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Jeff Timmer 0:05
Twitter is a weird and wild place we’re talking to strangers can be as dangerous as it is in the real world. But I’m grateful to have connected via Twitter with Ben Brett Jordan, and let me start that over. But I’m grateful to have connected via Twitter with Ben Brett Jordy and Midas touch nearly a year ago when they were still civilians and in their political infancy. Welcome, my friends. Thanks for joining us today.
Brett Meiselas 1:09
Thanks for having us on.
Ben Meiselas 1:10
Thanks so much. Great to be here.
Jeff Timmer 1:12
Well, let me ask the question because there’s going to be people listening to this that are familiar with what you’ve done and your your viral sensation and some of the work what got you interested in doing this leaving like real world civilian jobs and saying, we want to go into this world and make a splash what started all this?
Ben Meiselas 1:33
Donald Trump being a horrible human being who tried to destroy our country was basically the start of it. And so we’re we don’t have a political background. But we all you know, did our own things after, you know, leaving leaving home in Long Island, New York, where we all grew up, I became a civil rights lawyer went to Georgetown Law, became a partner at a law firm, Brett became a two time Emmy Award winning digital editor, he worked at the Ellen Show and ran their social media. Jordy became a award winning marketing executive in New York, we always wanted to work together. Obviously, we could never have predicted the devastation that was caused by the pandemic, but specifically the Pandemic X, the worst person imaginable to be there during a crisis like that. And, you know, I think we took for granted our democracy, even when Trump was was in power for those first two years. And I use terms like a power because he ran it like a dictator, but seeing it at home in our living rooms, those press conferences every day, we really couldn’t take it anymore. It got to the point where we had to stop going off of our text thread because it was just so dark and depressing. And we’re like, let’s just do something. So we started off doing blog style news, but then quickly found our stride with a bit with a video. Our first one was, are you better off which used Reagan’s Are you better off and compared it to, you know, the current Zeitgeist and use that reframing here. And that took off, we did another video called the snake. That did really good. And we just started Googling, how do we kind of professionalize this and make this something other than just a hobby. And we decided that creating a political action committee, because we were influencing an election, was the most appropriate regulatory from a regulatory perspective, and from a transparency perspective, the way to go. And then we just started doing video after video, and they all would get millions of views, we now have over a billion views over 500 videos. And, you know, did everything from videos to canvassing efforts to billboards to digital billboards to radio campaigns, 5 million text messages, I can list about 16 to 17 dozen programs that we run and have Meidas University chapters, university chapters and high school chapters across the country. And so that’s how it started. And that’s how that’s where we are now.
Brett Meiselas 4:13
It’s like the Twitter meme, how it started how it’s going.
Mark Brewer 4:17
Did you ever did you ever imagine when you started this that, you know, here you are. A billion impressions later, several million dollars raised, you know, the videos and everything that’s happening, how you branched out, can all be started with a lot of videos and Twitter and everything else like that. But then you were actually on the ground in Georgia. Right? You’re doing canvassing and everything. Yeah, never imagined that you would get to this point?
Brett Meiselas 4:41
We had very audacious goals from the beginning of what we thought this could be. And we always shot super high, you know, thinking that well, if we didn’t hit that we’d hit somewhere near it or somewhere in between. But you know, we never could have imagined the growth happening this quickly and to be where we are now. To be honest. When we started speaking once Are you better off, took off, we thought that was going to be like the thing that carried us through, you know, and was going to be this big deal. And we’re like, oh man, we did merge around this. And, you know, it’d be the coolest thing on the planet is if we had, are you better off billboards and just like a couple of swing states, if we could just get one billboard up in a couple swing states, like this would be the coolest thing ever. Like what a huge success. And now looking back, it’s like, you know, we have billboards in, in many states, you know, multiple different kinds of billboards, all different things, billboards that echoed our TV campaigns and our mailing campaigns and our grassroots campaigns on the ground, we just were able to ultimately do so much because there was a void that we ended up filling out there, especially coming from our side of being lifelong Democrats. There’s a, a messaging issue, frequently in the past from the Democratic side, and I think we helped fill that void. And then I think that’s why people kind of took to our movement, and especially as being these political outsiders who had never done this before, and people who are just really pissed off at what was going on to be frank.
