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How Trump Built His Coalition
01:12:12
The best way to understand what happened on Tuesday is to listen to what the actual voters have been saying. Dan checks back in with two strategists who run focus groups with key parts of the electorate: Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who's been talking to Trump-curious swing voters for months, and Carlos Odio of Equis Research, an expert on the Latino vote. Sarah and Carlos discuss some of the warning signs that were blinking red long before last week, and how we can recognize them—and act on them—in the future.
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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
If you listen upon Save America, you're a politically engaged individual, which means you know there has never been a more important time to invest in pro democracy media in this country. That's why you should add the Bulwark Podcast to your rotation. Tim Miller, my pal, friend of the show, former Republican operative turned anti Trump pro democracy crusader, interviews a wide range of guests from celebrities to politicians to everyone in between. It's a great, really informative conversation with people of all different views and you should definitely check it out. He's also joined by other members of the Bulwark crew like, like Sarah Longwell, Will Salatin, and George Conway. You'll also catch some of our Pod Save team on there from time to time, myself included. Watch on YouTube and listen and subscribe to the Bulwark Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:02]
Dan Pfeiffer
Welcome to another special episode of Positive America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. I'm recording this on Friday, November 8th, just three days after the election that left us shocked, angry, scared, and demoralized. On our two earlier shows this week, we talked about the results, about Kamala Harris campaign strategy. On today's show, we're going to focus on one thing, the voters that made the difference. Knowing how the race ultimately played out, there's no one better to talk to than today's two guests. First, I'm going to be talking with our friend Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark, who has run dozens of focus groups with swing voters this cycle. And Carlos Odio, co founder of ECCIS Research and one of the real Democratic experts in Latino vote. Let's get into it. Sarah, welcome back to Pot Save America under obviously less than ideal circumstances. But it's great to talk to you.
- [01:41]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. Welcome to my waking nightmare.
- [01:43]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes. How are you processing everything over these last three days here?
- [01:47]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I mean, look, one of the things that I'm trying to do is rather than sort of look at what just happened, I think a lot about what we've known for the last few years. Right. Because I've, I've spent a lot of time listening to voters. I do the focus groups multiple a week. And like, it's all in there, you know, it's all in there. We knew that people were really frustrated by inflation. It was the number one thing that we heard from people. You know, we start every focus group the same way. We say, how do you think things are going in the country? And left, right and center. The answer was usually not good. And inflation was the number one reason why. Just general costs. And you Listen to young people talk about housing costs and that frustration was palpable. And then there's just a bunch of big factors. Right. Obviously, I'm sure you guys have covered this around what's happening around the globe. Incumbents are losing. It basically is the post Covid inflation issue that seems to be driving people along with immigration, which I have too much annoyance from. My more left leaning listeners said that that is just a massive vulnerability for Democrats and has been for a while. And so like that stuff was just all in there. We knew it. I will say, you know, I thought that she could eke out a win in the sort of industrial northwest, the blue wall. And I was very focused on could you offset what were clear slides with Hispanic voters, some black voters, men in general, with doing a little bit better with white voters? Could you get more non college white women to vote for her? And the fact is they didn't. And look, we always knew there was some tension between reproductive rights as an issue for women, along with the fact that they are the primary shoppers often control household budgets. We were very like sensitive to how much groceries cost. I heard about it all the time from women in the groups. It was often brought up long before anybody mentioned reproductive rights. And so, you know, I guess like you know all that, but you sort of hope that Trump's being a felon, being an adjudicated rapist, being a horrible person trying to overthrow the last election, that the fact that voters hated him because they did hate him. I mean like the number of people, Tony, we just have been doing a couple focus groups the last couple days. Just we're just checking in with people like, okay, why'd you vote for him? And people are like, yeah, I hated his guts, but I thought he'd be better for the economy, which once you sort of process the fact that a lot of people who really don't like him as a person still voted for him for sort of policy reasons or just dissatisfaction with the way things are reasons. You're like, I see how this happened. I've understood the political realignment for a while. I understand that Republicans are bringing together non college voters of all races and ethnic types and building a big coalition. And there are just more of those voters than there are these college educated suburban voters. And that in that trade Democrats now are likely to do better in off year elections. But Republicans are gonna able to, with their sort of more populist stance are going to be able to pull out more low propensity non college voters during these general elections. And so, you know, it was all in there. We knew all of it. It just didn't go the way we wanted. Yeah.
- [05:06]
Dan Pfeiffer
Like I said, for a year, I mean, basically since Kamala became the nominee, I said this election is a coin flip. She's an underdog. As you and I, you and I spoke on a substack forum a few days before the election. We thought she was closing strong. We knew all the. I listened to every one of your focus group podcasts. I've heard all these voters. I've looked at all the polling. The fact that three quarters of voters have said the country's on the wrong track for four years now. 70% of voters say the economy sucks. Biden's approval rating never gets above 41%. All that is recipe where she could lose. Now, I thought if she was going to lose, it would be a close ish race. They would maybe later. I read Nate, Nate Silver's model and his most. His most likely scenario was she wins. He wins all seven battleground states. His second most likely scenario was she wins all seven battleground states. So I sort of thought in there, like, maybe she wins Michigan and Wisconsin if he gets Pennsylvania and the rest and it's ballgame. But the what I think I was stunned by, and in hindsight I should not have been, was the movement in all the non battleground states. 10 points in New York, New Jersey, Rhode island, you know, counties in Texas that are 97% Latino, going like Starr county in Texas, 97% Latino has gone for the Democrats for like 130 consecutive years. In presidential elections, Trump wins easily. Osceola County, Florida, which huge Puerto Rican population, which we thought the Tony Hinchcliffe joke would swing our way. And Trump gains 14 points over 2020. Just the full scale of it, I think was sort of a shock to the system for me at least.
- [06:48]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. And I can understand why I. And look, I'm not saying it's not for me too. I don't want to be like, boy, I just always saw this coming because I want to. I definitely thought she really could win. But, you know, one of the other things, I sort of think back to all the things that I often say and I say, like, listen to them now with the ears of knowing this information. And you're like, well, one thing we knew is that a lot of these young people who were coming into the electorate, Donald Trump was not an aberration to them. Right. Certainly for young Republicans who were coming into the mix, they came for Trump. Right. They were attracted to something that Trump was selling, and as a result, like, he overperformed with young people. I mean, basically overperformed everywhere. But I will say, the thing that you're noting, which I'm not saying it makes me feel better, but, like, as a practitioner, as somebody who was, like, thinking about the campaign, thinking about who was persuadable, thinking about who we could move, there is something in the totality of it that just shows you, like, this was sort of bigger than any one message. It was bigger than any one campaign. It was, I think, a lot of fundamentals that were always sort of stacked against her. And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't view this with an enormous amount of alarm, both in terms of what's about to happen and also what it says about us as a country, that for a guy who tried to overturn the last election, that a bunch of people in America were like, I'm fine with that. I still think he's better for the economy, so I'm gonna vote for him. Or I like the way he owns the libs, or I'm annoyed with libs. I think that is alarming. But I also, look, I am come from the center, right? And so there, I think I am less resistant to some of the critiques of Democrats in a broad way than some people who are Democrats might be.
- [08:43]
Dan Pfeiffer
Like myself, maybe. Yes.
