MARY
As promised, I am here with Michelle Kinney and Tara Setmayer, the co-founders of the absolutely essential and awesome super Pac, the Seneca Project. Welcome to you both, and first, before we even start, I just want to congratulate you on a phenomenal rollout and for coming up with this idea. Tara friend and fellow Nerd Avenger, it's one of those things that, until it happens, you don't realize just how vitally important it is. And I'm so grateful to have both of you here today on a very dark day in terms of what we're marking—the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision. So it would be great if you could tell us all about how you got here and what sparked this phenomenal idea.
TARA
Well, Mary, thank you so much and it's been a privilege to be part of the Nerd Avengers crew. I am grateful for that and that we're in this fight together and that you are on our advisory committee for the Seneca Project. It was really important to us. You were one of the first names—we said, we got to get Mary. She's kick ass. She's tough and she's just like us and that she takes no bs. And in this fight we need everyone. It's a coalition effort. And Michelle and I come from the right of center, left of center world. Everyone knows I'm a former Republican; Michelle's a Democrat, and we worked together for years at the Lincoln Project. And we were looking at the political landscape and saying, who's talking to left- and right-of-center women—moderate everyday women? Because as you mentioned, this is the anniversary of Dobbs, which has really cascaded into an assault on women's rights, which I don't think enough women fully appreciated until now as we see the headlines that it's more than just abortion rights.
It has cascaded into assault on women's rights in everything from IVF to contraception to some of these MAGA extremists are trying to go for no-fault divorce, trying to criminalize women who are pregnant and want to get divorced. Some of these people are saying they don't want women to vote anymore, like the [Republican] candidate for governor in North Carolina. I mean, it is out of control. It's an all-out season on women's rights.
We said, who's explaining what's at stake here for women not coming necessarily from a political side, because it affects all of us. It doesn't matter if you are bleeding out in an emergency room because the state you live in has now criminalized women's healthcare, whether you're a Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter. So as we were looking at the political landscape going into 2024 with the right of center women, the Haley voters, we hear that a lot, looking for somewhere to go.
They're not comfortable with Donald Trump and the direction the Republican party has gone in. And we saw that in the primary votes in closed primaries where all these Republicans were voting against Donald Trump even when Haley wasn't in the race anymore. Those are persuadable voters in swing states. And then you look at the left of center women voters in these states, they need to be fully engaged, too and not just take it for granted that, “oh, everyone else understands what's at stake. We might be a little upset with Biden on a couple things. Maybe we're not going to vote or we'll vote third party.” No, no, no, no, no, we can't have that. It's going to take all of us. And that was what really inspired us to say, no one else is doing this really. We'll do it if not us, who? And if not now, when? Thus the Seneca Project was born.
MARY
There really is no other time. What we're five months out, Michelle from the election? And I think what is most potentially galvanizing about what you're doing is the focus and the opportunity to throw out the whole, “I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat” dividing line. I have a PAC as well. It's called the Democracy Defense Fund, and I'm really proud of the work we do. But we see a recent poll saying that democracy is the number one issue among voters. Republicans say that too, which leads me to a believe that a lot of people in this country don't understand what democracy is or how it works. So focusing on something that's so salient and so immediately relevant to people's lives is a huge opportunity.
Michelle, one of the things that's so important about what you're doing is that it focuses in on a very specific issue that has cross-generational appeal, and that seems to be lacking in more amorphous issues like “Vote for Democracy,” “Vote for the Supreme Court.” So how are you utilizing that as a way to draw attention and to bring people into the fold?
MICHELLE
I think that democracy, and we were talking to Senator Boxer about this actually, about how democracy is such a huge concept, and it's such a big word that people don't, to your point, maybe don't understand what it means. So you really have to break it down to how democracy affects every piece of your life. And a big part of that is freedom and personal freedom and choice and having access to medical care if your life is in jeopardy. I mean, it's bananas that we're even having this conversation. I remember at the end of 2020, I was speaking on this panel and somebody in the audience asked me, oh, if they call the election for Biden, are you still going to be afraid that they're going to overturn Roe v Wade? And everybody on the panel was like, no, no, no. I'm like, yes, there's three appointees to the Supreme Court from Donald Trump that were personally handpicked by the Federal society.
