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- [00:01]
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- [00:37]
Date Announcer
It's Wednesday, June 25, 2025.
- [00:39]
Mike Pesca
From peach fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca, the next mayor of my city. Looks like it's going to be Zoran Mamdani. Mom Donnie gotta get it right or else you could be a racist.
- [00:52]
Commentator
There was the repeated mispronunciation of Mamdani's name that we just heard. That's been going on for weeks. It wasn't the first time that we've mentioned it on this show. So the question is, was he doing it? To other eyes, Mamdani make him seem foreign.
- [01:08]
Mike Pesca
So somewhat of an anti racist statement was made in backing Mamdani. Also an anti dynastic and anti sexual harassment statement in the defeat of Andrew Cuomo. More of that in the spiel. But mom, Donnie gives hope, if not too many plausible policies. He is trying to raise $10 billion in taxes to fund his ideas. The governor of New York, who's actually much more in charge, that is against it. Not good for him. He also is foregoing over half a billion dollars that would have been coming his way if he charged for buses. But he doesn't want to do that. My point in this part of the show is not to engage in policy critiques. It's to make something of a light prediction that in the next few months voters of New York are not going to have buyer's remorse. Exactly. But they're going to have more questions than they thought they might have had about this charismatic, well spoken candidate candidate. Here's some of Mamdani's victory speech.
- [02:04]
Zoran Mamdani
With the vision of a city that every New Yorker could afford, we have won.
- [02:13]
Mike Pesca
So on that issue of speaking, you heard that saying mom dummy instead of Mandani might be bigoted. That was on the Brian Lair show.
- [02:21]
Date Announcer
For which I have great esteem, but.
- [02:23]
Mike Pesca
Certainly an indicator of the attitudes of progressive New Yorkers. But that's what you open yourself up to when pronunciation strikes some ears as Wrong.
- [02:32]
David Zweig
Wrong.
- [02:33]
Mike Pesca
Okay. But if that's the case, what might some New Yorkers think when they find that Mamdani is an expert code switcher himself? And that when he was doing interviews with South African press to promote the Disney film his mother directed, for which he was the music supervisor he made, and this wasn't him in character, this is how he talked at the time or to the reporter. This was the pitch he made.
- [03:00]
Zoran Mamdani
All my friends in Kampala are doing the Kofi Annan, right? So Ugandans, we don't really have as many dance moves associated with a song, but we will always dance. We are always dancing. That's the thing. The difference for me is, you know, I'm from Uganda, but I also grew up in New York. In New York, you don't really, you know, you go out. Some guys are very hesitant to dance. You know, if they're not grinding, they're just standing in Kampala, you will just not find that people are all dancing. Everybody's dancing. Men, women, it's. It's a. And it's fantastic that way.
- [03:31]
Mike Pesca
Same guy, huh? New Yorkers are just getting to know him, huh? Mom, Donny did get over 400,000 first place votes, meaning over 8 million people, or almost 8 million people, did not vote for him. Theory. Some of them might say, huh, he said, globalize the intifada and doesn't take it back and stands by it. Huh. I actually think with that one, most of the people likely to be bothered by it already know. But some New Yorkers will say, huh, and someone in media is going to do the story. Now, it won't be a story. Someone will start spreading the meme, and it will be an accurate meme about all the costs of Mamdani's programs. And I also think New Yorkers will say, huh, so it's not exactly buyer's remorse.
- [04:18]
Date Announcer
Can't be.
- [04:18]
Mike Pesca
Like I said, only 5% of New Yorkers bought in. And, man, do they love the guy. And, wow, will they assail those who criticize him. But I also think that today might actually be the high point of the Mamdani New York love fest. On the show today, little bit about Andy Cuomo. Does that say something that you would never call the man Andy? Maybe that's why voters don't think he's that approachable. Anyway, David Zweig is here, as he has been in the past. He's a science journalist, a willing questioner of the cw, and his new book is called An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus, and A Story of Bad decisions. This has been called in results number two and three when I googled him, a searing indictment and a devastating account. But to me, having read it, it was actually more of an eye opener than an anger. It was eye opening about school closings and what we knew when, which was a lot more than experts with our supposed best interests at heart told us at the time. So it is another in my series of not looking away from the lessons of the pandemic, not relying on heuristics or the idea that they were just good people doing their best, and also not grading on an overly forgiving curve that the schools themselves could not grade on because the schools were closed. David Zweig, up next.
- [05:55]
Date Announcer
A few weeks ago on this program we had on Macedo and Lee, who wrote a book looking at the pandemic and all the NPIs, the non pharmaceutical interventions. And the big takeaway from that book was all other than vaccines, nothing worked. No NPI had any discernible or statistically significant improvement over not trying a pharmaceutical nonpharmaceutical intervention. Now I think the biggest portion of their book, and when people think about, hey, what do we get right and what do we get wrong about the pandemic, what comes to mind first is schools. And an excellent journalist who I've had on the show before has written a book just focusing on Covid interventions and schools. The name of the book is An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and A Story of Bad Decisions. David Zweig, welcome back to the gist.
- [06:50]
David Zweig
Thanks for having me.
- [06:52]
Date Announcer
So I've had you on to talk about some of your eye opening studies and findings, but it didn't really, I knew, I thought, I knew you were.
- [06:59]
Mike Pesca
A writer and I thought you were a science writer.
- [07:01]
Date Announcer
But here in the book you write that you began reading studies in journals and government reports about COVID I had no professional interest in the topic. I was more than a year of writing into another book and I admit we wiped our groceries down. But from my training as a fact checker and my skeptical disposition, I couldn't stop myself from digging a little.
- [07:21]
Mike Pesca
Good.
- [07:22]
Date Announcer
Thank God that you did. What did you find? What was your first, first eye opening finding of your digging where you said, how is no one else writing about this?
- [07:34]
David Zweig
I'm not sure. There was one moment, but it was in April is when things started to look awry to me. I, you know, as you noted in the little excerpt from the book there, I sort of followed along with everything. I live in the New York area. I had no reason to at Least I wouldn't say, not believe what we were being told. So we sort of complied with everything, as did most of my neighbors and so on. But something seemed amiss as far as there didn't seem to be in the sort of legacy press that I read oftentimes there didn't seem to be any real analysis or coverage or digging into sort of what's the evidence behind this stuff, behind these interventions. Again, in the beginning, I wasn't really questioning it as far as like whether this was the right thing to do or not. But as time went on. But you know, this, you know, that began in mid March when the entire school system in America, more than 50 million kids, shut out of school. So by a month later in April, I'm really starting to think through, well, what's the long term plan here? What is the actual benefit of these closures? And I kept seeing sort of pronouncements being made in the media and quotes from different, you know, public health experts. But, but they didn't provide real evidence behind the effectiveness of these things. And that kind of set me on my path.
- [09:05]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [09:05]
Date Announcer
So to set the scene, you're a science journalist. You're a journalist, but you do a lot that would be considered science journalism, right?
- [09:12]
Mike Pesca
Yes.
- [09:13]
Date Announcer
And in March, like everyone else in the world, you aren't on the respiratory infection beat or anything like that, but you are a science journalist. And we start seeing reports out of Italy and other places and maybe China, there is a virus.
- [09:26]
Mike Pesca
It's big, it's.
- [09:27]
Date Announcer
And you're like every other citizen, doing what you can to get your head around it, but also to protect your family. But you do have this training and these instincts, and perhaps sooner than most people, you raise the question of, well.
- [09:43]
Mike Pesca
Why is it that they are saying.
- [09:46]
Date Announcer
To do the things that they're saying in the beginning? Why is it that they're saying to stay this many feet apart? Or why are they saying that a respiratory illness is acting in this way? I would say that even inform people wouldn't have any preconceived notions of how a respiratory illness is supposed to act.
- [10:04]
Mike Pesca
But you knew at least to ask.
- [10:05]
Date Announcer
Wait a minute, what does the literature say about respiratory illnesses? And what did it say and how was it different from what they were saying about COVID Right.
- [10:14]
David Zweig
So you set this up well. And you know, there's. The reason I call the book An Abundance of Caution is, you know, a lot of us are, probably most of us heard that phrase used oftentimes as it's almost to some extent Kind of like a mic drop. It's like an abundance of caution. We're going to do X. And it's like, hard for anyone who doesn't want to be cautious.
- [10:35]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [10:35]
Date Announcer
Who has ever argued, no, no, no, better sorry than safe. No one's argued that.
- [10:39]
David Zweig
So the way this was framed early on was this is, you know, and I have a long section in the book about the precautionary principle and what it actually means. I interviewed this really interesting philosopher of medicine named Eric Winsburg, who studies this type of thing. So we got into kind of a deep discussion about what it means to be cautious. And, you know, it's caution. For whom? Caution in which direction? And there are a lot of assumptions built into that. Now, when you're faced with something sort of unknown that the sort of weights on the scales tilt in a certain direction. But once evidence starts accruing of. Of sort of lack of benefit, perhaps of these interventions, and on the flip side, evidence accruing of harm from some of these interventions that are opposed, you can no longer claim this is merely the precautionary principle in action. It's just dishonest. It's untrue. And so for me, what's interesting about my book, I hope to readers, is that the pandemic's the backdrop. But what I tried to do is really use that backdrop. It's almost like a case study of how do societies and authorities and individuals make decisions during a time of crisis or a time with. With limited information. What is the process there? So that's, for me, is like the lens through which the book operates and hopefully it's applicable. It's not, you know, for however many of your listeners are like, ah, another thing about the pandemic, this really is about something larger than the pandemic to my mind.
- [12:22]
Date Announcer
And I am also anticipating what many of my listeners are saying, which is something like, yes, mistakes were made and some of them were small and some of them have been exaggerated. Maybe some listeners are saying some were big, but, you know, as good people making these decisions, and I swear to you, listener, we're getting into that. But I have to jump on something that David just said. He talked to this interesting philosopher and they talked about the nature of what is the claim. When you say to have an abundance of caution, it seems so natural. It almost seems like folk wisdom. Are there any tradeoffs? And there is a section, a claim in the book. The precautionary principle is a burden of proof claim, says the philosopher you talked to. Tell me what that Means, right.
- [13:05]
David Zweig
That when you're practicing a sort of precautionary principle, which some philosophers just don't even believe is a thing, because even the precautionary principle still requires some level of, like a cost benefit, where you're making an assumption about the potential harm and risk from one thing and you're making an assumption about the potential safety and benefits of another direction. So even the sense of the precautionary principle still has at least a kind of like, tacit or approximation of, Of. Of a cost benefit analysis.
- [13:41]
Date Announcer
Right, Right. You're saying there's no such thing as a let's be precautious, let's default to precaution. Everything's just risk, reward, risk, benefit. There's this one category of things that if you're lucky enough to get it labeled precautionary, it seems more prudent to people, but it's not. It's all just risk, benefit. And if we were to engage and think about that rigorously, maybe we come to different conclusions.
- [14:05]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [14:05]
David Zweig
So I think most people, including me, you know, would say, look, when you have very limited information and something that seems potentially dangerous, that's going to tilt you in a certain direction. And indeed, you know, with the closures that happened initially, the way I would describe them is they were both reasonable but wrong. But when things shifted from reasonable but wrong to just wrong and unreasonable is certainly there are. People can point to a couple different points in the timeline, but if we want to make it irrefutable, it would be at the end of April and beginning of May, Millions of children began going back to school in Europe. And in May, the education ministers of 22 countries in Europe, 22, they met virtually at the euro. And they said, we have observed no negative consequence of these schools being open again. We're not talking about a little schoolhouse, you know, somewhere in the countryside in Scandinavia. We're talking about 22 countries, many of them with very large, densely populated cities like Paris. They began reopening their schools and, you know, within a month, they did not observe a negative consequence. And then they met a second time in June and had the same determination. We've observed no real impact from this. So when this came out, I, you know, I describe it in the book, I was like a cartoon character at a mirage. Like it seemed unreal because I didn't see coverage of this anywhere, you would think, because, you know, touching on what you mentioned a few moments ago about, well, people did the best they could. We had limited information.
- [15:47]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [15:48]
David Zweig
This was the Information.
- [15:49]
Date Announcer
Right.
- [15:50]
David Zweig
We were waiting for, like, how do.
- [15:51]
Date Announcer
We muddle through these hard times? Standard ways of doing it is to. If you're one city, you look at how another municipality might have done it. If you're a country, you look at other OECD countries. This is always done on issues like, I don't know, drug decriminalization. Well, you know, Denmark does it, and progressive Americans all know that Denmark or the Netherlands does it. And maybe we're supposed to take an example yet when it comes to this, when it comes to masking of schoolchildren.
- [16:17]
Mike Pesca
Which is where I first read about.
- [16:18]
Date Announcer
You writing about this in New York magazine, Europe was doing it entirely differently. And you are right. Except for you in New York magazine, there's almost no coverage of that.
- [16:28]
David Zweig
Right. So. So there's. So there are a couple of things here. One is the school closures themselves and then how schools reopen, which is the most important factor. But then we can run through, you know, the variety of other interventions, such as school mask mandates, which I'd written extensively about.
- [16:43]
Mike Pesca
When did the law. You had this. That.
- [16:45]
Date Announcer
When did the Los Angeles Unified Free School District open?
- [16:49]
David Zweig
Not, and I believe not until.
- [16:53]
Mike Pesca
A.
- [16:54]
David Zweig
Year and a half after the initial.
- [16:56]
Mike Pesca
So that is correct.
- [16:57]
Date Announcer
That jumped out in my book. Los Angeles, not a small city, second biggest in the United States. We're talking about in May of 2020. Europe was open in June. They convened again in 2020. There were students in L. A who did not have the option to go to a physical school until you Write April of 21.
- [17:19]
David Zweig
Correct. That's a full year later. But many of them didn't even go in that spring because it was like one day a week or a half a day with some ridiculous, you know, onerous sort of hybrid schedule. So many of them didn't even attend until the following fall, fall of 2021. Just to kind of step back that this is such a radical thing that happened, and I don't know you're better suited to describe this than I am, Mike. But, like, to my observation, there has not been nearly enough analysis and attention paid to how is it something as wild as keeping healthy children, millions of healthy children out of school, not for weeks, not even for months, but some of them, many of them millions, for more than a year, a healthy kid sort of sequestered at home, while at the same time adults could go to a bar, could go to restaurants, could go to the casinos were open and on and on. How is it that something this radical continued so that the sort of defense of, well, we didn't know this, that or anything that maybe was defensible for a month. But by the time this evidence came out from Europe in late April, early May, it was no longer a precautionary principle at that point. We also had two other important data points very early, which was tens of thousands of kids from first line responders, frontline workers, their families had never locked down. And those kids, tens of thousands of younger kids, but also adolescents, went to these ad hoc daycare programs, many of them at YMCAs. There was also a program in New York City, tens of thousands of kids. And there was no observable sort of outbreaks or rash of outbreaks. And by the way, they were not wearing mask mandates across the board. They weren't practicing six feet of distancing across the board. And yet we had tens of thousands of kids here even in America in that environment. Surely if there was not a major negative consequence of that in these daycare centers, we weren't going to see it in schools. And then lastly, Sweden never closed its lower schools. And very early they did an analysis and the teachers there were at no higher risk of infection than the average professional.
- [19:53]
Mike Pesca
But the Swedish, Swedish stats did take.
- [19:55]
Date Announcer
A while to work through for them to be compiled. So in the beginning the Swedish stats were showing that the death toll is a lot higher in Sweden. By the end, it's one of the best European countries. But we didn't know that until far after the fact.
- [20:08]
David Zweig
No, no, no. But this study on the risk to teachers, because a large part of the argument was that, okay, even if kids aren't at risk, although, and I give a mountain of evidence over and over and over again, how children were positioned as being at risk and that school closure was for their safety, which was false and just disingenuous. But even if we set that aside and say the narrative is, well, kids might infect the teachers, they might infect grandma.
- [20:38]
Mike Pesca
And so that was, that was the big.
- [20:40]
Date Announcer
Today my listeners will be saying, no, we know that kids weren't at risk, but of course they're going to take it home. And then they become vectors for contagion in the entire pandemic.
- [20:49]
David Zweig
So this is, so this is a really important point. And again, this is why I hope people listening will buy, well, go out and buy my book that it really studies how we think about evidence, how we think about what is true. It's sort of like an epistemological framework, to use academic jargon for a moment. But our intuitions are often wrong and that's especially so within medicine. And I give examples of this throughout history, but also recent history. It's not just like, oh, those uneducated fools from, you know, the Middle Ages. We're talking about very recent history where we continually think that something will work because it has a sort of bio plausibility. It makes sense. You've got a bunch of, you know, snotty kids running around to school. Of course they're going to bring the virus home and increase transmission. Or, of course, putting a piece of cloth over your face. Yeah, maybe it's not perfect, but that's got to have some benefit, right? What I show is that things that make sense intuitively often are not actually true once you study them scientifically and very early. The evidence from Europe showed that despite people's intuitions, opening schools did not have an impact on community transmission. And there's reasons for this. It's not just like, oh, we're supposed to take the word of these education ministers and I get into a whole thing in the book, or.
- [22:21]
Date Announcer
Though as far as taking the word, at least the Swedish education minister and.
- [22:25]
Mike Pesca
Expert you talk to said she was.
- [22:27]
Date Announcer
Deluged with calls from Americans wanting. American education experts wanting to do the right thing.
- [22:33]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [22:35]
David Zweig
Yeah. This is quite extraordinary. The Anna Ekstrom, who was the head of the. Whatever the title is, but the head of education within Sweden, and I interviewed her and I was like, okay, so your lower schools never closed. You had millions of kids out and about in your society. The schools are open. And surely. And I asked her which education or public health people were reaching out to you? You were basically conducting an experiment for much of the Western world. You had your schools open and people like, that's Sweden, that doesn't count. Stockholm is a densely populated city where, you know, a significant portion of the Swedish population lives. Make no mistake, it's more densely populated than large swaths of the United States. So just as one thing. And I looked at stuff with like, classroom densities and so on. So Sweden very much and the rest of Europe very much are useful and appropriate and appropriate areas to look at. You can't just wave them away and say, oh, that's too different. It's just the epidemiological data just simply doesn't show that. But, yeah, to my shock and dismay, no one contacted her from the United States. She had people from Iceland and she had people from around Europe chatting with her, checking in, learning about it. No one from America gave a shit. So the idea that you had places where schools were open, yet the People in charge here in America just basically waved it away. It was either ignored or when it was discussed, any number of a long list of excuses was given. They've controlled the virus or whatever it may be for why we weren't supposed to look at this stuff. And what I describe in the book is we had a culture where we were basically favoring theory over real world empirical evidence that they kept insisting in America on keeping schools closed week after week, then month after month after month after month or putting them in these hybrid schedules. They insisted on doing this and having mask mandates and 6ft of distancing and so on while we had. And all this was based on theory. There were no studies showing that this was beneficial, but it made intuitive sense. But when you looked at the real world evidence, it wasn't effective doing any of these things.
- [25:09]
Mike Pesca
And tomorrow we'll be back with more of David Zweig, author of An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and a Story of Bad Decisions. And now the spiel. Andrew Cuomo has been rejected by voters of the city he has called home for low these last 20 minutes. His sexual assault accusers got the last kiss on the lips, more in a Fredo in a rowboat style than a warm overture. Oh, and Andrew Cuomo should be noted, doesn't seem to very much like people or not people named Cuomo. But how would we really know any of this? He's done no outreach except to the back of trooper number one or Brittany Comaso. Speaking of which, here's a quote from Cuomo's concession speech, Mandani's night.
