Lady Voters

In this electrifying episode of The Present Illness, Drs. Arghavan and Alyssa examine America's complicated relationship with lady voters. 

Our physician hosts unpack the historical struggle for women's voting rights with their characteristic wit, dissecting how gender equality at the ballot box has changed our political anatomy. Fresh from the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities conference, Alyssa shares insights on disability bias in ethics consultations and the lesser-known consequences of the Dobbs decision, while Arghavan administers a dose of "Shakira Law" that will have you hips-not-lying with laughter.

The doctors' differential diagnosis includes exploration of voting barriers, political representation, and the ongoing treatment plan for a democracy that still hasn't reached gender homeostasis. This episode features a special cameo by Cesar the Llama, who demonstrates better judgment than many elected officials.

Side effects may include: heightened civic awareness, spontaneous ballot-box enthusiasm, and an irrepressible urge to thank the suffragettes for their service.

Thanks for listening to The Present Illness with Drs. Arghavan Salles and Alyssa Burgart!

Follow us on TikTok and Instagram @ThePresentIllness

Credits

• Production by Arghavan Salles and Alyssa Burgart
• Editing by Alyssa Burgart
• Theme Music by Joseph Uphoff
• Social Media by Arghavan Salles

Chapters

• 1:27 The Role of Women in Politics and Society
• 10:57 The Power of Inclusivity
• 22:54 Authenticity and Principles in Political Leadership
• 28:30 Republican Party's Response to Election Results
• 35:05 Prop 50 Redistricting and Its Consequences
• 41:39 ASBH Recap
• 47:19 Joy this week!

Transcript

Arghavan Salles (00:00)
Hey there, fellow nerds. Welcome to another episode of The Present Illness, the podcast where two physicians try to make sense of a world that is a little febrile and definitely underdiagnosed. I'm Arghavan Salles a surgeon scientist in your friendly neighborhood, Doomscroller in residence.

Alyssa Burgart (00:17)
And I'm Alyssa Burgart an anesthesiologist and bioethicist who tracks news and health law like they're EKGs full of spikes and surprises. The present illness is where we dig into public health, politics, culture, and ethics with a scalpel in one hand and a meme in the other.

Arghavan Salles (00:33)
Huge thanks as always to everyone who's listened, everyone especially who has given us feedback on our episodes. We always really appreciate that. I mean, extra special appreciated if you write a review or put like at least a rating. We really appreciate it. And extra love to our subscribers and a warm welcome to anyone who's just stumbled in from the implementation of Shakira law in New York City.

Alyssa Burgart (00:57)
Shakira law?

Arghavan Salles (00:58)
Well you know, since now they have a Muslim mayor-elect, ⁓ people had for a long time been saying that he would implement Sharia law and so the jokes people are making online are about how it's going to be Shakira law and the hips don't lie and you know, you can imagine the types of things people are saying.

Alyssa Burgart (01:13)
I can't wait for Shakira Law. That's wonderful. I'll look forward to that on my next visit to NYC.

Arghavan Salles (01:19)
Right? It sounds like NYC just got a lot more fun.

Alyssa Burgart (01:22)
All right. Well, we are glad that you are all here. Thank you for being here. Let's get into

Arghavan Salles (01:22)
Thank you.

Alyssa Burgart (01:28)
So listen, Shakira Law sounds amazing. Let's talk about the election.

Arghavan Salles (01:32)
Yeah, I mean, I think we could talk for hours about the election. So as people know, I think you'd have to be like very deep in a cave to not have known there was an election earlier this week. And there were a number of different things on different ballots in different states. And the really big picture summary is that Democrats came out ⁓ doing really, really well. mean, people seem to be

very upset, understandably, about all the things that are happening, right? We are over a month into a government shutdown. We have furloughed workers, federal workers, who are not getting any payments for, even though they're fully employed. I mean, I saw a video, very moving video from one of these workers who was talking about how she's a fully employed person, but she doesn't have money to feed her children or pay her rent or pay her bills. And nobody's really,

talking about it. mean, honestly, to be fair to her, we've talked a lot more in general in our society and in media about SNAP than we have about these furloughed workers. And she pointed out too that some of her colleagues are still working and may or may not ever get paid for the time that they're spending. So we've got a government shutdown. We've got, as we've talked about before, ⁓ problems around SNAP. Of course, the government has been ordered to give out those SNAP payments and

There was honestly a fair amount of back and forth between Trump and the media and the press secretary about whether they were or were not going to, first they said they were going to give out half the amount. Then they said, no, he said, actually our president said that he wasn't going to give it out until the government shutdown was over or something like that. And then, and then, but then Caroline Levitt said, oh no, we're complying anyway. So very messy around whether people were going to get their SNAP benefits or not. We've got people starting to see their premiums.

rising for the Affordable Care Act because those data have become available now for what how much their health insurance is going to cost and we knew those numbers were going to go up and people are seeing it and so they're angry. I mean there's so many other things ⁓ broader than that but even in just this moment where people find themselves going to drop off their mail-in ballots or going to the voting booth there's a lot to be upset about. I didn't even mention right ICE

and the 170 plus US citizens who have been detained, the constant videos, if you're like me, you're seeing every day multiple videos of somebody being dragged out of, just this week there was some being dragged out of a daycare facility. Can you imagine the young children having to see their, someone they probably look up to being dragged out. Anyway, so there's just a lot to be angry about. And that turns out it brought people out to vote and people voted in.

large, large numbers everywhere, including where you and I both live, which is in California. And we had extraordinarily high voter turnout, even though like in my county, literally the only thing I voted on was the gerrymandering, right? Like whether we can redistrict ⁓ here in California to counter the gerrymandering ⁓ plans that have been put in place in places like Texas. And we still had, right, Prop 50, thank you. And so one, I think just the voter turnout is a story.

