Early Voting October Surprises, and a Corrupt Contract for Fairfax County's Sheriff's Office
Early Voting Processing: A new Virginia law will make it easier for localities to process absentee ballots before election night, hopefully avoiding the "Red Mirage"-- a phenomenon where Republican Election Day voting totals look higher until early votes and absentee ballots, processed later, swing things back toward Democrats. Still, there's little evidence that increased voting helps any one political party anyway.
October Surprise Come Early: With the rise of early voting, we've also seen Election Day turn more into Election Month, and that's changed the pace of campaigning. So-called "October Surprises"--revelations that change the game--have started coming earlier, such as President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan.
Falling Test Scores: Governor Youngkin claims a new federal report card reveals "catastrophic learning loss" in state public schools. But scholars say Virginia's accreditation system paints a more complete picture--and the main problem is a lack of resources to help with staffing shortages and in-school services. As Thomas and Michael discuss, struggling schools are often those that need the most government support.
A new report from The Appeal reveals a contract between the Fairfax County Sheriff's Office and a telephone vendor for county jails--a contract that included the ability for the Sheriff's office to go on a Caribbean cruise. While the office says nobody has gone on a cruise, Thomas and Michael highlight how this sort of contract is indicative of huge issues in America's incarceration system.
Episode Transcript
Michael Pope
On this episode of Pod Virginia.
Thomas Bowman
Vote early and vote often.
Michael Pope
How is early voting changing elections?
Thomas Bowman
Does the October surprise need to come earlier?
Stephen Farnsworth
An October surprise does no good by this point.
Michael Pope
Plus, we take a look at test scores for reading and math.
Alex Keena
I don't view the accreditation system as covering anything up.
James Fetterman
If the Youngkin administration were to put their money where their mouth is, they would prioritize competitive pay.
Thomas Bowman
You're listening to pod Virginia; stick around.
Michael Pope
I'm Michael Pope.
Thomas Bowman
I'm Thomas Bowman.
Michael Pope
And this is Pod Virginia, a podcast that once again has Thomas Bowman on Thomas, and it's great to talk to you again. You're back from your vacation.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, finally, the first vacation in a couple of years, and I got to go down to Utah. Michael, I highly recommend it.
Michael Pope
Utah, gosh, I have to say I've never been to Utah as someone who does genealogy as a hobby. I'm familiar with Utah because they store a lot of the documents that I go through for my genealogy research. They do have a pretty hotly contested Senate race out there right now. Right?
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, there were political yard signs all over the place. But what we were there for was the hiking, and we did almost 30 miles of hiking in seven days.
Michael Pope
Yeah, they're for the hiking, not, not for politics. I understand that. I'm sure it was nice to get out of Virginia for a little while. Okay, well, let's get to the News. Voting early and voting often, none of Virginia's votes are counted until after the polls close at 7 pm on election night. But even though those votes haven't been tallied, they will have been processed, all the envelopes will have been opened, and all the signatures will have been checked. And the only thing really left to do at that point is hit the button to count the votes. Senator Creigh Deeds says a recent change to the law actually requires pre-processing, which he says used to be spotty,
Creigh Deeds
But it was at the registrar's discretion. And so you had early processing in many localities. But in some localities like the city of Richmond, like some of the Northern Virginia localities, you didn't have early processing. And that resulted in a very late count.
Thomas Bowman
The late counts were a problem because they created distrust in the process. Back in 2020, Trump seemed to be winning when people went to bed. But then Biden was leading once all the absentee ballots were finally added. Some people took to calling this the red mirage.
Michael Pope
And then there's also kind of like a blue mirage of sorts because people tend to think that early votes help Democrats. But Alex Keena at Virginia Commonwealth University says there is no evidence to show that's true.
Alex Keena
I think a lot of Republicans actually believe that if you can suppress the vote or you can prevent a large group of the public from voting, that might actually help their party, but there really isn't a lot of evidence to support that claim.