- [26:05]
Andrew Cuomo
And he put together a great campaign and he touched young people.
- [26:11]
Mike Pesca
No, wait, that was allegedly me. It's my bad Cuomo impersonation. All right, so what I did beside the Cuomo impersonation, I did all the references, right? I made all the jokes. I got dragged into doing the jokes. You know, I don't like having to do that the jokes, but I felt I did. But to rebut the jokes, or worse than jokes, the head on allegations that you are a sexual harasser, a sexual a coster, a sex pest. You've got to be able and willing to say something. And to quote the insightful and excellent just list available at mikepaska.substack.com Andrew Cuomo is not just a flawed candidate with baggage. That baggage was strangling him and he did nothing to extricate himself from having locked his head inside the telescopic handle. He thought the only strategy was not to communicate. Except for in the Forms of the outdated strategy of ads and flyers, which would have worked if we're in 1988. The problem is the other guy surged. It was too late to catch up and lay out the case against Mamdani. Okay, to be fair, I changed it from the direct quote in the gist list. I didn't go with the telescopic handle imagery. I like it. I'm indulgent myself here in the spiel. But this was all a big problem for Cuomo. So there's the front runner strategy, which is just, you know, prevent defense, take no big risks. He went beyond that. There's the Rose Garden strategy, which is let all the media opportunities come to you and then be very discerning. He went beyond that. Cuomo strategy was essentially turtling. Not only did he turn down every interview, even what would have been easy interviews, usually first by committing to it and then by canceling at the last minute. He didn't engage in any way that I could see. He also also didn't have surrogates or validators who could get press and were more or less in good standing. So AOC and Bernie endorsed Mamdani, Schumer, Gillibrand, Hakeem Jeffries. They stayed. Mom. I think it's because they don't like Cuomo. But a good campaign, a aggressive campaign, who really understood the theory of the case could have gotten them or people like them to go out and say some accurate but vaguely worded things, worrying about, say, Mamdani's boldest, craziest policy ideas or just some of the incendiary rhetoric he engaged in. You could do that as a responsible public figure, without offering an explicit or even implicit endorsement of Cuomo. Cuomo couldn't get that. Or how about a prominent, not hated celebrity, possibly a Jewish New Yorker, who could say, you know, this whole globalize the intifada thing, it's not okay to say that. Not even talk about Jerry Seinfeld or Amy Schumer. They're pretty hated now, right? What about a Leif Schreiber? What about Ben Platt? He's a guy. He's on Broadway. Right. I have no idea what their stances are, but it's the kind of thing or that kind of person that a campaign, not just that, could have, but with a different theory of the case would have had happen. And then there were the things to be said about what Ma' am, Donnie and all the other candidates would always call the 12 credible accusers. Now, first of all, not all of these women were actually literally accusers so the timeline is two former employees come forward to say Cuomo talked about sex with them in different contexts. All icky, right? Then a third on a list apparently comes forward. Big Wall Street Journal article. And this causes Democratic politicians to start asking for Cuomo's resignation. But as Eric Wemple in the Washington Post reported, analysts does not believe herself to have been sexually harassed. She called Cuomo grandfatherly. She didn't excuse what he said, but that's how she described him. A few times, he would call her a sweetheart and kiss his hand. But she said in a deposition, quote, it felt like I was just thrown into this group of women who said the governor sexually harassed me. And I wanted to be clear that the governor didn't sexually harass me. And then this is Wemple's reporting. Liz Jackson's attorney told the Washington Post that Liz Jackson never their emphasis, alleged that Cuomo sexually harassed her. And there was another reported victim of sexual harassment identified as state entity employee number two. Even though it was clear from one round of Googling that we're talking about a doctor named Elizabeth Dufort. And in a press conference, this doctor demonstrated how to give a nasal swab. She was all clad in full ppe. She gives it to Cuomo in front of the cameras. He has this narration.
- [30:51]
Andrew Cuomo
This is Dr. Elizabeth du Fort, who is in the appropriate PPE E where. Nice to see you, Doctor. You make that gown look good. Head up, close your eyes. Close my eyes.
- [31:08]
Mike Pesca
And that's it. You just heard the accusation of accuser number nine. You make that gown look good. It is a gauche, insensitive thing to say. Especially don't want to say such a comment if the comment is unappreciated. Now, would it affect your vote for governor? It might. Right. That's legitimate. Or even more legitimate, you might hear that and say, no, it's not the one thing. It's the pattern of behavior. But, you know, there is a percent, and I don't think it's a tiny percent who might be a persuadable voter who might say, wait a minute, that's one of the accusers, or list who's not an accuser, she's an accuser. And then maybe if you get the right press around this, you can start making the case that a lot of the other accusers were accusing. Things like a hand on the back tracing a word on a shirt. Things that you wouldn't want someone to do in an office, but maybe also things that don't qualify you for enacting policies that would help the electorate. I'm not saying this is nothing. I am saying that Cuomo didn't say it was nothing because Cuomo and his surrogates didn't say much of anything. Think back to how Donald Trump's backers minimized his much more serious and adjudicated to have actually happened sexual harassment. So is the case that every New Yorker who voted in the Democratic primary is inherently a better person than every Trump voter who made these excuses? I don't think so. I think people are people. They engage in motivated reasoning. They can be convinced of things if given evidence. And a lot of people will just say, ok, Cuomo did some bad things, but I think his policy will help me. And if they think those bad things are slightly less bad than what they were told or what they thought going in to making the decision, it could affect votes. You can't have that effect if you don't do any press or you don't successfully plant these stories in sympathetic media. The allegations become insurmountable because voters will say, well, they must be so terrible to not even address. Some voters will think that no matter what. But there are enough voters who could be otherwise persuaded. Team Cuomo strategy was not to risk the downsides of attempting that persuasion. And that was clearly a mistake in retrospect. Cuomo, by the way, has a lot of accomplishments, some that he didn't even talk about. He's always talking about the train stations and the plane stations and the subway line, because people have been to these plane stations and train stations, said, oh, that's a nice station. That was Cuomo. But, you know, he never got into things like New York passed gay marriage four years earlier than the rest of the nation. It wasn't all him, but without him, that wouldn't have happened. And maybe you say, oh, well, it was going to pass anyway, but we didn't know it then. And for thousands of New Yorkers, those four years meant a hell of a lot. Also, did you know that of all the states that legalize gambling, New York got absolutely the best deal, the most money from the gambling apps. And that one's pretty much all Cuomo. Sharp elbows, tough negotiator. Kansas, they legalized sports gambling with a tax rate of 10%. To the people of Kansas, Illinois, second biggest state after New York, to legalize gambling, they negotiated a 20% rate and they've since tried to raise it here and there because it's pretty low. Cuomo, 51% tax rate. Maybe all of that is too distasteful. Sexual harassment. Oh, I don't need to hear more. Legalized gambling. Oh, that doesn't seem fun. That has victims throwing a judgeship the way of a Republican legislator who knew he'd be voted out of office after a yes vote on gay marriage. That is kind of sleazy, isn't it? That's not aspirational. But that is the way change happens and government gets done or won't get done now that Cuomo won't be elected, I don't know. I am saying that he did not and his advisers made a calculation. The more left unsaid, the better. And that calculation has been exposed to be the wrong one. I think in general, his record of accomplishment might have resonated, but it was never communicated. And so now Andrew Cuomo has lost the first election in his lifetime.
- [35:36]
Date Announcer
And that's it for today's show.
- [35:37]
Mike Pesca
Cory Warr is the producer. Ashley Khan is the production coordinator. Michelle Pesca is our chief of Virginia relations. Astra Green is in charge of Florida affairs. Kathleen Sykes has been charged with beehive maintenance and Leo Baums just bombing it up doing the BAM thing. Improve. Thanks for listening. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.