The Fight for George Santos’s Seat
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The special election for George Santos’s vacated U.S. House seat has attracted tons of spending and a lot of attention—all to hold the position for less than a year. Who’s running, and what can this vote tell us about what to expect in November?
Guest: Mark Chiusano, writer, journalist, and author of The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Over the last few years, |
| 0:05.0 | the last few years, reporter Mark Chizano |
| 0:09.0 | has made himself into a kind of bard of Nassau County. Nassau is just east of Newau County. |
| 0:12.8 | Nassau is just east of New York City, past Queens. |
| 0:16.8 | It's the original suburb, you know, home of Levitown, |
| 0:20.3 | where people sort of experimented with what the suburbs were going to look like. |
| 0:24.0 | So it's funny, it's a little bit of a throwback. |
| 0:27.0 | For politicians, Mark says, |
| 0:32.0 | NASA's gotten this reputation as being a suburban crystal ball. |
| 0:37.0 | Ronald Reagan famously said that when a Republican dies and goes to heaven, |
| 0:42.0 | it looks a lot like Nassau County. |
| 0:45.0 | Then the wins seemed to shift. |
| 0:47.0 | Barack Obama won here, twice, then Hillary Clinton. |
| 0:52.0 | But a couple years after that, Republican fabulous George Santos entered the scene. |
| 0:59.1 | Mark was working for Newsday back then. Yeah, I wrote a little piece about him on the day he announced his |
| 1:06.4 | 2020 run and yeah I was kind of following him along ever since. Wow, wild ride, huh? It's been weird, you know? It was weird from the |
| 1:15.0 | beginning a little bit, like in that phone call, which was supposed to be his |
| 1:18.9 | launch, he said, I'm actually in Florida right now. What? |
| 1:23.0 | Why are you in Florida while you're launching your New York campaign? |
| 1:26.8 | I'm in the spiritual homeland of Republicans? |
| 1:29.8 | Yeah. |
| 1:31.0 | But so yeah, very strange from the beginning. |
... |
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