Michael Pope
Yeah, there's so much going on here with the early voting. You know, I was really heartened to hear about this new law that Deeds had a hand in, they passed this law when the Democrats were in charge, and it requires pre-processing. So you know, your local registrar is not going to wait until the polls close before they open the envelopes of the absentee ballots, which by the way, in some states, they're actually legally required to wait until a certain time before they can even open the envelopes. But here in Virginia, they get to open the envelopes; they get to check to make sure the signatures are in place; they get to check to make sure the person is a registered voter. They can, and also, this is the important part, send that ballot through the machine not to tally the vote but to tee up all the data so that when seven o'clock runs around, you can hit the button to tally the votes. So the first the very first results we are going to get are the early votes, which by the way, will not be presented in an, at large county-wide citywide precincts. They will, for the first time ever, be in your local precinct. So, Thomas, I know that you vote early, you know, for in recent elections, your vote will show up in that Richmond-wide at large precinct, but this election that's it's not going to show up there because that's not going to exist, it's going to show up in your local precinct. So I think after several tries, people are finally getting the hang of how this early voting stuff is going to work.
Thomas Bowman
And that specific nuance comes from Republican senator David Suetterlein. And both of these bills we're talking about here are great bills, one to let localities pre-process that is one of the reasons why Fairfax County would always come in so late, they've got a million people in their locality, they've got maybe not that many people are voting, but a lot of people still nonetheless. And they had to wait until the polls closed, and they got to do all of those things. You had to wait on the precincts to report; they count them at the local County Registrar, and they have to ship them down to Richmond. And by the time it gets counted, it was like 11 o'clock at night once the News would update. And the SPE would update with the results. So we don't have to wait that long anymore to get these absentee ballots processed. And the absentee ballots being counted in the precincts is going to be great because you're going to be able to look and see where these votes are coming from. And as a political person. I love that because it is going to tell me which places to target for early voting, like which precincts are more likely to have more early voters. Where do I need to do some work? This is a great bill, and it's non-partisan, or equally partisan, I guess, as Alex Keena at VCU points out, that because think about the people who take advantage of early voting; those are people, often the elderly people who don't have the ability to drive around at the last minute, or maybe they've got appointments somewhere else outside the county. And you don't need an excuse anymore. But early voting largely benefits older populations historically.
Michael Pope
Yeah, I'm really fascinated. This is a part of the story that I find really fascinating because there is this assumption out there that Democrats and Republicans both share that somehow early voting benefits Democrats, and there's just no data, there is no data to prove that, in fact, there's data that says the opposite. Because if you look at the 2021 election, we had a huge amount of early voting, and we had a record turnout. And guess who benefited? Republicans. They won all three statewide seats. So if anything, we've got data that shows that early voting actually benefits Republicans. So that, you know, burst that bubble. The other thing that really jumped out at me about all this discussion, and maybe this is because I have a book that just recently came out; it's called the Bryd Machine in Virginia: the rise and fall of the conservative political machine, available now on amazon.com. Is thank you is that, you know, in 1901, you and I have talked about this on the podcast before, Virginia adopted a new constitution that radically reduced the number of people who were able to participate in elections; it was a racist constitution, a Jim Crow, Virginia constitution that implemented the poll tax, and they there was a bunch of tricks that were in there to reduce the number of people who could legally cast votes. And if you look at the difference in the turnout between the 1901 election under the old rules versus the 1905 election under the new Jim Crow rules, you will see that the number of voters was reduced by 35%. 35% fewer voters participated in the 1905 election compared to the 1901 election. And so that did benefit a political party; it was the Democrats who benefited from that reduced voter participation. And it was very clear. And that's why they did it, by the way. So it is interesting. Now we've got this debate about, you know, expanding voting and making voting easier. And there's this knee-jerk assumption that it helps Republicans, but I don't think that's the case.
Thomas Bowman
Well, all things being equal, fewer votes tend to help whoever's in power, and more votes tend to help whoever is trying to get power. And there are reasons for that, but they all basically boil down to wave elections happen when you're mad at the establishment, generally speaking, and you want to replace, you know, throw the lot out, and that helps challengers fewer people voting tends to be just the people that are fine. They're, they're fine with the status quo. They're gonna reelect the people who are already there, generally speaking, so whether or not that's Republicans or Democrats, and I get this is not every single race and every single election, but this is just the macro picture here. That's generally how it works; more votes help the people trying to get power. Fewer votes help the people in power already.
Michael Pope
Well, early voting is radically transforming how we think about elections and also how elections actually transpire, which brings us to our next story. The August surprise when President Biden announced student loan forgiveness for 40 million Americans in late August, some people wondered about the timing.
Jennifer Victor
The first thing I thought of was, oh, October surprise came early this year.
Michael Pope
That's Jennifer Victor at George Mason University.
