Who Is Winning The Senate?

David Plotz
Hello and welcome to the slate political Gabfest, May 30, 2024. The who is winning the Senate edition? I am David Plotz of Citycast. I'm in my home in Washington, DC. From New York City and the CB's Daily report, John Bickerson.

Hello, John. I'm winning the Senate. Winning the Senate. I'm winning the House. I'm winning every contest so much today I can't stop winning.

Mega millions, powerball. Oh my God. It's all Dickerson. I am the opposite of winning. I am in the navier of winning.

Emily Bazelon
That host very dramatic shift. Sweet shift. It was a shift from the nadir to the zenith. From New Haven, Yale University Law School in New York Times magazine, it's Emily Bazelon. Hi, Emily.

Hey hey to both of you. This week on the Gabfest, Democrats have a one seat majority in the Senate, and at least eight of the seats up for reelection currently held by Democrats are going to be hard for them to win. What will it take for them to hold on to the Senate in 2024? Will it take a miracle? Then there's an astonishing account in the New York Times of the careful, years long campaign by a conservative legal network to topple Roe v.

David Plotz
Wade. We'll talk to the reporters who wrote it, Lisa Lehrer and Elizabeth Diaz. Then Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is one of the most colorful and weird people of the MAGA era, from heckling at a state of the Union to getting caught vaping and groping in a Denver theater to firing up gun rights supporters. We're going to talk to the creators, who are also my colleagues at Citycast, of a new podcast about Boebert and about her place in Trump era politics. Plus, of course, we will have cocktail chatter.

Christina Catarrucci
Hey, slate listeners, I'm Christina Catarrucci, the host of slow gaze against Briggs. I want to tell you about a special event we're doing at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on June 13 to celebrate the new season of Slow Burn and Pride Month. We'll be hosting an exclusive taping of the show with special guests, including Eric Marcus, the host of making gay history. We'll dive deeper into this season and talk about the lasting impact of the Briggs initiative and the continued fight over LGBTQ rights in school schools. Plus, we'll share some behind the scenes stories and never before aired tape from this season.

It'll be the perfect way to celebrate Pride month this June with LGBTQ stories and voices across generations. You won't want to miss it again. That's June 13 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. You can get tickets now@tribecafilm.com. slow burn.

Hope to see you there.

David Plotz
Democrats are defending 23 of the 34 Senate seats up this cycle, and eight of those seats have some serious level of jeopardy for them. Republicans are defending eleven. And all of those are basically safe, barring some extremely weird events. Democrats and independent allies currently hold 51 seats in the Senate, meaning if they lose more than one seat, they lose control of the Senate. And even if they lose just one, they will lose control if Trump beats Biden and Trump's veep becomes the deciding vote.

And they have already lost one. For all intents and purposes, the West Virginia seat that Joe Manchin is leaving will like. I mean, I can't imagine a set of circumstances in which the Republican will not win that seat. Maybe John can let me finish, John. Maybe John will imagine that.

John Dickerson
No, no, no. Interesting fantasia. No, no. I'm just trying to. Go ahead.

Go ahead. So they're going to have to run the table and be pretty strong. Republican candidates in Trump leaning states like Montana and Ohio have incumbents hold on in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and defend open seats in Michigan and Arizona. It looks pretty hard to me, John. So I think the way I've been thinking about it is basically the current outlook is that the Republicans gain anywhere between one and four seats.

If they gain only one seat and Donald Trump wins the presidency, they win the Senate, too. They're really, the way things look like they're going right now, it looks very likely that there's either going to be a tie or that they'll have the majority in the Senate.

And as you say, it's basically, all of this is taking place on democratic turf. And there has been an increasing tradition, and I'll go into the numbers in a second, of people voting in states the way they vote for the president, particularly in presidential years, there's some. And so basically what has to happen is, particularly in Ohio, Nevada and Montana. And Ohio and Montana and I guess, Jackie Rosen, in Nevada, all three, you have incumbents that have to hold onto their seats, and they're running in places where Biden is doing poorly and Trump is doing well. The reason that this is difficult is that we've seen an increasing over the last many cycles, particularly in presidential years, a split, or a lack of a split, I should say, between the way that people vote for the president and the way they vote in the state.

It's amazing to remember that in Reagan and Nixon years, half of the senators from the states they won were Democrats in 2016. Donald Trump, every state he won had republican senators, both of them. So there's, that is a massive shift that has taken place in american politics. And those rules seem pretty rigid. I mean, what's interesting about that is that it suggests that the identity of the candidates is kind of secondary and even that their campaigns are secondary, that there's this kind of baked in dynamic that they don't have a lot of control over.

Emily Bazelon
And yet, and I know this is early and just based on polls, but right now, some of these democratic candidates for Senate are running significantly ahead of Biden in a way that makes their races seem possible for them to win. Exactly. And so the question is how much? It's funny, because, as you quite rightly say, Emily, hard to get out from under the person at the top of the ticket. On the other hand, we have notable examples, most of them in the republican side, where, particularly in off year elections, people like Herschel Walker get nominated in red states, and they run campaigns that are so bad, and the Democrats run good campaigns.

John Dickerson
Campaigns really, really matter at the presidential level. There's a little bit more weight from the person at the top of the ticket, or boost, as the case may be. And as you point out, tester is running nearly eleven points better in Montana than Biden is. Sherrod Brown in Ohio is outrunning Biden by a five point margin. The problem is, those are such red Trump states that right now, that wouldn't be enough for the 2020 margins to hold for those candidates.

So they need to do even better. And also, both of those are incumbents, very familiar, high name recognition incumbents who've done pretty well for their state. And as Tim Sheehy in Montana and Bernie Moreno in Ohio start to spend their vast fortunes, I'm sure those numbers are going to narrow in their favor, in favor of the republican candidates. Right. And let me give you a great statistic that the folks at the Cook political report did as far back as 1984.

The Cook Political report analysis looked at it. They found that democratic senators were able to outrun the top of the ticket by an average of 23 points. Okay, so that meant Democrats could, even if they're top of the ticket, person like Mondale does poorly, Democrats could do well by 23 points, they could do well that number. Now, how much can you outrun a Democrat at the top of the ticket? By 2012, that number was down to four points.

So it shows you that if you are a democratic, this goes back to your point, Emily, that campaigns matter, but they don't matter like they used to. And we can talk about why that's the case. But those are the structural challenges that tester and Sherrod Brown and Jackie Rosen in Nevada face. So, Emily, one of the themes of this Senate campaign is rich guys running for the GOP. Moreno Sheehy, David McCormick in Pennsylvania, Eric Hovda.

David Plotz
Hovd. I'm not sure how to pronounce his name. In Wisconsin are all incredibly rich guys who are taking on democratic incumbents, but they have the money to compete. Is this a strategy by the Republicans, or it just happens that rich guys like to run for office? I mean, it's a huge plus, right, if you can come in and essentially self finance your campaign or at least start with a big leg up.

Emily Bazelon
And obviously, this isn't just this year, and it's not just republican candidates. I feel like we're seeing this trend more broadly. I mean, the governor in Connecticut, where I live, Ned Lamont, is a governor who is incredibly wealthy. That really helped him when he was running. So, I mean, it's just such a depressing reflection, right, of the enormous amount of money that it takes to run for these offices and then the way in which you can kind of vault over more established political candidates.

And I don't know, maybe that isn't such a bad thing. You kind of come in from the business world. You're not sullied by your voting record in lower offices. Then you say that your opponent is a career politician who's never set foot out of, you know, Washington or out of a campaign bus, and thus somehow is less worthy because they've actually devoted their life to public service. It's this sort of weapon that both works just in terms of the amount of money that's behind you.

And then also you kind of say, I'm coming from the business world, and that's better. Incumbency used to be such a powerful thing, and that's one of the things that'll be tested in 2024. As you say, Democrats have been able to count on Republicans running crazy people or people who you might not want watering your plants while you were away on vacation in Senate races. Not so this time, Republicans are running veterans. There are at least three veterans, including a Navy SEAL in Tim Sheehy in Montana, who are going to be candidates.

David Plotz
They're business people in Michigan. Looks like Mike Rogers, who's a. Just a standard issue Republican, will be running only really in Arizona with Carrie Lake and in Ohio with Bernie Moreno. Do you have candidates who are. Who seem super edgy or problematic or, like, kooky.

So why have they. Was this a conscious effort not to make this mistake? I mean, it is, and it is, yes, it's a conscious effort to not make this mistake that finally stuck because they've. Because Mitch McConnell has been trying so hard to not have kooky candidates for a long time, and he keeps failing. And part of that was even pre MAGA and pre Trump, and then it failed.

John Dickerson
And it was one of the sources of tension between Trump and McConnell. But it seems like Republicans have put up a better field than in the past. And also, with the exception of Kerry Lake, who seems to have kind of, this is really, some of these, a lot of these forces are, this is just, I feel like we're in super fresh territory. But remember, in the past, when they had kookie candidates, particularly on the right, when the left has had kookie candidates, it stayed and destroyed the race within that race, but it hasn't slopped over into other races. That's not been the case so much for Republicans in the past.

But Carrie Lake would be a kind of candidate who could cause other republican candidates difficulty if we were not in the Trump era, in which all bets are off in terms of what causes a party difficulty. One thing I'd like to go back to is whether there are vulnerabilities a, with these candidates and the person at the top of the ticket. Like how much and how much do they have to answer for Trump? How much do they have to stay in sync with him and not run afoul of what he says? How much do they have to show up with him in the state?

Is Dave McCormick going to spend a lot of time doing the JD Vance leg hugging of Trump, or will he try and keep some distance? Also, the question is, in Ohio, will Sherrod Brown, who has a great track record with working with working class voters, will Sherrod Brown run in that area where Trump is strong? The diploma divide is one of the most resilient ones in politics right now, which is to say college educated voters vote for Democrats and non college vote for Republicans. Brown can destabilize that. How does that work out with Trump and the top of the ticket and with all of these millionaires running?

Does that offer these Senate candidates an opportunity? And so one of the things I'm watching for is to see if democratic candidates can run kind of on economic issues, kind of without, sort of away from Biden at the top of the ticket, and actually use these millionaires and Trump's policies against him. Is that possible? Yeah. And then if you do that, what happens to your college educated voters?

Emily Bazelon
And will Biden try to come on board for more of that class warfare or at least like class based campaigning, which he has done in the past and has been effective, but now he has this coalition that is kind of pulling him inexorably in a different direction. Jon, isn't it like the case, though, that there really aren't split ticket voters at all? And so I think what you're talking about is if people are going to show up to vote because they're angry about the economy, they're going to show up to vote because they're angry about the economy, they're going to vote against Biden. And they're also going to vote, presumably they're low information voters, these kind of voters. And so they're going to vote on their low information.

David Plotz
At the moment, low information is favorable to the incumbents because their name is known. But once low information voters get a little bit more information and they are bothering to show up, I presume they will vote. If they're angry, they're going to vote their anger against Biden, but they're going to vote against Biden's party. I don't see why we would assume that they were because the people who are, the marginal voters are people who just don't know very much about things in general. And it's hard to imagine them being like, well, I'm going to contemplate, I do think the Senate would be more valuable with Sherrod Brown in it as a counterweight to the Trump presidency.

I mean, I don't think that that. A kind of cognitive Madisonianism. Yeah, I think that's right. But, yeah, well, we know one thing. We know that these candidates can get some distance from Biden, which would require some kind of argument that appeals to voters who a difference between the two.

John Dickerson
Your point, though, is are there enough of those voters to make up the gap? And the gap looks like it's pretty big. And if the gap is on these issues like the economy and immigration, which are sticky and hard to fix, can, can democratic candidates make piercing arguments that deal with those two things? Just two quick final things. One is I went and looked at the 2026 map.

David Plotz
I was so struck at how terrible this map is for democrats. I was like, how does the 2026 Senate map look where republicans are going to be defending 20 seats in 2026? So you think, oh, that's pretty good. But actually, when you start to go through the seats they don't look very good for democrats at all. That maybe Susan Collins, always potentially vulnerable.

In Maine, there's a North Carolina Senate seat that might be up for grabs, but otherwise very little that republicans are going to need to worry about. And there are plenty of seats or several seats that democrats need to worry about. The Georgia seat that they currently hold, for example. So the Senate appears to be, like much more foundationally tilting towards Republicans than I realized. Is that right, John, or not?

John Dickerson
Yes, especially if republicans aren't damaged by either bad local candidates or Trump. I mean, I feel like we need one more beat on. Trump is still a highly unpredictable factor bouncing around in the world, the Biden kind of range of possibilities feels like a more limited set of things that can happen, although, of course, being president in an unpredictable world maybe argues against that. But I mean, we have a possible, you know, court case happening in New York. You have, Trump is only getting more outrageous in the things he says.

And everybody would quickly point out, you know, it's been a long time since outrage has hurt Trump. But I don't know. I guess it really, what I'm, what I'm puzzling with here is really what turnout would really look like for Trump once everything has happened and once we get to the actual campaign ending. And so I guess I want to add just a little salt to those numbers that I have been saying are so determinative in terms of split ticket voting. I just feel like there's one more round of crazy to come with Trump.

David Plotz
Do you want to hear more from us after this episode? No response at all from John this time. If so, stick around. For our bonus segment today, we're going to be talking about pronatalism, the unusual new movement embodied by Elon Musk, or I guess, embodied by Elon Musk's eleven children, but also various other Silicon Valley adjacent eccentrics to encourage more Americans to have lots of kids. But this segment is just for slate plus members.

So if you are a slate plus member, thank you. You have kept us chugging along. If you're not a Slate plus member, please consider signing up. You'll get bonus segments of every episode of the Gabfest, and you'll get special episodes of other slate podcasts and discounts to live shows. And you won't hit the paywall in the slate site.

So if you are a member, thank you. If you're not a member, go to slate.com gabfestplus to become a member today. That's slate.com gabfestplus. And if you're like a pronatalist, I bet with your gabfest plus membership, you could probably sneak all those kids on it. I bet they won't even notice.

This episode of the Gabfest is brought to you by Zbiotics. There's now a game changing product to use before a night out with drinks. It's called Zbiotics. Let's face it, after a night out with drinks, it is tough to bounce back the next day because you have to make a choice. You can either have a great night or a great next day.

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So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotox.com gabfest and use the code Gabfest at checkout for 15% off. In 1978, gay people in California faced a dire threat. Proposition six. The Briggs initiative.

John Dickerson
The teaching profession is riddled with the homosexual element. John Briggs is going to fire every gay and lesbian schoolteacher in the state of California. I'm Christina Cotter Rucci. This season on slow burn, we'll explore how a nationwide backlash against gays and lesbians led to a massive showdown in California. This was tens of thousands of pissed off gay guys and lesbians roaring down Market street.

Christina Catarrucci
With so much at stake, young people became activists. We've got to fight back. We can't let this happen. In California. Became leaders.

John Dickerson
My name is Harvey Milk, and I'm. Here to recruit you. Slow burn, season nine. Gaze against Briggs. Out now.

David Plotz
Wherever you listen, there's an amazing article. The New York Times this week by Elizabeth Diaz and Lisa Lehrer, who are both reporters there. It is taken from their new book, the Fall of Roe, which comes out next week. The article, the untold Story of the network that took down Roe v. Wade, uses interviews with 350 people to trace the story of how the Dobbs decision came to be and how what began as a modest plan merely to undermine the national right to abortion became a fantastically successful frontal assault on Roe.

Welcome, Elizabeth. Oh, it's great to be here. Hi, Lisa. Hi. Thanks for having us.

So the conservative legal movement that was aiming and ending Roe started more than 40 years ago, and it was one of the most successful long games ever. But talk about how the specific strategy that you're talking about to take down Roe came to be just a few years ago. This question of how do you sort of start this narrative about this massive, really 50 year campaign to overturn Roe? How do you start that narrative? And we're really thinking about, okay, there's been so much change on the right just in this last decade, and it's hard to remember now, but just ten years ago, really around the time of former President Obama's reelection, the anti abortion movement really thought it was losing.

Elizabeth Diaz
I mean, they looked at the country. They're like, this country seems to be going in a very different direction. The Republican Party basically rejected them at around that time. And then there was this sort of small group of activists who just said, you know what? No, we're fighting back.

We refuse to take no for an answer. And of course, they both lucked out and worked hard to elect president, former President Trump. And we found out that really just days after former President Trump was elected, there was a meeting of the Federalist Society, the large, conservative, largely conservative lawyers association, spearheaded for years by Leonard Leo. They had their annual meeting, as they do in Washington, DC. And, you know, the mood there was both excited and sort of apprehensive, like, what is this whole new time of the Trump era going to mean for us?

But there was a group of very determined lawyers who saw a new opportunity and decided to come up with what ends up being a very sophisticated legal strategy to overturn Roe. So we watch a conversation that happened basically during a cocktail hour days after Trump's election with the former solicitor general of Wisconsin, Misha Seitland. He was basically just chatting with someone, you know, he didn't even know at this conference because it's a big mixer, right? Like, everyone's coming together and meeting new people. And someone earlier in the day had said to him, you know, oh, I don't think ro can ever be overturned.

And he was like, no, this is the moment. Right? This is the moment. So we have to come up with a way to do it. And then when he was relaying this conversation to a new acquaintance, it was someone connected with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a conservative christian legal group that is very devoted to certain kinds of cultural change.

And so from out of this cocktail conversation, what we reported out in all those interviews that you mentioned was this strategy that started from how to pass legislation in key states, how to work with or use legislators in state houses to accomplish their goal by tapping a conservative christian network of lobbyists and lawmakers. And then we track that all the way through what ends up being the case that gets to the Supreme Court, to that ends up overturning Roe. And the strategy that's so crucial here is this idea of a 15 week ban that they would go into the kind of heart of the second trimester beyond 20 week bans, which the pro choice groups had been leaving alone. The pro choice groups, I think the litigators saw those as losers in terms of challenging them. And as you say in your piece, almost all abortions take place before 20 weeks, indeed, before 15 weeks.

Emily Bazelon
But this 15 week ban in Mississippi proves to be the winning strategy for getting a challenge to the court because it's too early for the pro choice groups to ignore. And then it turns into the perfect platform. And one thing I would love for you to talk about is the kind of battle between the incrementalists and the more absolutists. So that's something I've been watching and you all have been watching for years in this space. There were others, legal groups, like Americans United for Life, that were trying to have a more kind of incrementalist approach to challenging.

They saw that as more promising, especially under the previous Supreme Court, before Trump's appointees joined in. And what you showed that was so fascinating to me was that your kind of more upstart characters who are not from these DC based groups kind of come in and say, no, we can use this 15 week ban to make the full on argument for overturning Roe entirely. And that kind of comes in, like, from the side, as I understood it. Can you talk more about that, lisa? Yeah, it's interesting because, as you point out, there was the strategy for 50 years was to chip away, to slowly inch back the weeks, to find different ways of restricting access to abortion.

Lisa Lehrer
To do that in states all over the country, occasionally in Congress, with some exceptions, like what they call partial birth abortion, never really becomes law. And that was a strategy both because it was what they believed the legal system in the court would bear. And also because it gave some political cover. Right. It's really hard for people to track a million different laws happening in all these different states.

And what they all add up to and what happened was that once Trump won, this is a movement that's so intertwined with politics. And there was this sort of radicalization and this shift that happened in the Republican Party. And there was a sense, I think, that you could go further and faster, because, look, there was Trump in Washington taking down, going further and faster and doing these things that had felt politically impossible for the right wing of the Republican Party. So I think that mentality also went into the anti abortion movement, which, of course, is so intertwined with Trump's rise to power and this MAGA base, it's hard to separate out those things. And that kind of thinking infiltrated their movement as well.

And you had this radical fringe that pushed harder and faster and said, forget about incrementalism. Let's just go for the whole thing. And in the end, they were successful. And I think that's part of what we're seeing now, which is in these state houses, you're seeing these state legislature legislators who come out of this movement pushing for things that feel, you know, unfathomable to a lot of Americans, like, you know, regulating IVF or, you know, this abortion abolitionist movement that wants to eliminate abortion functionally at conception. Right.

With no exceptions. And so I think that's part of what's undergirding our politics today, that now they no longer have this veil of 100 things happening at once and people not paying attention. Now people are paying attention. And this radical fringe of the movement is really getting the entire cause, making it much more complicated politically for the entire cause. Because, of course, the anti abortion movement never saw Roe as the end.

It was the beginning of the end, not the actual end. So, you know, this was a 50 year fight to take down Roe, and it continues for them into the future. It is amazing how a candidate who bears so little in his personal behavior that is consistent with the. With the christian life, nevertheless becomes, because he's beholden to them and makes those promises about the kind of candidates he'll put on the court, and then does so and becomes beholden to that group, ends up being the vehicle for their long term goal. Here's a question for in politics right now, it seems like you've got, like, there's the old fashioned kind of hardball politics, which was like, wow, that, you know, that guy's playing within the rules, but, man, he's really playing hardball.

John Dickerson
And then there's Trump, who is January 6, which is totally outside the rules. One of the things I found so fascinating about your such thorough reporting is that it's people. And this is, now I'm going to phrase it as a question. Were they asking, were they playing hardball within the established rules or was there, I understand the idea. The Overton window is open.

They have a sense that more things are possible. But were they playing within the established rules, or were they breaking the rules to get the outcome they want? They relied on a strategy of passing legislation. Right? Like, that was a fundamental basis.

Elizabeth Diaz
And they used the court system. Right. I guess it depends sort of on how you see it. Like, how did the nominations of the three supreme court justices, like, what do you make of how the topic of precedent on Roe was handled in their confirmations? But the reality is that this entire movement, like, used the existing system of american democracy to achieve their goals.

The ability to use the system, to use, like, how do laws get passed? Like, how does the court system work? I mean, we go on in the book a little teaser to talk about how they gamed the circuit courts, right? Like this teaser, it wasn't actually just Mississippi. They used other states in other circuit court districts to do this, too.

And so it was a very elaborate plan that showed, like, okay, how do you achieve what you want using the very tools available to you? And it's something actually that so many activists and lawyers on the right and politicians that we talked to are really quite proud of that they were able to do that. And in a way that still flew completely under the radar to the mainstream consciousness. I would say they played by the rules in a broken system. Right.

Lisa Lehrer
So you can debate, like, the Merrick Garland situation and whether Trump should have even gotten to fill that seat. And, you know, you can certainly discuss, you know, all the broken norms around Senate confirmation hearings and judicial appointments and all of that. And I'm sure you guys have excessively the course of your show. Right? But this wasn't, like, what you're talking about with January 6.

This wasn't a violent takeover. This isn't people breaking into the Capitol and defecating and tearing down signs. This is a way of breaking norms and using a system that, you know, I think many people would argue is broken in a lot of ways that we think about it or we have thought about it to achieve your goals. They took it effectively by grabbing political power. They didn't win hearts and minds.

That was always the sort of the discourse of this movement was that they were winning hearts and minds that people, you know, were coming around to their cause, which many in the anti abortion movement see as like, the modern day civil rights movement. But that's not what happened here. They didn't win hearts and minds. They won by, you know, using the levers of power in their advantage. And they didn't, you know, and sometimes they broke norms to do it.

David Plotz
So there are two sides to this fight. I mean, there's the conservative groups that are trying to take down Roe, and then there are the liberal abortion rights groups that are trying to protect it. And in the Times piece, you're very much telling the story from the conservative side. How did the abortion rights groups fail to protect their interests? What mistakes did they make either in legal strategy or politically?

Or was it just. Were they just inexorable? Because Trump got three Supreme Court justices and that was. That was it. Well, look, some of it was inextricable, right?

Lisa Lehrer
Like, once Trump gets the justices, it's really hard to stop this march. And in some ways, that the fight for them was really lost in 2010, right, where they lost this tea Party wave sweeps in. They're more, you know, to the right. You know, people think about them as this economic movement, but they were, in fact, a socially conservative movement, and they passed more abortion restrictions in 2011 than the country had seen ever. Right?

So at that point, the abortion rights organizations had lost so many state houses that it's hard to, like, get a grip there and stop these kinds of bills. However, that being said, there certainly was, in retrospect, more they could have done. I think they could have had a stronger presence in the states. There was a lot of focus on. You know, it's interesting because in some ways, they were fighting for hearts and minds and they were successful.

Right? Over the course of this ten year period that we call the final decade in the row of the Roe era, they won a lot of cultural capital, right? Abortion started showing up on Grey's Anatomy and Jane the Virgin on tv. People started talking about their miscarriages. There was this whole movement to shout your abortion, to talk about these things that were considered so shameful, you know, publicly, as a way of destigmatizing them.

Of course, the democratic party moved away from the language of safe, legal and rare. So they did win the cultural battle in many ways. And that's part of what we're seeing now. What they lost was actual power, and that cost them the whole ballgame. When it came to Roe.

Emily Bazelon
The major player, a major player you've talked about is alliance defending freedom, which I think has emerged as the most important conservative christian legal organization, which is interesting because it's like relatively new player in this landscape. Can you talk about its next steps, like what you see it trying to accomplish next? They won a bunch of Supreme Court cases in the early two thousands. They started to win some of them, and they're all kind of, they were all clustered around what they talk about as religious freedom and these decisions that if, you know, if they were to happen, if they did happen, would have a big cultural impact, that the effect of that is to advance or preserve many conservative christian values, especially about sex in the public square. So Roe was one of their first big, what they call generational wins, right?

Elizabeth Diaz
This is a movement that thinks not just in four year, two year political cycles, it thinks in generations. And it's thinking not only how do you achieve the cultural outcome that you want, but then also how do you lock that in? What's the next phase of that? Because they know that you can overturn a precedent. That's exactly what they did.

So part of it is figuring out on abortion. How do you lock in this win and how do you go even farther? Like right now? They've argued a case that's pending at the Supreme Court about medication abortion, but it doesn't stop just with abortion. There's other big cultural goals, too.

And we uncovered one of their internal strategy documents that outlines another four of their generational wins that goes into some detail about other Supreme Court cases and precedents that they aim to reverse or weaken or reshape, refine the rulings. And this would have a big impact potentially in what things like trans rights, parental rights in schools with doctors and about transitions for minors, this kind of thing. And so when we ask them about the document, they distance themselves from it. But, you know, once you see the lessons of history and kind of how their legislation to court cases to the highest court and then what that means for cultural change, once you see that whole pipeline and how it's been effective and you see the volume of people they have and their allies on the states, you see how that works. It's, you know, it's quite a serious operation that deserves to be taken seriously for their future goals.

David Plotz
Elizabeth Diaz and Lisa Lehrer have a new book, the Fall of Roe. You can read something from it, an amazing piece, the untold story of the network that took down Roe v. Wade in the Times. Thanks, Elizabeth. Thanks, Lisa.

That was great. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us. It was really fun. It's opinion Palooza season here at Slate.

Emily Bazelon
I'm Dalia Lithwick, the host of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and law and the Supreme Court. As this Supreme Court term hurtles towards its close, the justices are handing down decisions that will shape our politics and our lives for years and decades to come. My team and I are putting out analysis of the biggest cases just as quickly as we can, bound to our closets and fire up our laptops to speak to you. From presidential immunity to social media content regulation, to domestic abusers gun rights, we will be here unpacking the news for you. Listen to Amicus wherever you get your podcasts.

David Plotz
Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, the Queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title the welfare queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor. Now it's time to hear her real story.

Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name. The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are. Subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now. If you want to understand what is happening in the United States right now, you really need to understand what's happening with the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court. The battle between democracy and whatever this cage match is that we're witnessing, it's going to be won and lost at the ballot box, but is also going to be won and lost in the courtrooms.

Emily Bazelon
I'm Dalia Lithwick. I host Slate's legal podcast amicus, and we are doubling our output, bringing you weekly episodes from here on in. Because how else can we keep an eye on the many trials of Donald Trump? The conservative legal movement's assaults on our rights? The Supreme Court's latest slate of environmental gutting, gun safety eviscerating case is on the docket.

So follow amicus wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes dropping every Saturday morning.

David Plotz
I'm going to take this next segment by myself because it is particularly close to me. As many gabfest listeners know, I run Citycast, a company that makes daily podcasts and newsletters in eleven cities, including Denver. A few months ago, our Denver executive producer, Paul Carolli, and our Denver host, Brie Davies came to us with the idea of doing something new for city cast, which was a limited run series about one of the most interesting politicians in America who happened to be a frequent topic of conversation on their daily podcast, Citycast Denver. And that politician is Lauren Boebert. So last week, Citycast we, I'll use we here released the first episode of Lauren Boebert Can't Lose.

On Wednesday, we release the second episode, and it's going to be a weekly series until her make or break primary in late June. And that will also include a kitchen table interview that Paul and Brie did with Boebert herself. So I am so proud and happy to welcome to the Gabfest my beloved colleagues, citycast Denver's Paul Carolli and Bree Davies. Hi, Paul. Hi, Bree.

Hi, David. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you. This is really exciting. Boebert is a second term congresswoman from Colorado, and she is one of the weirdest and most controversial figures coming out of MAGA world.

Vaping, groping, heckling. She's only been with us since 2020. But, Paul, tell us where she came from. How did she rise to fame, which is the topic of your second episode. Well, she came from a place called Rifle, Colorado.