Alyssa Burgart (04:48)
Yeah, prop 50.

Arghavan Salles (04:57)
But two, I mean, it is unprecedented. I have a hard time thinking of when we've had such a pretty clean sweep for people coming out in support of Democrats. Even there was one person who had said like they didn't even like the candidate, but they were gonna vote for that person instead of voting for fascism. Like that's what they see on the other side. And we have...

Alyssa Burgart (05:21)
Hmm.

Arghavan Salles (05:24)
some really interesting data around men and women's voting practices in this election. For example, well, I should say back to the fall 2024 election, there was much that was written and said about how young men weren't voting for Democrats. And I'll just say that Abigail Spanberger, who was elected governor of Virginia, she won among men 18 to 29 by 14 points.

Mikey Sherrill in New Jersey won among men in that same age group by 10 percent, and Zeron Wemdani in New York won that same age group by 40 percent. So it's not really as much of a settled topic, I would say, in terms of how young men are voting as we were led to believe in the fall of 2024. Women also have very interesting voting patterns for this election.

Alyssa Burgart (06:12)
Mm.

Arghavan Salles (06:19)
81 % of women in New York City voted for Mamdani, 80 % in New Jersey voted for Mikey Sherrill, 78 % in Virginia voted for Abigail Spamburger. These are according to exit polls. I mean, those are stunning, stunning numbers. And it's not surprising, right? There's a lot for women to be angry about in this moment. We've talked before about the efforts some people are making to

revoke women's rights. There was just an article ⁓ in the New York Times about whether women are ruining workplaces. I mean, this is what is acceptable rhetoric now in our mainstream media, the so-called paper of record, they did revise the title to be our ⁓ liberal feminism ruining workplaces. But.

Alyssa Burgart (06:56)
you

You know, it used

to be that you could just openly hate Nazis, but we're not in that now. So you can just like, you can just go after feminists. It's fine.

Arghavan Salles (07:18)
Well, I'm not even sure we're allowed to openly hate Nazis anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you say that... Yeah. I agree.

Alyssa Burgart (07:22)
No, that's what I'm saying. That's over. Yeah, no. You can just hate women. You just hate women. We don't even

have to hide it anymore. Just hate the ladies. Why are they talking? Why are they voting? Gross. my god. Ew.

Arghavan Salles (07:31)
It's more socially.

Yeah, well, and

as we talked about before, folks may remember a couple episodes we talked about Pastor Joel Webin and how upset he was about loud women, right? So he's ⁓ done another.

Alyssa Burgart (07:47)
I love being obnoxious. I love being obnoxious. Thank you. Thank

you for noticing.

Arghavan Salles (07:55)
Well, he's done a more recent ⁓ recording of his podcast the day after, I believe, the election, where he talked about how women aren't meant for politics and we really don't understand politics, so we really shouldn't have a vote. ⁓ And he has posted publicly on Twitter about how it's time to repeal the 19th Amendment. And I want to just point out that part of the reason...

Alyssa Burgart (08:18)
And just for just hang on the 19th

Amendment just for anyone who doesn't know that is the amendment that got women the ability to vote in America.

Arghavan Salles (08:28)
Correct. White women primarily. But yes, ⁓ that was how we originally got the right to vote. And he has said that that's a mistake essentially, right? That women don't need to vote, shouldn't vote because we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about things like politics.

Alyssa Burgart (08:46)
What's so funny,

it's so funny because those were literally the same arguments that prevented the passing of the 19th Amendment for many years.

Arghavan Salles (08:55)
Right, but so that's why they're back to that saying that we, because they've seen, I mean, like the numbers I just read to you, they're seeing that women do have voices and we do want to express ourselves and we will do so at the voting booth. And that is really scary to people whose entire platform is subjugating women, right? And so giving us that ability to vote is going counter to their agenda.

I do want to just add in some other data points here so that people get a sense of, you know, kind of the fullness of the victory for the Democratic Party. Despite the fact that Democratic Party, think a lot of us would feel, certainly I would feel, has let us down significantly in the last year. So this is not, I just want to be clear, I'm not like endorsing the Democratic Party.

Alyssa Burgart (09:44)
I also

just, the other thing, like you said earlier about how some guy was like, yeah, I'm not even in, I don't even like this candidate, but I don't want to vote for fascism. I'm like, that's, feel like, isn't that just the motto of the democratic party? Like they should really just embrace that. Like we're not fascists. That's actually all people are looking for right now. I would just love to not live in a totalitarian government. Yeah. And I.

Arghavan Salles (09:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, to not live in a

government where we're murdering people in the ocean every day and just like proudly proclaiming it with no consequences.

Alyssa Burgart (10:15)
I mean, I was talking to my friends that live in Chicago and like, just sounds so exhausting what they're going through right now because, you know, just being occupied. Anyway, yeah, I'm with you. Like, I mean, I'll vote for the Democrats if they like actually do something useful. So sure, I'm very happy that how things went yesterday and the bar's pretty low. Just to be clear, the bar is low.

Arghavan Salles (10:39)
bar is very low and well

I think there's a couple things okay one is wait whatever folks may think of Zahran Mandani and the Sharia law that he's definitely not installing I mean it's worth noting that his entire transition team is women and if you were going to install some sort of like theocratic Muslim theocratic state that's not what you would do but anyway

Alyssa Burgart (10:59)
But

on that point though, before you move on, I am not worried about Sharia law. Do know what I'm worried about? I'm worried about Christian nationalist law. When you talk about we don't want women to have to the vote, women should have to stay at home, women's place is in the home, women should be seen and not heard, that's Christian nationalism. That is going to a Christian nationalist perspective. And so that is so...

Arghavan Salles (11:03)
Mm-hmm.

