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- [00:00]
A
If you want to bring in additional people that you're going to need to build a super majority to build a Big Ten coalition, you're going to have to say, I will be a more responsible steward of taxpayer dollars. It's really funny to be sitting here talking about this because it's not a moderate who is out there making the strongest case for fiscal responsibility right now. It's Zoran. Mom. Dummy.
- [00:23]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, and this week I want to revisit a debate I have spent a long begging Democrats not to have. But they do insist upon it, especially on the interwebs, whether the Democratic Party should become more moderate or more progressive. But that's. There's no stopping them. So personally, I think it's the wrong debate to be having. Everyone in Democratic politics agrees, in theory, that you need to have a big coalition to win elections. And there are a lot more moderate and progressive and completely heterodox Democrats who are models for the future. Yet everyone in the Democratic Party also has some people they wish were not in the tent with them. This week we're going to look for some synthesis in this moderate progressive debate because our focus groups have a fair bit of it and because I listen to voters. It is why I reject this moderate progressive frame, because if you listen to a lot of voters, you know that is just not the world they live in. I also want to look at some of the limits that Democrats place on their big tent, because part of having a big tent is knowing how to manage it. Well. My guest today is Adam Genelson, founder of the Searchlight Institute and author of the forthcoming book Super Majority How Democrats Can End Republicans Dominance and Build Lasting Power. It comes out on September 15th. Adam, what's up?
- [01:45]
A
What's up, Sarah? It's great to be back.
- [01:47]
B
Okay, so I'm so pumped to have this conversation in part. My book comes out September 8th, yours comes out September 15th, and it sounds like we are having a very similar conversation. Mine is called how to Eat an Elephant One Voter at a Time, and it is filled with focus groups that basically says, okay, how are we going to take down this toxic version of the Republican Party? And of course, it means building a big, broad coalition that is essential to doing this. Are you able to talk about your book? Like, do your publishers get mad if you give away spoilers for your analysis? Because to otherwise, tell me, tell me what's in there.
- [02:22]
A
They might, but let's just do it anyway. You know, look, the point of the book is thinking about, you know, how do we get out of this era where the best you can hope for, really, for either side, but I'm looking at this as a Democrat, is to win a narrow majority. Like we. We've gotten locked into this idea that every election is going to come down to a white knuckle question of do we barely beat the fascists? Right. And it's going to hang by a few thousand votes. We might wait for a week for the election results to be called. We need to break out of that mindset and start thinking about how we build not just a narrow majority, but a super majority party. And the way to do that is exactly what you were talking about in the intro, which is to think about how do you assemble a big tent coalition, how do you link arms with people who you may disagree with on some issues, but have a lot of areas of common ground. The first half of it looks at sort of recent history of how we lost the most recent supermajority that Democrats won under President Obama. And then it goes back through history and looks at times throughout history when Democrats have been able to build super majorities under FDR and LBJ and what lessons we can draw from then filtered through the modern era that we live in. And a lot of things that are, are different now, but there are still lessons that we can draw from history to understand how we can build a super majority today.
- [03:30]
B
I'll just say for myself, as somebody who is not native to the Democratic Party, I'm an immigrant to wanting the Democratic Party to win. And obviously so much of that is like, I came up as kind of a McCain person. And when Donald Trump took over the party, I said, well, this isn't anything. This reflects none of the values that I hold. How can the Republican Party go along with this? And in my search to figure out how to defeat Donald Trump, and in my early years, we're going back almost a decade now. In the beginning, right when I was thinking about how to save the Republican Party, it's like, okay, well, how do we primary Trump? How do we get rid of him? And so part of my book is chronicling my journey from somebody who was a Republican to just listening to voters. And like, the listening to voters was basically like a scales from the eyes moment for me. Not just because I realized how much a lot of Republican voters wanted Donald Trump, but how much they rejected the old sort of version of the Republican Party that Mitt Romney and even somebody like John McCain represented. Like they didn't care about free markets that much or American leadership in the world. In fact, they were growing increasingly skeptical of American leadership in the world. And so, you know, when I started listening to voters, what became clear is voters are just like a weird salad, man. They are not linear thinkers. They don't think in partisanship the same way that people in Washington do. Like, I just realized how much time I was spending in think tanks listening to people talk about education policy or whatever, and how much those conversations did not connect to the conversations that actual voters were having. And so when I think about building a big, durable majority, I think about it in terms of, okay, now that I've listened to thousands and thousands of voters, I realized that it's a little from column A and a little from column B, not more moderate versus more progressive, because those are both sort of have their own kind of coherent worldviews, but, like, that's not how voters are. And so I really want to sort of tease that apart today because I think it will be really useful for people who, especially political nerds, they still think about things in terms of partisanship, teams, you know, the polling numbers on different issues. And I don't know that they've thought about as much about the way that you think about things, which is, what does it mean to have. We say we now use the word heterodox. Right? Right. People who are. They're just. They're. They're not the same as, like, a regular politician. They're not just carrying water for one party or another. They got a bunch of different issues. And how do you get those sort of set of issues to align with the American people? You want to take a stab at that first before we start?
