be used as an excuse for federal intervention, right, or more activity later, right? The human error happens somewhere in the Georgia election system and something has to be fixed.

21:00Jessica Huseman: And it is fixed, but that gives us reason to sort of put this sort of conspiratorial veneer on the top of it. I think any time that you've got official communication claiming this grave of election sins, even if they have no basis in fact, you're sort of seeding the ground with future conspiracy plants, if you will. And so I think that they can have a huge messaging impact. And I think a lot of what we're seeing and the chaos that we're seeing and the concern that people have, that's what it's based on, right? It's not necessarily based on whether or not they can do something or they will do something.

21:40Jessica Huseman: It's the perception they might. And every voter that I talk to right now is either angry or they're anxious, and most of them are both. And if you drill down into the reasons for their anger and their anxiety, most of them don't hold water, right? Most of them are things that they're scared about that they shouldn't be scared about or rumors that they've heard that aren't true. And so when you unpack it all, everything's okay, right? But you can't do that with every voter. And this just adds something else to unpack. Well, and Greg, how close is that Secretary of State race, right? Because I feel like Raffensperger will go away at a certain point, right?

22:20Jessica Huseman: He has to go. And so then the question becomes, like, who's gonna, is there like a next person in line who will, you know, defend the election administration in the state?

22:32Greg Bluestein: Yeah, or hold something. Yeah, exactly. Either it would be a Democrat who says they oppose all this or a Republican in the mold of Raffensburg who is trying to sort of strike that balance. And that's a good question because Tim Fleming is the Republican nominee. He's a state lawmaker. He's a former top aide to Kemp, to Governor Kemp. He worked in Kemp's Secretary of State's office when Kemp was Secretary of State. So you know his election law. and he's again he's trying to wade that he's trying to toe that tightrope between energizing the MAGA voters he knows he needs to win and also winning those split ticket voters by saying that 2020 is behind us so it's kind of in between we don't have really reliable polling for those down ticket races it's hard enough to to kind of get a sense of the governor's race which is neck and neck and and the big question is you know if if the republican wins the governor's race does he carry the rest of the ticket below him?

23:24Greg Bluestein: Or can Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic nominee for governor, do the same? Or will we see a split ticket? Will we see Republican in some offices, Democrats and others? And that's a very real possibility in Georgia for the first time in a long time.

23:37Jessica Huseman: It's a little unclear to me who's towing who potentially on your ticket, where it's like Asaf has gotten so much good press and seems to be surging so forcefully. It's a question of our people, is that where the energy is and what that means? And I just don't know. And I don't think we'll know until it's all over. We'll know soon. Yeah.

23:53Greg Bluestein: I mean, Ossoff is not just going for the win. He is going for the humiliation. He wants to win by double digits, which is, I mean, imagine how hard that is just to win in a state like Georgia, but winning by a route in Georgia in a race that was once seen as the most competitive Senate race in the nation. I mean, Ossoff is the only Democrat running for reelection in the state that Trump won, the only Senate Democrat running in a state that Trump won in 2024. And now we're talking about it as if it's sort of an afterthought, right? I mean, not just us, but in the national news and Georgia news, John Ossoff has such an advantage in this race.

24:28Jessica Huseman: When we come back, the shenanigans brewing in Jessica's home state, Texas.

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26:17Jessica Huseman: Jessica, Texas, your state is another state where I feel like there's this question of how far will the GOP go? Because you got Democrat James Tallarico looking really strong in a Senate race against Ken Paxton, attorney general there. What's the latest? I mean, we talked about how there was this report over the weekend that Tallarico is in a mental hospital or some such, which is not true. so you can tell how crazy things are going there were reports i think last week um is when ken paxton's estranged ex-wife started campaigning with him which shows like how hard paxton is trying to get this seat even though the republican party his ex-wife many people are not fans so tell me the state of play here man i tell you what we being the politics friend of the group chat right now is a whole job um and it is great and yeah what's next let's let's come up with something else he went to the moon maybe um you can't prove he didn't um so you know things are really crazy here and i think that and tallarico would be the first democrat to win a statewide race in a generation like nights it's what 1994 george w bush became governor right like an out and unseated Ann Richards, right?