- [08:44]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. And I think it's fair for us to talk about those things. But, like, Joe Biden, in my opinion, never should have run again. And I felt like voters were telling us that from the start. It was very clear people didn't want him to vote, run again. They thought he should be abridged. And then, look, I, like everybody else, once it was clearly gonna be him, I kind of got on board. And I was annoyed with Dean Phillips and other people who were just like. I'm like, guys, this is just gonna make it worse. But, like, you know him, like, from the time he picked Kamala Harris as his vice president, she was gonna be his successor. He gets, you know, he finally has to drop out because it's so clear he shouldn't be running again far too late. Like, that was not the recipe for a good campaign. It wasn't the recipe for getting. And I listened to. And this is. I just listened to voters. We were. You know, when we're going through all the tape in our office and just listening to things, and, like, something that came up a lot was how uncomfortable people were with the fact that it just, like, became her and that there wasn't a primary that people didn't get a choice. Now, do I think that Dave Portnoy is right, that it was a coup? Biden dropped out in his. That's insane. She was his vice president. That's who replaces him when the president drops out. That being said, the idea that voters still didn't feel like they had a voice in that they didn't have a choice, there's all of that stuff's in the mix. But those are normal political gravity things.
- [10:11]
Dan Pfeiffer
Given the totality of Trump's win and all the fundamental points you made and the fact that every incumbent party around the globe has gotten crushed post Covid in the midst of inflation, it's hard to conjure some alternate scenario where you get a different outcome. But it's hard. It's also hard to argue that we wouldn't have had a better chance if after the midterms, President Biden had said, I'm not running, I'm going to, you know, doors open, everyone run. Maybe he says he supports Kamala Harris, maybe doesn't. She probably wins that primary anyway, but she has a year and a half to campaign, hone her message, become known to the public, win their support, run TV ads in those states. And you do like, primaries are good for the person who wins the primary. Right. You come out as a winner and then she would have been the nominee in like, you know, April or something and around the time Trump was. And like, maybe she has a better shot in that scenario. You know, maybe someone else comes out of that primary. Hard to say. But a world in which the president that the voters did not, including Democrats, did not want to run, where 90% of them said he was too old, runs until a debate blows up on national television to such a degree that he has to drop out 107 days before the election. But it's not a recipe for success.
- [11:26]
Carlos Odio
Right.
- [11:27]
Sarah Longwell
That is, yeah, these were suboptimal conditions. Right. And, and I think, look, there was always a part of you that could say, well, I don't know, maybe this is good for her, maybe a short primary. But I don't know, you know, that we can kind of. These are all. You end up sort of trying to debate the counterfactuals. And I'm not even sure how productive it is, but I do think in this sort of fractured media environment, I've always thought that the Biden campaign and then what became the Kamala Harris campaign was playing it a little safe, like you gotta go to all these non traditional places and do interviews. And that means you know, we're in, like a new era of campaigning. Like, she ran a very good technical campaign, if it was 2008 or four, you know, like. But the, you know, I think we make far too much of Joe Rogan, but let's just use Joe Rogan as a stand in for non traditional media. Like, and you and I talked about this on the thing, and I was like, you know, the thing about Rogan and his thing on Rogan is it's not for me. So I can't sit there and be like, boy, I thought he sounded really good on Rogan. But I will say that a lot of voters can listen to him ramble for 2 hours on rogan and say, you know, that guy's not Hitler. Like, he seems fine to me. And also, I think he's right about XYZ thing, whatever it is. And he's sort of kind of funny in a way that I do think Democrats are going to have to figure out how to sound a little less just like regular politicians, because voters, it's different now. We're in a different culture and climate around. Everybody's in our face on our phones. And so people want to feel, yeah. Like they can know you. And like, you know, I think voters never. They understand certain things. And one of the things they understand well is that right at the end, everyone's just looking for their votes. And so for Kamala Harris to come in with 100 days left and be like, okay, like, this is who I am now. I'm somebody who campaigns with Liz Cheney and talks about the lethal fighting force, even if she was saying things that voters might like, there was a real sense of, is that who she really is? Or was she this person from before who was, you know, a big fan of gender reassignment surgeries for convicted felons that taxpayers pay for, which, by the way, was availed of precisely two times, I believe. And so it is not, despite the $100 million that went behind that ad. It is not the great issue of our time, nor is it the deep concern of voters. But it did sort of paint her as this. What people were already worried that she was, which is a San Francisco progressive, which is generally a thing that is tough for both swing voters and others who are sort of like, that's not their jam at the moment. They're looking for something different.
- [14:07]
Dan Pfeiffer
So, yeah, I've really been wrestling with the, like, I agree with you on the media strategy. My sort of. My hobby horse for the last couple years has been that the Democratic media Strategy has to be everywhere all at once. Right. You gotta do everything, everything, everywhere, everything.
- [14:24]
Sarah Longwell
Everywhere, all at once.
- [14:25]
Dan Pfeiffer
You gotta do it all right? You gotta do Rogan, you gotta do Patzi America, you gotta do the bull work. You gotta do everything. And Trump has been doing that for a very long time and that works for him. But it's also hard to. I can say you should do this differently. Maybe they could have responded to that anti trans ad, but ultimately, does any of that get you six points nationally or three points in the battleground states? Probably not. So I've been trying to think about this in the context of what lessons we can learn going forward. Because the next time we're in an election, either in the midterms or presidential, it's going to be a hopefully better political environment for us. Right. We will not be the incumbent party. Right. We've had multiple change elections in a row and we'll be the opportunity to be change. But some of the die was also cast here long before anything happened. Right. You know, Democrats have now lost the economy. We've lost the voters most focused on the economy in every election since 2012, even in 2018 and 2020. I just looked at the exit polls in 2018 and 2022 when we crushed voters who list either the economy or inflation is our top issue. We lost them by an average of 36 points. And you can't win a presidential national election like that when the additional 50 million voters who come in are more economically focused. Right. And so there's like a lot of things to think about. Where do you think the Democratic Party went wrong here? Just like a couple of places. Even if we don't think it would necessarily change the outcome, but might have led to a closer margin or better prospects for the future.
- [15:57]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. So just taking the big one that I've already mentioned, which is not running Joe Biden, letting there be a primary. Look, I happen to believe that the Democrats relentless focus on sort of small niche cultural issues that keep them from sounding like they are talking like normal people is a problem. And people get like, don't just say like woke. And I'm not just going to say woke. I am going to say, look, let me answer this actually in a slightly different way that I think will make sense. The Republicans actually do. You look at Trump and you think he's so chaotic. There's not actually a strategy, but America first is actually a coherent strategy. And there's this guy, Jim Banks, he actually just got elected Senator, but he was a congressman and he, he would write these memos to Kevin McCarthy and it would be like, here's how we're gonna build a multiethnic, multiracial working class coalition. And this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna paint the Democrats as buddies of big business and Wall street, which is easier to do now that their coalition is made up much more of college educated voters. We're gonna hammer them relentlessly on immigration, which is an issue that Democrats have never come up with a position on that lets people say, like, these Democrats understand that we don't want just open borders. And I think the, I mean, when Biden finally did the executive order to close down the border, I was like, the best time to do this was three years ago. I guess the second best time to do this is right now. But when she had to answer for that, right when she was doing that town hall with Anderson Cooper and he was like, so did you guys not think this was a problem before? Like, it's. Obviously, you've solved it by shutting it down. Why didn't you do this before? She didn't have an answer for that. Because the answer is it wasn't a priority for us. We, you know, and then we realized what a political vulnerability it was, and we made it a priority. And so then I just think, look, you got to, you got to focus on working class people, like, and that's it. Like, working class people. And that doesn't mean you have to, like, throw minorities under the bus or like, you know, you don't have to, like, attack trans kids. But I certainly don't do that. That is definitely not what I'm saying, but I do think that, like, that is not. I think at some point Joe Biden did say something, you know, like, the trans issue is the, is the civil rights fight of our time. And I just think, like, you know, the focus on creating, like, what the government can do the best is try to help people. Like, we want to help people achieve the American dream. We need to talk to working class voters about the way that we're going to improve the economy and give them an opportunity, not hand them stuff, but give them an opportunity to work really hard and get ahead and to be able to outline not just an economic vision, not a PowerPoint vision, but give people a sense of purpose. And that's just not there. It's not in the messaging. And that is what I would say. I think if you, look, people are gonna fight if you wanna do economic populism. I don't personally, but, like, I do think that's what voters want. They want a little more economic populism coupled with more moderate social policies.
