720: The Moment After This Moment

Ira Glass

Florida is crucial this election. Florida, Florida, Florida. One of the people who thinks about that a lot is Kevin Sheekey. He's the guy whose job it is to spend $100 million that billionaire Mike Bloomberg has devoted to winning Florida for Joe Biden.

Sheekey is not intimidated by that task at all. He's spent lots of Bloomberg's money in the past. He ran Bloomberg's three successful runs for New York mayor and his campaign for president this year.

Ira Glass

So why Florida? Of all the battleground states, why $100 million there? Kevin explained that a big part of it has to do with what's going to happen in other states. He pointed to all the times, in tweets and in speeches, that the president has said that mail-in ballots cannot be trusted.

Ira Glass

Michigan will take at least three days to count their ballots. Pennsylvania is not much different.

Ira Glass

That's because more Democrats are doing mail-in ballots than Republicans are this year. Bloomberg's people have actually run the numbers and calculated that there are states who were throwing out 7% of the ballots at random for not being filled out correctly, which would flip a Biden victory in that state to a Trump victory.

Ira Glass

Florida is a state that Donald Trump pretty much has to win. If he loses Florida, it would be enormously difficult for him to gather enough electoral votes to have re-election. And-- this is key-- Florida is a state that counts mail-in ballots as they arrive. They're counting them right now, already, which means we very well could know the results in Florida on election night. And if Florida goes to Biden, it might settle the race that night.

Ira Glass

Most of that Bloomberg money is going to TV ads and digital ads, dropped into cities all across the state, like a vast air war conducted from 30,000 feet. Kevin Sheekey says Bloomberg's doing daily polling to see what effect this is having, which is actually kind of hard to figure out. All kinds of things push voter opinion around.

But Kevin says the numbers in Florida have moved from a tie between Trump and Biden to a small Biden lead. It's still within the margin of error, but it's a lead, 2 to 4 points, that the Bloomberg people find encouraging.

So that's the view from 30,000 feet. Down on the ground, that all looks a little different because of something so basic. And that's the coronavirus and how the two campaigns have responded to the coronavirus.

As you may know over the summer, the Democratic Party policy was, do not go door to door. Do not hold events in person. Do not hold rallies. Republicans did all that stuff.

And in Florida, even before the virus, they were doing more and registering more voters than the Democrats. In sheer numbers, there are more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans. But since 2016, the Republicans have knocked that lead down. It used to be 7%. Now it's just 3 and 1/2%. A quarter of the voters in the state have no party affiliation.

So the Republicans were going strong before the virus. And after the virus hit the state, they resumed normal operations. But the Democrats were not going out to campaign. It was like one party was out there in the streets, visible. And the other was just not.

One of our producers, Lina Misitzis, has been talking to Florida Democrats about all that. And Lina, how are they feeling?

Lina Misitzis

Not great. Or at least, not the ones that I talked to.

Ira Glass

Uh-huh.

Lina Misitzis

OK, so there's this one voter I found, Marji Hope. She's in a suburb called Weston, which is in one of the bluest counties in Florida. It's Broward County, which is just north of Miami. But she says that the Republican presence is so much more noticeable that her house is somehow surrounded by Trump signs.

Ira Glass

Wow.

Lina Misitzis

And there's almost no Biden signs in her neighborhood.

Ira Glass

Wow.

Lina Misitzis

Yeah, and she sees Trump supporters everywhere.

Lina Misitzis

So four years ago, Hillary Clinton's campaign had an office near Marji's house in Weston. And that's where people would go to pick up signs, to phone bank, to meet up with each other.

Lina Misitzis

Not only is Marji keeping track of what her site isn't doing, she's keeping track of what the other side is doing. She actually signed up for her county-- the Broward County local Republican newsletter.

Ira Glass

Wait, why?

Lina Misitzis

Because every day, when it sends out its daily email that lists all of the campaign events that they have coming up for the Republicans, she likes to keep track of it. And it kind of drives her crazy, just noticing all of these events that they're running.

Lina Misitzis

I also talked to Marji's friend, Julie. She tracks the Republican events, too. And while Marji sounds kind of indignant when she talks about it, Julie sounds almost wistful.

Lina Misitzis

In the absence of their own official meetups, I found a bunch of frustrated Democrats all over Florida, not just in Broward, who took matters into their own hands.

Ira Glass

What are they doing?

Lina Misitzis

OK, there's a woman in Oviedo, which is a small red town. And she's been hosting these very small rallies on street corners every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Ira Glass

Oh, wow.