Mark Brewer 5:41
That’s a great point, Brett, because you know, traditionally I’m … look, I was party chair in Michigan for 18 years been politics all my life. Traditionally, somebody would set up a super PAC and say, Oh, we gotta hire some consultants, we got to do some polling, to figure out our message. It doesn’t sound like you guys ever did that. No, in fact, was the key.
Brett Meiselas 6:22
We had we, you know, we approached a lot of people initially, just for advice, like, what is the best framework to grow Meidas Touch to be as successful as possible. And there were so many people who’ve been in the business along the way that tried, they had good intentions, but they tried everything they could to dissuade us from creating a political action committee. And they were more like, you know, what, why don’t you make videos for my organization? You know, why don’t you make videos for this organization? It’s gonna take you two to three election cycles before anybody even knows who you are, or your name, if you’re lucky, you know, and so we got so much of that coming at us. And we just constantly said, No, no, no, we had some people say, you know, what, like, these videos are good, but some of them are a little too hard hitting maybe if you tested them and did X, Y, and Z. And we were like, nope, no, you know, and but we took, we took good advice along the way, but we had plenty of bad advice coming at us also, that we had to recognize.
Ben Meiselas 7:17
The problem if you’ve tested though, with Trump, is the next scandal happens the next day. And if he’s not called for the one, by the time you would test, you’d be a week out or seven days out. And he would do five horrible things. So our whole strategy was two hours after he would do the thing we would get out of right away and boom, we would do the rapid response, which was Brett adding those Daytime Emmy Award winning skills where you really cut the video right away, too, because it goes to air in two hours. And that was the style that we deployed here, which I don’t think really hadn’t been done. So rapid response like that.
Jordan Meiselas 7:55
Yeah, it was really that rapid response style that we sort of built the Meidas Touch. Right. You brought back a really funny point that I remember when we were taking an early meeting like in the beginning stages, we’d a few people would be like my Meidas Touch, like I don’t get that you guys need to change that name. If you ever want to be anything or do anything,
Brett Meiselas 8:09
You should be the I hate Trump Pac 2021. You know, that was like all the suggestions we got no,
Jordan Meiselas 8:14
but to Brett’s point, though, we did take good advice along the way. And I think that was a huge impact played a huge role in our growth as well.
Mark Brewer 8:22
I think you put them to work, because if I see there’s a trademark, you’ve trademarked that now. Right?
Brett Meiselas 8:28
They put me to work, we need a whole law firm at this point to deal with everyone who’s threatened to sue Meidas Touch. And so I do Meidas Touch for free. And I’ve been one of the cofounders do all the work for free. But I don’t know. And second thought I kind of like, I didn’t think we were going to be you know, when you’re trying to take down a dictator, there’s going to be a lot of hate that that comes your way.
Jeff Timmer 8:54
Yeah, watching last year, because really, it’s been just over a year since you launched this. And, you know, most people when the pandemic started and locks that lock downs happen, you know, they started to do Okay, okay, me, I haven’t had a haircut and I got fat. And, you know, you guys would have this burgeoning media empire, you know, you seem to have been a little more productive than a lot of people were during the, during the pandemic, but you know, I get where, where you’re coming from and, and you talk to somebody like me, who’s been in politics for decades, or Mark, you know, a year ago, we probably would have been of the, you know, you can’t do this advice, just because, you know, this isn’t the way to do it. But one of the things I’ve really learned, you know, an old dog learning new tricks is if you’re if you’re willing to be a disrupter, you can get some things done and you know, what we were doing at Lincoln Project is in a lot of ways what what you guys were doing, although, you know, different profiles and backgrounds we came from the Republican campaign world, but just said I guess we just do it all to the wind and you know, started this We know who’s gonna get pissed off about this good, let’s do it again. You know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t trying to keep people happy. He wasn’t trying, he was trying to, you know, achieve something bigger than than ourselves and in doing what we could in our lane, and that was to, like you say, take down a dictator prevent authoritarianism. And it’s not hyperbole to say that.
