Can Biden Stop Trump’s Revenge Tour?

Summary

Pod Save America Episode Summary: "Can Biden Stop Trump’s Revenge Tour?"

Release Date: December 6, 2024
Hosts: Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer
Guest: Steve Schale, Democratic Strategist

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1. Biden's Consideration of Preemptive Pardons ([01:24] - [14:56])

Overview:
The episode delves into the emerging discussion within the Democratic Party about President Joe Biden issuing preemptive pardons for individuals that former President Donald Trump and his allies have threatened to prosecute. This strategy aims to mitigate potential retaliatory legal actions against Democratic figures.

Key Points:

• Background:
  On Tuesday’s show, hosts Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor floated the idea of Biden issuing blanket pardons to protect certain Democratic officials from anticipated prosecutions. Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported that the White House is now considering this option, highlighting a "vigorous internal debate" among senior aides, though President Biden has not yet joined the discussions ([02:30] Favreau).

• Pros and Cons Discussion:

  • Pros:

    • Protection Against Retribution: Dan Pfeiffer argues that given Trump’s explicit threats to prosecute political opponents, a preemptive pardon would be a rational defensive move. He emphasizes Trump’s "literal enemies list" as a clear indication of the threat ([05:10] Pfeiffer).

  • Cons:

    • Public Trust Issues: Pardoning individuals without clear evidence of wrongdoing could erode public trust. Jon Favreau notes the risk that voters might perceive the pardons as an admission of guilt, thus undermining the Biden administration's integrity ([06:18] Favreau).
    • Scope and Limitations: Determining who qualifies for pardons is challenging. Pfeiffer highlights the potential for a slippery slope, questioning where to draw the line and who else might be included inadvertently ([07:58] Pfeiffer).
    • Legal Uncertainties: Such broad pardons are unprecedented and lack clear Supreme Court guidance, posing legal risks ([09:55] Favreau).

• Norms and Perceptions:
  Both hosts discuss how preemptive pardons could reinforce negative perceptions of governmental corruption. Favreau argues that in the current political climate, norms around pardoning have been significantly eroded, making such actions more controversial ([14:46] Favreau).

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Pfeiffer ([05:10]):
  "The idea of preemptive pardons is a rational response to what Trump is promising to do with his words and his actions."

• Jon Favreau ([06:18] - [07:02]):
  "It's hard to explain to the median voter that we need these pardons because of someone named Cash Patel. Like, that doesn't make sense."

• Dan Pfeiffer ([11:51] - [12:05]):
  "They can just come in and say, everyone should go commit crimes... it's just crazy."

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2. House Democrats' Committee Strategies ([28:13] onward)

Overview:
With Democrats holding a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, the hosts discuss strategic moves to enhance the party's effectiveness, particularly in committee roles. The focus is on replacing older ranking members with younger, more media-savvy Democrats to improve performance during hearings and investigations.

Key Points:

• Committee Leadership Changes:

  • Judiciary Committee: Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin challenges Jerry Nadler for the ranking member position after Nadler announces his withdrawal. AOC has expressed interest in Raskin’s former spot ([18:13] Favreau).
  • Agriculture and Natural Resources Committees: Similar strategic placements are occurring to invigorate these committees with dynamic leaders.

• Rationale Behind the Shift:

  • Media Savvy: Younger members are seen as more adept at handling the performative aspects of committee hearings, which are increasingly about media presence and public perception.
  • Telegenic Appeal: The move aims to capitalize on members who can deliver compelling performances that resonate on television and social media, thereby attracting broader attention and support.

• Impact on Democratic Strategy:

  • Oversight Committees: The focus is on having members who can effectively conduct investigations and hold Republicans accountable, thereby maintaining pressure and visibility.
  • Potential Candidates: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is highlighted as a prime candidate due to her exceptional communication skills and ability to engage audiences both in-person and online.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Pfeiffer ([18:22] - [18:30]):
  "Democrats have lost touch with younger voters... Trying to put younger faces forward is absolutely essential."

• Jon Favreau ([21:47] - [22:14]):
  "AOC is probably the best communicator in the Democratic Party right now... her content is so compelling that other people are trying to draft off of it for engagement by reposting their videos."

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3. Trump Campaign's Targeting of Swing Voters vs. Harris Campaign ([29:35] onward)

Overview:
The discussion turns to the Trump campaign’s innovative strategies for targeting swing voters through streaming services, contrasting it with the Harris campaign’s more traditional regional and zip code-based approach. This segment analyzes the effectiveness and implications of these differing strategies.

Key Points:

• Trump Campaign’s Approach:

  • Streaming Persuadables: The Trump campaign identified 6.3 million individual battleground state voters, termed "streaming persuadables," who heavily use streaming services like Tubi and Roku. They utilized targeted ads on these platforms to maximize reach and efficiency ([29:35] Favreau).
  • Efficiency: According to the Trump campaign, this method allowed them to stretch their advertising dollars further by focusing on persuadable voters rather than entrenched supporters or opponents.

• Harris Campaign’s Approach:

  • Regional Targeting: The Harris campaign opted for geographically-based targeting, focusing on zip codes in battleground states. This broad approach aimed to mobilize existing Democratic voters and appeal to moderates and independents within those regions ([32:16] Pfeiffer).
  • Challenges: Such targeting can be less efficient due to the diverse needs and voting behaviors within each zip code, making it harder to tailor messages effectively.

• Impact of Advertising Strategies:

  • Data Utilization: While the Trump campaign leveraged individualized targeting to engage specific voters, the Harris campaign’s broader approach may have diluted their messaging impact.
  • Future Implications: The shift towards streaming services indicates a changing landscape in political advertising, with potential long-term consequences for Democratic strategies as traditional advantages in paid linear television diminish ([35:55] Pfeiffer).

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Pfeiffer ([29:35] - [32:16]):
  "Trump's campaign did a very good job of communicating with their target voters through a variety of means... It's not as brilliant as maybe they would like us to believe, but it obviously worked."

• Jon Favreau ([35:35] - [36:09]):
  "There's got to be diminishing marginal utility at some point... billions of dollars were spent to reach like 12 million people in the country."

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4. Turnout vs. Persuasion in Election Loss ([37:19] onward)

Overview:
Favreau and Pfeiffer tackle the perennial debate on whether Democratic losses are primarily due to lower turnout among their base or persuasion failures among swing voters. They reference Nate Cohn’s analysis from The New York Times to shed light on this issue.

Key Points:

• Nate Cohn’s Analysis:

  • Turnout: Lower Democratic turnout was significant in non-battleground states but not in battleground ones, where turnout was higher.
  • Voter Switching: Biden 2020 voters who stayed home were often moderates who might have been equally likely to support Trump if they had voted.

• Hosts’ Perspectives:

  • Dan Pfeiffer: Argues that the fundamental issue is Trump’s ability to attract and convert Democratic voters, emphasizing that simple narratives about turnout or persuasion miss the complexity of voter behavior.
  • Jon Favreau: Highlights the magnitude of Trump’s voter base expansion, noting that Trump added millions of voters between 2016 and 2024, many of whom were former Democrats.

• Strategic Implications:

  • Acknowledging Reality: Both hosts stress the necessity for Democrats to recognize Trump’s success in swaying Democratic voters and to adjust strategies accordingly.
  • Complexity of Voter Behavior: Voters are influenced by a multitude of factors, and simplistic explanations fail to capture the nuanced reasons behind election outcomes.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Pfeiffer ([38:50] - [40:07]):
  "Donald Trump convinced our voters to leave us and join him. Yeah, that is what happened."

• Jon Favreau ([40:34] - [41:10]):
  "Donald Trump added like millions and millions and millions of votes to his total between 2016 and 2024."

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5. Interview with Steve Schale: Democratic Collapse in Florida and National Implications ([53:11] onward)

Overview:
Steve Schale, a seasoned Democratic strategist with extensive experience in Florida politics, joins the show to discuss the Democratic Party’s struggles in Florida—a bellwether state that reflected broader national trends. Schale provides insights into the breakdown of Democratic support among Hispanic voters and offers recommendations for revitalizing the party’s strategy both in Florida and nationwide.