Lina Misitzis

Another example is a grandmother in Tallahassee who told me that she printed out a bunch of Florida voter registration forms. And she was handing them out to young-seeming people in the Walmart parking lot.

Ira Glass

Now I've read that the Biden campaign did finally start going door to door in Florida and in other states, too, this fall.

Lina Misitzis

Yes, that happened two weeks after I started talking to Marji. And she went out with them. But for her, it wasn't enough.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our show, we have stories of people fretting, worried about what is going to happen next, and all that is still unknown. The future is barreling towards them. They're going to find out soon enough, but not quite yet. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And let's get to it. Act 1, the School of Hard Knocks.

So Lina looked into whether the fears that she heard from Florida's Democrats are justified. Are their leaders dropping the ball? Did the party pull back too far with the coronavirus precautions? She put together this story.

Lina Misitzis

I think Democrats have been doing, instead of door knocking, phone calling. And gone is the camaraderie of organizing, everyone breathing in the same air in some makeshift, fluorescent-lit campaign center. This volunteering is done from home. And here's what it looks like.

Maria is a phone banking volunteer. She's 33, living in Southeast Florida with her husband and her three-year-old son.

Lina Misitzis

She works in consulting. And after work, she has 45 minutes to phone bank before her kid gets home.

Lina Misitzis

Maria was born in Colombia, moved here when she was 16 with her parents. She's a citizen now, and not a fan of the president.

Lina Misitzis

Maria did door knocking in 2016, and she's doing phone banking now. I wanted her to compare them for me. And so I listened in while she phone banked. In 45 minutes, she dialed 28 phone numbers.

Lina Misitzis

Nine of those 28 phone calls went to voicemail, which the Democrats mostly don't think it's worth it to leave messages after the beep. One phone call, a toddler picked up.

Lina Misitzis

The kiddo seemed to put the phone down and walk away.

Lina Misitzis

Some grownups didn't want to get into it either.

Lina Misitzis

Of course, not everyone Maria spoke to favored her side.

Lina Misitzis

There were three calls like that.

Lina Misitzis

The goal of these calls, it's not to persuade anyone. It's just to get Biden voters to vote. And over a third of them, 11 people, were Biden supporters. Six of them said that they'd already mailed in their ballots. And five of them hadn't.

Lina Misitzis

Maria says that that one call, it made it feel worth her time that day.

Lina Misitzis

So 45 minutes, one actual vote for her team, for her state. Though, also, four other Biden voters that she nudged towards mailing in their ballots.

And how do these phone calls compare to door knocking? Maria says in 2016, in terms of how many people she'd made direct contact with in a shift, door knocking and phone banking are about the same. But going door to door takes way more time.

Lina Misitzis

There's been actual research on this, which shows that door knocking and phone banking are pretty close in terms of their effectiveness, with a slight edge towards door knocking, though calling people is faster.

So the question really is, how many phone calls are Democrats making for Biden in Florida, compared to doors knocked on in the past? I called around for numbers. The closest I got was from the independent organization that coordinates a lot of the get-out-the-vote among Democrats in Florida. They're called America Votes.

They say when you count phone banking and door knocking and everything else that they do to reach voters, they've doubled the number of people they've had conversations with in Florida. It's 2 million this year versus 1 million or fewer in previous elections.

But that number doesn't include the Democratic Party's own get-out-the-vote effort, which is an important part of the picture. Party officials would not give me outreach numbers for this year or previous elections.

What they did do, instead, is say that everything is on track. All of the Florida Democratic officials I talked to agreed on that. Here's Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She's Marji's congresswoman, and she used to chair the National Democratic Party.

Lina Misitzis

It's true that more Democrats than Republicans have mailed in their ballots. But that's kind of what you'd expect. COVID reactions have fallen along party lines, and way more Democrats asked for mail-in ballots than Republicans did.

Of course, things could get completely reshuffled on Monday. That's when early in-person voting starts in Florida. Republicans could start showing up in droves.

I honestly think that there's nothing Debbie Wasserman Schultz or other party leaders could say that would reassure Marji or Julie or any of the nervous Democrats I talked to. Jeff Green, who also lives in Broward, he remembers, two years ago, how confidently they all headed into the governor's race. It was the race that was supposed to show that a Democrat could win statewide office in Florida.

Lina Misitzis

Looming even bigger, of course, is Hillary Clinton. Every Democrat I talked to invoked Hillary Clinton.