Brett Meiselas 10:21
No, and I think that’s one of the reasons why, you know, Lincoln connected is one of the same reasons why might is connected in that way. It’s that what we were talking about earlier, with typical Democratic messaging, not not being hard hitting like that, and not really going for the jugular. And that’s what Lincoln filled in. And I would say, you guys are kind of the outsiders on the inside, we’re like the outsiders on the outside. And, and I feel like, you know that that’s why both these things take off. And I remember early on, when we released some of these videos and on Twitter, you know, you’d see Huffington Post or whomever they would write stuff like Lincoln project and Meidas Touch released new ads. And I’d be like, crazy, is it that there’s that they’re put our name next to these people have been in politics, their whole lives, all of a sudden Meidas Touch, and like in project, like, that’s insane What is going on?
Jeff Timmer 11:06
I mean, it was something to watch. And, you know, I think nobody can claim to you know, we did it. It was a collective effort. Everybody played a part and had everybody not done, what they did, look how close this election was, when it should never have been, but it took everybody lifting and doing their part, it took the institutional Democrats and the organizations on the left, it took building a broad coalition that included people on the right like John Kasich sick and Christine Todd Whitman, and, you know, people like us who were just fed up with the Republican Party, and were willing to be a lot more bold than, you know, some of those politicians. But it also took people stepping up who didn’t have the ties in the political world, who looked around them and said, We don’t want to live in this country, if it’s gonna be like this. And you guys inspired, you know, so many young people, you know, you certainly had a progressive lane. But you you’re I think your fans kind of transcended the, the political spectrum. And I saw a lot of people who, who I came to know and know their backgrounds, just from Twitter, you know, suburban moms who’ve been Republicans for a long time, who were suddenly have, you know, Meidas in their Twitter handle, and how cool
Brett Meiselas 12:21
is that, by the way?
Jeff Timmer 12:24
Well, I mean, you have a lot of fans here in my household, but that’s because I have, I have a lot of kids and my wife loves you guys. So but I know we’re not alone. It’s been something much.
Jordan Meiselas 12:39
Jen, I have to say, before we go any further, you and your wife are my favorite Twitter followers, like the the absolute best.
Jeff Timmer 12:46
I just funny how that came to be for like years, she would, you know, like, hate, you’re spending too much time on Twitter, you know, i need money. You can’t beat them, join them, and she
Jordan Meiselas 12:59
How how table’s turned. That’s a great approach.
Jeff Timmer 13:04
So now our conversation is boiled down to have you seen what I tweeted lately? Will you retweet me?
Mark Brewer 13:15
But you know, Jeff’s absolutely right. You know, I’ve been doing Michigan politics since the late 70s. And right after Trump got elected, I’d be going to party meetings, extraordinary turnout, and never saw crowds like that before. And it continued the whole four years and lots of lots of new faces, of all ages, all backgrounds. And it was, you know, we had indivisible form up, the party grew dramatically in terms of membership. It was really quite amazing to watch all motivated the same way you guys are motivated by watching this guy destroy our country. Yeah.
Brett Meiselas 13:49
Is this the broad coalition that you’re speaking about? I mean, I think if you look at this election by the Electoral College, it wasn’t won by the biggest margins electorally speaking, you know, there’s, it’s in the, I think, the 10s of 1000s of votes between the main swing states. And so I think if you remove a Lincoln project, if you remove a Meidas Touch, if you remove a Stacey Abrams, if you remove, you know, the the Republicans who voted for Biden, if you remove the progressives who joined, you know, this, remove any one of those, and you’re in trouble. And that’s why I think everybody played such a pivotal role, and nobody could, on their own, take credit and say, Yeah, I did that. That was us. But I think everybody played an essential part. And I think a you know, the respect has to be spread out amongst all these groups who came together at an existential time for our country and stood up for democracy.
