How Democrats are trying to win back voters

Summary

Apple News Today: How Democrats Are Trying to Win Back Voters

Release Date: May 2, 2025
Host: Shemitah Basu

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1. Presidential Staffing Shakeup Amid Communication Controversy

In the early segments of the episode, Shemitah Basu discusses President Trump's significant personnel changes within his administration. The president removed his top advisor, Mike Waltz, from his position as National Security Advisor. Trump announced plans to nominate Waltz as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. This decision follows Waltz's controversial use of the Signal app to share classified information, including military strategies concerning Yemen.

Key Points:

• Signal Chat Incident: Waltz added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat that included high-level officials, violating secure communication protocols.
• Republican Response: While Trump reassigns Waltz, he also fired his deputy, Alex Wong, and defended his actions by attributing the issue to technological failures rather than a broader "witch hunt."

Notable Quote:

“My job is to make sure everything's coordinated. But how does that work?... I didn't see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else.”
— Laura Ingraham [01:19]

Perry Bacon, a columnist at the Washington Post, was consulted for his perspective on Trump’s handling of the situation. Bacon expressed confidence in Trump's management, stating, “I don't think he should apologize. I think he's doing his best.” [01:57]

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2. Democratic Party’s Struggle to Reconnect with Voters

Transitioning to the Democratic side, Basu outlines the party's declining favorability, citing a CNN poll where Democrats hold a 29% favorability rating—the lowest since 1992. The Democrats face voter frustration over perceived inaction in Congress and occasional support of Trump’s agenda, such as preventing a government shutdown.

Key Points:

• Internal Divisions: Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer advocate for a cautious approach, allowing Trump to make mistakes and hoping he will falter on his own. In contrast, figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders push for more direct opposition.
• Strategic Debates: The central debate within the party revolves around whether to actively fight against Trump now or wait until the midterm elections to consolidate opposition.

Notable Quote:

“The real divide is over kind of fight versus kind of wait till the midterms.”
— Perry Bacon [04:34]

Bacon further elaborates on strategies to win over moderates and independents, emphasizing the need to appeal to those who may have previously supported Trump but are now disillusioned. He highlights different approaches within the party, from bipartisan efforts to strong policy-driven campaigns aimed at the working class.

Notable Quote:

“The urgency about what Trump is doing is sort of... trumping the discussion about what the Democrats should do next.”
— Perry Bacon [07:15]

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3. Bipartisan Victory: The Take It Down Act

Despite heightened partisanship, Congress demonstrated rare unity by passing the Take It Down Act—a law targeting the online distribution of non-consensual sexual imagery, including deepfakes. The legislation received overwhelming support, with 409 votes in favor and only two opposed, and was championed by First Lady Melania Trump.

Key Points:

• Legislative Impact: The Act criminalizes the sharing of revenge porn and deepfake imagery, imposing significant penalties on offenders and holding platforms accountable.
• Expert Commentary: Olivia Carville, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, lauds the law but points out its limitations in targeting the creators of deepfake tools.

Notable Quote:

“This is a meaningful step forward to closing a very dangerous legal gap.”
— Olivia Carville [09:55]

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4. Judicial Rejections of Trump’s Immigration Tactics

The episode highlights a federal judge's recent ruling against President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify mass deportations. This 18th-century law was employed to deport Venezuelan men to El Salvador, many of whom were found to lack criminal records.

Key Points:

• Legal Challenges: The judge determined that the activities of the Venezuelan gangs did not meet the legal standards required by the Alien Enemies Act, thereby preventing further misuse of the law for deportations.
• Immigration Issues: Concurrently, the death of a 44-year-old Haitian woman in a Florida detention center has sparked outrage and demands for accountability from lawmakers.

