Why big GOP money matters less than ever

Make Me Smart September 25, 2023 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

All right, if you hear a smacking sound, it’s me trying to kill this goddamn mosquito.

Kimberly Adams

Yeee, I get the worst reaction to mosquitos.

Kai Ryssdal

I don’t know whose in charge today, but I guess we’re gonna go. Are you ready? Yes, I’m ready. Let’s do it. All right, everybody. I’m calling Kai Ryssdal, welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make the day make sense. Jayk Cherry going rogue, holy cow.

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you, everyone, for joining us on this Monday. Hope you had a good weekend. And yeah, it is Monday, September the 25th.

Kai Ryssdal 

Amazing. Alright, so we will do what usually do on a Monday, news, smiles and then we will get out of your hair. I’m telling you this mosquito is gonna make me crazy. He’s just flitting around.

Kimberly Adams 

I heard a prover, I’ll have to look it up. But it says something to the effect of if you ever believe that a little, one individual person can’t make a really big change, you’ve never spent a night alone in a tent with a mosquito.

Kai Ryssdal 

Right? Totally. That’s kind of what I feel like and, you know, it’s funny he’s bopping around in the same place. Alright, I’m going to ignore him and we will move on. You get to go first. What do you like?

Kimberly Adams 

I like the story in Politico headline, “Big GOP donors hoped for an alternative to Trump now some are giving up.” So the GOP debate, the second GOP debate is coming up this Wednesday, and I was out of town for the last one. But I do hope to be able to watch this one. And usually at this stage in a presidential primary, you know, lots of the front running candidates plural, are getting money from a lot of different donors that will eventually coalesce around the nominee, right. But this time, you have all of the big money, Republican donors, backing all these candidates that are unbelievably far behind in the polls, compared to Trump, who folks are mostly staying away from because he doesn’t need them anyway, he’s getting money from his supporters paying his legal bills. But the idea that these donors are they want an alternative to Trump, they don’t see a path forward, and they’re starting to kind of hold back on spending, because they don’t want to back a loser. And they also don’t want to alienate Trump if he does end up with the nomination, but it ends up being kind of this like self fulfilling cycle, right? Because if the donors hold back on backing these other GOP candidates, those other GOP candidates have less money to run their ads and do their campaigns and try to pull away some of these Trump supporters who are very active in the primaries and who are going to vote and, you know, decide who the nominee is. But on the other hand, you want to kind of if you’re a donor, you want to reserve the funds that you plan to spend for the real race, because it’s likely going to be close between, you know, likely Joe Biden, and like, Donald Trump. And so this piece is very interesting. And they’ve talked to you know, they’re very plugged in over at Politico, they’ve talked to a bunch of GOP donors about how they’re thinking, and you know, how they’re kind of just getting resigned to the fact that it is likely that Trump will be the nominee, and therefore, how do they want to think about spending their money, it’s very similar to the conversation we were having about the anti-abortion groups, you know, where they want something else, but kind of don’t have a choice.

Kai Ryssdal 

So, yes, to all of that, we should be clear, too, that this is also as I read the article quickly, there’s we’re talking, it’s super PACs, and it’s outside groups, and it’s not just the candidates in the campaign’s themselves, right, this is across the spectrum of spending.

Kimberly Adams

What do you mean?

Kai Ryssdal

Well, it’s not just people not giving to Trump or not giving to a leader. It’s the whole panoply of ways that money gets funneled into our campaign,  our our campaigns, right, that’s the deal.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, the sad thing is, I don’t even really think about money going directly to the campaigns anymore, because it’s like, what do you mean it because so much of the money in politics now is from outside groups PACs, super PACs and you know, dark money groups with, you know, the PACs do have some campaign contribution limits to the PACs being like the RNC affiliated PACs and DNC affiliated political action committees. And I was just talking with Rick about this as we were working on a story the other day.

Kai Ryssdal 

Rick Karr, for those who aren’t on the inside.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, sorry, Rick Karr, my editor. And I was telling them that we need to start thinking about how we use the term Super PACs, because it implies like an extra-large political action committee, but it’s not it’s a completely different kind of group that doesn’t have campaign contribution limits in the same way that a political action committee actually does. So we call them super PACs, but they’re not actually PACs in that way. Anyhow, went way down that rabbit hole, all this to say that, yes, it’s these outside groups where the real money is these days.

Kai Ryssdal 

Right. Also, also, the the modifiers “super” implies largeness, or hugeness, or all of that, and they’re not necessarily ginormous. Right? I mean, you’re gonna have super PACs of midland size, right?

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, you can have a super PAC of two people. You, it’s often that these super PACs, these outside dark money groups, however you want to talk about them, it’ll have one big donor behind them, and they’re their buddies, you know, and then wound up with, but you may not know who that donor is, when we talked about the Patagonia guy, and Patagonia guy and the Republican guy who did it and yeah. Who will have to pull that up, who basically around the same time said, we’re going to put all of our money into politics in this way, you know? Anywho. So this is my, I’m interested in this, it’ll be very fascinating to see how the different candidates do in the debates. You know, the people I talked to, you know, in DC is not the most Republican of towns, but the Republicans I talked to here who don’t work in politics. They like Nikki Haley, they liked Tim Scott, they really don’t want Trump but they are also starting to become resigned to the idea that they may have to make a decision between Trump and Biden. I think a lot of them if they end up stuck with that may sit it out.

Kai Ryssdal 

Hmm. It’s a lot of money on the sidelines. It’s a lot of money on the sidelines,

Kimberly Adams 

A lot of money on the sidelines. Alright, let’s see yours.

Kai Ryssdal 

Okay. So here’s mine. It’s a piece I saw on the New York Times, which caught my eye because about eight years ago now, on a Monday morning, I came in to the office and I said to my producer, at the time, I am absolutely sick and tired of doing Greek debt crisis stories from here, I want to go to Athens. Thursday morning, I was on a plane to Athens, which for Marketplace, is very, very fast. And we spent four or five days there Tommy Andres, and I and Rob Ayers, our producers, and we did stories about the Greek debt crisis. And how badly was hitting the Greek people. And if you remember this, this was a huge, huge deal, right? There was corruption in Greece, there was fat pent, there were fat pension plans, there was mismanagement of the entire economy. The Europeans were really worried about it, the Northern Europeans, we should be clear Germany and France, right? Because, because Greece was gonna need a lot of money to get bailed out. Also, if you remember, and this was pre-Brexit, basically, Greece came really close to breaking the Euro. Because once you get into the single currency union, you don’t have control over your own currency. And there were huge problems with debt loads. It was a very, very big deal. And if you listened to Marketplace at the time, we did a lot of stories on it, because it was it was a giant deal. Well, now comes The New York Times, having put somebody on the ground there to point out to us that Greece is the fastest growing economy in the Eurozone, unemployment while still high at 11%, is way down. And arguably, it is thriving. Having gone through a really, really bad time, people remember the austerity budgets in 2016, 17 and 18. It was really challenging for them. But now Greece has turned it around. And I think it’s it’s what not without scars. But it’s a really interesting story. And it’s also just heads up to those of you who pay the bills in St. Paul. I’m gonna be going to Greece here soon. If I can. Yeah, it worked last time. I don’t know why this time is different. Anyway, it’s just cool story. It’s a cool story.

Kimberly Adams 

But how long did that take? You know?

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, it took eight very long and painful years. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, it’s sort of like us pulling out from the recession. It took such a long time.

Kai Ryssdal 

And countless people lost their jobs and homes and much pain, you better believe it. You better believe it. I’m sure there was there was there was people left and, you know, intellectual powerhouses left and the economy is worse off because of it. But now it’s growing and better. So there you go. All right, Jayk, shall we? Today was not a smilable day for you, is that where we are?

Kimberly Adams 

No, I didn’t, nothing was moving me. I mean, I have a smile ish story from the weekend where I was at a bar and take talking to the bartender, you know, as you may be aware, I do like a good cocktail. And and, you know, the bartender was saying, you know, what, what kind of cocktails do you like, and I was telling him about my kitchen, cocktails and things like that. And the bartender, the wonderful Thomas told me that he actually has started using ChatGPT to make cocktails. And he’ll plug into ChatGPT. Here’s what I have, you know, and what kind of cocktail can I make with that. And so that was this weekend. And so then today, I saw where OpenAI announced that they’re adding video and photo and invoice integrations and things like that. And one of the examples they gave was that ChatGPT will have the ability for you to take a photo of what’s in your fridge, it’ll analyze it and suggest recipes for you, if you ask, and it you know, so many of the conversations we’ve been having about ChatGPT are about jobs and what it will do to the overall economy. But it’s fascinating to see this sort of little ways that it’s getting baked into life of I want a different cocktail. What can I make with this, here’s what’s in my fridge, I want something like my sister told me that she used it for meal planning, but she was like typing in what she had. And so it made me smile a little bit to see you know, a non-destroy the economy way. Well, I mean, that’s somebody’s job who’s you know, coming up with cocktails and coming up with the recipes so that could be damaging and reduce that market.

Kai Ryssdal 

But going to a bar is not about the cocktails.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. And it was fun. And then we started talking about anime, so it was great.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s a win, win. It’s a double whammy.

Kimberly Adams 

It really was. There, actual smile.

Kai Ryssdal 

That was good story. So I got to one of which was “huh, this is interesting.” And the other one literally made me laugh made me laugh out loud this morning. I’ll go with “huh, this is interesting.” One first, credit to Maria Hollenhorst, one of the producers on Marketplace who pointed this out to me. Article in The New York Times today and yes, I do read other things than the New York Times. But this is where I found a study out today. In some journal of repute, Geoscience, Nature Geoscience is the journal. It points out that mammals are about halfway through their time on Earth, we’ve been around for about 250 million years, and in about 250 million years, mammals will no longer be around. And I just thought was fascinating. It’s combination of the sun getting hotter, and US injecting stuff into the atmosphere to make it hotter. Also, also plate tectonics, because what’s going to happen is there’s the the continents, now the plates are going to move, and they’re going to recreate another super continent. And it’s going to have much more landmass and much fewer land near the oceans. And so that interior landmass is gonna get much hotter. And it’s going to be too hot for mammals to survive. So we’re about halfway done gang, we’re about halfway done. That’s all you need to know.

Kimberly Adams

What animals will remain like, well, like the insects still be around, or are they?

Kai Ryssdal 

I don’t know. It’s, I was mostly concerned with the mammals to be honest with you. I was mostly concerned with mammals. So here’s the one that made me laugh out loud. And this is at The Messenger which is a very interesting news outlet, not without a troubles but they did have an exclusive John Fetterman, senator from Pennsylvania who we’ve talked about a couple of times on this podcast came out on Friday or certainly over the weekend anyway, and said that Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey indicted on Friday on multiple counts of of let us just say corruption. Fetterman says Menendez should resign. Fetterman also now is going to return the campaign donations that he got from Menendez and his various campaign apparatuses and he’s going to do it with $100 bills stuffed in envelopes, which come on come on senatorial shade. Come on. Wow. Come on. I mean, look at all thing is terrible in a zillion different ways. But that was pretty funny.

Kimberly Adams 

That is pretty funny. But this is sorry I went on I was lost in thoughts. I was thinking it’s worth, at some point me doing a story explaining why members of Congress give each other money all the time. And, and how that plays into the politics that we have keeping in line and votes and things like that, but totally story for another because it’s

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s that’s, that’s it’s part of why we are where we are with politics in America. Yes, that is the story for another day. And that is it for us today. Tomorrow is Tuesday. We’re talking government shutdown. We’re talking about the federal budget process how it’s supposed to work why it always seems to break down how we got here why it’s such a mess what we might do to get out of it. I don’t know if there are answers to that questions, but we will ask it tomorrow, or I will anyway Kimberly knows the answer probably.

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, I think most of us know the answers it’s just the answers are not being done. But anyway until then, if you do have questions, specific ones or even nonspecific ones, or just want to, you know rage and write it down, feel free. You know, why not? You can send your questions, comments, whatever at makemesmart@marketplace.org Also leave us a message 508-U-B-SMART.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s program is engineered by Jayk Cherry.  Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our interns Niloufar Shahbandi.

Kimberly Adams 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcast and Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital. I feel like the vibe of this music is very California to me.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, it was written in California by two guys who live in California.

Kimberly Adams 

I know. I was just thinking this is very California vibes.