← The Bulwark
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, friends. Happy announcement. Today we're going to be doing something a little different on the Mona Charon show coming up next week, and it's something that viewers and listeners can get involved in. I am going to be talking with my colleague Sunny Bunch, who is our culture critic at the Bulwark, and we're going to be talking about a movie that we hope you will watch before you watch the conversation. The the movie is called A Man For All Seasons. It was an Academy Award winner back in 1966. And the reason I want to revisit this film is that it was the most popular movie among conservatives when I was growing up and becoming mature. I loved it. It was always my favorite and so did other conservatives. It's all about personal conscience and what your conscience requires of you. You'll see it's situated historically, it's about an actual historical figure and we'll talk about how realistic it is. But in any event, it is highly relevant today because guess what happened with the rise of the Trump movement, conservatives were faced with an ethical challenge and so many flunked. So I hope you will join Sunny and me to talk about A Man for All Seasons. You can download it and view it for, I think 3.99 on Amazon or other platforms, YouTube, various places. Sorry about the small fee, but it is well worth it. It's a great film, even if it didn't have any political significance. It's a fantastic story, beautifully acted and sh. So that's our plan for next week. We will also be doing more of these audience participation programs where we're going to try to go live and have audience participation through comments and responses. Q&As. So I do hope you'll join us for this debut episode of an interactive Mona Charon show. Now we will join this week's show with Matt Bennett.
- [02:25]
B
Everything will depend on who we nominate for president. I mean, party brands are dictated entirely by their presidential nominees and their presidents and we won't have that for, you know, two years.
- [02:41]
A
Welcome to the Mona Charon Show. Thanks so much for joining me today. I am delighted to welcome Matt Ben Bennett this week. He is the vice president at Third Way and has been a guest before. We've talked about where the Democratic Party needs to go and in light, Matt, of the Supreme Court decision in the Voting Rights act case and the primaries that are unfolding. I am so glad you were able to come. We have a lot to cover. So I want to start with the Democratic Party's brand right now. Even though we have an administration that is just cratering in terms of public approval. If you look at where the Democratic Party stands in terms of people's approval, it's abysmal. It's like 28%, according to one poll, have a positive view of the Democratic Party. So how. How do you analyze that? How much of it is just Democrats being dissatisfied with their own party? And tell me how you evaluate this.
- [03:58]
B
I mean, it's pretty bad. As you say, Trump is about as popular as head lice with everybody outside the MAGA base right now. People are just apoplectic about gas prices, and they. They know who to blame. Democrats should have benefited from that. Thermostatic political change means as one side comes up, the other side goes down, the other side should come up. That really isn't happening. I mean, we are benefiting in the kind of generic ballot. Who would you vote for in a House race? We're up a little, but not because Democrats are more popular, only because Trump and the Republicans are less. And the question is why? Now, some of that is Democrats who are disgruntled with their own party, who will eventually vote for Democrats for sure. But some of it, and a worrying amount of it, are swing voters who think both parties are terrible, and we're only slightly less terrible than the Republicans at the moment. I think there are many reasons for that, but most of them go to damage to the Democratic brand That happened in the run up to 2024 that has not been repaired. If you look at some polling by American Bridge, which is a Democratically aligned group, they concluded that swing voters believed that Democrats were weak, woke, and out of touch. Those are three very bad attributes in American politics. And that really hasn't changed much in the last year and a half, despite all of Trump's troubles.
- [05:32]
A
So let's talk about the weak aspect of this, because do you have the feeling that that was attributable to the Democratic Party's position on immigration or foreign affairs or crime, or maybe all three? What do you think?
- [05:50]
B
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good rundown of the three, and probably in that order. Immigration, crime, and perhaps foreign affairs, although that's less clear. For about 30 years or 40 years after Vietnam, there was this huge gap in public perception on national security. Republicans were seen as tough, Democrats were seen as weak. Now Trump has kind of scrambled that, so I think that all is less clear. And voters hate this war with a burning passion. So, yeah, I think the other two things are the bigger problem. And even though voters really don't like, what's going on with ICE and with the internal enforcement of immigration laws. They're satisfied with how Trump is handling the border, and he's still way ahead on managing the border. And Democrats have done nothing to repair our brand image on that, which, you know, President Biden's stewardship of the border wasn't good. Voters know it. And we haven't come out clearly to say we're not doing that again.
- [06:53]
A
Yeah. And it isn't, arguably, it's not just Biden. And by the way, I say this as somebody who is a. An immigration booster. Immigration dove. Myself, I'm very pro immigration. But I do remember that in 2019. 2020, in that year when there were all these Democrats arrayed on the stage and practically everybody raised their hand to say they do not think that it should be an offense to enter the country illegally. And that was the whole range of candidates for president. So it wasn't just. Wasn't just Biden, but I think actually Biden was one who didn't raise his hand, strangely enough, halfway. Okay. Yeah. So it's very hard to know. I mean, clearly, voters are in the middle. They really hated how weak Democrats seemed, but they also hate how harsh the Trump administration has been, and they're sort of saying, no, no, you know, way too far. We want a secure border, but we don't want people being rounded up and sent to gulags in other countries.
- [08:06]
B
So
- [08:08]
A
is there a sense, do you get a sense that Democrats recognize that this is an opportunity to find that sweet spot on immigration or no?
- [08:18]
B
Some do, for sure. And I think everything will depend on who we nominate for president. I mean, party brands are dictated entirely by their presidential nominees and their presidents, and we won't have that for, you know, two years. And so we are going to kind of flop around here for a while. And I think the brand can't really recover until we've got a leader who clearly articulates what it means to be a Democrat. I mean, if you think about what happened with Republicans after 2012 on this issue, they did their big autopsy after Romney's loss to Obama, and they concluded what we need to do is be nicer to immigrants and be more welcoming. And then they nominated Donald Trump and went the exact opposite direction, and he obviously set the tone for the party. So no matter what people like me are doing and saying for the next two years, and there'll be plenty of fighting about it between folks like me who say we got to be clear that, you know, we need strong border enforcement we need moral, constitutional, ethical enforcement of that law, which we don't have at the moment. We got to gut what Trump is doing, but we can't go back to what Biden did. And there's people on the other side who are more akin to the people raising their hand on that stage saying we should decriminalize the border. That debate will happen for two years, but we won't have a brand identity on it until we have a nominee. And much will depend on what that person does and says.
- [09:45]
A
I've been running a very limited little campaign myself that the slogan should be more cops, less ice. Right. I mean, they should. They should. Democrats should campaign on, you know, just like, reallocating all the funds that were spent on, if they could, on ICE and on immigration enforcement. Just reorient that to cops. And I don't know. I'm old enough to remember that Bill Clinton ran on a campaign of hiring 100,000 new cops.
- [10:21]
B
100,000 cops. Yep.
- [10:23]
A
And it was very successful. And it also sort of militated against the image of Democrats as being weak on crime. Right?
- [10:33]
B
Absolutely. So I was on that campaign, and the big issue in 1992 was crime. The kind of crack wars were raging in inner cities. Crime was much. I mean, so much worse than it is now.
- [10:48]
A
So much worse.
- [10:49]
B
But crime was bad in 1992, and Democrats were seen because of things that our national leaders have done and local people had done. I think not incorrectly, is kind of weak on addressing crime. And Bill Clinton came out with a very kind of robust approach to attacking crime, using 100,000 cops as the centerpiece of that. And it was enormously successful in rebranding the party. I mean, he created, along with the dlc, he created the idea of what it means to be a new Democrat. And part of that was being tough on crime and being clear that, you know, he was accused of being racist for all of this, but he was clear, no, no. The victims of crime are often. And the majority of the victims of crime are people of color. They are the people that are suffering from crime. It is not racist to crack down on crime. In fact, it is the opposite.
- [11:46]
A
You know, it's always surprising to certain kinds of elite progressives to find out that people who live in cities who tend. Who tend to be African American and Hispanic more than white, don't want to cut back on cops. They want cops.
- [12:08]
B
You know, this was put to the test in Minneapolis after the George Floyd murder. You'll recall. That's where the defund the police movement started. And in fact, there was a ballot initiative made Minneapolis to defund the police, and it lost overwhelmingly. And the places where it lost the most were in black and Hispanic districts of the city.
- [12:27]
A
Yeah. So let's talk about blacks and Hispanics. One of the things that was so horrifying about 2024 was that Trump made inroads with black and Hispanic voters. Major inroads. And, you know, most of us think, well, the, you know, you couldn't find a more textbook racist in American public life. And yet it looks like the bottom has really fallen out of Hispanic support for Trump and the Republicans. Although we'll see. But, but what's your analysis of where we stand on? Because it wasn't just in 2024. There has been a secular trend for quite some time now of minority vot attached to the Democratic Party. And my feeling was the Democrats were just, they were blindsided by this. They just thought they owned those voters.
- [13:25]
B
I'd like to say we were blindsided, but everyone saw it coming. It's like the scene in Austin Powers where he's yelling no as a very slowly moving, you know, truck comes at him. We could have moved out of the way pretty easily, but we didn't. And I think we made a bunch of mistakes. First of all, we treated Hispanic and Latino voters as if they were a monolith, which is insane. I mean, the kind of subcultures within the Latino and Hispanic communities are many and often at odds with one another over all kinds of issues. And we treated them as if the only thing they cared about was immigration and immigration enforcement, and as if what they wanted was open borders and no enforcement. And in fact, the truth was just the opposite for many of them. And their number one issue, as is the case with every voter, is the economy. And we just didn't deal with that in any realistic way. And as Senator Gallego, Ruben Gallego says every Hispanic, you know, he, he's Hispanic. He said every, he's a Latino. He said, every Latino man wants a big ass truck. That's the thing. Thinking about they want. What he means, of course, is they want to live a middle class life that allows them to, to have not luxury, but things that provide joy and comfort. And that's what everybody wants. And if we don't treat all of our voters that way, then we're making a huge mistake.
- [14:51]
A
So your critics say you neglect the importance of the core. Democratic voter is progressive. That's the base. You need to excite them. You need to energize them. Look at the way they turned out for Barack Barack Obama, whereas they didn't for Hillary Clinton because she was too milquetoast. This is how the argument goes. You are by counseling that the Democrats should be more moderate in their policy positions, you are forgetting about the importance of base mobilization and excitement. How do you respond.