Ben Meiselas 14:40
And here’s the thing people were people are suffering, people have problems, and they need help. And Trump was able to reach them with lies and with hate, and you know, our approach was we can we have to be cheerleaders for democracy too, and we have to be We have to really champion pro democracy, which I just think both parties and and particularly the Democrats just took it for granted that because if you structure policies in a way that you think are going to be helpful to people, you don’t actually talk to them. And you don’t talk to them how they talk to people, you know, and if you just talk to them with your thumb up like this and say that you’re not actually getting the message. They’re not listening. They’re tuning you out. And so our whole brand of you know, people have families, they have brothers who have brother banter, you know, and we hope that that could kind of open you up to seeing that this is, this is real, and we have emotions. And then when we have the, you know, in our living room, we can start saying, All right now that QAnon stuff is kind of crazy, don’t you better infrastructure, you know, or that Melania and Donald and Ivanka thing, like come on out some wacky stuff for Jewish space lasers? Come on. Don’t wait, don’t we want more of that?
Jeff Timmer 16:03
I mean, I hope that those are real.
Jordan Meiselas 16:06
Yeah, I’m hiding in the closet in here. And don’t tell anybody.
Mark Brewer 16:09
And you’re absolutely right. Democrats were infamous for this. We have big platforms write long policy papers that nobody reads. That doesn’t appeal to anybody. Because we don’t talk about values, which I think is where you guys connected with folks, the values and no talking to folks in everyday language. And that’s why
Ben Meiselas 16:27
it was important that people got to know who we are. And we really want to open up our, you know, be very vulnerable and show people about our families, about our relationships, you know, with each other and outside of Meidas Touch, because that emotional connection in politics is something that was exploited by Trump to lie to meatball and so bringing them in and then having these conversations was probably the most important decision we made was, in addition to becoming a political action committee, though, was alright, we need to be front and center, we know there’s going to be hate and death threats and criticism, and we’re not going to be as private as we used to be. But if we don’t stand in front and say, This is who we are, then no one’s gonna really relate to it and get it.
Jordan Meiselas 17:21
And when we first started mightest, we all kind of hid behind the account for a little bit. It was like that spider man meme when someone asked, Hey, who’s running Midas touch? I know, it’s like you and your brothers. But like who’s doing that? We’d all sort of point at each other Oh, brow that spreads thing all night. Let’s bend thing. I’m not sure anything. This was when we were still at when we were still a blog, and we were still writing
And then it was that shift? And we’re like, Okay, if we want to make a real impact, just like Ben was saying, we have to open up and let people see who we are.
Jeff Timmer 17:47
And well, I think I mean, it was it was late into, you know, communicating behind the scenes. I remember dming back and forth, you know, with you on the on the Midas account. Brett and I thought it was you but I said, Okay, who exactly am I talking with? You know, I mean, this is probably August, you know, we’ve been talking for months. I don’t even know which one of you I’m talking to. So yeah, I experienced that myself.
Jordan Meiselas 18:10
Yeah, and we were talking about this before the show, but it’s funny how many people I’ve met and how many people we’ve met over this past year in this process probably have met more people over Twitter in the past 12 months than I have in the past 12 years. And oddly enough, have never seen most of them face to face, zoom or otherwise and definitely have not seen anybody, person to person. And it’s just so funny how this pandemic has brought me closer to something is closer to so many people. But at the same times, we still have not actually met so many people.
Jeff Timmer 18:41
I figured out that a lot of people I’ve been friends and family with my entire life, you know who represented my Facebook, I really don’t want a lot to do with those people.