It's a small town on what we call the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. This is the rural western part of our state. When she rocketed to fame, it was really just one moment, which I didn't even realize looking back on it. We decided to do this series because we were interested in who she's become. But looking back at her story, it really was this one specific moment that actually happened here in the Denver suburbs, in the suburb of Aurora, which is its own city, where there's this legacy of gun violence.

There's this horrible shooting, the Aurora theater shooting in 2012. And in 2019, when the Democrat Beto O'Rourke was running for president, he wanted to make a statement about gun control, and he chose to do so in Aurora, where he did so, he had a crowd of friendly faces, except for one person who at the time was just a woman, just a person who happened to make a drive from tiny little rifle, Colorado. And that's where one of our sources saw just this person in the crowd who stood out because she had a gun on her hip. And then a few minutes later, she confronted Beto O'Rourke. And then that footage went, you know, bonkers, viral online, and she became the person that we all know now.

Lisa Lehrer
Thank you so much for my question. My name is, and I drove down here from rifle Colorado to speak with you today. I was one of the gun owning Americans that heard your speech and heard what you had to say regarding, hell, yes, we're going to take your ar 15 and your AI. Let's be respectful. Let's be respectful.

Well, I am here to say, hell, no, you're not. So with that, I would like to know how you intend to legislate evil. Because it is not the gun. It is the heart of the man that does that. We all have stories.

David Plotz
Excuse me. Let's allow her to finish. Please, please, please. We have these stories. We all have the experience.

Lisa Lehrer
Experiences. I was living in Aurora during Columbine. I had just recently moved when the aurora shootings happened. Yet I have very close ties here. Yet all of those people were there defenseless.

They had no way to defend themselves against a crazed shooter. So I want to know how you intend to legislate the hearts of men and leave american citizens. Like my felt like myself. American mothers. I have four children.

I'm five foot zero, 100 pounds. Cannot really defend myself with a fist. AR 15. It's okay. Please, let's allow her to finish.

I don't have my AR 15 today. I have my Glock. Don't worry, sir. I have your back. And then what happened?

David Plotz
So she confronts Beto. And what happened after that? Well, then she became a star on Fox News, and a few weeks later, she announces her campaign for Congress. And then basically one year later, she wins. So she unseated this five term incumbent, Scott Tipton, who was himself, herself quite a trumpy figure.

So it's not like she had different politics. She just had a very different approach that really resonated with the people of western Colorado. So Breet talk a little bit about that approach and sort of what, how she, once she arrived in Washington or when she was elected. What are the sort of distinguishing characteristics of the Boebert as a politician? I mean, there's the heckling, for example, but what else?

Bree Davies
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different things about her that I think we've already seen before. Right? We've seen it in Donald Trump, but it's different when it comes in this package of this petite woman from the west with a gun on her hip. I mean, this was what made her famous. Also sort of prior to this, she had been on, I think, ABC News as, like, woman who owns restaurant where all the waitresses are strapped.

It was a huge deal. And so she really kind of leaned into that avatar, which I think all politicians have one. Hers is just particular, really interesting because it's bombastic and it's, it's loud and it's very self assured. And as you'll find in our series, a lot of the other reporters that we talked to had such interesting interactions with her. We have a great conversation with Kyle Clark, who's a kind of a local celebrity here in Denver.

But she sat down with him, I believe, for her first interview in Denver, like on Denver television. And he was shocked by how little she knew about the actual workings of Congress. But it didn't seem to bother her that she didn't know. She was kind of like, I don't know, I'm going to go figure it out, but I'm just here to represent my people. And so I think that she kind of gets overshadowed by the behavior, stuff like that.

I mean, heckling the president is a huge deal. I'm not undermining that or this. She made international news for being in a theater and getting busted groping her date and vaping and stuff. But beyond that, we see, Paul and I have been to a campaign event of hers and we've interviewed her. It's more than that.

It's something that relates to folks in her districts. Now she's running, she's running two different districts. That just resonates in a way that other conservative politicians weren't able to get at. And I think that's part of this work with the series is we're trying to get at, what is that? What is that thing about, what do you think?

David Plotz
What is it? I mean, I genuinely, I don't know. And I also feel like we really know because we see it all the time. It's just like she doesn't, you can't shame her. Like, you can try.

Bree Davies
She's not very easy to, I haven't seen her feel shame. Oftentimes when she's doing an interview or she's, you know, getting people riled up at one of her events, the first thing she does is bring up those salacious situations. So it's like she puts them out there first before you can pin them on her or her opponents can sort of poke at her with them. So she's just really a master at running a room and being a politician. But it's in a way that makes some people uncomfortable.

David Plotz
I mean, it does sound, as you're talking about her and the bits I've seen about her, there's a lot of the Trump psychopathology in her, Paul, narcissistic, no matter what happens, always forward, never apologetic. Flaunting ignorance, but also filled with sort of a joy and boisterousness with which they approach the problem. Well, I 100% agree. I mean, we started thinking about Boebert as like the, what happens to the Trump movement without Trump? That question that's been lingering on the Republican Party for a few years now.

And I think it's people like Boebert who do exactly that. What you're talking about, my theory is she took the vote from her district as a mandate to stick it to democrats, to stand up to democrats, to fight back, and to embody the anger that had been building up the resentment that had been building up in these communities for 1520 years. And that's what she's done ever since. And she keeps doubling down. I also have started to think about it as kind of like a Ponzi scheme.

Like, you keep going after these big moments, she keeps going after these confrontational moments because she knows that for every person that hates her for it, a new person is going to love her for it. That's a great metaphor, the political Ponzi scheme. I love that. So, Paul, she's running in a new district. She's moving to the open seat that Ken Buck left open.

Why did she relocate? Was it because she going to lose in her current district and is she going to win in this? There was a little thing that happened last year where she went out to see Beetlejuice at a fancy theater here in Denver. And I think a lot of people heard about this date she went on, and that just didn't sit well with a lot of her constituents. And she was already losing their faith.