Lina Misitzis

Fact is, most big elections in Florida in the last 10 years have been decided by about 1.1% of the vote. Biden's ahead right now in the polls, but not by much. And either candidate could win. So they're not wrong to be worried.

Ira Glass

Lina Misitzis is one of the producers of our show.

Coming up, fears of toys that come on without anybody touching them and other worries that have nothing at all to do with electoral politics, I promise. That is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Moment After This Moment. We have stories today of people who are worrying about a future that is on its way. We are now at Act 2 of our program. Act 2, Words Versus Fear.

So when you're scared about things that might happen, the most effective thing to do, of course, is to jump into action and see that things go your way, right? To try to make things happen so that the worst does not occur. But the truth is, that doesn't always do the job, right? It doesn't always get rid of your fears. So then what do you do?

Well, years ago, we did a story about somebody who came up with this strategy. There were things that this guy was afraid of, things that put him on edge. And one day, he just decided to write them down, just to get them out of his system. And so he started writing, numbering every fear, one after another. Quickly, it got to 10 fears, and then 20, and then 30 and 40 and 50, until he had 138 of them on paper.

The man's name is Michael Bernard Loggins. He was in his 50s at the time he did this. He's developmentally disabled. He was living in San Francisco-- still does. And the arts program for adults where he did this, a place called Creativity Explored, published this writing as a little, handwritten, xeroxed zine called Fears of Your Life.

And then a few years later, Michael found out there were more fears to tame by turning them into words, and he put out a part 2, a sequel, titled Fears of Your Life, a Whole Brand New One. This one listed 45 fears.

Michael gave us permission to excerpt the two books. And they're just this remarkable, wide-ranging, encyclopedic, Talmudic, memorable tour of human fears. And none of them have to do with politics. And they seem worth going back to today. Actor Tom Wright is our reader.

Ira Glass

Excerpts from Michael Bernard Loggins' two xeroxed zines, Fears of Your Life, Parts 1 and 2 read for us by actor Tom Wright. To get your own copy of these amazing books or to find out more about the arts program where they were made, you can visit the website of Creativity Explored. That's creativityexplored.org.

[MUSIC - "HEAVY THINGS" BY BRETT NEWSKI]

Ira Glass

Act 3, The Best Laid Plans. So today's program is about people worrying about the future. And we thought for a change of pace, we would do this next story about people who are not worried enough about it.

This is another story from our archive. It is a particular favorite. It is about this couple and the future they kind of cheerfully threw themselves towards. And after that, everything that happens to him, it's like a hand grenade they bring into their own home, pull the pin, and then wait to see what is next. And one important thing about all of this is, is that when they did this, the kind of couple they were was a really great couple.

Ira Glass

Kurt Braunohler met his girlfriend on the third day of college. And in all of the ways that we think of what makes for a good relationship, I think that they were doing better than you or me or most people. They had a lot of fun together. They could talk about anything. They didn't really fight. Happy sex life.

Ira Glass

I talked to the girlfriend who did not want to come on the radio. And she said basically she'd only had two boyfriends in her life-- her high school boyfriend, who was not a good boyfriend at all, and Kurt, who was great.

But she met Kurt, she said, when she was 17. She was 30 when this happened. And she said that she felt like maybe she missed out on something in her 20s, experiences that other people had. And she didn't want to regret that.

A warning-- I should say, before we go any further in this story, we're going to acknowledge the existence of sex between adults. Nothing explicit. Anyway, so they sat on the couch, and they talked this through.

Ira Glass

That's true. She did feel that way. I asked her. So before they started the Rumspringa, they took a last romantic trip together to New Orleans over New Year's. And they had a great time. And then on January 3, after they both cried a bit, Kurt moved out for a month.

So suddenly single, 31, time clock ticking, where do you start, right? Well, Kurt called this woman that he knew just a little bit and had a date on the very first or second night. He can't remember which it was.

And at dinner, he told her the entire situation. He laid the whole thing out that he was seeing somebody. They were taking this break to sleep around. And this was a rule that he made for himself, that he was always going to be honest with any woman that he met during this month. He was going to be honest upfront.

Ira Glass

Kurt was staying on a futon on a friend's living room floor for the month in this apartment where there was no door between the living room and the bedroom where his friend was sleeping. And he brought this woman back on the first date, and they made out a little bit. And then they set another date.

Ira Glass

A day or two after that, he picks up a woman at a bar, something he had never done before in his life, and he goes home with her. And from there, he's off and running. But remember, he has the emotional tools of a 17-year-old.