Jennifer Victor
If you are a campaign or a group that wants to turn out voters and you want to have the maximum impact on the most voters who haven't already voted, then you would time it for the beginning of October before the end of September.
Thomas Bowman
Campaigns have tried to spring a shocking October surprise as long as November elections have existed, but the first known use of this phrase was by the Reagan campaign in 1980. They were concerned that President Jimmy Carter might use the power of the White House to cut a last-minute deal with the Iranian hostages.
Michael Pope
But now, with early voting, election day is more of a season and every day in October is essentially Election Day. Stephen Farnsworth at the University of Mary Washington says that's having a subtle influence over the pacing of campaigns.
Stephen Farnsworth
An October surprise does no good. When you think about all the people who've already voted, by this point, you now need a September surprise really to impact the election in the way that an October surprise used to.
Michael Pope
You know, the October surprise was always kind of the fun part of the campaign; you're waiting for that last shoe to drop and the last bit of oppo research to come out. But you know, with the way early voting works, that's a terrible idea. You don't want to hold on to stuff to the end; you want to front-load it. And I think in this election cycle, we've seen lots of front-loaded October surprises that happened over the summer. Like as we heard Jennifer Victor talking about Biden's move on student loan debt forgiveness. That was an October surprise that came early. Also, if you think about that surreptitiously recorded audio of Yesli Vega talking about how she didn't believe that pregnancies could result from rape, that was an October surprise that came early over the summer. So I think we have already seen campaigns try to reposition themselves and their messaging based on our new way that people vote now.
Thomas Bowman
The reality is if you think the campaign stops, you're going to lose it. Because the campaigning never ends. As soon as you win the election, it's time to start posturing for the next one. Whether you've won or you've lost, and Republicans are actually great at this right, I'll point to the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary. So what the Republicans did, long before the election was actually underway, people were actually voting as they were hitting people with boosted headlines and boosted posts on Facebook. And they didn't necessarily care where the source was; they cared about the headline because if you are scrolling through your newsfeed and you see headline after headline about how corrupt Hillary Clinton is, then it doesn't matter if you read the story or not. Or if it is from a legitimate source or not, that starts to prime you to believe that Hillary Clinton is corrupt because that's, that's all you're seeing. You're being inundated with that message. And then that is going to, in that case, help Donald Trump get elected before he even starts really campaigning in September or whatever it is. This is a technique that Republicans do a lot better, generally speaking, than Democrats because, one, they've got the money to do it. It takes a lot of money to campaign 24/7. But two, they understand it fundamentally, in my opinion, better than Democrats do because Democrats don't campaign 24/7.
Michael Pope
You know, the thing that strikes me about this is I'm wondering if Labor Day sort of changes as a mile marker, you know, the old way, Labor Day was the people thought of it as the beginning of the campaign. But under these new roles, and people voting early and stuff like that, is it possible that, you know, Labor Day might essentially be the end of the campaign and that people's assumptions and people's beliefs and people's opinions and people's thoughts? They already been shored up by the time Labor Day comes? I mean, like, is labor day going to be a different kind of psychological mile marker?
Thomas Bowman
Well, yes and no, yes and no, because when it comes to the November election, that is when people start paying attention. But the reason that's when they start paying attention is because that's when they get home from their vacations. That's when they're back at work. Kids are back in school; they've resumed a normal routine, presumably. And so there are practical reasons for that. And on the campaign side, you don't want to spend a ton of money advertising to people who aren't in front of their TVs, right? So if you're trying to cut a cable ad and put that out, well, guess what? People are on vacation. Over that holiday over the summer, so you're not getting as much ad lift as it's called in those months. And the other thing is if you do try to use dynamic ads and geo-target, well, then you're going to pick up people who are on vacation and don't actually live in that district. So because of limited resources, the reality is, we're still not really going to see the uptick until September when you have more resources than you can. And this is like an advertisement for why you should contribute to your favorite local politicians because they need the resources to get their message out and compete against their opponents in a world of nonstop politics. Right. So that's why they need your $25. That's why maybe not Nancy Pelosi, but definitely, you know, Mayor Wilson would need it right so that they can get their message out at the local level.
Michael Pope
All right, well, let's get on to our final news item for today. Falling test scores. Governor Glenn Younkin says a new federal report card for fourth-grade students and eighth-grade students is revealing what he calls an honesty gap in Virginia. So the Governor says the honesty gap is between. On one side, it's the portrait of the school system where most schools are accredited, versus on the other side, test scores that show fourth-grade reading and fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. Those test scores show what he calls a catastrophic learning loss in Virginia. Laura Gordon, the Commonwealth Institute, says Virginia's accreditation system gives a complete picture that includes things like attendance and improvement over the previous school year.
Laura Gordon
I tend to think that providing more information to families is better than providing less information to families. So I don't view the accreditation system as covering anything up. What it's doing is providing additional information to families.
Thomas Bowman
That additional information is proving to be controversial. A lot of people say if a school doesn't meet the grade, it shouldn't get accredited.
Michael Pope
James Fetterman at the Virginia Education Association says the real problem is not test scores for reading and math; it's a lack of resources.
James Fetterman
If the Youngkin administration were to really put their money where their mouth is, they would prioritize using our revenue surplus to invest in competitive pay to stem our staffing shortages, fully fund the research-based standards of quality or the SOQs, and lifting the support cap. So all students receive the in-school services they need.
Michael Pope
So these new federal test scores that came out last week show performance in fourth-grade reading and math and eighth-grade reading and math. And the headline here, Thomas, is it's not good; the scores are lower than they have been for many, many years. So, for a very long period of time, Virginia test scores were above the national average pretty significantly above the national average. Now, they have fallen to where they're right in line with the national average, perhaps a little bit above, but pretty much, you know, in line with the national average. So the shift here the change is that, you know, a state that had, for a very long period of time, then above the national average, is now average. And that's robbing a lot of people the wrong way.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, I mean, you spend the last two, or three years attacking teachers making it such a troubling profession to participate in, and it's been longer than two or three years. But things ramped up during COVID. We pretended that it would be safe for kids who are mostly still today remain mostly unvaccinated to go back into congregate settings. Well, that disruption and addition to the disruption from the prolonged pandemic, means that they're not going to be in a position to learn effectively. And the farce was trying to push kids back into those classes rather than preparing the schools to be able to deliver high-quality remote education. Now, the other thing here to call this an honesty gap, Michael, I swear every accusation is an admission.
Michael Pope
It's a little Orwellian, isn't it?
Thomas Bowman
It really is it really is? Trust the experts, right? So there is a term called pedagogy, which I know you know, but maybe not everybody listening knows what that is. And basically, what that boils down to is there is a scientifically documented best practice. And we want to use that scientific best practice to teach our kids because that's how you're going to get the best results. Sometimes the pedagogy changes as the science changes, and we adapt it as we grow as a society. But the bottom line is that professional teachers know how to teach; they've gone to school for it in Virginia for at least five years.
Michael Pope
So here's the argument for the honesty gap. This is the argument that Youngkin people are making is that if your local school is accredited but actually fails to meet the performance that it's supposed to, so like you either pass the test or you don't. And so what happens in a lot of schools is that they might have doubled their performance over the previous year, but they still failed to meet the, you know, to pass the test the past that didn't pass.
Thomas Bowman
Right. And it's an oversimplification of how education works, right? So like, if you either pass a test or you don't seem like, Okay, that seems like a benchmark that everyone can agree on. But it's not because not everybody gets the same prerequisites, right? So not everybody has a parent who's able to stay home and read with their kids to make sure that their kids are completing and doing their homework and learning and answering their questions. People have different resources; this is why we are looking for equity and education, not equality in education, right? And so to have a benchmark where you either pass or you fail, that's a quality, right? So that's everybody, you either meet the measure or you don't, but you never really go into the next level of, of trying to understand the problem is to why are some people passing? And why are some people not passing?
Michael Pope
Well, that's what Laura Goran was saying in our soundbite there is that, you know, the way that Virginia has done this is that like there's, you know, whether or not you pass or fail is important and not to be overlooked. But there are other things in addition to that, that we also want to look at, including attendance. This is controversial, like, you know, because if you don't attend school, you're not learning. And so, attendance is actually a very important measurement. That's not reflected in whether or not you pass or fail a test. Improvement we talked about a second ago if you have doubled your performance but you still fail the test under the old system, you would not be accredited under the Northam system; you would get accredited. So but this is really controversial. There are Republicans; there are lots of people, not just Republicans, who believe, look, if you haven't passed the test, you shouldn't be accredited. And so, you know, rewarding schools that improve their performance significantly, Laura Gordon might like that idea. But Youngkin thinks that's an honesty gap, and that you're not being honest with parents about the fact that your school is not meeting the grade.
