We're Here for Freedom with Mi Vecino (Devon Murphy-Anderson & Alex Berrios) 38:09

Hey everyone, it's Reed. Before we get started, I just want to say it's been three years since I took over as the host of The Lincoln Project, and I cannot say thank you enough to each and every one of you who listens, who downloads, who shares. I meet people out who said, I've heard you talk. Thank you so much. And all I can say is thank you. Thanks to everybody out there. As we get deep into 2024, please,

Rate us five stars. Share it with your friends. Share what we're talking about here at The Lincoln Project and how we're going to win this fight in November. Thanks, everybody. And on with the show.

Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by Devin Murphy-Anderson and Alex Berrios, the co-founders of MiVecino, the first year-round boots-on-the-ground voting rights organization in Florida that's on a mission to register, educate, and empower Hispanic, multicultural, and first-time voters who've been historically and systemically marginalized, silenced, or ignored.

Me, Vecino, is also a proud member of the union. Jointheunion.us. Devin and Alex, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for having us, Reid. Good to be back. It's great to be here, Reid. So, guys, the last time we had you on, it's been like 18 months. The last time we spoke on the air was just before the 2022 midterms. So, Devin, I'll start with you. Tell us...

where you were organizationally and where you are now? - Yeah, great question, Reid. So basically this summer in July, MiVecino decided to do a little bit of an organizational pivot. And so what I mean by that is up until this point and every time we've been on the podcast, we had basically been talking about doing voter registration, vote by mail enrollment,

and voter mobilization, we decided based on where Florida is at right now, where our organization is at right now, and all of the voter suppression bills that Ron DeSantis passed in his last legislative session, that it was best for us to start working on the Reproductive Freedom Ballot Initiative here in Florida, which is basically a constitutional amendment to protect abortion access, which is

been filed and a coalition has basically coalesced around this in response to a six-week ban that has been passed and we're waiting to see how the Supreme Court rules on the current 15-week ban to see when the six-week ban will go into effect.

And Miivacino felt really, really passionate about being able to prove that we could secure Hispanic voters for abortion access and really push back on some of the narratives that historically we've heard around Hispanic voters and not supporting choice. And so we basically launched this massive program to collect petitions.

from Hispanic voters to help put this on the ballot. We are super excited to announce that we did reach the petition threshold. We did qualify for the ballot. It is now being called Amendment 4. And we are basically waiting to hear from the Supreme Court by April 1st on whether or not they're going to rule that this language is constitutional for the 2024 ballot here in Florida. All right. So, Alex, let's talk about that. So, guys,

As you may recall, like when I lived in California, like I was in the ballot measure business. Right. And in California, it's out of control and it has been for 120 years. In Florida, Alex, they raised the threshold. Right. I think you have to get 60 percent.

of the electorate to agree with you. It's not 50% plus one anymore. They, they ramped up the threshold, but take us back to the beginning from me, Vecino's perspective. So tell us, you know, what kinds of neighborhoods were you going into? What kinds of folks were you talking to vis-a-vis getting the petition signed? And what were you learning at the doors during that process? Just to tag onto what Devin said, you know, we're going into our third year of nonstop organizing and we,

We saw where the petition process was ramping up, where it might go is a lot of uncertainty, but it's an important issue. And we also saw that, you know, we've got hands down the most experienced, best organizing team in the state of Florida. And so we said to ourselves, you know, we've been speaking to voters across the spectrum, persuading them to register to vote, to enroll in vote by mail.

getting to know them and becoming a fixture in the community. And so we wanted to see just how much of that organizing muscle we could flex and start working to connect voters' lived experiences, the issues they care about, and the issues we all care about to policy and legislation.

So we thought we could be successful persuading Latino voters and then all voters to support this ballot initiative. So we started to collect petitions. We started to talk to all voters, Republicans, unaffiliated voters, Democrats. And we started to really have some of the best conversations that we've had in our couple years of organizing. We have some of the longest conversations with Republicans. We have elections.

some of the highest contact rates, meaning folks that answer the door, pick up the phone from Republicans. And what we found as a similarity is that with Latinos, they want to be treated with dignity and respect.