Jordan Meiselas 18:51
ever go on Facebook
Jeff Timmer 18:53
was in my judgment over my life. So …
Brett Meiselas 18:56
One thing Trump did do was expose, expose them all. So you now know who all those people? That’s for sure.
Mark Brewer 20:00
So you know, you guys have built this great community, you know, in a wide variety of ways online and otherwise, donors there there was like that. Trump has gone, at least for the moment, Trumpism is still with us, and still a real serious problem. So what’s next? Now I’ve seen you, you’ve done material on Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and so forth, with with the boogeyman gone, at least for the moment, what what do you do with this great thing that you’ve created?
Ben Meiselas 21:00
We want to make the GQP (and that’s what we call it) a marginalized fringe party, we know we can’t fully eradicate it in its entirety. But that Marjorie Taylor Green strain, that Boebert strain, you know, that needs to be, you know, that needs to be marginalized. And we need to show that that can’t be the face of a major American political party. And if that means the party just doesn’t exist anymore, so be it. But we need to keep exposing that. The reality is, is that that’s what the parties become when you have what what’s her name? Who’s the head of the GOP? Cobra Corona or Rona? Yeah, yeah, you know, and her cowtowing to Trump saying, Trump’s the leader, this is just embarrassing. And part of what we’re also doing is just being like, these are just embarrassing, despite you, they’re fascist, and they’re hateful, but they’re just weird, embarrassing, you know, you know, reject people who, who shouldn’t be running anything, you know, yet alone a government. And if you hang with them, we’re just going to assume that you’re that you’re that crazy. And so all of our videos, that kind of messaging now is, is making those connections and trying to further marginalize that group of people. And again, I don’t think we can eradicate it. But that’s what we’re doing now. And obviously, as things gear backup for 2022 2024, we have a great system in place now. We can turn the machinery on and start doing videos, you know, every day if we want to our podcast platform has become a huge podcast platform. But what we’re really focusing on too, as things open up, are building real communities now, that can be activated. And that’s what we want to do in advance of 2022. So the university chapters, the high school chapters, and we’ve even been talking about having regional and local chapters, you know, as well of just people who meet up, maybe even if it’s just once a month, at a restaurant, and just do something good for the community. Because all of those people at a very local level can be activated. That’s how we sent in four days, 5 million text messages was because the people who are supportive of Midas touch, they didn’t do anything that day, but send text messages. And that’s just real authentic connections with people.
Mark Brewer 23:37
There’s certainly gonna be a lot of work to do and Jeff and I see this all the time there’s so many Trump wannabes not just at the state level here in Michigan, I’m sure it’s true elsewhere in the country, but down to the local level. People are emulating him, they’re modeling themselves on him because they think that’s the key to political success. So you’re gonna have your hands full as well the rest of us kind of deal with that for the next several years.
Jeff Timmer 23:59
I’m afraid all the wannabes are even dumber and crazier and meaner than he is. They’re, they they’re, they’re You’re right. They’re so damn weird. I mean that authoritarianism sounds like something we should be afraid of. But when you see these authoritarians, they’re just kooks.
Brett Meiselas 24:19
They will totally wacky and
Jeff Timmer 24:20
You underestimate how dangerous they are. But I look at them say how do they do that? Why does anybody listen to what they say?
Brett Meiselas 24:26
Wayne LaPierre from you know from the NRA. It’s like, you know, it’s like you got two yachts in the Bahamas. And you know, it’s all this like it’s all this like Ponzi scheming, fraudulent, weird stuff. You know, they’re either I won’t even go I was gonna say they’re either like hiding gates, things are hiding financial fraud schemes, or whatever, but there’s something there that they’re compensating for, to act this crazy publicly because it’s all projection and them behind the scenes having real mental issues, mental health issues.
