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- [00:00]
Kara Swisher
Don't miss Blinds.com's 4th of July mega sale.
- [00:03]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Happening now. Save up to 50% plus get a free professional measure. Blinds.com invented a better way to shop.
- [00:09]
Kara Swisher
For window treatments with upfront pricing, no.
- [00:12]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Showroom markups and no salespeople in your home.
- [00:14]
Kara Swisher
Choose from classic shutters to outdoor shades and more, all backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee.
- [00:20]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Don't miss blinds.com's 4th of July mega sale. Save up to 50% plus get a free measure.
- [00:26]
Kara Swisher
Rules and restrictions may apply.
- [00:32]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Hi, it's Kara Swisher. New York magazine is dropping a special hamptons issue on June 23, spotlighting the personalities, social scenes and shifting power dynamics that define the summer enclave alongside the season's most exciting new openings. While New York has covered the Hamptons for years, this dedicated issue signals something more the enduring fascination with a world that, in summer becomes utterly unlike anywhere else. It's out June 23rd and on newsstands for a month. Don't miss it. Subscribe now to get access to it all. It's Fourth of July weekend, which means cookouts, fireworks, parades. But not everyone wants to celebrate the.
- [01:12]
Kara Swisher
Red, white and blue.
- [01:14]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Is it okay to still look at this flag and look at this country and be like, I can still find pride and love for this thing and what my ancestors helped build and what, you know, I helped contribute to this country to make this a livable place that's full of diversity and full of so much goodness. But does that can that live alongside the bad? Why are black people having a back.
- [01:34]
Kara Swisher
And forth with Americana? That's this week on Explain it to Me.
- [01:40]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
I agree with Marsha Blackburn. Whatever. I'm with you, Marcia. Today. Just today. That's it. Hi, everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media podcast network. I'm Kara Swisher. Scott is off today, sailing in some place, maybe Ibiza, who knows? So in his place, I brought someone actually smart, a fantastic co host, Kristin Soltis Anderson, who is a pollster, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and co founder of Echelon Insights. I was on the Chris Wallace show with her, and she is a Republican pollster. I am obviously. Well, I don't know what I am. Anyway, welcome, Kristin.
- [02:18]
Kara Swisher
Thank you so much for having me. I miss our weekly get togethers with Chris Wallace refereeing.
- [02:25]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Yes, I know they're quite good, but you're never really like. You're always so reasonable and then you convince me of things. I don't want to be conv. So that's why I'm having you here today. But there's a ton going on. What are you up to mostly right now? I mean, obviously you've been inundated with information as a pollster. Right.
- [02:42]
Kara Swisher
There's a ton of stuff going on. So you've got the tariffs that next week we will see 90 deals, 90 days. Does that work out? So lots of people interested in what's public opinion on tariffs in the economy, everything that's going on in the Middle East. Do people feel safe? Do they feel unsafe? What's their reaction now that we've had a little bit of time to digest what happened and then, of course, what's going on with one big beautiful bill and the many different ways you can try to gauge. Do Americans even know what this bill is? And from what they've seen, do they even like it?
- [03:13]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right. Which they don't. Right. I mean, we'll get to that. We'll get to all those things. You have some things to talk about today, do you, right now when you are doing polling, there's so much polling out there and there's so much Internet polling and everything else. Talk just a tiny bit about the business because people, like, don't trust polls, but they're glued to them at the same time. So give me an idea of how you figure this out when you're in, in this pool of info.
- [03:37]
Kara Swisher
You're right. It's very much one of those, like, the portions are terrible in so small kind of situations where people will say that, I hate polls, I don't trust polls, but they seem to know exactly what's going on in the polling averages. Look, distrust of polls or skepticism of polls is completely natural. I. I understand it. Oftentimes polls are used to do something they are not built to do. They are not actually great at pred down to within a point or two how a fluid situation might turn out a week or two down the road. And so I get why people are skeptical. The other challenge we're facing is technology makes it easier for me as a pollster to find you and ask you questions, and it makes it easier for you as a respondent to evade me, ignore me, block me, and so on. And then you add to that the way that AI is going to change our industry. It's going to make it so that you have more hurdles to jump through as a pollster to try to make sure. Are the people that I'm contacting and surveying really legitimate or are they bots? Are they bots that look an awful lot like people digitally. These are challenges that we as an industry are facing. And really, right now, the big thing that I am watching is there was a great Atlantic article, I think, a week or two ago that was about how teenagers are asking for landlines again. And, gosh, the return of the landline would be like the greatest thing ever.
- [05:00]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
For pollster because people answer the phone.
- [05:02]
Kara Swisher
No one answers the phone anymore. No one answers the phone.
- [05:05]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Not at all. But when you have so many of them out there, too, when they're doing them online. Elon Musk just did one. We'll talk about that in a minute. Like, about whether you should start an America party. Did one around a lot of things this week. He does it all the time. But he's not the only one. Everybody seems to have a hot take or I've polled these people. How do you stand out as an actual pollster with actual standards?
- [05:26]
Kara Swisher
So there are a couple of things you can do to stand out. One of them is you're not just looking for the cheapest, fastest data you can find. The reason why these panels exist of people that you can survey is not actually mostly for political purposes. It's because every brand under the sun has a marketing department that's trying to gauge how's our new ad campaign going? What do people think about our new consumer product, and so on and so forth. So most of these polling panels that a pollster in the political space is using don't first and foremost exist for political purposes.
- [05:57]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right. It's like, how do you like this? Clorox or whatever.
- [05:59]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, you have to be good at knowing how to take this. These panels that are made mostly to gauge what do people think about bleach or sneakers or anything, and make it into something that looks really like what an electorate will look like. What we do at my firm, we use the voter file. It's the publicly available list of everybody who's a registered voter. It's pretty frequently updated in most states. And that can at least give you some ground truth of who is and isn't registered to vote. How often do each of those people vote or not vote? And that can help you have some sense to that the people you're talking to are real people. They're registered voters. And you have a good idea of how often they are a voter.
- [06:37]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
And last question, you do this thing for the New York Times. You have the same people that you talk to. Is that. Is that helpful? Because you're trying to gauge their opinion over time. Correct.
- [06:48]
Kara Swisher
So for the New York Times, what's really fun is that's qualitative. We are bringing in, you know, eight to 12 people, depending on the group, to just talk to them for 90 minutes about what they think about a key issue. And there, you know, you're getting real people. You know, you're not getting bots. You're looking at each other face to face. You can see how they react to each other. And what's neat there is we have, as you mentioned, had times where we bring the same people back. You know, a year later we did one like that around January 6th. We had some Republicans come one year after January 6th and tell us, okay, a year later, how are you feeling about this horrible thing that happened in our country? And then we had those same people back a year after that to see, okay, how had the horror of the day converted into belief in a conspiracy theory or just a belief, it's not that big a deal, and so on and so forth.
- [07:35]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Oh, that's interesting. Now, one, one more question. There beefs between pollsters, there's beefs between journalists, that's for sure.