27:34Jessica Huseman: We're like, it's been so long. Like, I have no conscious memory of that time, in fact, right? Like, this would be a sort of like a generational shift in Texas politics. And I think what makes it different, right, from past election seasons is, I mean, is the candidates themselves. And there's really no way to get around that. Like, Like the last statewide Democratic candidate that we had in Texas that was sort of inspiring Democratic ferv was Beto, right? And he did not win. He lost, not like by an impressively small margin. He was behind in the polls, only narrowly, but behind and often within the margin of error, which gave Democrats this sort of idea that if they they had succeeded in turning Texas voters out, right?

28:25Jessica Huseman: Like the voters in Texas, Texas does not vote, right? Like Texas is one of the states with the lowest voter turnout in the nation. And so voter turnout and mobilization, especially in a place that's this big, is and this rural often is hard to do. And so the thing, though, that I think differentiates this is that Tallarico has been leading in all polls for months and well outside the margin of error. Right. Like this is just a slightly different political landscape. And as much as people think that everybody hates Ted Cruz, I actually have a neighbor who's had a everybody hates Ted Cruz sign in his yard for years.

29:04Jessica Huseman: Right. As much as everybody thinks that people hate Ken Paxton so much more, so much more. It is visceral. The Republicans impeached him. Do you know what I mean? Like his own party impeached him. I mean, here's here's what I think is interesting about looking at your states together, which is I feel like Georgia and Texas are at different stages of grief when it comes to the Republican Party. like when you look at what's happening in the Georgia race you do see Republicans publicly saying like actually I'm gonna I'm gonna vote for Ossoff like they're they're coming over right and they're saying it whereas in Texas it's like a race or two behind like like no like GOP has dominated Texas and is dominating Texas and like it's very hard to beat and so so you're not seeing that, what you're seeing in Georgia.

29:51Jessica Huseman: Instead, you're seeing people fight really, really hard to maintain control. And it's just interesting. It's like different, it's like one timeline is at a slightly different place than the other.

30:00Greg Bluestein: And you can see that shift happening quick too. I mean, not so long ago, one of our suburbs up in Cobb County was, that's the, you know, the home of Newt Gingrich, the home of former Senator Johnny Isakson, right? It's been a Republican bastion. And there were Democrats who used to tell me like, I couldn't even wave signs on the street. You know, we had to meet secretly. We had to, it felt like it was, and now it's a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition. It is like the backbone of the suburban Democratic Party in Georgia. And Democrats can't win without winning Cobb County by a big margin. So it just shows you how like just not so long ago, I mean, 2014, it was, it was, it was, there were Democratic activists who didn't want to show their faces in the county in some sense.

30:41Greg Bluestein: And now it's pretty bright blue.

30:44Jessica Huseman: Yeah. Okay. But at the same time, Jessica, I do feel like we have to talk about, like we did in Georgia, the fundamentals of the vote, right? Like VoteBeat recently reported, there's been this huge backlog of voter registrations in Texas. So that's a huge thing. That's just like a structural thing that exists in the state. And then I think a lot of people look at the Senate race in particular, and they say, okay, well, Ken Paxton is the AG. What could he do if he lost to try to pluck at it? Because he's going to care if he loses. And he also may have his hands on the levers of power a little bit.

31:26Jessica Huseman: So how do you look at that as a reporter? And what do you anticipate? Yeah, Texas has so many unique and very frustrating challenges for election administration. I think chief among them and the thing that kind of underlies everything is that we don't have online voter registration at all. No one can register to vote online. It is not available. You have to register on a piece of paper and that piece of paper has to sit in front of an election administrator and that election administrator has to type it into the computer for you. And is it feeling like that's more secure? We don't know because everyone here is fine with online voter registration except for Governor Greg Abbott, which is the singular reason we don't have it right now.

32:03Jessica Huseman: Has he ever explained his opposition to online voting? No. I have asked him every month for 10 years. I have an automated email.

32:12Greg Bluestein: Wow.

