This seat is very important that they'll do anything to win this seat, lie.
Cuz they wanna make it by everything else except what the true problems that we have
in this country is.
This inflation, the border wide open, crime.
>> Herschel Walker, following the big abortion scandal he was involved in,
has decided to really lean into his anti-crime messaging.
And that's really no surprise, he's running for a senate seat in Georgia.
And if you look at the political landscape right now and
all of these various elections, you'll notice a repetition of
the same anti-crime messaging from these Republican candidates.
And I bring this up because we should be a little concerned.
It seems to be working in some cases,
especially when you look at the polls between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman.
Fetterman still has a lead, but Oz, even with all of these terrible stories
coming out about him, and how his company did terrible abusive testing on dogs,
he's starting to close that lead that Fetterman has over him.
And I think it's because he keeps repeating this crime messaging.
Now, the Republican National Committee has tweeted out a near daily update of
crimes and crime statistics in the Philadelphia area.
On Tuesday, it shared footage of a carjacking at a Philadelphia gas station.
And highlighted that there have been more than 1000 carjackings in the city
this year.
So this is very much something that is supported by the Republican
establishment, this pivot toward crime messaging.
And I wanna focus on the Fetterman race a little bit, and then go to you, Jordan.
So in Pennsylvania,
Republicans are seizing on high profile incidents in the Philadelphia area.
Including the recent ransacking of a Wawa store,
and the shooting of five students outside a high school last month.
Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman, the state's lieutenant governor,
has been forced to play defense by, this is not good,
erasing statements of support for Black Lives Matter from his website.
So playing defense is never good.
And Democrats tend to play defense, and I hate that,
I would like to see more offense from them.
And to be fair, Fetterman has been doing a great job.
He does play offense, and that is very important.
But if you look at the polling,
it seems like this strategy is working a little bit for Dr Oz.
Let's go to graphic five.
The strategy appears to be paying off as the Republican candidate for
Senate in Pennsylvania, Mehmet Oz,
has gained some ground in the polls over the last two weeks.
On Tuesday, the Cook Political Report, which in August shifted the race from
"toss up" to "lead Democratic", moved it back to its "toss up" column.
I wanna get your thoughts, Jordan, because, honestly,
I've been warning about this, and I've been seeing it.
I saw it from a mile away, I knew it was gonna come to this.
And my plea to Democrats was,
don't try to outdo Republicans on being tough on crime.
This is a great opportunity to empathize with victims of crime, and
offer something different and better.
And I haven't really seen that.
I've actually seen a lot of Democrats running away from this issue, or
trying to pretend like there isn't a crime wave at all.
>> Well, Democrats like to govern from a position of fear.
And I think that really infects their campaigns, too.
Because a lot of people just bounc around between campaign and office or
organization, whatever.
And it's frustrating when you see moments like this, when they're very clearly just
picking outliers, and trying to sensationalize them.
Because it's reminiscent of that Willie Horton style ad,
where they're just hyping these things up to scare people.
But if you really look at it, and I did some research before I came here,
cuz I wanted to see where, especially in these states, what are the crime rates,
and how do they compare to other states?
And would you be surprised if you heard that out of the top ten states
with the highest murder rates, eight of them are red states?
They're not really concerned about any of this.
If they they were, they would be doing the same things about their own states.
>> 1000%, no, let me be clear about one thing,
just in case anyone might misconstrue what I'm saying or thinking.
No, Republicans don't care about the crime wave at all.
But it is about how they campaign, and how they message.
And so, when there is a crime wave, and people are concerned about it,
they're gonna think that the candidate who pretends to care about it actually does
care about it, you get what I'm saying?
So that's why I'm saying if they're gonna attack Democrats on this issue,
it's really important for the Democratic candidates to get out in front of it and
say, listen, this is a problem, we recognize it,
here's what we're gonna do about it.
And they should offer up solutions that are very different from what we've
done in the past and what we're currently doing today, right?
>> I mean, I don't even think it's this unique problem.
We've had crime, we unfortunately will have crime, no one likes it.
They try to frame Democrats as not only just being soft on crime, but
wanting more of this.
And these ads are just hysterical.
And I just think, unfortunately, it's the nature of our politics,
we can't really have a nuanced conversation about this issue.
>> No, we can't. >> So unfortunately, it's sound bites,
it's just 30-second ads, it's tweets.
But ideally, I'd love to see him say, okay,
lay out every single aspect of reinvestment in our community.
Meet some people's material needs, meet some people's mental health needs.
Meet some people's just regular general health needs,
all of these things together.
And investment in education and preventative care,
all of these things that really would help lower the crime rate, we can't do that.
Our system is so fundamentally broken, we cannot do that.
>> That's right.
>> So I don't really accept that we just have this unique crime wave that
we have to address and deal with within the context of a campaign with Oz,
or within the context of a campaign with Herschel Walker.
Because they're not reasonable rational actors.
>> No, they're not, but you could use that to your advantage, right?
So, I mean, look, if I were running against someone like Oz, I'd be like,
great, let's have a debate about the crime wave.
Let's do it, I wanna have a debate about the crime wave,
I wanna hear your solutions.
What are your solutions?
Because they have no solutions, right?
If we know that they're bad faith actors,
if we know that they're not actually concerned about this issue,
then create a situation in which you can call them out on it.
Call them out, and watch them stutter and struggle to answer a question
about issues that they keep bringing up themselves, right?
That's what I would like to see.
And I do think, look, I think Fetterman,
from what I've seen from him in relation to crime related issues, right?
No, he has the right idea.
He's like, our prisons are overflowing with people who shouldn't be there.
People who are not being rehabilitated.
If anything,
they're turning into hardened criminals by the nature of being in these institutions.
He wants to clean the records of people who have ever been prosecuted for
marijuana possession, which makes all the sense in the world, if you ask me.
It's insane that in much of the country you could just legally buy weed,
not even for medicinal reasons, just cuz you wanna smoke weed, right?
And in other parts of the country, you'll still go to prison for it, it's insane.
So I think he has the right ideas.
I think he's a smart guy.
I don't think he needs to run from this.
I don't think he needs to erase things from his website.
I think he should politically punch him in the face the way
he's been doing on every other issue and succeeding at.
>> Don't meet him where he's at, you have the upper hand,
the polling shows he's still up 4%.
It's not the most comfortable position to be in, things can change.
But he's still up, and it's because he has a good platform.
Oz doesn't have a platform, he wants to privatize Medicare Advantage,
and universalize private Medicare Advantage.
>> Insane. >> In what world does that make sense?
That's such an easy debate to win.
>> My God, no one wants that, Republican voters don't want that.
>> Well, Wall Street wants it.
>> Exactly, so have him repeat that he wants that, that he's pushing for that.
I mean, anyway, but you're right, Fetterman has been doing great.
I think his campaign, for the most part, has been pretty wonderful.
And he might be the only Democrat running for
office who understands meme culture, which is great, it's rare.
[LAUGH] >> His digital team is fantastic,
they've been crushing it.
>> They've been so good.