Unpacking America with Rob Sand

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.

So 12 years, 2 months and 24

days ago, I received an email and it started like this.

I read your piece in Good magazine regarding public campaign financing. My honors thesis at Brown on public campaign financing's effect on political participation won the Philo Sherman Bennett Prize for best political science thesis. Loads of statistical regressions show that states with public campaign financing have 11 to 13% fewer uncontested state legislative races and about a 3% higher voter turnout than states without. It's attached if you want to take a look.

And I did take a look and it was extraordinary. And we spread it far and wide.

And he open sourced the data for

other people to build upon.

And then I didn't hear much from the author of that email, Rob Sand. He had told me he had left. He had gone to law school and turned down Harvard, where.

Which was a striking idea, but he

did and he went to Iowa for law school. But then after law school, Rob sand joined the Attorney General's office in Iowa to focus on public corruption and major financial crimes.

And as you'll hear in our conversation,

he cracked the largest lottery scam in history, as well as many other public corruption prosecutions that upheld the integrity of the AG's office. And when he ran for auditor, state auditor, in 2018, and beat an incumbent by almost five points, people saw that

he was a candidate of extraordinary potential for the Democratic Party, for Iowa for America.

So today I want to introduce you to this extraordinary and young public servant. We'll talk a little bit about the work he's done and what he's learned about government as he's done that work. But then you'll see, the conversation shifts to the focus of at least one part of this season, who is America? What can we learn from a sympathetic

listener, which is what a statewide official

in Iowa has to be.

Stay tuned.

Okay.

So, Rob Sands, I'm grateful you're here with us today. We first met, as I introduced in the introduction, when you sent me an email and told me you had turned down Harvard to go to the University of Iowa College of Law, which I always admire. And then after law school, you went to the Attorney General's office in Iowa, became an Assistant Attorney General as prosecutor.

Right.

So when you left law school and

having done work focused on how to make democratic politics more representative, how to

get more people involved, what was the thought about becoming a prosecutor? What was it about being a prosecutor

that was attractive to you?

To me, it was actually particularly about being a white collar prosecutor. I was interested in working for Legal Aid, you know, helping out folks who were down on their luck and struggling working class folks who maybe had a legal issue. And I had done a little bit of work with the Attorney General's office. I had spent a summer there. But really what excited me was going over there for an interview and hearing that Tom H. Miller, who's not the Attorney General, just has the same name and works in the same office. Tom H. Miller actually wanted to hire someone to focus on white collar crime, which I only found out after he asked me, what would you like to prosecute? And I said, well, white collar crime. He said, wow, that's amazing. We never get anyone who says that. And the reason is in Iowa there's very low guarantee of your outcomes as a prosecutor and very high complexity, of course, in the cases. And so everyone else in the division was just like, no, give those cases to someone else. And so along comes, you know, someone bright eyed and bushy tailed who wants them all, and they're like, hey, look at this moron, let's hire him as quickly as possible. So, so. But I care a lot about accountability for powerful people and I care a lot about the idea of gratitude. And if you're someone whose position in life has given you access to a great deal of money that belongs to other people, then your life can't be that bad. You have to be, you have to be employed, you have to be earning a decent income. There can be other things going on in your life that are things that you and I might hear and say, oh, that's, that's awful. But relatively speaking, you are doing well. And if, relatively speaking, you are doing well and you choose to commit acts of theft or embezzlement or fraud, that just gets me. It really gets me and it makes me motivated to say, no, that's not okay, you can't do that. And to provide some measure of accountability for it.

Well, you know, if you were in Chicago or in New York, I guess one would expect there'd be a lot of that kind of crime. Did you think that the. It would be an easy job in Iowa, you think? There wasn't much in Iowa that you

would be, you know, enough to keep one guy busy anyways across the whole state. But no, there's a decent amount. It might not be as big, usually, usually, not always, but usually isn't as complex, but there's enough going on to keep a guy busy. It might be a small town clerk who's stealing, who steals $80,000 from the town that they live in, and they've done it over a three year period, but they know every person that they stole from. It could be the lottery rigging scandal or really you actually right up there with the lottery rigging scandal. For most bizarre cases I've ever prosecuted. The International bank of Mika Mui, which was a 20 year running Ponzi scheme out of Papua New guinea that actually brought in an Iowa guy who was our defendant, who then victimized a mechanic, a school teacher, a retiree, a farmer, just all kinds of ordinary folks here in Iowa. So, you know, I was there for seven years. It kept me busy, certainly keeping somebody else busy at this point.

So. But if you think about the criminals, the people you were prosecuting directly, who were those people? What kind of person was that? I mean, you describe it very.

Yeah,

clearly when you think about somebody

who knew the people he was stealing from, like what kind of person did you find you were attacking?

It would depend on the case. Typically, if you're talking about a small town clerk, it'd be a resident of a small town, but it'd be a resident that has a, you know, a pretty decent job. If it was, you know, you look at the lottery rigging scandal. Eddie Tipton was a guy who really had the keys to the kingdom for the organization that ran most of the lotteries in North America, or at least more than any other entity. And he was making great money and just decided to have a little fun with it for himself and his friends. So the identity of the folks really varied. And frankly, I'll add this, I didn't do exclusively white collar prosecution, prosecuted quite a few sexually violent predator civil commitment cases. Really kind of the worst of the worst, where we're trying to keep them in a secure facility until they're not likely to reoffend, as well as armed robbery, sexual abuse, even a perjury case. So folks from all walks of life, but typically people that are not as desperate as we imagine when we imagine a criminal.