No.

Alyssa Burgart (11:25)
ironic to hear people do this just dog whistle nonsense like, no, now that there's a Muslim, they're going to make us all be Muslims. That's not the threat, America. The threat is the Christians. It is the white Christians who are the threat.

Arghavan Salles (11:40)
And it's a distraction, right? Like, I people like to say that about lots of things, and I don't know that everything is a distraction, but I do think the Islamophobia right now is definitely a distraction from the Christian nationalism, the rising Christian nationalism. Don't look over here, look over there. You know, somebody, I don't know that I'll remember the name of this person, but somebody posted on ⁓ either election night or the very next morning a photo, or it might've even been a video, of the Twin Towers as the... ⁓

planes hit and said, how could the city where this happened have elected a Muslim? And somebody was like, maybe because he wasn't the one who did it and he was 10 at the time. you know, like, because that's this whole idea of collective punishment, right? That if one person from this group did this thing, then how could you possibly elect anyone else who has any?

overlapping identity characteristic with the people who did this horrific thing. And it's not reasonable or logical or appropriate to go down that line of thinking. And what I was going to say about his campaign was that it was very positive. I think part of the reason he had such great success in New York gaining over 50 % of the vote in a three-way

⁓ election was that he didn't do a lot of, know, woe is us and life is terrible, right? He said, what do we need here? We need free buses so people can get around. And you know what? People can get behind the idea of free buses. Heck, I would love to have free buses where we live. ⁓ He said we need affordable childcare. Yes.

Absolutely. It takes a weird person to be like, no, we don't want affordable childcare.

Alyssa Burgart (13:34)
Does it take a weird person though? We know that there's plenty

of people who are like, why do you guys want to hand out?

Arghavan Salles (13:40)
would submit those are weird people. And I didn't say they're rare, I just said they're weird. And so then his last major point was affordable housing. And I mean, he has lost the other policy ideas, but those are kind of three central ideas around his campaign.

Alyssa Burgart (13:45)
You

Well, and this is what working families need, right? I mean, this is what families need. And we can talk about this more in another session of like, one of the things that he talked about is having baby baskets. And like, these are actually things that help new families. families wanna be able to feed their kids, they wanna be able to earn a living wage, they wanna be able to have an affordable place to live, so that people are not just constantly struggling.

Arghavan Salles (14:02)
Exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (14:27)
unnecessarily to benefit these corporations.

Arghavan Salles (14:27)
Exactly. And he made

exactly right. So he made people feel seen. He listened to what people in the city actually wanted. There's a video that the campaign released, I think either election day or the day before of him a year ago, standing on a corner in New York City, asking people right after the presidential election, asking people, why did you vote the way that you did? Trying to understand what people actually wanted and needed.

And he built a campaign where he tried to address the things that he heard from people, right? So he grounded his campaign in the people in the city, listening and trying to put together something that would address their concerns. And he was positive. He did a scavenger hunt. When was the last time you heard of a politician who brought people together for a scavenger hunt? I've literally never heard of that happening. He had people going to, and it was based on.

New York City trivia and the history of New York. Like I've never lived in New York, I'm not a New Yorker. And I was like, please tell me what are the clues? What was the location? I wanna follow along this, you So it's very positive. And the reason I'm emphasizing that is that a lot of, I know we just said like, we want anything other than fascism, almost anything other than fascism. But when you give people, I think the power of his campaign was when you give people something positive to connect on and to say yes.

This is a vision for the future that I actually would like to see happen. That's when you see the level of enthusiasm that he had. That's when you see the turnout that I believe was higher than New York City has had since like the 1960s. And to the extent that other Democrats should be looking at his campaign, I think it should be that. Like, how do we give people something positive to gather around and to mobilize around?

Alyssa Burgart (16:06)
Are you?

Are you saying that the democratic approach, the democratic party's approach of like constant fear mongering has not been successful?

Arghavan Salles (16:25)
Yes, I am saying, if you let me be explicit, am saying campaigning on I'm not that guy is not going to always work. ⁓ I mean, it's sometimes little, it's not enough.

Alyssa Burgart (16:35)
Well, it's not enough. It's not,

I mean, I joke, I joke, but like, you know, I mean, this is part of how, you know, Obama, when he ran on his hope campaign, which like, you know, people look back on it now and have, have different feelings, but like at the time it, it felt good to have a, have, I was about to say a clinician, to have a politic, politician, you can tell I talk about clinicians a lot, to have a politician who,

Arghavan Salles (16:45)
Thank

Yeah. ⁓

Alyssa Burgart (17:04)
who also had like a vision for the future. And obviously there's lots of, know, whether that was realized, whatever, whatever. And I think for Mom Donnie, you know, there's a really funny, I like Saturday Night Live, and ⁓ they had a spoof of the, you know, debate that was on with Cuomo and whatever the other guy was with the hat, I can't remember his name, that guy. And.

Arghavan Salles (17:15)
Mm.

Lee-Wan.

Alyssa Burgart (17:31)
You know, but they were talking about how mom Donnie was basically just gonna like Talk about these really hopeful things and then he was you know, once you elect me We'll both find out together that some of these things aren't gonna be possible and that's okay. Like I understand that ⁓ You this idea of like running on what a future could be and how is it that we incrementally get there?