- [19:18]
Dan Pfeiffer
It's such a hard thing because, you know, there's been a bunch of people like a great way to go to get attention right now is to go on like Fox News and say as a Democratic strategist and say Democrats are too woke. They do all these things. Like they should stop saying Latinx and all these things. Then you're like, well, when did Kamala Harris do those things? Yeah, in this campaign. In this campaign. And so I say that only because we have a broader branding problem as a party. Like we have allowed the Republicans to brand us as the party of cultural elites. And so we have this cultural disconnect from working class voters of all races that is preventing them from liking us despite the fact that we just laid out our policies and Trump's policies in a blind taste test. They're going to pick ours almost every single time on economic issues. Right. Higher minimum wage, tax cuts for the middle class, raising taxes on the wealthy, Social Security, Medicare, all those things. But they don't trust to do those things because they don't believe that's who we're fighting for or what we're focused on. And so we've absolutely lost a branding war here. And we have to, I think for the party, we have to really think about how we fix that. And like that was one of the challenges for Kamala Harris was that she started as a blank slate. So she immediately adopted sort of in voters mind she does not cannot be unique from the Democratic Party when Democrats had a lot of these same challenges when Barack Obama became the nominee, but because he had had time to build up name ID and introduce himself, he could be different than that caricature Trump same way. Republicans had this opposite problem of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan cut Social Security and Medicare. We had done a very good job as a party of branding the Republicans as sort of plutocrats who want to cut your Social Security, Medicare and take your healthcare away. Trump comes along, redefines the party in sort of this America first nationalist way. And despite having a bunch of policies that are going to hurt working class people, they think they're more likely to trust him because he seems, which I know is insane because he's a billionaire with a gold toilet in his own airplane. But he is seen more culturally similar because the anti establishment I guess to than Democrats do. No matter where how Kamala Harris was raised or what her personal story was.
- [21:26]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I think the other thing I'LL just throw out there. That's. That was just an issue that came up. A lot is like, look, these voters, there's a lot of, there's a lot of trading of voters. And so there's a lot of ways in which Trump's Republican Party feels like the Democratic Party circa 2006, but one of them is on foreign policy. Like, you know, I just hear so many voters talk about how they do not. And this is, again, this is sort of their America first posture is like, America first means I don't like it when we send money to Ukraine because that means we're not spending it here in America. I don't like it when immigrants get X, Y or Z because it means we're not giving it to Americans and what they see. So, like, the reason that the trans ad was so effective is it was also. It wasn't just. It's not about the trans issue per se, but she is for they, them. Trump is for you tags into what everybody already sort of thinks America first is about, which is like Trump is gonna prioritize Americans, right? That means not immigrants, that means not Ukraine, that means not all these things. And like, you know, and that like people, people want that right now. I mean, the way that I hear voters talk about money being spent abroad to like, support Democratic allies, they don't want that. Not most Republican voters anymore. And that's a big change. But like, if you ask me, so this, none of this is me saying, like, I agree with it. It's me saying, like, if you want to know the why, I feel like voters have been telling us for a while about this and it's not a question of whether they're right or wrong. Like, the macroeconomic environment was quite good, but like the way voters felt was that it was not good. Now mostly those voters are people making less than $100,000, and those voters who are making less than $100,000 on a family income are made up of two working class people often. And those are the people that Democrats are losing because they don't know how you're going to improve their lives.
- [23:32]
Dan Pfeiffer
It's interesting, you bring up the, the wars, right? And the, the money and Ukraine and all of that. And this is the. That's exactly. You're right. It's 2006. This is the perfect example. It was the, the way in which we. I've been thinking a lot about post 2004 Democrats because it's the most analogous time from our party in the sense, like, obviously as horrifying as the reelection of George W. Bush was to me as a Democrat, the second election of Donald Trump seems so much scarier and so much worse. But that election felt the same way. Right. Bush had built. He had done better with Latinos than any President Republican in 20 years. Ken Melman was taking over the RNC to become. They were gonna do all this stuff and it felt. And there were all those books that were written. The emerging Republican majority that was gonna take over. And two years later, we get the House and the Senate and Obama gets elected. But one ways in which.
- [24:17]
Sarah Longwell
And they demonized gay people in a big way, which worked as part of the cultural.
- [24:21]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes. And it caused a lot of Democrats to shy away from our true beliefs because we were so scared of that issue. But one of the things that we became sort of the America First Party there was all about ending the Iraq war so you could spend that money here at home. This is a very esoteric thing that only people of a certain generation will do. But when Bush tried to sell our ports to Dubai and the Democrats stopped that in the Senate, that was who we were. And Katrina, in that moment was an example of. This was horrible at home because we were focused abroad. And that was sort of the breaking point. And so Trump now owns everything, right? He's going to be in charge of it all. And we're going to have to find ways. Democrats have to find ways as a party to get back to that sort of messaging. The other thing that I think is real, that I'd be curious as your take on, is that we are. Even when we were out of power from 2017 to 2020, we still remain the establishment party and people hate the establishment. Is that sort of something what you get from your focus groups as well?
- [25:26]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. I mean, look, although especially from Republican voters talking about why they like Trump, is that, you know, they. They think that. Well, here's. So this is the phrase that I hear all the time and I've been on a lot of podcasts and things, so just forgive me if I've already said this, but it's like the. Not a regular politician. Oh, I think I did say this earlier, but not a regular politician is what people love about Donald Trump. And he cultivates that because now he has been a. He's been president already. So, like, he's pretty. He could have been the incumbent, but his burn it all mentality. Burn it all down mentality. His anti establishment. And look, I've got my buddy JB last over at the Bulwark being like Maybe Democrats should start talking about they should burn everything down too. And, like, maybe they should start being more anti establishment. And I. With all this talk of preserving norms and institutions and when people are angry, does that work? I think that's not quite it. I just think we are in an era where you're gonna be in change, election after change, election after change election, in part because I think human dissatisfaction is going up because we have our faces and phones that show us something better elsewhere all the time. And I think we are grappling with a moment in human history where not only is our media environment deeply fragmented, not only are we optimized for rage, but also we just always feel left behind because somebody else has it better. And we didn't used to be able to see that person, Right. We lived in a neighborhood where everybody in that neighborhood roughly had the same amount that we did. And so you just felt like, oh, this is what life is and it's okay. And if you get ahead a little bit, that's cool. And now it's like, but what about this person who gets to fly on a private jet? Well, I have to do this. Or what about this person, you know, getting to do this and take these vacations. We'll have to do this. And I see pictures of it all the time. Like, the level of chronic dissatisfaction, I think could lead us to a lot more change elections. And, you know, I do think that getting to a place where Democrats have some leaders who understand how to talk to people, meet them where they are, focus on the working class, broad swaths of voters that seem deeply invested in making their lives better. And I get it. I'm not arguing that Donald Trump was making a case that he was gonna make people's lives better. Donald Trump came from a place of grievance and selfishness and sociopathy. And, like, you want more people to see that. But, man, I just listened to so many people talk. Like, we use words like fascist and authoritarian. Most people don't know what the word authoritarian means. I mean, listen to the way people use socialism and communism. They just, like, throw it out there. People don't, like, really know what they mean. They kind of know it's bad, but, like, what does it mean? They don't know. They're like, eggs are expensive.