- [07:42]
Kara Swisher
For the most part, pollsters are all friends and that includes pollsters across the political aisle. So Republican and Democratic pollsters, we generally all view each other as part of the reality based community who are trying to live in a world that is driven by data. And so you find a lot of these fun partnerships between Republican and Democratic pollsters that do not exist anywhere else in the political consulting space. You don't find Republican and Democratic ad makers working together that often, but you will find that in, in polling, the beef is less, you know, your right versus left, and it's more quality versus people who are peddling garbage. And they, the folks that are peddling garbage, make it harder for the good pollsters to do their job because they, quote, lower prices, they set different market expectations, and then they're the ones that are out there sort of pushing narratives that you either have to debunk or.
- [08:33]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right, right. And it doesn't really matter if they're right or not right. They just move on to the next thing. All right, so we've got a lot to get to today, and you're bringing us some stats, too. We're also gonna talk about Paramount settling with Trump and Trump's latest target, New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mandani, who did spectacularly well now that the results are in. But first, so President Trump is hitting back at Elon Musk after days of Elon railing against Trump's big, beautiful bill, which just passed the Senate Trump took aim at the government subsidies that Elon's companies received and said the country would save a fortun. He also threatened to sic Doge on Elon and said it would, quote, take a look at deporting Elon when asked about that. He also said Doge would eat Elon for some reason. I'm not sure why. After those comments, Elon said it was so tempting to escalate, but he would refrain for now. And I had predicted that he was going to slap back over this bill because really, I know him pretty well previously and this would bother him. He's been ramping up the rhetoric, posting on X, that Republicans who vote for the bill will, quote, lose their primary next year if it's the last thing I do on this earth. Okay. And after declaring that we live in a one party country, the Porky Pig Party, Elon renews his calls to form a third party, the America Party, if the bill passes. So we're gonna talk about the bill in a moment. Let's start with the return of the few. Now, I am not surprised Elon erupted like this. I said he would when he did his first eruption and then apologized. But Tesla shares took a tumble on Tuesday, falling 5%. And this just came in. Tesla's global car sales fell sharply in the second quarter. Now he's expressing regret over his chainsaw stunt, saying it lacked empathy. You think? So he's threatening this third party. Let's start with this. You have some brand new polling on third parties in the United States which has been tried and tried again, although it has happened in the United States several times.
- [10:22]
Kara Swisher
Yeah. Polling on this really shows that a lot of Americans don't think that the two existing political parties are meeting their needs. But there's really not a lot of consensus about what a third party would look like. And the, the bad news for Elon Musk is that this kind of libertarian type viewpoint is most likely not where you would find a real viable third party spring up. So I've been doing research at my firm for the last number of years where what we do is we ask people, do you think of yourself as liberal or conservative? But then we also ask them a bunch of issue questions to get their sense of, you know, are you picking the conservative position on 10 out of 10 economic issues or 10 out of 10 social issues? And then we kind of plot every everybody out on a chart and we see where do people fall. And only 11% of voters are strong conservatives. Right. They're picking the right wing position on almost everything. And only 13% of Americans pick the strong liberal position on everything. There's a lot of people that choose a little from column A, a little from column B. But the problem for the libertarians is only about 5% of people tend to choose a bunch of liberal social positions and a bunch of conservative fiscal positions.
- [11:32]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Oh, wow.
- [11:33]
Kara Swisher
There are significantly more people who are the opposite who take a more sort of socially, culturally conservative viewpoint, but then also believe that, yeah, we should have robust government safety net and those sorts of things. So the problem that Musk is going to run into is yes, Americans don't love the two party system. Yes, there's a hunger for a third party. But no, it doesn't necessarily look exactly like what I think Musk's politics look like.
- [11:58]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right. So what would that look like? Like that they're socially conservative. That's interesting. Usually it was a socially liberal and fiscally conservative. That used to be kind of a thing from a lot of people in the center.
- [12:09]
Kara Swisher
Right. And you know, I do a lot of presentations to business leaders and I'll ask, you know, how many of you in this room would describe yourselves as fiscally conservative but socially moderate to progressive? And tons of hands go up and like the bad news for those folks is in the data, it's actually a very small portion of the electorate. We tried asking it a different way where we gave people five different hypothetical parties to choose from. One is kind of a far right, nationalist, populist type party. One is a more center right, maybe old school Republican Party. One is a center left Labor Party, one is a Green Party, and then one, we jokingly call it the Acela Party, but like that's not really what it's called, but it's this kind of Mike Bloomberg like socially moderate centrism. And that only gets 13% of voters.
- [12:54]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Oh, wow. Which one gets the most?
- [12:56]
Kara Swisher
The most is the Labor Party, Bernie Sanders. Well, so I, I don't know if I would say that's Bernie Sanders. I would think of it more almost as a, like maybe a John Fetterman setting aside. Like, I know he definitely has some views that are at odds with the Democratic majority on a couple cultural issues these days. But this idea of like middle class economics, labor unions, tax the rich a little bit, support programs for those less well off, but it's not like break up big corporations. Like that's what we said for the Green Party and that only got 6% in our polling. The more interesting thing I think to me too is that the right is really split. So While most Democrats coalesce into that kind of labor party type model, Republicans are very divided between this more old school, you know, three legged school stool of conservatism. Right. Strong military, strong families, limited government versus a. Like we're cracking down on illegal immigration, we're stopping political correctness, America first. Like that really does divide the right in our polling.
- [13:56]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
No foreign intervention, that kind of thing.
- [13:59]
Kara Swisher
So.
- [13:59]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
So they are they headed for a crack up in that way? It seems like it wants Trump. Trump is removed from the situation. There's a real crackup about to happen.
- [14:07]
Kara Swisher
It feels like Donald Trump is holding a lot of pieces together, that in the absence of a strong dominating personality who has just captured this party entirely, those cracks would begin to show. A lot of this Musk feud reminds me of the Tea Party days. I think I described it on air once as like the reheated leftovers of the Republican Party's inter family drama from like 2011. That these fights feel familiar, but they feel old. They feel like they come from an era before Donald Trump came in and said, it's my way or the highway. Right.
- [14:45]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
So, but is there a chance for him to have a party in here? What would it be if you were, if he said to you, kristen, I want you to create a party for me, what would you advise him? And he's gonna give you a pile of money and you'll do it, right? I don't know if you would, but you should because you would be a good influence on him. What would you advise him, Elon? This is the party you need to start.
- [15:07]
Kara Swisher
So I think he's got some good instincts in the sense of being anti establishment. Right. I think the problem that too many attempts to start a third party have had is that they have been too captive by existing establishment or it's like elites driving it. And so your sort of average American is like, well, I want a third party. But maybe not that he is of course an elite himself, but I think he is more comfortable breaking out of that sort of elite bubble. And so I think there's something about the anti establishment vibe you would need to pull this off. But I do think that this idea of just like slashing government and that being the main thing you're all about, that's tough to build a party around because you know Republicans, they love to cut spending, they love to talk about it at least, but the political reality of the popularity of cutting spending is very different. And so if you can talk a big game about it, but then when push comes to shove, what is it that you want to cut? You know, Doge has already cut most of the things now that were politically low hanging fruit. And we, I think we're going to see some thermostatic backlash to some of this too. Like foreign aid is something I've seen in poll after poll, was pretty popular to cut. Well, now that we've cut it, we're going to see the consequences of that. Wouldn't surprise me if all of a sudden funding for foreign aid becomes more popular than it was five years ago precisely because we've now cut it.