Jeff Timmer 25:06
And you know, when you have some visibility and some success, there’s there’s kind of the institutional actors that have jealousy, who’s who’s, I guess, influence, you might be threatening, people who feel insecure. You know, they look at the success, you know, people who’ve been in this their whole lives, I think we’ve had some of these conversations online and on the phone and whatnot, where the Lincoln project and you, I think, experience some of the same kind of awesome oppo-dumps going into the end of the press saying, you know, you might want to look at this, look into their spending, look at what’s going on. And I know that, you know, I know that you guys experienced that that recent piece in Rolling Stone, but I thought the, what Rolling Stone was thought was a hit job and are going to be just a kind of a drive-by of you guys. You got out in front, jumped on the story took some of the good amount of the wind out of the sails by kind of again, throw all caution to the wind, you know, you get out there and tell your story first, make them pay for it, there was that hashtag boycott Rolling Stone or whatever it was going on. You had like, you know, a good share of the resistance left Twitter, you know, jump into your defense before anybody had read a damn thing. So it was pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good. Communication. No, it was the same way. If you’re advising and working in, in communications shop at a company, this is what you would advise them to get out and get, you know, get your spin on the story, take your lumps, tell the truth. You did all that. But you made them. You took a pound of flesh from them as they were trying to exact, you know, one from you.
Jordan Meiselas 26:52
Let Ben I’ll let Ben tell the story cuz he’s, he’s really good at kind of recounting what happened there. But I will say if we were in any way worried about certain, you know, truths coming out, that would be bad for us, it would be the world’s dumbest strategy on the planet, to have to make such a stink about this article, and to draw so much attention to it. But because we knew that it was just a straight up hatchet job, and that they were trying to make issues out of either just non issues, or literally inventing things, just making things up that didn’t exist. And some of the things are really on the level of border on QAnon insanity, conspiracy theories that they were making up with us, but because we just knew how silly it was, that’s why we decided to get out in front of it, and answered all the questions publicly before they would write the piece. And I’ll let Ben tell the rest of it.
Ben Meiselas 27:47
Growing up, you know, you think Rolling Stones like one day, that’d be a dream to be in that to be in Rolling Stones 30 years ago, when I when I’m growing up, and little do I know that it’s actually like $200 million is invested into the parent company by the government of Saudi Arabia, that it’s actually not the Rolling Stone that we that we thought it was ever gonna be. But I mean, at the end of the day, I don’t know if if they’re not even against the concept of money, some people getting paid so much is like the concept of currency in general, because to run an operation, you have to, like genuinely pay things to do things, you have to make legitimate expenditures for things to happen. And like, here’s an organization that I took the personal affront to it, because I literally made $0 up and work the book and pretty much worked at it full time. You know, specifically because I wanted to sacrifice, you know, and make an important position that I’m fighting for this country, and you’re talking like he’s coming, he’s coming at us. We’re saying like, you know, your entire overhead to run the entire operation for like 10 employees, the main consultant, everything $385,000 which to me, is like the most efficient number imaginable, how could you possibly do that or coming after me for, you know, saying it was $5 a door for canvassing efforts in Georgia, and then comparing it to canvassing efforts three years before that in Wisconsin, and saying that our efforts during a global pandemic was too expensive per door, compared to a failed, failed canvassing effort years before a global and that’s…
Jordan Meiselas 29:42
First of all, we lost them. Second of all, there wasn’t a global pandemic. It’s not even apples to oranges. It’s like apples to like motorcycles. What you’re comparing is not even in the same realm. And no matter how many times we would even, you know, we would answer every question we sat down with the guy for over over an hour. He cut off the conversation we sat sat down with him in December. And for all intents and purposes, we were like, Oh, this is gonna be a fantastic piece. And even if it wasn’t, we’re always happy to answer questions. We’re not afraid of hard questions. It’s when the quote unquote hard questions become accusations. And ultimately, the breaking point at the end was when he said he gave us 48 hours and said, We are publishing these things. We need your response within 48 hours. And they were not questions, they were accusations saying that you claimed you know, you grossly overspent on on paying $5 per door for for your door knockers. And I was like, by what metric are you talking about? We got a million proposals. This was the cheapest we paid everybody a living wage and provided everybody with PPE, like what are you even talking about you grossly overcharged. You said that your ads were helping you, you’ve spent over $1.4 million on TV ads to help Democrats. But because it didn’t meet the Nielsen GRP metric of 1000 grps per ad, you lied to your donors. And we’re like, what do you talk? So you didn’t actually help Democrats? We were like, What are you talking about? What outdated metrics are you using here that you’re going by grps and Nielsen and what not like do not understand the power of the movement and of the power of earned media and the power of having a TV ad which is then reciprocated in a billboard, which is then reciprocated in a half a million dollar mail program and door knockers that come to those same people’s doors and reiterating that message like a movie campaign every single day? And that, you know, they, they didn’t want to listen, so we had to, we had to pull the trigger on.