- [28:16]
Dan Pfeiffer
You hit on an important point here, which is Donald Trump does not talk like a politician, right? And he probably that has been to his group. Like, we ridicule that a lot as Democrats. We say he sounds dumb or like a clown, and he often does the things he says are often insane. Sharks and wind turbines and whales and all that other stuff. But the fact that he doesn't sound like a politician helps him. And Democrats, probably we all sound like politicians at a time in which people hate politicians. And even like, I think Kamala Harris ran a great race under impossible circumstances. She crushed it in the huge moments. Right. Her convention speech was great. She was amazing in that debate. But even when you hear us talk about things like the opportunity Society, like, that's just not a real term that people understand. Right. It sounds like focus. No offense to focus groups, but it does sound like focus group gobbledygook. Right. Where you. Yeah, you just take the things that people dialed high and then you string them together in a sentence and hope you find some verbs to go in there. But it's a thing we have to work on. Do you see anyone in the Democratic Party on our bench, which I feel is very strong, you know, but who might meet that moment is not. May come off as like an advocate for working class or not a politician or not establishment or something like that?
- [29:26]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I mean, look, I love a Josh Shapiro and I know that ultimately I think I'm glad he wasn't her vice president this time because that might have done real damage to him. I think he does. People think he comes off, I think at a very surface level. They're like, but he's too much like her. He's sort of a college educated. But that is not how voters view him in Pennsylvania. He is very good at working with people. He is very good at speaking directly. That being said, going back to this, not a regular politician, I just, I watched Mark Cuban as a surrogate this time and I was like, it's kind of like that guys like a guy who, you know, owns a basketball team and understands business that people see as successful, but also, you know, thinks. But like, who isn't a sociopath? And I bet that Mark Cuban has done a hundred things that would get him canceled, like, or whatever. But like, do I think somebody like him could win an election? I do. And I'm not just saying like go run celebrities, but I do think that, and I honestly used to really dislike that, that just sort of reaching for non traditional candidates because it feels gimmicky and you want somebody who's like serious and has serious policy chops and like can deal with other world leaders. But I just, I can't shake after listening to voters just talk about how they just don't feel like she really connected with them. And I listened to her, and I agree with you. Like, you hear things like opportunity, and you're just like, okay, but like, it also, the idea that it was word salad or that, you know, she couldn't express policy views, I didn't think that at all. Like, Donald Trump sounds like a lunatic, but. And so you want somebody sort of better than him, but you also want somebody who's kind of talking it to voters in a way that feels straightforward, authentic, connects with them where they are, even in terms of vocabulary. Right. They're just not, like, trying to talk over people or talking in ways that feel like, man, this person's not really. They're giving a boring speech. I don't want a boring speech. Like, I want to. I want to laugh. I want to be. And this is. Look, what do we do? It's changing all over our culture, right? People don't want Late Stage cable. They want Pod Save America and the Bulwark. Why? Because they want to connect to people. And they also were like, hey, I know where you guys are coming from. You guys are those Obama bros, and this is what you believe, and this is how you talk about things. And with us, they're like, you guys are those Republicans who hate Trump and they know exactly where we're coming from. Right? We're not trying to tell them anything that we're not. And they're like, okay, and you're giving it to me straight. I feel like you're telling me what I want. And that is much closer to how people are consuming things now. And I think politics is going to have to change a little bit in that direction. What do you think? Who do you think?
- [32:23]
Dan Pfeiffer
I honestly don't know. And I'm very. This is my life experience to hear, which is. So I worked for Tom Daschle in 2004 when he lost to Jon Thune. And I was obviously unemployed after that. And the party is trying to figure out who's going to run, who's next. Like, is it Mark Warner? We need someone from the heartland who can connect with voters because of what just happened against 04. Evan Bay calls me, tells me he's thinking of running for president, hires me to be his communications director because he's a former governor from a red state who can win a red state. And I worked for him for two years. He drops out, and I go work for Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama from the south side of Chicago, who then wins the presidency. And so what we think now about who that person, the profile of that person, because it's going to be very different four years from now or two and a half years from now when we actually start picking a nominee. But one of my predictions before the election was that if Democrats were to lose that Mark Cuban would be on everyone's short list very quickly because he can go on Rogan, he can go on Theo Vaughn, he can carry his own on the all in podcast and all of that. And he speaks like, no, that's for better or for worse. Like, I actually don't know a ton of what Mark Cuban's policies are. But you can sort of see that in the immediate aftermath of his loss, that's the sort of person that people immediately flock to because it's. He's not like Trump. I don't want to say that, but he is a media personality, a businessman media personality like Trump was. So you can see people flocking to that. I just don't know. Like, I look at it and I feel like everyone seems like a politician and people do not want politicians. And Barack Obama was technically a politician, but he didn't come off like a politician. And he was so new to it that he was almost more celebrity than politician because of how he got famous. The fact that he was senator was almost like an afterthought for voters. And so it's hard to be like, and maybe the Trump presidency is such a disaster that you will want someone who is serious and experienced. And this is actually how Biden ended up winning amidst the pandemic. So maybe it is like Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Spero, or maybe it's someone like Ruben Gallego, a working class veteran Latino. Maybe it's Westmore. There's probably some people out there and we'll know more. But just this idea, I just feel like we have to reevaluate what we say and how we say it to people because the muscle memory is all focus grouped economic language that we're then going to say on cnn. And the biggest takeaway for me from this whole election is Democrats have no capacity to reach less engaged voters. Because what you can see is where we spent a billion dollars on TV ads and we had thousands of organizers knocking on doors, making phone calls. We lost by three points where we had no presence. We lost by six points. And so somehow Trump had no presence there either. Right? He's not. They're not running ads in New Jersey and Connecticut, Rhode island yet. They're making huge gains there. So something is filtering through to those voters that is coming from their framework. And we are offering no Countervailing messaging to it. And so that to me is a thing we have to absolutely think about in terms of our media strategy, our investments, how we say it, who says it, where it goes. Because this is it. We become the midterm party for time immemorial. We will just keep winning midterms. And the Senate map is pretty unpleasant, so it's going to be possible, but hard to get it back next time. And maybe you can get the House in a thermostatic election, but you're not going to win a presidential election. Like you can't be the party. This is where the Republicans were prior to 2016. You are the party who can't win presidential elections. You can only win midterms. And we cannot be that. And we're going to have to do some dramatic, radical changes to avoid that fate.
- [35:59]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I do think there's this conversation around the rights media ecosystem and how effective that's been, which I think is right. And one of the ways that that came about, because I was on the right when this was like one of the main complaints was like, well, the left wing media. And so the right went and built, right, its own media ecosystem. They built Fox first, but then they built all these other things. And then, you know, once basically anybody with a, with a microphone that could plug into a computer could become a podcaster all of a sudden. I mean, I know Theo Vaughn because Theo Vaughn was on Road Rules. And like I remember when Theo Vaughn was on Road Rules, but like I actually didn't quite know that he'd become a famous podcaster until like this like within this year. And like those are the right now owns, not just political podcasting or political sort of non traditional. It's like wellness, it's working out and fitness. Like the number of people in the focus groups where I'm like, hey. Cause we always ask, where do you get your media? What do you read, what do you listen to, what do you watch? And like so many of them, I mean a lot of people say Rogan, I will say there's just, there's a lot.
- [37:09]
Dan Pfeiffer
It's huge. It is the biggest media in the country, hands down.
- [37:14]
Sarah Longwell
And like to the extent that like the barstool sports guys and Rogan and Elon, when they all got red pilled, like that opened up a huge door to non traditional voters to get their information from people that they respected for entirely apolitical reasons who were now giving them political information. And that political information was essentially like, how annoying are these libs with their Woke stuff. And I don't know. And like, the thing is, it's one thing if you're like, well, it's all manufactured. Like you're saying things that aren't true. But it's another thing when people are like, I don't know, I get my emails from the person in HR and it says she, her. And like they're making me put my pronouns in my email or any of that. And it's like, all it takes is that kind of stuff for people to be like, just annoyed enough to be like, yeah, I think Theo Vaughn's right or I think, you know, or to get a little red pilled. And I do think that's what's happening.
- [38:04]
Dan Pfeiffer
You're right. There is the fully political right wing space, right, which is Fox News, Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, the Tucker Carlson podcast, Megyn Kelly, that stuff. But the right is now dominating non political spaces, right? It is gamers streaming on Twitch. It's gamers.
- [38:23]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah.
- [38:23]
Dan Pfeiffer
Crypto conversations. It's a lot of gambling stuff, which is like, really where they're nailing the young men. My wife brings up the wellness stuff to me all the time. All the Instagram influencers and the wellness podcasts are just all wellness. And then all of a sudden there's just like a lot of RFK Jr. Especially since RFK Jr. Endorsed Trump. There's a lot of maybe Trump's going to get red dye out of our snacks. Which is a thing that is a lot of people are worried about. Just Bandit here in California and like, and there's just no similar infiltration. Now there is a very vibrant left wing podcast space, Right. I'm not talking about Black Paths, the American Crooked, but there's also streamers like Hasan Piker and all these other people. But the Democratic Party does not engage with them in the same way the Republicans do, in part because they disagree with us on some issues. Right. Like if Kamala Harris had done something with some of these folks, she would have had to answer a lot of hard questions on Gaza. But also Rogan and Trump don't agree on everything either. Yeah, and there has been all the, there's like this video going around Twitter that is responding like, who's the left? Rogan. It's like, oh, it was, we had one, it was Rogan, right? When he, you know, he endorsed Bernie. He was a big Obama fan. He, you know, supported. He was like very friendly with Andrew Yang. And our response to that was because we did not agree with him on some things where he is Very, very wrong. Vaccines, a lot of transphobia and other things on there. But we just cast him out as to never go on there. And I can argue round or flat whether, you know, Kamala Harris should have gone on that podcast three weeks before the election, a month before the election. Sure. In that last six days. You and I talked about this before. It's hard, hard to spend a day in Texas that last day. But the fact that that is the place where Democrats do not are not willing to go is a massive problem.
- [40:09]
Sarah Longwell
Rogan. I'm not. Because we're talking about Rogan as like a stand in like for. You have to be able to go everywhere and talk to everybody. Like that's the new rule. The new rule is like. And you gotta be able to do it in ways where like. And Pete Buttigieg is probably the one that's so far the best at it. But like you sort of have to be able to shoot. No, like, here's the thing about let's say Mark Cuban. Let's take him hypothetically. Mark Cuban probably believes like a real hodgepodge of stuff that doesn't feel neatly Democrat or Republican, which is sort of what Trump's done. And people like that. You know why? Because they don't think things have to fit neatly into a package for a political party. Like, that's one of the things that they like. And so they're like, I don't know, you got some heterodox views on this and you got these other things that I think cool like that. And I don't have to agree with you on everything. There's a reason that people I think, reacted well to the idea that he had RFK as a surrogate and Elon as a surrogate and Tulsi Gabbard. And I'm sitting here going, those are all Democrats. But then I'm like, yeah, but so was Trump. So was Trump. And what they did was they built a new coalition out of lib hating Republicans and a bunch of people who might otherwise be Democrats but heterodox thinkers. I just think of all the people that now Republicans I know tell me they think are really smart. It's like Matt Taibbi and obviously the guys over at whatever. What Barry Weiss is doing with the free press. The sort of anti. There's a whole massive political ecosystem and I think that Democrats can figure out how to engage with those people.
- [41:43]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah. And we have to build our own version of it too. Right. Like which we have been doing. And this is a very self interested Hobby horse of mine. But Trump and all the Republicans do, all the right wing media, they value it, they nurture it, they put their arms on it. They view it in their political interest to grow that ecosystem. And there are exceptions to this. Some Democrats will do it, but for the most part there is not that. Right. And that was certainly not something the Harris campaign did a lot of. There are a couple examples, but you know, didn't come on Pasadena America didn't go to Brian Tyler Cohen didn't do a bunch of other things like that where Courier News, some of the, you know, some of the real, like large parts of, you know, the emerging parts of the progressive version of it, like our political media apparatus, Democrats just don't see the imperative in the same way, in part because, I mean, it makes sense because Republicans believe the mainstream media was biased against them and Democrats do not believe that. Even if we have turned like hard on the Washington Post, the New York Times in recent years before the politicians themselves still, like, there's like some, I don't know what it is. Like they feel like an air of legitimacy if they do it on Ezra Klein's podcast instead of ours. Right. Yours or mine or whatever else. And it's sort of a, it's a very counterproductive way of thinking.
- [42:56]
Sarah Longwell
It is. I mean, you got to just go where people, when you say meet people where they are, it's like what they're listening to and engage. They want to feel like you engage authentically then with the people that they like, who they trust. And look, I'm not saying it's a good thing for our politics that so many voters trust Joe Rogan. It's not a good thing that that's where they get most of their information. Most of. But you know, what if that's. What if, you know, if that's just a reality, if that's where the ball lies, like, play it as it lies and be able to go on there and like talk for three hours and like, you know, have it out. People will respect that. But that's what they want to see out of people.
- [43:29]
Dan Pfeiffer
Now, Sarah, you and I could probably talk about this for hours and hours and hours. This has been my own, this is my own personal therapy is instead of disconnecting from the Internet, I am just talking to as many people as I possibly can and consuming much information as I can to just wallow in the misery. But thank you so much for being here. You have made us much smarter as always, and we're very grateful for all the work you did in this election.
- [43:49]
Sarah Longwell
Well, I appreciate that. Can I ask you one last question before we close to be annoying? Do you think the Democrats will run a woman again ever?
- [43:57]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, I do.
- [43:58]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I do. I mean, some people, I've heard people be like, dems won't run a woman again after this.
- [44:05]
Dan Pfeiffer
I think, I think that we have to be able to. This is always hard in shorthanded political discourse, but we have to recognize that there is very clearly a lot of misogyny and racism in our politics. It is some of it conscious, some of it unconscious. It comes through in press coverage and how women candidates are portrayed in the media, what they can get away with. Right. The kind of just on that debate stage. Joe Biden four years earlier could tell Donald Trump to shut his pie hole. And Kamala Harris could never do that as a black woman. Right. The way they'd be traded. But at the same time that that happened, you did have women candidates like Tammy Baldwin, Alyssa Slotkin and Jackie Rosen run ahead. And so there is work to do there. I absolutely believe we will have a primary process, and I hope that we do not as we did in 2020. I think in 2020, we picked the most electable candidate. And the polling was pretty clear that Biden was the most electable. He was the only one running ahead of Trump. But what we can't do, we have to have a very broad view of electability. It can't be just white man who can relate to white voter in Wisconsin, which is how I think we were thinking about it in 2020. But, no, I absolutely think we can and should.
- [45:16]
Sarah Longwell
Interesting. Thanks for letting me ask you.
- [45:18]
Dan Pfeiffer
Of course, of course. All right, Sarah, thank you so much.
- [45:20]
Sarah Longwell
Thanks, guys. Bye.
- [45:22]
Dan Pfeiffer
Okay, when we come back, I'm going to talk with Carlos Odio about what happened with the Latino vote in this election. But before we do that, as you heard us say on Friday's pod, the House is still in play. There are lots of races where the count is ongoing and they need your help. Taking the House majority is our best shot at constraining Donald Trump. But it's a huge lift. And those races need your support to keep paying their staff and to help cure ballots that have problems. The best way you can ensure that every vote is counted is to go to votesaveamerica.com and donate to their house fund. It is really critical. There are also opportunities to volunteer, especially if you live in one of these key districts. Again, votesavamerica.com this message has been paid for by VoteSave America. You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. When we come back, Carlos Odio. Carlos, welcome back to pod. Save America.
- [46:16]
Carlos Odio
Dan, it is always good to be back, even under these circumstances.
- [46:20]
Dan Pfeiffer
You were one of the first people we thought of on election night to try to figure out what happened and where the Democratic Party can go from here. But before we get into that, I just gotta ask, how you doing?
- [46:29]
Carlos Odio
It has been a very long week, as it has been for many people. I don't feel special in that regard. I will say that I haven't allowed myself a lot of moments to think about or process what this all means. Because when you do get a break and you do contemplate it, you know, my mind goes to people who I love a lot, who I feel like have a reason to feel unsafe, either because of things that this next administration might do or because of what he's unleashed in America, like, what people feel emboldened to do. So, like many people, I'm mourning the fate of the country, contemplating the bad stuff that can come, even while I'm trying to understand how this came to be. And in the midst of it, Dan.
- [47:09]
Dan Pfeiffer
Because you asked and I did. Yes.
- [47:13]
Carlos Odio
Is that you have people blaming Latino voters for what happened, which actually, you know, I'm fine to debate. That's a data question. That's an empirical question. What's not fine is what anyone who is Latino has had to face on social media this week. I hope you get deported. I hope you get thrown in camps. I hope you have your passport because you're about to get thrown out of the country. Go back home, Beiner. And what's amazing is that these are coming from liberals. And it makes you wonder, is this how people have felt about us all along? So in addition to everything else, I'm now also mourning the loss of decency, humanity, among the many things that Donald Trump has robbed of us. And at the same time, turning to what needs to get done next to protect our people and bridge the divides so we can get back to a better place.
- [48:06]
Dan Pfeiffer
Let's stipulate that exit polls are an imperfect vehicle to analyze what happened and that we will have another conversation there. Polls, Right. Which, as we have proven, are imperfect before the election, after the election, during the election, and that we will revisit this when we get better data from Catalyst and Pew in a few months. But it seems pretty clear based on both the exit polls and when you look at county by county results, particularly in counties with large Latino populations, that there was a further shift among Latino population to Trump. What's your analysis of what we know right now?
- [48:46]
Carlos Odio
Yeah, and I understand actually why people pounced on the Latino numbers the way they did. These were eye popping, frankly. I was. As much as my job is to document and explain shifts in the Latino vote, I was surprised by some of the numbers we saw. I live in Hudson County, New Jersey. We saw massive shifts that I would not have anticipated the extent to which they would be that big. And so, look, I think it is. I've always hesitated using the word realignment. I feel like it isn't offered very much to this conversation, but I think essentially what we're headed to is Trump gained about 8 points in support from 16 to 20. I think it's going to be another 8 to 9 points. And so you're talking about nearly 20% increase in support from 16 to 24, which I don't care what you call it. It looks like a realignment. It sounds like a realignment. The question of whether it's specific to Trump, unique to Trump, or something more lasting is almost a moot point because we've got another four years of the Trump era ahead of us. So regardless of what it is, let's call it the Trump realignment among Latino voters, it is the current reality in which we find ourselves. There is a difference in the battleground states, and I think we can talk about that. Part of why I say you shouldn't blame Latino voters is the shifts, while they were eye popping, are not the reason Donald Trump won. The battleground numbers were not surprising. We actually knew, we've known all along that we were going to have this kind of drop among Latino voters in the states that mattered the most for the Electoral College. And it was already baked into campaign strategy. It was baked into the forecasts. We had narrowed this down to the point where it was the blue wall. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. What was surprising was the wider erosion. You had a six point uniform swing nationally. You had Trump overperforming his margins in nine out of 10 counties that have been counted. That's not a demographic story. You can't narrow that down to any one group. That's massive. Even to the point that especially in a Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, you can't attribute what happened there to Latinos. You know, in Pennsylvania, you could erase the Latino shift and Trump still wins the state. One point in white support in Pennsylvania is the equivalent of 19 points of Latino support. So I think we have to, as people who care, hold both stories True. That there is this wider Latino realignment that we have to contend with and that there is a story of this election that is much broader. And something so broad requires big, large explanations.
- [51:21]
Dan Pfeiffer
I think I want to just stipulate that one. Blaming voters for an election outcome is incredibly stupid and counterproductive.
- [51:27]
Carlos Odio
So dumb.
- [51:29]
Dan Pfeiffer
It was yelling at non. The yelling at white women or non college educated voters in 2016. It's how you end up doing worse with them in the next election cycle. And we lost ground everywhere. Right. And even in the places where we thought we would gain ground, like the collar counties in Pennsylvania, Trump made gains. Right. In college suburbs where they were largely white and college educated, Trump also gained grounds. Absolute failure across the board. I want to dig into the Latino one with you because it has massive implications long term if this trend is not reversed because it takes the Sunbelt off the map, largely for Democrats. You can't win in Arizona and Nevada. The idea that Texas would turn blue sometime in our lifetime is mathematically impossible with these margins among Latinos. And it's the fastest growing population in the United States. And if you are losing ground with the fastest growing population in the country, that's a bad thing.
- [52:26]
Carlos Odio
You're on the wrong side of math.
- [52:28]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, we are on the. And we were after being on the right side of math for a very long time. And it's like for people like you and I who come from the Obama world to then confront the opposite. Right. The emerging Trump coalition, as opposed to the emerging Obama coalition is a very hard thing to fathom and reconcile. Do you have a sense either looking at county data, what you guys did before the election, or even digging into the exit polls about what parts of the Latino population move? Was it mostly men? Was it more working class? Or was it more sort of broad based and across the board?
- [53:02]
Carlos Odio
Yeah, you know, as you said, the exits are unreliable on this point. And in fact, the Edison exits have Trump winning Latino men. AP Vocast, which is a little more reliable, has Harris winning Latino men. Really, we won't know that level of demographic difference until we get individual level data back from the official state voter files. I think what we know right now, though, is a story similar to 2020, which is that as much as there are lots of different divisions in the Latino vote. Right. Like what falls under the Latino umbrella is a stitched together group of very different communities and experiences. And yet the shifts we saw cut across those differences. So as we're trying to explain what happened, you need explanations that span Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is Heavily Dominican, where you saw Trump gain 15 points in two way support. And in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas along the border, which is very Tejano, Mexican American descent. You need theories that explain both of those things that are unique to Venezuelans in Broward county, cannot possibly explain the shifts among Mexican Americans in Michigan or Wisconsin. So at this point, what it appears to be is fairly broad based. The people who shifted, what they have in common is that they are Hispanic. Now, we do know from our pre election polling that there was a wide gender gap in this election. And so it is reasonable to say that there is a story that will center around men. And I think what this moment calls for is deep reflection about Latino voters. But then we almost immediately have to ladder up to a conversation about men across race, and from there to a conversation about working people, and from there to a conversation about a broader cultural and economic divide. We live on. In one reality, the people who are listening to a podcast like this and the people who voted for Donald Trump essentially live in an entirely different reality.
- [55:00]
Dan Pfeiffer
I think there's a really important point here, which is the gains towards Trump are so broad, based across so many different groups that like we're talking about the Latino vote here, that is incredibly consequential. But it is also possible that the reasons why the Latino vote shifted are not that different for why Trump made gains across the country. Right. And particularly among he won voters who make under $50,000 according to the exit polls, with the appropriate caveats. And when you have populations where more or disproportionate number of that population makes below $50,000 or below $100,000, whatever income level you want to get. The Latino community faced, on a whole, a tremendous amount of hardship from inflation. And so it's not shocking, theoretically, if one of the reasons for the shift in this election towards Trump is because of inflation, communities that disproportionately suffered more from it would shift more. Right?
- [55:49]
Carlos Odio
Yes. Now, of course, this is so much about the economy. I mean, the backdrop to any analysis has to be that there were the twin crises of inflation and migration that have afflicted the globe. And any incumbent who presided over this period of post pandemic inflation has faced a major penalty at their next election. That's the starting line. And then you have to ask yourself, well, could different decisions have led to different outcomes? So did our president rise to that challenge of the inflation and migration crises, or were we denying for a very long time that it was even happening while voters were yelling my grocery bills are going up. And we were saying, no, the economy is doing great. And so gaslighting voters is generally a way to communicate that you don't actually hear them or understand them. In addition to the president himself, a man I deeply love, at the same time, voters did not feel like he was up to the challenge. And so that's your starting place. When Kamala Harris joins the race. She recovered a lot of voters. She did better, I think, undoubtedly, than Joe Biden would have done. Undoubtedly. And yet some people were just far gone at that point. There was no making up that deficit. And so that's why I think we should think about campaign tactics and what could have been done differently. But at the end of the day, we're talking about such a broad shift that we have to have a more zoomed out look at what we were facing and the fact that we probably lost a lot of these voters much earlier in the cycle.
- [57:18]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, before Kamal Harris ever became the nominee.
- [57:21]
Carlos Odio
Right, correct.
- [57:23]
Dan Pfeiffer
And so I do want to talk a little about immigration in here. You know, you see this come up in a lot of research about there's some liberal assumptions about how Latinos voters feel about immigration. You have pushed back on this a lot, particularly around how people feel about the border. What role, if any, do you think immigration played, particularly with the Latino community?
- [57:41]
Carlos Odio
People try to simplify what is such a complex issue. And I'll just give one example of where I think the analysis is lacking. You hear a lot of swing Latino voters saying in focus groups that they were upset at their perception, by the way, a wrong perception, but still their perception that people crossing the border today were being handed papers, they were being given legal status. Now, their reaction to this was, well, what about my undocumented family who've been working and living here for decades? This was a sense of fairness, not of xenophobia, not of nativism. It wasn't about turning against immigrants. It wasn't about thinking that America should fundamentally rethink its relationship to immigration. It's about saying, hold on a second, we were in line. We are immigrants and we feel like there are others being handed benefits, that we're not in the midst, that we're struggling in the same way. By the way, that as much as it pains me because I support the cause in Ukraine, people saying, we're spending all this money in Ukraine and there doesn't seem to be any money for us who are struggling at home. This is not about being anti immigrant. This is not about being racist. This is not about acting white. This is about saying, I am facing tough material conditions and I'm looking for someone to take care of me.
- [59:05]
Dan Pfeiffer
Now, the last time Trump was president, right, he had engaged in a series of cruel immigration policies, deportations, family separation, etc. He is promising to do all of that and more next time around. You and I, and I am like you and I'm now on my third podcast since Tuesday. I have tried to resist too much of like second guessing of campaign tactics because I struggle to find a strategic or tactical move made since Kamala Harris became the nominee that changes the outcome here, given the margin. But I think there are some lessons we can learn from things they did or didn't do that might project forward as we think about what comes next. Last time you were on a couple weeks before the election we talked about and both you and I both lamented the fact that Democrats, Harris campaign on down were unwilling to speak out against Trump's proposed mass deportation policies. We had limited the immigration conversation entirely to who was going to be tougher on the border 1. Democrats are almost destined to lose. I am not attributing that to the huge swing here. I'm not saying that that's why she lost. But just what are your sort of thoughts on that in hindsight?
- [60:13]
Carlos Odio
Look, my feelings on this are well documented. I think if there's one decision that I thought was foolhardy was to entirely cede to Trump. We allowed Trump to define what his mass deportation plan was. You know, when J.D. vance in the VP debate was asked about this, he said, no, we're going to deport criminals. That's not their plan. Their plan is to deport anyone who is undocumented. They are going to get dreamers. They want to get the spouses of American citizens who've been working and living here for decades. And we just couldn't call them out on it. I don't think that's why we lost. But certainly I think that would have been important. And now especially that we're facing this moment, I think seems doubly so that we would have fought that debate. That said, here's a thing we heard a lot in focus groups, people were voting for Trump. The people who shifted for him, it was about the economy. Let me very clear. The sense they got about Donald Trump in the midst of the pandemic was that he would prioritize the economy above absolutely everything else, literally over human lives. He would value economic growth. And that was the takeaway from the pandemic. And so if you have a voter who themselves in their own life values, the economic wellbeing of their family. They see a kindred spirit. And what they did in voting was saying, I'm going to do that exact thing. I'm going to put the economy above everything else. But that feeling also impacts other things, which is voters told us in focus groups, we don't believe that Donald Trump is going to ban abortion. We don't believe he's going to repeal Obamacare. We don't believe that he's actually going to carry out mass deportation, because we don't think he actually cares about those things. He's a businessman. He just cares about the economy. And literally, they would say mass deportation would wreck this economy. And that's why we don't think he's going to do it. They threw it off as political rhetoric, and they kind of have reason to do it. By the way, if you look at Ron DeSantis, Ron DeSantis passed a draconian immigration bill. Right. We haven't talked about it a lot since then. And let me tell you part of why we haven't.
- [62:11]
Dan Pfeiffer
Please do.
- [62:12]
Carlos Odio
Soon after it passed, Republican state reps were dispatched to evangelical churches in Hialeah and in agricultural areas to reassure people that this wasn't real. To say, please tell your people, don't leave the state. This was about politics. We are not actually going to come after you. So it is not irrational for a certain kind of voter to view all of this as pure political propaganda, as hyped up rhetoric, but that at the end of the day, when it comes time to make decisions, a belief that Donald Trump is just going to do the practical thing, and we let him get away with that.
- [62:56]
Dan Pfeiffer
Now, it seems we can debate the degree to which he's going to engage in the policies, but immigration policy is going to get much crueler. There are going to be more deportations. There are going to be people who are not criminals, who are deported from day one. And how do you think Democrats can go about having that conversation? And if we do, is that a way to begin to rebuild credibility with elements of Latino community?
- [63:20]
Carlos Odio
Yeah, that's an excellent question. Look, I. First of all, by the way, whether Trump believes things or not, the people he's going to empower are a bunch of psychotic freaks who have a fetishistic desire to punish immigrants. So Stephen Miller now is going to have an ungodly amount of power, and that's what scares me. Look, I think there's a real danger here. I think in the context of an election, you have to hype up the threat, I think in this moment, we have to be really careful not to be hyperbolic. Meaning Trump caught us in this a lot last time. And by the way, it's a thing that DeSantis has caught liberals on in Florida as well, which is if we say he's going to deport 12 million people and then he deports eight, he says, look at me, look how moderate I am. I'm so reasonable. He catches in this trap all the time. You know, I think what we really have to do is as much as we can shape the mandate and say if there was a mandate here, it was to bring down prices, it was to focus on the economy and the pain that people were feeling. And that's what we're going to hold you to. And we're not going to talk about the rest of it, because we're saying we expect you to just focus on the economy, such that when they are overreaching and when they are doing things that are not about bringing down prices. Right. We can call them out on it, because even when we're calling them out on this, they have to be. It has to all still be economic argument as well, or we seem out of touch. This cannot be symbolic resistance.
- [64:46]
Dan Pfeiffer
You and I are kindred spirits on this. I was. I spent a lot of time thinking about and getting a lot of questions from people about why Dobbs did not deliver another victory for Democrats. Especially when you get the exit poll and it's like 68% of voters think abortion should be legal. It's because the voters who think. There is a large swath of voters who think abortion should be legal, but they prioritize the economy. And we lost those voters by, like, 40 points. And the test here as we go forward is people elected Trump to lower prices, raise wages, and make their life better. And every time he does something that is not that, we have to point out that he's not doing the thing he said he would do. So when they get in there and they start trying to put in place whatever their mass deportation plan is, however many people it is, when his first move is to a giant tax cut for corporations, when they try to ban abortion, or all the bullshit that gets the MAGA base going, it is coming upon Democrats. And that will benefit us, I believe, with all voters, right? The ones we lost, the ones that didn't turn out for us, Latinos, white voters, black voters, young people, et cetera, is he's full of shit. And we have to prove he's full of shit, that he did not deliver on the thing he said he was going to deliver.
- [65:54]
Carlos Odio
We've got to regain common sense. We've got to regain common sense. And I think how many times did he tell us that Project 2025 isn't his agenda? Let's take him for his word. Hey, he's not going to do Project 2025. He told us he's not going to do Project 2025. We should take him to his word. And then when he breaks that word, we again are trying to regain at this point the common ground. Kristen Solstice Anderson, who's Republican pollster Echelon Insights, had a great piece before the election about this being a stop the Madness election, but that both sides interpreted stop the madness differently that for Republicans they thought that Democrats were presiding over a period of madness. Really that was about the economy, that was about the border and so forth. I think if we play our cards right here, we can regain the advantage on who represents order and stability versus who represents chaos and madness.
- [66:49]
Dan Pfeiffer
Last question for you. It seems pretty clear, looking both at exit polls, county results, that Ruben Gallego significantly outperformed Kamala Harris among Latino voters. It also appears that perhaps Jackie Rosen also did at least a little bit better for Latino voters than Kamala Harris. Do you take anything from the way they ran their campaigns that could be lessons for Democrats going forward?
- [67:12]
Carlos Odio
Well, first I think it's a lesson for Republicans, which is that to some extent this was about Donald Trump and is about Joe Biden and that these gains do not extend automatically to other Republicans. Where Trump, the businessman, had a unique anti elite appeal, it does not extend to them automatically and they should not take for granted that they are going to have those votes going forward. I think Rubin Gallego in Arizona really does represent a great deal of hope and shows a path forward. I mean, he is obviously Latino himself and proudly so. He didn't shy away from that identity at the same time that he was leaning into his working class identity, working at his record as a veteran, talking to people about things they cared about, showing up in their communities as much as he can and not being scared to separate himself from Democrats and saying I will not follow any kind of ideological line all the way down. That's part of this, is we have to establish that we have some independence, that we are not a faceless mob of people. We have people with differing opinions. So I think there is a path forward for a kind of multiracial class, conscious, progressive in substance but moderate in style, kind of Democrat going forward. I take a lot of Solace in the fact that 2004 was a point where I felt incredible despair, as we all did.
- [68:36]
Dan Pfeiffer
Yes.
- [68:37]
Carlos Odio
And that the Obama election was only four years later. A lot can change over a very short period of time.
- [68:42]
Dan Pfeiffer
And I think a lot of our people listening to this, a lot of people who, like I work with the crooked media, they are obviously too young to remember that, but it was very similar. And there was long talk about the emerging Republican majority. Bush had done incredibly well with Latinos. He from Texas, spoke Spanish. The new RNC chair was going to spearhead this whole effort. And Bush had actually done better with black voters. He actually won Ohio because he did much better with black voters in Cleveland than any previous Republican had done. And two years later, they lose the House. In the Senate, four years later, Barack Obama's elected, builds an entirely new coalition that is incredibly diverse, moves those voters back, and so that can be our future. Now, Democrats did a lot of things. They got lucky in some ways, but also did a lot of things to get back there. And I think it is a little bit analogous to what you're saying about holding Trump to his promises. Because Bush's first move when he was reelected was to try to privatize Social Security, something he had not run on, something voters did not want. And Democrats beat him. And that was the beginning of the downfall of the Republicans, because we unified, we ran. It's a different media environment, but made it a huge deal everywhere in the country that this is what Bush was trying to do. And we stopped him. And it seemed like he had violated his promise to voters. And we can do the same thing with Trump starting next year.
- [70:05]
Carlos Odio
Absolutely. And listen, we gotta let him screw up. We gotta let him screw up, because if we know anything about Donald Trump is there's no discipline, there's incompetence. When he hires people, he's not bringing in the best people. And so I think there's going to be a lot of overreach, and we have to be prepared for it. And what we certainly can't do is lose hope. As much as I think in the short term, people should disconnect and take a break, there's going to be a lot of time to fight in the future. I think we've got to be ready and remain hopeful in spite of the very dark moment in which we find ourselves right now, that seems like a.
- [70:40]
Dan Pfeiffer
Great place to leave it. Carlos, thank you for doing this. I know you're very tired and you would very much like to disconnect yourself, but you. You suited up for one more podcast interview, so we appreciate it. Thank you.
- [70:49]
Carlos Odio
The battle continues. Thanks Dan.
- [70:51]
Dan Pfeiffer
That's our show for today. Thanks to Sarah and Carlos for joining. Jon Lovett and Tommy will be back with a new show on Tuesday morning. Hang in there everybody.
- [71:00]
Jon Lovett
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