Arghavan Salles (17:42)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. And I think people are really looking for something to look forward to, a way forward that's better than what we are in now. And I'm not that guy. You for someone like me, that's good. I'm glad that you're not that guy. And what else, what are you for? And I wanna just highlight one more thing about this specific campaign, which was that

they really were inclusive. mean, people use that word in all sorts of ways, but what I mean is when Mondani spoke, like in his acceptance speech, in his victory speech, he referenced so many different groups of people, including aunties, but also trans people and also immigrants. you know, it wasn't a campaign of exclusion, which I feel we see so much exclusion in political campaigns. ⁓

And I understand that that appeals to some very specific segment of the population, but I don't think that's the majority of people. And I think the majority of people in this country understand that a lot of the value of the United States is having so many different people have access to opportunity. And when we close off doors for different groups of people, it hurts our society as a whole. So I think he did a really fabulous job of

not closing the door on anybody. Even the people who didn't like him, even the people who didn't vote for him, he was very explicit about wanting to help everyone. And part of the reason I'm emphasizing that is even other democratic politicians currently who are, you know, maybe trying to position themselves for a presidential run or otherwise hold some kind of high office, I've been very disappointed to see throwing

trans people, for example, under the bus. They've made some sort of calculation. Yeah, exactly.

Alyssa Burgart (19:51)
Yeah, I'm out. I'm sorry. If you're, if

you're going to throw, if you're going to throw trans people out of the window, you are not for me.

Arghavan Salles (19:59)
I agree. And I think it's a severe miscalculation of who their supporters would be because there are a lot of people who, let's just, we're both in California. Let's talk about Gavin Newsom for two seconds. So yeah, I know, I know. But what I'm saying is, give me a moment.

Alyssa Burgart (20:16)
He's a man with good

hair. That's, ⁓ you know.

Arghavan Salles (20:20)
You know, that goes a long way in our politics, unfortunately. But what I want to say is, I think nationally, people who don't know him as well may not know about his policies on homelessness, for example, which I think both of us are not in agreement with. But people nationally are saying, well, here's a guy who's not afraid to speak directly to Trump and to say, I will not stand for invasion of the cities in my state. I will not stand for these terrible policies. People deserve to be fed, et cetera.

So I think external to California, a lot of people are seeing him as guy who's willing, one of the few to give him credit, who's willing to stand up and say, no, I'm not going along with this. And he was very quick to say some not helpful things about trans people on his podcast and to kind of basically sacrifice trans people in that way. And for people like me, I'm just like you, that's a no for me.

Like that's a deal breaker, we're done. Because if you're gonna throw them under the bus, well, first of all, it's wrong and it's unethical, it is immoral. And it suggests to me that you don't have principles and I don't know who else you're going to throw under the bus. I cannot trust you if you think that you can use people as chips in your political game. I'm never going to be on board with that. And what Zoran Mimdani showed was I didn't have to do that. I mean, he went to rallies with trans people. He had trans people.

helping him inform his policy around trans people and you know.

Alyssa Burgart (21:45)
It's,

Yeah,

and this is where it's more than he didn't have to do that. He actively chose not to do that.

Arghavan Salles (21:56)
Correct. Correct. And he won. I mean, he won handily. Exactly. And so to me, there's a message there for some of the kind of more ⁓ party line democratic politicians who've been in the Democratic Party for a really long time, who've been on the scene for a really long time, who listen to, I don't know who, pundits or pollsters or whoever they're getting their information from instead of listening to the people.

Alyssa Burgart (22:00)
And he won big.

Arghavan Salles (22:25)
And I think that's what Mamdani did really well was listening to the people. I wish that Gavin and Pete Buttigieg is the other one that comes to mind, who also like generally, I agree with a lot of what Pete has said. I like that he goes on Fox News and speaks to people who have a different perspective. But he also was like willing to just basically betray trans people. And again, that's a hard line for me. I hope that people like them are seeing

Alyssa Burgart (22:34)
Mm-hmm.

Arghavan Salles (22:54)
what's happening now and recognizing that they've made a miscalculation, that what voters want is authenticity and voters want people with principle. If you cannot be for everyone, then you are not for me as a voter.

Alyssa Burgart (23:10)
Well, so the other thing I think that's important to talk about when we talk about Mom Donnie, like he won despite, I mean, he basically ran against the Democratic Party also because the Democratic Party was like behind Cuomo. Gross. Like that's how out of touch, as far as I can tell, that's how out of touch the party is.

Arghavan Salles (23:30)
Yeah, the party is terrible. I mean, they're really not showing up for this moment the way that I think most voters want them to. And if it had not, if we weren't in such a terrible, terrible political moment, I don't think they would have seen the outcomes that they did, right? If the situation were not so dire, I don't think all of these races would have gone the way they did. Although I don't want take away from these specific candidates. Like I think these specific candidates also did... ⁓

I mean, the ones that I know I think did a really good job of speaking to the moment and taking advantage and connecting with voters. And I think, you what we see, in case we talked a lot about New York City and the obvious thing to say there as well, it's a blue city, what did you expect? Fine, what about Virginia, right? Abigail Spanberger won and the Virginia House of Delegates flipped, I believe it was 13 seats so that they went from 51-49.

Alyssa Burgart (24:25)
Mm-hmm.

Arghavan Salles (24:28)
to 64, 36. That's a pretty big deal. And that's Virginia. That's not a blue state. ⁓ Georgia had two statewide elections that went to Democratic ⁓ candidates. Mississippi for the first time in, think, well, I won't say exactly how many years, but in a while lost their Republican super majority. Last I checked, Mississippi is also not a blue state.

Alyssa Burgart (24:52)
many decades.

Arghavan Salles (24:56)
Georgia is also not a blue state. So that was Mike Johnson who had said that. He said, well, you know, the election went as we expected. These were all blue states and blue cities. And no, no, sir. And Pennsylvania, routine.

Alyssa Burgart (25:06)
What a convenient,

what a convenient reframe though. Thanks for trying that.

