Clock It with Symone & Eugene

President Trump is at his lowest approval rating ever. Polling averages from FiftyPlusOne show Democrats winning in 11 of 15 key Senate races. Its generic ballot test for control of the House asks voters which party’s candidate they would support. Democrats are +9. But the party isn’t declaring victory just yet. Many of them still have a touch of PTSD from election nights in 2016 and 2024. But Clock It’s latest guest – pollster and data journalist G. Elliott Morris – says unless Republicans have secretly generated the biggest get out the vote campaign they’ve ever had, there’s no evidence that Democrats won’t win big. “ The Republicans right now are just hoping, praying for polling error,” said the FiftyPlusOne co-founder. “That's obviously a bad place to be. And like, if you got nothing else, then you're saying all the polls are all rigged.” Symone and Eugene also ask Morris about how FiftyPlusOne ensures the veracity of their reporting, as well as breaking the news about the fake Wedgewood polls that made it into national political coverage, including on MS NOW.

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This week Symone and Eugene joined Nicolle Wallace on her podcast "The Best People" to discuss all things midterms: El-Sayed's low polling with Black voters, Talarico fever in Texas, and could the senate seat in Mississippi... be in play for Democrats? All three MS NOW colleagues talk about the best version of America they’ve seen under Trump 2.0, exemplified by the Minneapolis ICE protests and the “No Kings” marches — times where we rely on community to propel us forward. “There is a world where selfishness is not the way you have to operate in your daily lives” says Eugene. “The only way to do that is to hold hands and jump together.” And Symone agrees: “We're the people, it is literally on us,” she says. “History is going to record that we made a difference.”

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Two weeks from the most pivotal midterm elections in modern history, the polling looks good for Democrats. But if they’re going to win back the House and the Senate, they’ll need voters to show up to the polls. Eugene’s been traveling around the country working on a series focused on Black voters called “The Deciding Vote.” In the first episode, he went to Cleveland, Ohio, where over 600,000 Black voters sat out the 2022 midterms. In the city, he finds that most of the non-voters he speaks to never connected – or were never told – how much voting could change their lives. Then Symone and Eugene invite Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott to the groupchat to prove how much a good leader matters. Mayor Scott, sworn in at the age of 36 in December 2020, has presided over a resurgence in public safety and development in the city he grew up in. He credits his success to being his real, authentic, Black Baltimore self. “ I grew up basically at the worst time to be a young Black poor person in my city,” Mayor Scott said. “My view on what happened, and what the city needs to focus on is different because I lived it.”

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This season of America continues to get more and more violent. Last Thursday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the administration would livestream a public firing squad execution. That same day in New York City, an ICE agent shot immigrant Oscar Bergal in the neck while he was driving a car with his five-year-old son in the backseat. “We're moving the bar on what is socially acceptable,” says Daniel Peña, the latest member of the Clock It groupchat. Symone and Eugene invited the Pushcart Prize-winning writer & Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar to discuss his new book “How to Look Away,” America’s evolving relationship with violence, how hit TV shows from the 2010s predicted Donald Trump’s rise and the use of force for political gain. “ For people who were like, it was outside the realm of their imaginations that Trump could happen, you saw pretty quickly like, no, this is in the DNA of the country right now,” he says.
Editor's note: After this episode was recorded and originally published, President Trump posted on Truth Social that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan on December 3rd will not be livestreamed.

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Michael Steele remains a Republican, but the party as it stands today is unrecognizable to him. “For the sake of power, we bought the idea of the South will rise again,” he says. “We should've killed it in its infancy and [been] done with it because it gave rise to what happened on January 6th.” The first Black chairman of GOPAC and the RNC joins the groupchat to offer his take on big money (and dark money) in politics, to reflect on how his faith guides his politics, and to explain why he’s stuck with the Republicans in spite of their about-face with regard to individual liberties. “ The easiest thing to do is walk away,” says Steele. “ I have to believe in your rights as a citizen under the flag and the Constitution to be on this soil, to live on this soil, to flourish on this soil – however we find you on this soil.”

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