Can Democrats Lose the Downer Image? + Chris Murphy in Conversation (Crooked Con)

Summary

Pod Save America – “Can Democrats Lose the Downer Image? + Chris Murphy in Conversation” (Crooked Con, Nov 12, 2025)

Episode Overview

This live episode from “Crooked Con” dives deep into the persistent image problem facing Democrats: Why are they broadly seen as downers or “scolds,” and how can they find a more joyful, relatable, and big-tent appeal—especially going into the next election cycle? The hosts navigate recent election wins, the unique energy in Democratic campaigns, building broad coalitions, and the challenge of projecting economic populism and authenticity. Special guest Senator Chris Murphy joins for a candid conversation about the Democratic Party's future, messaging challenges, and lessons from Tuesday’s big wins and setbacks.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

The "Democrats Are No Fun" Problem

• Opening Reflection ([02:21]): Dan Pfeiffer notes the historic perception shift: “Three decades ago, Trump found an audience among pretty apolitical comedians and media personalities…who see Democrats as pious and scolding. The Democratic Party is widely reviled.”
• Tim Miller’s Diagnosis ([04:43]): “You guys are kind of annoying… There’s a lot of inertia and status quo happening… It’s important to accept it and think about how we appeal to more people.”
• Fox News vs. Liberal Media ([11:44]): Jessica Tarlov explains why Fox appears more fun: “The JOY is important to the formula that makes Fox so appealing…They’re not taking themselves that seriously. They’re not scolding each other.”

Notable Quotes

• Jessica Tarlov ([12:49]): “Because we have this kind of uniform policy of stay in line, it’s joyless. You can’t feel free to criticize somebody… The Republicans…go about their business in a way that we don’t.”

• Hasan Piker ([14:43]): “If I had to sit next to Jesse Watters and Greg Buttfelt the entire time, I would kill myself. And the fact that you have been able to successfully sit in that room every day and just white knuckle through Jesse Waters’ snide ass remarks is impressive. It is.”

The “Woke, Weak, Out of Touch” Branding Trap

• How Attacks Stick ([06:10]): Dan Pfeiffer questions how to counteract GOP attacks without falling into the identity politics trap or ignoring economic issues.
• Simone Sanders’ Response ([06:49]): “You cannot allow your opponent to define you and not answer… The answer is not to run away from the confrontation. You need candidates that people like and believe in—even if they think your brand is shitty.”
  • Story of John Ewing’s Omaha campaign: Focused on real issues, didn’t let trans/bathroom attacks overtake the campaign.

Quote

• Simone Sanders ([09:44]): “The brand was poopoo, [yet] people voted for Democrats anyway…People are willing to support candidates even if they think your brand is shitty.”

On Moderation vs. Bold Messaging

• Pushback on Moderation ([10:14]): Hasan Piker criticizes "do the same, go moderate" advice: “I knew there was no way moderate enough. That was what the issue was.”
• Brand vs. Candidates ([10:31]): Discussion reveals ongoing struggle for Democrats where the party is disliked, but their individual candidates can win if authentic and engaging (see Zoran Mamdani’s campaign for example).

Joy, Community, and Political Energy

• Community as the Antidote ([18:48]):
  • Dan Pfeiffer: “What we saw in New York feels like an antidote to some of this problem. Zoran Mamdani is having fun... finding community in politics.”
  • Hasan Piker ([19:40]): Shares DNC experience: “I actually found myself feeling a sense of anxiety…Why is everybody just, like, celebrating like we’re at the end zone here when it is not a guarantee?”

Economic Populism & The Five-Point Plan

• Hasan’s Policy Wish List ([31:17]):
  • Medicare for All
  • Massive housing expansion/socialized housing
  • Federal jobs guarantee & jobs program
  • Free college, education improvements
• These are what he sees as kitchen-table, "working-class" issues, not culture war distractions.

Running Where You Are: Localizing the Message

• Jessica Tarlov ([29:41]): Not every Democrat can build a massive platform—the party has to empower diverse voices representing their local districts.
• Simone Sanders ([32:26], [34:49]): On the limits of universal messages: “Candidates have to run for the race that they’re in.” Warns against compromising on core values, especially for marginalized groups.

The Trump Factor: Populism, Media, and Authenticity

• Tim Miller & Simone Sanders ([35:22+]): Robust debate on how Trump is able to "triple down" on very unpopular or extreme ideas, yet keep a loyal, enthusiastic base. How? Authenticity, boldness, even while being "fascist." Democrats, in contrast, lack figures able to project joy and confidence while holding the big tent together.

• Hasan Piker ([37:37]): Critiques Democrats for failing to robustly counter Republican misinformation on immigration and crime: “There is not enough of a robust defense mechanism out there. And that’s the reason why people end up believing this bullshit and then they get shocked when it’s actually implemented.”

Authenticity and Message Ownership

• The Bernie/AOC Secret Sauce ([42:03]): “Barack Obama didn’t run from the left. He ran against Washington. Bill Clinton had that kind of momentum. But right now, that energy and connection is coming from the left.”
• Bernie’s Confidence ([42:51]): Bernie can say things out of the mainstream and voters still trust his intent because “everyone knows what Bernie Sanders stands for.”

Quote

• Dan Pfeiffer ([43:22]): “He [Bernie] can answer in a way that maybe riles some of the base, but you trust him. And that to me is the connection between…are we having fun…and the actual hard work of politics.”

Lessons from Zoran Mamdani’s Campaign

• Focus on Real Issues, Build Community, and Communicate Clearly
  • Mamdani focused obsessively on affordability, listened to constituents, and built a sense of belonging and joy in his campaign—even moderating his media presentation when needed ([44:33]-[47:23]).
  • He was able to counter negative portrayals (anti-Semitism, for example) by listening and “being persuasive to bring more people into his coalition” ([44:33]).

The Big Tent (and Its Discontents)

• How to Keep the Coalition Together ([55:49]): Dan Pfeiffer and Jessica Tarlov dissect Chuck Schumer’s fear of association with the left flank; how Dems can embrace a big-tent approach without losing vulnerable moderates.
• Jessica Tarlov ([56:26]): “All the candidates that won were affordability candidates…We all got to the place where they thought the Democrats want us to have more housing and more money in our pockets, and the Republicans have been dicking us over.”

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Senator Chris Murphy in Conversation (Live at Crooked Con)

Opening Reflections on the Election ([69:39])

• Sen. Murphy: “Democracy is, for the time being, still alive and well… People want an opposition party willing to stand up and fight in this country. It is not coincidental that we got that big victory at the first moment when the Democratic Party is showing real resolve.”

Lessons for Democrats: How to Win Everywhere?

• ”Three Big Ideas” ([73:22]):
  1. Tell a Strong Narrative: Not just solutions, but a story about who’s screwing you (corporate, billionaire class), and how Dems will shift power to regular people.
  2. Become a Big-Tent Party Again: Nominate candidates who might not align on every issue, but can draw in more voters on core economic/democracy issues.
  3. Invest in Permanent Mobilization: Stop wasting money on ephemeral ads; build permanent messaging and ground game (the GOP does this better).

Notable Quote

• Sen. Murphy ([73:22]): “It’s not a mistake that the only person in our party that draws crowds of 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 is Bernie Sanders and AOC…You have to tell a story… about shifting power from people who have too much to those who don’t have enough.”

Zoran Mamdani’s Campaign: Model for the Future?

• Murphy’s Analysis ([76:36]): “You couldn’t ask him a question that he didn’t answer by talking about the cost of living… If you don’t have one or two things a voter vehemently disagrees with, they get suspicious of you… If you aren’t authentic…you are not electable as a Democrat in this country today.”

Economy vs. Democracy: The Same Story

• Murphy’s Synthesis ([86:47]): “I don’t think of it as two different stories…What is [Trump’s] goal? …to turn the federal government into a vehicle to enrich himself and his billionaire friends… The only way he gets away with that is to destroy the democracy.”
• Dems shouldn’t cede the “reform” narrative—they can be the party fighting to reform, not just defend, the status quo.

On Preventing Election Theft and Future Strategy

• Key Measures: Invest in pro-democracy local and state leaders, pressure/collaborate with social media companies on election integrity, and keep grassroots protest and civic engagement high ([91:02]).
• Protest as Safeguard: “If 3% of a population is engaged in regular protest, it just becomes the secret sauce which puts enough sand in the gears to protect your democracy from destruction.”

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Timestamps for Key Moments

• [02:21] Democrats’ “annoying image” and the Clinton ‘92 paradigm shift
• [06:49] Simone Sanders on Omaha race – running on local issues
• [11:44] Watching Fox News for fun: Joy and energy in GOP media
• [18:48] The DNC, sense of community, and what excites the base
• [31:17] Hasan Piker articulates a populist five-point plan
• [34:49] Simone Sanders on not compromising core values
• [42:03] Lack of charismatic figures outside the left flank
• [55:49] The tension of the “big tent” and Chuck Schumer’s approach
• [69:39] Sen. Chris Murphy: Democrats need to be a fighting, big-tent, story-telling party
• [73:22] Murphy’s three big ideas for growing the party’s footprint
• [76:36] Zoran Mamdani’s campaign as a case study in focus and authenticity
• [86:47] Blending democracy and economic messaging

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Episode’s Most Memorable Quotes

“People are willing to support candidates even if they think your brand is shitty.”
—Simone Sanders ([09:44])

“Because we have this kind of uniform policy of stay in line, it’s joyless.”
—Jessica Tarlov ([12:49])

“If you don’t have one or two things a voter vehemently disagrees with, they get suspicious of you.”
—Sen. Chris Murphy ([76:36])

“Have some fuckin’ balls, like, run a fuckin’ campaign… tell us what your campaign is about. Don’t be a fascist. And be able to talk and be able to communicate to people and lift them up…”
—Tim Miller ([64:10])

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Final Insights & Takeaways

• The Democratic Party’s persistent image problem is not about policy alone, but about energy, communication, authenticity, and community—a sense that it’s “no fun” to be a Democrat.
• The path forward, according to panelists, is focusing relentlessly on real issues—especially economic and affordability concerns—while building a coalition that tolerates discomfort and disagreement, and is locally rooted.
• Candidates who listen, bring joy, and aren’t afraid to stand for something—even if controversial—can succeed (see Mamdani in NYC).
• Democrats must offer a reform agenda, not merely a “defense of democracy as it is,” to re-energize disaffected voters.
• To win and govern in an era of Trumpism and culture wars, Democrats need to combine bold populism with practical, local focus, and never lose sight of strategic coalition-building.

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For Further Listening

• The episode is a must for Democrats and anyone interested in political strategy, movement-building, and how authentic engagement might be the answer to breaking through messaging traps and reshaping the party’s brand.

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Transcript

[Dan Pfeiffer]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

Hi, everybody. Wow. I'm John Lovett. We're live at CricketCon. He's got people. Everybody here has got people everywhere.

[Tim Miller]

You know we're in the Reagan building, baby. I've co opted your ass.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Can't lose control just yet. In his 1992 convention speech, Bill Clinton, who is perfect, said of Republicans who were at the time angry about Murphy Brown Being a single mom on television. If other politicians make you feel like you are not part of their family, come on and be part of ours. Republicans were the hall monitors we were welcoming. Three decades later, Trump found an audience among pretty apolitical comedians and media personalities and their fans who see Democrats as pious and scolding. The Democratic Party is widely reviled. A broad survey of working class voters described Democrats as, quote, woke, weak and out of touch coming out of Tuesday, which was awesome.

[Hasan Piker]

Semaphore zigwa woke Sharia.

[Simone Sanders]

What?

[Hasan Piker]

Yeah, woke Sharia, baby.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

We're all living in momdana stand now. Semavore's Dave Weigel put it best in summarizing the exit polls. What do you think of the Democrats? They stink. Who did you vote for? As many Democrats as possible. So where do we go from here? Joining me are streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker, Ms. now, Simone Sanders, the bulwarks, Tim Miller and the co host of the Five, Fox News, Jessica Tarlov. Tim, I want to start with you and I want to just concede that this is like a big topic and it can be hard to tease out style from substance, strategy, ideology. But I want to start with that 2024 dynamic. You have Trump and his allies on Rogan and a whole bunch of apolitical shows and media. In hindsight, Democrats say, oh, we need Democrats that can go everywhere. They have to go everywhere, just like Trump did. But then we look around and we say, well, who are the Democrats that can do that? And as a former Republican, as a pilgrim in an unholy land who's gone from viewing Democrats being annoying as an asset to a liability, where is your head at?

[Tim Miller]

Well, I was happy about the woke Sharia New York, but you do have to remember that the CIA has taken over in Virginia across the river, so the deep state establishment is also on the rise.

[Hasan Piker]

Big tent, big tent, big tent.

[Tim Miller]

You know what, Lovett? You guys are kind of annoying. And it is something that we're dealing with. And I just, I think that it's important to just accept it and think about it and that, that the fundamental question that you got to. Which was, okay, well, we need a Rogan Barone or we got to be able to go hang out with these, you know, folks. We got to be appealing more to the comedian set. And then it's like, well, who would go on the podcast? And then it's like, well, are you available? Are you? Like, the list is kind of short, right? And so, you know, we can' create people from scratch. But I think that it's important when I look back at the mistakes the Democrats made that got us to this place, it's like Biden wins in 20 when everybody's inside, so you didn't have to be out there. And then in 22, it's like, well, we didn't have a red wave. So it's like things are going pretty well. Right. And so I just think that there was a lot of just inertia and status quo happening and a lot of the problems that were undergirding that a lot of things people were frustrated with about COVID or about, you know, the not as fun parts of Woke Sharia. Right. Like there wasn't a lot of reflection on that. And I think that it's good to reflect on it now. And I think that Tuesday was awesome. But just because we did really well on Tuesday, because Trump is fucking everything up, does not mean that we shouldn't also, like, think about how we can continue to kind of expand out and appeal to more people.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Simone.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It seems like Democrats are often in a trap, which is Trump or one of his acolytes does something genuinely offensive, whether it's attacking or undermining a Democratic institution or going after a vulnerable group of people. And Democrats want to defend those people. Right. But then at times, sometimes they seem like they're writing their own version of the Federalist Papers or they are doing what is then described as identity politics. And so how do you fight back against Trump when he's attacking people, when he's making an issue of marginalized groups without then being seen by a broader group, but being focused less on, say, the economy? How do you square that circle?

[Simone Sanders]

Well, you know, I'm from north Omaha, Nebraska. Shout out to the Midwest people in the room, yes, there are black people. There are black people in Nebraska, all over this country, maybe not North Dakota. And so I say that because earlier this summer, a black man who is a Democrat unseated a three term Republican mayor in Omaha, Nebraska. We can clap for that. His name is John Ewing. And John Ewing, I grew up knowing John Ewing. I know him very well. But in that race, like in many other races across this country that have happened since 2024, one of the issues that the Republican candidate tried to pull to the forefront was, were bathrooms and trans issues. And you know what John Ewing's answer was? Well, first of all, he had an answer. He put up an ad to answer the attacks, which I think is really important. You cannot let attacks go. You cannot allow your opponent as A former strategist. You cannot have your opponent defining you and you not answering. So that's part of it. I think specifically coming out of 2024, a lot of candidates did not answer the attacks. And some people were just like, oh, no, no, that's not me. And it's like, well, who are you? But John Ewing put up ads and went out there and did speeches and was on the streets talking to folks, doing interviews and whatnot and campaigning and saying, she's doing this because she don't want to talk about the potholes. She doesn't want to talk about the issues that are affecting you. She's want to make up this issue that I'm not talking about. She doesn't want to talk about the potholes. And so I think the answer is not to run away from the confrontation. Like, you're not about to make me. As I used to always tell candidates, don't allow these folks, anybody, any of your opponents, to make you believe that you're for an issue that you've never taken up. I don't know what the hesitancy is from some of the campaigns and the strategists over the last couple of cycles to just not be clear about what folks are for and what they're not for. Because in 2024, that they. Them ad was seen everywhere. And black people in Philadelphia told me, the organizers in Philadelphia said that everybody had saw that ad and there was no counter, and they believed it. So I do think that. I don't think Democrats need to do a wholesale like you need a full brand rebrand. Because I think, frankly, the Democratic Party brand, it might never be popular, but what may be, and that's okay, because what you need are candidates who people like and they wanna vote for and who they believe in. And if the brand is popular or not, I'm not. I think the Democrats need to be less concerned about rehabilitating the brand of the Democratic Party apparatus and more concerned about running candidates that are close to the issues in the districts and places that they're trying to win. Tim, don't agree. Tim. Tim, don't agree.

[Tim Miller]

I know. I mean, the brand is.

[Simone Sanders]

The brand is grown.

[Tim Miller]

I agree with that.

[Simone Sanders]

The brand was. Poopoo voted for Democrats anyway. So to me, that says people are willing to support candidates even if they think your brand is shitty.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Well, I think. I think that.

[Simone Sanders]

I don't know.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I think that's an important part of what I think the dynamic we see, right? Which is, you know, there was just a report that came out that said, oh, here's a set of policies that are broadly popular that Democrats should embrace going into the midterms. And they're pretty moderate and sort of.

[Simone Sanders]

Oh, a bunch of these people that lost some races and hadn't one recently put this report up.

[Hasan Piker]

It was shocking. I, for one, was shocked when I saw that report. I was like, wow, so do the exact same thing that the Democrats have been doing that caused them a sequence of failures. That's good. I like that. I knew there was no way moderate enough. That was what the issue was.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

There was no way I was gonna get to the end of that sentence. I don't even know why I considered starting it. But taken. But when I hear what you're saying there, when I see a report like that, I see a group of people straight struggling against a brand that is in the toilet and a bunch of people trying to win despite that. Which is another way of saying, we're in a ravine. Let's find the highest spot we can here in this trench that we're stuck in. But the reason I think this question is important, even if you're right, people win despite disliking the Democratic Party. People hate Congress like their congressperson. I do think it's worth asking what it is like to imagine a world in which Democrats are broadly popular.

[Tim Miller]

So how many gummies you take before coming out here?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Which brings me to Jessica. So I'll reveal something to all of you, which is, John, Tommy and I share an office perfectly. And we often, if not more often than not now, switch over to Fox News during the day. And we do because we want to see what's happening over there. But also it's entertaining. It is. They're having fun over there.

[Jessica Tarlov]

True story.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And, Jessica, I want you to talk about, like, what it is like to be in that environment, because part of what is so fun is their just collective appreciation and shared view of Democrats, which is that they're kind of feckless and funny and ridiculous.

[Jessica Tarlov]

They definitely enjoy that part of it. And I'm so glad that this conference is this week and not last week, because we'd all just be sitting around crying and looking at that memo and saying, well, you know, this is 57% popular, so I think we should go with that. But now we have some wins and we have this diverse set of wins. So I have had a way better couple of days.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

They almost circumspect.

[Jessica Tarlov]

Oh, yeah. I mean, sometimes they got a little rowdy, too. But, you know, you can't dispute Results like that, you can't dispute a Mamdani win and a Spanberger win and whatever happened in the Mississippi State House. And I'm obsessed with whatever a public commissioner is in Georgia. I still don't.

[Tim Miller]

When nobody shows up to vote, we win. It's important, remember?

[Jessica Tarlov]

But the JOY is important to the formula that makes Fox so appealing as a set of programs to watch. And I think about it in context of the Joy campaign of 2024. That was not right. We were being told all the time, like, you're having so much fun, like, brat Summer feels great. And I did feel great at the dnc. Cause I thought that was the moment of like, maybe we have a chance. But it was fleeting. And it's always on our side. I think since the 2016 election, it feels like it's forced upon us versus it's coming from within. There may be individual candidates that we're into. I've gotten super excited about people down, ballot all over the place or I love Ruben Gallego. That's always fun for me to talk about. But because we have this kind of uniform policy of stay in line, it's joyless. Because you can't feel free to criticize somebody that you disagree with or you're gonna get scolded by this person and that person. And the Republicans, generally speaking, live free of that amongst themselves. I mean, criticizing Trump is a whole other thing, but they go about their business in a way that we don't. And that I think that we're adapting to in at least based on these election results. And Fox captures that. That there are people who have kind of like a shared core set of values maybe, but they're not taking themselves that seriously. They're not scolding each other. It also matters in the quality of the programming. It looks great. Our graphics are beautiful. Our lighting is fantastic. Are you making a face?

[Hasan Piker]

Look, I'm your fedayeen. I'm your biggest die hard fan.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Okay?

[Hasan Piker]

But no, I don't think the Fox News graphics are beautif. Look, I respect what you do. Especially cause like if I had to sit next to Jesse Watters and Greg Buttfelt the entire time, I would kill myself. And the fact that you have been able to successfully sit in that room every day and just white knuckle through Jesse Waters snide ass remarks is impressive. It is.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Concur.

[Jessica Tarlov]

Thank you. And it is nice to be amongst my people, which I'm usually not like cautiously weaving through. But my point in bringing it up, and you don't have to love our graphics, even though they're copied in every movie and things like that. It's like the official look of it.

[Simone Sanders]

But. But even when the PR people love Jessica, she is a favorite of the.

[Jessica Tarlov]

Fox PR folks, but nothing is taken that seriously. And that's not the case in liberal media. And that doesn't mean you're not talking about serious things, but there's this feeling like it is not the end of the world and in every topic that you're discussing. And this idea that we can just go and show up in conservative spaces or, you know, come for an hour and you have to be open to those kinds of things, like, doesn't capture how hard it is for people who vote like me. And some of the things that I think to genuinely form bonds and interact on a ongoing basis with people who you disagree with. An hour, two hours, three hours is not getting to know the other side. Living amongst them and spending time with them is. And I think that's why I'm able to do my job and have a reasonable therapy bill. Like, not insane, but we know each other like the family that it looks like, which is dysfunctional, but it's still a family. And people who watch the show and we have 20% Democratic viewership still get that. Hassan, sorry, has maybe not the answer.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You guys wanted, but you're not getting.

[Hasan Piker]

A lot of claps because you're defending Fox News in this room.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Well, let me speak. I want to talk to Hasan about what you just said, but before, I heard something from the crowd, and I think it reflects what they're feeling, which is. Well, they're not taking it seriously because they. Because these are people that are not appreciating the consequences or are praying or telling themselves a story about the consequences. And I know you know that, but that's a challenge for the left. I think sometimes we are seen as upset or scolding because we're motivated by, like, a deep set of values. And when you watch Fox, there's a frivolousness to it, but maybe that's a kind of carelessness about what's happening to the country.

[Jessica Tarlov]

I totally agree with you about certain issues. Absolutely. And I make that very clear. And they can make fun of me or whatever, but elections have consequences. And we saw on Tuesday night that the American public sees through it. That's the point. People get all hot and bothered about how conservatives are reacting to certain things and that they're being dismissive, but they are the ones that think the American public is stupid. And we're the ones who know that they can see what's going on. So whether you get 90 seconds of talk time or you get to talk for hours a day on your podcasts or on your live stream, all the things for Hasan, like, they're the ones that are doubting people's capacity to understand. And so I get what you're saying, and I feel it. And sometimes I don't like being made fun of sometimes for being upset about American citizens taken into ICE detention and not getting to call their loved ones. But Tuesday night, people showed up all over the country and said, fuck off. That is unacceptable.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Hasan.

[Jessica Tarlov]

I gotta pause.

[Tim Miller]

Hasan hasn't gone 17 minutes without talking since 2014.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

The stage is about to have. Stage is vibrating. And I'm sorry it took this long to get to the fact that what we saw in New York on Tuesday in many ways feels like an antidote to some of this problem. Zoran Mamdani is having fun out there, and he's also representing a incredibly enthusiastic base of people who are finding community in being part of politics. And that does seem like something now that is more easily formed on the left. I can think of all the candidates and campaigns that have been left driven, that have built that energy and enthusiasm and sense of fun. Brad Summer was an exception. There was a moment where, look, we can all look back and be like, I knew I was full. I went full breath.

[Hasan Piker]

I mean, I was there.

[Simone Sanders]

We were.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah.

[Hasan Piker]

No. And as someone who was there to DNC before I got kicked out, but on the last day, I actually found myself feeling a sense of anxiety over the course of every single day that passed where I was like, why is everybody just, like, celebrating like, we're at the end zone here when it is not a guarantee that Kamala Harris is gonna win? And I kept warning over and over again that there were a lot of unaddressed issues that the Democrats just kind of never wanted to acknowledge at all.

[Tim Miller]

And we'd not just be excited. We had somebody who could talk, though. Could we just have had one week? We were excited for a week. Cause she could talk.

[Hasan Piker]

No, no.

[Tim Miller]

That was great. So just give us a break.

[Hasan Piker]

No, but the exact. The excitement that came into the DNC was actually because for. For some reason.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Right.

[Hasan Piker]

And the reason is because people finally realized Joe Biden was, you know, his brain was leaking out of his ear. I'm sorry. And. And for that reason, I know there's probably a lot of Democratic Party staffers in here. They're going to get really pissed off for me for saying this, but it almost felt like we had a competent party for once and they were responsive to the people's needs. And that's the reason why everyone was excited. I was excited when I saw Kamala Harris choose Tim Waltz when she could have just as easily gone with Josh Shapiro, for example. I was like, my God, is this, like, is this happening? Is there like an actual progressive momentum backing this candidacy, backing this campaign? And then they back pocketed him. And Kamala Harris went from saying that she was going to do price controls, and she actually very decently messaged around that by saying, we're just gonna go after price gougers right at the grocery store, which was her most popular policy at the time, and directly address one of the main economic anxieties that people were experiencing. And then lo and behold, her brother in law, who's head of legal at Uber, came on and was like, cut this economic populism shit out. And then you had $50,000 in tax credits for small business owners. And that was not addressing the problems that people were experiencing. And I think that we have to, we have to do the honest autopsy of this campaign and realize that maybe people were excited for the progressive momentum that they perceived the campaign actually was going to have and the responsiveness that the party finally had to the people's desires to the basis of voters desires. But then they kind of just threw that into the wind and just kept pumping Liz Cheney and refused to talk about.

[Tim Miller]

Sorry for wanting to help poor Liz Cheney. Can I just do one thing on the honest autopsy though? Because actually we can find some common ground on the economic populist stuff. I think that Kamala should have probably, in retrospect, obviously had a more tangible message on economic populism. My problem with the walls thing though is that that relates to the topic of this panel is that I think if we're having an honest autopsy and looking back at the campaign, there were a lot of liberals that live on the coast that were like, whoa, this dude can change a carburetor and I can put on a camo hat. Like he's gonna really, that guy is really gonna connect with rural America. Cause he seems like a guy that really connects with rural America. And people who like grew up in rural America or who lived in red spaces are like, no, that is the guy who was the P flag teacher at the rural high school. And by the way, being the P flag sponsor at a rural high school is awesome. That's a great thing to be. Everybody loves that. That's Great. But like, everybody who's from that world did not look at him and say, you code conservative or like, you have conservative values, like me. They coded him. It's like, oh, you're the nice liberal at the school. Right. And so I think that if we're going to have an honest reflection on the last campaign, the economic populism stuff was a miss too. Was a miss for sure. But the. But being seen as being to the cultural left and being out of step with the country culturally on a wide variety of issues, whether it be social issues or Covid or free speech, or just being able to chill on comedians podcasts, like that was a miss. And it was. And people misunderstood what Tim Walsh was bringing to the table because he was not able to do any of that.

[Hasan Piker]

Yeah. I think the cultural stuff is only relevant if that is ostensibly the only thing that you're bringing to the table. And unfortunately for the Democratic Party, I mean, these used to be wedge issues for a reason. Right. These were concocted in think tanks with the deliberate design to make it seem as though there was some significant disagreements between the two parties. And they were created to make the Republicans more popular so that people would focus on whatever the Family foundation decided was a more successful way to present anti trans narratives after focus testing their message. And when people are focusing on that, they're always going to go, okay, well, the Democrats are silly. Why do they care about this? This is like a tiny sliver of the population. Instead, they should like every moment that they're talking about that is a moment where they're not talking about affordability. We're where they're not talking about, like a working class centered party.

[Simone Sanders]

Where are the Democrats that ran on trans issues? Showed them to me. People, where are they?

[Senator Chris Murphy]

They didn't.

[Simone Sanders]

They didn't.

[Hasan Piker]

I agree they didn't.

[Simone Sanders]

It was a Republican.

[Hasan Piker]

But you, you, you actually brought that up. And I 100% agree with you where.

[Simone Sanders]

You said, okay, good. Sorry, sorry, I jumped out my seat.

[Hasan Piker]

No, I, I 100% agree with you. Because you said the potholes, right?

[Simone Sanders]

Yeah.

[Hasan Piker]

Like, if you're talking about the potholes and your opponent is constantly being like, well, what about trans people then? They look insincere and they look silly. And there is no reason to betray marginalized groups and decide that we're going to actively write them out of the equation because they're working class as well. And this is something that I have never compromised on. And yet seemingly I've been able to find like a very populist and robust movement in my own audience that does not compromise on these issues, but also is always in the affirmative making the argument that we have to focus on kitchen table issues. If you want to use that kind of language around it, but like center the working class and try to seek out what their problems are, address them and also make this earnest attempt and show that we are honest about actually fighting for them. And I think Zoron's campaign and its success was a fantastic example of this. I know people say it's in New York, but that's precisely what he did. Five key issues. He went out, he asked people, what's your problem? I'm going to solve it. And he centered his campaign around five key issues of affordability in New York. And lo and behold, in spite of 22 billionaires spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to take them out, in spite of a very hostile media environment, especially leading up to the primary or certainly after the primary, they, they genuflected a little bit by the end, but and, and, and all of these attack ads, he still won.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

This episode is brought to you by Zebiotics. Pre Alcohol. When you're raising a glass to your team winning, catching up with your old buddies back in town, we're just trying to stay sane. With a house full of relatives, how you feel the next morning still matters. That's why I drink pre alcohol. DBiotics pre alcohol Probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's a buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for rough days after drinking. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

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[Jon Favreau]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

God, this is going great.

[Tim Miller]

Are we having fun yet?

[Jon Favreau]

I'm having.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Are we having fun yet?

[Tommy Vietor]

No.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Jessica, I want you to respond, and then I want to kind of tease two things out here.

[Jessica Tarlov]

Well, I agree. I totally agree. I just exist in a world where we can't behave that way. Like, not everybody who's gonna run for office or who wants to have a voice can build the platform that you have. You're ridiculously talented and damn, thank you.

[Simone Sanders]

No, no.

[Jessica Tarlov]

But even being able to talk that long or to. It's a skill set that I. That I don't have. But when you say, we don't need to deal with this, and I agree with you about the ad, and I remember when that happened. There are people who are running in races where you need to do more than that. Like we were talking earlier, I was overdoing Tim's pod with him. We're talking about Jared golden not running in Maine. And Jared golden can't afford to not talk about the issues that his constituents genuinely care about because they also vote for Donald Trump. And for some of them, they just want to hear someone say, listen, I want to protect everybody. I'm an inclusive guy, you know, But I. Whatever happened with Leah Thomas or that's always like, the lightning rod, you know, trans athlete issue. I understand your concern about, you know, trans women and women's sports. That doesn't mean Jared golden needs to say, I want a ban on this. It means Jared golden says, like, the head of the NCAA did when they testified. This is. You're talking about 10 athletes out of 500,000. So it is a small fraction of the population. But I'm not going to dismiss your concerns. And this big tent and a winning coalition across this country has to be compromising about what people need to do to win their races. I'm not talking about being bigoted, I'm not talking about being nasty. But the country operates differently in different places. And I feel like we give lip service to that, but don't always behave that way.

[Hasan Piker]

Like, I. The thing is, like, if the Democratic Party was defined by five key policies, okay, Medicare for all, a single payer system, socialized medicine.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Right?

[Hasan Piker]

Something of that sort. And a plan to expand the available housing units. I want socialized housing that is not even broached, that's not even discussed amongst the Democratic Party. I want a federal jobs guarantee and a jobs program to build those houses. Right? Free college and better education overall from K through 12. If those were like your five key signature campaign promises that directly tackle all of the issues that people. The economic hardships that people in the heartland are actually going through and not just like, you know, highly educated liberals in big cities, then any moment that these people would turn around and be like, well, what about trans people? They're gonna get healthcare too. You could just be like, okay, what, do you not want healthcare because you think a trans person is gonna get it?

[Simone Sanders]

Well, I just wanna be clear. There was a moment on a debate stage where they weren't talking about trans people, but in the democratic primary in 2020, they asked. There was one of the large primary debates and they asked, well, do you think undocumented people should have healthcare? People raised their hand and it was used as an attack ad. And it was an effective attack ad. So I think sometimes I agree with some of what you're saying. Okay? The dig at small businesses I disagree with, because the biggest driver of wealth in African American communities outside of government jobs, which is why the fact that 300,000 black women have lost their government jobs is a blow to wealth ascension in this country for black women is small businesses. And so the small business plan was a plan that spoke to working class black and brown people in this country who do not work at large corporations, but had an idea, wanted entrepreneurship, and then they saw a plan for them. And so it was a wide, you know, tense situation. But I guess my point is to Jessica, what Jessica is saying, Yes, I do think candidates have to be, you gotta run for your district. You Gotta run for the race that you're in. As a. You know, I'm a black woman from the Midwest. Every day, everywhere I go, okay, I Live in Washington, D.C. but I'm black and I'm bald. So there are some things I think I hear when these conversations come up. And I've sat in strategist rooms when they've come up. They've come up on campaigns I've worked on, and I hear them on the sets and the commercial breaks when we have some of these candidates on our show, it feels like to some people that look like me, that the people within the party apparatus want folks to compromise on issues that, for me, are uncompromisable when folks say that. And so, like, I do think that if the party is like, look, people need to. I think the answer is people need to run for the race that they're in. Okay, well, what does that mean? Does that mean when. Because let's just be very clear. Donald Trump and the Republicans, they aren't looking for a big tent. They're like mass deportation. F you look at my one good black person shithole countries in Africa, all the brown people need to be deported. Women got blood coming down their eyes, but, like, yay, we're going back to a meritocracy. And that means only white men. Like, what? Hold on, What? But they were winning. And so they didn't win because they opened up the aperture and let people do what they needed to do. They won because they tripled down on what they believed.

[Tim Miller]

Even if what they believe, that's just not. I'm sorry, that sounds good and I like it. I want it to be right. It's just not right.

[Simone Sanders]

It's not. They didn't win because they tripled down on what they believed.

[Tim Miller]

No, they did triple down on their.

[Simone Sanders]

Yes, they tripled down on racism. Yeah, it was populism, but he was a. Populism is a thin ideology mixed with a thick ideology. According to Cass Mudd Simone, his populism had a lot of things in. It was an economic populist, but populism had a little white supremacy in it, a little racism. Like, Bernie Sanders is a populist in a different way than Donald Trump.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Here's the thing, though.

[Simone Sanders]

I don't understand.

[Tim Miller]

Here's the thing, though. Can I just say really quick, though, here's the thing. Like, yeah, he doubled down on a bunch of terrible shit that they believe. That's extreme. No doubt. No doubt. He also was seen as left of Kamala on foreign policy. He was seen as an anti war candidate. He was seen as anti the Republican establishment of war. He cut to the middle on that.

[Hasan Piker]

Yeah, he lied about that for sure.

[Simone Sanders]

He's a liar. He lied.

[Hasan Piker]

But then.

[Tim Miller]

Then maybe our guys should lie about some things that are popular, too.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Okay.

[Tim Miller]

Okay.

[Hasan Piker]

Sound like me during the campaign where I was like, what the fuck are you guys doing? When you're not, like, addressing this stuff where Donald Trump can present himself as the peace candidate. That was insane to me. But obviously sending Bill Clinton to Dearborn to talk about Judea and Samaria as most people were seeing.

[Tommy Vietor]

All right.

[Hasan Piker]

Most people were seeing.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I want to bring us back.

[Tim Miller]

They didn't moderate on things, is all I'm saying.

[Tommy Vietor]

He.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I'm having so much fun.

[Simone Sanders]

No, no, I'm sorry. You cannot have a convention where you have signs that say mass deportation now.

[Tim Miller]

Not saying he was going to moderate. Moderated on things.

[Simone Sanders]

That's centric, nationalist version of this country and say that he moderated. What he did is say, people in Gaza, you should vote for me because Joe Biden ain't doing what you want. That's not a moderation. He had good rhetoric, but his policy was consistent. And the vice president on that debate stage said all of the things that he was saying that he would do, and he has outdone them. He said he was going to send the military into the streets. He was saying it on the campaign. That's not moderation. That's fascism. He said he was going to deport all of these people in this country. That is what he said. That it's not just the criminals. He's coming for anybody that is in this country who is undocumented. So I just. I can't get with the. Well, Donald Trump didn't moderate a bit. No. They tripled down on the bad stuff and had nice graphics and good. And smiled through it.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So can I just. I want to bring us back.

[Hasan Piker]

Simone is.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

All right. Hasan quick. And then I want to bring us back.

[Hasan Piker]

Simone is absolutely right, 100%. And these were things that I was screaming about nonstop. But there was also.

[Tim Miller]

You told me that he ran left of Kamala foreign policy.

[Hasan Piker]

He was moderating on foreign policy.

[Tim Miller]

He didn't run unpopular Republican views on foreign policy.

[Hasan Piker]

However, he ran to the left on foreign policy. Only because the Democrats came out and said, I'm going to have the most lethal military. Because unfortunately, and I mean this sincerely, I don't think the Democrats actually saw the threat of Donald Trump as a significant enough threat, because if they were, they would have locked in and had better messaging overall and tried to at least establish a base of support with counter narratives, with counter messaging leading up to the election. Not in the aftermath or not during the election, but leading up to the election. Because Republicans, they act as though there is an election every single day. They are constantly on message. They're constantly creating an alternative reality with lies saying that undocumented migrants are actually responsible for a metric ton of the crimes that are taking place in American cities. When that is an abject lie. Ok? And when I talk to congresspersons, whether it be at the DNC or even before, even after, and I tell them, why the fuck aren't you guys counter messaging against this? We are a nation of immigrants. America is the most diverse nation on the fucking planet. It is literally the reason why we are such a domineering force beyond all these other. Beyond all the other, you know, violent reasons. But, but, like, that is what. That is one of the most redeemable aspects of America that I personally love that the Democrats completely dropped because they were scared. They saw that one poll from the Pew center of Research that said that said that 66% of Americans want mass deportations. That exact same poll also showed that if given two options, mass deportation and mass amnesty, that the majority always chose mass amnesty. So why is that never communicated? Because Americans, sure, the median voter trying to understand where the median voter is coming from is impossible. Possible. Okay. You will kill yourself if you try to understand what these people are doing.

[Simone Sanders]

You just lost me, Hasan. I was with you halfway through that, but you lost me. But I'm with you.

[Hasan Piker]

But what I'm trying to say is this, okay? There are Trump. There are. There are.

[Simone Sanders]

You're doing great.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I want to hear this point, and then I'm going to.

[Hasan Piker]

There are Trump supporters out there, okay, that have been deluded into thinking that Donald Trump represented a change. And obviously, we saw that buyer's remorse this past Tuesday, Right? Especially in Hispanic communities where they were like, I can't believe that he is actually doing mass deportation. And it's, you know, we're in D.C. this is a fairly liberal crowd, and we laugh at those people. But, like, I talk to those people every day. And there were people that genuinely thought, they genuinely believed that Donald Trump was actually excising the violent criminals. And the only reason why people are led to believe this lie, aside from the faucet of misinformation that comes from independent outlets on the right and also Fox News as well, well, is because there is no robust response from The Democratic Party that says that's a fucking lie. That's a lie. Undocumented migrants in this country are responsible for a lower rate of per capita crime than natural born US Citizens are. If you pair that up with documented migrants, it's negligible. It is marginal, and they're hyper. Focusing on it specifically because this is a vulnerable population that is easy to target and it's easy to ridicule and there is not enough of a robust defense mechanism out there. And that's the reason why people end up believing this bullshit and then they get shocked when it's actually implemented.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So I think that's a good point. And I, and I, and I think I sort of agree with Tim and with Simone about impossible.

[Tim Miller]

Rift.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Because. Because one of Trump's gifts, One of Trump's gifts is he is. I think he convinced a lot of people he was going to go after criminals. But he also said at the convention that they were going to do mass deportations. And I think how to bring it back is that is possible because of a big void. So Trump can do a lot. Trump has room to operate, to maneuver. Why? Because he has built an authentic connection with millions of people who believe him, who have his back, who think, yeah, he'll compromise. It is inconceivable that Kamala Harris would appoint Mike Pence to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Inconceivable? We wouldn't live in that world. But Trump can appoint a Kennedy to run the Health Department. Why? Because he has built such a credible, loyal following that he. Because of the authentic way in which. You don't agree with that cult?

[Tim Miller]

No, it's just cults.

[Jon Favreau]

Cults.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Look, yes, it has certainly become a cult, Right? And then you look at our side and you find the politicians that have that kind of authentic connection to the voters. You look at the list of leadership of the Democratic Party. How far down do you go before you have somebody that can fill an arena? You have to get to Bernie Sanders. You go to Barack Obama, you go to Zoran Mamdani, you go to aoc. It is largely on the left. That is the truth of this moment. But it wasn't always true. Barack Obama didn't run from the left. He ran against Washington, Bill Clinton and had that kind of momentum. He actually ran from the right. But right now, that energy and connection is coming from the left. And so Hasan lays out a group of policies that are from the left. Like, I'm not for socialized housing. I'm for building a ton of housing.

[Jon Favreau]

Boo.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

That's okay. But it is a void that the left is currently filling that the leadership of the Democratic Party is not. How does Trump get away with all this stuff? How do we get defined as being anti trans? The other day, Bernie Sanders was asked about the border and he said, oh, countries got to have a border. That pissed off some people. Me too. It pissed off some people on the left. Did it piss off Hasan?

[Hasan Piker]

I mean, yeah, I disagree with Bernie Sanders message around that because obviously, yes, nation states have well defined borders and boundaries.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

But my point about it is he. He can say that without. With confidence. Because everyone knows what Bernie Sanders stands for. Yes. And so when he is asked about trans issues, when he is asked about issues in which Democrats are not at 55, 45, but at 30, 70, whatever it may be, he can either say, you know what? I don't care about that. I'm not talking about that, or he can answer in a way that maybe riles some of the base, but you trust him. And that to me is the connection between, honestly, the kind of like, what seems a bit frivolous, like, are we having fun? And the actual hard work of politics. Like Zoron, you said was moderating in the last few weeks of the campaign. I was glad to see that Tim and I are both. That pushed him hard almost. I am. I am. To the.

[Tim Miller]

I am out against him. And I was like, okay, we're in business now.

[Hasan Piker]

Z. I mean, he was the reason why Zoran was moderating on. I don't know what he was moderating on. I guess, like, maybe you guys are talking about, like, the policing stuff. Even though it was. Now that the election is over, we can be honest about it. Zoran Mamdani did this brilliant thing that got liberals to basically come to terms with a lot of things that liberal media had considered radical right. Because he had a way with. He had a really good way of communicating these.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Can you generously call that he did a good job of listening, seeming curious, and being persuasive to bring more people into his.

[Hasan Piker]

Sure, yes. But. But one of the things that he did. But he was still uncompromising. Defund the police always was about making sure that the headcount either remained stable. But then we actually turned around and restructured some.

[Simone Sanders]

Defund now.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Now who's doing. Now you're the PR guy. Most political you've sounded.

[Hasan Piker]

But the thing is. The thing is it has a bad rap no matter what you say or do. Democrats immediately attacked it. They said, this is a danger and it's partially because Americans really love police. It's unfortunate. I don't know how, because they don't do their fucking jobs ever. But. And I wish they would because I'm not like, I'm not saying we can live in.

[Tim Miller]

Do their jobs ever.

[Simone Sanders]

I want to be able to call the police. I just don't want them to think I'm a suspect when they show up.

[Hasan Piker]

Exactly, Exactly. We want a presence of law and order. And unfortunately, in many communities, police's presence is lawlessness and disorder. Now, having said that, Having said that, he wanted to not reduce the headcount necessarily, but at least like, bring in social workers to take away some of the bandwidth, some of the workload from the police. And that was a message that resonated with even Tim Miller, it seems.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

No, I want to, but I.

[Hasan Piker]

He liked it. It was. But you won't defund the police now.

[Tim Miller]

No, I want to. Can I just, just really quick because I think, like, like, Simone, I'm like, you're talking, you're talking. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you say something like, dude, bro here. So. But here's, here's. I think what Zoran did well, that kind of combines part of what you're talking about with what. What maybe. I think, I think I'm happy he didn't take your advice on part of. Part of his campaign. But what he did well to the. Are we having fun? Fun yet? Zorin was happy. He was having a good fucking time. He has a fun hang. Came on my pod. We had a great time. He had a couple specific things you cooked him on.

[Hasan Piker]

Globalize, the intifada. That wasn't his best answer.

[Tim Miller]

That wasn't his best answer. But we were vibing, though, and people listen to the pod. Liked it. He had four issues, like you mentioned. It's kind of hard to know what Kamala's issues were. I think if you quizzed all of us on here, everybody would say different things. Everybody knew it. Zoran's issue, that was good. He was good on that. He could go on a pod with me or somebody else. He could have gone on Rogan for three hours and hung out and had a good time so he could communicate. He's happy. He had three issues, but three or four issues. But he also just did like making the practical decision to say he was going to keep the police chief rather than doubling down on the tweets that he sent in. 2019 was smart, practical politics. You can have clear left wing policy issues that people understand. You can Be positive and optimistic, and you can also be practical. All of that, like, quite well, actually.

[Hasan Piker]

I'll give you. I agree with that. I think his messaging was good on that. And that's precisely what I was talking about. Like, for example, okay, especially not in, like, the broader population's understanding of this issue, but, like, in mainstream media and in American politics, there's a major division between how the population is receiving what Israel is doing and how our politicians are responding to it. Right. And how the media even responds to it. Anti Zionism is like, a scary term or a scary word for a lot of media professionals in a way that, like, you know, being anti Israel is not necessarily scary at all for the average person. As a matter of fact, they are very anti Israel now, and there's polling to reflect on that reality. Now, what Zoran did so perfectly was to communicate his position in a way that liberals understand it. He turned around and said, yeah, Israel has a right to exist as a nation state that has equal rights and representation for all people. That is identifying that Israel has a Jewish ethnostate project. Right. That is identifying that Israel has an exterminationist policy on the Palestinians and incredibly repressive policies on the.

[Tim Miller]

True. For Qatar, too. Does Qatar have a right to exist? Only if everybody has equal rights for all religions. Is that true for Qatar or just Israel?

[Hasan Piker]

No, I don't care. I mean, yeah, okay, no nation state has a right to exist, including Qatar. Like, I don't know why you're bringing up Qatar as though I'm going to be like, oh, my God, Cutter. Like, they pay me so much.

[Tim Miller]

I just say, I don't know why that's the only country that don't. That doesn't have a right to exist unless they get equal rights for everybody.

[Hasan Piker]

Because all.

[Tim Miller]

All of those countries in that region are an ethno state. No. If you can, Qatar is an ethno state. Iran's an ethno state, Jordan's an ethno state. Saudi is an ethno state. So I'm okay with criticizing Israel. I'm just saying that's like.

[Hasan Piker]

So you're okay. So you're okay with all of these other countries being ethnostates then? And you're not just using that as a deflective mechanism to move the attention away from Israel, a country that literally receives more aid and more political support than from the United States of America than anyone else. As a matter of fact, a lot of people actually get mad about Qatar because now the Gulf leaders have realized oh, if we give this guy fucking jets, he's going to defend us too. We're oil barons. It's awesome. And that's the reason why it almost feels like people who defend Israel are jealous that, like now other Gulf nations are trying to do like Israel style things over there.

[Simone Sanders]

I love it. Please bring us back.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Sorry.

[Hasan Piker]

Anyway, my message. I can moderate the message without compromise.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I have disagreements with you on this, as you know. I will say that Zoran had a challenge. Right. And part of his challenge was reassuring a lot of Jewish New Yorkers that are deeply worried about some of his past comments and which he has. And he spent a lot of time trying to reassure those people, I think, because he recognized that there was a liability in some of the ways in which his previous statements and some of his positions were seen by a lot of New Yorkers, which is where more Jews on earth live than in any other place than in Israel.

[Hasan Piker]

True.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And he sought to address it. Now, without getting into the details of where we.

[Hasan Piker]

I think he had to do that because he's Muslim. I'm gonna be honest. I think it was racism straight up. He had never said a single thing that was remotely anti Semitic, and yet the media constantly kept needling him on that.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I don't agree with that. And I don't agree with that because it's honestly impossible to know because it's over. Determined. Right. Do I think there's anti. That there is Islamophobia in the reaction to someone. Of course there is. Do I think there's genuine concerns about some of the things he said? Of course there is.

[Hasan Piker]

You can't tell me what.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Hold on. You can't tease it out.

[Hasan Piker]

What was concerned.

[Simone Sanders]

Well, he got elected, so does that argument really matter? He is now the mayor elect.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So the reason I.

[Simone Sanders]

So whatever he did work.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So the reason I don't want to stay on it is because I think there's a lot we can say about it. But. But what I'm trying to say is he had people that were really glad to see someone who had taken his views run for mayor and succeed. He also had people he needed to reassure who had disagreement. But he recognized that he was in coalition with a lot of people who had different views, including. He was asked about Abigail Spamberger, and he was asked about Mikey Sherrill. And he said that this is a party that has room for everybody, not just people who look like me. And I think that, to me, is.

[Hasan Piker]

What I. I hate Republicans. If you can unseat a Republican, it's good. It's good in my book. Look, that was my anger and resentment with, like, the way that the Democrats were representing themselves during the campaign, where it kind of felt like they didn't hate Republicans too much. Whenever I hear Nancy Pelosi say, we need a strong Republican Party, I'm like, no, we don't need a Republican Party. We want to run this country in every seat and be so successful that you have a weak and feckless and ineffective Republican Party that cannot undermine the agenda that centers the working class.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

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[Dan Pfeiffer]

Talking about the overlap of the ways in which Zoron built a big, enthusiastic base of support. Talking about the ways in which Democrats have a void of not people, not not really knowing what they stand for, which lets them be buffeted by issues where they're kind of. Whether it's trans issues or other kind of issues where they feel like they're on their heels. And there's this debate about throwing people under the bus. What are the lessons that you think Democrats should be taking from the success on Tuesday? You know, Chuck Schumer was afraid to. So I. Yeah. So this is now going to be the third time Chuck Schumer has been booed at a Democratic event I've been at in 48 hours.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

And.

[Tim Miller]

Right. You ready? The former Republican's gonna praise Chuck Schumer right now. The shutdown strategy's worked pretty good. We're doing great on the giving him a little claps. Shutdown strategy turned out to work pretty good. Everybody's like, oh, Chuck.

[Hasan Piker]

Yeah, we had to drag him to finally do that. He had an opportunity to do it early.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

What is Jessica Simone? You were gonna leave the Democratic Party in March?

[Simone Sanders]

Well, you know, about every six months, I gotta do a gut check. Every member of the 92%. That's how we sustain ourselves.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

It's like renewing your vows.

[Simone Sanders]

Very much so. Very happy to be with my Husband.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

So.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Chuck Schumer is being afraid of Democrats being tied to Zoran. He is less afraid, it seems to me, about the young people and people that support Zoran not seeing Schumer on their side. And so, Jessica, how do Democrats confidently assert that we are a big tent that includes everyone from Mikey, Sheryl and Abigail Spamberger and Tim Miller and Hasan and Zoran without Deal, without ignoring the genuine and real politics of moderates not wanting to be tagged as New York or San Francisco socialists, which is real and we can't ignore.

[Jessica Tarlov]

Yeah, well, I think so. I just want to say, since I've been looking and reading, are we having fun yet? The last 10 minutes were the opposite of fun. And I think that. No, but it's important for our electoral strategy because that fight is the opposite of fun. It doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen. But when you are the party that is being represented by that kind of screaming back and forth versus saying the stuff that we agree upon that were like, all of the candidates that won were affordability candidates. It sounded different out of Abigail Spanberger's mouth and what she was talking about then out of Zoron's mouth. But we all got to the place where they thought the Democrats want us to have more housing and more money in our pockets, and the Republicans have been dicking us over with their policies, and so that's where we have to be. I was so excited by Zoron's campaign in that it was. It finally felt to me like there was some Obama energy back. And as an elder millennial who spends a lot of time with Gen Zs, I'm sad for them that they don't know what hope and change felt like. They don't know what it meant to watch him from the DNC convention through. When he left, Tim's like, it was terrible.

[Jon Favreau]

It was fine.

[Simone Sanders]

He was good.

[Tim Miller]

I got some goosebumps every now and then.

[Hasan Piker]

No, I hated the DNC for sure. Like, I'll stand on that.

[Jessica Tarlov]

Yeah. But people finding community, people combating loneliness, people having shared purpose, you know, getting outside touching grass, all of that. That's what politics means to me. And you want a great policy agenda, of course, but you really want to feel common cause with people. And you can have disagreements about, you know, of very various issues, but that is the path forward for me. And that's not gonna come from Chuck Schumer. I think Chuck Schumer is, you know, past his sell by date in terms of leading the party this way. But, you know, Chuck Schumer, I think that he was right to recruit Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown to be running for those Senate seats. And I hope that they're gonna win. And I feel good about that. And I think that, you know, his momnani stuff is about himself. And he's, you know, he voted in the election. He's a Jewish New Yorker in Brooklyn there. And Maidani got 30% of the Jewish vote, which is very low. He has work to do with the community. I hope that he will do that work. But I don't think focusing on Chuck Schumer is the answer to it. It's the energy. And that there was energy across New Jersey and there's energy in Virginia and there's energy in New York. And that's the kind of organizing. It's not big Democratic energy. It's individual candidates that have this affordability message and are communicating as a naval pilot, as a CIA officer, or a community organizer.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And this can be for everybody. So Trump is also now giving us a pretty big opportunity. On the one hand, he's been going after comedians and he's, you know, trying to get Kimmel canceled. He's angry about Seth Meyers. Every other day he's tearing down parts of the White House, which was a strange choice, which I tried to walk to see it. And they've built giant walls so that we don't see the construction site. And, you know, Trump is not doing as many rallies as he used to do. He's really kind of ensconced now in this in Mar a Lago and the White House at his Great Gatsby parties, he's tweeting out photos of marble bathrooms. Even some of his top staff now are living on military bases. They've isolated themselves in a lot of ways. Like, do we now have the opportunity to say, hey, they're the hall monitors and out of touch scolds. We're the ones that actually understand what's going on.

[Hasan Piker]

Yeah.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And is there a way, to me, like, is there a way to have a unifying agenda that does what Hasan is talking about, but is one that is appealing to maybe not every single most centrist Democrat, but a broad enough and big enough agenda that would unite that you would like and Tim would like and Jessica would like that we can get behind?

[Simone Sanders]

I just think I just come at this from, as a former strategist, I was a comms person for most of my career. And I did campaigns from state legislative races to judges races to presidentials. Yes. I worked in the White House. I don't know if you'd agree with me here, Tim, but I think that the wrong. The answer is not, okay, just these five things and then da, da, da, da. I think the answer is about the strategy and the. What things you put under your strategy depends on what candidate you are and where you are running. Because coming up in 2026, there are gubernatorial races, there are state legislative races. Like 2026, and frankly, 2027 are really about 2028 and then 2030, and you have to win state legislative seats, you have to win the governor's races. But you also, you know, you should want to take back the House and the Senate. Okay, and how do you do that? It is not by saying, we only do these five things right here. No, it is about what is the strategy. And the strategy does have to be touch grass, talk to people. What are the under. You need to understand your constituents and your community. So whether it's Abigail Spanberger, Mikey Sherrill or Zora Mondami, the thing to Jessica's point that they all did well is they understood what the people wanted. Affordability in Jersey and Virginia also meant energy. Energy prices are way up. One of the things that Mikey Sherrill said that people got behind is that she wanted to declare a state of emergency on energy on day one. And that is what she plans to do. I talked to a lot of. I talked to the folks whose job it was to go out there and organize African American voters in New Jersey. And they said for the black voters in New Jersey that they talked to, for them, it was bigger than Mikey Sherrill. They were dealing with all of these issues that they listed that had to do with affordability and whatnot. And they felt like what was happening in the other states and places in this country, voting for Mikey Sherrill was going to keep that from happening because Jack Cittarelli was very much so aligned with Donald Trump. So I think that you have to just stay close to the issues and the races. But the answer is not. The party apparatus says this is the answer is not those posse papers that these people keep putting out. That's not the answer from my perspective, because that's not how you. You win races by campaigning and you go out there and you talk to people and you earn their votes. You do not win a race by a policy paper. And I just think that there's all this focus on how can we align on these five issues except. And not a focus on, well, what is our strategy? Is our strategy staying close to the people. It's why Democrats, the shutdown fight there. It is terrible for people in this country who work in the federal government. That is absolutely terrible. But what the Democrats are doing is, in the end, at the end of the day, it's going to benefit all of those people because they are fighting. But they settled on a strategy.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And is it a good example, though, this, this shutdown, exactly what we're talking about, which is Democrats chose an issue there. I was skeptical. I didn't. I was skeptical of every choice, to be honest. I didn't think there was a good option for Democrats who were not playing with the best hand. But we chose health care. We chose it and we said we're gonna take this to its logical conclusion. And it's worked better than anyone, I think really predictable.

[Simone Sanders]

But can I just note, they didn't just choose healthcare. They chose a very specific thing that was happening in Congress that was tangible, that connected to people's everyday lives that they could see. And so when I say we don't need to choose all the. Like, that was a strategy.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Exactly. No, I'm agreeing with you.

[Hasan Piker]

I'm agreeing with you.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

I just. We're getting. I think I was having fun, by the way. We could do a whole other hour.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Yeah.

[Simone Sanders]

And I think the disagree.

[Tim Miller]

I think, I think the disagreement is necessary to say. I'm also like, you know, I'm pretty easy to please. I mean, like, Zo Ron had me. I gotta know what more you people want from me. You know, I voted for three straight Democratic presidents and I was gonna vote for Zoran for mayor. So I'm pretty easy to please. So you can get me on board. Here's what you have to do. We'll get this some specific things. Have some. Have some fucking ball, like, run a fucking campaign. Tell us what your campaign is about. Don't be a fascist. And be able to talk and be able to talk and be able to communicate to people and lift them up and like, it's. That seems like that isn't that hard, but it's kind of been for us for the last 10 years. But, like, that's how I would summarize.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I do think so. You know, we're coming from behind in part because I think we've paid for having, like, if you were someone coming up in politics and you see who the standard bearers of party have been for the last 10 years, you might not know exactly that Democrats used to be fun and cool.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

So we have one minute left. Hasan, final thought.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Hasan Piker]

We gotta get rid of the gerontocracy within the party. Down with the seniority structure that we have. We need real whips in the party. This is something that I talk to you about. This is something that I talk to the paw johns about every single time. If you have people who don't want.

[Simone Sanders]

To play ball, what kind of whips?

[Hasan Piker]

Like, you know it.

[Simone Sanders]

I don't.

[Hasan Piker]

I don't like whipping votes. I don't mean it in the. Unless it's Joe Manchin, in which case, you know, maybe. I'm kidding. Of course I can't use spicy language here, but we need to. We need to make sure that we earn the trust of the working class back. And I think that they have been hyper focused on culture war narratives. And the only reason why they've been hyper focused on culture war narratives is because we have not done enough on the left flank to say, no, we are with you. We will fight for you. We're gonna make sure that we solve your economic hardships.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And, Jessica, you're just gonna go back in there and you're gonna fight all these people and you're gonna defeat them for us.

[Simone Sanders]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

No, you got this, girl.

[Jessica Tarlov]

But agree with all of what was just said as the kind of final wrap up stuff. But you know, this idea. You need to be able to talk. You need to be able to talk where I talk. You don't need to be able to talk for three hours with people who agree with you. It's easy. I launched a podcast last year like everybody else. I can get anyone who's gonna be running for president to come on my pod. They're dying to do it. The tougher conversations are the ones that we need to be having because that's how you can get in people's faces and say, that isn't what my party stands for. We're not a Communist party. We're not a socialist party. We're a big tent part.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Sorry, We're a big tent that includes some socialists.

[Jessica Tarlov]

Yeah, A democratic socialist is not a socialist. When they're. I mean, they use these words interchangeable.

[Tim Miller]

Hasan was pro USSR earlier this week.

[Hasan Piker]

We're wrapping it up.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

You were ending on a high note.

[Jessica Tarlov]

Are we having fun?

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Are we having fun?

[Tim Miller]

All right.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

And I do think, by the way, like I hear, look, what's great about being part of a big coalition is being comfortable with the moments of tension and discomfort and disagreement. Because Republicans can't. You're right, they've been a little less scoldy, but they also are running to squash dissent because they're not comfortable with discomfort. They're trying to tell people that politics is easy and there's never any time where you need to feel conflicted or bad or that anything is hard. That's kind of part of the appeal of fascism. Democratic politics. Politics can be tough. Democracy can be tough. But we are part of a big coalition and I just think we can all have fun together. All right, thanks, everybody. Thanks for coming to this. And thank you to Jessica Tarlov, Tim Miller, Hasan Piker, and Simone Sanders. Yeah.

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[Tommy Vietor]

Joining us live here at CrookedCon, he's one of the Democratic Party's loudest voices calling out the dangers of the Trump administration. Welcome, Senator Chris Murphy.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Hey, thanks, Dan. Hey, everybody.

[Tommy Vietor]

Before we get started, I would note the senator has a vote, so we're going to probably have to wrap this up a little about five minutes early because we can't let him miss the vote. But we're going to be here for as long as we possibly can. All right, let's start with the good stuff.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

So the mood, as you can tell in this room is much better because of what happened on Tuesday. How are you interpreting those results?

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Well, democracy is, for the time being, still alive and well. Listen, obviously the election on Tuesday was first and foremost a referendum on Trump's corruption, his chaos. It was an important statement in every corner of the country that the American public are not ready to turn our government over to a would be dictator. But there's another message, I think, that comes from Tuesday as well, and it's one that I hope Democrats are able to learn, which is that people want an opposition party that is willing to stand up and fight in this country. It is not coincidental that we got that big victory at the first moment when the Democratic Party is showing real resolve, is showing a willingness to stand up to this guy. And so, as I've said over the last few days, it's important for us to hear the voters and continue the fight that we're engaged in right now. So it was, I think, a really important moment. I think the result of Tuesday will be that a lot of folks who maybe had been thinking of sitting on the sidelines, some of the corporate elites, the higher education elites, the legal elites who were maybe thinking that Trump had already won this fight, will now realize that, right? The fight is still on. And I think it ends up giving confidence to a lot of people and a lot of institutional players all around the country to maybe reenter the fight to save democratic norms and the foundation of our democracy.

[Tommy Vietor]

Democracy, obviously, huge wins, but these wins are mostly in bluish states, right? New Jersey, Virginia, two states, Kamala Harris, one California. I mean, Georgia is obviously the exception. Do you worry that there's maybe a danger of overreading this, right, to think maybe kind of as Democrats did after 2022, that the voters are with us? I mean, you can ignore some of the hard questions that still exist after 2024.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

I think that's exactly right. I think it's interesting that the party has not been able, I think, thus far to find the oxygen to do a real autopsy as to how we got to this point. And that's understandable at some level because we've had to be engaged in, you know, this, I mean, just epic scale fight to save the country. But the reality is, if you look at the United States Senate, you know, the best right now that Senate Democrats can do if we run the table is 52 seats. Because right now, for the time being, we're not competitive in a lot of states that just a decade ago we were competitive in. And so we do have to wrestle with why, you know, we have lost a lot of low income voters, why rural areas have abandoned Democrats, and Trump will make us more electable in some of those places. But it probably doesn't get us over the hump in like in a place like Missouri or Florida where just two seconds ago we were running candidates that won. So I am certainly worried about the fact that the party has only 12 months to go before the midterm election and maybe hasn't done enough of that reckoning with what went wrong that will allow us to once again be a national party able to win everywhere.

[Tommy Vietor]

Now that I expect you to have all the answers here, but one of the reasons we're all gathered here together is try to figure out questions like this. Do you have some thoughts on how Democrats get back to a world where we can win? The Ohio's, the Iowas, the Montanas, or even some states in the South? Some things we should do differently, different kind of candidates we should be open to?

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Yeah, I do. And I'll give you sort of three simple ideas. First, I just do believe that it's not a mistake that the only person in our party that draws crowds of 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 is Bernie Sanders and AOC. I just think you have to tell a story, and you obviously are better at this than anybody, but you have to tell a story, a narrative. And that narrative has to not only tell you how we're going to make your lives better, but it has to tell people who's screwing them. And there's a true story out there about the corporate class, the billionaire class, consolidated economic power, making people's lives miserable in this country. And the Democratic Party has become this sort of technocratic party that only talks about solutions, solutions that are largely about just rearranging the pieces on the existing marketplace playing field. We've got to be a party that talks about who has too much power and exactly how we are going to radically and immediately shift power from people who have too much of it to people who have not enough of it. The second thing we have to do is become a big tent party again. And I know this is a tough conversation for our party, but if it were up to me, we would be a party with two big tent poles. A tent pole that talks about unrigging our economy and a tent pole that talks about unrigging our democracy. Right. Getting big money, anonymous money, billionaire money out of politics. And by the way, like admitting that you have to do big things to do that. Like if it takes a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics, we should be a for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics. But Dan, that means that you are letting people into the tent, perhaps nominating candidates or being present in areas where, you know, folks might not be with us on all of the social and cultural issues, might not even not be with us on, you know, issues that I care deeply about. Like guns. But I just think we have a better chance of convincing them if they step inside because they align with us on a higher minimum wage or on campaign finance reform. So I just think we have to become that Big Ten party again. And then the last suggestion I'd have is just how we spend our money. We've been corrupted by a consultant class in the Democratic Party that tells us to spend money only on 30 second TV ads and digital ads. The Republican Party goes out and builds a permanent messaging and mobilization infrastructure. We talk about that all the time, but we end up spending almost all of our money on ads that disappear as soon as the last election is over. And so if you want to win in this country as a Democratic Party, be a big tent, be a pugilistically populist party and spend money on permanent messaging and mobilization infrastructure.

[Tommy Vietor]

Speaking of populism, what do you make of Zoran Mandani's win in New York City and some of the discomfort that some Democrats, including some of the Democratic leadership, have had with that sort of candidate?

[Senator Chris Murphy]

You know, it almost got to the point of being hilarious. You look at Mamdami's interviews in the final days of the campaign and you couldn't ask him a question that he didn't answer by talking about the cost of living in New York. Right? I mean, he was so laser like focused on cost. There was a survey done of Democratic social media posts maybe two or three years ago and it showed the percentage of our social media communications that talk about the economy. You know what the percentage was? 10%. One out of ten messages from the Democratic Party is about economics. Now we were talking about a lot of other stuff that's really important, but when you only spend 10% of your time talking about economics, people start to take, take the hint that maybe you are not gonna fight as hard as you say you're gonna fight when you get into office. So that relentless focus on the economy. Second, just being authentic and not being worried about making mistakes in your communication, not vetting every single thing you say through communications professionals, and then like a realization that if you don't listen, I don't agree with Zorin on everything, but like you are actually perceived as illegitimate to voters if all of your views are inside the 40 yard lines. Like if you don't have one or two things that a voter vehemently disagrees with you on, they get suspicious of you. And so just being true to what you. And also they have a bullshit sensitivity that voters probably didn't have as acutely decades ago. And so if you aren't authentic, if you don't have a couple views that are a little outside of the mainstream, you are actually not perceived as real and thus not electable as a Democrat.

[Tommy Vietor]

In this country today, let's talk about the shutdown. Right? We are, I don't even know what day we're on now, but it's the longest shutdown in history. Some of the people who are here today are people who would be at work in the federal government somewhere were it not for the shutdown. You know, there's been all this talk since the, you know, right before the election, even after election about some group of Senate Democrats who are negotiating with or open to negotiating with the Republicans around some sort of deal to open the government exchange for a vote on the Obamacare subsidies, sort of. What is the status of those negotiations? You can tell us. And what do you think Democrats should need in exchange to end the shutdown?

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Well, I mean, first let me say this in this audience I know are people that a right now have been furloughed, have been without a paycheck for over a month, people in this audience who have been illegally fired from their jobs. First and foremost, let me just say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for what you have done for this country. Thank you for the sacrifice that you have made. So I went down to South Florida on Monday with Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith. And we went down there because in South Florida is the highest concentration of people who have ACA plans. In some parts of South Florida, 25% of residents have an ACA plan. And if these premium increases go into effect, and you're talking about premiums doubling or tripling for folks across the country, but particularly in this area, whereas where we have a high concentration, we're talking about a meltdown of the healthcare system. And so yes, there is deep pain in a shutdown. People are not getting paid, food stamp benefits are at risk. Obviously, travel gets interrupted. But if we don't stop these premium increases from going into effect, there is life and death pain as well. And so it is important for my colleagues to realize that there is no good choice here, that Republicans have put us in an impossible position. Listen, for me, coming off of Tuesday, when the people of this country told Democrats to fight, it would be heartbreaking for Democrats to make an immediate decision to stop fighting. So.

[Tommy Vietor]

I guess the question is how does it end, right? Like there is, you know, a Senate vote without a guarantee of a House vote is that's a, you're that's fake. Right? Like that's, you're not actually solving, you're getting something. But it's really the people who are, premiums are going up are getting nothing. And I just, like, I really, I really feel like you guys are in an impossible position of you're negotiating with people or you're staying, you're, you're standing off against people who do not seem to care about hurting their own voters. Right. Like you were in, you're in Florida, which is the highest percentage of people on plans, people using, get the subsidies. The subsidies largely benefit people in states that did not expand Medicaid, which are red states. Right, right. So how do you sort of think about how to bring this thing to a close when there's no good faith partner to negotiate with here?

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Yeah, I think it's charitable to suggest that they don't care about hurting their voters. They actually do seem to care about hurting their voters in that they are deliberately trying to make the shutdown as painful as possible. These are, are, these are nihilists. Right. That we're, that we're dealing with. Which, which makes it hard. I mean, listen, I think you have to listen to Donald Trump. What did he say on Tuesday morning? He said that the shutdown is hurting Republicans. We should realize that most Americans have not actually gone on to the website to see what their new premium increase is. Many of the rates were just posted a few days ago. So we should understand that Donald Trump's pollsters are telling their party's leaders that they are going to lose the midterms. They're going to lose both the House and the Senate if they don't stop these premium increases from going into effect. And so I just think we have to have faith that there are a lot of reasons why the Republicans, as this nightmare of premium increases starts to become more real, are going to be willing to sit down and cut a deal. We made an offer just an hour ago to Republicans in which we said, listen, we will vote to end the shutdown today for a simple one year extension of these premiums. Previously, we've been talking about two or three years. We made a really, really simple offer here. I think as the days go on, it is going to be much harder for them to say, no, we can be reasonable. We were reasonable in the offer we made today. But to fold at this point, I think ultimately A doesn't help the people we're trying to help in our healthcare system, but also empowers Trump to act more brazenly and more illegally. Knowing that the Democratic Party really in the end and doesn't have the stuff necessary to stand up to him. So I think if we don't get something for the people we say we have been fighting for, not only is there an immediate impact on them, but there is potential more pain coming from an emboldened President Trump.

[Tommy Vietor]

You know, this is the point in a typical election cycle where the House speaker and the Senate Majority Leader become laser focused on nothing more than keeping their jobs in the majority.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

Like what?

[Tommy Vietor]

Just maybe there's no answers. But help me understand why when Trump says it's hurting the shutdown, it's hurting them. The shutdown's hurting them. Trump's pollster said there would be a 12 point shift in the generic ballot if they let these things expire. And he said that before the shutdown.

[Dan Pfeiffer]

What are they doing?

[Tommy Vietor]

I don't really understand the thinking here. There's just no logic to it.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

They're asking me to try to explain what.

[Tommy Vietor]

You go to the gym with these people. I mean, you see them in the hallway. You talk to more Republicans than these guys do. I think certainly I do, yeah.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

I mean, they don't have any independent thought process. They are employees.

[Hasan Piker]

Right?

[Senator Chris Murphy]

They are. They just take direction from Donald Trump. Now, he did give him a direction on Tuesday morning in the Senate. He said, go and change the rules of the Senate. But Senate Republicans sort of scratch their head because they just got wiped out on Tuesday. They are now increasingly likely to lose the Senate next November. And they thought to themselves, do I really want to change the rules so that when Democrats take control, we can very easily pass into law Roe vs Wade and Universal background checks and an extension of the Voting rights law with 50 votes. So maybe there are very limited moments when they choose not to follow his instructions. But no, by and large, even if he is telling them to take a barrel over Niagara Falls. Right. Which is what they're kind of doing right now, politically, they are going to follow instructions like good cult members do.

[Tommy Vietor]

It was very funny. I watched the video that Trump, the very strange video that Trump put out arguing for eliminating the filibuster. And it sounded to me almost exactly like a bizarro version of a 2021 Pots of America episode. We were selling abolished the filibuster shirts back in those days when you guys tried to get the voting rights bill passed. Let's talk about a little general strategy here. Right? One of the things that you have become very known for since Trump took office is just being a very vocal spokesperson who's calling it as it is, not mincing words around the dangers to democracy, to our freedoms, to Trump become an authoritarian. Now, at the same time, you have Mandani winning this race on affordability. There's this report, the Tidying to Win that came out last week. That's like Democrats have to talk about economic issues. That's what everyone cares about. How do you think about the balance of these obviously critical assaults on democracy that. That we know are very of great interest to the people in this room, but maybe not to swing voters. How do you sort of think about your messaging?

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Yeah. So I don't think of it as two different stories. I think of it as the same story. Okay. It's not a story about his assault on costs and making people's economic lives more miserable. And his assault on democracy. It's the same story in this sense. What is his goal as president? His goal as president is to turn the federal government into a vehicle to enrich himself and his billionaire friends and to steal from people to raise your costs in order to reserve enough money so that he can give it all to his pals. That's deeply unpopular. Nobody wants that. Right. The big beautiful bill is the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich in the history of the country. It's wildly unpopular. So how do you get away with just stealing from regular people? Well, you destroy the rule of law. You destroy the ability of people to dissent, to protest, and to stand up and object in elections. And so, yes, he is trying to turn our government into a kleptocratic oligarchy in which he hurts us, to help he and his mar a lago cronies. The only way he gets away with that is to destroy the democracy. So now, I just explained that in, you know, 60 seconds, but you can actually explain that in 20 seconds. And so I think as long as we tell those two twin stories together, people will get it. And I also do think that we maybe have overlearned our lesson a little bit from 2024. Okay. It is true. Like, our democracy message did not land in 2024, in large part because people were like, well, why do I want to save this version of democracy? Right? Like, this version of democracy sucks. It just works for the elites and the billionaire class. But that doesn't mean that people aren't plugged in right now to the actual threat. And the polling tells you that, you know, 80% of the American public thinks that we are in a political crisis right now, that more than half of Americans believe that their right to free speech is at risk. So I think you tell it together and I think that you have confidence that the democracy part of the story actually does resonate and turn people out in a way that maybe it didn't a year ago. That's how I think about it.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's interesting, I think that there you hit earlier when you're talking about how we reach these voters in these red states. What I think is the key solution to this challenge, which is we need a reform agenda because we have to be the. What happened in the Biden era is we became the party that was defending democracy as is. We were the status quo people. But if we can be the party that's trying to reform democracy to get the corporate power out, get the money out, like that's a different message. And it gives people a sense that we're fighting for something better than we currently have.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

So when I, when I entered politics 20, 30 years ago, so campaign finance reform, right, getting big corrupt money out of politics was like a top three or four issue for Democrats. And something happened over the last 20 years in which it barely cracked the top 10. Some of it is that our democracy reform agenda migrated from big money to voting rights. And that's for good reason because they were and still are trying to stop people from voting. But it is also you were gonna.

[Tommy Vietor]

Ban dark money in the John Lewis bill last year or. Right.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

But it wasn't necessarily.

[Tommy Vietor]

Never talked about it.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

What we led with it is just true though, that Trump did get elected on his promise to drain the swamp. People do wanna vote for a party that they think is gonna clean up Washington right now. They don't really believe that we're much less corrupt than they are, in part because they don't hear us talking every single day about that reform agenda. And so that's why I get back to, you know, my prescription, my amateur prescription for the party, which is make the tentpole, make 75% of what you talk about unrigging the economy, big ideas to put money in people's pockets, simple ideas like Mom Domini had, and talk all the time about what you're going to do to unrig the democracy and make the influential have less power and regular people have more power.

[Tommy Vietor]

One last quick question here, because we know we got to get you this vote. How are one of the great concerns people in this audience is that the Republic's going to do something to try to steal the 2026 elections. How are you thinking about that problem? Anything you guys are doing to get ahead of it.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Yeah, I think continuing to invest in good local and state leaders, which is why these elections were so critical. We made a smart play which was to to put a lot of focus and investment on governors and mayors who are the actual people who administer elections. And so I think we can have some confidence that right now we in the states that are going to matter, we have people who are going to protect against these efforts to try to corrupt elections. I think we have to be in a real active public and private conversation with social media companies that right now are being corrupted by Donald Trump to essentially allow for election distortion and interference to exist on their platforms. That if they do that and Donald Trump doesn't win, that they should keep their records and that there's going to be a price to be paid for essentially helping Donald Trump try to engage in election intimidation. And then lastly, just keep on turning out, right. There's this political science that says if 3% of a population is engaged in regular protest, it just becomes the secret sauce which puts enough sand in the gears to protect your democracy from destruction. The institutional players who would have to fold to essentially steal an election are just a little bit less likely to do that. And that includes the Supreme Court. Right, who are full of politicians who want to do Trump's bidding but don't want to get too far outside of the political mainstream. They are all watching you. They are all watching whether no Kings is just a once a year phenomenon or if it becomes a once a month phenomenon. And so the amount of buy in you need to steal an election is pretty large. And public protest at scale is probably the key ingredient to keep the folks we need to stay straight from being corrupted when Donald Trump asks. So I wish it were more simple than that. But there's nothing more important than your ability to be present and to organize your friends and neighbors. In being present during this moment, that.

[Tommy Vietor]

Is a great place to end it. Please give it up for Senator Chris Mervey. Senator, thanks for being here.

[Senator Chris Murphy]

Thanks, guys.

[Hasan Piker]

If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to cricket.com friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked, Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Ilick.

[Jon Favreau]

Frank and Saul Rubin.

[Hasan Piker]

Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Churlin is our executive editor. Adrienne Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kantor is our sound engineer engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt de Groat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kellman, Kiril Pelaviev, David Tolles and Ryan Young, our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America.

[Simone Sanders]

What's poppin listeners? I'm Laci Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time. Wanna know about the fake errors? We got em what about a career con man? We've got them too. Guys that will wine and dine you and then steal all your coins. Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters. I'm joined by guests like Nicole Bo, Ira Madison iii, Conan o' Brien and more. Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.

[Hasan Piker]

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