So the lottery prosecution was huge victory, and at least your campaign ad described it as a single line of code, which is a cool conception. Like the idea that one would trip across a single line of code but tell a story about finding the guy who had figured out how to hack the program. So steal the money.

So this is a wild case. If you haven't heard of it, I'd Google the man that cracked the lottery to see it in more detail. Or at some point soon, maybe this week, the podcast Criminal is going to have an episode on it. But long story short, my boss, Tom H. That I mentioned was retiring. And as he retired, he plopped a thin file on my desk and said, here, this is for you. And I was very aggravated because it was this sort of long standing mystery joke in the office of this missing lottery ticket. Somebody bought a lottery ticket worth $16 million and they had never come in to claim it. And then at the very end of the claim period, things got very hinky. Some claims were made, then they were withdrawn, and ultimately a criminal investigation opened. So my boss had worked on that criminal investigation a little while, had identified two individuals, but hadn't been able to speak to him who might know a little bit about it. And then the trail went dead. And he gave it to me, saying, look, I know this is kind of a pain in the butt, but I know that you are going to do everything you need to do in order to put it to bed, knowing that there was nothing else to be done. I mean, his assumption, which also was mine, was really, you're going to put some time into this and then you're going to, you know, shrug and call it a closed case because it doesn't seem like there's anything there. And. And then it turned out to be the largest lottery rigging scheme in American history, which we uncovered over a period of years. But that included a trial where the national media had said I they expected I was going to lose. And new investigations, multiple co defendants across the boundaries of, I think six different states total, if you count Texas, which I think you should, because that's where a lot of this stuff happened. Anyways, so.

So what he had done is he'd basically rigged the system for determining, for picking the lottery numbers and gave him an advantage because of the rigging.

Yeah. So our mastermind is a man named Eddie Tipton. And his job was literally to write the code that picks the random numbers, that picks lottery tickets, lottery winners, when they are picked by RNG random number generator rather than a ball machine, for example. So, yeah, he had at one point in time when there was a loophole big enough to drive a truck through in the approval process, wrote himself a little bit of extra code. He knew how that code operated. He knew what combination of events had to occur in reality for that code to get activated. And then he and his friends used that. I want to five times. I think we had five jackpots over the course of about five or six years to the tune of millions of dollars.

Wow.

Crazy story.

Okay, so he, like these other people, you're talking about prosecuting are people who are doing bad things and know they're doing bad things. You can think of it as classic corruption, right? But obviously when I first met you, you were focused on something that we could think of as a different kind of corruption. I think of it as legal corruption, like the influence of money in politics. And your thesis had measured, found a really clever way to measure the effect that public funding might have on willingness of people to get engaged presumptively because they saw that there was more reason to be engaged when they didn't think that it was just big money calling the shots. Those people, those people who were running for office, taking the big money, they're not criminals in the way that you think of the people you were prosecuting as criminals. Right. They're public representatives living inside that system. So I wonder how you think about corruption when you think about them.

So when it comes to campaign finance, and I appreciate you, I think that was the email that you mentioned at the beginning of the recording here. I remember seeing a piece you wrote in the back of some magazine and seeing that you were. Yeah, and it was now. And you were now looking at corruption. And so I just cold emailed you that thesis and went from there. And yeah, basically what it was is we had statistically significant findings on a data set with about 40,000 data points in it that states that have public campaign financing have higher voter turnout by about 3% and then higher candidate emergence for legislative races by, I want to say, 14%. Maybe it's been a little while. But when I. So at the end of the idea here is if we can make a system that actually tells people and shows people that they own it, that people are more likely to get involved with it. And my thinking now that I've actually run for office and won, my thinking on it is different. I've had now had the experience of raising money. I've now had the experience of serving an office. And I've never had the experience of someone trying to attach, you know, strings attached to any kind of a donation. But I think about this in a couple different ways now. I mean, number one, everyone's following. Well, everyone should be following the law, right? So you can take these contributions and you put them in your campaign account, you use them for what they're used for. And it's within the law if you're doing it appropriately. But I think about it in different ways now too. And this is something you talk about a lot of, you know, it's people working in A system less that makes each one of them individually corrupt, but more that maybe opens them to opportunities for corruption or is just simply itself a corrupt system. And the biggest way I think about that is in terms of, think about, think about a spectrum of integrity, right? You might have people who are, if you accept that they are at a certain point on a spectrum of ambition, right? For whatever that level of ambition is, you're gonna have more people with higher integrity and people with lower integrity. And the real problem that we come into for the public interest is when we elect people that are low integrity people who are willing to make massive trade offs against the public interest in order to further their own ambition, right? Those people are very problematic. And it's also, I think it's a hard thing to measure. I mean, how do you determine that level of integrity? It's a difficult thing to do. And so, you know, if we had, if the people who were running for office were all high integrity individuals, you could have a system like ours and you would have much better, much better outcomes than what we have right now. But there's a lot of people in office who I think just sort of say, you know, their core is to hold a position or to hold a title as opposed to advance the public interest. And if that's their core, then they will do lots of things to help hold that title or advance their own position that are against the public interest. The low integrity individuals are really what makes the system worse. And of course they exist, right? They're located at all different levels of government. So one problem is our system just doesn't control for that at all. It makes it very easy to advance. It actually makes it easier, I think, for low integrity individuals to advance because you're given opportunities to exploit your own lack of integrity. And then in addition to that, the other way I think about this now is in terms of the opportunity cost for time, right? They say that if you're in Congress that you're expected to be doing what, 30, 40 hours a week of fundraising. So you're not solving problems, you're not talking to the other people in your caucus, you're not talking to people across the aisle. You are just literally on the phone raising the money to get yourself reelected. With a public campaign finance system, obviously we have a system where you can say, hey, this is the amount of money I have to spend on my next campaign. My opponent's gonna have the same amount of money. And so why don't I develop a record to run on where I can actually look at people and say, hey, look, I have delivered for you. I have actually solved problems. Because I think what we end up with right now is we end up with a mix of integrity in the system. But a lot of people who are lower integrity advancing in the system, exploiting different pieces of it, different weakness of it, and then even those high integrity individuals, they don't have the time to actually advance the issues. And so what they end up doing is trying to work on reelect. And maybe, maybe their moves are not as self serving, but at the end of the day they also just have a limit of the amount of time available to them to get good things done. And so all of our problems fester and fester and grow upon each other instead of actually getting solved.

