820: It Wouldn’t Be Make-Believe If You’d Believe In Me
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. This year comes to an end, and we think about what politics looks like right now in our country. A good place to understand it is a state political party that made a very bold choice this year. The convention will come to order, the state is Michigan. This is a meeting that happened in February, where the Michigan Republican Party had to pick a new leader. If you want to return to your seats, you're welcome to. If you don't, that's fine. I know you're going to get up and sprint to vote here in a minute. They were at a crossroads. They'd gotten killed in the midterm elections, which is just a few months before this, creamed. They were further out of power than they'd been in 40 years. The Democrats controlling the State House, the Senate, Governor's office, most of the congressional seats. And why? What big reason was, because the Republicans had all these candidates who were pushing the idea that the presidential election had been stolen. And Michigan voters are not into that. They do not want to elect candidates who were obsessed with the election being stolen, apparently. So this meeting in February, the party needed to elect a leader who was going to rebuild and take the party forward. And if you think about it, one logical path they could have taken is, they could have picked somebody who renounced the whole election fraud thing, right? All the conspiracy theories about voting machines and just all that stuff that Michigan voters are rejecting. But there were no candidates like that at all. Nobody who said, "Let's drop all this election fraud stuff." Because the candidate like that would not have a ghost of a chance with the Republicans in this room, where the ones who actually picked the new party leader. In the last two years, election fraud stopped the steal enthusiasts have driven out the regular old-fashioned conservatives and even other mega-loving Trump enthusiasts. Those people who have been ousted, they didn't care enough about election fraud, or if they have ties to the old party establishment that this new guard sees as completely corrupt, compromising rhinos. So in the end, at this convention, there were nine candidates. And just to give you a sense of the range of this group, the most traditional Republican of this bunch was a guy named Scott Greenley. Any somebody who thought like, "Okay, election fraud is a problem," but he also came with connections to donors, to old-school, pre-January 6 Republicans, if at Greenley is an experienced political consultant, which, by the way, in this crowd is not an asset, he talked to one of the producers on our show, Zoe Chase. So everyone's telling me that you're the establishment candidate. Oh my goodness. So I get called all the names. I mean, I'm called establishment. I get called to rhino. That's even worse. I've also been called to America first guy because in 2016, I was working extremely hard for President Trump long before a lot of people were involved in the party. So that's Scott Greenley, the most traditional Republican. The least traditional candidate for party chair was a complete political outsider in every way. Somebody who was involved in a politics started in 2020 as a poll watcher in Detroit. Someone who got famous when she claimed that she saw election fraud with her own eyes. She went under Steve Bannon's podcast in all kinds of right-wing media and then ran for Secretary of State. She's an arresting talker, black, a millennial, a devout Christian named
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