So this has been a 50 year jaunt to take away the rights of women. And I feel like there's also so much misinformation in that space as well. And the evangelicals and the right wing crazies have just flooded the zone with crazy lies about what this all means. And I think that it's up to us really at the Seneca Project to make sure that women in the middle who are understandably living their lives, raising kids, working, juggling a million things, they're not maybe paying attention to every little detail of everything that's going on, that if you are a woman who maybe is experiencing a miscarriage, which there's a large, I think majority, there's a large number of women who've had to deal with that, myself included. And you don't really know what happens to yourself and to your body until you go through that. I was thinking about the man who's from Texas, Austin, Texas, [Ryan Hamilton] the radio host who's been kind of talking us all through the experience that his wife has been going through, having a miscarriage in the state of Texas, she was turned away by three hospitals. And these are just things that you don't think, “oh, that's not going to happen to me.” But it could, and it could put your life in a really risky situation where either you could die or you could lose your ability to have children after the fact.
I'm not sure that everyone really understands how bad it is, how bad it is, because it is that bad. And I think one of the most dangerous things that any of us can do is have a lack of imagination about how much it can get.
MARY
And what's alarming about the lack of imagination is that it's going to get worse, and we know that it's going to get worse. And Tara, what you guys are doing by taking it out of the realm of the political or at least attempting to do that, is really vital because the Supreme Court is determined to make it political by delaying any real decision about Mifepristone, for example. They're taking it out as an election issue in 2024, but they're just keeping their powder dry for when and if they get an administration that they want; and they haven't ruled yet on a case which is going to determine whether politicians—okay, in America 2024—whether politicians can put doctors in jail for treating pregnant patients who experiencing medical emergencies.
TARA
That's the Idaho case. When I say it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat, if you're bleeding out in an emergency room, that comes from what's happening in Idaho and that Supreme Court case and what's happening in Texas. Those are the two most stark examples of where that's happening right now. Right now. This isn't something notional, this isn't something we're making up. These are stories, real women and their stories of what's happening to them. And so, I don't know that enough women in the rest of the country fully appreciate that or aware of it even because they think it's just Idaho. No, no, no, no. It's coming everywhere, contingent upon the Supreme Court's decision here in that Idaho case. Or if Donald Trump and MAGA extremists are back in power, they're telling us what they plan to do. This idea that, “oh, well, it's up to the states?” We all know that that's a dog whistle.
That's what he's saying for now. But if he's in power, he will sign a national abortion. Absolutely. They will try to scale this extremism up. And this is more than just about abortion, which is another reason why the idea of choice and freedom that Michelle brought up we're kind of taking that language back. The right to choose has always been kind of owned by the left. It was always a pro-abortion stance.
Our first ad is called a “Time for Choosing” for a couple of reasons. It's a double entendre, obviously, for people who know about Ronald Reagan's most famous speech. We took it from his Rendezvous with Destiny speech. When Michelle was writing our first script—we wrote the script together—she said, “well, I don't know how good this is.” I read it, and the concept was that the choice is bigger than just abortion. It's our choice for agency over our bodies, our freedoms. And I said, “Yeah, you know what? This is very in line with the Reagan speech.” And she's like, “What Reagan speech?”
MICHELLE
Yeah. I was like, Democrats, liberals, we don't sit around watching Reagan speeches.
MARY
We we're not nostalgic about Reagan.
TARA
I was like, what do you mean? I said, “Listen, you know what? That's our first ad. It really encompasses the bipartisan nature. This threat to American women transcends party lines, and it is a time for choosing.” So, ironically, the name of our first ad comes from a Reagan speech, but it speaks to everyone because it speaks to the moment that we're in. And that time for choosing, I think, is a theme that you'll hear from us more and more because we do not have time to sit around and ignore what's happening. Apathy is not an option, and we have the ability now to shape our future. We have to do it now. And those right of center women who are looking for that permission to vote for President Biden, we're trying to give that to them.
It's okay. No one has to know who you vote for. Michelle made the point on MSNBC the other day when we debuted our ad on Nicole Wallace (and we're so grateful to her for giving us that platform). She made the point that the ballot box is one of the few last sacred places where women have privacy and no one has taken that away from them yet. So it's between you and your ballot. No one else, just like the movement before was about, it's a choice between you and your doctor. Well, this is a choice between you and your ballot, and no one else has to know. So it's okay. Vote your interest and your conscience, which is for President Biden. You don't have to agree with him on anything else. But this is an existential threat to our lives, literally as women in this country, and to democracy. When you go after women's rights, it's a harbinger of an unhealthy democracy and what that can lead to. So it all ties in together in being bigger than politics.