32:14Jessica Huseman: And no, I have never gotten a response. And that's how long I've been covering voting. That's how long I've been doing this. At no point has he explained his opposition to online voter registration. And so we are one of eight states that do not have it. And so the reason we always have backlogs is because of that, right? Because when you register to vote online, it can do a lot of the verification work for you. You type in your own name. You are much less likely to misspell your own name, especially if you have a complicated one, than someone looking at handwriting on a tiny little postcard, right?

32:51Jessica Huseman: So we always have these backups. Was it especially bad this year? And it's especially bad this year because there was a lawsuit a couple of years ago about the fact that we don't have online voter registration. The Motor Voter Act of 1993 requires that you be able to fully register to vote anywhere that you can get a driver's license. You can get a driver's license online in Texas. Ba-dum-bum-bum. lost here, right? So now Texas has a little tiny bit of online voter registration. So if you renew your driver's license online, you can register to vote. And the DMV processes those registration and is supposed to pass them to the voter registrars in all 254 Texas counties, right?

33:36Jessica Huseman: It's a huge state. And they just weren't doing that for a long time. There was an error in the system. And so hundreds of thousands of registrations were not passed through. And so, for example, in Bexar County, which is where San Antonio is, they got 45 ,000 new registrations overnight. When you call those administrators, like, what are they doing? They're just working until midnight every night? They're working until midnight every night. And I will say to you, they're used to doing this because there is always a backlog. Now there's just a bigger one. So they scale up the plan that they implement every year.

34:10Jessica Huseman: So in Bexar County, they have two teams of people working between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. in two shifts, constantly processing voter registrations. And they're going to do that until they're done. These people are shockingly efficient, and they can get it done. But we're like we, as in Texas taxpayers, are now having to spend money, extra money so that we can pay more people to do this stuff. Or in a lot of cases, counties don't have that money. They can't get the money. There is no money. And so they're having to pull other government workers off of necessary functions elsewhere to come and enter things into a computer.

34:54Jessica Huseman: So like you're not administering Medicaid now. Right. You're not figuring out Tuesday's trash route. You're going to go enter these registrations that came through from DPS and you're going to process them and verify all of the information, right? That's what they're doing now. It's so striking to me looking at both Texas and Georgia that like, we're talking about elections in these states, where Democrats are very hopeful. But like, what we're talking about isn't about the candidates. Do you know what I mean? It's about like the basic mechanics of like getting the votes counted and getting people registered and all that sort of stuff.

35:32Jessica Huseman: And you just realize what a weight that is to bear if you are trying to win an election as someone who has maybe is a part of a party that has not been in power in that state for a long time.

35:45Greg Bluestein: And I can tell you, I mean, in Georgia, there was a debate among candidates, Democratic candidates themselves for a long time of whether we even bring up these issues, right? Because the worry was if you bring up voting rights issues, there's a segment of the population who just think, oh, well, they're trying to make it harder to vote. I won't vote at all. Right. And there was that fear. And I remember when Stacey Abrams started bringing it up in 2018, you know, there was that calculus. I remember, I think even I questioned her, like, isn't there this age-old fear that it could dissuade people from voting?

36:15Greg Bluestein: And she said, we're ready to take that risk, essentially. You know, and voting rights became the major issue in the final days of that campaign. It certainly hasn't gone away. Is it up there with affordability and public safety and immigration and some of the other issues we talk about on a daily basis? No. But it's always there in the background. You're exactly right. And I think you add one more wrinkle to it. Those concerns about federal intervention, well, it's already happened, right? We already had the FBI raid Fulton County's ballot warehouse not so long ago. There was literally this fear in the Georgia Capitol, Republicans and Democrats were kind of looking over their shoulder thinking, when will Brad Raffensperger get arrested?

36:54Greg Bluestein: You know, there is a legit concern that could lead to indictments, that could lead to charges, however you want to characterize them against state elections officials and other state officials who were on Trump's naughty list, right? So it still kind of pervades a lot of what we do in Georgia.