Key Points:

• Decline in Hispanic Support in Florida:

  • Historical Context: During the Clinton years, Democrats enjoyed substantial support from Hispanic voters in Florida, often winning by large margins.
  • Slippage Factors: Starting as early as 2018, Hispanic support began to decline, particularly among non-Mexican groups like Cubans and Venezuelans. This was attributed to perceptions of Democratic rhetoric around policing and socialism, which resonated negatively with these communities ([53:58] Schale).

• Broader National Trends:

  • Non-College White Voters: Similar to Florida, there has been a significant loss of support among non-college-educated white voters, exacerbating Democratic challenges.
  • Organizational Weakness: Schale points out that Florida lacks a robust Democratic infrastructure, resulting in minimal sustained party presence outside of high-stakes presidential campaigns ([57:33] Schale).

• Recommendations for Democrats:

  • Investment in Infrastructure: Building a permanent, on-the-ground Democratic infrastructure in key states like Florida is crucial. This involves sustained voter engagement and grassroots organizing beyond presidential elections.
  • Reconnecting with Hispanic Voters: Democrats need to redefine their identity in Hispanic communities by emphasizing core issues like healthcare, education, and economic opportunities over divisive social issues. This requires significant financial investment and consistent, culturally sensitive communication ([60:02] Schale).
  • Diversifying Campaign Leadership: Emphasizing diverse, relatable, and media-savvy leaders can help rejuvenate the party’s appeal among younger and minority voters.

• Strategic Shifts:

  • Early and Broad Engagement: Engaging voters early in the campaign cycle and broadening the scope of outreach beyond traditional demographic categories can help capture persuadable voters.
  • Message Refinement: Moving away from overly simplistic narratives about voter motivation and embracing the complexity of voter identities and concerns.

Notable Quotes:

• Steve Schale ([53:58] - [55:38]):
  "The sense in a lot of these communities is that we've gotten away from it... we're now entirely focused on these social issues which often kind of runs contrary to sort of the faith-based sense of who they are as a people."

• Dan Pfeiffer ([57:33] - [57:58]):
  "The Florida Democratic Party at this point literally operates out of a rented third-floor building... they maybe have three or four full-time staffers in a state of 23 million people. It's hard to win from there."

• Steve Schale ([61:17] - [67:25]):
  "We have to redefine who we are as a party with those voters... We have to spend a lot of money communicating earlier... we have to cast a broader net and we have to kind of accept where the median voter is, even if it's not where we want them to be."

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Conclusion

The episode "Can Biden Stop Trump’s Revenge Tour?" provides a comprehensive analysis of the Democratic Party’s current challenges and strategic considerations in the face of former President Trump’s persistent influence. From the contentious debate over preemptive pardons to the tactical shifts in committee leadership and campaign strategies, the hosts and guest Steve Schale highlight the complexities of modern American politics. The insights underscore the necessity for Democrats to adapt by investing in robust party infrastructure, redefining their engagement with key voter demographics, and embracing multifaceted strategies to rebuild and expand their coalition.

Overall Insights:

• Strategic Reflexivity: The Democratic Party must continuously evaluate and adapt its strategies to counteract shifting voter behaviors and external threats.
• Infrastructure Investment: Sustained investment in party infrastructure, especially in swing and diverse states like Florida, is critical for future electoral success.
• Voter Engagement: Moving beyond simplistic voter classifications to embrace the nuanced motivations and identities of voters can enhance outreach and persuasion efforts.
• Media Savvy Leadership: Empowering younger, media-savvy leaders can improve the party’s performance in high-stakes committee hearings and public engagements, thereby increasing visibility and influence.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Dan Pfeiffer ([05:10]):
  "The idea of preemptive pardons is a rational response to what Trump is promising to do with his words and his actions."

• Jon Favreau ([06:18]):
  "It's hard to explain to the median voter that we need these pardons because of someone named Cash Patel."

• Dan Pfeiffer ([18:22]):
  "Democrats have lost touch with younger voters... Trying to put younger faces forward is absolutely essential."

• Steve Schale ([53:58]):
  "The sense in a lot of these communities is that we've gotten away from it... we're now entirely focused on these social issues which often kind of runs contrary to sort of the faith-based sense of who they are as a people."

• Jon Favreau ([35:35]):
  "There's got to be diminishing marginal utility at some point... billions of dollars were spent to reach like 12 million people in the country."

This episode offers a deep dive into the multifaceted strategies and challenges facing the Democratic Party as it navigates a polarized and rapidly evolving political landscape. Listeners gain valuable perspectives on the importance of adaptive strategies, robust infrastructure, and nuanced voter engagement to counteract the enduring influence of Trump’s political legacy.

Transcript

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

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[Steve Schale]

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[Jon Favreau]

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[Steve Schale]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

[Jon Favreau]

On today's show, House Democrats make moves to overthrow the gerontocracy. We're getting more. We're getting more information about who the swing voters were in the 2024 election, the kind of information they're getting, and how Trump won them over. Then we get to hear Dan's conversation with our friend Steve Shale, a Democratic strategist and campaign vet in Florida, about how we got into such a deep hole there, especially with Latino voters, and why he's worried that what happened to Democrats in Florida may not stay there. But first, you heard it on Pod Save America. First, on Tuesday's show, Tommy and I both mentioned that it might be a good idea for Biden to issue preemptive pardons for people who Trump and his allies have said they want to prosecute. Which, according to Politico's Jonathan Martin, the White House is now considering. You're welcome, Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney. Just kidding. We were not even close to the first that that raised that. And the White House has been working on it a while, apparently, according to J Mart, he says that there has been a, quote, vigorous internal debate about this among a small group of the most senior White House aides, including the White House counsel and the chief of staff, though the President himself has not yet been part of the discussions. The news has set off a debate among Democrats over whether it's wise to issue preemptive blanket pardons. Congressman Brendan Boyle, who's a close ally of Biden's, said that Trump's decision to put Cash Patel in charge of the FBI means that prosecuting his enemies is, quote, no hypothetical threat, and urged the president to give the pardons. But Schiff himself, who would presumably be on the list, urged Biden not to do it, arguing that it would seem defensive and unnecessary. Well, what do we think? Jim Jordan was actually asked about this, the idea of a preemptive pardon. We're going to listen to what he said, and then we're going to listen to what Donald Trump says about what he plans to do.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Democrats are now asking Joe Biden for a preemptive pardon.

[Jon Favreau]

Okay.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Of Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and Tony Fauci. Well, what is this all about?

[Jon Favreau]

Preemptive part, Pardons, for heaven's sake. Well, this is ridiculous. Donald Trump has never been about retribution. Already hundreds of people have been murdered because of her action at the border, and thousands more will follow in rapid succession. She should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions. Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted for that.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

If we win.

[Jon Favreau]

And when we win, we're going to prosecute people that cheat on this election.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And if we can, we'll go back to the last one, too, if we're allowed.

[Jon Favreau]

What do you think? You think they're going to be allowed? All right, what do you think of this? Pros and cons of blanket preemptive pardons from President Biden on his way out the door.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Let me start with the one con which I give zero fucks about, which is the idea that somehow doing this breaks a norm or makes it easier for Trump to do what he wants to do when he leaves office. Trump's going to do what Trump wants to do no matter what. Whether Biden does preemptive pardons or not, Trump will. If he wants to do the same thing, he'll do the same thing for his people. We should stop reverse engineering our ideas or our actions around things Trump may or may not do. That is stupid. The pros here are pretty clear. Donald Trump campaigned on prosecuting his political opponents. He picked someone to head the FBI who published a literal enemies list of people to prosecute. Like, it's not. There's no. There's no subtlety happening here.

[Jon Favreau]

And what an appendix.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You know this.

[Jon Favreau]

It's like in the back of the book.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

He was hoping people wouldn't find it, but we did. The idea of preemptive pardons is a rational response to what Trump is promising to do with his words and his actions. And if you run around saying and believing as Joe Biden has done and said, and I think we have said and believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, this sort of action, a preemptive pardon, is a rational response to that threat. The con here is also pretty serious, which is people don't trust government. They think everyone's corrupt. And these people did nothing wrong, didn't even. Like, these are invented crimes. Trump can't even define the crimes they committed. And if you offer them pardons, it's going to give people a reason to believe that crimes were really committed, that the Biden administration really was corrupt, that these people really did do something wrong. Because why would you do that? It's hard to explain to a the median voter that we need these pardons because of someone named Keshe Patel. Like, that doesn't make sense. And you're just going to assume your natural inclination is people are corrupt. So that's the downside to it, I think.

[Jon Favreau]

It's funny, I didn't think about that downside. I guess if I was going to announce it and I was Joe Biden, I would like play maybe even a longer supercut like the one we just did. Of all the times and all the people. Trump said he was going to prosecute and then put Cash Patel in there, too, saying that he's going to come out after people and whoever else is in his administration and be like, that's why I'm doing this. These people did not commit any crimes. They're innocent. I mean, I don't know. You're right that, like, that's the way that people would consume the news about it could lead them to believe that these, that these folks are actually guilty. I think the other con is, or at least one of the challenges with doing this is where do you draw the line? Where do you stop? Like, who's on the list?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

That's pretty clear. You start with Anthony Fauci and you end somewhere right after podcasters. Like, that's the plan.

[Jon Favreau]

Apparently, the Washington Post followed up on the J Mart reporting today. They said that people who have been discussed are General Millie Foushee, Schiff, Cheney, Jim Clyburn, I think, gave an interview to cnn. He said that Jack Smith's on his list. But you can start to see where this grows. Like, all right, so Jack Smith's on the list. What about Jack Smith's whole team? What about Merrick Garland? What about like a whole bunch of other. Joe Biden's probably not going to put Merrick Garland on there now. It's like Merrick Garland has as much chance as we do is getting on that list. What about like most of the Justice Department? What I mean the danger is that you, the Biden saves a bunch of people and then, and love it brought this up on Tuesday. Then like the next group of mid level people are, are, have targets on their backs.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, there's, there are 1 million challenges to this approach. I think if you're going to do it, you should at least limit it to people who worked in the administration who did things that Joe Biden asked them to do as part of their jobs and therefore like what gets like once you start getting members of Congress, I think that's ridiculous. Once you know, is it going to be Schiff, Cheney? What about Eric Swalwell? They seem to hate Eric Swalwell and keep accusing him of espionage. What about Joe and Mika? What about Leslie Stall? What about the producer? Like it just goes down the road. And so I think if you want.

[Jon Favreau]

Joe and Mika secured their freedom.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Well, well, I mean if they're waiting with Beta Breath to find out, I'm sure. So this is, you could go down the line forever if you were to do this. Fauci, Millie, Jack Smith. But it's hard. Like there is no, there is no good answer. Here we are in unprecedented and dangerous territory. I do think it's good that they are contemplating it and thinking because I think there has been this sense, and I felt this since the election that it's like, oh, Donald Trump's huge danger. Oh my God, everything's terrible. And then it's like it's not really not that bad, as bad as you think it is. And it is an important corollary to the conversation on the Hunter Biden pardon. Right where it's not just that right there, it's that one went first, that one went first because of the sentencing. But at least you're thinking of other ways to do it. And if he does do it, and this is my main criticism of the Hunter Biden pardon, I understand why. I was kind of mad about it at first. I now understand why Biden did it. I probably would have done the exact same thing. In fact, I'm 100% sure I would do the exact same thing. But if he were to do it, he's got to go out and explain it. You can't do a paper statement on Sunday night. You have to just go out and defend it. And just like the way you said it, we don't want to do this. This isn't, this wasn't our choice. But he picked a guy to head the FBI who published an enemies list. So maybe I should protect the people on the list, right? Like maybe just use that list.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I mean, look, I, we talked about this Tuesday and I, if I was in his shoes, I probably would have done the same thing too. I do think that if you imagine what you just suggested, which is like, imagine if Biden comes out and includes the Hunter pardon with this like blanket preemptive pardon for all the people who have been part of the administration or worked closely with Joe Biden that Trump has specifically mentioned that he wants to prosecute. And same thing with Cash Patel and same thing with anyone else in his orbit who's explicitly listed people that they want to prosecute. And you did it all at once. You probably don't get the blowback or at least you don't get as much blowback as he did by just, and I still think if he decides not to do these at all and only pardons Hunter, and then we're in 2025 and Trump's president and suddenly there's a whole bunch of prosecutions like, you know, that's, that's a con for not doing it because, but I, I do, I don't think it's like I, I was in favor of this, you know, when I first heard about it. It's not like cut and dry and easy. Also, by the way, the other thing is that the pardons don't protect you from a crazy red state, prosecutor, attorney general, someone in a red state, like state level crimes. Right. You're not protected from. And, and then the other challenge here is the Hunter pardon was this very sweeping blanket pardon. Any crimes that may have been committed over a 10 year period. The only other time there was a pardon that sweeping in modern history was the pardon that Ford gave Nixon was preemptive. And it was pretty complete. These kinds of pardons have not been tested at the Supreme Court yet. Pardons for crimes that have not been committed that are not specified in the pardon. So there is like a risk there. But it's fucking crazy, by the way, that we're just, we should have said at the outset it's crazy that we're talking about this and that it's, that.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It'S not insane that Biden's thinking about it. Right? That's the thing.

[Jon Favreau]

Fucking nuts. It also, it's like the pardon Power is, wow, really stupid, bad, bad move from the founders.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Because, I mean, not the only one, John. They.

[Jon Favreau]

But like your point at the beginning where it's like, yeah, Trump's gonna do what Trump's gonna do. That is true. But, like, I mean, Trump could just basically come into office and say, everyone should go commit crimes, go kill people, go do whatever, and I'll pardon you afterwards. No big deal. And now the Supreme Court has said he can't be prosecuted for that. He wouldn't be impeached for that, because, you know, Republicans do whatever he says. And so that's it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, we have been with the Supreme Court's immunity decision and all of this conversation around pardons just sort of codified something that became obviously true during the Trump administration, which is a president can commit, at least a Republican president can commit any crimes they want. They can't be charged while in office. They cannot be impeached because of the radicalization of the Republican Party and polarization. And now because the Supreme Court, they can commit crimes out of office.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. What did you make of Schiff's comments about. I mean, I would say that. I think if you want a preemptive pardon, you probably wouldn't publicly say that you want a preemptive pardon. First rule of preemptive pardon club. Guess we broke that. But do you think. Do you think he just cares about the norms? Because he's a norms guy.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

He is a norms guy also. I think it's the norms and trust that this. Obviously, he's very, very smart. This is incredibly complicated. This is sort of things that White House advisors and lawyers and legal scholars can sit around discuss for 17 straight days and come to no conclusion and end up not doing it because it's so complicated, because there is no obvious way to do it. I do think, I imagine the shift is also concerned about what it says to the public about the party. People are going to think you're guilty of crimes. It's just. It reinforces their view that everyone's corrupt. Like, if Trump going out of office, if Trump had just unilaterally pardoned all of his people for anything that may have happened, imagine what we would have thought about that. Imagine what the average voter would have thought about that.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, I mean, he tried to overturn the election and incited a violent insurrection. And then everyone was like, yeah, let's take another flyer on the guy.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Well, you got 4.8. Democrats will have a few years to fix. Fix the problem. But.

[Jon Favreau]

So I don't know, man. I Don't know. Like, I, you know, I actually, I don't. I really. The one thing I doubt. And I'm. I am. I think I'm in favor of this idea. But the one thing I doubt is that the public would be like, oh, they're all guilty. I think the public be like, well, he's got the power. He can do what he wants. It feels like. One thing I have learned from this last election is that most people in this country do not give a fucking shit about norms.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I don't think it's the norms. I agree. I wrote an entire book about breaking norms. I am very anti norm. I've been anti norms for a long time.

[Jon Favreau]

Normizen is the only norm I like you, Norm Eisen.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

That's you.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yes. Normizen is the only norm I like, I guess, anyway, the way in which we are going to get back to power is to be able to convince the median voter that the other side is corrupt and that we are going.

[Unknown Speaker]

To face what's going on.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I get that, but that gets harder to do in this situation.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, but it's not like there's allegations against those people that are real. It's like if it was Hunter, right? Like the Hunter stuff. You're like, oh, yeah, he. I mean, a jury convicted him of crimes.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Well, I mean, jury convicted Donald Trump of crimes, too. And, like.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

But like, the white feels about the Trump crime. Like, yes, the problem we have here is that it's all fake.

[Jon Favreau]

It's all fake. And like, of course the MAGA people would be like, yeah, he gave them pardons because they're all really corrupt. But most people would be like, oh, yeah, Donald Trump ran around saying he was going to prosecute people. So I guess Biden used his, like, special, you know, his special power to help them. I guess that's what you get to do when you're President, because they're all fucking corrupt.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I guess we'll test this proposition maybe one day.

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, really bad. Really bad. All right, let's talk about what's going on with House Democrats who are going to end up with 215 members now that Adam Gray officially pulled off a win here in California by less than 200 votes. 200 votes. What do we say? Every vote matters. This is why you go out. This is why you knock on doors, you make phone calls. Because Adam gray won by 200 votes, and now Democrats have 215. There will be 220 Republicans, but with Matt Gaetz not returning and Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz leaving for jobs in the administration. That is a 217 to 215 margin for the opening stretch. Meaning that if all Democrats vote together and just one Republican joins them, you'd get a tie. Which in the House means the vote fails. Even so, being in the majority means Republicans will get to chair every committee, hire staff, send out subpoenas, control just about everything. The most powerful Democrat on each committee will then be known as the ranking member. And since they're in the minority, their main job is basically representing the opposition party during hearings and generally making Republicans lives difficult. Which is why Democrats have decided that their best shot here is to bounce some of their older ranking members on key committees in favor of younger, more telegenic folks. On the Judiciary Committee, Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin announced a challenge to New York Congressman Jerry Nadler. Apparently at the urging of Gen Z sensation Nancy Pelosi. Nadler couldn't shore up the votes and announced that he is bowing out. So Jamie Raskin will be the ranking member on Judiciary on the Oversight Committee where all the fun investigations take place. AOC has said that she's interested in taking Raskin spot as the ranking member since he's going to Judiciary, but she hasn't made a final decision. And then similar scenes are playing out on the Agriculture and Natural Resources committees. I know those are two committees that you're very excited about. We don't talk a lot about congressional committees here since Dan just fell asleep while I was talking, but this seemed worth getting into. You, do you think this is. What do you think about this overall move towards sort of younger, more telegenic Democrats on these committees? Why is that valuable? Why does it matter? What do you think?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I don't want to overstate the importance of the ranking members on committees like it just there are some exceptions which we'll get into.

[Jon Favreau]

I don't know there's that much of a danger, but.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yes, but I. What I appreciate is that this is a recognition of the fact that Democrats have lost touch with younger voters. Right. We have. That has been a trend that has been ongoing for eight years. Here we have a. We had an 80 year old president, we had congressional leadership in their 70s. We had two consecutive nominees in Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden who were at best young voters, had lukewarm feelings about, did not feel like that they represented them. That was something that came up in all of it. Kamala Harris did much even though she did not end up doing as well as we would like with younger voters. She at least was more culturally connected with at least parts of our base than Democrats. But we have a real problem here. And so trying to put younger faces forward is absolutely essential. And the House leadership, to their credit, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, they stepped aside, they made room for Hakeem Jeffries and his team, who are younger, they are more media set, more modern media savvy, and that's good. And so doing that here is a good thing. It does, I will say, speak to the challenges of the gerontocracy that we are pivoting from Jerry nadler in his 70s to Jamie Raskin, who is 61, I think, where so it's not, we're not exactly getting a bunch of like, we're not getting like Maxwell Frost there yet, but it is, it's progress. It's progress.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. I mean, look, I mentioned gerontocracy at the beginning and sort of a joke. I think it's less about age and more about performance and being good on tv. Right. Like committee hearings, let's be honest, are about performance these days. I know a lot of staff work goes into committee hearings. They are important for legislation, but especially when you get to what the Republicans have done to the Oversight Committee, where it's just like a place to have these investigations and it's a circus and they do all these hearings. What you need is people who are good on TV and who are good performers and who get it and who are going to, you know, have moments that end up going viral. And I think we saw that even in the difference between some of the hearings we've seen. The January 6th hearings, for example, I think probably went better than most people expected, partly because Liz Cheney was excellent during them. They also, like, didn't let every single person on the panel speak and give five minute speeches. Right. Like just the entire style, forget about the, the members being old. The entire style of communication in Congress is old. The rules, the way people do it, the chart, like all of it. And I think when you have people who are new to Congress, who tend to be younger or people who are just practiced being on tv, speaking to voters, speaking to reporters, like, it's just going to be, it's going to be more compelling. And especially if you're in the minority and you don't have that much power to begin with, all you really have is the performance that you deliver at these hearings. And so you might as well go with your best.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, that's exactly right.

[Jon Favreau]

What do you think about AOC? AOC's move for oversight.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I love this idea. I mean, let's just be frank. AOC is probably the best communicator in the Democratic Party right now. What she says, how she says it and where she says it. And she is obviously very good at getting attention. She is quite relatable. I was on TikTok and I saw this video of AOC making an espresso martini. And it's like, get yourself a member of Congress who make it. Who can make a homemade espresso martini and things. Interesting is. I'm pretty sure I didn't even see it on her page. I saw it on an AOC fan page, which. Just how many members of Congress have a fan page on TikTok right where they are. Their content is so compelling that other people are trying to draft off of it for engagement by reposting their videos.

[Jon Favreau]

And Dan, do you know that I can make an espresso martini as well?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

How often do you make them?

[Jon Favreau]

Once in a while.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Is it pretty good? Is yours are pretty good?

[Jon Favreau]

Ask Emily.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I hate to really age myself here, but I don't think I can have caffeine that late at night.

[Jon Favreau]

No, I'm sure you can't.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I really tap out at about 10am.

[Jon Favreau]

I need a steady drip of caffeine from 5am right through bedtime. So that's.

[Unknown Speaker]

It's weird.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It's weird that. I mean, I recognize I'm up at the same time you are, but it's weird. You're such a. Not such. Not a great sleeper. You're just polishing that Diet Coke off with dessert.

[Jon Favreau]

Anyway, I want to check out AOC's recipe, but go on.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yes. Anyway, I think she, she is a phenomenal communicator. And there is a benefit in the fact that Republicans. She drives with the Republicans insane. And that is good because it just means more attention. Right. If we had picked a aoc, being the ranking member on these hearings, it means they're going to get more attention, more coverage, more certainly more. What is going to matter, even more than whether CNN takes it live, is whether people are going to clip parts of it and put it on social media. And that will happen with her. I think she's very smart and she's been very good in these hearings and she speaks like a human. So I think this, this is great. I hope she does it. I hope people support her doing it.

[Jon Favreau]

I will also say that she, she does drive Republicans crazy. But when she speaks during these hearings, it's not the typical like. Like she doesn't just make the whole thing about the Republicans on the committee or about Republicans in general. And I do think that's important because I think there are a lot of members and moments that go viral that like, you know, libs share. We all share with each other and we all think it's amazing, blah, blah. And I think if most voters saw it, they'd be like, these fucking people are yelling at each other. The Republicans an asshole, the Democrats an asshole. They're all going back and forth. They don't care who started it. Right. And I think that AOC like I think on the Oversight committee, if she ends up being ranking member and then part of this is a play where like if we take back the house in 2026, then she is, then she gets has subpoena power and then she can sort of hold her own hearings on oversight. Right. And I would imagine that she'd be more like a Katie Porter model than a like just beat up Republicans, like imagining AOC bringing in a bunch of CEOs and corporate interests and lobbyists and, and just sort of holding them accountable at these hearings for like why they are screwing most working class Americans. I think that is even more effective than like oh, did you see this AOC dunk on Jim Jordan? Right?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, the dunk thing is very important because we, you know, you and I saw this at the convention. We saw so many of the speeches that the especially the Democratic House members were doing were basically reverse engineered from a dunk on Republicans like moment. They could go viral. And AOC doesn't have to do something to go viral, right? This is like there's a certain set of politicians who have this ability for whatever reason. Trump is one of them. Right? Obama was one of them. You can just. Pete is very same thing where you don't have to just your presence doing what you do authentically gets attention in traffics on the Internet as opposed to trying to come up with a thing where you're just going to really take down merger Taylor Greene in front of everyone as a way to do it. And it makes it easier to have a conversation in that committee that speaks to voters as opposed to speaks to political junkies who will hit the share button.

[Jon Favreau]

AOC destroys Marjorie Taylor Greene. I mean right now Elijah's thinking that's great. SEO.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jon Favreau]

He's helping.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

No one wants us more than Elijah because it is we're going to crush on YouTube if that happens.

[Steve Schale]

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[Jon Favreau]

All right, before we get to your conversation with Steve Schale about how Democrats can win again, want to talk about some new findings that the party might be able to draw some lessons from? Shane Goldmacher at the New York Times dropped a long story on Thursday in which the Trump campaign explained how they went after swing voters on streaming services. So according to campaign officials, they put together an actual list of 6.3 million individual battleground state voters that they thought were persuadable. That was about 14% of battleground state voters. They tended to be young, nonwhite, and they heavily use streaming services like To Be and Roku. The Trump campaign believed that about half of this group of persuadable voters watched streaming TV exclusively. The Trump campaign referred to these voters as, quote, streaming persuadables. And I had no idea. But apparently a lot of these streaming channels now allow you to target ads to individual households rather than just regions. Trump campaign said they took advantage of that feature, but the Harris campaign didn't, which meant that they were spending huge amounts of money on viewers who had already made up their minds, while the Trump folks were able to make their money go further. This is, of course, according to the Trump campaign, this general theory of swing voters media Consumption is backed up by new data from Navigator. This is based on their big survey of 5,000 people who said they voted in the election. Whereas half of Harris voters said they get their news from broadcast television, only 38% of swing voters said they did. They were much more likely to get their news from YouTube and Facebook. 61% of swing voters said they watch live TV through a streaming service, and only 42% of them said they get their live TV through cable or satellite. All right, there's a lot in there. What do you think of the Times piece? And do you buy the Trump campaign's take on how much this targeting mattered and what was happening with the Harris campaign?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I think we should stipulate that the Trump campaign did a very good job of communicating with their target voters through a variety of means, paid advertising, including this individualized targeting on streaming. All of his media appearances, the work they did with influencers like Aiden Ross and the Nokboys, they knew who their target voters were and they went after them and they clearly reached them. I do feel a little bit like in reading this story that they're taking what is a relatively common tactic for political advertising and treating it as sorcery. So I think it was good that they had a challenge. Democrats had more money than Republicans. They had to spend their money more efficiently. This was an efficient way to do it. It's not as brilliant, I think, as maybe they would like us to believe, but it obviously worked. So what am I to say?

[Jon Favreau]

What do you make of the Harris campaign side of this? Like, why were they not targeting individual households on streaming and instead doing it by region or they're doing it by zip code.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

According by zip code, which is. Which is obviously, that's a smaller population of people than the metro area of Philadelphia or the state of Pennsylvania. And the reason why I believe the Harris campaign did what they did is pretty simple. In the battleground states, the Trump path to their win number was pretty simple. It was base vote, plus some slice of this swing voter universe that was overwhelmingly male and younger. That gets you there. The Harris campaign path to these swing states, which are bipartisanship and political performance. A couple points to the right of the nation as a whole was to get their base of core Democratic voters. But then they also had to get some of these same young men voters. They had to get older black voters. They had to get juice up their numbers with college educated suburbanites. They need Republicans and Republican leading independents. They need some of these Nikki Haley voters. They needed to juice the numbers with Seniors, their math was so much more complicated that it was more cost efficient to do it by zip code than it was to do it on an individualized basis. And the other thing I just say about the individualized targeting is many of the streaming services do not allow political ads.

[Jon Favreau]

Like YouTube is the big one that does.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Well, YouTube, YouTube TV uses it. You can do political ads.

[Jon Favreau]

That's what I meant.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I mean you can't do individualized on it. You can't do individualize it. Netflix, no political ads. And the vast majority of Netflix subscribers don't use the ad tier. But we brought up to be and all of these fast networks, it's free ad supported tv. It's like if you buy a smart TV today and you just turn it on, connected to your Internet, you'll see a bunch of icons. Tubi is one of them. There's a bunch of free TV you can just watch with ads and an increasing number of people do it. And particularly young people who get their diet is like Netflix, maybe another streaming service. And then if they're just like flipping the channel or looking for something, they'll just go onto these fast channels and you reach those people. And so it's not that the Trump campaign is smarter than the Harris campaign. The Harris campaign was very smart about how they did a lot of their advertising. It's just they had to reach a much more diverse group of voters to get to their win numbers. So it was probably much more efficient. Do you think about this way you're doing zip code, you're going to do a certain number of people in Waukesha, Wisconsin, are you going to do a certain zip code in Waukesha, Wisconsin? Right. And so that's, it's kind of little six year half dose in the other, I think. But it is the future. This is the future. And this has consequences for Democrats because our advantage in a world where Republicans have a massive advantage on free media and social media was in paid linear television. Right. Particularly targeting people on cable, on people who are watching live television, news, sports, et cetera. And that advantage is dramatically diminished and is going to be just given the rate at cord cutting and the rate at which the cable business is collapsing before us, it's hard to imagine what 2028 is going to look like. But it's going to be very different from this election.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I just think that, I don't know, at some point the utility of all of these ads and just one after another that sounds the same and looks the same and on your phone and you can't watch anything else. I feel like there's got to be diminishing marginal utility at some point. Yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It is the greatest waste of money in modern American history. Like, billions of dollars were spent to reach like 12 million people in the country. Not even 12 million people. Right. And it's people.

[Jon Favreau]

I know I could, I could go on this forever, but like, I have.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

A YouTube show about this. You're always welcome.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it's just like there's. I feel like we're like, really? There's always a step that's being skipped, which is like, well, this ad tested really, really well. It's like, yeah, of course you showed it to a bunch of voters. And the voters like, yeah, this is persuasive. This might make me vote more. Blah, blah. And then you run the ad and then, you know, the ad reach people. But like, we still don't know. But like, once the ad reaches the actual voter, does it move the voter? You can actually go take the action. I mean, I know that you can.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You can do a regression analysis on this stuff, but you never really know because it's impossible to test in a lab the actual impact of watching all the ads. You see. I mean, you. We spent some time in battleground states. At the end, if you watched. I watched football in Philadelphia, I'll be way before our show started. And I mean, holy shit, we left.

[Jon Favreau]

Philly and you voted for Trump.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

A lot of Harris ads, actually.

[Steve Schale]

But then.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

But then it's also, how do you sit fit with all the. And what you really can't test is how the ad fits with all the other surround sound you're getting right. From social media, the regular news and stuff like that. So it's a lot of money is being spent and we're not really sure why.

[Jon Favreau]

Cool. Cool. One other perennial post election debate is the question of turnout versus persuasion. The way this goes is did Kamala Harris lose because more Biden 2020 voters stayed home or because more Biden 2020 voters switched to Trump? The answer is always in every election, some of both. But one reason it's heavily debated is that if the loss was mostly caused by voters staying home, often there are lefty types who will argue that it's because the candidate didn't sufficiently excite the party's liberal base. If the loss was mostly caused by voters switching parties, centrist types will argue that it's because the candidate failed to win the middle moderates. Nate Cohn at the Times waded into the debate this week with a piece where he makes a few points. One, lower turnout among Democrats was a big part of the story in non battleground states this election, but not in the battleground states where turnout was much higher. And then a second point is the Times polling data suggests that the Biden 2020 voters who did stay home in 2024 weren't necessarily deciding between Kamala Harris and the couch, as is often the phrase. They were in fact more moderate voters, less partizan, less ideological voters who if they had turned out could have just as easily supported Trump. What do you think? Does this settle the argument once and for all?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

This argument will never be settled, John, for the exact reasons you laid out, which is people have an interest in continuing the argument. It's happened in every losing election in my career. We're always looking for simple ways to tell ourselves a story. Right. Like this idea that there's this ocean of potential Democratic voters if we could just reach with our very compelling Democratic, very progressive message would turn out. That would be a great world to live in because your path to victory forever is obvious. Another simple story to tell ourselves is if we could just sand down the edges on this issue or that issue, then we could get this mythical group of centrist, very focused policy voters who line up the white papers of both campaigns on the, on a. Dining on a diner table somewhere in Wisconsin and they make a decision. No, it's. Voters are complicated and they have different reasons for turning out, different reasons for making their decisions. They are cross pressured in thousands of ways. I do think in this election the most brutally honest thing we can say to ourselves is that Donald Trump convinced our voters to leave us and join him. Yeah, that is what happened. And we can't shy away from that. Because if you shy away from that, you know what?

[Jon Favreau]

He did it in 2016. He made more, he added more votes in 2020, even as he lost by 40,000 votes. I mean Donald Trump added like millions and millions and millions of votes to his total between 2016 and 2024. And a good portion of that is people who have voted for Democrats. Barack Obama, Joe Biden. It's just, that's, that's what happened.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, there's a bunch of Obama Trump voters. Got a bunch of Biden Trump voters. Like it is it and it just, it is hard and dark. But I think you kind of have to just like reckon with the absolute wreckage that we're currently in so that you can right size what the solutions are. Because if you want to tell yourself an overly simplistic story, and I think People in the center and the left are doing that, then you're not going to do all the work you have to do together because we have to win. You know, I know this was a very. I don't know if you heard this, John, but I did an interview with the Harris campaign. Happened over the holiday break. Not a lot of people noticed it.

[Jon Favreau]

I got to check that out.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah, I think you would like.

[Jon Favreau]

I hope you were tough.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Well, I got. I would say that Jeremiah Dillon is still walking the earth. So I was not as tough as. But in that interview, David Pluff made the point that in these states, we have to crush it with moderate voters. And people got very mad about that. Right. That. Like, that's a mistake. But the thing is, you have to. If we're going to win, we have to win moderate voters. We have to do better with independents, and we have to get all of those young voters who either went to Trump or. Or stayed home. And some of the young voters definitely stayed home, who were voters who should have been with us for a variety of reasons, including Gaza. And we have to get them all back. You have to do all of those things. It's not as simple as one or the other. And we just like that. I think that's just the most important takeaway from this, is that we have a very complicated task before us. It is the problem of having a big tent coalition. But is that big tent coalition that has given us the ability to win the popular vote in all but two elections since 1988. If we want to continue that, we have to figure out how to do all the things.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. I mean, the most simplified version of the argument that both sides are making, which is they are not actually making this argument, but this is just for the sake of talking about it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

This is the Twitter version of it. Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

This is the truth. Yeah, right. Which is like there's this economic populist button that if you press it, suddenly just thousands and thousands and millions of voters who are just hanging out at home are just going to just leave their houses and run to the polls as fast as they can. Because now that Democrats actually stand for something, economic populism, that all these voters will come out and vote for them. And also if in this instance, it had to do with Gaza as well in Michigan, which did make a real difference in Michigan. And then on the other side, it's like, if only. If only on cultural and social issues, if Democrats just sort of said, no, I'm not for trans rights, I'm not going to talk about it anymore. I'm not going to talk about cultural issues anymore. I'm not going to talk about immigration anymore. I'm going to be as tough as Republicans are on the border and I'm just going to take all these positions. Then suddenly all the moderate voters, all the swing voters are going to come and it's just, that's just we talk about the data and everyone's like the dad, everyone's too into the data. It's like, don't call it data then just go talk to fucking voters.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It's math. It's math.

[Jon Favreau]

I swear to God, just go out there, talk to fucking voters. People that you don't know, people that aren't like you, like, sit down with them. And I mean, what I take from this and I, this drives me, it's because I've been doing this since, I've been having this conversation in this debate since like when I did the first season of the wilderness in 2018, 2017, eight years ago now, seven years ago, whatever. And the way I think about it is the voter who the Democratic voter or the person who has voted for Democrats in the past who decides to stay home is not that much different than the person who's voted for Democrats who then switches to vote for Republicans. They are, they're, they're different, but they are not as different as this debate makes them out to be. Yes, they are less ideological, they are less partisan. They tend to be. And what confuses Democrats is they tend to now be younger and non white, which liberals think that's our voter. If they're young and they're a black voter or Latino voter and Asian voter, then they must be progressive. And it's just the wrong way to think. It is not supported by the facts. The problem, and I think the same thing for some of these voters that switched to Trump. Right. And that doesn't mean that they're not, that doesn't mean that they're out of reach for us. That doesn't mean that, that a good chunk of them would respond favorably to more progressive positions on X or a more economically populist position on Y or, you know, more cultural moderation on something else. But you can't make blanket statements about entire identities of voters in terms of their behavior and how they're going to act in an election. You just can't do it anymore because people are just too different.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I think one thing we should, there are several things I think we could do going forward that would help our mentality on this one is we have to just eliminate the term go TV as a part of a messaging strategy. Like they're everyone is a persuasion target.

[Jon Favreau]

They're all. I was just going to say that they're all persuasion targets.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

The second is we do have to just untrain ourselves from how we thought about politics for a long time. Like I think the term identity politics is obviously overused and has been weaponized by Republicans in really gross ways. But this idea that used to be able to make real predictions about how people would vote based on their race, that is no longer true in politics. So we should abolish the idea that we have any sense of how people are going to vote based on their race because that's clearly not true anymore. And finally, we probably ought to stop using the term moderate because moderate and this isn't the way in which Plouffe used it in the interview is that's how people self identify. That's how they describe themselves.

[Jon Favreau]

I think people miss that from that. That's why I was, I was surprised that clip got so much reaction because I'm like the moderate thing you're saying like in an exit poll, it's how you self idea the exit pollster says are you liberal, moderate or conservative? And then you pick one and you tell them.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And that is different for every voter. Right. That you. That needs some combination of maybe I am very liberal in economic issues. I am, you know, certainly care a lot about Social Security and Medicare. I'm protecting those and I might be a union member and I. But also maybe I'm concerned about the border. And then for other voters it's the reverse. Right. Where it's like they are very liberal on social issues like trans rights and marriage equality and all of that, but they're deeply concerned about spending in taxes.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And so it's there like the, we've create, we create these avatars of fake voters when it's like everyone is different, everyone has different point of view and we. So the other thing is stop thinking about voters ideologically because that, that puts them in the wrong bucket, I think. Particularly when you get to the moderate.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Well, especially when the, when the, the central divide in American politics now is whether or not you have a college degree. That is the best predictor of how you're going to vote. And what we have seen since Donald Trump took over the Republican Party is you have a coalition of voters who do not have faith in institutions, who are anti establishment, who don't think the system is working for them and they, most of them don't have a college degree. And then you have a coalition of voters who do have a college degree who generally do think the system is working and want to defend institutions and like. That is the axis of American politics right now. And it just, it does scramble the traditional ideological positioning that we've talked about for the last, you know, much of the century.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. Instead of thinking of politics as left versus right, it's insider versus outsider. Like that is the way in which our politics moves now.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. All right. When we come back from the break, you'll hear Dan's conversation with Steve Shale about what the hell is wrong with Florida and the Democratic brand and strategy more broadly. But before we do that, the latest episode of Hysteria dives into some of the biggest questions from the last election. Aaron and Alyssa are joined by our friend Aaron Haynes, editor of the 19th News, to break down the role that racism and misogyny played in Trump's win and the latest revelations about Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth's problematic past. Tune into Hysteria today wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Steve Shale, Pod.

[Steve Schale]

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[Jon Favreau]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

Joining us now, he's a Democratic strategist who calls himself a 26 year survivor of Florida politics. Steve Schale. Welcome to Pod Save America.

[Unknown Speaker]

Hey, thanks man. Good to see you.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Good to see you. All right. You spent your political career in Florida. You helped Obama win in 2008, 2012. You wrote a piece for the Bulwark with the title I watched the Democratic collapse in Florida. I fear it's happening nationally, which certainly caught my attention. You were also on our list of people to talk to about what the hell happened in this election. So this is a great time to bring you on. Let's I want to get into your recommendations for the party, what you think is happening nationally. But I want to start with the party collapse in Florida. We won in 08, we won in 12. We barely lost in 16. And we lost, Democrats lost Florida in 2024 by a margin not dissimilar to what we used to see in places like Montana. What the hell happened in your state?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I mean, I think finally just the, the weight of the coalition falling apart. I mean, if you go back to say, for example, the Clinton years, I mean, we were winning Hispanics in Florida by 30 points. And you know, we've kind of, we began to see the slippage among Hispanic support here as early as 2018, certainly in 2020, you know, a county, Dade county that, you know, we won, you know, with Obama by 20 some odd points. Biden only won by seven. And you saw particularly those Hispanics that were non Mexican, the exile era type, your Cubans, your Venezuelans really just kind of almost repelled to some of the Rhetoric that was out there defunding the police. You know, some of the socialism talk, I mean, I remind folks all the time, like if you're from Venezuela, you know, you came here to avoid socialism. So when you hear people wax on poetically about socialism, that brings back an immediate bad trigger. And you know, so we saw some of that kind of begin to slip away. And then in 24, the combination of non college whites, which again we've seen kind of go the wrong way here, added to the issues we've had with Hispanics and it's just, it all just added up to a disaster, frankly.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I remember after 20 talking to folks in Florida and reading folks, I think you made this point that one of the things that happened between 16 and 20 was that the, you know, a lot of the rhetoric around Democratic socialism really had an impact on people with Cuban and Venezuelan, maybe Salvadoran backgrounds in Florida. And that was a unique situation. But this time around we saw in like Osceola County, a largely Puerto Rican county, just a massive collapse over the previous year. So it seems more widespread than that. Thoughts on that?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's, you know, listen man, you get this. You just your whole life, I mean, there's a permission structure in almost any community you go into. And so, you know, we used to talk about, you know, back sort of college educated white voters who were Republicans in Florida, the Obama days, like our permission structure was taught, talking about cutting taxes. And if we talked about cutting taxes, they would listen to us on other stuff. And a lot of the permission structure in the, in these Hispanic communities, Puerto Ricans, for example, starts at sort of understanding that there's a cultural politics which are a cultural sort of part of life that is different, that's more conservative, you know, you know, they may be with us on education, healthcare, but they may not be as where we are on, for example, abortion. And you know, I think that, you know, the sense in a lot of these communities is that we've gotten away from it. And I'm not saying it's totally accurate, just I think it's the sense of the reality that they see that we've gotten away from focusing on things like the Affordable Care act, on good schools, good jobs, and we are now entirely focused on these social issues which often kind of runs contrary to sort of the faith based sense of who they are as a people. And that's a real problem. And I think, you know, there was that interesting story that came out in the Atlantic. You may have seen there was something like you know, I think it was the voters thought that like the number two issue we cared about around the country was trans issues and number three issue was abortion. And you know that. And again, I'm not saying we don't fight for those issues, no fight for marginalized voices, but when the perception is that is our primary goal, those communities where, you know, where faith is a big part of who they are, you know, it's hard for us to kind of get in the door to talk about other issues.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You know, the Democrats have struggled. You know, we won, obviously won Florida at the presidential level. You know, Bill Nelson had some success there for a while in recent years, but Democrats have not had the governorship in Florida in more than a quarter century now. So any lessons you see there about sort of the organization and funding of the party infrastructure that can apply nationally, sort of what you've seen over the course of your time there?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I was, I was, I was talking to our mutual friend Sam Kernalli at the DNC earlier. And I mean, the, you know, the places where state party infrastructure has really been bad, we've really struggled in. And Florida is a place where we just frankly haven't invested in the partisan infrastructure. And honestly, man, as I'm a homer for our old guy, but a lot of the stuff that we did coming out of the Obama years, and I think the Organizing for America infrastructure, a lot of which got moved away from partisan infrastructure into a lot of these C3 and C4 groups in states that have weak political party infrastructure to begin with, really kind of set us on a not great course. And you know, the challenge we've had in Florida is that when we've had presidential elections that are engaged, we have this huge infrastructure. It's here for six months, you know, registers hundreds of thousands of voters, puts hundreds of kids on the ground, and then it leaves the next day and there's nothing to take its place. And so as you know, as we got into 2020, for example, it had a very different kind of campaign. And listen, I don't blame the campaign for not putting boots on the ground. We were dealing with COVID We didn't know what we were dealing with. But I think not having that real infrastructure on the ground, even for presidential campaigns, and then having sort of nothing in between, you know, it just at all, it atrophied to really nothing. I mean, the Florida Democratic Party at this point literally operates out of a rented like third floor building, an office downtown, and they maybe have three or four full time staffers in a state of 23 million people. It's hard to win from there.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I mean this is, I mean Florida is obviously a state where there's a lot of money. Right. A lot of the big Democratic generals come from Florida.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Is it just, is it struggle? Is it people think it's a lost cause, like how it's, you know, we've spent way more money in Texas over the last 10 years to try to turn that one blue, obviously with less successes there as well. But like, I just sort of curious as to like what the struggle is to get actual investment. And I will say I think it's important to note that we did almost win the governorship in 2018 in Florida and we almost reelected Bill Nelson. We came within basically a point, I think, or close to a point in those.

[Unknown Speaker]

But just 9,000 votes.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah. Much less to the point. As for someone whose formative political experience was Al Gore's election in the recount, that seems like a landslide to me, but I get the point. But just what is preventing broad scale investment in state party infrastructure in Florida? And I take your point on Obama at no. 8 and 12. I was part of some of those decisions. I understand why we made them. They had downstream effects that I think have been not awesome. And Florida's example of that. But you know that we're 10 years past that now.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, well, I think, listen, a lot of southern states have this problem in that the political party infrastructure never existed in the same way that you like a state like Michigan that has a strong union base, has had a lot of governors, like a partisan infrastructure is part of their DNA. A lot of these southern states, the political party existed frankly just as a way for governors, old southern governors to run money through to get around contribution limits. And so we've never really had a real party to begin with. And then, you know, not having a governor who can help drive money to a political party has been a tough issue. And so I think all of these things, you know, I tell donors all the time, listen, the political Democratic Party is whatever the donors make it. You know, if you put eight or $10 million into it, it's going to be something better than it is today. But it's just, there's just never been a real culture to build the political party. And that's been frankly, I mean, if I've been setting myself on fire about one thing down here for the last decade, it's been that, which is if we're ever going to get Florida to A better place. And, and I'm not even saying at this point, getting to a place where, like, we're competitive in 26, 28. I'm talking about in a better place to make sure that Jared Moskowitz gets reelected and that, you know, you know, Congressman Frost, you know, can grow and, you know, like just kind of win seats at the local and congressional level. We still need to invest in that permanent infrastructure. At the partisan level, we've just never really done it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So in your piece for the Bulwark, you offered a series you talk broadly I should recommend everyone should read it. It offers a lot of, a lot of very interesting thoughts about where the party has been, where it's going. You offer some specific tactical recommendations which I will summarize here, and you should feel free to correct my summary. But they include spending more money early in campaigns, using data less smartly, more smartly. I'll let you explain that one. And sort of diversifying the number of groups who are campaigning on behalf of the nominees, sort of in the super PAC universe. So maybe sort of. Except explain what you're, what you're arguing for here.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, no, it's funny. So, you know, I ran a super PAC in 2020 and sort of a little bit in 2024, calling night the country. And it's one of these things. I never thought I would ever run a super PAC until my, you know, our mutual friend Greg Schultz called me in at like 9:30 on a Friday night at a friend's 40th birthday party in a week, moment of weakness. I said yes, and great lesson about not answering phone calls at that hour after five or six beers. And what was interesting about 2020 and when you guys had puff on the other day, this is kind of what drove that. David talked about the infrastructure that existed in 2020. And again, I don't have any experience before that. I never ran one of these things. But in 2020 there wasn't really a primary super PAC. And what was interesting about that is it forced all of us to kind of figure out together how to support then Vice President Biden. It brought lots of interesting voices to the table. For example, I never had known a woman named Adrienne Shopshire who runs Blackpack. I never met her until 2020. She's one of the smartest people I've ever talked to in my life. And because of that lack of sort of singular entity, you know, her voice was elevated in ways that certainly wasn't this cycle. And I think that, you know, you, we bet that Biden benefited from having that, you know, that chorus of people on the outside all raising money, all working together. It was hard for donors. Donors hated it because they would get 35 pitch calls instead of one. But in the end, like, you had so many more voices with so many more sort of views at these tables, and I think collectively ended up in a really good place. So, for example, we learned we ran solely pro Joe Biden ads. That was our lane in 2020. American Bridge ran these ads where they would find former Trump voters talking about why they were voting for Biden. Well, what we found is that our ads and their ads were really good. Our ads, if they were on the same buy schedule as their ads, were amazing because we would tee up people talking about why they were not leaving Trump and then you would fast forward to us. And so you had, I hate the word synergy, but you had kind of that thing that happened because you had that. Whereas this cycle, you know, I mean, I like a lot of those guys, they're all friends of ours at Future Forward, but like, they had a theory of the case, and if you weren't part of their theory, you just weren't at the table. And, you know, and in the end, I mean, like, they, they believe the science says spend money late. You know, I totally agree. Like, running ads late, you know, something we all do. But, like, the foundation was so bad, you know, and I think that, you know, folks made, that made this point in your, on your, on your pod last week, like, we were in such a bad place to begin with that I don't care how much money you put in, you couldn't move the foundation. Whereas you go back to, say, 2012, like, the work that was done by Priorities and billing those guys to define Romney in the spring just made it easier for all of us in the fall to go do our jobs. And that was my frustration. I think had we run, for example, a bunch of anti Trump ads in the spring of 2024, we might have been at a place to actually close the deal in the fall. But the floor was so low.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

This one is so hard because at least there was a ton of pro Biden spending early, right? In 2023. Future forward in the Biden campaign spent tens of millions of dollars to do it and moved literally nothing, right? Any person you talked to said move nothing. Now it's like, what's the right answer? Is that because it was too early? Is it because people's minds were made up on Joe Biden at the time and nothing was going to change anyone's mind. It's. Yeah, there was. It. The ads were just, they were like the right strategy, wrong execution because the ads were bad. You know, I generally agree with you. Like I've heard several people all associated with the Harris campaign and other super PACs make the same point that Pluff and Jen made to me and you're making now that diversity is better.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You just see it's sort of, you have more fail safes in the system where if one, and I'm not arguing that future forward, what they were doing was wrong or their theory was wrong. But if you have more people, you have more theories, you're less likely. You have your eggs in multiple baskets. But then it's also hard to set. Like this is why I find this election so hard to talk about because there are all these tactical things that we can debate till the end of time that we, that the Harris campaign did wrong, the rest of us did wrong. But do any of those add up to victory? Hard to say. Right. Just it's like, like it's close, but it wasn't that. Like it was like close in margin. But when you look at the movement among groups, it was so widespread that it's hard, it's hard to get to. It's hard to argue that more money wins this race for her. But does more money make it closer? Is more money better than less money? Probably like hard to say. Right?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. And I think, you know, part of why the first line of my blog piece for Bulwark was essentially like, I don't want to talk about 2024 anymore. And I know I talked about it in the piece but you know, my frustration has been, I think we've, we've gotten to a place where, you know, I mean, we're very cycled. It's like let's collections. But like, you know, we've had some macro level trends that in part because frankly Biden was old and a lot of people were kind of, that was baked in. Some of it's Trump being what he is. But the macro level trends, for example, with Hispanics, that didn't start today. The macro level trends with non college whites, that didn't start today. And I think my point on a lot of this stuff is a, we have to get back to some basic organizing, some early organizing. I do think particularly in some of these communities that we consider to be base communities that we do need to spend more money communicating earlier. We have to treat voters. So we've, I think we've treated by, you know, particularly just a turnout target is persuasion. And that part of the point I made about the data thing is, you know, we've got.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Will you make that, make that point for our listeners?

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

So, you know, for, you know, your average, you know, way we look at data as a party, your average voter is going to have a score from 1 to 100, one being, you know, 1% that are going to vote for our candidate, 100 being the sure thing. And we tend to sort of chop up the electorate by that way. And so if you're for example, a African American male who's voted in four elections in a row and has a primary voting history like you may have a persuasion score of 100, we think you're going to vote for us. So we don't talk to you anymore. And except to make sure you vote well, if we're not talking to you anymore and the other side is talking to you, that's not going to work out well for us. And I think at the same time, and Stan from the Obama years, one of the things that our guy doesn't get enough credit for and you guys campaign don't get enough credit for is he kept the floor in a lot of these places very high and in part because frankly we had money so you could communicate widely. But take the panhandle of Florida, very conservative area. I look at where we were versus where Harris was and it's not changed dramatically. It's still white, still non college, but we spent the money there, put the people on the ground there to keep those floors high. And nowadays if you were to look at data, they'd be like, oh, that area always was Republican. It's a waste of your time and your money. So you don't spend any money there. Well, all of a sudden the floor has gone from 40% to 25%. And so my point is for me, I'm not a smart guy. I'm smart enough to add up to 50%. If we're not talking to enough people to make sure we're getting to that number, then we're not going to win very many elections. And so I think we have to cast a broader net and we have to kind of sometimes accept where the median voter is, even if it's not where we want them to be. You know, it's, you know, just my view of the world.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

One question before I let you go because I know you got a fight to catch. But just the real canary in the coal mine for Florida in the country is the Massive shift in the Latino vote. As someone who saw that firsthand, what recommendations would you have for the party to begin to not just stem that tide, but reverse it?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I mean, if we don't do this as a party, we are not going to elect presidents. I mean, I mean, I think we're senators, frankly.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

I mean, I mean, because I think the other thing that's really important to keep in mind here is that the next redistricting reapportionment after the next census is going to change the map in fundamental ways. The path to 270 through Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan will be a path to like, 255 to 257. So we're going to have to win Nevadas. We're going to have to win Arizona's and Georgia's and potentially Florida's, North Carolina. All these states have much bigger Hispanic populations than you have in the upper Midwest. So, a, we have to do it. You know, I think. I think a lot of. I mean, the upside is. Listen, man, like, before Barack Obama, we weren't necessarily doing great with Hispanics either. I mean, we were able to change that pretty quickly. A. We had an amazing candidate, generational candidate, but also, I think just kind of getting back to redefining who we are. I mean, I think this perception that we are a party that is more focused on sort of niche social issues. And again, I'm not saying we shouldn't stand it for the marginalized. We absolutely should. That's what makes us all Democrats. But redefining that, you know, we are there, you know, whether it's, you know, for helping people go to college or tech degrees. I mean, just getting back to those core issues, which is going to require us to spend a lot of money, but I think we have to just engage in redefining who we are in those communities. It's going to be slow. It's going to be painful. Again, I think that, you know, I think that some of the work that d. I mean, I'm critical of a lot of things I'm not critical of, like what the DNC has been doing on the ground in a lot of these states. I think it's been very good. We should build on that going forward. But I mean, we'd have to. I mean, it's just going to have to claw back and redefine who we are as a party with those voters.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Steve Schale, thank you so much. We will count on you to turn Florida back around in the next four to eight years. So it's great to talk to you.

[Unknown Speaker]

I'm getting old man. I'll do what I can do. Good to talk to you buddy. Thanks man.

[Jon Favreau]

That's our show for today. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday morning. Have a great weekend everyone.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Bye everyone.

[Jon Favreau]

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