Arghavan Salles (25:09)
Of course. Of course. I

was surprised he even knew that the election had happened or that there were any results. I was expecting it, oh, there was an election. I'm just hearing about it now. That's what I thought he was going to say. anyway, so the point is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court also retained the Democratic majority. There was also, as we were talking about earlier, before we started recording, we're talking about Bucks County in Pennsylvania where they

ousted all Republicans from both school boards in that county. ⁓ Anyway, a lot of her

Alyssa Burgart (25:43)
My girlfriend lives

there, she's so excited.

Arghavan Salles (25:45)
Yeah, mean, people want, again, people want something positive to look forward to.

Alyssa Burgart (25:50)
Okay.

Okay. Okay. But I to you a funny story. So apparently in that election in Bucks County, the sheriff who was this like, you know, hardline Republican, his ads apparently for his own campaign were basically talking about how much he loves ICE and is like really going to work with ICE and he had implemented policies while in office in alignment with that. And so when my girlfriend saw these, she thought that it was, she thought those were opposition ads, like to point that out.

And then when she looked into it, she was like, no, those were his campaign posters. So it was like he was he was like advertising against his own campaign because he thought that that's what people in Bucks County really wanted, I guess. And the people have spoken. They did not.

Arghavan Salles (26:34)
He didn't read the room. Yeah,

think, listen, if you are in a bubble, which I think some of these folks are, and you're believing the things that Mike Johnson is saying and the things that the president is saying and the things that JD Vance is saying, then of course you would have a pro-ICE message. But that is very much out of tune with the majority of voters. I mean, really any poll that I've seen in the last...

Alyssa Burgart (26:56)
At least the majority

of voters who turned out.

Arghavan Salles (27:01)
When you even look at polls that aren't necessarily polling voters, people in this country are very concerned. The majority of people in this country are very concerned about what our Department of Homeland Security has been doing across party lines, more in some in the Democratic Party than in the Republican Party. But still, the majority of people are like, what are we doing here? Like, we cannot be just dragging people out into the street.

Alyssa Burgart (27:23)
Yeah,

that is the logical response to what we are seeing, truly. ⁓

Arghavan Salles (27:28)
Exactly.

okay, here's, sorry, go ahead.

Alyssa Burgart (27:33)
so, well, I just think that it's also, whenever I think about election results, I just also think about what was voter turnout and who is it that shows up to vote? Who is it that's, whose votes are not being suppressed? Who is it who feels they have a stake in what's going on? And so I just think it's important that when we contextualize the voter turnout, we recognize that it's.

It doesn't represent everybody who could vote because a lot of people still didn't vote.

Arghavan Salles (28:03)
Absolutely. Yes, even with even even with very high turnout There's still a lot of people who don't vote and there's lots and lots of reasons for that. ⁓ I will say the next point I was hoping to talk about is around voting and and what and what the Republican Party seems to have taken away from What happened on Tuesday night? So that night I believe it was Tuesday night ⁓ Trump posted on truth social

Alyssa Burgart (28:18)
Mmm.

Arghavan Salles (28:30)
pass voter reform, voter ID, no mail-in ballots, save our Supreme Court from packing, no two-state addition, et terminate the filibuster. So basically, ⁓ let's obstruct people from being able to vote. That was his takeaway. And he's not the only one who's had that reaction of, wow, when people come out to vote, we don't...

seem to do well. The party that's trying to restrict human rights doesn't seem to come out ahead. And so instead of reflecting on that and thinking about what policies might actually be desirable to the majority of voters, this is exactly what they've decided to do is to figure out how do we make it harder for people to vote. Trump apparently said to Senate Republicans, I believe this was yesterday, ⁓ or

a day or two after the election, we should pass no mail-in voting. He also made this very odd statement about wanting voter ID wherein he said, you go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID, but for voting, they want no voter ID. Yeah, exactly. How much more clear do you make it that he does not know how you go grocery store shopping, he does not know how you fill your gas tank because unless you're buying alcohol, unless you're buying alcohol or cigarettes, know.

Alyssa Burgart (29:37)
What? What is he talking about?

gentleman who has never been... A gentleman who has never been in a

grocery store thinks he understands how to buy groceries. Come on.

Arghavan Salles (29:57)
I

mean, I think he knows he doesn't understand, but he's just making this stuff up. anyway, I also wondered, to be honest, I was like, is he thinking back to when we used to write checks and you would have to give an ID to match your check? I don't know. I think he just obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. But that seems the most likely explanation. I agree. So leading very hard into making it

Alyssa Burgart (30:13)
This man has never been in a grocery store. That's my guess.

Arghavan Salles (30:25)
harder for people to vote instead of how do we make policies that are attractive to voters? And it's the same like we were talking about the results for women, how women voted in some of the key races on Tuesday. And immediately after what started to happen online was calls for repealing the 19th. So folks may remember if they listened to our episode from a few weeks ago with Pastor Joel Webin. ⁓

that he was already talking about, you know, how women are too loud. But he said the lesson is not from the election. The lesson is not to appeal to liberal women. The lesson is to repeal women's right to vote. You don't argue with insanity. You mitigate it. Suggesting that women voting is in and of itself insanity or that the women who are voting are insane or whatever it is, but that we don't have the right, which is very consistent with what he said in that podcast episode I was referencing.

And there was a slew of other, I will say mostly men that I saw posting the same thing with one of them saying, repealing the 19th is the moderate position at this point. I mean, that's how much of a bubble that person is that they actually, I mean, I'm assuming they actually believe what they're saying. Of course they might just be saying it, but.

Alyssa Burgart (31:43)
But also

if that's the moderate position, I don't understand what's other end of that ideal to this person. Yeah.