Notable Quote:

“Marie had been complaining about chest pain for hours... Unfortunately, Marie never woke up. Her loved ones deserve answers.”
— Representative Sheila Scherfilis McCormick [12:47]

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5. Upcoming Focus: World Press Freedom Day

Basu concludes the episode by highlighting the significance of the upcoming World Press Freedom Day. Global media outlets are collaborating to spotlight the ten most urgent cases of imprisoned journalists worldwide, including the case of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong.

Key Points:

• Press Freedom Concerns: The episode underscores ongoing threats to journalistic integrity and freedom, with governments clamping down on pro-democracy voices.
• Future Content: Listeners are encouraged to explore the Levittown podcast series by Olivia Carville and Margie Murphy, which delves into the impact of deepfakes on small communities.

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Conclusion

This episode of Apple News Today provides a comprehensive analysis of the current political landscape, focusing on President Trump's administration changes and the Democratic Party's strategies to regain voter trust. It also touches on significant bipartisan legislation, judicial actions against controversial immigration policies, and global press freedom issues. Through in-depth discussions and expert insights, the episode offers listeners a nuanced understanding of the challenges and dynamics shaping American politics in 2025.

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For more detailed discussions and ongoing coverage, listeners are encouraged to access the full episode on the Apple News app.

Transcript

[Shemitah Basu]

Good morning. It's Friday, May 2nd. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News today. On today's show, how Democrats are speaking to voters 100 days into Trump's presidency. A rare show of congressional unity and names to know on World Press Freedom Day. But first to Washington, where President Trump made his first big staffing shakeup of his second term. He removed one of his top advisors, Mike Waltz, the now former National Security Advisor, and says he plans to nominate Waltz to be U.S. ambassador to the UN instead. Remember, Waltz added a journalist to a Signal chat in March where high level officials, including the Vice president, discussed military strikes in Yemen. Signal is not an approved, secure platform for sharing classified government information. And Waltz took responsibility for adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the top editor of the Atlantic, who published a story revealing what happened. But Waltz confused many, including Fox News's Laura Ingraham, with his explanation of how it happened.

[Laura Ingraham]

My job is to make sure everything's coordinated. But how does that work? I mean, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but how did the numbers. Have you ever had a. Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have an. And then you have somebody else's number there? I knew they make those mistakes, right? You got somebody else's number on someone else's contact. So of course I didn't see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else.

[Shemitah Basu]

Trump's decision to reassign Waltz and fire his deputy, Alex Wong, comes after he has defended both Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was also in the chat. Trump told NBC News he would not fire people over, quote, witch hunts. On other occasions, he's blamed the technology.

[Perry Bacon]

I don't think he should apologize. I think he's doing his best. It's equipment and technology that's not perfect and probably he won't be using it again, at least not in the very near future. What do you think?

[Shemitah Basu]

Republicans in the House, meanwhile, have blocked an attempt to launch a congressional probe into the matter. An internal investigation in the executive branch is ongoing. Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters he thinks Trump is focusing on the wrong person, saying they should be firing Hegseth. That's because reporters at the New York Times learned on the very same day Waltz created the Signal chat with Goldberg. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth created a second chat. He invited his wife, brother and lawyer, and he reportedly shared the Yemen attack plans in detail. Hagseth has since attacked the media, blamed disgruntled former employees, and described the Times reporting as a hit piece. To be confirmed as U S. Ambassador to the UN Waltz would need to go through the Senate confirmation process. Republicans have the majority, but Democrats will likely press him hard on the signal incident. While Trump looks for his replacement as national security advisor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will fill in the role. Temporarily holding both positions means Rubio will run both the National Security Council, which coordinates foreign policy, and the State department, which manages U.S. diplomacy. The last person to hold both of these powerful positions together was Henry Kissinger.

[Barry]

Foreign.

