They're the brains and voices behind Pod Save America, a political podcast by former Obama staffers dismayed by (but still able to joke about) Trumpism.
On Thursday, they're doing the show live at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater at 8 p.m. The following night, they'll do two shows in Miami.
The guys are Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor. Favreau and Lovett were Obama speechwriters; Pfeiffer was White House communications director, and Vietor was spokesperson for the National Security Council.
In the last 15-plus months, their company — called Crooked Media, a reference mocking of Trump's disdain of non-right-wing media outlets — has launched multiple podcasts and other digital political content.
Recently, they've taken the show on the road.
In a conversation with CL this week, Lovett and Vietor explained why stopping in Florida — not exactly a Dem beacon like Los Angeles or New York or D.C. — was important to the work they're doing ahead of the midterms.
“We don't want the show to be just about talking to Democrats," Vietor said. "We want to go to states that are Republican, that are swing states, that are important politically, so this is part of that ongoing process.”
Florida isn't exactly a red state, regardless of what the likes of House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Governor Rick Scott might like you to believe. But it is a purple one, in which voter enthusiasm determines election outcomes. Often, it's a bellwether at that.
So rallying the troops in a place that's so politically important (or at least convincing local Dems to hang in there despite it all) can't hurt.
Lovett added that he's expecting some love from a certain key political figure in the Sunshine State.
“Also, Marco Rubio's been so eager to have us,” he joked. “He's on our welcoming committee; he's the one who helped us put this whole thing together."
Rubio, after all, has long been a target for Lovett, who hosts a satirical podcast for Crooked Media called Lovett or Leave It.
Lovett told CL he pokes fun at Rubio in particular because he thinks the junior U.S. Senator for Florida, a Miami Republican with designs on the presidency, eschews principled stances on matters like guns in favor of ones that keep him in his party's good graces.
“I mean, Ted Cruz knows who Ted Cruz is," Lovett said. "Sometimes it doesn't seem as though Marco Rubio is familiar with who he is.”
Lovett said the outrageous or salacious things that have come out of the White House since January of last year aren't what bother him most about the current epoch. It's the GOP's complacency.
“It's not like I held Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio in such incredibly high esteem [prior to Trump's inauguration]," he said. "But there needs to be a word for people you don't trust who still manage to break your heart. Because they don't care enough about the country to tell the truth.”
Before Obama even gave his farewell speech, the guys at Crooked Media seemed to recognize the need to contrast the outgoing and incoming administrations and the way congressional leadership behaved during one administration versus another.
It started with Pod Save America but is now a budding left-of-center digital media empire.
For those who've spent the last two-plus years nursing Trump-induced anxiety, it's a refreshing alternative to cable news's ever-present acrimony.
If you're a listener ("friend of the pod," as they say), you're probably not all that interested in hearing what a rank-and-file Republican guest on a CNN panel has to say anyway.
They've intensely followed quite a few special elections that have taken place since January of 2017, from Democrat Jon Ossoff's loss in a suburban Georgia Congressional district to Doug Jones' somewhat surprising win against Roy Moore in last December's Alabama Senate race.
Vietor said the past couple of years should, if anything, show Democrats that, blue wave or not, winning elections takes a lot of work.
“I would want people to look at it as an opportunity, but one that will only come to be if we work really, really hard," Vietor said. "No one should sit on their butts and think we're going to just win everything back in 2018. We saw how that played out in 2016. But I think what we want Democrats to do is run an opponent in every single race, get people who only voted in the past to actually volunteer and put in time and money and effort into helping Democrats win races.”
Find tickets to Thursday's Ruth Eckerd Hall show here.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 5, 2018.