Arghavan Salles (31:49)
What's the extreme? I don't know,

cutting our heads off, I'm not sure. That doesn't seem good. Whatever direction that's going, doesn't seem good. ⁓ And I think it says a lot about a party that is not willing to be in any way introspective and instead doubles down on, mean, Mike Johnson also said this, like,

We're going to continue on with our policies. These are great policies. you know, like from the perspective of someone who would like to see them lose, because again, I'm for human rights, I don't mind that that's his takeaway because I think it guarantees they're going to lose big in 2026 if we are able to have elections in 2026. ⁓ But in the meantime, so many people will be harmed and continue to be harmed by these policies that I wish they would have some.

Just self-interest, right? Like from a position of self-interest and wanting to retain your power, you would think they would want to appeal to voters instead of just insisting that everything they're doing, which is really horrifying to large numbers of people in this country, is perfectly fine. And that if they just keep doing it, they're going to do fine because these outcomes in this election were all blue states and blue cities.

Alyssa Burgart (33:07)
Well, you know, the other thing that Mike Johnson has been in the news for outside of this election is a previous election, like, I don't know, six weeks ago in Arizona. And I apologize. I do not know how to pronounce this person's last name. Adelita Grigialva. Do you know how to say her name? I'm actually not sure, but.

Arghavan Salles (33:24)
I'm assuming it's very halva, but I actually don't know.

Alyssa Burgart (33:31)
This person was elected and Mike Johnson does not want this person to take office because she will apparently be the deciding vote in trying to get the Epstein files released, whatever it is that may or may not exist. We just don't know. ⁓ And clearly Mike Johnson and his friends in the White House are so threatened by this woman who got elected that just refusing to

Arghavan Salles (33:46)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (34:00)
Put her in office.

Arghavan Salles (34:01)
Yes, believe she's now, it's been the longest gap between an election and time for swearing in for anybody ever, I believe.

Alyssa Burgart (34:10)
And he's claiming that he's doing it because well, this is what Pelosi did. like the person who had a previous longer time before being sworn in, it was by that person's request. Like that person set the date they wanted to be and Pelosi honored that. So it's just such a facetious, absurd argument.

Arghavan Salles (34:25)
Exactly.

totally disingenuous like everything else that he's said and done in or maybe not everything else but most of what he's said and done that I'm aware of. think what I saw recently on that point was that there is another Republican representative who they think will be

appointed soon who they assume will counter her vote and so that he's waiting so that he can swear them both in at the same time and their votes will cancel each other out and we will still be left at the same place with regard to the Epstein files which is totally disgraceful to the survivors who have been fighting so hard to get that information released.

Alyssa Burgart (35:05)
Well, you know, we mentioned Prop 50 earlier. ⁓ Why don't we talk about it a little bit? I mean, it's a national issue, even though it was our California election.

Arghavan Salles (35:15)
Absolutely. mean, I think, so if folks probably know, you know, a few months back, President Trump asked Texas to create five more seats, Republican seats. And so there was a big to do about it because as you can imagine, some of the Texas politicians were like, no, this is, I mean, let me just back up and say,

Alyssa Burgart (35:34)
can't pack the courts, but you can pack Texas.

Arghavan Salles (35:36)
Right. Well, the thing is that we do reassess districts typically in normal times. We reassess districts in census years, and this is not a census year. And that's part of why this was so controversial, because it had nothing to do with having new information about voters and the distribution of voters, but it was just he wants more seats, right? So he wants to basically openly cheat to get more seats.

And the Republicans in Texas's legislature were more than happy to oblige. And some of the Democrats actually literally fled the state to avoid being forced to vote on this. And of course they were only able to do that for so long. It takes a lot of money to be living in another state away from your home, et cetera. And eventually they came back and the measure passed. And so they redistricted. And Gavin Newsom, again, to his credit, you know, he's just got flaws, but to his credit, he said, you know what, if you're going to do that.

I'm governor of one of the biggest states in the country and a huge contributor to the economy of this country. And you know what? We're not gonna just sit and watch you do that. So you wanna redistrict, we can also redistrict. Interesting approach that he took though, that I think he's getting a lot of praise for is he said, I'm not gonna just do it myself. I'm not gonna demand that the state legislature do it. We will ask the voters if they wanna do it. And so that was the election. That was what happened statewide in our election.

this week was the question of do we support redistricting essentially to counter the ⁓ really unprecedented changes that were made in Texas. And I think it was somewhere around.

Alyssa Burgart (37:11)
Well, and it's

temporary. It's also temporary, which is part of what I think also, I mean, honestly, if it had been permanent, I don't know that I would have voted for it because our constitution requires that we have nonpartisan districting, like it's a requirement. And so in voting for Prop 50, it's only for the next few elections. And so it's really to put that clear, to say like, is about responding in this moment. This is not about it being a

Arghavan Salles (37:14)
Okay.

Alyssa Burgart (37:40)
permanent change to like override our constitutional ⁓ preference and what we had voted for in the past, which is to have have nonpartisan districting.

Arghavan Salles (37:52)
Yes, and I just want to point out that the split for this was as of today when we're recording, which is November 6th, roughly 64 % to 36%. So 64 % in support of that's a huge level of agreement across the state. And we had over 8 million people voting, which is a huge number of people when you consider that, for example, in my county, this was the only thing there was to vote on. So

people like me went to voting booths or did mail-in ballots literally only for this. That's really meaningful. related, I believe it was the night of the election or it might've been the next day that Kansas actually announced that they were not going to proceed with a similar measure in the state of Texas.