37:14Jessica Huseman: Can I ask you guys each one more question? I'm curious, we're talking at this particular moment, Donald Trump's approval ratings have been bad for a long time, but they keep getting worse somehow. I think we're at 30 % now. It's just not great. It's a real armpit situation. But he's coming to your states or saying he's going to come to Georgia. He's been to Texas. Is that helping? Like, Greg, is that going to help?

37:39Greg Bluestein: I think, I mean, both parties right now are saying, pretend like Donald Trump's on the ballot. And so when Democrats are also saying that, that gives you everything you kind of need to know about how Democrats view that. Republicans are in a bind, right? Because on one hand, there are Republicans who, like Rick Jackson, the nominee for governor, and others, they want to run to the more of the middle, but they also can't afford to have Donald Trump at their neck, right? They can't afford to have Donald Trump saying negative things about them. Rick Jackson's going to be with Donald Trump later on this week, along with Mike Collins, the Senate nominee, in Georgia, in Northwest Georgia, the town of Dalton, very deep red sort of part of the state.

38:18Greg Bluestein: and it'll be interesting to see what happens because I think Rick Jackson's calculation might be a part, okay, well, you know, if this is going to be a Trump electorate, then we've got to lean into it. Also, his calculation has to be, if I don't show up, what do they say about me? It's kind of like your classic middle school drama debate. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Yeah, if I don't show up to this girl, to someone's party, like, why did I say negative about me? So he's going to show up, he's going to be there And Keisha Lance Bottoms is quite happy to see him there because she's been saying Rick Jackson equals Donald Trump.

38:51Greg Bluestein: She's like, see, see. Now you see him on the same stage together. I mean, it's a little bit different in Texas, I feel like, because Donald Trump took his time getting to Paxton and doesn't seem to like Paxton very much.

39:03Jessica Huseman: Like as a human being, he doesn't seem to like him at all. It's really hilarious.

39:08Greg Bluestein: He insults his clothing. He insults his look. Yeah.

39:11Jessica Huseman: So it's a little more of a forced marriage there. but I feel like they're stuck together. It's a forced marriage that Trump entered willingly. Right. And now they're stuck. Right. And so he did not have to do anything. Right. He wasn't intervening. Corden was leading. They went into like Corden was slightly ahead when they went into that runoff. Then Trump really went for it and Paxton took it. And I think this this sort of chain of events is interesting when it comes to like whether Trump is helpful now. Because, again, I told you, Texas doesn't vote. Right. So we're talking about a primary that has about less than a quarter of the people who are eligible turn out to vote in that.

39:49Jessica Huseman: So we're talking about an extraordinarily small number of Republicans who are very insider, who are very attached to party loyalty that went out and voted in the primary runoff, right, which had even lower turnout than the initial primary, right? Such a small portion of the overall Texas voting base chose Ken Paxton in that runoff. And those are the ones that are really attached to Donald Trump and will probably turn out and vote in the general instead. Again, I don't think that that's going to be enough people. So we'll see if between now and then, I mean, early voting starts a week from today in Texas, a week from yesterday in Texas.

40:31Jessica Huseman: So he doesn't have much time. But, you know, we'll see if he can sort of bridge that gap with the rest of the Republicans. But right now, no, I don't think Trump is helping Paxton at all. He's openly insulting him, saying that Paxton is willing to debate when Paxton is absolutely not willing to debate under any circumstances. And now he has to deal with that. And so I think he's just throwing curveballs into the state that I think most people would tell you are not helping the Republican Party here. I think if you talk, and I have, like if you talk to Republicans off the record and in the quiet, they will tell you, like, we wish he'd just stayed out of this.

41:08Jessica Huseman: Like if Cornyn was in this race, he would just win it. And now look, look what's happening. I think that's the attitude that a lot of people are starting to develop right now. Jessica, Greg, I'm super grateful for your time. I feel like I understand a lot more than I did at the beginning. So I'm grateful. Thank you, Mary. Thank you. Greg Blustein is the chief political reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Jessica Huseman is the editorial director at Votebeat. And that's our show. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TVD.

41:47Jessica Huseman: Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcast here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. I'm Matt Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.

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