Ira Glass

Kurt says it was just a month of incredibly intense feelings. He'd feel this crazy elation, or he would find himself walking down the street weeping. The girlfriend told me that she, meanwhile, was having escapades of her own. She'd be out all night, drinking and dancing, going to exclusive clubs with Mexican high rollers, doing crazy things with European tourists. It was just what she wanted, actually.

And both of them told me that the weirdest thing about that time was that the person that they wanted to talk to most about what was going on and share it with was each other. But of course, they weren't speaking.

Kurt says that one of the most amazing things to him that was kind of a revelation during that time was something-- I've never actually heard anybody talk about it aloud, but I totally related to this-- was how quickly he would find himself in the home of a complete stranger.

Ira Glass

So after a month, Kurt and his girlfriend get together and talk. And they agree that a month was not enough for this. They both said it was just obvious the experiment hadn't run its course. They both wanted more time. So they decided on a second month, which then becomes the third month.

And for Kurt, as time went on, it got harder and harder to stick with the rule that they had made of not getting into any relationships. He was just muddling about how to figure out how to do that. In his head, he would think, like, when is something actually a relationship?

Ira Glass

It's difficult because he was giving women two opposite messages at the same time. He would tell them that he was just taking a month's break from his real relationship, and this isn't serious. But then he didn't hold back any of his feelings.

Ira Glass

So it was hard to stop himself while it was going on. And when we talked about it, Kurt's best explanation for that was--

Ira Glass

I asked Kurt's girlfriend if all this happened to her during the Rumspringa, too, if it was hard just to have sex without emotion entering into it at all. And she said, absolutely not. Quote, "You mean the dudes that I meet at bars or parties, whatever? Those people?" She said, I didn't tell anyone anything about my background or the situation.

And I asked her, wait, so you wouldn't explain, I'm on a break from a relationship? She said no, because it sounds crazy. I told her that Kurt would reveal all of that, which she knew. And she said, yeah, Kurt's way too open. But, quote, "That openness probably just made him more appealing to the ladies."

By the end of three months, Kurt started to fall for this woman that he met in Australia-- and this time, really, actually fell for her in a real way. And this made him, of course, feel differently about his relationship with his girlfriend.

So he flew back to the States, stayed at their old apartment, and because this is the most comfortable relationship that has ever existed between two people, of course, they dealt with it all right away, very straightforward.

Ira Glass

His old girlfriend said something similar. She said she'd probably wanted out of the relationship before the Rumspringa, but she was too scared to admit it to herself. The Rumspringa gave them a way to break up.

Kurt says he would not want to do a Rumspringa again, but he came out of this experience believing that it is important to force things to a decision with someone, and that it's healthy for any relationship to be evaluated now and then.

Ira Glass

But Kurt and his girlfriend feel like the Rumspringa got them where they needed to go as a couple, even if that place was different than they intended when they began the whole thing. Sometimes what you need to do next as a couple, you can't even tell what it should be. And the best you can do is hold your breath, make a guess, and jump.

Well, these days, Kurt Braunohler is the host of a podcast called Bananas, and he virtually hosts the long-running variety show with Kristen Schaal, Hot Tub with Kurt and Kristen, Mondays on Twitch. So that story is a few years old. And I could probably say a lot about the things that Kurt and I talk about at the end, but I will leave it at this-- these days, Kurt is married, and I'm not.

Ira Glass

Act 4, POTUS Operandi. OK, I'll say it. I believe that children are our future. And I believe that worries for our children and their future are probably the most common worries out there. Humanity's number one worry category, top of the charts, our survey says can't be beat, generation after generation.

But there's a whole other class of thoughts about our kids' futures that are less-- I don't know. They're not worry, exactly. They're more just like curiosity. 10 years ago, one of our producers back then, Jonathan Menjivar, talked about both those feelings, the curiosity and the worry, on our show.

Jonathan Menjivar

POTUS will have dark wavy hair. Her eyes will be brown, unless they're green, or maybe hazel. She will have full lips. She will not be tall, which is a nice way of saying that she might be short.

Because of this fact, POTUS will not like going to concerts because, like my wife Hillary, she'll only be able to see the backs of other people's heads and that spot on a person's back between their shoulder blades. Someday when she touches that spot on a person she loves, it will feel oddly familiar and comforting. Because all her life, while standing in line at the swings or waiting for a cashier to ring up her milk, she will have looked at that spot on other people.

Because she will be our daughter, POTUS will like chocolate ice cream and enjoy puns. She will need glasses by third grade.