MARY
Somebody asked me recently, “What do you say to people who just aren't excited about the candidates or are bored by the whole thing?” My first thought is to tell them to grow up. But that's not really productive, I guess if you're trying to talk to people and engage them. My second response would be, “Don't think about it as an individual contest between two old guys, because it's not. It is literally a contest between democracy and fascism.” And again, to get specific and literal about people's lives, it's a choice about whether women are going to be second class citizens. And Michelle, we know that it's it's already having an impact on pregnant women and increasing the number of pregnancies by rape among many other things. The numbers are through the roof.
MICHELLE
60,000 or something.
MARY
It's just horrific. And incest victims, et cetera. But even women outside and men outside of those states are making choices about where to live based on what's happening. College kids graduate and say, “Yeah, I can't go to that graduate school. I wanted to go to an Alabama, but I can’t now.” So it's already here.
MICHELLE
I was going to say, I had a conversation with one of my neighbors actually, whose daughter was looking at Florida State and eventually he's like, “Well, I can't send my daughter to the state of Florida. That would be just so dangerous and risky and Russian roulette because you just don't know what's going to happen. And if my daughter cannot have the same rights to healthcare that my son does, we're not doing that.” And to the point in our ad that if we don't make the right choice in this election, there's not going to be a state to go to. You can't escape like, “Hey, I need an abortion. I'm going to go to New York.” It's not going to matter because you're not going to be able to get one here either.
MARY
No.
MICHELLE
And I was going to say just really quick, let's say that New York was one of the last places you might not have time
TARA
Or the resources, right?
MARY
Well then resources don't matter at that point. If you are, as you say, are bleeding out in an emergency room, it doesn't matter how rich you are; you're not going to be able to get your private jet gassed up in time.
TARA
I don't know how many people know that there are doctors in Idaho talking about how horrible this is for them and how they've had to airlift a couple dozen women out of the state in order to give them the emergency care that they need because of these stupid freaking draconian laws that are on the books now in Idaho. So this is happening already. It's just a matter of whether we want it to scale up. And the answer to that is not no, but hell no. And there's the point about personalities and how we don't like either one. We actually had a line in our ad that we had to cut out for time reasons.
You'll hear the part where we say they're telling us it's a choice between left or right, but we know what the real choice is. The line that was originally after that was that it's a choice between two personalities, that we have to make a choice between two personalities and minimizing this, making it seem like, oh, whether do you like Biden or do you like Trump? No, no, no, no. It's bigger than that. It's bigger than the personalities. It's bigger than the negative partisanship of left or right. This is about the choice for our lives, our future, and the future of our democracy. That's why the idea of a time for choosing was the fundamental foundation for it all. Because this choices, it transcends party lines and we can't emphasize that enough. The other thing too is that it also, as you brought up earlier, the men play a role in this.
The girl dads, they're important. We need those allies. The Seneca Project came from the birthplace of the Women's Rights Movement in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention. And that was a coalition. It wasn't just women. Women were fed up. They said, enough is enough. We're tired of being treated as second class citizens. They were back then, even worse than now. And you had male allies that came in and said, yeah, you had black allies that came in and said, yeah, because they were treated like that, too. And it took a coalition of all of these different groups. We welcome the dad allies, we welcome the male allies. And research has shown that the relationship between dads and their daughters is the most powerful bond that could persuade them to change their behavior.
I'll give you a quick example. My husband is in law and federal law enforcement. And so it's a bunch of big tough guys. One of his coworkers saw our ad and watched it with his daughter, and his daughter turned to him and said, “See, dad, I tried to tell you.” And he was like, “I didn't really get it until she made that comment to me. Please tell your wife and her co-founder thank you for what they're doing. It opened up my eyes sitting there with my daughter turning to me going, ‘See Dad, I try to tell you for me to get it.’” So it's starting already, having that impact.
MARY
And I think it's so important to have instances like that and actions like the actions you're taking to take us beyond partisan politics, but also this cult of personality. I blame the whole, “Who would you rather have a beer with” thing for starting that. I really do. It stopped being about ideology and policy, and it became about likability. And again, don't get me started on why anybody would want to hang out with Donald. But it did become about that. And I think one thing that's missing on the left is the sense that voters have that somebody fighting for them.
Michelle, this seems like such a huge opportunity to put this front and center as an issue that is going to inspire people and make people feel like there really is something to fight for beyond two candidates they may or may not be excited about.
MICHELLE
And I mean, Tara always says that Democrats have to fall in love. And Republicans fall in line.
MARY
That's right.
MICHELLE
And the thing that's so funny about the choice between two personalities, let's say it really is, okay, who's the better guy here? Right? Who's the one who's been fighting for women his entire career?