Jeff Timmer 31:38
Yeah, I just I brought that up just because the style that you employed in response to that showed this same kind of no boundaries, thinking outside the box, disrupt her attitude to the response, it was like, no throw caution to the wind. And, you know, sock these guys in the mouth.
Jordan Meiselas 31:58
Well, if their, their their thesis was Midas touch was ineffective and not influential. And I think when we got the number one trend in the country, boycott Rolling Stone, they knew really quickly that their article had to change from that being the claim of the article to the article being about Midas touch attacked me. The whole the whole article, the just became like…
Ben Meiselas 32:19
The article is about how we attack them,
Jordan Meiselas 32:21
then they were trying to make up lies, which was the reason they were like, We asked hard questions and things got strange. It’s like, No, you didn’t ask hard questions and things got changed. We answered your your quote unquote, hard questions for five months. And then you gave us an ultimatum that you’re going to print, adores them, really, I’ll tell you offline, like QAnon level, just bonkers wild, wild stuff. But we were like, oh, like, Okay, if you’re gonna print that, yeah, we’re gonna sue you, because it’s so off base. And then they’re like, oh, they’re Trumpian. They’re threatening to sue us? Like, yeah, if you’re going to print, like, if I printed the horrible things about you that weren’t true, I think you’d be I think you’d be pretty upset about it. And we’ve run an incredible organization and built the grassroots movement of people contributing that average of $25 at a time, our median donation was $20.21, for the 20 for the election, you know, over $5 million raised and incredible grassroots support ground game, mail. Now, when you add up everything, the Midas mighty community, I mean, we have nothing but you know, we are so proud of this movement, and we’re happy to talk about it for hours on end. But don’t mischaracterize, you know, what we built and what we’re trying to do.
Jeff Timmer 33:29
Well, it’s, it’s been great watching, it’s been great, you know, working alongside with you in the effort to save democracy. You know, Mark and I is he mentioned when we started off here, you know, we’ve we’ve been adversaries on different sides of the political spectrum for a long time. But over these last couple of years have found we have a lot more in common than then we have different and that’s the belief in, in in democracy. We can go back to winning elections or arguing about marginal tax rates, you know, someday when you write some of these QAnon cooks.
Mark Brewer 34:09
And I know we could talk for hours, but unfortunately, our time is up for this week. So I really want to thank you guys for joining us. Tell us your story and your about your future plans and kind of want to wish you the best of luck. I know hopefully, we’ll get back together at some point in the future and talk more about what the Midas touch is up to.
Jordan Meiselas 34:29
That’d be great. Thank you. We’re so humbled for all your support that you’ve given us over the past year and for all the support your listeners, we really appreciate it.
Jeff Timmer 34:37
It’s great seeing you guys. It’s let’s let’s come up with a hashtag and get a trend.
Mark Brewer 34:42
Now that’s a challenge.
Jeff Timmer 34:45
Let’s get this trending. And it’s number one
Jordan Meiselas 34:46
Challenge accepted.
Jeff Timmer 34:48
All right, Let me know what it is.
Jordan Meiselas 34:52
sounds great.
Jeff Timmer 34:53
Guys. Take care. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai