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It's Friday, November 8th, 2024.From Peachfish Productions, it's the Gist.I'm Mike Peska.An election, a loss in an election for the Democrats, is a chance for an autopsy, recriminations, recalibrations.All that's good.
Now, you have to note that there are a lot of elements of the self-analysis that are actually a little contradictory. And yet, at the time, when Democrats have lost and they're looking for answers, all the answers seem right.
It was everything that went wrong, even when the things don't really align with each other.So for instance, a big explanation, one that I was saying before the election is just a terrible environment for incumbents, terrible environment.
for anyone who is associated with the Biden administration, look the world over, all these governing parties who are governing at the time of inflation, we're losing.That's true.
And yet we're also hearing, and there's a lot of elements to this, is that the Democratic Party is terrible at messaging.They're terrible at connecting to blue collar people.
They have, as I tweeted today, they have something of the sheen of the HR department about them in the eyes of most average Americans. So I guess both of those two things can be true.Democrats were never gonna win.
Kamala Harris as the Democrat was fated to lose and also she was bad.But here's another truth, that Democrats lost 6% of the vote in the country as a whole.Yet in those swing states, Kamala Harris only lost 3% of the vote.
So where she competed with this terrible message and these terrible positions and maybe this useless get out the vote effort, seemed to have done twice as good as in places she was just coasting on the brand of Democrats or her personal appeal.
There is one aspect of the recriminations that Democrats are engaging in, I could say indulging in, that is probably not helpful to their cause.And if you want to hear Democrats engaging in recriminations, a great place for it is Pod Save America.
And this is typical, and in fact, I think in some ways, more rationally stated than some other left-leaning precincts.But they put the blame, once again, on big money and the bad, bad man, Elon Musk.
A new set of super PACs revved up by the crypto industry spend $130 or $135 million this cycle, including dumping $40 million worth of negative ads on Sherrod Brown's head in Ohio.
That is an unbelievable amount of money, a disgusting distortion of our politics by a few crypto billionaires like the Winklevoss twins were talking shit about it on Twitter last night.It's a couple of the venture capital firms.
I mean like that kind of thing I think would offend everybody.You know what I mean?Like 99% of the country is like, that is gross and wrong.And I do think that's something we need to run on and run against.
I mean, Barack Obama, I think very effectively ran against money in politics in 2008.Okay.
But not mentioned was the fact that Future Forward, a dark money pack, that is a 501c4 corporation, pledged and spent upwards of $750 million in this race.We don't even know how much.They're what's called a carry corporation.
Maybe in a few weeks we'll get some more glimpse into their spending.But the New York Times reports it was around $700 million.Michael Bloomberg gave $50 million to them.Bill Gates gave $50 million to them.I know Gates and Bloomberg are
good guy billionaires or good guy, maybe okay guy billionaires in the eyes of most Democrats.Elon Musk is certainly evil billionaire in the eyes of most Democrats.
But if the problem was a billionaire spending money in a dark money pack, the Democrats did it five times as much or as well, or judging by election results, not as well. as the Republicans did.
So I think you get a lot of traction blaming Elon Musk and blaming the role of money in politics.
If you're a Democrat for, I think the fourth cycle in a row, the Democrats, the Democratic presidential contender has far out raised the Republican and the results do not seem to align with the amount of money, dark, light, or green that was spent.
On the show today, as promised, I will talk a little bit more about Democrats.I have this theory of the megaphone and Donald Trump's use of it, which is normally described as such a bad thing for all of us.
But you know, wouldn't it be nice for the Democrats to have their own megaphone?They think they do, but they don't, and that's the problem. But first, turning to sports, college football is in full swing with a 12-team playoff this year.
College basketball is underway.I'll give you some scores.The Lindenwood Lions beat the University of St.Louis School of Pharmacy Eutectics 98-30.Actually, it's just the eutectic.What is eutectic?
It's a chemistry term relating to or denoting a mixture of substances that melts at a single temperature lower than the melting points of the separate constituents. In other words, it's a bit of chemistry whimsy.
Their mascot is a guy named Mortimer McPessel. I'm not really here to talk about the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St.Louis or their basketball team.