MARY
It's amazing.
MICHELLE
Biden loves women. I think about all the years that he spent working on the Violence Against Women Act, his administration is the first time in American history. They have invested 12 billion in women's health. I mean, I was reading about just the word pregnant and women's health and the hush hush about our bodies and we're not allowed to talk about what's going on and how the episode of I Love Lucy, where she was pregnant and they couldn't even say the word pregnant on TV.
MARY
And they had to sleep in separate beds,
MICHELLE
I mean, just how insane? It wasn't until I think another decade or more later that they said it on the Dick Van Dyke show for the first time. So, it's that culture of silence around women's health and women's bodies and women's everything. Even with miscarriage, it's like, “Oh, don't tell anybody. Don't talk about it. Nobody wants to hear about it.” That has created this void for other people to come in and say crazy things that aren't true and make women feel less than. They have to shrink themselves to exist in our society. You look at somebody like Joe Biden, the way he loves his wife, the way he loves his daughter, his granddaughters. That's the kind of guy—I wish he was my grandpa. You know what I mean? You look at Donald Trump, who has spent his entire life doing terrible things to women, saying terrible things about women, an adjudicated rapist.
TARA
Joe Biden doesn't fantasize about dating his daughter or making those comments. It's just the contrast to Michelle's point is so vast. It's like, what is happening here? And that's why we say in our America, what the hell are we doing?
MARY
Actually, I have a question about that because it's one of the things that keeps me up night up at night, and there are so many: What do you say to women who are supporting Donald Trump? Let's put aside white evangelicals who are anti-choice in every single circumstance and live in their own little bubbles.
TARA
Yeah, they're not persuadable.
MARY
I haven't been interested in them in a long time because it's a waste of energy and resources to try to talk to them or change their minds. They’re not changing my mind. We're not changing their minds. But the people you are targeting—it can't just be lack of engagement. It's really about how you talk to people who are willing to throw away their rights, their daughter's rights, their friend's rights, and for what exactly? I don't know.
TARA
I think the persuadables are the people who already are looking for the exit from the Republicans and the Trump train that they've potentially been on. They're looking at all of it in its entirety going, “This doesn't sit right with us. We're not okay with this. This is not my father's Republican party. It's not my grandmother's Republican party. Even I am not okay with this, but I'm not a Democrat and I've voted Republican my whole life. Is it okay? Can I do this?” And that's where we go with telling the personal stories. Our organization is women led. And so we want to be able to speak to women as women, two women saying to them, “Look, this is not about the partisanship. It's about your future and it's about the future you want for your kids.”
I think that those stories, when we see the Biden campaign has begun doing this brilliantly, telling those real stories about how these things impacted real everyday women. Michelle having experience with miscarriages, it's real for her. There are millions of women who have gone through something similar and they're saying, “Yeah, I went through something similar and I didn't like that, and I don't want my daughter to go through something worse.” And that's where the idea of voting for who you think is best suited for your interest is a private decision. You don't have tell anyone, Senator Boxer, who is someone who was on the progressive left for a long time, she's kind of almost more of a moderate now on the Democratic party, she jokes. But we were on opposite ends of the political spectrum for a long time. I probably never agreed with anything Senator Boxer did when I was a Republican. But she jokes that we have come together though in solidarity on this because it's that important. It doesn't matter what the policy differences were before; this is so much bigger than that. And that's how you talk. That's how we present it. This isn't about that stuff. It's about real everyday life and real everyday rights that if we don't do this, if we don't make the right choice, the alternative is pretty unimaginable.
MARY
I love the way you both talk about solidarity. Michelle, you made such an excellent point about the veil of silence and the isolation that often surrounds reproductive issues. And I think the solidarity is vitally important for many reasons. But the two I think most salient for this conversation are one, the coming together of people who, and Tara, you and I have talked about this, maybe eight years ago, I don't know if we would've been able to have a conversation. I said this the other day, on the Nerds, “Hey, if I can do it, anybody could do it right? I can play well with others because everything is at stake here and we need to stay focused.” Michelle, the other thing, the lifting, that veil of silence and having conversations that we've never had before so that we don't lose any more ground, I think that is one of the most important things you guys are doing.
MICHELLE
I mean, to the miscarriage point, again, when it happened to me, I had no idea how many other women went through this until I did and started talking to my friends and they're like, “Oh, well I did, or my sister did, or my mom had three.” I'm like, “Oh my God, this is so common.” Why doesn't anybody talk about this? So opening up the dialogue for all of these issues, and especially, I mean IVF, right? This is a thing that is just honestly bonkers to me that the right is going after. It's like the purity, “Oh, well, if you didn't do it the natural way, it's not God's way.”.