So Kansas had originally been exploring the idea of changing their districts as well, and they have apparently now abandoned that idea. And I think there's a couple of reasons for this. One is it's kind of like this never ending arms race, right? To say that every state is going to redistrict. Like Kansas can do it. Well, know what? Massachusetts can do it. You know, like it's just going to go on like this. ⁓ But I think perhaps

More importantly, I don't know, didn't talk to any of those people in Texas, I mean in Kansas, sorry, I don't know what their reasoning was, but one of the things that we saw in this election was that the Latina voters shifted much more toward Democrats in this election than in the 2024 election. And so what happens in a state like Texas where they did do their redistricting is they took some more heavily Republican ⁓ districts and made them somewhat less

heavily Republican to basically spread the Republicans out over more districts, right? And that works if you have a huge, huge advantage. But if you have a large swath of voters who change their allegiance because you're, for example, let's just say your policies are directly attacking those communities, now it's actually more risky than it may have seemed at the time that Texas did their redistricting to kind of dilute out the Republican vote.

And I think other states are seeing that. So both as a result of seeing what happened in California and as a result of seeing what's happened with the Latina vote across all these different elections, I am curious to see if we will continue to see these efforts or if people specifically in red states will back off of those efforts, recognizing that they're risky and they may actually lose whatever advantage they may have had already with their current district maps.

Alyssa Burgart (40:29)
I mean, I gerrymandering is just the worst and we just shouldn't do it because and this is you see you see this right like playing out across the country this like absurd gamesmanship over like, who can redistrict things to make everything to their advantage and it's like that all of this behavior just serves to make this whole like us versus them attitude about society just worse and worse and worse because it just whichever group is doing it just comes out looking like

greedy monsters. And I just, don't understand why we keep letting them do it. It's, we deserve better America. We deserve better.

Arghavan Salles (41:09)
And I don't think it's just greedy, it's cheating. It's admitting that the way the lines are currently drawn are not to my benefit and I'm gonna redraw them to make it easier for me to win. I mean, in any other game that's changing the rules to make it easier for you to win is considered cheating. Like that's what that is.

Alyssa Burgart (41:26)
Yeah, well, I

mean, this is we talked earlier about, you know, voter suppression and like, what is voter suppression, but just trying to cheat the system. And again, we deserve better America. We all deserve better.

Arghavan Salles (41:38)
Yeah, let's hope we get it.

Alyssa Burgart (41:39)
⁓ So I didn't have a chance to talk about this last week, but I mentioned previously that I had gone to Portland for the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities National Meeting.

Arghavan Salles (41:40)
moment.

Alyssa Burgart (41:51)
And it's one of my favorite meetings, because it's pretty small, like compared to the anesthesiology meeting is really big and it's kind of, I don't know, it's fun, but it's a little overwhelming. So these like smaller organizations, just, fun. I got to see so many of my awesome friends who are ethicists. I got to meet Evan, the bioethicist in person. We've been, you know, online friends for a long time. And so I got to like hang out with them at the meeting and they, I had invited them to be on a couple of panels.

And so was super cool to also see there's a lot more ethicists who are realizing like, wow, we do need to have more conversations that are sort of external and that we can't just ignore everything that's going on online because of course it's showing up. It's showing up in clinics and it's showing up in hospitals and in all the ways you and I have been talking about. So it was super fun to bring Evan in. They and I did a session where we talked about being sort of online bioethicists and what that means and

Arghavan Salles (42:30)
and

⁓

Alyssa Burgart (42:50)
and how do we navigate various issues. And then they also did an awesome session for our pediatrics group along with ⁓ a palliative care doctor from University of Washington named Jen Kett, who was awesome. And Nicole Dudovnik, who's a psychologist who does a bunch of information on like ⁓ the neuroscience of trust and the neuroscience of misinformation. Like, why do we believe the things that we believe? And so we had the three of them on a panel.

for a lot of our pediatric ethics community. And it was just, it was on fire. They did such a great job really talking about sort of strategies that we can all use in terms of having these difficult conversations about, you know, when just kind of interesting, unvetted ideas show up in healthcare, like how is it that we can deal with that and how can we, you know, really invest in our patients and our families and building that trust? So that was super fun.

Arghavan Salles (43:36)
Thank

Alyssa Burgart (43:45)
And then I got to be on a fabulous panel, all about, I had two different panels I was on. One was all about disability justice and sort of how ableism shows up in the hospital. And so we had a lineup of scholars talking about just the really tangible ways that ableism shows up in the way that we're educated as clinicians, the ways that it shows up amongst clinicians who are, you know,

Arghavan Salles (43:51)
Hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (44:12)
don't necessarily realize that some of the things that we do are actually very much in opposition to the well-being of people who have disabilities. We talked a lot about quality of life determinations and how ⁓ fraught that concept is, which was super interesting. And then the other panel that I was on was all about reproductive justice, and we were really talking about how, you know, there's still a lot of talk, obviously,

Arghavan Salles (44:15)
Okay.

Hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (44:39)
and necessarily about abortion in the news, but there are so many other negative consequences and so much more nuance around that. And so it was a really great panel talking about sort of data suppression in the post-Dobbs context, how we're not collecting as much data nationally as we used to in terms of maternal morbidity and mortality. There's data suppression in certain states where they're just not collecting this data the same way or they're not releasing it. ⁓ So data that's just not being

Arghavan Salles (45:03)
Hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (45:09)
put out into the public at all, or it's being delayed. And then we also talked about how we have such a long history of reproductive care being grounded in racism. So many of the things for people who are familiar, for example, with Marion Sims, who is often considered the grandfather or whatever, the founder of gynecology, did all of this research on enslaved women who were not anesthetized. And so

Arghavan Salles (45:27)
Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (45:38)
really trying to, on this panel, ⁓ one of our panelists, Jen James from UCSF, who's brilliant, really drew that very clear through line through not only the history of obstetrics and gynecology, but also like our carceral approaches and how they're showing up in terms of pregnancy criminalization and really connecting all of these dots for the audience. And then my colleague, Kayte Spector-Bagdady, who's at University of Michigan, talked about EMTALA and how

We're really seeing so many patients who are trying to get care at emergency departments either, you they're just not getting the standard of care necessarily because you have so many clinicians who are afraid of legal repercussions because they're being told by their state that if anything you do is considered abortion, you're going to be prosecuted. You're going to lose your medical license. ⁓ And then again, and then Faith Fletcher talking about data suppression and like, what is it that we're going to know and not know about the outcomes of all of these cases?

So that was super interesting. I'm excited to write more about it and talk more about it with you, obviously, but also just more broadly in general, because I think the more opportunities we have to get these sorts of nuanced discussions out of these conferences and out into the public, I think is super important.

So I know that that was a super fast overview of a ton of interesting content. We are gonna get into it in way more detail in another episode because I cannot wait to talk about these issues because I think all of them are so important to our practice.

Arghavan Salles (47:14)
Absolutely, those are all really important things that I think our audience would benefit from hearing more about.

Alyssa Burgart (47:19)
Well, I'll tell you what, why don't we talk about what's bringing us joy this week, Arghavan because it can't all be doom and gloom. It cannot all be a doom scroll. We cannot spend all of our time on TikTok feeling sad. So what is out there on the internet bringing you joy?

Arghavan Salles (47:28)
You're exactly right.

say, this is not my one thing, but there were a couple of different people, I also have two things, I guess. So a couple of people who were saying, I haven't joy-scrawled like this in over a year, because I think with the election, there really was so much positivity for, again, people who are pro-human rights. And that's a lot of us. It really is a lot of us. So that was great.

Alyssa Burgart (47:49)
yeah.

And I do think

also like, and I think leading into this also because there have been so many successful protests, know, the no Kings protests and like other other protests around the country.

Arghavan Salles (48:08)
Those were all paid.

Those are fake. That's what they said. Those are fake.

Alyssa Burgart (48:13)
yeah. OK. OK.

But I think that having and well, and you talk about, you know, legacy media really not covering those the way that I think they would have been covered in any other time. But I do think that ⁓ that sort of political mobilization that we've seen across the country of people being like, I want a different America, ⁓ really leading into, you know, the election that we've just had.

Arghavan Salles (48:24)
No no no no.

Mm-hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (48:43)
and the kind of energy because to your point too, like people in your county, like only having one thing to vote for my county, we also had a bunch of county things, but it was still only like we voted on like four things and they were mostly local. ⁓ But voter turnout in a non presidential election year is almost always quite poor. So to have such a turnout in this election was wild.

Arghavan Salles (48:53)
Mm.

Thank

Absolutely, and it just goes to speak to, or it demonstrates how eager people are for their voices to be heard and how hard it is for us to feel that we are getting that outside of the ability to vote. Okay, the other thing that I was actually gonna say for my thing that was bringing me joy is that there's a comedian on social media named Vinny. I think his username or their username is Vinny. Yeah, and they had put out a video that I saw.

Alyssa Burgart (49:29)
It's like Vinay.

Arghavan Salles (49:36)
today, November 6th, but I don't know actually when they put it out. it was Andrew Promo taking an elocution lesson.

where he tries to pronounce people's names and the one that he just like really, really struggles with is Ron Mamdani. And the number of ways that Vinay came up with to not get that name right is pretty impressive. And he's a talent or they're a talented comedian. ⁓ So anyway, we'll put a link in the show notes for people to check that out. And what's bringing you joy?

Alyssa Burgart (50:09)
Okay, so we're going to see.

Yeah, well, so we talked last time or a couple of times ago about ⁓ in Portland, there was all those videos of the people with the blow up costumes, like trolling the ICE agents. Well, so when I was in Portland for the American ⁓ Society of Bioethics and Humanities,

somebody who organized the conference had the brilliant idea of bringing in Cesar the llama, who is a certified therapy llama, I will have you know. ⁓ And I got to meet the llama and his handler, who is a delightful person. But since then, I have now seen all of these videos, he takes the llama out to protest, to like support protesters and let them like hug. And the llama, first of all, he is a dignified gentleman. He is the most gorgeous llama. He's like very,

Arghavan Salles (50:53)
Hmm.

Alyssa Burgart (51:00)
And he's a therapy Lama, so he's like very clean and very friendly. And I will tell you, know, ethicists, like many healthcare people in healthcare space, like have some trauma. And I'll tell you that that Lama, he looks in your eyes and you're like, don't make me cry. Don't you make me cry. So anyway, it was really cool to see him at the conference. I had no idea this Lama existed or that he went around. so now I've been seeing all these videos of him going around like

comforting people around Portland and I'm like, this is great. I want a therapy llama in our neighborhood.

Arghavan Salles (51:37)
Yeah, I had never heard of a therapy llama, but it sounds pretty fantastic.

Alyssa Burgart (51:43)
Yeah, we all should... You should all go to Portland and meet Cesar.

Arghavan Salles (51:48)
Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. Sounds like he's going to restore democracy.

⁓ On that note, that's it for this week's episode. If you didn't like what you heard, this has been Modern Love. If you liked it, don't forget to subscribe to The President Illness, leave us a review, and tell your friends and anyone else you know. ⁓ And we'd love to hear your feedback.

Alyssa Burgart (52:11)
And you can follow us on all the places we are on TikTok and Instagram at the present illness. And you can stay on top of all of our TPI related news.

Arghavan Salles (52:19)
We'll be back next week with some more headlines, hot takes, doom scrolling, and as always, we try to bring in some laughs as best we can.

Alyssa Burgart (52:28)
Until then, agitate, hydrate, take a nap. We will see you next time on The Present Illness. Also, do not take medical advice from random people on the internet or random people on a podcast. This show is for informational purposes. It's meant to be fun and it's certainly not medical advice. So please take your medical questions to a qualified professional. We'll see you next week.

Arghavan Salles (52:51)
Excellent.