Yeah, I mean, there's one really tragic pathology about the amount of time that you spend really raising money which produces. I mean, we've spoken to people in Congress and they've described this life of raising money. It means that you don't get anything else done, which has the perverse effect of actually making it. That money raising is the most successful thing that they do. It's kind of like doing push ups. Like you don't really like to do it, but there's a standard like I need to raise $25,000 today. And when you hit, hit it like you get that dopamine hit. It's like, I did my, did my job.

Yes.

As opposed to actually trying to accomplish anything inside of the system. But you know, you're in a very unique position to understand this because you very successfully ran statewide office in Iowa and beat an incumbent for auditor substantially by almost five points. And so you're young and everybody must view you as a person who's rising in the system. System. So, you know, you're not a person of low integrity, but nobody really can know that ex ante, let's say. So there are a lot of people who are eager to make connections with you, who are eager to make you dependent upon them so that, you know, when you rise through the system, you might actually be somebody who's more beneficial to them. So you have you experienced that dynamic? I mean, that's a hypothesis. So you experienced that.

I think those folks are typically pretty easy to spot. So in 2018 when I ran, so I was the first challenger who had never previously held office to beat a statewide incumbent in Iowa. In 36 years of either party, the only other time that a statewide incumbent has lost a reelection was when Chuck Culver lost to Terry Branstad. But Branson had already been governor for three terms. Just it had been a while ago. Or more than three terms. More than three terms. So, you know, yes, I was able to do something that no one had done for a long time. But a piece of how I was able to do that was I'd raised a lot of money. And the way I did that, I mean, so this is, this is one of those other issues where it's just sort of like, you know, I, I sat down and I called everybody I know, and they say you're supposed to do that. I don't know how many people really do it. I actually did it. If I had a phone number for someone, I called him. If I didn't have a phone number and I could find one, I called him. And I remember calling a guy, you know, who was a year ahead of me in law school at Iowa, who was, who was a Republican. I'm a Democrat. And you know who. I didn't, I don't even think I ever had any one on one time. But we knew each other, we'd say, hey, in the hallways and, you know, interactive parties and in class, that sort of thing. Maybe I remember calling him just like, I hadn't talked to this guy in 10 years. But this is my job. My job is to call everybody. So I called him up, told him what I was doing, and he said, you know, in fact, his only previous contribution, Larry, had been to Ted Cruz.

Wow.

Yeah. But he said, he said, you know, I've been worried about the shape of politics lately. I don't know what directions are going, things are going in. But in law school, you were always somebody who took the time to listen to other people and seemed to actually care what they thought and treated people well. So, yeah, I'd be happy to support having more people like that in politics. And so the vast majority of my fundraising was from people I knew, whether it was from high school or college or law school, just literally calling them all. And you know what? I also raised a good amount from my in laws. They have a very financially successful business here that's headquartered in Iowa. And even though they are, I can't say they, even though they're certainly more conservative. And I, and I, and I know that at least a couple of them are Republicans. This is, and this is one of the things you always talk about. You put on a red shirt, you put on a blue shirt. It obscures all the similarities, all the things that we actually share that we agree in, Right? And so some people say, whoa, how'd you raise that money from your in laws. They're Republicans, you're a Democrat. It's like, well, number one, like we're related. So, you know, they're very important people to me in my life. These, you know, this is the grandfather, grandmother of my sons. These are people I care deeply about, people I love. But beyond that, my goodness, if all we do to conceive of ourselves is the letter behind our name, we have failed. We failed as a country, we've failed as a state. We have done exactly what George Washington warned us against in his farewell address. And here's the thing. I raised from a lot of Democrats. I raised from probably people who are, I would guess, left of the Democratic Party. I raised from Republicans again. And I know this is kind of, I don't know, people who know me want to see, want to see me succeed in this. I am kind of a stickler for rules. I'm kind of a stickler for doing things the right way. And there are times in life where that leads to disadvantage. But there are people out there who want to see more of that in politics. And so at the end of the day, you know, the handful of times that I've encountered folks like that, I'm not going to take anything with any strings attached. If you're donating to me personally, it's because you think I'm going to do the right thing in every situation. And if you disagree with what the right thing is, then I guess that's fine, don't support me in the future. And frankly, if you come back to me and you say, hey, this issue coming up, this thing that's coming up, you need to do this or I won't be with you. Let me just say this publicly right now. If you come to me and you say that, then I'm going to turn around and publicly say, hey, everybody, I'm going to do the right thing on this, even though so and so threatened to not contribute to me anymore. So I hope now you will because I'm demonstrating my integrity publicly.