- [06:12]
A
Absolutely. I mean, I go back to that word that you just used, heterodox. I've stopped using the words moderate and progressive when we talk about which direction the party needs to move, because it's neither. It's heterodoxy. And, you know, there is a meaningful difference between heterodoxy and moderation. And that is that, as you said, heterodoxy means combining things from different ideological traditions. Right. And the issues that you combine or the issue stances that a voter might combine might be immoderate. Right. The positions themselves might even be extreme. You know, you could have a voter who says, you know, I want to throw every CEO who was involved in the 2007 housing crisis in jail, and I want to deport every illegal immigrant. Right. Neither of those is a moderate position. Those are both rather extreme positions. But when you put them together, what you have is heterodoxy. And I think that's a meaningful distinction. And we, we get hung up on this vocabulary of moderation because often it's the only category that is offered to voters in polls and focus groups that, that isn't either Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative. So it's sort of this catch all category where voters say, well, I don't see myself as being rigidly liberal and I don't see myself as being rigidly conservative, so I'm going to call myself a moderate, even though what they're actually describing or the way they actually approach the world is much more closer to heterodoxy. And I'll say one more thing, which is that I do think you get these crazy mixes of positions and you obviously want to try to align as closely with the electorate that you're trying to win as you possibly can. But there's like, there is a, there is a sort of bigger picture thing that comes from being heterodox, which is this impression that you think for yourself that you're not going to be captured by the interest groups or by the corporate interests on either side, that when you are in a decision making position, you are going to have, you're going to think for yourself, you're going to think independently and you're going to have the voters best interests at heart. So even if you don't match up with them on their own personal mix of heterodox positions, the fact that you're heterodox means you are an independent thinker. And that's going to increase their level of trust in you to make the right decision. When the moment, when the moment comes down, yeah.
- [08:19]
B
The most modern heterodox political official I can think of is Donald Trump. Right. Donald Trump was not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. He's not a traditional Republican. And he took his weird blend of tariffs and protectionism with his closed borders and then his particular brand of, you know, being an absolute jerk. But he also told people like, I'm not going to touch Medicare and Social Security, which is something that Republicans had been talking about for years about how, no, we needed to do something about this for solvency issues, something that I actually happen to agree with, that there's things that we have to do to make these programs sustainable that neither political party is willing to spend the political capital on. And Trump just was like, yeah, I'm not going to touch that either. And that worked for him because voters don't want anybody to touch him.
- [09:07]
A
Right. He was saying things that voters weren't used to hearing come from a Republican.
- [09:11]
B
That's right.
- [09:12]
A
You were, you know, probably watching this debate In August of 2015, when Trump stood on the stage and turned to Jeb Bush and he said, I think the Iraq War was a big fat mistake. Right. And I think your brother screwed up, basically making leftist arguments against the war. You know, he basically didn't quite say Bush lied and people died, but he came pretty darn close. And so, you know, this was a point where the Iraq War had become unpopular and everybody else on that stage was defending the Iraq war. So this was Trump, you know, being heterodox and saying things that people were not used to hearing from Republicans, but that aligned more closely with the broad majority of the American people who by then had turned hard against the war. So, and there's another aspect to this, too, which is that bought him a lot of free media. You know, he had no real campaign at this point. He was not putting money on ads. But with that kind of conflict, it aired nonstop on cable television. It was plastered across social media at the time. And so it drove attention and allowed him to break through and define himself as an independent thinker without spending a single dollar on ads. And that kind. That's the kind of branding, you know, money can't buy in politics.
