Defending Democracy
Rep. Maxwell Frost on How Florida Republicans are Suppressing Young Voters
Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost talks with Marc Elias about engaging young voters, how Republicans are suppressing voters and what he’s worried about in the upcoming elections.
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This video was produced by Allie Rothenberg, Gabrielle Corporal and Paige Moskowitz. It was edited by Gabrielle Corporal.
- Broadcast on:
- 04 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Young voters will have a huge impact on the 2024 election and Republicans are doing everything they can to suppress them. The first Gen Z member of Congress, Florida Representative Maxwell Frost is here to discuss. Welcome back to Defending Democracy. I'm Mark Elias. Let's get started. Congressman Frost, thanks for joining Defending Democracy. Of course, thanks for having me on. Good to be here. So let me start with a question I ask a lot of politicians and people who run for elective office. You know, what made you decide one day? You know what? I want to run for Congress. Well, I had always been involved. I had been involved in politics since I was 15, but I was on the operative side of things. I was a field organizer, field director, worked with ACLU, and then was at March for our lives. I never really thought about running for office. And when I did think about it, it was like, maybe I'll do it sometime in the future, you know, decades down the road. But what happened is my local congressman about Demings had decided to run for the U.S. Senate. And so it became an open seat. I had some friends who very casually said, you know, you should think about running. I said, hell no, actually. That's exactly what I said. I said, I'll know. And you know, all the things that my opponents would say about me actually said about myself first. I'm too young. I don't have the experience. I'm not ready. Like, you're crazy. At the time it was 24. It was like, am I even old enough? And this and that. And then, you know, sometimes people tell you something and they're planting a seed in your mind. And so, that's kind of what happened is they planted that seed in my mind. And as the months went by, I kept thinking about it. And I pulled together a kind of like a kitchen cap that, you know, brain trust of a lot of people I had worked for on campaigns, all the smartest campaigners I knew and people I knew from the political world. And I said, look, I want to see if this is possible if I can do this. And if I can't, I don't want to do it because I wouldn't be running to make a point. I would be running to win. And so we came up with this conclusion that I did have a path to win, but it was a very narrow path. But there still was one there. So I started speaking with people in the community that I knew friends, teachers, families, organizers, etc. And, you know, for the purpose of the interview, it'd be great to say like, everyone told me I should run, but it was about half and half. And the people who said I shouldn't run weren't saying it because they didn't think I would do a good job. A lot of them didn't think it'd be possible to win. You know, so a lot of pessimism in our political world, especially with campaigns, especially with congressional campaigns nowadays. And I was really at this crossroads deciding on what I wanted to do. I loved my job. I was the organizing director of March for our lives. So I got to work with young people across the country. And I was really loving the job. But I knew I'd have to quit to run for Congress, especially at my age. And so what changed everything for me was actually a conversation with my biological mother. It was the first time I had ever connected with her and really learning about her struggles and her life. And like my beginnings really changed everything for me. And it was after that phone call that I decided to run. All right. So I want to take advantage of the fact that you have been on both the candidate side and on the operative side. And we are now only weeks before the election when both candidates matter and operative matter. So so let me dive in and talk about the demographic that there seems to be right now the most confusion about, which is young voters. Historically, you know, we think of young voters as a population that tends to skew more democratic, more progressive, that, you know, the issue there is usually a question of turnout relative to persuasion. But this election psychologist, there just seems to be a lot of swirl about young voters and whether we are seeing a greater gender gap, whether we're seeing higher motivation about younger voters, less motivation for younger voters. So to put on, I don't know if this is your candidate hat or your old operative hat. But what do you, what do you say to people who are nervous about the upcoming elections? House Senate presidential city council about young voters and like how we should think about them and how we should be talking to them? Well, the first thing I'd say is, you know, I think, I think it's always good to not be fully content with where we're at. And you know, when people always ask me, how do you feel about this election or that election? I always tell them, I'm always worried about every election. But again, that comes from me working as a field director, field organizer, where, you know, I always tell my volunteers and organizers, you know, the polls are for the people in the headquarters. The only numbers we care about are, you know, how many doors we're knocking, how many phone calls we're making. Those are the real numbers we should really care about. And I even say that now as a congressman is, you know, I'm on the National Advisory Board for the Vice President's campaign. I've been traveling a lot. A whole week ago, I did this nationwide back to school tour, where I met with tons of young people across the country, primarily in the battleground