I'm here to talk about a higher level of college sports because college sports is big money, huge money.And for many years, the players couldn't make the money.And now they can.Isn't that great?No, it's quite terrible.
It is called NIL, name, image, and likeness.And the Washington Post did a deep, deep dive into just how this system works. Long story short, it doesn't.Shorter story long and really quite fascinating with the Washington Post's Albert Samaha up next.
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So time was, and not that long ago, college football and basketball players were engaging in enterprises that made millions, and indeed in aggregate, billions for their university.They were the labor.They got to keep none of that.
A Tim Tebow jersey, didn't say the name Tebow, had Tebow's number, sold millions and millions of dollars worth, and Tebow pocketed nothing.Don't worry, Tebow did pretty well.
otherwise, but it just seemed unfair, and it was unfair, and the players said it, and more people in the media said it, and coaches began to say it, but the important thing was the Supreme Court eventually said it.
You can't keep making money on the labor of student-athletes without allowing the student-athletes to share in some way.So what the NCAA concocted was a program which would pay athletes for their name, image, and likeness.
In other words, Tim Tebow or the backup guard on the University of Florida or maybe a gymnast at the University of Florida who was pretty could go on Instagram or sell a jersey or just smile nicely and boosters would give them
hundreds of dollars to, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars.What could go wrong?The answer is everything.The NIL system replaced, and we're going to get into this, replaced enforced amateurism with chaotic professionalism.
And it's very hard to figure out exactly what's going wrong. We see the effects of it.A prominent coach at the University of Virginia just quit saying he doesn't like what college sports has become.
It is, and this is a cliche phrase, but it gets at what's going on, the Wild West.No one even knows how much money the college athletes are making.
And some college athletes have gotten ripped off by promises because none of these offers are really chronicled in any systemic way.
One of the most important and, I think, eye-opening investigations into the NIL system has been conducted by the Washington Post, College Sports Money Machine, the hidden NIL economy of college sports.
And I am joined by one of the four authors of this, Albert Samaha.Albert, welcome to The Gist.
Thanks so much for having me.Pleasure to be here.
So you, as someone who covers these issues, knew that there was a lot of discontent brewing, but there are also a lot of questions to answer with NIL.And I guess you had to decide what question you were trying to answer.So what was that question?
Before we can even get into the questions we wanted to answer, we had to get into the biggest question we did not know the answer to, which is, what does this economy look like?How much are athletes actually getting paid?Who is paying them?
How is that money getting from point A to point B?We knew nothing about this system, so we kind of had to start from the very, very top, which is, how much money is in this economy? What are athletes getting paid for?Who's doing the paying?
And then once we started to get some answers to those questions, we were able to kind of get to the next step, which is why is, you know, what is the gender disparity between what men make versus what women make?
How wide is the disparity between the big time programs that are making millions and millions of dollars from boosters versus the ones that are more mid tier that don't have as much money?
And how is that manifesting in how, you know, rosters are being put together?
Yeah, those two questions, by the way, are is the economy efficient and is the economy fair, which are slightly different things.And I do want to get into it.But you're right.
You're like an economist who has this opaque underground economy, which is crazy since it's being done on national television and the most watched shows.
But it's an opaque underground economy and you're trying to put some numbers on it, figure out some statistics.So I know how I would try to go about doing that.What did you decide?
Well, once we learned that 24 states require student-athletes to file disclosures of all their NIL deals to their universities, immediately, our minds immediately went to public records requests.
So we filed public records requests to every public university in a major, formerly known as Power Five Conference, and kind of just wanted to see what we would get back.We didn't even know if these universities were keeping any records.
The laws say that student-athletes have to file these records, but nothing in the law says the universities have to actually keep these records.So we filed these records, and then a bunch of schools said no.
But a bunch of schools also gave us what they had.And even that small sample size opened our eyes to kind of this big opening window of this economy that we knew nothing about.
So even despite the small sample size we got, because we had nothing before that, it was still incredibly fruitful.
Right.So to be clear, Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, these are schools that play big time sports.You knew not to even ask.They're private universities.There's no public disclosure requirements.