A lot of times you're going to have some distance and opinions and how you approach the differences you have between them is critical to gaining any level of support, collaboration, or even just civil discourse with people. And we found that at the end of the day, we're getting field stories back from our organizers. And we had one young woman wearing a...

Joe Biden t-shirt signing an abortion ballot initiative petition. But I mean, I think, you know, Devin, just to remind folks that the difference, I think, between what you and Alex have done at MeVacino and what so many other organizations do, and we certainly appreciate this too, is one, most political organizations are really cyclical in nature, right? They ramp for the campaign and then they sort of go dark for 18 months, right? And then they come screaming back.

And so there's a timing issue, which is, you know, a little bit to Alex's point, which is you disrespect voters by showing up eight weeks before an election and saying, hey, by the way, can I have your vote? But secondly, you all have been very particular in the idea that the organizers that Mivasino has are part of the community to which they're talking, right?

Absolutely. And that's like a key part of our mission. And I would like to say that we were the ones that came up with it. We weren't. We know that it worked for Obama. We know that it worked for Stacey Abrams. Hey, listen, we're magpies. We'll steal any good idea, right? Well, you know, we have the formula for success on the progressive side. And like that has been

something that we have been screaming from the rooftops about for a long time is that basically there's been a disconnect between a lot of the incredible polling research, et cetera, even from awesome orgs like y'all at the Lincoln Project, and then the actual dissemination of those messaging developments that happen from that research to actual voters. And so MiVecino views it as our mission to bridge that gap and to bring these conversations and these messages to

to voters directly. And then it also helps create a data feedback loop to help bring back to the pollsters and the analysts, et cetera, and say, look, this is what's working, this is what's not. I think a great example of this is our work around the Abortion Ballot Initiative. We have filtered all

all of our issues for this cycle, including abortion, through the lens of freedom, right? Cost of living, freedom for our families to have the opportunity to survive, right? Gun violence, the freedom to have our kids and our families be safe. And then abortion, the freedom to be able to make our own medical decisions without government intervention.

And that's something that you only really learn when you have face-to-face conversations. But I also want to just make one note back to your previous point about getting to that 60%. The beauty of having a year-round team that is on the ground every day is the opportunity that it gives us to pivot almost immediately to any issue. And so when we did this pivot,

It was in a week. And we're able to look at the math for 60%. And I want all the listeners to understand because there's a lot of confusion about this. We need 60% of the vote of the people who cast a ballot on this issue.

OK, so people who go into the ballot box and they vote for Trump and then that's it. They don't vote down ballot and they don't vote on this amendment. That's not a part of the 60 percent math. It's everybody who actually votes on this amendment, which is a very different mathematical strategy. And so when we sit down and we look when this was happening, we need to get to 60 percent. Here's the kind of the piece that we want to deliver as MiVecino. We have the ability to immediately pivot and to start working on that. There's no ramp up time and a lot of programs take months to ramp up.

I think that's right. And Alex, I think, you know, just to dovetail into what Devin said about freedom, you know, the interesting part about this, too, is a sort of vestigial Republican is that freedom and liberty, individual liberty is one of those things that Republicans or even conservative leaning unaffiliated or maybe conservative Democrats, whatever, like that still scratches like whatever lizard brain itch we have.

Right. Because we're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. At the end of the day, like being, quote unquote, conservative means like you basically leave me alone. You leave me alone. I leave you alone. We all live in harmony. Right.

which is certainly not the Republican Party of Donald Trump, MAG, or whatever else. But also we've seen that that same message formulation has worked in Kansas. It's worked in Ohio. It's worked in Kentucky, right? So this is, I think, a really brilliant evolution on the part of Democrats and left-leaning groups to understand that if you run around screaming abortion on demand, abortion on demand, abortion on demand, that ain't going to do it. Right. Right.

Exactly.

People are a little more sophisticated than that, right? You can personally not want to have an abortion, but still be okay with other people making their own decision. And that's an important piece in the way that we talk to people. You know, when we're talking to men, which we've had tremendous success with, people have really counted men out on this issue.

with a lot of assumptions that we understand they seem intuitive when you make them. But when you actually talk to people, it turns out men are very, very supportive of women having the right to make their own decision. And the way that we approach it is that, you know, politicians are taking away your job as a man. They're usurping your role as a protector of your family.

As the breadwinner, someone that takes care of your loved ones, whether it's your mother, your sister, your daughter, whoever it is, they're coming in and making those decisions for them and taking that away from you. And your job, one, as a man, is to take care of the people in your life.

And that's just something that we all believe. Yeah. And let me ask you this, Alex. And I think that there's a global utility and belief to that. But I'm curious, too. I feel like if I am wrong, just say you're an idiot. Right. People say that to me every day. So you're not going to hurt my feeling. I only have one feeling and it doesn't come out very.

out very often, is, you know, the Latino population, as we have talked, the three of us have talked offline in person when we've been in South Florida or now Central Florida. And on the last podcast is the Latino vote. The Latino population is far from monolithic, right? It is as varied, maybe more varied than anybody other than maybe the East Asian community, right? As far as folks who have come here. But I wonder, Alex, too, is that do we mistake the idea that Latinos are

predominantly or have, you know, Cubans are very different, right? Like Cubans have historically voted for Republicans in South Florida. But there is a cultural conservatism, not a social conservatism, because I think that's different. A cultural conservatism that I think you're hitting on when you're talking about that, when you're talking to male voters about a responsibility to

Right. That I think sometimes the elite political types, whether it's D.C., New York, San Francisco, L.A., I think miss because they sort of you know, they're that old New Yorker cartoon. Right. Which is like the world is them and then everything else is out there. Am I right or am I wrong about that?

Buddy, you are spot on. If this was a high level strategic meeting with some of the alphabet people that I'll be kind enough to not mention, what we would be saying is, well, Alex, you're half Puerto Rican and you're half Cuban. So you know how all of both of those groups think on every issue. Right. And also, you probably know all of them individually. Right. Yeah. All 17 million of them. Right.

Right. And so this like these crazy assumptions starting from this place is just where we just go like wildly wrong, like pants on head wrong. Crazy. What we fail to see, but we were seeing it. Maybe, you know, when you you've caught on in your own means is that people are coming to this country for freedom.

Right. They're coming to this country for freedom, the freedom to think what they want, to support their families, to make their own decisions. That's why they come here. They don't want to be policed. They're escaping bad situations to have this opportunity. Latinos want to work.

Right. It's not that they're opposed to reforms or the same, but when you say we give you universal income and free healthcare and free this Latino people come to this country to make something of themselves. And so these issues, especially the way they're presented, do not resonate with this community. Now, when we talk about the diversity of the Latino community, yes, we acknowledge it's definitely not monolithic. Our political views and religious views are as diverse as we are, but we

That's not an actionable insight, right? To just say that they're all different. They're all different, that we can't do anything with that. What we like to do is we like to focus on the things that we have in common. And what you brought up, Reid, was one of the things that we all have in common, that we came here for these freedoms. Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.

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Odoo, modern management made simple. Alex, you are 100% right about talking about the things that unite, not divide. And when I say this, I don't believe it's divisive, but I just want to be clear about the way that y'all communicate with people in communities literally can come down to the type of Spanish language.

vernacular that they use, right? Is it the Venezuelan community that speaks almost exclusively in slang? Which one is it? Cubans. Cubans, yeah. Cubans speak almost exclusively in slang. Right, so if I take my North Dallas high school Spanish, right, in there and go, donde esta el baño, right, they're going to be like, get the hell out of here, man.

Right. Like I don't understand you. They just won't like you. Hey, you know what? Again, something I deal with every day. I'm just kidding. But I think that's the kind of stuff, too, that's so unique about what you do. So, Devin, let's talk about this. So, you know, you and I talked probably I think it was either in December or January about the kinds of things.