Thomas Bowman
Well, and the honest analysis there, Michael, is that the schools that struggle to meet the grade are the ones that need the resources most, the extra resources. And what Youngkin kids are proposing is to return to a failed system that punishes schools that have struggling students. And we already know that doesn't work. And what's the definition of crazy doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? Right. So we don't want to do that because we know it doesn't work. But what does work is when you meet these schools, where they are, when you acknowledge that they serve historically underprivileged and underserviced communities, and you say, Okay, well, what is the relative improvement here? Is that worth rewarding? Then the answer can be yes. And you're not going to tie it to something like funding, which just creates a self-defeating doom spiral.
Michael Pope
Yeah, yeah, the whole logic of No Child Left Behind just never made any sense to me, as someone who spent a very long time trying to figure out the details of specifically how it worked in specific schools with specific principles and that sort of thing. The idea was you identify the schools that are not passing, and then you punish them by withholding money, like, how's that? How's that going to help anybody? I mean, like, the whole logic of No Child Left Behind was just, like, fatally flawed from the beginning. And it's worth pointing out, I mean, people associate that policy with George W. Bush, but like, you know, Senator Teddy Kennedy was also behind that, too. I mean, this is a bipartisan proposal.
Thomas Bowman
Right? Yeah. Well, look, you live, and you learn, right? And the point is that you learn, and if you don't learn, then you probably shouldn't be making policy.
Michael Pope
That's a good transition to our water cooler. So a couple of things in my water cooler. I want to start with something I read in a news outlet called The Appeal. An amazing story that folks at The Appeal got their hands on a contract between the Fairfax County Sheriff's Office and one of the jail communication vendors. So if you think about like, if you're in jail, you need to have contact with the outside world, which means you need to get on the phone, which means that you have to pick up a telephone that is operated by a vendor. This is not a telephone operated by the Fairfax County Sheriff's Office. It's operated by a vendor, and these contracts jails. These are big money contracts where people get rich, really rich, off of these kinds of contracts. So this jail communications vendor in Fairfax County had a contract that included the ability for the sheriff's office to go on a Caribbean cruise. Now the sheriff says no one actually ended up going on a Caribbean cruise, but The Appeal got their hands on the contract that spells it out. And so good work for The Appeal for identifying this really corrupt contract in Fairfax County. I mean, like, it's it sounds like it's possible that they didn't actually go on these corrupt junkets, but the fact that it was in the contract is not a good sign for the Fairfax County Sheriff's Office.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, the Department of Corrections broadly, and generally speaking, could really use an audit a human rights audit in more ways than one. So you got contracts you got, how people are being treated, you've got conditions in the jails, which is more than just how people are being treated. That's the physical condition. Right. So you've got the structure itself falling apart? Is it livable? Is it really a place? You know, most of our Department of Corrections is based on punishment rather than rehabilitation? Right? And so when we're punishing people, when we're being punitive about it, we think it's okay to do things like give prisoners 22 cents an hour, which is what they make in Virginia, and we think it's okay to then charge, you know, four, five, six, seven times that per minute, just for them to make a phone call to their attorney, or to their family member that month. Right. Or not let them vote. Yeah.
Michael Pope
Why is it that people in prisons are not able to cast a vote for people who represent them in the General Assembly and people who represent them in Congress? I mean, like, when they draw the congressional districts, they take into account the number of people that are incarcerated at these prisons. So these are constituents we're talking about, and yet, they can't, they can't. They're legally prohibited from voting from these people. Why can't these people vote?