- [16:33]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Interesting. So one of the things he said is he lacked empathy. Again, polling on him is terrible, right? Correct. The biggest brand. Scott talks about this, the biggest brand diminishment and it's affecting his businesses. If you were hired by Tesla or Starlink or whatever, what would you say he'd do? He said he lacked empathy. That's sort of a little step towards I was an asshole. Right. I shouldn't have been such an asshole, essentially. What do you say to someone like that to get his brand back to where it was probably never.
- [17:05]
Kara Swisher
Yeah. This is part of why I'm surprised that he's picking the fight again, because I think he had an opportunity to say, I went in, I was trying to do things that I thought would be good for the country. I made some progress on some things. I didn't get some other things done. I'm now turning back to my businesses and I'm going to focus in on the core things that Americans thought were really cool about me before I got to into politics, that they think I'm a really smart person, they think I'm really innovative, they think I'm building things that are cool and are going to change life on this planet. I would encourage him to go back to those brand attributes like less Chainsaw, more Mars. And, and that to me feels like it would be the smartest short to medium term play for him in order to kind of rebuild his brand. I mean, I don't know that he's ever going to be back to like strong favorables among Democrats. But I mean, we live in a world where anything's possible. People love reinvention. And I think if he goes back to the things that have traditionally made people think he is a voice worth listening to, those attributes can still exist. They've just been blocked out by so much of the noise and the insanity.
- [18:11]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
The insanity. But at the same time, right now Democrats are not re accepting him. And now Republicans, who he thought were his new customers are now not accepting him because he fought with Trump and he continues to fight with Trump even if he doesn't name him, that's exactly who he's fighting with. And he is gonna. When he says, I can respond for now, he's going, He's. He, he is going to escalate. There's no question in my mind he's going to escalate.
- [18:33]
Kara Swisher
What do you. I'm curious, what do you think escalation will look like from Musk? Because when he talks about how he's going to go primary, every Republican that votes for this bill, that's a lot of people to primary. Like the nuts and bolts of politics of going in and finding a viable challenger, building their name id, taking out an incumbent, that's hard to do in a handful of races, much less taking out Inc. Almost the entire Republican conference. I think he's gonna find that that's more challenging than he thinks if he really tries it. But what do you think escalation would look like from him?
- [19:04]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
I think he'll. Like he said he's gonna back Thomas Massie. Where is he polling? Right. He's the one that pushes back on Trump. He's been the one who hasn't backed down in that regard. And Trump has threatened him. Now the other two Trump threatened are leaving, essentially, whether it's Tillis or Don Bacon or whoever.
- [19:20]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, Trump definitely has. Has levers he can pull. Trump can make Elon Musk's life very difficult. I am skeptical about how difficult Elon Musk can make Trump's life.
- [19:31]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right. Right. That he could, he could do something. What would. If he wanted to, what would be the best thing he could do? He shouldn't insult Trump. Correct. I think he's not going to resist. I think he's going to go back to Epstein. I think he's going to go. I don't know. I feel like scorched earth is his kind of policy in lots of ways. He doesn't care.
- [19:50]
Kara Swisher
I think the smartest business leaders in this crazy political moment are the ones that try to stay as far away as possible from anything partisan and from anything involving directly addressing Donald Trump. If the word Donald Trump is coming out of your mouth, you have created problems for yourself. The way I describe the Trump effect on everything is that that science experiment you can do as a kid where you put a bunch of pepper into a dish and then you put like a drop of dish soap in the middle and all the pepper like flies to the side of the dish. That's what happens. Anytime Trump gets involved in anything, everything flies out to the side. And that's a terrible way to run your business. When you need to be reaching customers across a political coalition, you need to be maintaining favorability from stakeholders. Donald Trump is the drop of dish soap that just makes everything fly to the sides. And so Musk has, he has gotten himself tangled up in Trump. He has benef. He had benefited from that by being a very powerful individual for a while. But there is a trade off there. And that gamble does not always work out well for everybody.
- [20:58]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Yeah. So Trump can do him more damage. Eventually he'll be able to do more damage. This guy didn't blow up rockets for no good. I'm just saying he's a blow up rocket kind of fella. That's my feeling, is that he is and he could do damage in the constant drumbeat of things. You know what I mean? If he was a normal person and he cared about blowing up his businesses, that's one thing. I don't think he care.
- [21:22]
Kara Swisher
That's.
- [21:22]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
You know what I mean? Like he, he math is very important to him and this math doesn't work. Right. And so it, he couldn't hold it in. You know, you'd think he wouldn't say anything about the veil, but he can help himself. He cannot. You saw how little control he had over himself. Right. Physically and mentally and everything else. But he really doesn't. And it's not a game, it's not a, I don't know. We'll see what he does. Eventually he will cause damage to these people, you know, because he doesn't care about the repercussions for himself. So let's move on to where things stand with the big, beautiful bill, which in most Americans, according to several polls, I think some of your own aren't exactly thrilled about. The bill narrowly passed through the Senate on Tuesday in a 51 to 50 vote, with three Republicans siding with Democrats and Vice President J.D. vance having to break it with a tie. As of the recording, the bill is now back in the House where Speaker Mike Johnson has vowed to get the bill over the line. He's been very successful previously in doing this. By the time you're listening to this, this may or may not have happened. Now I want to note a few things about this Senate bill. The latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office has adding more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. The bill cuts about $1 trillion from Medicaid and other health care programs. It also makes cuts to snap nearly 12 million people will lose healthcare coverage if it becomes law. What jumped out at you over the last few days? And we saw this debating and negotiating in the Senate, Obviously, Senator Lisa Murkowski, who I'm calling the Quisling, said it was an agonizing to vote for the bill, and yet she did. She kept trashing it as she was voting for it, which is, of course, typical of her. Talk a little bit about what jumped out at you and then this data you have. Yeah.
- [23:01]
Kara Swisher
So this bill is, it was always going to be a massive challenge because it is the, like, Cheesecake Factory menu of conservative priorities that some people in the coalition love and some people in the coalition hate. But you're kind of asking them to eat everything on the Cheesecake Factory menu all at once. Once. And, and so you, the, the thing you may love, like I may love my 1600 calorie Santa Fe salad, but, like, in order to get that, I have to agree to try a little bit of everything on the menu. And that's, that's the legislative situation they've all found themselves in. There's three things that are making this bill move, even though the polling isn't great. The first is the power of Donald Trump. He says, this is my agenda. This is my bill. You're with me or you're against me. And he's a very powerful force in the party. Nobody wants to cross him. He could, more so than Elon Musk, cause people problems in a primary. The second thing that's driving them is Republicans love cutting taxes. They like the Tax Cuts and jobs act from 2017. Their regret is only that they didn't do it earlier in that year, in 2017, that instead of doing it at the end of the year, they should have done it earlier. So it could have, in their thinking, helped them in the 2018 midterms. So they're like, like, we love this. We want to get it done, even if it is loaded up with all this other stuff that we might have questions about. The core thing is the tax cuts, and we've got to get it done. And that's the carrot that's dragging everybody to this bill, even if they have other reservations. But the final thing is that I think Republicans not incorrectly believe that they will be able to turn these numbers around. So because this bill contains so many multitudes in a poll, how do you even begin to ask about it? It is a Medicaid reform bill. It is a spending cuts bill. It is a tax cuts bill. It, for one point in time, was an AI regulation or non regulation bill. It's an EV tax credit bill. I mean, it is a child tax credit increase. It is the number of different ways you can describe this bill is almost infinite. And so the question is going to be Republicans have started to coalesce around. We're going to describe this as it's a tax cut and, or preventing a tax hike. And it is focusing on making sure we're putting America first. And they describe that as we're funding stuff for border security. We are putting in these work requirements on Medicaid, which in and of themselves test well.
- [25:31]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Lazy Medicaid people. Right.
- [25:34]
Kara Swisher
That's the Republican message. The Democratic message, on the other hand, is you're calling these people lazy Medicaid people. In reality, it's going to be hardworking people who can't figure out how to file the paperwork and they're going to get dropped from their health care because they can't navigate your new requirements. And that's going to be, as you mentioned, it's going to be 12 million people, many of whom you would say are deserving or are your neighbor or did vote for Donald Trump. And so the reality is, like, Republicans do have a message that can work, but if the reality of it is that the economy is not actually doing better by next November, or that these policies in states that begin to try to implement work requirements earlier, if that creates snags and causes people who voted for Trump to lose healthcare, there could be really big backlash to that to create that would create problems in a midterm.
- [26:20]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Why right now is it polling so badly?
- [26:22]
Kara Swisher
I think it's polling badly because if you don't like Donald Trump, you know you don't like it. And so you're already starting off with almost half of America right there that's like, oh, it's Trump's bill. I'm out. And then of those voters who do like Donald Trump, there's not unanimity that it is a good thing, because for some of them, they're like, well, I like Trump, but this has some things that I'm not crazy about. So it's easy for the opponents to all be unified against it. We don't like Trump. This is Trump's agenda. Trump bad bill, bad done. But for the supporters of it, you've got the criticisms from the middle, the Murkowskis, the Mike Lawlers of In the House, but you've also got attacks from the right, from the Chip Roys, the Thomas Masseys. And so it's like a two front War this bill is fighting, right?
- [27:09]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
What Marjorie Taylor Greene says, it's a shit show. Why is she doing that? Why are they all doing this from the right?
- [27:16]
Kara Swisher
I believe a lot of them, again, to the extent that this is echoes of the old Tea Party moment, they want to be the one that says, I stood up for true fiscal discipline, but they don't want to be the one that sinks the bill. Like, if the bill is already going down, they will happily be like, yes, I was part of helping to tank it because it's bad and we need to demand that we get a better deal. But like, none of them wants to be the one that causes this to go down. Nope. None of them want that headache. Because if so, they're not just going to be held responsible for you tanked the things that are unpopular. They're like, they're worried you'll be held responsible for, by, for making taxes go up. And that's not anything any Republican wants to do.
- [28:02]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
So the taxes is at the center of it. Correct. The idea of giving these, even if the Democrats are putting it out as a, as a gimme for wealthy people, is that a good message from a polling point of view?
- [28:14]
Kara Swisher
It's one of those things where when you test it, should we cut taxes for wealthy people? Even a lot of Republicans say no. But the reality is that the Tax Cuts and Jobs act from the first time around, the economy was doing pretty well under Trump during that first term. And so if Republicans say, we just want to keep that going, we don't want to undo that. That's a way you message it that people say, oh, well, that actually makes sense. Sense. So just using the same messages against it that were used last time, I'm not sure, actually moves the needle for Democrats. And it'll all also come down to what does the economy look like in November of next year. If the economy is in the tank, then everybody's going to vote for Democrats and Republicans are going to be in big trouble. If the economy looks good, then it'll make Trump look like he was right.
- [28:57]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
And what do you, what would you advise Democrats to do at this point? To just keep pounding in on the people who are going to not have their health care. This sort of scare tactics.
- [29:06]
Kara Swisher
I mean, I think they need to coalesce around a message because as you noted, I mean, one of the downsides of the bill having a million different pieces, it is a target rich environment for Democrats, but if they don't pick one or two main targets, that's going to be a problem if and right now, even though Republicans are having struggles, it is not as though the brand of the Democratic Party is great. It is not as though voters are saying they think Democrats have strong leadership and a clear vision. And so, like they need to sort some of that out as well. Well, if they want to have a chance at having a really good midterm next year.
- [29:41]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right. So the best message for them right at this moment, it depends on the economy. Right. It's the economy. Stupid kind of thing.
- [29:47]
Kara Swisher
It depends on the economy. I do think that the Medicaid message is potentially potent in part because of the new coalition Republicans have put together that includes a lot of people who are on Medicaid who may think of themselves as hardworking people, who nevertheless find that the new work requirements and such actually do catch them up in a paperwork problem. And suddenly they're without healthcare. And that is a huge, huge, huge potential problem if that's how this comes to pass.
- [30:17]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
That's sort of the leopard ate my face argument. So one of the big points of the connection to the bill as you just talked about, was something we've been talking about here a lot. On pivot to the 10 year moratorium on state laws regulating AI. The Senate voted 99 to 1 to strike the provision from the bill. They also got rid of the one about selling off public lands. But the loan holdout was Senator Thom Tillis, who's not running for reelection as a few days ago open. A few other big names in Silicon Valley have been lobbying for this amendment. I find it to be a silver lining in this whole mess. But how does that poll like states should be able to do? Green was on board for that. Lots of people, Democrats and Republicans.
- [30:53]
Kara Swisher
Yeah. So this is an issue that I did some polling on for Common Sense Media, which they're focused on kids safety online. And they came to me because I can help understand Republican voters and they wanted to know, okay, how does this actually test with the gop? And this was a provision that was really unpopular. It was unpopular on the left, it was unpopular on the right. And I wanted to know in this poll, okay, even if you're, if you're just asking people, do you think states shouldn't be allowed to regulate AI? That tests terribly, but I wanted to really pressure test it because at a, like a policy level, I understand the instinct to say it's really bad if you have a patchwork of 50 different state laws all telling tech companies what they can and can't do. We're in a race against China we need to be able to survive and be competitive and be cutting edge. And we can't do that if states red and blue are passing all kinds of nonsense legislation. Like I get the argument. So I wanted to test it and we pitted the strongest possible case for this legislation up against an argument that basically says it should be states rights. States should be able to do this. We need to be able to protect, affect kids and families. And even when you pit those things together, you still find a huge number of Republicans saying, yeah, I get the arguments that we need to be competitive on AI, but that doesn't mean you just handcuff states for 10 years. And so this was one where that's, that's how you get to 99 to 1, the Senate going, yeah, let's take.
- [32:27]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
This one out of here, this one out of here. So they just states rights always prevails and other world.
- [32:32]
Kara Swisher
Well, and it wasn't just states rights. I think in and of itself a states rights argument doesn't get you all the way there because it's kind of wonky. It's process. I think the thing that added to this and made it so powerful was the, like the safety of kids online. You know, it is possible for the federal government to pass legislation or for there to be regulation that, that people really like around AI, things like, like the take it down, you know, around things like revenge porn or AI, that, that kind of stuff gets really popular. But when we ask, you know, even when you're presenting, here's the reason why you don't want to have too much regulation on AI and you spell it out for people, Even then we still had by a 12 to 70 margin, people saying no. A blanket preemption on states goes too far because it could roll back these red and blue state protections for kids from tech related dangers. There was an attempt at a compromise where they had Senator Marsha from Tennessee. She's really big on this because she represents country music as well as, you know, she's, you know, socially conservative. They have a lot of interest in this like legislation around protecting kids. They tried to come up with language that would be a carve out that would try to exempt like kid safety focused stuff from this blanket preemption. But ultimately she decided that the compromise wasn't worth it.
- [33:52]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
And so yeah, yeah, she's got to stick to it. I agree with Marsha Blackburn. Well, we can come together. Wow.
- [33:58]
Kara Swisher
Wow.
- [33:59]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
I know.
- [34:00]
Kara Swisher
You bring a Republican on the show, all of a sudden you're agreeing with Marsha Blackburn.
- [34:04]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
You know what Everything else about her is just a hot fucking mess. But this one, she's when someone's directionally correct, Kristen, I'm gonna go with them. Right? She's directionally correct. All her reasoning, I appreciate that about you, Kara. Yeah, all her reasoning is like anti gay. It's always something terrible. I'll agree with her. And she goes, it's cause we have to protect ourselves from the gays. And I'm like, no, no, that' I'll bring you along, Marcia. Anyway, whatever. I'm with you, Marcia. Today. Just today. That's it. Okay. I was kind of pissed. She was actually making trying to make a five year. They were going to do a five year or whatever, I thought. No. Either stick to your guns or you don't. And I'm sure she has plenty of guns. Anyway, Kristen, let's go on a quick break. We come back, Paramount settles with Trump. Support for this show comes from smartsheet. You know that frustrating feeling when you're getting really into the flow of a work task, but when you hear a little ping of a message notification, you then switch your screen, then you open a new application, then check the message, then click on the link in the message. Whoops. That opened a new application and your flow is totally broken? Well, you're definitely not alone here. On average, this toggling between tasks and application adds up to about 9% of time spent working each year. That's five whole work weeks. This distracting tax switching is what Harvard Business Review called toggling tax and increases stress hormones, decreases focus, and makes it impossible to tap into a state of flow. That's where smartsheet comes in. Smartsheet is the work management software where you and your team can plan, track and deliver their best work without toggling back and forth between multiple applications. Imagine that you could do with those extra five work weeks if your work happened all in one place. Smartsheet work with Flow. Visit smartsheet.comfox today to learn more. Support for Pivot comes from IBM. Bigger isn't always better, especially with AI. Super sized models can drain your budget fast. Smaller ones are smart and can help cut AI cost up to 90%. Right. Size your models@IBM.com the AI built for business. IBM Roy told me about using AI to cruise his way through every assignment.
- [36:27]
Kara Swisher
I had to stop him and say, like, why would you go through so.
- [36:31]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Much effort to get into an elite.
- [36:34]
Kara Swisher
School like Columbia and then just not do?
- [36:37]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
And he said, I'm here to find a co founder and a wife. This week on the gray area is AI changing the college experience.
- [36:45]
Kara Swisher
Listen to the gray area with me, Sean Illing.
- [36:47]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
New episodes every Monday, available everywhere. Kristin, we're back with more news. And actually, this is what you were dovetailing is it's better to keep your head down. Paramount has agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit with President Trump that alleged a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was deceptively edited. The settlement does not include a statement of apology or regret. And in fact, Paramount had said this is just a ridiculous case, as did most lawyers think that asides from legal fees, the payment will go towards Trump's future presidential library. The settlement comes as Paramount seeks to complete a merger with Skydance Media, which requires approval from the Trump administration. Reminder that ABC News has agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a defamation case late last year, which is a much strong in this case. It's not. It's just not. So talk about this, the repercussions, I mean, obviously they want to get this deal through. It has the feel of a shakedown and a bribery that has been brought up against Sherry Redstone. It feels very urban, autocratic, very strange and lawfare, which is what's something that conservatives complain about. And it's also heinous on many levels. Your thoughts?
- [38:04]
Kara Swisher
So I can't help but think about this in the context of a couple of other lawsuits that have proceeded further down the road against media organizations. Not necessarily from Trump himself, but I think a lot about the Fox News defamation case and how much they had to pay out regarding, you know, the Dominion, Smartmatic, all of that. And then, you know, cnn, where I'm a contributor, where, where we met doing CR show. I mean, they had to settle a case around some stories earlier this year about someone who is trying to evacuate refugees from Afghanistan. At any rate, a lot of these media organizations, I think, feel like they are nervous about what happens when even if you feel like you've got a really good case and even if you feel like I'm just doing good journalism, it's not fair. I shouldn't be in this position. This just feels like a moment where the climate is not on your side and so, so do you just do the settlement, save yourself the embarrassment of discovery and going through a trial and all of that pain and suffering, even though it's going to cost you a pretty penny and even though you're going to have to swallow your pride, like which is the least painful path forward. But I also think that things like this are part of why, if you look over a long enough trend line, do you trust the news media? I mean, those numbers have been declining for a long time, but most recently, the decline is not actually coming from Republicans. It's from Democrats, and it's coming from Democrats. Whether they think that the media has become too soft on Trump or they've normalized Trump or that they are too sensationalist or what have you. Like, the decline in trust in the media from Republicans happened a while ago, and that has kind of bottomed out. The declines that we're continuing to see overall are actually being driven by Democrats who say, I don't know that I trust that these organizations are doing the right thing either. Right.
- [39:59]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
So in this case, I get the idea, oh, let's just let it go away. Right. That kind of thing. And I do, I understand in the case of Fox, they had a good case. Right. There was so many emails. There were like. It was like, it was frightening how bad they behaved in that situation. They knew just they had all the elements of proving it and they'll probably lose their next several cases in that area. So that was actually really egregious behavior on the point of the part of that news organization. And they deserve to lose, really, in many ways. In the case of abc, probably, I suspect there was some emails that weren't so great or texts or something like that. You know, there was. And there was an obvious mistake. It was when he had the information of how to say it. And we have had to correct it. We have changed stuff when we edit stuff if it's said wrong. So you have to really be careful. Whether they could have proved there was malice, that's a different situation. In this case, it's just not the case. And they have a brand 60 minutes. Two people have left the company. The staff is obviously, I don't know what they'll do today or whatever day, but it's a real problem of sort of collapsing what is a trusted institution, which is 60 minutes or something that isn't a problem. Right. Is that dangerous in the longer term or does it not matter at all?
- [41:15]
Kara Swisher
Yeah. I never love the use of lawsuits to try to achieve an end, especially if it's potentially going to have the effect of chilling free speech. I mean, this is one of the things that these days frustrates me a lot about the right is I think over the last decade there have been a lot of very legitimate questions raised about the existence of free speech in this country and the protection of free speech in the country, especially from, you know, when Conservatives say we're being silenced. Like, I'm sympathetic to those charges that you, you need free speech. And that has to include even speech that you think is offensive or is out of bounds. But then once you get the reins of power deciding that you actually do want to just like, stop speech that you don't like or, you know, chill speech, that does make me very concerned. Another case that I sort of think of as part and parcel of this, it's very personal to my industry, is the lawsuits against Ann Selzer, the pollster in Iowa, and the lawsuits against Des Moines Register, the case. I believe the federal case was dropped, but I believe it was refiled as a state case and it was done a day in advance of the anti slap laws coming into effect in Iowa that are supposed to protect against the use of like, lawfare to go after people who engage in speech you don't like. So that's a case that I'm watching very closely because the idea that someone can come after you and sue you because they think that your poll was wrong and that it was reported on, you know, know, in a way you didn't like in a paper, that's very, very, very concerning.
- [42:45]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Where does it go from here? This. Does this embolden Trump to do? Because they're doing it all over the place like anything he doesn't like. He threatened CNN the other day. He threatened for reporting on an app like that. There exists the existence of an app. They didn't say, please buy this or use it. It's about ice. This ICE app. Does this. What happens here? Is there a point where, where people say no more or they overreach or not at all. If it works, I mean, if this works and these people, especially if you're a company that wants something and you always want something from the government, right? Or it's just once it stops working, it's going to be hell to pay, I suspect, for Republicans.
- [43:25]
Kara Swisher
I don't know where this ends. And this is where, not being a lawyer, I'm unsure of what the strategy is in terms of continuously trying to push people into, in courts and like, how much pain do you incur if you do try to fight back? I'm less familiar with that. But I know that if you look at sort of Trump's target list, he is picking targets that are not beloved by the sort of general public, whether it's the media, Ivy League institutions, you know, big powerful law firms. Like, he's picking targets that your sort of median American goes, yeah, I don't really like them that much anyways. And I that has been, I think, at least savvy political strategy on his part. Setting aside that I don't feel qualified to comment on it as a legal strategy.
- [44:10]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right. And is there any chance the media's image will bounce forward in any way? What would happen to do that?
- [44:18]
Kara Swisher
Well, I do think that you're right that at least in the short term, it much the same way that we were talking about with Musk earlier, that he lost his credibility with Democrats and now he's picking fights with Republicans. But he's unlikely to, at least in the short, short term, see like a resurgence of love and admiration among the Democrats that he has alienated over the last couple of years. I sort of feel like this may be the same way, at least in the short term, that, like by doing this, it's not as though you're going to suddenly have a bunch of Republicans who are like, fantastic. These news organizations have all made big donations to the Trump library. We love them. Like, at least in the short term it just means that kind of everybody's mad at you, even if for very different reasons.
- [44:58]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Yeah, absolutely. You don't win at all. I don't know. I think fighting is probably better. But they want this deal. They want this deal to happen. There have been threats later to go back at them as a bribe someday. I doubt they'll get to that. But. So they're making that calculation that Democrats won't wreak revenge once they get back in power. But we'll see. Maybe they will. They have long memories. And President Trump says he also has a buyer for TikTok, another thing that he's doing in the media. Let's listen to a clip of the announcement on Fox News. An interview with Maria Bartolome Roman. We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way. I think I'll need probably China approval and I think President Xi will probably do it. I'll tell you in about two weeks.
- [45:40]
Kara Swisher
A big technology company.
- [45:42]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
They are very, very wealthy people. It's a group of very wealthy people. The Pentual buyers reported the same investor consortium before the first bid stalled amidst trade talks. Oracle Corp. Blackstone Inc. And Andreessen Horowitz. The president recently signed an executive order extending the debt to headline for the third time. The law requires ByteDance to divest from the platform, so we'll see. Polling in a few months ago showed support for TikTok bans standing at 34%. Not great. Where are we on polling this? Have people forgotten? Given all the other news happening, polling.
- [46:12]
Kara Swisher
On the TikTok ban has been fascinating because a couple of years ago when you did polling around something like TikTok, there were real concerns about it. Right. Is this Chinese propaganda? Is this warping kids minds? Is it taking too much of their attention? And you know, when this was initially proposed and passed by Congress, it, it was reasonably popular really. The only people who were particularly mad about it were the kids who used TikTok. But TikTok very, very smartly was able to marshal their users and to make the case. How can you take this from us? And I think because Donald Trump perceives that he won his election in part by doing well among some of these disaffected gen zers who may be using a lot of tikt, he is not inclined to tick off that constituency. And so he loves to be viewed as a deal maker. His position on China is fascinating because he likes to talk about being tough on China, but he also likes to talk about coming to deals with Xi. So this is sort of ready made to be the kind of thing where even though being tough on China is almost never a losing position within the Republican coalition on this one, the very particular constituency of who really loves TikTok is a group that Trump is trying to win over.
- [47:29]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
And so it's good if he comes to a deal, even if he hands it over to people or not, if he doesn't, what happens if China says fuck you, like no way we're doing this?
- [47:39]
Kara Swisher
Well, I'm curious about how legally this can all proceed, because my understanding is that Congress was pretty clear that this has to happen. And so I expect if Trump does, how much longer can he keep saying like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Congress, you passed this law. But I'm kind of not going to follow it because I don't really feel like it. Like at a certain point, doesn't the court have to intervene?
- [47:59]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
No, you'd think Congress would do its job, but they seem to be abrogating a lot of that.
- [48:04]
Kara Swisher
Well, Congress is saying that they already did their job. And so that's like this is now. You know, they've already passed a bill saying Trump has to do this.
- [48:11]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Yes. They hold him to account over so many things. Just like, come on, it's like down the list. Like, I don't know, he doesn't listen to them in otherwise. But it'll be interesting to see if he gets a real bump if something really comes off, even if he's handing it over to, to his friends, whether it's Larry Ellison or Marc Andreessen. Correct. I mean, nobody cares about that, that these rich people are getting another break.
- [48:34]
Kara Swisher
Essentially, he will just love that he can say, I made another deal. And it will just add one more piece to the puzzle of his kind of brand image on that front.
- [48:43]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right. So that works more, more than the particulars. All right, Kristen, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, I'm very excited to talk to you about this. Trump targets need York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani.
- [49:01]
Kara Swisher
The Supreme Court just ruled on a case about pornography and free speech. The court has ruled on this numerous times, including in the sexy 70s.
- [49:10]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
So there was one film that came up in front of the Supreme Court, and the plot of this thing was literally, there's a woman, she likes sex. She has a lot of sex, and then she gets on an airplane and the airplane is hijacked. We could stop in Sacramento, couldn't we?
- [49:23]
Kara Swisher
We'd be violating international law.
- [49:24]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
And I suggest you violate it. Huh? If I am correct, with six stops for refueling, we shall be in Havana in approximately 30 hours, at which time and the hijacker launches into this lecture on the relative virtues of communist and capitalist societies. The communist countries have far less money than America, but the people work together as equals. Now, why did that happen? Well, one reason is because it meant the film was protected by the First Amendment. Today explained a wild ride every weekday. The Supreme Court has just held that federal judges can't block even unconstitutional executive orders throughout the country. So what now? I'm Preet Bharara, and this week, Supreme Court experts Trevor Morrison, Melissa Murray, and Jack Goldsmith join me on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet to discuss the biggest implications of the court's term. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, y'?
- [50:27]
Kara Swisher
All?
- [50:27]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
It's Kenny Beachum. The 2024, 2025 NBA season is over. But all that means for us is that the 2025, 2026 season season is already beginning. On Small Ball, we'll be talking about breaking news, major trades, and all the exciting developments the offseason has in store. Which teams are tearing it down? Who is retooling to make a championship push? And what teams are leaving me dumbfounded by their lack of direction.
- [50:51]
Kara Swisher
Don't miss Small Ball with Kenny beach.
- [50:53]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Of new episodes drop every Friday, available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast. Kristen, we're back. Official results are in for New York City's Democratic mayoral primary. And Zoran Mamdani took it away with a massive 12% lead. Mamdani still faces a general election, which will include incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and potentially Andrew Cuomo again. Meanwhile, President Trump was asked about Mamdani at a press briefing on Tuesday and made some pretty bold claims. Let's listen to a clip of Trump's response to being asked what he would do if Mamdani blocked ICE raids in the well, then we'll have to arrest him. Look, we don't need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I'm going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation. Trump then took things a little further, saying this. A lot of people are saying he's here illegally. He's, you know, we're going to look at everything. Mamdani was Naturalized as a US Citizen 2018. He responded on social media saying, we will not accept this intimidation. Any big takeaways from Mamdani's official win, Kristen? And also these threats, which are troubling, I would say, to say the least.
- [52:03]
Kara Swisher
Yeah. For. In terms of the win. First, I cannot imagine why the sort of Democratic establishment thought that selling Andrew Cuomo with all of his baggage was going to work. It is in some ways kind of appalling and an indictment of New York's Democratic establishment that they couldn't come up with a better alternative. But I also don't want to take anything away from Mamdani here. I think making the number one issue. The number one issue issue, which is cost of living stuff, costs too much and it should cost less. Is. It is. That's the right strategy. And he paired it with. And this is something that I also think AOC is so good at, despite the fact that, like, I don't agree with her on a ton of policy, but I, I rate her very highly as a political communicator. She's very good at showing up where voters are and speaking to them the way voters want to be spoken to. It's not condescending. It's not overly fancy or overly technical, but it's not dumb. It's not dumbed down, so to speak. It's just speaking normally. And like, most politicians are just allergic to doing that for reasons I cannot comprehend. And he's very good at it. The video of him talking about, like, make halal $8 again, like, is. It was a really great video. Like, stuff like that. So good.
- [53:20]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
You liked him a little bit, didn't you? You like, liked him sort of like Trump in a lot of ways.
- [53:24]
Kara Swisher
Look, I, I think that populism plus t not even TV savvy, but like media savvy is a very potent combination. And I think he has it. And. But I would also say, I think there's a lot of like over reading into this about what it means ideologically. There was a quote from a Democratic strategist, like the morning after the win that was something like our base, they're always voting for these insane ideas and these far left lunatics. And it was this like real contempt for the Democratic base coming from this like, centrist Democratic strategist. But I don't actually think that the Democratic base on the whole is super ideologically to the left on economic issues. Like, they are very open to a robust role for government. But I don't think that actually the majority of the Democratic electorate is like truly DSA stay aligned. And so what works in a Democratic primary in Manhattan is not necessarily transferable anywhere. The other thing that I think is very valuable, though, to learn from Mamdani's win. If you looked at the age breakouts of people who voted in this primary, younger voters were like the biggest group of voters. That almost never happens in, especially in a primary, which is always like a really low turnout sort of thing. It's exactly the kind of contest young voters typically see it out. He turned them out. So I take nothing away from him on those grounds. Even though I disagree with him on a lot of policy. I think this feud between him and Trump is. It's probably going to benefit both parties involved. As much as I think the whole idea of trying to denaturalize someone because you don't like what they're saying, I think is terrible. Everything I said earlier about free speech, we should not be in the business of trying to punish people's speech and saying we don't like what you said.
- [55:12]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
That does not poll well. I can't imagine people do not want.
- [55:14]
Kara Swisher
People generally just like, deported because you are, you know, left leaning or you said even. Even in the cases where you said something that's really offensive, like if you are a naturalized US Citizen, being deported, I cannot imagine is something that would be popular. At the same time, Donald Trump is going to love the elevation of Mamdani as like the face of the Democratic Party, he will think that is a very advantageous dynamic for the White House. At the same time that it's probably good for Mom D politically to be coming under fire from Trump because to the extent that there were any like, wavering establishment Democrats or centrist Democrats who were like, ugh Maybe we just vote for Eric Adams because we can't with this crazy guy. If all of a sudden he is like the poster child for I am taking the fight to Trump. That probably does pretty well to unify the Democratic base behind you as you move into a general election in November. So it's not to say that there was like a Republican candidate who I think was going to win and become mayor of New York, but to the extent that there are independent challenges, challenges, it's probably good for Mamdani to have to be in the line of fire from Trump.
- [56:17]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
The ratings are good, as Trump would say. But talk about where he did well. He did well with young people. What kills me is that they're like, young people don't vote and then they vote. They're like, we don't like how young people vote. It was sort of like they're voting and it's up to them to decide what they want. Do you see the Democratic reaction has been really interesting and sort of they're upset. They're largely upset around globalize, the intifada. He won't push back on that. That seems to be the. But they also were sort of shocked by this in a way that I wasn't shocked or other people weren't. It's really interesting because when you look at voters, they complain about young people not voting, and then they did and they didn't like it. And the same thing was with Sanders. Whether it's with aoc, they're hugely popular. Why the response of the Democratic establishment?
- [57:07]
Kara Swisher
Well, this reminds me a lot of the sort of freakout that a lot of Republican strategists had when the Tea Party movement was getting going in the sense that it was very like, it felt like, oh, these people are kind of off putting to me, and they're going to drag our party in a direction that's going to make it impossible for us to win elections. And that wasn't 100% true. And I think the same thing is the case here, that I think there are certain positions that the sort of further left wing of the Democratic Party takes that have been a big political problem for Democrats. I think it is true that they pulled Democrats too far to the left on a number of things that gave Trump this big opening. But with that said, I think in the case of New York City, the idea that suddenly somebody like Mamdani is gonna win a primary for, like, the South Carolina Senate seat. Yeah. If that happened, then Democrats aren't winning the South Carolina Senate seat. Like, that's True. But you also have to adapt to like, what's, what's the right candidate for my area area? And like, who are, who are the voters there? What do they care about? And so something that is okay in New York may not be okay for trying to pick up a swing congressional seat in Iowa, but smart parties are able to, to understand that different electorates exist in different places.
- [58:26]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Right. And so Mamdani's approach could be used by a centrist. Right. It just depends if you're genuine. The qualities here are genuineness. And one of the things I was struck by is Bill Stepien, who's a very well known Repub. Duncan campaign person, said, don't make fun of this guy. He's like, in the similar way people are like, I used to say, don't make fun of Trump. Like, Trump is interesting, right? Do you see that at all? It was interesting that he said that when they were sort of touting, oh no, now we've got them. I'm like, do you. Because he's really attractive, like in so many ways.
- [58:59]
Kara Swisher
I think I 100% agree with Stepien on this one. I think communication, satisfaction, savvy genuineness, as you described it, that matters so much. There is so much noise and there is so much stuff that politicians say and do that just sounds the same and it just washes over people. People can pick up a talking point from a thousand yards away. And if you are able to communicate in a way that does not sound like you're just regurgitating talking points, that doesn't sound like it's something you've, you know, you're just saying because, like, you've been fed it by a consultant. The benefit that the thing that makes Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders similar is that you actually believe they believe the things they are saying at some level. And that goes a long way. Like I believe Mamdani believes the things that he says. So even if I don't agree with him, like, at least that's, you get, you get some points for that.
- [59:51]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
What about freshness? Is that something that's important? Do you think they're calling it an earthquake for the Democratic Party? Do you think that's the case?
- [59:58]
Kara Swisher
I would caution everybody from reading too much into to a primary election in New York, but I think it ought to be a wake up call for anyone who thinks that you can just defend the status quo, that this is a wake up call, that in order to win elections in 2025, you have to be the candidate of change. You have to be you had to be the candidate of change in 2024, which was a big reason why Joe Biden was in trouble. And then the handoff to Kamala Harris was ultimately unsuccessful. You have to be the candidate of change. You have to be the candidate of what's new. And Mamdani was able to channel that very, very, very effectively.
- [60:36]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Now, last question. What would you advise him to do now if he, you know, he's going to do what he wants to do, but what's the most important thing he do?
- [60:43]
Kara Swisher
I. I would advise Mamdani to focus in on the cost of living question relentlessly. Do not get pulled in these other directions. He has said and done a lot of things in his past that his opponents did not dredge up in the primary that are gonna get dredged up now. But I think if he keeps his message focused on cost of living and does not become over consultantified and keeps his message pretty focused on we need New York to be a livable city again, I think he will succeed. Now, if he ultimately becomes mayor and he tries to implement these policies and things like city run grocery stores or rent freezes, have all of these second and third order next negative effects that folks on the right think are inevitably going to happen, then the backlash will come. But for the moment, I do think that Republicans should be wary of thinking, oh, let's just elevate this guy and like, it'll be great that he's the face of the Democratic Party. I think media savvy populism really sells. And be careful of thinking that you can make that really, really, really unpopular.
- [61:44]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Yeah, I always see them put up lists on Fox News and I'm like, that sounds good. It was just. I'm like, are you trying to get him elected? It's. It's kind of funny. All right, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.
- [61:59]
Kara Swisher
The summer is heating up with Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four.
- [62:03]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Light them up, Johnny.
- [62:07]
Kara Swisher
On July 25th.
- [62:08]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Time to save the planet.
- [62:09]
Kara Swisher
What's the plan?
- [62:10]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Trust me, I hate that. Bad plan. Come on. Terrible. That's a stupid, stupid plan. Prepare for fantastic. We will face this together as a family. Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four first steps only in theaters July 25th.
- [62:25]
Kara Swisher
Get tickets now.
- [62:26]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
This film is not yet rated.
- [62:29]
Kara Swisher
Shop 4th of July Savings at the Home Depot right now and get up to 40 off plus up to an extra 600 off.
- [62:35]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Select appliances with free delivery like Samsung from all in one washer dryer to smart refrigerators. Upgrade to tech you can trust with Samsung appliances. The Home Depot has what you need to simplify your routine. Don't miss 4th of July appliance savings at the Home Depot. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $396 or more. Offer valid June 18 through July 9, US only. See store or online for details. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down.
- [63:05]
Kara Swisher
So to help us, we brought in.
- [63:06]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
A reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless Everybody better get 30, 30 better to get.
- [63:13]
Kara Swisher
30, better get 20, 2020 better get.
- [63:14]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
20, 20 better get 15151515 just 15 bucks a month. So give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [63:22]
Kara Swisher
Payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra. See Mintmobile do.
- [63:33]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Okay, Kristin, let's hear a prediction.
- [63:35]
Kara Swisher
I predict that the F1 movie starring Brad Pitt, which came out a week ago and did very well at the box office both domestically and globally. I think it's gonna have legs. I know this weekend it is going up against a new Jurassic park movie. But I think this F1 movie is fantastic. I'm a big F1 fan. I saw it last week. I almost never see movies in theaters anymore, but it was so worth it. My prediction? This movie is going to have legs.
- [63:58]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Yeah, I'm excited to see this. And Apple finally has a hit. Like, they've done a lot of great movies, but they haven't had a big hit like this. And people will worry that F1 had jumped the shark a little bit in terms of expanding too quickly. But it's really good. I'm excited to see it. I'm excited. I may have to go with you because my wife doesn't want to see it. Krista, I may have to go.
- [64:18]
Kara Swisher
I'll go back and see it again.
- [64:19]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
All right.
- [64:19]
Kara Swisher
I would love to go back and see it again.
- [64:21]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
I'm excited to see it. My prediction has to do with Mark Zuckerberg's creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs this week. This is a group that will be focusing on Metas a AI efforts. He's been on a hiring spree, grabbing top talent. Zoe Schiffer from Wired had a great scoop. Zuckerberg offered pay packages up to $300 million over four years. One OpenAI staffer told Wired. That's about how much it would take for me to go work at Meta, though Meta is saying the size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place. That's not. He is trying very hard to do this. I do not think he's going to be successful. I mean, I don't think they did a lot of due diligence on scale AI as much as they should have. I think it's a lot more intern kind of a chaos. I think there's going to be a lot of chaos here and just grabbing all these people and creating like an Avengers team. That's what they're calling it. I don't think it always works. I don't think doing that is particularly smart. He has had a lot of misses, although the stock is at an all time high. Let's be clear, they're doing great in the areas they've always done great in. But he renamed the company Meta in order to go into the Metaverse and that was a 10, $20 billion disaster. And they can afford it. I just don't think he has the same sense of, of innovation that someone like Elon Musk or even OpenAI or other companies has. So I think this might be. I think he can afford to do this, but I think it's really the wrong way to go about doing innovation. So I'm not so sure it will pay off in the way he thinks it will. We'll see. How does he poll? Not well, I guess. Correct. Do people like him?
- [65:54]
Kara Swisher
I think most of the tech billionaire type folks have not polled particularly well. I think like 10 years ago there was a sense of like cool and excitement around them that now has sort.
- [66:07]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Of faded, has waned. Yeah, yeah, I know. He's leading the way. And the Bezos wedding, I'm guessing that didn't poll well.
- [66:13]
Kara Swisher
I have not. You know what, I haven't pulled on it, but we're actually putting a survey in the field next week. If you think of any question you would want me to ask the American public about this wedding, you let me know.
- [66:21]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Is this a heinous display of wealth in the most grotesque and tasteless way? There's my question right there.
- [66:28]
Kara Swisher
If you had gotten invited, would you have gone? That might be an interesting question.
- [66:32]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
You know, of course, of course you want to see this ridiculous traffic accident up close. I mean, and for the bag alone, the swag bag alone, I suppose, I guess, I don't know. I'd want to see it, but I would be terrible and take pictures and put them out the whole time. I'd be terrible. I'D be the worst guest.
- [66:49]
Kara Swisher
You would break the rules right away.
- [66:51]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
You remember Wedding? Wedding Crashers. That's Kara Swisher. Anyway, we want to hear from you. Send us your questions about business, tech, or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-Okay-That's the show. Kristen, thank you so much. I find you to be so smart, I could almost become a Republican.
- [67:10]
Kara Swisher
Oh, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be on the big show.
- [67:13]
Kristin Soltis Anderson
Yeah, the big show. You're on the big show. You delivered with all kinds of information. Scott should hang his head. You have so much good data, and that's what's important to our listeners, to get the real deal and to really say what's happening, which is really important. Anyway, thanks for listening to Pivot and be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, which is fast growing, actually. We'll be back next week. I will read. Today's show is produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin and Kevin Oliver. Ernie Enderdot engineered this episode. Thanks also to Kate Gallagher. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine@nymag.com pod we'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.