Like, she had this squeaker of an election where this Democrat came up and gave her a real run for her money in 2022. She only ended up beating him by 546 votes. So the expert opinion was she was not going to win in her district. So it seems like she made an opportunistic choice to switch to this new, much more heavily republican district on our eastern plains, the complete opposite side of the state from her old district, which is what people call like a plus 27 republican leaning district. So all she really has to do is beat these five other people who are running for this race, and then she'll have basically locked up.

The Democrats are a non factor in this district. And as for whether or not she's going to win, I think absolutely she's going to win. These five other people, none of them has really distinguished themselves. I mean, there's still like a month left to go, but she's got Trump's endorsement. She's got name recognition, she's got a war chest of fundraising.

People know her all over, and she's got the MAGA base in her pocket. I think she's got it locked up. What do you think her future is, Bree? You call the podcast Lauren Bobert can't lose, which implies. I don't know what it implies, but do you think she has a big future, or is she just going to be like a kind of marginal gadfly?

Bree Davies
I think that she has a big future. Whether that's in politics or not is a great question. Or with this particular race, regardless of the outcome, will she run for something else? Possibly. I think she found her place in politics, stepping into it at first because I think she realized she had some power within her community and she wanted to say something.

This face off with Beto is such a great example of someone getting energized to be part of a political conversation in their community that they otherwise had not been a part of yet. But beyond the politics part, she's very deeply, I guess, entrenched in sort of the christian right part of the GOP, and she kind of goes around to these various conferences and things and does big speeches at them. And I think she's got plenty of things she could be doing outside of politics that's still going to appeal to her community, whether that's directly political or something to do with church stuff or just being a public figure. I think she really likes that, and I think she's really good at it. Yeah, I mean, she, I guess the person she maybe most reminds me of is Sarah Palin.

David Plotz
She's got this sort of screwball charisma. Like, she has star power and screwball charisma and just, like, willing to just be out there. And, I mean, Palin hasn't had, like, the most amazing career, but there's just star power to her. I think she's even. I think she could be bigger than Sarah Palin, too.

Bree Davies
I think she just has a bigger, she has a little bit stronger footing also. It's just a different time. Right. We're ten or 15 years out from Sarah Palin, and how women are viewed in politics is changing all the time. But I think particularly with this brand of politics, there is more space for women, especially moms.

I mean, that's another big thing about her that she kind of gets picked on about is being a mom and being a grandma. But she's really figured out how to put energy behind that. And I, I think she could do a ton of, ton of things with it, whether it's politics or beyond. Paul, Bree, thank you so much. Check out Lauren Boebert.

David Plotz
Can't lose. Wherever you get your podcasts, I, I especially recommend the second episode as sort of an introduction to who Boebert is. And if you care about Denver, you must, must, must listen to Bree and Paul's daily Denver podcast, citycast Denver. It's so good. Thank you guys so much.

Bree Davies
Thank you so much. David. This was awesome. Thanks for having us. David, let's go to cocktail chatter.

David Plotz
When you're having a chat. Cocktail, my girlfriend and I have decided, we've tried to decide if Wednesday is too early in the week to start drinking. So if it's a Wednesday night and Emily, you're having a cocktail, I don't know, it might be too early for in the bathlon household to have a drink. What are you going to be chatting about? Yeah, Wednesday night is not my drinking night, but I'll try to imagine nonetheless.

Emily Bazelon
So I wanted to tell listeners about a fellowship application for an organization called the Law and Justice Journalism Project that I'm on the board of. And it's for up and coming early or mid career local reporters around the country. It can be tv, it can be print, any medium who are interested or currently covering courts and crime and police and want some more mentoring and nurturing. So the idea is that a lot of local newsrooms are cash strapped and they're not necessarily in a position to do all of the nurturing along the way that people who are coming up in their field need. And so this is a fellowship project that pairs folks on their way up with people with a lot of experience who kind of talk them through the year they're having and try to provide help outside of the newsroom.

And this year, we're asking people to come to us with a project that they have in development that they would work on throughout the year. That's part of their normal work life. So we're not asking to do extra work. We're just trying to make a good, exciting project that you want to do better by helping with it. So anyway, it's called, as I said, the Law and Justice Journalism project.

It's LJJP for short. And you can go to ljjp.org and find our application. And we are excited to get good applicants this year. So come on down. L JJD.

David Plotz
John Dickerson, what is your chatter? My chatter is about the puzzling moment that danish antiquities dealer doctor Italy Gradel had in 2016, when he's looking at eBay, of all places, and sees this amazingly rare ancient gemstone carved with the intricate figure of the greek fertility God. And he thinks, wow, that's amazing. He thinks, that should be in a museum. And then he realizes, maybe it is from a museum.

John Dickerson
But suddenly, whoop, it goes away on eBay. And this antiquities dealer has a very rare and very specific area of interest with these gemstones. And he also, it turns out, has a photographic memory, even though this particular one that he saw disappeared from eBay. He got to thinking about it, and he had bought some other gemstones from a user whose name was Sultan, 1966. And so he did a little sleuthing from his danish island and realized that, in fact, some other things that he thought he saw were connected to the british museum.

And he alerted the museum, but because of the Covid-19 lockdown, they kind of, like, blew him off. But then he just kept going. And it turns out that he found out that, in fact, the head of the museum's greek and roman antiquities division, a man named Doctor Higgs, was in fact, stealing from the museum and selling its wares on eBay. And so the museum is now charged this fellow. So basically, 600 miles away from the British Museum, a fellow on a danish island discovered that there was thievery going on inside the museum.

Doctor Higgs denies the claims. I have a quiz for you. I got probably more texts from people in the last few days, friends, saying, oh, I guess you're. Things like, I guess you're voting for Trump now, or you must be really worried. Now, why did I get those texts?

David Plotz
Any theories?

No theories from John. Emily. Is he against pandas or something? It's panda related. Exactly.