Thomas Bowman
Well, if you really want to get woke, Michael, you know, so the United States never actually outlawed slavery; we just regulated it. And we route we regulated it to people who are in prison. So when you go to prison, you can become a slave. That's why you can get, in some cases, it's $0 an hour or zero cents an hour, but in Virginia is like 22, 26 cents an hour, something like that. So let's just call it a quarter an hour; you can work for less than the minimum wage that we think all humans need to have a livable life that when it was created, that was the intent, at least. And those people in prison make all the government's furniture in Virginia, right? So the desks and the General Assembly, in the office furniture, the chair you sit in if you go and you lobby, your elected official, you're sitting in something made by prisoners when you drive a car, your license plate was made by most likely prisoners because that's who had the contract, at least the last time I looked into it. And there's also a procurement clause where if the prisons make something like pencils, the pencils that they give you are made by prisoners, right? And so this is slave labor. Regular businesses can't compete for that, right? So those conditions in prison, the things that we make prisoners do and subject them to, when you understand that, that is the modern evolution of slavery. And the police in most cities were created in their very founding, initially slave catchers; well, what do they do? Right? Well, they arrest people, they put them into the slavery system, the injustice system. And that is literally today, the modern evolution of slavery, post-Civil War, so that was the compromise. This is how we get the South to stop fighting, is to say, hey, oh, okay, we're just going to regulate it. So you can't go off and do your own thing. And it's what we do with every industry when they go too far and in a direction that society doesn't like; we regulate it. Well, when slave owners go too far in a direction they don't like, we fight a war first, and then we regulate it.
Michael Pope
Well, I would add to what you just said that if you think about what happened after the Civil War, it wasn't a straight line because there was a detour. There were Black people who were elected to office, but people forgot about this after the Civil War. After reconstruction. There was a brief period of time when you had the registers in power and you had Black members of the House of Delegates and Black elected officials in local offices. And you know, they were actually contributing to making the public school system better. They were making changes To the criminal justice system, they're making changes to voting. And all that was wiped out by the Jim Crow era. And so now, in our model, the way we currently think about that, it's like civil war Jim Crow. But there's this hidden chapter between the Civil War and Jim Crow that people don't often think about.
Thomas Bowman
Yeah, oh, yeah. And this is a huge failure of public education. And that's by design, by the way. But kids, at least when I was in school, admittedly, in the 1990s and 2000s, we didn't learn about Black Wall Street, we didn't learn about the Tulsa massacre, we didn't learn that rally was basically a Black-governed town majority Black too. And the white people there just killed everybody in, like, the late 1800s, early 1900s. They just killed everybody and took over the town. And we don't learn this stuff. And this is our history. And what this tells you is that you cannot rest on your morals. There are no final victories. There are no final defeats, don't get comfortable because the enemy can take it away in an instant.
Michael Pope
Well, if you want to learn about the history, I highly recommend you pick up a book titled The Bryd machine in Virginia: the rise and fall of a conservative political organization, where I go into lots of this detail about what happened in Virginia. But hey, something there's something else in our water cooler Thomas that I want to get to, which is listener mail. We got this email from Cynthia, who was not happy about one of the ads she heard on the podcast. Here's what she wrote quote, "hello, I'm a new listener to Pod Virginia. Excellent podcast with what seems to be fair and balanced reporting. But the first episode led off with a horrifying negative ad against Cheri Beasley, that's a candidate in North Carolina for US Senate. So Cynthia continues here in her email, quote, I can't support a pod that takes these kinds of ads. It is not fact-based and uses distorted scare tactics. Are you screening these ads before you run them? Thomas? Are we screening these ads before they appear on Pod Virginia?
Thomas Bowman
Yes, no. But, in this case, we can't. So this is a good opportunity, Michael, to explain how our advertising works here on Pod Virginia. Because we have a mix, sometimes you hear host read ads, so read by Michael or me or a Jackleg Media employee when it comes to our underwriter credits. But you also hear dynamically inserted ads. And when you get dynamically inserted ads, we do not talk to those advertisers. It's right there. They've got their targeting. They're there. We don't know what you're hearing; we don't know who's trying to reach you because it's different from person to person. Right. So that's absolutely frustrating in this case that Cynthia points out here because I wouldn't want that ad either. And by the way, as somebody who does advertising in their day job. What that tells me is that somebody is wasting their money with bad targeting; not only are you not interested in getting that ad, Cynthia, but I'm guessing if you're listening to Pod Virginia, then you're probably not in North Carolina, and in a position to vote for this person, one way or the other. So, you know, I totally get why you'd be miffed. And I will say there's an advantage to this arrangement, Michael, because it keeps you and me out of the financial discussions so that we can stay independent and authentic and, more importantly, accurate in our News, reporting and analysis and opinions and not get sullied by the money. Yeah. Well, Michael, let's leave it there. Because you're getting on to one of my special interests, and I could talk for hours about advertising, and this is not that kind of podcast. So thank you so much for listening. And do not forget to vote.