MARY
Fetal personhood.
MICHELLE
Insane. I remember the senator from Hawaii, Brian Schatz was on the floor talking about this when it first came up in Alabama. And he said, “I never thought that IVF was political. I truly didn't.” And most people in my age group, we know somebody or many people who have been able to conceive and start a family through IVF. It's very expensive; it can be financially taxing, physically taxing, emotionally taxing. It is really an all-around investment that people make because they want to start a family so badly. And for the conservatives and the Republican party to be going after a people’s rights to start a family is just the cruelest, most just foul act I think that they could do. I mean, it's just cruel and awful.
TARA
Michelle, to your point, out of step with mainstream America. That's an extreme position, but yet we're empowering these people to try to implement this. If you don't make the right choice at the ballot box, which is I think the bigger point here. I mean, IVF has like 90% support in the country, for God's sakes. Nobody can agree on 90% of anything, but they agree on 90% that IVF should be available.
MICHELLE
The fundamental part of conservatism is about small government and get the government out of my life, get the government out of my business. And yet they're the first ones to be like, “Let me tell you how to live. Let me tell you how to have a baby. Let me tell you what you're going to do with your body.” It goes against everything that they preach.
MARY
And not only “let me tell you how to live your life,” but “let me make shit up so that I can make anybody who's pro-woman pro-reproductive rights look like a murderer.” I don't know if you guys saw this hearing, but Sen. John Kennedy lied. Nobody terminates a pregnancy in the final trimester unless something horrible happens. You get that far in a pregnancy, unless you live in one of those red states without abortion access, you choose to go that far in a pregnancy, you want that child.
MICHELLE
It’s the most devastating thing that can happen to someone. They probably have already picked out colors for the nursery and a crib and all these things, and they get the most devastating news of their lives. And they have to make a choice. Sometimes the baby dies. And having that in your body, you can die. You can get sepsis. There are a lot of states up until recently, that was illegal to even do that, and you would have to go to another state to be able to handle that.
MARY
Again, I am really grateful you're here today on this anniversary because it's a difficult thing to wrap my head around. So to have you two doing this unspeakably vital work, I mean, I said this to Tara when she told me about it, that this fills a void that shouldn't have been allowed to exist, but that you identified it and rushed in to fill it with this incredible work. Tell us how people can get involved. How do we follow the work you're doing? Where can we find out about other appearances or how to be supportive, get other people involved, all that good stuff?
TARA
Mary, Michelle and I will speak from Michelle right now, we are so grateful for your support and your being involved in this fight with us because you have an incredible voice. You have an incredible reach and experience in fighting against some of this MAGA scourge that we are fighting against. And it really helps us branch out to speak to all of the different types of folks that we need to because it is a coalition effort. Truly, together we can win. There it is. Together we can win. And the way we are entrepreneurial in our upstart here that we are building the plane as we're flying it because there's an urgency of now of getting this out there. And our first ad, the more money we raise, the more eyeballs can see it, and then we can make more of these ads and put them into these swing states.
There's a national strategy as well, but the swing states, the battleground states where this election is going to be decided. Michigan and Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, these are the places that really are going to make the difference. So, you want to support us, they can go to Seneca Project.us. That’s our website. You can donate there. You can also see our first ad there. We will be posting more as Seneca Project is featured more and more in the news. And thankfully, I have a cable news footprint, so you get to see me a little more often and we'll be posting those things there, what we're doing, and you can keep up with what we're doing. Follow us on social media, we're on Twitter.
MICHELLE
YouTube as well. We're going to have all the media hits, all of our content, our ads, everything will live on our YouTube as well.
MARY
And I'll keep all of my The Good in Us peeps apprised. And obviously we're going to keep talking about this over at the Nerd Avengers because I believe this is the issue of our time. It's going to define who we choose to be, while we still have a choice, as a people. It just is. This is it. So again, one, I'm really grateful and humbled by your wanting me to be along for the ride. I'm so excited about this work, and I think it's going to be amazing what you accomplished in the next few months. And I'm just really glad you spent some time with us here today on this really important day and just shared all of your plans with us. So thank you so much, Michelle, Tara, and come back anytime the invitation is open, and I will see you both soon.
Seneca Project website:
http://Senecaproject.us
Twitter: @senecaprojectus
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SenecaProjectUS
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