Well, this is a good transition because as you know, what I'm eager to

talk about is, as I framed it, who America is.

And you bring this out quite strikingly when you talk about how difficult it is to imagine a Republican supporting a

Democrat for state auditor.

I mean, what are the partisan issues in being a state auditor? But I wonder, as you watched the last two years in particular, I mean, from the position of being an elected official, and you watched how America spun In the last two years, especially in

the climax of January 6, was there

a part of you that said, I kind of understand what's happening, or was most of it, like, for many of people like me who live near the Republic of Cambridge, just complete bafflement? Like, we don't even understand what this place is. What is this country where this is happening?

It's been a mix. In 2016, after Trump won, the thing I said to a ton of people was, ton of Democrats was, look, imagine he had been the Democratic nominee. It shouldn't be that hard to imagine, right? He's been registered as a Democrat longer than he's been registered as a Republican at that point in time. So imagine he's saying, I'm going to overturn Citizens United, I'm going to raise the minimum wage. I'm going to protect a woman's right to choose. And yet he's erratic and bullying and lecherous. Most Democrats do not give that thought enough, serious consideration. What would you do if you were in. If you were in that voting booth? I think a lot of people I know people, Republicans who are friends of mine who said, look, the policies outlast the man. And a lot of people felt that way. The bigger. Let's step back for a second here. We are all living in a really fundamentally stupid political system, right? You get two choices. That's it. Behavioral economics. You know, folks talk a lot about the paradox of choice. The more choices you have, the harder it is to decide, right? I can go into the grocery store and go to the toothpaste aisle and be. I can spend 25 minutes in there picking up toothpaste because there's too many options. It's like, I know, okay, I know I want Crest. So I walk over there, but then I'm like, oh, geez. Like, I. Which Crest do I want? I. The problem with this is because we have this very dumb system where you're forced to choose either A or B, or, you know, you can choose C. But we all know how that works. People can make a decision based on a single issue and not really have to think about anything else. And I ask a lot of people, in addition to trying to imagine that Trump was the Democratic nominee, to just think about the importance of experience as a teacher in life, right? So in a lot of areas in rural America, and this is true in Iowa and it's true elsewhere, we have seen, particularly since the advent of free trade, massive decline. And people say this is economic anxiety, that is. That is underselling it. It's existential because I Grew up in a small town, 8,000 people. You got to drive an hour to get to anywhere bigger, and then we've driven that hour in a town of, you know, 50,000 people. Minneapolis was the biggest, like, big city, and that was three and a half hours away. So we're out there kind of, you know, in a pretty relatively rural area. And your town lives and dies. The mood of your town, it's like being at a party is the best way for me to describe someone who's never lived in a small town where maybe somebody comes in and tells people bad news and the mood just kind of quiets down and sours for a while. That's a business closing in a small town. That's a family with younger kids moving out of town. It's not a question of whether I personally have a job. It's bigger than that. That's a part of it. But it's. But it's. Is our community is. Is the place that my parents grew up, is this place I love, where everyone I went to high school with, everybody I dated, everybody that I drank a beer with, everybody that I ran cross country or played football with or played volleyball with, is this place going to live or die? And those questions are really daily thoughts for a lot of Iowans, for a lot of Americans who live in rural areas and in small towns. And when your entire lived experience is that where we're literally by the business downtown, as a new business opens, everybody in town has pep in their step. For the next two months, a business closes down, everybody's worried and whispering, should we have done more to support them? Were they just bad at business? What is this? So when you have a guy, when this has been happening for 30 years and you've been. And you've seen this slow decline for 30, 40 years, and you have a guy who walks in who says, free trade sucks, and I don't like, you know, I'm going to drain the swamp and I'm not going to be politics as usual. And then, frankly, for two cycles in a row, the alternative is a very much an insider candidate. Right? Because Joe Biden was still the status quo candidate, even though Donald Trump was President of the United States, a lot of those people go for the person that speaks to their lived experience. Experience is such a strong teacher. When he talked about American carnage, do you remember that in his nomination acceptance speech? I had heard this before. The single biggest predictor for Trump's vote share in a County in 2016 is per capita opioid deaths in that County. So he was speaking to the lived experience of so many different Americans. And it really minimizes it, I think when people say, oh, you know, this isn't about economics. Well, I mean, they're right in a sense, but they're wrong in the sense that they're saying that it has to be other issues that explain it. People say race. Oh, that's. That's why he got that much support. You know, me growing up in a rural area, I had very little frame of reference on racial issues until I lived somewhere else. Many Iowans, many Americans in rural areas, spend the vast majority of their time in their own county. And these are places that aren't diverse. So you might grow up in a small town or in a rural area and not know any black people. You might not literally, I mean, I'm being serious. You might not have ever seen in real life a black person in certain areas. Now, you'll have, at this point, probably seen Latinos, maybe have talked to them. You may not know that, you know, people who are gay. Right. And so. And so when you have these issues of diversity that come up, it's not that I think most Americans or most Iowans or most people in quote, unquote, red states are against people who are different from them, but it just. It doesn't hit their personal experience level. They don't know that that problem is real, either through their own experience or people they have talked to. Whereas free trade decline, American carnage, they know that's real. And so if they're offered that choice, it's. It's understandable they make the choice they make.