[Shemitah Basu]

Let'S turn now to the other side of the aisle, the state of the Democratic Party. 100 plus days into the Trump administration. Across multiple polls, the Democratic Party as a whole has lower approval ratings than President Trump, with a recent CNN poll showing Democrats with a favorability score of just 29%, the lowest for the party since 1992. Voters say they're frustrated by the lack of action they see in Congress and moments when Democrats have voted to support Trump's agenda, like when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted to fund the government and avoid a shutdown at the same time. Many Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Illinois Governor J.B. pritzker have been trying to speak directly to voters and galvanize the opposition to take stock of the Democratic Party's current strategy. I called up Perry Bacon, the columnist at the Washington Post.

[Barry]

I think there's a fighting versus kind of being more cautious divide still. I put Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. If you listen to them carefully, they're the Democratic leaders. What they say is we should not go overboard. We should not oppose too much. We should let Trump sink on his own. Like if you look at Schumer, he didn't want to do a government shutdown. In part, he was saying that Trump himself is going to make a lot of mistakes like he did in 2017. Let's let him fail on his own. That's one strategy. And then you have a lot of other Democrats who are out there saying we need to oppose him because the midterms are not next week, they're a year and a half from now. So we need to do stuff we can to oppose him. Now. The real divide is over kind of fight versus kind of wait till the midterms.

[Shemitah Basu]

You wrote a column recently for the Washington Post arguing that Democrats should really be focusing on speaking to and winning over moderates. What do you see them doing that is effective in that regard?

[Barry]

So what I was getting at was that inevitably win the election. You have to win people who are independents, moderates. And what I was trying to argue is, like, you're seeing a lot of different things going on right now. You have Governor Whitmer, who is focused very much on working with Trump and showing herself to be bipartisan. You also have people like Raphael Warnock, who's in Georgia, who won a lot of moderates in his reelection, who are being pretty critical of Trump and not being particularly conciliatory with him. So you have a bunch of different people trying a bunch of different approaches. I think the main divide is between people who think you have to win over Republican voters by saying, I agree with Trump on some things, and you have other people who are saying, Republican voters don't love Trump either. That's why he's unpopular. So you need to win a tiny sliver of moderates, independents, some of whom voted for Trump, but the sort of core Trump base likes Trump, and they're not gonna vote for a Democrat. So I think part of the question is it looks like Trump's got probably 40, 43% of people who are permanently with him, and that's what the approval rating show. But you probably have 7 or 8% of people who looks like in the polls who voted for Trump but don't like him now, and how do you get them to vote for Democrats? And I guess the Whitmer theory is to emphasize bipartisanship. I think the Bernie Sanders theory is emphasized policies that work for the working class and even if they're not necessarily bipartisan, I think that's the split is between how much do kind of swing vot vote based on how much you like Republicanism versus are they just looking for an appealing message? And it could come from the left, the center, or the right on some level.

[Shemitah Basu]

Yeah, yeah, I was gonna ask you to. And you're kind of laying this out already. But, like, what is the I'm working in 2025 strategy for Democrats?

[Barry]

I think the 2025 is focused on the tariffs and how many sort of normal federal employees who do normal things they fired. I think that's something that's resonating. Elon Musk being in Cabinet meetings strikes people as being weird. Trump keeps saying Canada should be the 51st state, which is annoying Canadians and Americans. I think so in some ways, I think that the midterms were today, the Democrats should just run a bunch of ads finding the seven most outlandish things Trump has done, and that would be a good campaign. And in fact, we don't have to guess the new prime minister of Canada. I don't really know what his policy agenda is, and he didn't talk about it very much. His agenda basically is we are Canadians, we are normal. Trump is crazy and his poll numbers shot up and that party won election, they were going to lose. And so in some ways, if you're the Democrats in Congress, you should be thinking, should the Democrats have a good message, a unified message? Sure. But that message probably needs to be less about our plans raising the minimum wage or our plans to change immigration policy or our plans to build manufacturing and just more, unfortunately, more negative campaigning against Trump will probably get it done right now. I think that's where people are. When you get to the presidential campaign, you do have to choose is the Buttigieg message better than the Sanders win, better than the AOC one? But I think we're not there yet. There are visions being debated right now, but I think that conversation is getting shunted in certain way because every day Trump does something extreme. And so I think in some ways the urgency about what Trump is doing is sort of, to use another word, is trumping the discussion about what the Democrats should do next.

