Screenshot/Pod Save America/YouTube
The Pod Save America bros took aim at pollster Nate Silver, failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Taylor Swift conspiracy theorists as they announced the winners of their annual “Pundies” awards for the worst political takes of 2024.
Debating the most disastrous polling in the lead-up to November’s presidential election, former President Barak Obama aides Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor highlighted Silver’s $100,000 bet that President-elect Donald Trump would not win Florida by more than eight points.
After Trump donor Keith Rabois argued his candidate would carry the state by 10 to 14 points, Silver agreed to the bet—and then Trump won Florida by 13 points. Luckily for Silver, the bet was never finalized even though he told Rabois to draw up a contract.
“Honestly, Nate Silver, while spectacularly wrong about Florida… I guess I have a little respect for putting the hundred thousand dollars on it,” Favreau said.
Outside the polling realm, Kennedy came up repeatedly for his surrogates complaining about a supposed lack of “integrity” surrounding the June presidential debate—which did not include Kennedy—and for his alarming statements on vaccines.
In Dec. 2023, CNN’s Kasie Hunt asked Kennedy about a previous interview in which he’d said, “There is no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
“I never said that,” Kennedy said.
“We have the clip. Please play the chip,” Hunt said.
After being confronted with his own words and image, Kennedy told Hunt, “First of all, I’m not anti-vaccine.”
“How is that statement not anti-vaccine?” Hunt asked.
“I’m not anti-vaccine. I just think it will kill you, which I will repeat to everyone I see,” Vietor deadpanned.
The foursome also highlighted a number of other absurd moments from 2024, from Trump’s deranged claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio, to MAGA world concerns that Swift was attending the Super Bowl not to cheer on her boyfriend Travis Kelce—who was competing with the Kansas City Chiefs—but as a George Soros political plant.
When it came to their own worst takes, Vietor’s prediction that Trump might tap South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his running mate proved to be a flop. Vietor had argued that abortion was a weak issue for the Republicans during the election, and that Trump could choose Noem to bring gender balance to the ticket and woo suburban women voters.
But that was before Noem outed herself as a puppy killer in her autobiography No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. The book describes how Noem shot and killed the family’s dog Cricket after deeming her dangerous and “untrainable.”
Pfeiffer’s co-hosts also called him out for saying Trump’s felony convictions could matter in such a tight presidential contest. In fact, the president-elect handily won both the electoral college and the popular vote despite being convicted of 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records and fraud.
“I stand by that 1,000 percent,” Pfeiffer said. “He would have won by 10 if he hadn’t been convicted.”
A counterfactual whose accuracy we will never know.