Yeah, I. That's completely believable. Everything you've said, and especially when you emphasize the swamp drain, the swamp frame around 2016. I mean, you know, that was the first Republican candidate on a debate stage to call out other people for money. And he said super pacs were an abomination and he was going to do everything he could to change that system. And. And so people who live this frustration, really, I think it's right to call it existential. They see this existential threat to the life they've had and somebody speaking to it. I get how that triggers them to

be extremely committed to that candidate.

The puzzle is what happens after. Because you didn't see a candidate who came in and delivered on changing the world to address that exist. The one major policy Success was a $1.7 trillion tax cut for corporations and rich people.

Yep.

I mean, so. So, like the real. I mean, I understand the motivation. I understand getting into it. I just don't understand how you stick with it. Like, what explains how, you know, so many Americans, you know, the President likes to talk about how many millions of people voted for him. That's right. That many millions of Americans who could have been motivated the way you describe it in the face of everything that happened would still think this is the person they need to support.

And at the end of the day, there are no absolutes. Every answer. When you ask, why did somebody vote for Donald Trump? Well, think of an answer. That answer is true for at least one person, I'm sure. Right. And the question is always just a question of scale. But again, at the end of the day, I want to go back to the idea of this, you know, this binary choice that people get. There's no paradox of choice. It's too easy to make a decision when it comes to politics, whether it's a presidential race or someone else. You just say, oh, they got a D behind their name. That's who I'm voting for. Do you know who these people are? Nope. Do you know what they stand for? Well, I mean, they're a Democrat, so that stuff, I guess. Or they're a Republican, so Republican stuff. But it's become so easy to just make those decisions that we don't. The system disincentivizes serious thought for voters. Right. It's not rational for a voter to put a great deal of time thinking about the discrete policy differences between, you know, any particular candidate's website and what they list versus the candidate of the other party. They're just sort of general.

Wait, wait, wait. Okay, but, but you, you described how people were pulled in on the basis of ideas.

Yeah.

And we're not talking about the difference between Joe Biden and any other Democrat. We're talking about the difference between Donald Trump and any other Democrat. These are not small differences.

Yes.

And after 2016, it's not like there's a long list of all the amazing successes delivering on this existential threat that they could point to. So if ideas bring them in, why, why don't ideas continue to discipline whether they stay?

Because I think at the end of the day, a part of his appeal was, again, it goes back to the idea that he was the anti establishment candidate.

Right.

Think about Republican primary voters. All these Republican primary voters, you know, they heard Lindsey Graham say, if we elect Donald Trump, we'll be destroyed and we'll deserve it. Marco Rubio saying, don't elect Donald Trump. And so the plurality of voters in all these primaries are like, I guess he's the guy. These, these are their own voters, these are their own people. These are the most core activists Republicans have, and they're like, screw the Republican establishment. So I think in 2020, there are a ton of people out there who voted for Donald Trump because he was gonna shake it up. Right. And so even though he's looking back and, you know, most of what he can offer them is I got this big tax cut done. There were some foreign affairs issues that he touted as successes, and then of course, obviously, appointments to the Supreme Court. But a big piece of his coalition was there because he was there to piss people off. And if that's your mindset, you're going to expect for the most part, that maybe you don't get a lot done because the people that you're pissing off then don't want to go help you do the things you want to do. And I think for a lot of folks, it was just a second chance to poke a finger in the eye of the establishment.

So that's. So some, some people say a strong motivator for supporting Donald Trump goes with the belief that government can't do anything anyway. So if you don't think government can do anything anyway, then of course you're just going to pick the guy who's, you know, in some sense most exciting, most, you know, the better, the better show stick somebody who's going to stick the finger in the eye because it's not going to cost you anything. You know, even if you had the best person in there, you weren't going to get, get anything. And so, I mean, do you experience, as you experience the life of trying to persuade people into politics, that a huge proportion of the people you're trying to persuade into politics are people who don't believe there's any real reason to worry about politics because politics isn't going to do anything for them anyway.

Yeah. And I think that is a line that the Republican power structure has had great success in selling to people for the last. What, how long has it been since the Powell memo? I mean, 30, 40, 40, 50 years. And what they've done is they've told people, you know, government's always the problem. And that was a joke when Ronald Reagan said it. And now we've had a pandemic and nobody's laughing anymore. When I was running in 2018, I would tell people, you know, putting a modern day anti government Republican in charge of the government would be like hiring a vegan to cook the steaks at your Steakhouse. They don't want people to eat steaks. They don't want steak, and they don't want you to have a delicious meal. They actually want you to go out of business. Why would you do that? You know, it's not, it's not logical. And yet they've done such a good job on these big issues the Republican Party has, of trying to define Democrats somehow as a party that, you know, wants unlimited government. That just sounds bizarre. That's crazy. I actually put a class together when I was at Brown for undergrad on conservative thought. It was a wonderful class. And one of the issues that I really moved on the most was the idea that the most local government, the lowest level of government, can tend to solve problems best. But I don't think I'm alone in that in the Democratic Party. I think there's a lot of people in the Democratic Party who like more local government, less distant government, more government that you can walk up to in the steakhouse and say, hey, why'd you vote on that property tax levy the way you did? As opposed to writing a letter to Chuck Grassley or Joni Earnston, getting a three page single spaced reply from some intern sit in a cubicle somewhere. Yeah, yeah, I can't. What was your question, Larry? I forgot where.