[Shemitah Basu]

Barry, thank you so much for your time.

[Barry]

Thank you. I appreciate.

[Shemitah Basu]

Can seem in this highly partisan moment that our lawmakers in Congress can't agree on anything. But there was a rare moment of unity earlier this week when Congress passed the Take It Down Act, a law designed to stop the online spread of non consensual sexual imagery known commonly as revenge porn, including DeepF. The bill was championed by first lady Melania Trump and it passed in a remarkable show of bipartisan support. 409 votes in favor, just two opposed. President Trump is expected to sign it into law. The Take It down act makes the sharing and posting of these types of images a federal crime and carries punishments, including fines and possible prison time for victims targeted by deepfake porn creators online. It's being hailed as a big step in the right direction.

[Olivia Carville]

So there has been a lot of positive feedback about the law being passed and that includes that finally we get real concrete relief for victims who for a long time have had nowhere to turn, that this is a meaningful step forward to closing a very dangerous legal gap.

[Shemitah Basu]

That's Olivia Carville, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg businessweek. I spoke with her and her colleague Margie Murphy, a cybersecurity reporter, on this week's Apple News. In conversation, they've been reporting on the effects of AI and deepfakes. Carville said. Despite strong support for the bill, some think it doesn't go far enough.

[Olivia Carville]

So while the act targets the offenders who might be pumping the photos into these apps, and it also goes after the websites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, where this content can be shared, what the act doesn't do is go after those who are actually creating the tools to enable deepfake porn to be made.

[Shemitah Basu]

Carville and Murphy have a new podcast series called Levittown, where they tell the story of how one small town was upended by a deepfake scandal. During their reporting, they saw in real time just how the advancement of these tools has allowed entire communities to be targeted by creators of deepfakes. And they met remarkable victims who fought back. If you're listening in the Apple News app, we'll queue up that conversation to play for you next. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. A federal judge ruled Thursday that President Trump cannot use the Alien Enemies act to carry out mass deportations. The 18th century wartime provision allows presidents to quickly deport people from countries that are carrying out an armed, organized invasion of the United States. Trump used the act to justify sending hundreds of Venezuelan men to a high security prison in El Salvador, two of which judges have since ruled were wrongly deported. His administration claims the men belong to gangs, including the Venezuelan Trende Aragua. However, a CBS investigation found 75% had no criminal records. The judge said the gang's activities in the US do not meet the definition of the Alien Enemies act, so it cannot be used to detain or remove people from the country. This decision is the latest rebuke to Trump's aggressive deportations, which have involved little or no due process. Staying with immigration a 44 year old Haitian woman died in a Florida detention center last week, and lawmakers are demanding answers from ICE about how this happened. Here's representative Sheila Scherfilis McCormick, a Florida Democrat speaking from the House floor.

[Sheila Scherfilis McCormick]

Marie had been complaining about chest pain for hours. They gave her some pills and told her to go lie down. Unfortunately, Marie never woke up. Her loved ones deserve answers. They deserve accountability, like so many immigrant families who have their loved ones missing and who are hurt.

[Shemitah Basu]

ICE says her cause of death is under investigation and the agency has denied failing to provide emergency care. And finally, tomorrow is World Press Freedom Day. Global media outlets have come together to publish a list of the 10 most urgent cases of journalists who've been imprisoned by governments across the world. Time magazine has the full list, which includes Jimmy Lai, a journalist being held in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in Hong Kong. He's been there Since December of 2020, when the Chinese government cracked down on pro democracy advocacy and journalism. You can find that story and all the stories we cover today in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the news app right now, stick around. My full interview about Deepfake AI pornography with Olivia Carville and Margy Murphy from Bloomberg coming up next. If you're listening in the podcast app, just search for Apple News in conversation to find it. And we'll be back with the news on Monday.