Toggle Menu

Fighting for Vote-by-Mail: Pramila Jayapal  

Plus Tom Frank on Trump, Biden, and “populism.”

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

August 13, 2020

Representative Pramila Jayapal in the Rayburn House Office Building, July 29, 2020.(Mandel Ngan / Getty Images)

When Attorney General Bill Barr told the House Judiciary Committee recently that voting by mail on a large scale presented a “high risk” for “massive voter fraud,” Pramila Jayapal challenged him—with evidence. She’s cochair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; she represents Seattle; and she talks about the fight against Trump for voting by mail. Her new book is Use the Power You Have: A Brown Woman’s Guide to Politics and Political Change.

Also: Tom Frank, author of the classic What’s the Matter with Kansas, talks about Trump’s phony populist appeal—and whether Joe Biden, the guy from working-class Scranton, can win back the working-class white men who turned to Trump last time around. Tom’s new book is The People, NO: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


Latest from the nation