states. And I said the same thing to them. I said, look, the polls are, are, are, I have a very, I guess it could be an unpopular opinion. I think polls are helpful. But for us on the ground, not so much. For us on the ground, I think this is really about just going full tilt, like we're 20 points down all the time, no matter what the numbers are saying and making sure we're reaching as many people as we can. And as it relates to young voters, I, number one, my, I don't make any predictions anymore, because in 2016, I predicted that Hillary was going to win. And I was wrong about that. And that one hurt so much that I just not making predictions. But I am, I'm coming back out to make one prediction. I do believe that we are going to have the highest youth voter turnout in the history of our country this November. And I say it for a couple of reasons. Number one, there's this notion and there's this false, there's this false notion out there that people have that young people are not voting at all, which is false. Like we actually had the highest youth voter turnout in the history of our country in 2020 for Joe Biden. And then the highest youth voter turnout in the midterm for 2018 and 2022 were both the first and second highest in our country's history. So young people now are voting at higher numbers than we ever have ever in our country's history. We've, and you know, the, the generation before us to have that kind of engagement where the baby boomers at our age. And so now we've surpassed that at this age. And a lot of Gen Z aren't quite old enough to vote yet. All right, we still have a few folks who are unable to vote. So I feel really good about this. The energy is really high. We see it online. We see it translating in person as I was on these different tour stops. You know, the purpose of this tour right after the DNC was to connect with the hyper engaged organizers, college Dems, those, you know, students for Harris folks that get them excited to go out and start that movement on their campus. But at every stop I went to, there was a significant member of people there who, you know, the college general president will come up to me and say, I've never seen them before. I go up and speak with them and they'd say, I've never been involved in politics in my first political event. That is the bellwether, right? That right there shows me that the vice president's campaign is seeping outside of the typical students who will be involved in an election and out into just the general population. And that's what the difference here that makes sure not just a political candidate, but a movement candidate. And it's when a candidate can really bridge that gap between cool and consciousness and really be a part of the culture of a country that it's typically an untapped potential in US politics. We saw it with Barack Obama, obviously. But we haven't seen it, you know, since then in a big way, and it's a very unique sort of thing. So I'm really excited about it. I do think she's going to have record youth voter turnout, and it's really going to help Democrats up and down the ballot. One other operative sort of question I'm curious about the role of not just the issue of abortion, which obviously has proven to be a very powerful issue for Democratic candidates now since the disastrous decision in Dobbs. But in particular, the ballot initiative movement, I know in Florida, obviously, there is a very important ballot initiative involving reproductive rights. But we've seen in states like Ohio, you know, a pretty conservative state past Kansas, pretty conservative state. It has passed it. It seems to be, you know, very, not just very popular with the public, which is kind of the first layer of surprise. But the second is it does seem to almost ride a, I don't know if it's reverse coattails, but it sort of, it seems to have some boosting effect when there are these ballot initiatives on Democratic candidates in performance. And I'm just curious if either as a Floridian who is seeing this right now in real time of your own state, or as a former operative who probably saw this, you're going to say around other issues, you're going to say this is maybe not new. But what is the dynamic between how voters, young voters or others view kind of these ballot issues against, you know, with vis-a-vis candidates? There's not as much data on young voters as there should be. There are a few really good folks doing work around here. I mean, you have circle over at Tufts, John De La Vope, who does amazing work. The IOP, but we need more people looking into this. But the interesting thing is, you know, the age of the single issue voters really going away quickly, because you have young voters, when you ask them what they care about, you rarely get one issue, you usually get several. And then they have a unique understanding of how these issues interplay with each other to impact their personal life, which gives me a lot of hope for the future of this country in the way that we vote. And it's a similar thing with these ballot initiatives. You see in older generations that you'll have people who will vote to, let's say, preserve abortion rights, but then at the same time, vote for a candidate who doesn't believe in that. That's something that's happened in the state of Florida. I mean, the only way we're going to win our abortion ballot initiative, which I believe we are going to win, is by quoting a lot of those voters, who there's going to be voters who vote for Donald Trump, who boast. One of his greatest wins is overturning Roe versus Wade. And then they're also going to vote for amendment four. But with young voters, you don't see that as much. And I think it's because, you know, we see the connection between these issues and these candidates. The problem that Florida Democrats that we've had for a long time is we've run scared a lot of the time. That's been changing. We know we have our new chair, Cherokee Freed, and