Yeah, well, I mean, no, this, that's a great answer to the question because, you know, as we think about like, what's motivating the anti government Republican Party and why people would want to participate, it's got to be that they don't believe there's any cost to participating in the anti government Republican Party because there's nothing government can do anyway.

Right.

So when you, you know, when you ran for auditor, obviously you convinced a bunch of people that there was a lot of stuff that could be done. And nobody, you know, thinks there's anything controversial about the idea of rooting out corruption, you know, unless it's your neighbor or your relative. But the point is, like, it's a pretty, it's pretty clear this is something we should be able to do. But when you think about the Democrats in Iowa trying to persuade Iowans to become Democratic, what are the ideas that could persuade people that there's something government can do, that there's a reason to want government to do anything?

Because, yeah, I always push back. Well, a big piece of this is messaging. And I think we just have a general tendency to not engage on an issue. I engage and I can get into the weeds on stuff, but the support I'm on for Anyone who's listening, you can find me on any social media at robsandia. It's me on Twitter, I'm on my Facebook. People really appreciate having issues explained. Explaining the same way that I would love it if when I go two blocks over to the auto mechanic, three blocks over, you know, if he gives me a very quick and dirty explanation of why it is he needs to charge me this money to do this thing, I just appreciate it because I don't know. But that's why I asked him to do it. I get paid. Legislators get paid. Every statewide elected official in the states get paid. We get paid to sort through these issues for voters and to help them understand it. That's literally our job. We are a representative sent to make it work. And I think that Democrats far too rarely engage in those ideas. Republican talking point all the time is, well, it's a good thing we didn't pass any bills. That'd just be more government. Ha ha, ha. No morons. You gotta pass a bill to revoke a law. If you wanna have less government, you're gonna have to pass a bill to get rid of the laws that you don't want. So you are literally doing nothing. If you're bragging about not doing anything, that doesn't mean you didn't add government. It means you also didn't get rid of it. So you didn't accomplish what you set out to do. We don't push back. We don't gauge enough. We aren't assertive enough. I think. Here's the other issue. You know, when I ran in 2018, my ads said a couple different things, but one thing all of them said was that when I was at the AG's office, I prosecuted Democrats and Republicans. That's true. I treated everybody the same. And I think that's one of the things that people want. It's less of a question of a party and more of a question of doing the right thing. Someone who's willing to part ways with their party, at least in the state of Iowa. Right. And we're maybe unique. We're about a third, a third, a third Democrat, independent, Republican. But we also are the home to the most counties that swung from Obama to Trump.

And we beat.

The next highest state is Wisconsin. They have like 20, we have 30. So it wasn't even particularly close. And my hometown, Decorah, is in northeast Iowa, which is the heart of all of those counties in Iowa and in Wisconsin and some in Minnesota, it's called the Driftless area. So these people who will Vote for Barack Obama and they'll go vote for Donald Trump. It's me, it's my friends, it's my classmates, it's people in my hometown. It's less of a question of a party because we're not supposed to have parties. It's more of just a question of who is going to get in there and try to do something differently or try to do the right thing.

Okay, that's all completely understandable. Here's the part still, though, that I just don't get. You know, we had an election. I take it you agree Joe Biden was elected president.

Indeed. Legitimately. Quite.

Yes, legitimately. But we're gonna see for the next four years the continued feeding of this alternative reality that this man was not elected legitimately. And there are people out there who believe it in their heart of hearts. You know, you started by saying, imagine if Donald Trump had been elected as a democr Democrat. What would you have done? I often say to people, January 6th, imagine it had been the other side. Imagine that they had done what we were worried they were going to do. Imagine Mike Pence had said, well, I understand that there's a slate of electors from Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, but I don't think that's a legitimate slate. I'm going to count the slate for Donald Trump, but I'm going to do that in Georgia. I'm going to do that Wisconsin. And it turns out Donald Trump as president, imagine he had stolen the election. You know, if we really believe they had stolen the election, I don't know what the appropriate thing to do would be. I mean, maybe marching on the Capitol. That's not, that's not crazy. But the point is they acted on what they honestly believed, but what they honestly believed had no connection to reality. So one really important feature bug of our current political system is that you can get 40% of America to believe something that is so fundamentally untrue.

And that's true for many, many, many Democrats too, either side.

Okay, But I want to push back on that. Show me something as crazy on the Democratic side. I'm not saying, I'm not saying you don't have people believe things that aren't true.

But I'm saying we're not going to. There's nothing, there's no, there's no, there's no example comparable to the idea that the election was stolen through widespread fraud. But I remember at some point, I don't remember which year it was, but the PolitiFact lie of the year was you could keep your doctor under Obamacare.

Yeah, Obamacare.

Everybody said that. Everybody accepted it, right? So. And here's the thing. At the end of the day, a piece of that is division, this tribalism. And that exists at the same time that there is this little core of people, and people agree that this core is shrinking. But this little core of people that are willing to go either way, who are fighting and looking for someone who wants to speak to their lived experience and who wants to try to do something differently, that doesn't mean that the person who does that always wins the election. That doesn't mean that when they do win that it's a 60, 40 victory. It's probably more like 53, 47. But you're right, there's this noise machine, right?

What is that noise machine? What makes it work? How does it work?