you were seeing at the door. So let's talk a little bit more about the data that Alex sort of opened the door for us on amongst male voters, amongst Latino voters, amongst Republicans. What were you seeing in the prism of freedom and this ballot measure? What were some surprising things you all were seeing? Really good question. And I'm so glad you asked it. I think the first point of context for listeners that's important is

is that there are multiple types of campaign strategies. And what we're talking about right now is a persuasion program. In a persuasion program, you can plug different types of voters into. And what I mean by a persuasion program is basically a program that we invest in

serving multiple touch points to voters to incrementally move them into our column. The first step of a persuasion program, and you'll know this, Reid, even more than us, you've been doing this longer than we have, is basically to segment voters. And so Miva Sino's approach to this issue of reproductive freedom with Hispanic voters has been to include Trump voters, Republican voters, men, Democrats, unaffiliated voters, etc.,

everybody, okay, and segment them based on this issue, and then start to have our persuasion program with the undecideds, which we're kind of saying is this movable middle, and then the voters that are leaning on either side. And I think that that's really important for people to understand for this one main reason, which is we are in the era of social media and messaging and TV ads. And we still have a lot of campaigns investing millions in direct mail.

Those types of message delivery strategies are a monologue. It is a way to deliver a message. It is not a platform that opens up to have a dialogue with the voters. And persuasion requires some type of a dialogue. We just had the Super Bowl. We all watched the millions of ads. We had Jesus on our TV. But like, did that persuade you? Did you change?

change your opinion based on an ad that you were served, the answer for most people is no. And so being able to have a dialogue to have that persuasion is important. To your point also, just to put a fine point on it, is the Super Bowl is the only thing where people specifically watch the commercials. Nobody watches commercials any other time, right? Right. That's a tune out time other than that one time a year.

So in terms of what we actually are seeing that's surprising, and I'll let Alex weigh in on this, too, because he's our resident data guy. But basically only 20 percent of Republicans and comparatively like 15 percent of Democrats think that the government is doing a good job in Florida. OK, and our government is ruled and dominated by Republicans. And so we have Republican voters, like Alex mentioned and alluded to, that our average talk time on a phone call with a Republican voter is five minutes.

five minutes that they're willing to take out of their day to talk to us about how much they think their government is failing to address the issues that matter most to them. And that is the question, as it's phrased from the Mivasino script from our organizers, is how well do you rank the government's response to issues, to addressing issues that matter most to you? So I think that's really important and it creates an opportunity for us to be able to, again, have the dialogue and incrementally move people

So I was listening to a podcast. Remember that if you're a white guy over a certain age in America, you have to choose one of two hobbies, which is World War Two or smoked meats. Right. Those are our only two options. We get no other options. And mine was always World War Two going back to when I was 10. And so I'm listening to a World War Two podcast, Alex, to Devin's point. And they're talking about a battle in Italy where like it was muddy, it was rainy.

Right. Planes couldn't fly. Tanks couldn't move. Right. And it became what these guys called elemental. It ultimately became soldiers on either side, like running up to one another and fighting with each other. And I feel like to Devin's point, that's where we're almost back to from a voter contact perspective, which is there are so many ways that people get information on this. Right. Or whatever it is. And they're all more inefficient. Right.

And less trusted than they ever have been. So that one on one contact, which we took for granted, frankly, I think for decades may now be the most effective, but also takes the most work. Right. Like sending a text is easy.

But the ease also is, you know, how much response do you get? Right. Most people are going to say stop or whatever. So talk to us a little bit about that when how you guys go out and you see this, because I think that getting out and talking to people is going to be more important now than maybe it's been in 50 years. That's a great point, Reed. As the what we like to say is, as the world's gotten more sophisticated, right.

We've grown further apart and the most effective means of communication are the simplest, which is face-to-face conversations, which Mavacino has had over half a million face-to-face conversations. And so what we've seen is the last real persuasion campaign we had here in Florida was Obama.

where they put in the effort to go out and talk to people, get to know people, and not just tell them what to do. We've since then shifted to this system of nudges. You fit this profile of a voter with these past historic behaviors and most recent behaviors. So I'm just going to send you a nudge to go do this, go do that. This is what time have you done it yet? We don't talk to people. We don't persuade people. We certainly don't follow up with people. This is not what happens.

We take them for granted and we ask them to give us their most precious civil asset for literally no work on our part. Right. Right. Especially when you were thinking about the Latino community, which is honestly the most persuadable on the table community.

set of voters we have in this country. Latinos want to feel like they're a part of this. They want to feel like they're part of the system. They want to feel like they're part of the process, but they also want to feel important enough for you to come talk to us. And so when we talk to a lot of people, the way that they feel is you have one party that really doesn't stand with us

And they don't claim to. And then you have another party that also doesn't stand with us, but they do claim to. So which is worse, being ignored or hypocrisy? Right. So, you know, what they come back to is a lot of Latinos are opting out of the process, becoming unaffiliated voters, disengaging with the process. They feel disenfranchised. And then you have other voters that are saying, well, at least, you know, you got to give it to the Nazis. At least they're honest about being Nazis. And it's...

You know, it's like this kind of crazy basic, but how do you go wrong with that? Right. It's like you, if you're going to pick up a snake and you know, it's a snake, at least you can prepare for getting bit. Right. That's how they feel. Yeah. There's a, there's an old cartoon from like 2016 of a wolf on a billboard that says, I will eat you. And two sheep that go, at least he tells the truth.

Right. Right. Right. And this is this is we end up in this weird situation because we don't feel like we have options. And there's just no amount of advertisements or tweets or policy wins or press conferences that can overcome the feeling of being disrespected and disregarded. Right. And look, I mean, I think that's so much of what we see today, Devin. Right.

To say it's legitimate or illegitimate is hard because everybody's the star of their own movie, right? So your grievance in your mind might be legitimate, even if I think it's ridiculous. But that sort of level of, again, if you're going to ask somebody for this thing that they desperately need to utilize and we desperately need them to give to us, wouldn't we expect that there would be a little work? I mean, we got so lazy with super PACs and social media and everything else, right? Like, I mean, guys, I mean,

We're still running. You know, it's like, oh, there's going to be a two billion dollar campaign or three, whatever it is, like how much of it is going to just be burned alive on broadcast television on TV. Right. And we know how that story ends. And that's the most frustrating part of being on the inside and feeling like you're just absolutely saying the same thing over and over again. As we saw this in Florida last cycle, we had two hundred and eighty thousand Democrats vote for Ron DeSantis.

We had less voters on the Democratic side cast a ballot than actually vote. We had less than 50 percent turnout. We had two million Democrats that didn't vote. And so that's what happens when you have a top of the ticket race that had raised over 80 million dollars and did not run a paid field program. We know how that story ends.

And so we're seeing that now when we're talking to people around reproductive freedom, to get back a little bit to the data, over 30 percent, it's about 34 percent of the Republicans that we've talked to while knocking doors are supportive of the abortion rights constitutional amendment. And in addition, another 30 percent of Republicans are undecided. Like that mass right there, just with Republicans and the majority of these folks being Hispanics gets us to the 60 percent that we need. And I would just say this is that that for the

The opponents of the ballot measure, those figures are catastrophic. Right. And there's somebody who, again, who knows a lot of, you know, who's done a lot of ballot measures, too, is, you know, you really need to start well above 60. Right. Because you have to assume that some of it's going to erode. It's not because this isn't going to take place in a vacuum either. Right.

Exactly. And the Republicans are probably thinking that a lot of these voters are their base voters. And this goes back to the point of why year round organizing is important. If we get to these folks first and we've knocked 35,000 doors, but I wish it was 135,000 doors, 235,000 doors, right? Like,

If we get to those voters first and talk about freedom as the context and the lens for reproductive freedom, then there is going to be some seeds planted when the Republicans or the opposition starts to really blast. And we know there's going to be investment from the right, right, when they really start to blast voters. And look, I mean, Alex, you know this, too. Like, let's just talk about the choice debate, right, which is more heated now post Dobbs than it ever was. And I will say this just as an aside. I've said this before is

Like Dobbs is the car bumper that Republican dogs can't get the taste of their mouths out. Like they just love it. Right. They just love to catch that car. But also, you know, we know what they're going to do. Right. Which is this particular iteration of Republican Party MAGA evangelical Christians. Right. They don't moderate. I mean, in some cases they do. But in this they're like they're going to go crazy.

Right. It's going to be awful campaigning. It's going to be, you know, horrific videos, horrific pictures, you know, all this other stuff that, you know, it's the same people that push Marxism in schools and critical race theory. It's all the leftist wackos who are pushing this stuff. They're coming to Florida. Right. So, you know, just as someone who's been a campaign strategist for a while, like, you know what they're going to do. Right.

Honestly, Reid, that's how we're going to beat them. That's how MiVecino is laying the groundwork for success, right? We're stealing their voters out from underneath them before they even begin. Ron DeSantis put all this time, money, and effort into building an engaged Republican electorate, but only about 30-35% of that are the rabid, ultra-MAGA lunatics, right?

The rest of them are on a spectrum. And we're going to get as many of those Republicans out from underneath them as we can. And every time they lose one, it's effectively two votes. They lose one, we gain one. Right? That's the kind of movement that we need to be successful. And when we talk about persuasion, this is why persuasion is so important. Because first you have to talk to people to know where they are on the issues, who's persuadable, who's not.

and then to continue to engage with them over time. A lot of our strategy is built by reverse engineering Republican success in the state of Florida. We focus on Miami-Dade and how you can move Miami-Dade from red in 22 back to blue in 24, and even the possibility of over-performing Joe Biden's 2020 performance. Well, it sure as hell hope that's possible, right? Oh, it is. The natural question is, well, where the hell do those votes come from?

Well, in 2016, when you look at the 2016 Clinton-Trump matchup and then the 2020 Biden-Trump matchup in Miami-Dade, only about 7,000 votes separate Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. So where did that like 20, 22% swing come from? It came from Donald Trump gaining an additional 198,000 votes in 2020 he didn't have in 2016. Well, where the hell did those people come from? Mobilizing low propensity voters

Out of touch voters, people that don't normally turn out and vote in elections. And those are exactly the people that we're talking to. Also, we're going to, again, dilute and undermine the support for the Republican policies that they're trying to push out on us in Florida because the majority of people are honestly sick around DeSantis's shit.

right? They have real issues they're facing. So a beautiful segue, Alex. Devin, we're going to call this the gratuitous Ron DeSantis 10 minutes. So he is, not surprisingly, he was a terrible presidential candidate who ran a terrible presidential campaign. They immolated themselves politically and their finances to the tune of what, a hundred some million dollars or whatever it was. And Alex touched on this, Devin, which is

as he was out gallivanting around the country on a private jet because he and his wife, you know, refused to fly on Southwest or whatever, you know, what's going on in the state of Florida? I mean, is everything still a Carl Hyasson novel down there or what's happening? It's pretty awful because we're on terms of like the timeline, all of the bullshit that was passed last session is being implemented. Right. And so like we at Mi Vecino tried to view this in

in the chaotic shitshow that is Florida as like an opportunity to try to start to connect some of Ron DeSantis' policies with

with the reality people are facing in his absence. And so there's a few ways we're doing that, right? Like the number one issue right now for people is cost of living. Okay. Number two is healthcare. Number three is gun violence. And that is across the political spectrum. And I really want people to understand that, that 14% of the Democrats we've talked to, 12% of the Republicans and 12% of the no party affiliate voters have ranked gun violence as their number one issue. Okay. And so when we talk to voters and we're like, yeah, it's terrifying, right?

Right. And there's this perception of crime and violence like on the rise. And it's really, really scary that Ron DeSantis, instead of doing anything to protect us, pass permitless gun carry. Right. Like that was his response to that. OK, now let's talk about health care. Number two issue, you know, instead of trying to close the gap of two point seven million Floridians that don't have health care. What did Ron DeSantis do? He rejected the eleven billion that was, you know, available to Florida from the federal government just to say F you to Democrats. Right.

And instead of doing anything else, decided to regulate abortion with a six week ban, which is, you know, we have over 70,000 patients that access abortion care in Florida every single year. So that's absolutely a devastating blow. And we're the second largest abortion provider after California, right, in the entire United States of America.

Well, and Alex, too, I think that, you know, you guys are hurricane central. So I think, you know, homeowners insurance is in some cases unaffordable, you know, or it's becoming unaffordable. It doesn't sound I don't know what the status of that is. But listen, as someone who lived in California for 10 years, right, earthquake insurance, you could buy it, but it was basically self-insuring anyway.

But the difference is, is like you could get a mortgage without earthquake insurance. You can't get a mortgage without homeowners insurance. Right. So and this is obviously, again, going to have a disproportionate effect on folks who are buying a first home, trying to refinance or trying to buy, you know, another bigger home for a growing family or whatever, because now it's like, OK, well, you know, if I can even get the insurance, can I afford insurance, mortgage insurance?

taxes, because again, there's no state income tax too, right? So everything's really tourism and property tax. So to just extend on what Devin's saying a little bit, talk a little bit about how you have a uniparty state from a governance perspective that seems to not care about the individual citizen of Florida. Well, that's where everything's potentially going wrong for Ron DeSantis, the Republican legislature, and ultimately...

potentially, with the right kind of strategy and investment in Florida, the Republican nominee for president. They've been successful with the f*** you, I got mine crowd.

But now even those people are hurting because there's a lot of people in Florida that can't afford anything anymore. They can't afford rent. They can't afford to live alone. They can't afford the cost of absolutely anything. So then you had those people with the deeper roots. They're the lucky few that had a house. They bought a home when those were still possibilities for people. And you're seeing their homeowner's insurance go up 60% from one year to the next.

Along with the cost of everything else, along with, as you're saying, the damages that are done by catastrophic weather events and just a million other things going wrong for people. And so what we're seeing is this widespread dissatisfaction across the spectrum where people are struggling with real issues.

And they're seeing their governor spend all of his time going after Chupacabra and Bigfoot and trans kids and making up monsters. He's manufacturing these problems to try to just pit us against each other. And people don't have time for it anymore. Right. And, you know, guys, as we wrap up here, Devin, I mean, that's as someone who grew up as a Republican who left the party, it's hard to believe almost 10 years ago now, you know, there was the difference between being like you could be a Republican who wasn't an asshole.

You could even be a conservative who wasn't an asshole. Right. That there was it wasn't to say. And look, I am far from someone who thinks government should do everything. I think government should do the things it should do. It should do them well. It should do them efficiently. I know all of that's a pipe dream. Right. It's government. We know what we get and we all have to deal with that. We get what we get and we don't throw a fit. I think that's what everybody used to say. We don't get upset. Right. I used to say to my kids and.

And so, you know, now it's like, OK, but your job is not to kowtow to a very specific set of economic people, religious people, political people, whatever. It's you're the governor of the whole state.

And I think it goes to show you that like Ron DeSantis, maybe he wasn't as bad a guy as we thought he was, but all this kind of stuff, guys, I think is revelatory, right? Ron DeSantis has shown us who and what he is, right? I'd be shocked to be honest with you. And you guys might have a better sense of it. I'm not even sure he'll finish his term, right? I think that, you know, what's he going to do? You know, is Casey really going to want to live in Tallahassee for the next three years? Like, I just don't buy it. But...

He also shows us like what the Republican Party has become in power, just as Greg Abbott has shown us what the Republican Party is in power, which is a group of people, as I said, and I'm repeating myself on purpose, who doesn't care about the common man, the common woman. Right. They only care about the things that help them politically, help them financially or Alex, to your point, help them say F you. Right. They'd rather say F you than how can I help you?

you, if that makes sense. All right. Before we go, Devin, where can we find you? If you dare to tread on social media, where can we find MeVecino? You can find MeVecino on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok at MeVecinoFlorida, all spelled out. You can find me, Devin Murphy Anderson, on Twitter and Instagram and also TikTok. All right. And Alex, how about you?

Pretty the same. I think I have a Twitter still, a Berrios or something like that. It's really exciting. I retweet all of Mivacino's tweets. So definitely if you didn't catch it from Mivacino, you can follow me and see it. And occasionally I throw some data out there.

Awesome. As always, gang, you can find me on Instagram and threads at Reed underscore Galen underscore LP on Twitter and TikTok at Reed Galen over at Substack, the home front. Devin and Alex, thanks for everything you and me, Vecino, are doing. We look forward to talking later this year. Thanks, Reed. Thanks, Reed. Everybody else, we'll see you next time. Thanks again to everyone for listening.

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