Then you have all the other big state schools that we've heard about.And a few of them, I think eight of them, sent data sets that listed every dollar amount for every NIL payment.And they were very detailed.
And they were schools like Kansas, Oregon, Colorado, UCLA. Cal, Purdue, Maryland, and Illinois?
Correct.And Oregon State.
Oregon State, not Oregon.Sorry about that.Sorry, Ducks.They were the beavers.The beavers outdid you on this one.By the way, the Oregon Ducks would have richer NIL deals than Oregon State.
But it was from these eight and some of the partial information from some of the other schools that were maybe partly compliant that you assembled your database and got your information, right?
Exactly.We got these eight schools that gave itemized transaction logs.
We got five other schools that gave aggregated numbers that showed the total sums for each program, which was great for seeing gender disparities and great for seeing the difference between what a football team makes versus a women's tennis team.
And then we had another half dozen that gave us Some kind, like Oregon, for example, gave us itemized logs, but they omitted the dollar amounts in each of those amounts.
So that kind of makes the, there's some things we can get from that, but not for a data analysis.So we sort of had to work with what we got.
They omitted the dollar amounts.Yeah.That, that, that would seem to be kind of useful information, but also it does show Oregon state more or less complies.I mean, this is not complied.You can't force them.Oregon state gives you full information.
Oregon gives you quite incomplete information though, better than some schools. This is not anything that the NCAA mandates.This is not anything that a state mandates.
This just goes by the vagaries of the accounting departments within individual schools, right?
Yes.And just to kind of put a finer point in how sort of inconsistent and arbitrary this is, Oregon State actually omitted the money data from 23 of the hundreds and hundreds of transactions.
So even from these full data sets, there were still little holes.And it kind of just comes down to how each university decides to handle their process.
So I guess the headline numbers are the biggest numbers.And there we have Colorado and Deion Sanders being the coach.And he greatly affects the economy of Colorado sports, right?
He does.And you can really see that in how much money the football team is getting versus how much money everybody else is getting. Which is how much?The football team.So here's the caveat that we have to make throughout the story, right?
We get the numbers that the student athletes are disclosing by law.Colorado claims that many student athletes are not filing those numbers by law.And so that they would say that the numbers we have are low.
The numbers we have is that the football team got about five million dollars from July 2021 when the Supreme Court decision came in to July 2024, the end of our data sets.And 90% of that came in the 18 months after Dion arrived.Yeah.
But that is because Dion Sanders had a deal with a production company and they might not have even had a deal or thought that they could get away with a deal without the Supreme Court ruling.There's just money there because Dion Sanders is a star.
There is one member of the Colorado women's basketball team who only played 11 minutes, but she did well.She's Dion Sanders' daughter. She got $42,500.That said, she also had 700,000 followers across social media.
And I don't know the exact CPM or ROI, but 700,000 followers should get, someone should get some bird call influencer tens of thousands of dollars, I guess.
And Colorado is a perfect example of how there's kind of these two distinctly powerful markets here, right?Like, there is the market of the boosters, who are determining value based literally on their own interests, right?
They like football, and so they're going to give money to football players.
And then you have this whole other economy, which is dictated by the interests of corporate brands, who see someone with 700,000 followers, and they don't care how many minutes you played.
They see that you have a big reach on Instagram, and so they're going to give you a lot of money to promote their product on Instagram.And obviously, with players like
Shador Sanders and Travis Hunter, they're sort of at the apex of that intersection, where they are both massive social media stars and also players who can really help your team succeed.And so they're sort of cashing in on both of those pipelines.
How much do other players or other programs at the eight schools that you know the most about, how much money is being spent on, I don't know, pick a program, the Purdue basketball team, the Kansas football team, the Cal women's rugby team?
Yes, I mean, at the bottom levels, right?So let's look at LSU, right?They have, in our data set, $23 million across all sports over these three years.For the football team, they got about $9 million of that.
For the women's tennis team, which reached a second round of the NCAA tournament, so, you know, that's a solid program, they got zero.