So comes news this week. The Smithsonian has secured a deal with the chinese government or the chinese entity that handles pandas in China to rent, to lease two more pandas to come to the National Zoo, which is just around the corner from where I live, where I've lived for most of my life, in fact. Bao Li and Qing Bao, a male and a female, are going to be arriving from China later this year. This follows a period when there have been no pandas at the zoo, after. A blessed period for David, a blessed.

Period when there have been no pandas. And when pandas are at the zoo, it is all the zoo can talk about. And it's like the central exhibit at the national ZOo. They've had pandas there, except for this recent period for my entire life, they literally arrived more or less synchronously with me? No wonder you resent them.

Emily Bazelon
They like to sell your fanfare. When you were born, you would have been the central exhibit at the National Zoo were it not for the pandas of your era. I just want to remind everyone, however, that pandas are the worst. They are the worst Animal. They do have these supermodel good looks, like, no denying a panda is cute, but they are so dreary, they're so lazy, they cannot be bothered to breed.

David Plotz
They are always doing things like mauling their keepers or squashing their babies, and they have no survival instinct to speak of. They lead this life of unparalleled tedium, and they won't even climb a tree because it's just, oh, I can't bother to climb a tree. Maybe they do a Zen Animal and you're just too much of a striver to appreciate their placid demeanor. They're loners. No, they're not even that.

They're placid. They're lazy. But when they have to encounter anybody else or another panda, they're generally hostile and unpleasant, except when they're baby pandas, in which case they're quite cute, they're charismatic, megafauna. But actually, they just don't deserve all the love and attention we give to them compared to, you know, a seal or a red panda. There's an animal.

There's an animal that's got some piss and vinegar in it that's got some spirit, will try to escape, will just be joyful and interesting. Give me a red panda. Give me a prairie dog. Give me a seal. Just enough with the pandas already.

Enough with the panda. And now I guess I have to vote for Trump because Biden is, is making deals with the Chinese on things like this. That sounds like a good choice for you, the high information voter. I'm one of the. Someday I will decide whether it is the fact that the pandas have been pressed upon you because I grew up in the same era in the same city.

John Dickerson
And it's true that, like, it was mandated that you be excited about the pandas.

My elementary school, Franklin Sherman in McLean, Virginia, had the panda. I don't know if it still does. Had the panda as it adopted the panda as its symbol. Virginia and the panda, no connection, not related. So is it being forced fed panda or is it intrinsic to the panda?

I guess for you it's both. It's both. I think it's both. For me, it's like, deeply, emotionally scarring all the way back to childhood. But also, I've come to intellectually understand why I responded that way.

David Plotz
Listeners, you have sent us great chatters. Please keep them coming to us, something that you've been chatting about with your friends and loved ones. Email them to us@gabfestlate.com. dot. And this week's listener chatter comes from Anna Marie, and it's about Folsom prison.

Annamarie Smith
This is Annamarie Smith from Sacramento. My chatter, the podcast entitled on our watch. It's produced by KQED and season two deals with Folsom prison. This is the story of two prison guards who witnessed serious misconduct on the part of other guards. Seeing the inmates badly abused, they tried to act as whistleblowers.

But as soon as the two men start speaking up, they are treated as enemies by the prison authorities. They attempt to stay the course in the face of a massive harassment and intimidation campaign for the whistleblowers and the inmates. Nothing good comes out of this setup. The gender subtext is fascinating as well. The KQED voices on tape belong to women.

They sustain their measured professionalism as they delve deeply into the hetero macho world of prison guards running amok. In my view, this is outstanding journalism, and I'm happy to share it with you.

David Plotz
That's our show for today. The gabfest is produced by Shayna Roth. Our researcher is Julie Hugin. Both of them are agnostic on pandas. Our theme music is by they might be giants, who I suspect really like pandas.

Ben Richmond is senior director for podcast operations. Alicia Montgomery is the VP of audio for Slate. Alicia, also a fellow Washingtonian. I'm unclear whether what her panda position is for Emily Panda loving Bazelon and John Panda loving Dickerson. I'm David Plotz.

Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

John Dickerson
The panda is still the damn school's mascot.

David Plotz
Hello, Slate plus, have you, any of you met Octavian George Collins or Torsten Savage Collins or Titan Invictus Collins or new baby industry America's Collins? There's a story in the Guardian this week. It's sort of in the british people liking to gawk at Americans category of, you know, let's find a snake handler kind of story. But it's about a small new offshoot of effective altruism. Effective altruism, the movement touted by Sam Bankman, fried and others.

It's like let's look at the long term problems the world faces and do things to fight it. And this particular case, there's a set of people who are like musky and Musk adjacent, who believe that one of the crises the world faces is that certain kinds of people are not having enough children, that the world is headed for a population collapse, or perhaps a population maldistribution, because in rich countries and educated countries, the birth rates are quite low and going down, and we risk a situation where we have too many old people, not enough workers supporting them, and sort of a geriatric, non expansive, non productive society that could be dangerous and could be unstable. And so these pronatalists are embarking the old fashioned way, one by one, to have more and more children. And so the Guardian profiled Malcolm and Simone Collins, a Pennsylvania couple that is headed for seven children with those wonderful Ayn Randian kinds of names. So I actually have some sympathy for these people, and I'd be interested in having a conversation with you all about it.

Emily Bazelon
Oh, good. I'm glad you have sympathy. I wondered what you thought, because their philosophy connects with your book the Genius Factory, I think, and this idea that, I mean, they're trying not to be eugenicists, right? They're trying to say, well, anyone can join our movement. We're just in favor of lots of babies.

But there's, there's also this selection for intelligence and other traits and a kind of sense that actually the people in the movement tend to be white and affluent. That suggests that we're talking about a more select part of the population, shall we say? So how does this connect to the eugenics of the past that you wrote about and then why? That was just a snippet from our slate plus conversation. If you want to hear the whole conversation, go to slate.com gabfestplus to become a member today.

David Plotz
If you want to hear the whole conversation, go to slate.com gabfestplus to become a member today.

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