POTUS, I should explain, is what Hillary and I have taken to calling the little girl Hillary will give birth to in 2010. Calling our kid "it" only felt right for about a week or two. So we brainstormed baby code names one night in bed.

Hillary thought the name should be something like that opening scene in the West Wing pilot, the one where Rob Lowe walks out of the shower, and a woman in underwear and a men's dress shirt reads from his pager, "POTUS in a bicycle accident." Hillary said our code name should pop like that. But we couldn't think of anything as cool as POTUS, so we just stole it.

I worried that while POTUS was still nothing more than cells splitting into other cells that we might be setting unachievable expectations by naming her the acronym the Secret Service used to refer to the President of the United States. When people find out you're having a baby, they predict all kinds of things about the child you'll have. But I wanted to let POTUS tell us who she was, so I tried to cling mostly to the facts.

20 weeks into Hillary's pregnancy, we went in for an ultrasound. Our ultrasound technician looked like Kate from Jon & Kate Plus 8 in scrubs. She had that crazy hairdo and everything. We asked if she could tell the gender of the baby. And she said, it's a girl. She said it with the same level of enthusiasm I used to tell Hillary that we got a gas bill in the mail.

Knowing that POTUS was a girl meant that now there was a shape to the mystery. The ultrasound gave us the lines of a coloring book, and we couldn't help but fill them in. Hillary remembered all the stuff about dominant and recessive genes that I slept through in my high school biology class.

And we thought about our friend Michelle, a biologist who spends her days working with fruit fly genes. I don't really understand what it is she does exactly, except that it has something to do with diabetes. And this summer, when I was having a fruit fly infestation, she didn't have any suggestions for how I could capture or kill them.

I thought maybe Michelle could help us figure out what POTUS might look like. She said she'd do her best, but that this stuff was more complicated in humans than what I was imagining. She also told me that there was a great paper published in Science recently about the genetics of dog coats, and that if we were breeding a dog instead of a little girl, she could be really helpful.

So Michelle came over to our house, and in exchange for lasagna and a beer, she sat with me and drew Punnett squares, those little squares divided into four smaller squares that are supposed to help you figure out what traits win over others. Michelle was willing to commit to a few things, like the fact that POTUS will likely have dark hair.

But really, she said, even if she was able to study me and Hillary in a lab, she couldn't tell us with any certainty what our baby will look like. Because unlike dogs, humans haven't been bred for certain traits, so there's really no way of knowing what green eyes may be hiding in my genes.

Mostly, she said, the whole dominant/recessive thing could help us figure out dopey stuff. Like, for instance, now we know that POTUS will have unattached earlobes and be able to impress her friends with her ability to roll her tongue like a taco.

A few months ago, not long after we found out that POTUS was a girl, I was riding my bike home from work. The traffic was heavy, so I was going pretty slow. I looked to my right and noticed a girl on the sidewalk looking at me, staring, really. She looked like she was in her early 20s, and she had her auburn hair tied in a thick braid that swung over her right shoulder.

I can't remember if she was wearing glasses, but I know she was wearing a dress and holding a petition clipboard in her right hand. If skin was made of Play-Doh, hers is what you would get if you forever mixed the Hillary color with the Jonathan one. I couldn't tell you if it was that or the way she looked at me intently that's to blame, but I stared back. And for a split second, I thought she might be POTUS all grown up.

I wanted to ask her so much, how was school? You live around here? What do you like more, seeing fireflies for the first time in the summer or the first fat snowflakes of winter? Really, though, every question was some variation on the one big question I'll try my whole life to make POTUS answer yes to-- are you happy? It's also, I realize, a question I can't predict the answer to.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Menjivar. These days, he's making shows at Pineapple Street Studios. His daughter Sasha is now 10 years old in 5th grade, really into playing the drums, and running for school treasurer.

[MUSIC - "EVERYTHING RIGHT IS WRONG AGAIN," BY THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Bim Adewunmi and me. The people who put together today's show include Elna Baker, Dana Chivvis, Aviva DeKornfeld, Noor Gill, Chana Jaffe-Walt, Seth Lind, Lina Misitzis, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor, Sara Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Sahil Mehrotra, Dr. Daniel A. Smith, Casey Morell, and Steve Schale. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's videos and all kinds of other stuff there. thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. His new enemy? February. He'll tell you himself, very shifty month. It's supposed to be 28 days long. You never know it's going to stick around an extra day and refuse the peaceful transfer of power into March.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "EVERYTHING RIGHT IS WRONG AGAIN," BY THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS]