Pod Save America - Is JD Vance the Republican Front-Runner?

Jon, Lovett, Dan, and Tommy answer your questions about the upcoming midterms, early bets on 2028, what they got wrong about this year, and Lovett's future reality television career. Then, they listen back to their 2024 New Year's resolutions and set ones they hope to actually keep in 2025.
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Duration: 1h 25m
Broadcast on: 30 Dec 2025
Audio Format: other

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Welcome to Plaid Safe America, I'm John Favera. I'm John Lovett. I'm Tommy Detour. I'm Jan Faver. It's that time of year again. When we answer your most burning questions about the year, we're wrapping what's coming next and all sorts of personal stuff about Lovett. Okay. Then we'll be confronted with our New Year's resolutions from last year, as we always are. Love us. Come clean about how we did and as always, we're going to make some new ones about 2026. You guys ready? All right. New Hampshire Avenue asks, cosplay Republican strategist for a minute. You're headed into a midterm year. You control all of the government and you shat the bed and everyone knows it. Dems will run on a simple change affordability message. What's your best possible counter message? We're going to start off by doing some work for Republicans. Do we get to do things or just say things? The best counter message is you ditch the tariffs, you extend the ACA subsidies. Oh, no. I think you pitch on gas prices being down. I think you're your reaction. You go to war with Republicans, you have that. Thank you. That's right. That's it. Yeah. Okay. Dan, you want to go in? Yeah, sure. Okay. So I've given this little thought. I find it alarming. But so my first step is I stormed into the Oval Office and I stated Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, your plan to make this election about immigration and crime will not work. It's doomed to fail. No caravans, no crime stats. This is an affordability election and we cannot win by trying to change the subject. That cannot happen will not work. So as Tommy said, there is a way to do this, which would be to actually lower prices. But we're not going to do that because we're Donald Trump and Republicans. That's not how we operate. So instead, the goal here is to disqualify the Democrats as vehicles for change. And as people who you would trust to actually lower costs. So you run a hard negative campaign showing Democrats focus on all things, other than costs. You use a lot of photos and videos of Biden and Kamala Harris and you try to associate Democrats, these Democrats with the economy that people hated just one year ago. And then probably, and this is the most I think you could expect from Trump and you probably can't even expect this, is you start Trump starts saying, we have made progress, we have to make more progress, give me more time. And that's your plan. Yeah, can't beat that. Yeah. Well, it's funny because sort of that you got the negative part. That's what they always do. They just can't seem to get Donald Trump to deliver any kind of a self-aware message. Yeah, like, I was thinking the same thing, Dan, like you want to say Democrats, if you like Democrats, they just want to raise your taxes again,

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