And every other program, whether it's a rowing team or a rugby team, kind of falls somewhere within that spectrum, right?And when you see the outliers, you can sort of trace the reasons why.So, for example, Virginia's swimming and diving team.
they had almost 30% of Virginia's entire NIL distribution.And you're like, oh, that's kind of strange.You don't really see that from kind of a random non-revenue sport like that.
You do the research, it's like, oh, they've won four straight national championships and had three Olympians, including the Walsh sisters, on that program.So they're getting a lot of endorsement monies for that.
And they're getting a lot of platform for their participation in the Olympics, which is something that wouldn't have been possible, obviously, before NIL.
So I will opine, and you could comment or not, but thus far, nothing, none of the dollar values that you say strikes me as unfair from a strictly capitalist perspective.
LSU's football team generated $105 million in revenue last year, $54 million in profit.This is what happens when you play in the national championship game of which the NCAA is paid
hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate for the TV rights, $9 million for the team that generated $54 million.Just in terms of like labor theory of value is a huge underpayment.
And when these guys go pro and many, I don't know if most, but many, many of them will, they'll be earning more money for their teams that are making more money, but not as a proportion.So that's just one thing.The women's tennis team,
lost money for the school.
Now you could, there's another value of labor, there's another value of payment that would say this is just unfair in terms of gender, it's unfair in terms of success, it's unfair, and I think this is a good point, of why the university says it has these teams, right?
They don't say we do it to make money, they say we do it because college sports are important for the overall fabric of the university and for all these other reasons.
So you have to value the women's tennis players as much as the men's football players.
But so far, nothing strikes me as unjust, but there are, and we could get to that, and we'll get to the gender disparity, but there are instances that really do strike me as unjust, which is how the people being paid, if you want to say, there's a lot of money being made, give some of it to students, that's great, but how they can't even know
how much money others are being paid.They don't even have contracts.And this leads to the exploitation of labor.We saw that, well, we saw that in a few situations, but what did your investigation uncover?
Yeah, the lack of transparency is somewhat at the heart of all of these problems, right, is that this gives the people holding the purse strings a lot of leverage when the people asking for money don't, like in any labor system, salary transparency is a big leverage point that people can make as they're negotiating salaries.
And a lot of these contracts with booster collectives, we know, even have language in them that requires, that bars the athlete, the student-athlete, from sharing how much they're actually making.
And I think that your point sort of strikes at the philosophical question at the heart of all this, which is, why are we paying college athletes?Are we paying them based on the value that they generate, based on the metrics that we set?
Or are we paying them for their labor and the time that they put into their sports?And I think before any of this happened, everyone that wanted college athletes to get paid sort of conflated those two things.
Now that we're actually seeing this unregulated market blooming, we're seeing that those two things are distinct from each other.
And in terms of the market value, you bring up the point of revenue, but an important distinction here is the people that are determining the market value are not actually the people that are benefiting from the revenue, right?
Like the schools are the ones making the money that the college football players and men's basketball players are drawing in, but the schools aren't doing the paying, right?
On the other hand, it's the booster collectives who are paying all this money because they want to see their team win, but they're not getting any benefits of revenue.
So even that point of, like, paying people based on the revenue they're able to generate, it's not so much a causation of getting paid more for the revenue you generate.It's more like those are two factors that come from the same thread.
which is the popularity of their sports.
And who determines the market value at this point comes down to the fandom and passion and bank accounts of big money donors and corporate brands and the value they see in the social media followings and reach of some of these athletes.
Do players who touch the ball, do they get paid a lot more than players on the football team who don't?
So it largely, I mean, the short answer is like mostly yes, but at the top tier programs, the Texas's, the Michigan's, the LSU's, these boosters are smart.
They know that if they want the players who touch the ball to touch the ball into the end zone, they're going to need an offensive line, you know, to open holes for them.
So you see these kind of team deals, like Michigan was one of the first ones to publicize where they got their whole offensive line
Bunch of money and cars and making sure they know how to how to build a roster I mean, it's it's it's similar to kind of the NFL right maybe the NFL years and years ago Everyone was just paying the quarterbacks then eventually Now offensive line, you know left tackles are you know, some of the biggest earners in the league?
We're seeing that same economies take shape in college football.
The blind side is just dawning on the boosters.What about the NCAA?Does it not care?Does it claim its hands are tied in terms of doing something to put more sunlight into this situation, which would only help student-athletes?
My opinion is that the root of all this chaos is the NCAA's refusal to confront the reality of this.
Like, the reason this is so chaotic is because the NCAA is trying to still maintain the veneer of as much amateurism and arm's length distance as possible.So they've taken responsibility, liability, accountability entirely out of
Their own hands entirely out of university hands and into the hands of the boosters and the corporate endorsements third parties that universities have no say over in the pragmatically speaking maybe they have a little bit but.
In the NCAA's perspective, there are some important reasons why they feel that they don't want to jump on board to just start paying athletes directly through universities.
The first is, there's this question of, are they going to consider student-athletes university employees, which could make them eligible for collective bargaining, which is something a lot of universities don't want.
But a court recently determined that they can be considered university employees.The second reason, which might be even more important, is Title IX.Title IX requires that universities Give equal funding for men's sports and women's sports.
If you look at a lot of universities, you'll see that there are more women's sports than men's sports because football, which is only a men's sport, has 100 players.So you've got to make up the scholarships on the women's side.
That strikes at the question of, OK, if you have to pay equal money to men's and women's players, well, how much does that mean that you have to pay your quarterback a million dollars and then you have to pay someone on the women's side a million dollars?
Or does it mean that you're going to have to pay your quarterback $50,000 because you can only pay your women's players $50,000?
So the NCAA knows it's regulated.It's a regulated body.They go before Congress.They benefit from funding, public funding.They know if they become involved, they will have to enforce the rules of America.
But if they are hands off, maybe whatever the Wild West economy can either let itself play out and even to the detriment of the student athletes, the people that they claim they're benefiting. Or do you think that, I'm sure that's going on.
I would also think there might be a little bit of sour grapes in that the NCAA has always opposed this.And then when it was imposed upon them, even though Charlie Baker is now the president, used to be Mark Emmert.And so those are different regimes.
Perhaps they're saying, we always warned against this, and now they're incentivized to make it seem chaotic and fail because that reflects well on the NCAA's historic position.
I'm going to let the siren pass real quick. I think that sort of nails the point.I mean, the NCAA has some significant questions they would need to answer in a system where schools are paying athletes directly.
And one of those questions is, who pays for the non-revenue sports?Do football and college basketball drive enough revenue to be able to pay the salaries? of athletes in every other sport?Are they gonna have to raise tuitions on students?
And I don't know if that's necessarily been proposed at all, but these are the questions that I'm hearing from boosters, from administrators, from the people that do not want to see a university employee-student-athlete system.
They're raising the question of, well, who's gonna pay for all this if the revenues aren't enough from football and men's basketball?And I think that the
The issue has been that the NCAA has preferred to kick that can down the road until they are legally forced to confront the questions.
And they are now facing that reality because of these series of court rulings that have now put the ball back in their court to create a entirely new system that will take some of the power away from the boosters and put more of that power in the university's hands.
even if they don't really want it. confront and control, right?Unlike a war in a foreign land and an expression of dissatisfaction with that from the student and faculty senate.
This is something they could do in the name of justice and fairness, but no schools are doing it because if Michigan were to do it, they'd be at such a competitive disadvantage.
By it, I mean disclose how much money everyone gets, they'd be at such a competitive disadvantage against all their rivals.
And we're already seeing how that sort of competition system plays out across states, right?It's almost like everyone wanted to lower taxes so that they can get the businesses coming to their state.
A lot of the states in the SEC conferences, they would see like a good example is like Florida, where in 2021, Florida passed an NIL bill.That was one of the most rigorous in the country.I spoke to the author of that bill.
He based it off of California's NIL bill, which is one of the first in the country.
Several months later, South Carolina, Alabama, they passed some of the loosest NIL laws in the country that basically have no regulation over the system, allow any kind of deals to happen, minimal disclosure requirements.
And so Florida's like, oh, wait a minute, this is going to hurt us in recruiting.And so they rewrite the law to make it more like Alabama and South Carolina's.And that is sort of how this system of
non-disclosure of non-regulations has perpetuated around the country.
It's because it's a competitive advantage to have hands off, to have your lawmakers not touch this system where you can just pay athletes whatever you want under the cover of darkness.
And part two of our interview with Albert Samaha will play tomorrow on The Saturday Show.An inducement, perhaps, to listen to our Saturday offering. I like fantasy sports.I like daily fantasy sports.
I've been looking for a good, reliable, fun, easy to use, interesting app.PrizePix is that app.Why is it interesting?
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I'm like, I'll take more on that.There are a few other bets.It could be a Sunday when I'm with my friends watching the game or games at a sports bar and there's something going on in every game.So I have Tyree kill under 75 receiving yards. or J.K.
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So given how interesting, quote unquote, our chaotic election season is, and by season, I mean, I don't know, from time, you can trust our friends at the Dispatch podcast to break everything down with the biggest stories.
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Find the Dispatch podcast wherever you get your erudite perspicacious, interesting podcasts. And now the spiel.Most people who talk about politics are better at talking than at politics.
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Think about recent MSNBC hosts who used to work in White Houses, Nicole Wallace, Jen Psaki, Simone Sanders.They were spokespeople for George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.
The guys on Pod Save America, or I should say the guys who speak most often, they were in the comms shop, not the policy shop.They at least started there.Same with David Axelrod.
He became a chief strategist, the chief strategist, ran the campaign for Obama, started as a journalist and a wordsmith.And then there are the journalists who stay journalists but talk politics.
So all of these people over-indexed for the importance of messaging. And if they say Democrats should change, it's usually Democrats should change their message.
Sometimes they say Democrats should change these policies, but then it's often because the policies are hard to message or hard to explain to America.
I understand all that, but I do think the Democrats, even with that, I'm going to say as an opinion haver, the Democrats have really bad messaging.And I also think they have Donald Trump megaphone envy.And here's the shocking part.
The megaphone envy is apt.We all know that Donald Trump has a huge megaphone, medium-sized hands, huge megaphone. he has a unique ability to get attention.
And Donald Trump's big old megaphone, it is usually talked of with derision in democratic circles, something like, oh my God, he uses this megaphone to spread his lies.And yes, he does.
But he also uses it to clarify what he means or what he wants people to think he means.So when Donald Trump says that he's not going to sign a national abortion ban, As far as the abortion ban, no, I'm not in favor of abortion ban.
But guess what effect it has?People hear it.And a lot of people believe him.There are a lot of polls showing that voters who are otherwise concerned about abortion heard this.They know that this was Donald Trump's stance.
And I don't think Democrats had the same ability to get a message through a don't worry message.
Now, when it comes to things that the Democrats wanted voters not to worry about, things like fracking or decriminalizing borders, Kamala Harris never really made a don't worry argument.
She tried for more of a, well, you know, it's not that bad now, and you've got to understand, and he cynically killed the bill, and we still have to preserve the dignity of all those who aspire to improve their lives, that sort of message.
So we can't really test why Kamala Harris, don't worry, I'm going to handle the border message, didn't get through.You know, she didn't really say it like that.
But she did say what she wanted to say, and she and the campaign was probably pleased with how it was transmitted, because it went through the respectable mainstream media, legacy media, with all the nuances that she and the Democrats wanted.
And I got to tell you, I would rather have the megaphone."People don't know what Kamala Harris stood for because she didn't have a megaphone, or maybe she didn't want the megaphone, she couldn't handle the megaphone, she needed the megaphone.
If you think, well, everyone had all the information they needed on abortion, no, no they did not.
Everyone you and I know did but polls were showing this is crazy But when the Dobbs ruling came out, it was very popular but also that 25% of the public blamed Joe Biden for Dobbs because it happened on his watch
I don't know if this impression was totally corrected, but in correcting it, you could have used the megaphone.And there's a lot of talk about Kamala Harris not going on Joe Rogan one podcast.And yes, she should have done it.
No, it wouldn't have changed much, but it's clear they didn't want to do it because they found the forum distasteful or calculated she wouldn't be good at it.But you know what that is?That's them giving away, shunning the megaphone.
Because for Trump, the megaphone isn't the fact that he makes speeches, even if they're poorly attended or less well attended than they were before.It's not his true social account.People don't care about that.
It is most of all his willingness to go on outlets that are willing to broadcast him.
For the hundred years from 1910 through 1920, if I were running for president, I would much, much rather have the favor of the press and the networks than everything else combined.Now, I would much rather have
the friendly access to every other form of media besides the networks and the number two and three rated cable news station and the press.My God, even calling it the press.
I mean, pretty soon this will take on the flavor of bemoaning the candidate's poor treatment by big daguerreotype.
The other problem with allowing respectable media to be your stand-in megaphone is that they earn their respect by having some say in how that message is transmitted.Good, I insist on that.But the Substack, Pod, TikTok, Glob, they don't really care.
They just want you to demurely touch the like button. No, they want you to smash the like button, dammit.Here's another way we're depending on respectable media as your megaphone serves you poorly.
Respectable media gives you a misimpression of sentiment and truth and facts on the ground.
The most effective ad of this campaign was Donald Trump actually accurately attacking Harris for at one point supporting taxpayer-funded surgery for trans inmates.You know the ad.
Now, now, I, maybe you, are hearing Democrats saying, yeah, that ad was effective.Very effective.I heard Axelrod admit it on his Hacks on Tap podcast.But what were they saying then, when the ad came out?
Then, they were saying, and I think they believed, that Republicans are surely going to fail if they even pursue this line of attack.
Here's CNN's Jake Tapper talking to Parker Malloy, and the first sound you'll hear is the clip they used to set up the questions for Malloy.It's Kamala Harris speaking about that ad in her interview on Fox.
He has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to hit me with a bunch of disinformation and misinformation on this.And he's living in a glass house because the policies he's speaking about in terms of those surgeries were also his policies.
What did you make of Vice President Harris's response?
Sure.Well, I think the point that she's making there is that this is not what the American people want to focus on.
There was a recent survey done by Data for Progress that found that 80% of Americans, including 85% of Republicans, think that politicians should spend less time on trans issues.
So I think she's really just highlighting the fact that most people would rather talk about the economy and inflation than talk about where someone uses the bathroom or whether an under 12 girls soccer team includes a trans girl or not.
Now that what you just heard from Malloy was an exercise in precisely missing the point and Tapper didn't direct her to the point.Malloy and the Democratic Party surely would rather talk about the economy But this ad worked.It shocked people.
And the fact-checkers couldn't rule it anything but accurate.And it wasn't about another aspect of trans rights that Dems would rather talk about, which is who uses what bathroom.That was the last battle in the trans rights fight.
And the Republicans lost it.They looked weird when they tried it in such states as North Carolina.But the battle over girl sports and this endorsement that you heard of taxpayer-funded surgery
not as a regular practice, but as an example of an actual extremist position, at least so in the minds of voters, that really did hurt Democrats, fairly or unfairly.But the right way to rebut it isn't to just emphasize the unfairly part.
It's to use your megaphone to rebuke the stance you once had or to say why it is unfair and really make your case pithily, please.Because the case of we'd rather talk about other things That's not an answer.Let's change the subject?
When that's your answer, that's a pretty good indication that the subject is bad terrain for the Democrats.And it was.And they never used the megaphone to combat it.And they are afraid of the megaphone.
They were proud of their let's change the subject response. Media Matters for America, a left-wing media criticism site, headline, mainstream media uplifts trans voices to call out the flood of anti-trans political ads.
Parker Malloy was prominently cited as a wonderful example of an effective and necessary rebuttal.Democrats, Democrats, Democrats.
You can't outsource your messaging to the activists who are going to approve of the opinion columnists who are talking to the Harris-Waltz-friendly cable network and call that effective communication.You need to learn to wield the megaphone.
Oh, and also when you do, try to have something to say that will appeal to voters other than yourselves. That's it for today's show.
Cory Warr is the producer of the gist, Joel Patterson's the senior producer, Leo Baum's our intern, Michelle Pesca, CBSO of Peachfish Productions, Oompa Loompa, and thanks for listening. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
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