- [10:17]
B
Yeah, and in part, too, because, you know, the press, for all of its flaws and all of its good things, like, the thing that it does is it's looking for a certain amount of conflict. Right. For things that aren't just the same. And so when a. A presidential candidate or any politician is kind of delivering the talking points of their party, it's just, like, inherently not as interesting as somebody running against their party, which is what Donald Trump did. Like he was taking the sacred cows, or what people assumed were the sacred cows on the right. Then this is a good example, too, of assuming your voters think one thing when they really don't. And this was. This was, to me, the big revelation is how many voters, when I started talking to them, liked Donald Trump because he was against the old Republican Party, which they had started to see as feckless, as just not taking on the left, as not taking on certain issues that they wanted to see, you know, like immigration, that they really wanted to see somebody do something about. And I feel like the same thing is happening on the left right now. I'm looking at what's happening right now with Democrats, and I'm like, I'VE seen this movie before, and we're going to get into the groups in a minute. But for this show, we basically talked to and we've done this experiment before, but I wanted to rerun it because it's very much part of the conversation right now. Like the, should we be more moderate, more progressive Democrats, like, continue to relitigate 2024 to figure out what their path forward is. And so we basically got commissioned several groups, some of whom think the Democratic Party should be more moderate, some of whom think that the Democratic Party should be more progressive. But really what they want is for somebody to be more aggressive. And, and it's because they are frustrated. Democrats are frustrated with their own leadership. After 10 years of Donald Trump, Donald Trump winning again basically made a lot of Democrats feel like, what are you guys doing? What are you doing there? I want somebody who's going to go fight. I want somebody who's going to stand up to Donald Trump. Why do we get beat by this guy? What are you guys even doing up there? And that is less about ideology and more about posture.
- [12:18]
A
100%. I mean, that's the thing is people want to see people fight, right? And they want to see people stand up for what they believe in. They want to see them beat Republicans. And all of those things are consistent with heterodoxy. Heterodoxy is consistent with populism. Heterodoxy is consistent with what we call a procedural hardball. And being for aggressive reforms to the system, like getting rid of the filibuster, which is something I deeply believe in. And so what they want to see is people who are, who are willing to fight, who know what they believe in, even if those beliefs don't line up exactly with their own and have principles and independence. And, and you know, there's a huge generational change aspect to this, too, where people are just tired of seeing the same news in Washington. And so put all those things together and you've got a winning formula. And that's what I think Democrats have an opportunity to do right now if they follow through on it real quickly.
- [13:06]
B
What about somebody like Zoran? Molly? My certain first impressions of him because he calls himself a socialist, I was immediately like, well, that's a guy's not funny for me. But as I watched more of him, I was floored by what a good communicator he is. And I am desperate for Democrats to up their communications game. And so I increasingly started to see somebody that I was like, well, man, this is a generational talent. Like, I may not agree with all of his positions, but then even on his positions, he's, you know, he's this hero of the. The socialist left, but here he comes with sort of pragmatic solutions. Like, as he's governing, as he's been in office, you know, he's doing housing stuff, doing some government cutting red tape stuff that make people like me go, okay, okay, I see you, Zoron, totally.
- [13:54]
A
And what he's doing, he's expanding his coalition. He's bringing in. He's building a big tent. You know, he's bringing in people like you who were skeptical of him at first. I mean, what the most recent video I saw from him on social media was him bragging about balancing the budget. Right.
- [14:09]
B
So I love a balanced budget. Exactly.
- [14:12]
A
You know, so, I mean, and there's nothing inconsistent. I mean, you know, I think he's done a phenomenal job at talking about demanding excellence in government. You know, a lot of the reason people don't trust Democrats to govern is they think we take power and direct services to favored groups or are just lazy about it, and we're not responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. And those are all very reasonable and understandable concerns. And so if you want to be the party of government, as we are as Democrats, you have an even greater responsibility to show people that you're using their taxpayer dollars responsibly, that you are giving it to people who've earned it and who deserve it, that you're, you know, being fiscally responsible in closing budget deficits where you can. And so, you know, if you want to make the case for expanded government services, if you want to make the case for expanding the social safety net, especially as we face massive job displacement from AI, it is even more incumbent on you to show that you're responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars. And that's something that Zoron is doing in a way that I think is reasonably accurate to classify as heterodox. It's not what you would expect a socialist to do once in office. And I think it's part of the reason he's been able to bring in people who are skeptical of him in the first place.
- [15:20]
B
All right, I'm going to talk more about the socialists as we get into the sound, but I want to start here with. With the voters. And like I said, we have. We have a group that wants the party to be the Democratic Party to be more moderate group that wants it to be more progressive. I want to start with the moderate crowd and sort of the reasons that they.