You! This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Isaac Dober. I'm in Detroit this week for the presidential

debates. We hear a lot from those 20 plus candidates all the

time, but while I'm here I thought we could bring you a different kind of voice

from Michigan. That's the new State Attorney General Dana Nessel. She was

elected in 2018 as part of the blue

wave that hit the state. It's the state of course which surprised the country by

narrowly voting for Donald Trump in 2016. She is not a white moderate man. She is a progressive Jewish lesbian and she won. And she has some thoughts

about what that means for politics in 2020 here in Michigan and beyond.

Attorney General Dana Nessel, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks so much for having me.

So you got into your race with a splash in 2017.

You had a video that you put up. It was right after the Harvey Weinstein scandal had broken.

Me Too was coming into being.

And people may, even if they never heard of you before, may remember that video because it got

a lot of pickup

when you said one way to not have a person show you

as penis is to not have a penis.

I don't know that was the exact phrasing,

but I guess was the gist a bit but you know I think there was there was more to it than just the me too moon with there was that of course but what I was running up against was that we were looking at having an all-female ticket for the Democratic Party and there were a lot of people who are pushing back against that saying that an all-female ticket couldn't possibly win in our state and I was

very aggressively saying actually I think an all-female ticket is going to do much better

than any other ticket composition we could put together so long as we have the best candidates,

the most exciting candidates that are going to energize people to get out and vote and as it turned

...