we have, I feel like we're doing a lot better of a job in Florida of running on our issues and not running scared. You know, forever Florida politics was a Republican would call you a communist, socialist, defund the police, whatever. And whether you were, whether you identified that or not, you were going to be called it, right? And we would spend all of our money on ads that say, no, I'm not versus sticking on the issues. And when you pull the issues in the state of Florida, Florida's actually a progressive state. It's a democratic state. It's a blue state in terms of the issues. People believe in the right to abortion. People want to expand Medicaid. People want their health here. People want to end gun violence. People want to defeat the climate crisis. I mean, we have a hurricane barreling towards the state as we speak. What we need is we need our candidates to run closer to the issues. So that way, as these ballot initiatives come up, of course, it can help us in terms of turnout. But even when they're not on the ballot, every campaign seems like a ballot initiative to the electorate, if that makes sense. They're thinking about those specific issues connecting them to very specific candidates. And so that should be the goal here. But I do think with amendment four and Florida and amendment three, which is the ballot initiative to legalize adult use marijuana, I think we're going to see new parts of the electorate come out that perhaps have never voted before, or they have voted, but they haven't voted a long term. So one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you is because you have been a leader on an issue that I talk a lot about, and which I think, frankly, has not gotten the attention it should. So there is, in my view, a widespread effort by Republicans to engage in voter suppression. And I think a lot of people agree with that. The place where I feel like the emphasis does not always exist is that among the populations most targeted by Republicans for voter suppression are young voters. And it is oftentimes sort of either not taken as seriously as some other types of voter suppression. I think that there is actually kind of a latent bias candidly in the media that says, okay, well, you know, these young voters, they're in college, you know, they're kind of like anyway. Yeah, exactly. Right. And then there's kind of like a like, there's a less of a urgency around solving that. And you have really tried to take this issue head on with a couple of bills. One, the High School Voter Empowerment Act, which requires public high schools to conduct annual voter registration drives and the Youth Voting Rights Act, which allows for pre-registration. And I'm just curious, maybe this is partially also an activist question, but you know, from a legislative standpoint, and as a leader, as someone who is now a leader of the country in high office, like, you know, how do you think about this issue on voter suppression targeting young voters? I really appreciate the question. And, you know, we always hear this trope, right? Like young people don't vote anyway, so why do we have to focus on making sure their votes aren't being suppressed? And I always ask people to take a step back and really think about this and kind of, you know, it's about chicken nag, right? It's like part of the reason why the youth vote is one of the smallest pieces of the pie in terms of the electorate is because, and it's not a new thing, because our votes have not been valued and because they have not been valued, they have not been protected. There's a few things to look at here. Number one, the age of 18 is a weird age to start any kind of very important habit, like getting involved in the civics of our country. And so it can become a difficult age for a lot of young people to get involved in voting. And that's why, you know, we have pre-registration in Florida at the age of 16. That's why we believe, like, the High School Voter Empowerment Act, we believe that high schools should get involved in making sure people get accustomed to voting and understand what voting is early on in their education. You know, something has really changed in civics classes and social studies classes over generations. And one of our former governors and senators, Bob Graham, wrote a book on this. And essentially, you know, right now in civics class and social studies class, students are really just learning history, how government works and things like that, important, of course. But we believe civics class and social studies should also be teaching how students can be impactful in their government and be a part of it. That's a huge part of the puzzle that's missing here. And I'm not even, I'm not saying teach it in a partisan way, just teach it to students so they can understand how they can impact their government, how they can be an American, right, in this country and take part in it. And they don't get that anymore, what they're really learning about are just facts and figures, which doesn't really stick with anyone the way that you being involved in something can. So that's one part of it. The other part of it is there's been systematic efforts to erode the right to vote for students on college campuses across this country. We see it happen all the time and we got to get really local here too. What happens is there'll be a early vote location on a college campus. Maybe it doesn't get the best turnout in one or two cycles and the supervisor of election will say will cite the poor turnout as a reason to pull it, which means a turnout for those students on that campus will be even worse. And the question we have to ask ourselves is why are we having this scarcity mindset with our voting that if a polling location isn't doing the best that we need to automatically pull it away which would further that problem, which would make the problem worse. I think the federal government has a role to play here. There's two bills that I think will help us generally with voter suppression and will ultimately help students. A big one is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The next one is the Freedom to Vote Act. We need to pass both of these together. They both handle different things and I think they're both going to be really helpful, especially in the South. You know, Ron DeSantis has signed the law multiple bills that are suppressing the vote for everyone, but especially students. And they really want to suppress that youth voter turnout because here's the thing. If a young person starts voting between the ages of 18 and 25, it means they're going to be a lifelong voter. 70% of Gen Z and millennials voted for Democrats last cycle. So the right wing, they're getting really worried about young people breaking heavily, heavily for Democrats and sticking that way throughout their lifetime, which means we'll be able to really build power throughout the years. And as Gen Z gets older and we take up a larger, I'm the oldest Gen Z or it can be, right? I'm 27. As Gen Z gets older and we take up, naturally take up a larger part of the electorate, it means we'll begin to win more elections. And so if they can suppress the youth vote early on and suppress the ambitions of young people early on, they see it as not just something to help them with this election, but help them with the next 10. And this is part of the reason why we didn't fight this youth voter suppression that we're seeing across the country. Yeah. And you know, just to emphasize and amplify a couple of things you said, in Florida, my law firm and I sued Florida because Florida passed a law that said you could have a early voting site in any public building except on a college or university camps. Literally, that was their law. And we sued to say that is discriminatory against students at University of Florida and Florida State. We won the secretary continued to try to fight that and ultimately, we prevail. But it shows the kind of animus that you would have toward that that that that you had that, you know, why on earth of all of the public buildings, you could use with that. Yeah, I wonder why. The other thing is in, you know, and to talk to your point about about Florida being purple or blue state, you know, there's a Senate election in Florida this this go around and Rick Scott, who's the incumbent the last time he ran in in 2018, he won by one 10th of 1%, one 10th of 1% against Bill Nelson. And if you looked in that election, there was a study done by actually a couple of professors in Florida that looked at rejection rates of mail-in ballots in that election. And if you were between the ages of 18 to 24, and you voted by mail in that election, you had a 5.4% chance of rejection, which means one in every 20 young person's mail-in ballot was thrown in the trash didn't count. If you are over the age of 65, the rate of rejection was 0.6%. Okay, so if you want to understand why Florida has the requirements they do about voting by mail, why the mail is slower around college campuses and not slower in some of the retirement communities, why the county election officials process certain ways and don't process certain ways, just ask yourself, would that be tolerated if that were the other way around? If all those young voters had a very low rate of rejection and older voters had a higher rate of rejection, would it be the case? But you know, like you said, you know, there's just kind of like this built-in assumption, well, they don't really vote anyway, and you know, what's the what's the problem? So there is a lot of work, a lot of work in this area to be done, and also in the area, particularly in Florida, around the frankly very serious progression of voter suppression into voter intimidation, and you sent a letter to the Department of Justice about that problem involving involving your governor. Of all people, you know, you think of voter's aggression, voter intimidation, you like to think it's non-state actors, and your state is actually your governor, so talk a little bit about how crazy that situation is. We all know about Project 2025, and what I always tell people is Project 2025 is Florida 2024, and Florida 2023, and you know, so on and so forth, because our governor is an authoritarian leader who has no shame in blatantly using state government resources to help him and to help whatever he wants politically. We just sent a letter on this that we found out the governor sent state officials to supervisor of elections offices across the state in mainly democratic areas. They went in and photocopied thousands and thousands and thousands of petitions for amendment for the abortion ballot initiative. Then they sent law enforcement officers to some of these people's homes. Knock on their door and said, "Oh, you might be the victim of fraud. Did you sign this petition?" Not just that. It just came out that the governor, I think it was 12 million dollars, the governor's from this request for 12 million dollars for advertising. If you look into it, it has to do with using state government resources to advertise and advocate against amendment three and amendment four. In fact, on the healthcare administrators page, an official government website of the state of Florida, they have a whole page dedicated towards talking about why amendment four is a bad idea. In Congress, we have very strict rules between our campaign side and our official government side. In fact, I'm like, you know, I'm very worried about if I accidentally have my pin on and I'm walking into a fundraising event, and I'm like, oh God, and I take the pin off, right? I mean, that's the level of scrutiny that we have with these things. And I think it's really important to have that distinction. But to have a governor blatantly and publicly use the government and taxpayer resources for a damn campaign, I think just shows how emboldened he believes he is. And the reason why is because they've stacked the courts so they know that any kind of litigation is difficult to pursue unless you're successful like you were, right? But it's difficult to pursue. And not just that, but they're just, you know, I call this the Florida problem. There are so many issues going on. We don't have a big enough kind of public legal apparatus, right, to handle all of these. And so that's part of the thing too, is they're doing so much bad stuff that it's hard to handle all of it while we're also trying to reduce the harm to our people in the first place. So it's what's going on in our state is really sad. It's a race to the bottom. And this is part of the reason why the elections are so important. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Representative Maxwell Frost. But I want to take a moment to make sure you are aware to subscribe to Democracy Doc. It's free daily and weekly newsletters. It is the best way to stay up to date in this election season on everything happening to Democracy in court. The link is in the show notes below. All right, I want to talk to you about a set of elections that I think are really, really important, and that is control of the House of Representatives. You are obviously elected in Florida, which has been subject to some of the most aggressive and, in my view, illegal gerrymandering by Ron DeSantis. As you, as people may not know, but the people of Florida enacted a set of amendments to the state constitution called the Fair District Amendments that prohibit partisan gerrymandering and racial gerrymandering. The legislature of Florida engaged in racial and partisan gerrymandering after 2010. And we sued and we won, and we got a fairer map, eventually, through the state court system. Well, in 2020, the Republican legislature wanted to pass what was probably still an illegal map. Okay, just to be clear, probably an illegal map, but, you know, was cognizant of these amendments. And in something I have never seen, and I have litigated now for 30 years in almost every state in the country, and I have done redistricting litigation. If you name a state with a traditional litigation, I have done a redistricting litigation. I have never seen a governor veto a map of their party. Period. And, and Ron DeSantis refused to sign a map. Why? Because he didn't think it was a partisan gerrymander enough. The governor's team wrote a map that is clearly in violation of all of the men, the, the fair district amendments, probably also in violation of federal law, that those maps are still the subject of litigation. My law firm is litigating them in the state Supreme Court. But, but boy, oh boy, Congressman, you know, you guys are in the, are in a dog fight for control of the house. So talk about this, both from a Florida perspective, but also I'm very interested in your national perspective as you go from state to state, and you, you know, you talked to Democratic members, Republican members, and also candidates, like what is going on in the house, house elections? So we feel confident for a few different reasons. Number one, the Republicans have just completely squandered their gavel and their leadership, this Congress. We've seen it happen with the speaker's vote, the debt ceiling problem, they couldn't elect another speaker. I mean, we've all, we all know what's been going on in this Congress. And I think the people have been really paying attention to this. But not just that, a lot of these moderate Republicans have really sewn themselves to the hip, to Donald Trump and extremists. And they have a constituency that doesn't want abortion to be banned. They have a constituency that doesn't want their rights taken away. They don't want this far right extremist ideology running their lives. And I think because of that, what we're seeing is Democrats are winning the generic ballot, congressional, generic ballot nationwide. And we really need to make sure that we have good turnout. And I think having to be at the top of the ticket helps with that to make sure that we win this race. We have a lot of very close races. We have a lot of races that Democrats won last year that everyone counts it out. Very heavily Trump districts that they won. And so, you know, we're out there, we're pounding the pavement. I'm going to be doing a lot of travel in October, predominantly for the vice president, but also for a lot of my colleagues and difficult races to really work at getting out the boat, and especially the youth vote. But we can't send Kamala Harris to the white, oh, she's already in the White House. We can't put her in the big chair, per se, without backup. And she's going to need a Democratic House, and we're going to need to retain the Senate to get this agenda through. And we're also going to have more of the shenanigans going on. And so, you know, encourage people to please get involved with your local congressional elections. If you can, you know, phone bank into these very difficult front line seats and the DCCC, if you just Google DCCC, front line or red to blue, we have a lot of districts across the country that President Joe Biden won decisively. But there's currently a Republican in that seat, and we need to make sure we get those seats back. All right. My final question for you is one that I get. It is the single question I get most often. And I have to imagine you get this throughout your travels and among your constituents in your district. You know, people say, you know, Mark, I really enjoy your podcast. You know, I love your interview with Congressman Frost. I am inspired by him as everyone is. And he is just an absolute warrior for everything I believe in. So thank him. But then they go to the second part, which is they say it. But I'm not a member of Congress. I'm just a voter and I am nervous. I am petrified that Donald Trump will come back into office that despite, you know, my voting and I will vote, like, I feel powerless. I don't know that there's anything I can do. So what can I do just as a as a citizen, not as a, you know, just as a voter, I don't have the platform that, you know, the Congressman has. So what do you tell the people who come up to and feel powerless about their, their, you know, their ability to do the things you say are so important. Well, number one, I was telling, you know, I recently stepped into this platform. But before it, I was, you know, like everyone else at home, thinking about these issues, figuring out what can I do? I mean, I was 15 years old when I became an organizer. And it was because of the Sandy Hook shooting. I went to DC, met kids my age who had lost loved ones in those classrooms who were shot to death by an assault weapon for nothing. And I came home feeling both inspired, but also defeated. I felt inspired because I wanted to do something and gun violence, but I also knew that we had a long fight ahead of us. And I started organizing in the way I knew how I remember I did a petition on my high school campus. I didn't know anything about policy. So, you know, usually a petition will have a specific policy on it. Mine said signed to end gun violence. So we had a lot of people sign it. But it was the first time in my life, I identified a problem and looked around me and saw people around me as part of the solution. And it was the first time I ever organized in my life. And so what I would tell people is of course vote, but it's never a vote period. It's always vote and. And what else are you going to do after you vote? Because I do recognize, you know, we all recognize, you know, this is trope we see online people, you know, make fun of, make fun of us sometimes and they'll say, well, the world will be burning and Democrats will say to vote, well, we do need you to vote, right? Because a lot of things can be prevented if people used their power to vote. For instance, we saw there, you know, was this horrible execution in Missouri, I think just yesterday. And it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And because we didn't have the numbers there, they didn't say this execution and this man was killed. Not understanding the fact that the prosecutors who prosecuted the case. Exactly. Exactly. And it just leads back to making sure that we build political power and all the spaces that we can. So we can, when situations like this happen, we have the numbers to do the just thing. And voting helps us do that. But it's voting and advocating in our communities. And I always encourage people to find a group locally that you want to get really involved in, you know, like whether it's a housing group or gun violence prevention group. Maybe it's a criminal justice reform group. I don't know, you know, and maybe you want to go to a few different meetings. But doing that does a few things. Number one, it helps you become a better organizer because you learn how to organize with people who are doing it locally. Number two, it puts you in a place of fellowship with like-minded people, which is something that I think a lot of times we dismiss or think is not important. But as someone who's been in the gun violence movement for 10 years, I'll tell you that the fellowship with fellow organizers is part of the reason I'm a member of Congress today. If not, I would have quit this stuff a long time ago because gun violence is one of the slowest moving issues in our country on the federal level. And it's been being with other people, spending time with other people, venting with other people that has really helped me keep the longevity and self-preservation in this political movement. So get involved locally, you know, get involved with your city council, your school board, your county commission, whatever, because those local positions are really important. And oftentimes when you create those relationships with local elected officials, you're talking with your next congressman, you're talking with your next senator, or maybe not. Maybe they'll do there and continue that work, but it's really important. So I encourage people to really organize, organize locally and vote. Well, Congressman Frost, I want to just say that I am inspired by everything that you do. And I know everyone who is watching this is, you know, there are not a lot of members of Congress who are willing to give up their time, you know, their time, their time off, their time that they could be talking to their constituents, campaigning for themselves, to be helping national political figures like you have been helping Kamala Harris, which is a tremendous sacrifice that you've given there. And then on top of that, also being helping make sure that your colleagues take control of the house, and also being a force for so many issues of good. So I don't know how you'll have the time for all these things, but you are truly a hero of democracy at a time when our country needs it. I oftentimes say that, you know, in 20 or 30 years, people are not going to look back on this time and ask what did you do about tax policy? You know, what did you do about, you know, the interest rates, I'm not to I'm not diminishing those things are important for people, but but 40 years from now, people are going to want to know when democracy does it say, did you do everything you can? And you are one of the people who will be able to say, I did everything I could, I did everything I could legislatively, I sacrificed, I ran for office, I introduced legislation, I fought for important issues for my constituents, but I also tried to make a difference at a national level by helping Kamala Harris and by helping House House Democrats and other Democrats get involved. So thank you for everything you are doing. And thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Thanks. Thanks for joining this episode of defending democracy. Please make sure you're subscribed to its free daily and weekly newsletters. We'll see you next time. Defending democracy is a production of democracy. In LLC. [Music]