Well, I mean, you can go back to behavioral science. I mean, you know this stuff too. It's confirmation bias. It's repetition, it's recency, it's primacy. All these things where if you've heard one thing enough, you start to accept it as true. What's really interesting as I go back to a conversation I had is the same question that you asked me after 2016. I was talking to a guy who was in intelligence in one of the armed services. We were talking about the 2016 election. I said, you know, it's just hard to understand how we got the outcome that we did. And he kind of jumped on the statement, like, how do people vote this way? They were. They were influenced into voting this way. And they were influenced by actors who wanted to see a particular outcome. And some of those actors were legitimate and some of them were not, but they were fed a great diet of disinformation, a lot of information that was not true. And then they acted on it, and they. And keep in mind, again, they're acting on it in this weird, dumb binary where you really get too real realistic choices. And so how much thinking do you really have to do anyways to make your choice? So if you're hit with this stuff day in, day out, over and over and over again, and you really only have the one choice or the other, it's disappointingly easy to get there, I think.

So the people that you represent, I mean, they live on a diet of media that is deeply divided, right? I mean, there's like your Fox News watcher constituents and there's maybe your non Fox News. I don't know what the. I don't know how you think about that division, but I Mean, do you. Do you have to monitor, like, what's reality from the perspective of Fox News about what Iowa's government is doing versus what's reality from the perspective of, you know, msnbc?

You know, a lot of those conversations are more federally focused. Focused. Fox News and their advertisers and everyone who's on Facebook trying to influence those conversations are much more focused on federal office. Right. So the state auditor level, Some. Yeah. Actually, I was just working today on a response to a letter that was written that was false. Had a bunch of false information about an issue that we addressed recently. The campaign against me in 2018 was a lie. They said he's not a CPA, so he can't audit. Literally. I mean, the last three people who held the job all were CPAs. I am not. And their campaign was, he can't audit. We won't be able to issue audits. It's going to cost the state millions of dollars. All of this was false. And I invited fact checking. I rebutted the claim. So, yes, at the end of the day, there's a constant need to correct disinformation. And there's this. What's frustrating is there's the nihilism of the people who spread the lies and then there's the nihilism of the people who don't bother to correct them. Oh, they're just going to say that they're going to lie no matter what. So whatever, you know, we're not going to get those people that are, that are saying that anyways. I'm sorry, I just can't. I can't agree with that. If somebody's lying to the public, they ought to be confronted about it and in. The truth ought to be told and.

Well, but I mean, if you imagine the truth being told in the town you grew up in, you know, kind of town square, standing up and telling the truth, everybody's there, they're listening. That's one thing. But, you know, if you're imagining telling the truth in a media market where 35% are watching one channel and 35% watching another channel, how do you tell the truth? I mean, you're not going to get Sean Hannity to bring you on to, to tell the truth and you're not going to buy ads or you could maybe, but it's kind of hard to be able to do that. So when we have that architecture that doesn't facilitate this dynamic of getting the truth told, doesn't that have to affect how you're going to do politics? I Mean, you know.

Yeah.

Can you really be playing a game that's trying to get the truth told as opposed to just getting the best lie out there?

Oof. Makes me shudder.

Sorry.

At the end of the day, you're right, though. I mean, to this degree, you're right on this issue. It's a lot easier to tell the truth than to have the truth be heard. A lot easier to tell the truth than have the truth be heard. Enough times for people to say, oh, yeah, that's right. What really happened was this, as opposed to what you're saying. And I don't know. I don't have the answer to that. To me, it's just the right thing to do is just say, no, that's a lie. The people who are telling that to you are liars. And then. And then there's good research behind this. Tell them why they're lying, and they are lying to you because they don't care about being truthful with you about issues. They just want to keep in, stay in power so they can do another tax cut like the one big one that they did for corporations and rich folks back in 2017, 16, whichever it was. I think it was 17, wasn't it? Got it done in 17. So you help folks understand that and you hope it sticks with them, but at the end of the day, I don't know what other choice we have.

Yeah, you're in the middle of Iowa, obviously, and Iowa's in the middle of a little bit of a storm about what happens in the next cycle. Do you guys like being first out of the box? I mean, is it good for you, or is it. I mean, because many of us complain that, like, you see federal policies bend over backwards to make Iowa happy. And why should that be the case? I mean, I like Iowa just like any other state, but it should be just like any other state. But are you happy about the prospect that maybe you won't be first?

You know, I think the conversations that we're having about the caucuses are good. Iowa Republicans don't really have a caucus.

They bas.

It's basically a primary. And so that's an important distinction to make. The people who say that Democratic caucus is inaccessible have historically been very accurate. But we've also done a lot of reforms to make it more accessible, and I think we should continue down that road. The process of caucusing, to me is kind of like what you were just describing, which is the First Amendment painting, the Norman Rockwell. Do you remember that painting?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. The old man in his leather jacket, standing up, looks like in his church. He's got his hand in his cap, in his hand, you know, speaking his piece. That's a caucus and it means so much because it's one of the only places where people actually come together on any kind of a regular basis to really, truly actually have a debate. Now sometimes there's not a debate, sometimes it's divisive, but sometimes it's exactly what democracy is supposed to be. And when we have those moments, it's really meaningful. And if they're gone, I'm going to miss them. I think a lot of other people you were in 2016 caucus actually, so 2016 was interesting. I ran a caucus location. The director for the Polk County Democrats called me up and said, hey, we need more people to run a caucus location. Will you do that for me? It means you wouldn't be able to caucus at your own location, but will you? And I had spoken to her previously, which is why she called me. I'd said, you know, I'm not super pumped about either Hillary or Bernie. And so she knew I was sort of eh. And she called me up and said, hey, will you do this? I said, yeah, sure. So in 2016 I got to run a caucus for a lot of folks who, I think it was in Beaverdale who we had a lot of first time caucus goers. It was fun. But I remember my 2008 caucus back in my hometown in Decorah and a good chunk of Obama folks and a good chunk of Edwards folks. It was really cold that night and it was so fun to see people that I knew and have an opportunity to come together and have a bit of a debate.

And after that experience, people walk out. Liking democracy more or liking democracy less?

It depends on the caucus site. Sometimes more in its relatively universal, sometimes less if it's poorly run or if maybe one of the, one of the people who's speaking on behalf of a candidate is aggressive or negative or divisive. It just varies. But at the end of the day I still think that there is something to the idea of showing up in person with your neighbors and maybe if the caucus ends, we can find a way to replace that. But it is a really wonderful opportunity and a hard thing to understand if folks haven't gone through it before.

I do think finding a way to get people to sit down with people they disagree with and discuss issues honestly and openly with respect is the most important contributor to this democracy.

Deliberative juries. Yes, deliberative juries. I loved, loved Having trials in my seven years at the AG's office. Loved jury trials. You sit down with people, you do jury selection, which in Iowa State court can be a lengthy process. You talk to them about issues, you hear what they have to say, and then, you know, you present the case and then send them back into the jury room with it. People. There's a lot of wisdom in people. If we give them a system that's actually set up to help them succeed instead of one that's not putting them front and center.

Yeah, and the way you put it is exactly right. There's a lot of wisdom in people. It's the idea of getting multiple people to reflect on an issue that gets us to wisdom, as opposed to targeting individuals, which is, of course, the mode of democracy right now.

Right, exactly right.

So, Rob, it's been a lot of fun, and it's great to connect after 12 years. And it's been wonderful to watch your rise, and I'm eager that your voice continues to define one part of the Democratic Party.

I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for having me.

So that was a lot of fun. It's actually the first time I've gotten to see this person of 12 years ago, at least visually.

Of course, email didn't have a zoom

link back then, and so this conversation,

conducted across zoom, was the first chance I got to listen to him speak as he showed me what he thought through his eyes.

We're going to release, if I can get permission, the video of this, too, because I think it adds to the

integrity, a word at the center of everything Rob sand says about the argument he's making. And that argument is ultimately an argument about how to make democracy work again. And obviously that's been our focus here, too. But what's striking in his contribution is the hopefulness. And I think we have to embrace it, embrace that hopefulness, because though we're at a moment when it's hard to be hopeful, given the challenges to majoritarian democracy that we see, it is through the efforts of surprising success from surprisingly

successful young people like Rob sand that

I think we find we old people, we find our greatest hope. So this was a lot of fun, and I'm glad to be able to share it with you. Next we're going to talk. It's not clear yet whether.

Whether we're going to talk on the

record or not, because my friend is not sure he wants to be outed in the way this conversation will out him.

So let me be obscure about who

it will be, but it's a person who just before the election declared exactly why he was supporting Donald Trump in 2020 for president.

A colleague, a friend, a person I

had admired and respected, and I have to say was surprised when he said that.

So we're going to have a conversation next on this podcast. Who is America?

Who would support even someone like him, Donald Trump. Now, as you know, listening to these podcasts, my question is not about how do we rally people to our side versus their side. It's a genuine puzzle to me. It's a genuine question. And of course, there's a genuine question for them on the other side, too. It's not like I'm imagining I have a unique abscess to truth. And they don't. So it's a part, as we talked about in this podcast, about the biases that we confirm and the practices we engage to challenge those biases. That's what this conversation should be, and I'm looking forward to that, too. So stay tuned for that.

This is Larry Lessig.

These podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens. You can find them on the web at citizens us/ another way. Please share these podcasts and please use the form on that page to give us feedback and ideas and other people you think we should be speaking with. This has been a conversation about America, as America struggles with this question of who we will be again,

as we've

tracked in these conversations, too, the progress that the most important reform legislation America has seen has been made. So it's a wonderful moment to reflect that as I record this podcast. Congress, the house, has passed HR1 and it's moved to the Senate. And though many people in the Senate think it has no chance because it requires 60 votes to get around the filibuster, the great news now is that there might be a thawing in the commitment to sustaining the filibuster, at least sustaining it here. And that would be an extraordinary development because if we could relax the filibuster

rule here, then the Senate, too would

pass this enormously important reform legislation. And people ask, well, maybe the Senate will pass only part of it. Maybe they'll cut out parts, especially the parts that I care most about, the public funding component for congressional elections. Although this last election and the changes happening in the states have convinced me

that we also need to be deeply,

deeply concerned about the way in which they parties will entrench their power against the voters. But with public funding, it is encouraging that Joe Manchin is a supporter of public funding. And so I think we have a shot, a real shot. And when I hear John Sarbanes say we have a shot, I hear him believing what he's saying, which is usually the case with Sarbanes. But sometimes you can hear it more clearly than at other times. So stay tuned for that news, too. We have a great new substack which is gathering all the news about HR1 and synthesizing what's essential and what's interesting and what's fun. You can sign up at our substack page, either substack, Equal Citizens US or on the website, our website. You can sign up for our substack, and that will give you all you need to know about the most important democracy reform legislation there is. So what else is there?

That's the real question. This is Larry Lessig.

Thanks for listening. I look forward to the next conversation with some anxiety, no doubt, but with hope that at the end we'll feel

better about where we are.