Offline with Jon Favreau - Democrats Need to Care About Getting Attention

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

Chris Hayes, MSNBC host and author of The Siren’s Call, returns to Offline to talk about Democrats’ posting problem…they’re too afraid of controversy, too stingey with their appearences, and too focused on fundraising. Have the content firehoses diluted cancel culture? What’s the secret to Zohran Mamdani’s press strategy? Is John Fetterman the Democrats’ John McCain—and is there a lesson to learn in that?Also:  Offline is now coming out Saturdays. Thank you for sharing your weekend with us! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Go to quince.com slash offline for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash offline. free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com slash offline. When they're recruiting candidates, they are looking for, number one thing, can they raise the money? Which is, are they personally rich? Do they have rich friends? Number two is bio, resume, basically. You know, high name recognition because, you know, they're a sitting elected statewide person.

Or they were a Marine and a Rhodes Scholar and they, you know, now they're a neurosurgeon, whatever. are they good at talking to people? Are they good at getting attention? Do they have Riz? That actually doesn't rate that high in the candidate recruitment playbook. And so part of this, too, is about thinking about candidates in a little bit of a different way, because those staffers are probably correct that some of the people that have been recruited, you don't want going two hours unscripted in a podcast. I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from Friend of the Pod Chris Hayes, the host of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes and the author of many books, including his latest The Sirens Call, which he talked about last time he was here. The Sirens Call is about our attention, why the competition for it has become so fierce and the implications of that dynamic for just about everything.

This week, Chris wrote a piece about attention for the New York Times that caught my eye because it's about why Democrats have been losing the war for people's attention and how they might be. able to change that. This is something I've been thinking about and talking about quite a bit, especially since 2024. And I've become especially frustrated with party leadership for not making it a higher priority to find and support candidates who have an aptitude for communicating and connecting with people in a way that gets and holds their attention. Sounds obvious, and yet, here we are. Anyway, Chris and I get into all of it. Lessons from 2024, Trump, Mamdani, Obama, AOC, and of course the Graham Platner drama. Spoiler, we solved everything. And just a heads up, you may have noticed that this episode came out on Saturday morning, which is our new and hopefully

permanent time slot. We figured we'd give you all weekend to listen to the show while you're hopefully resting, walking, and not looking at your phone, except to find this podcast, of course. Okay, now for my conversation with Chris Hayes. Chris, welcome back. It's great to be back. Last time you were on, we talked about your outstanding book on attention, Sirens Call, still one of my favorite books this year. Thank you.

Also, apparently Barack Obama's. Barack Obama also liked it, which was pretty awesome. I will say, that was pretty cool. This year, he made an addition to his picks list where he had, like, little handwritten reviews, but I was digging it. Putting a lot of time in to something. My phone blew up, yeah, that was cool. So this time I wanted to talk to you about a piece you wrote for the New York Times this week

as part of a series they're doing on the future of the Democratic Party. So your piece is also about attention, but in the specific context of why Democrats need to focus on getting more of it, you start by arguing that Kamala Harris's, quote, core problem was not her message, however imperfect it might have been. It was an inability to get enough people to hear it. Maybe you can start by making the case as to why you think Harris's message was less of a problem than her getting attention.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important to ground analysis what went wrong in 2024 in the results, right? And one of the things you saw was the swing towards Trump in uncontested states, there's effectively no campaign, there's no local ad buys, there's no local events, was larger and sometimes really considerably larger than the swing towards Trump in the swing states where there was a campaign, which is to say,

take away the campaigns and the attentional information environment plus inflation and the just state of the country was pushing towards Trump and the campaign in the states that it was spending $2 billion actually seems to be fairly effective in moving that back a few points. I think it's important to recognize that because I think it so much can be chalked up to the campaign, but like, why was New Jersey, New York, and California these enormous swings to Donald Trump? And that's where they weren't, no one saw any Kamala Harris ads, right? No one saw the candidate. So my point is, yes, I think the arguments about both the issues Democrats stand for, the coalition and the big tent, the message are all really important and

useful. But one of the big takeaways, I think, from the campaign is, from 2024 is, unless people are hearing that message, unless you're somehow breaking through. the message is not going to matter that much. And that is an enormous thing for not just national candidates to figure out, but I think from president down to basically the congressional level, everyone's got to have a theory of attention. This is obviously tough to unpack, but I want to try to do it, which is like you could also argue, though,

that if the message itself had been more compelling, even in the swing states, then more people would have spread it, shared it, Yes. More people would have heard it. So, like, I always try to figure out how to figure out the interplay between the message itself and, like, what actually generates attention? Isn't it the message itself that generates attention or lack thereof? So that's a good point.

What I'm trying to talk about here, and I think it's useful to talk about this distinction between what we called paid and earned media, right? So in campaigns, these two categories. Paid media is the ads you buy mailers, radio ads, and. and mostly television. Earned media is the interviews you give and the media events you do. Press conferences, you do campaign events. Let's just talk for a moment about paid media. And I think you'll agree with this,

although I'm curious to hear how you see it as someone who has worked in the trenches. I don't think people outside politics understand how much, for the last 20 or 30 or 40 years, what campaigning is raising a ton of money and spending that money on TV at. in the same way that Paul Krubman once said the U.S. government is like a social insurance program with an army attached. And like because basically our large entitlement programs and the Defense Department are like, you know, 85% of the budget. A campaign is a vehicle to purchase TV ads. And so what that means is that exists because the TV ad solves an attentional problem.

How do you get people's attention to you? I'm running for office. know about it. I buy TV ads. And one of the points that I'm making in the piece is that model really worked pretty well. It's just degrading. And because it's degrading, you have to be thinking about how are you reaching people that aren't seeing your ads, which if you're buying them on local news, right, on networks, is a larger and larger share of the electorate, particularly young people. So go back to your point, I think the paid ads were pretty good. They tended to be, I think, pretty effective. The earned media, the strategy to get that message out into the ecosystem more broadly,

I think, was deficient. There is an implication in talking about the sort of like how paid media is not as effective as it once was, which is, and you say this in the piece, and I think this might surprise a lot of people, especially people who follow politics closely, which is that money cannot buy attention as reliably or directly as it once could. And I think the implications there, you know, are, it means that fundraising in this new world might not be as important. It could mitigate some of the damage that Citizens United has unleashed on our campaign finance system, or at least even the playing field for candidates who don't have a lot of money,

but do have a lot of aptitude for getting attention. Yes. I think all of those things are true. I think it remains to be seen how this all plays out. So we're sort of at a strange hinge point, right? Lots of people still watch TV. There's this sort of tendency to kind of overread the death of television. I know this because I work in television and I still have a TV show and I talk to five million people a week. Like, there's people watching. So, but it clearly it's changing profoundly and the old model's coming apart. And so the question is, becomes, I think you'll see two things. One is, I think you're going to start to see ads crop up in a lot of other places, right? So if the streaming services start doing more and more ads, well, then if you can geo-target in a congressional district to the people who are on Netflix, particularly if you can kind of demographically model who's probably a swing voter, or you can even better buy that data, right? That's a huge new area we might start to see. We might start to see more ads on TikTok. So there are ways in which the paid ad world might adapt to these changes.

But I also think that that first point you made, which is if you're good at getting attention in earn media through all sorts of different ways, right? Vertical video like Zora and Mamdani, TikTok as Jeff Jackson did in down in North Carolina, you have avenues to reach people that you didn't have before. And that also sidestep, you know, some of the obstacles you might have faced. previously. I have a take on this that is unsupported in the sense that I haven't been involved in a campaign for quite some time now since 2012. But I just think that paid media as a whole is just so much less effective. Forget about where you're reaching people. Forget about television versus your banner ads versus your TikTok ads. It feels to me that in this information environment where we are now, especially younger generation,

so used to just watching content with people who are just authentic and themselves and a little rough around the edges, that the typical paid media ad, whether you're seeing it on television, whether you're seeing it on your screen, on your phone, it's just, I can't imagine that it is as effective as earned media appearances. Like, I'd rather put my candidate on your show talking to you and reach the people that you reach than buy an ad on your show. for my candidate and like if I had to pick one, right? So A, I totally agree. B, I absolutely share your intuition here.

I want to be humble and say, I don't know how testable the hypothesis is and what the data say. So I do want to be humble about this. One thing that I think, though, that I write about the piece and I think you will really, I think you'll agree with is to go back to that thought experiment, do I want to book my candidate on Chris's show, or do I want to buy a 30-second spot?

If you buy a 30-second spot, the downside risk of a screw-up is very low. You tape the ad, you're in an edit room, and make sure that every little thing, and occasionally, you screw-up ads. As people know, stuff gets in there, someone looks kind of silly, it doesn't land the way you think, but you have this control. also there's an industry of people that get paid for purchasing those ads i was about to say that who have a direct financial incentive in in buying ad time if you put a candidate on my show or any show or long-form podcast like things can go sideways they can give an answer that then gets magnified you can have a moment where you don't look great and i think this is true of all political professionals but particularly in the democratic party

There is a very intense risk aversion. Waltz compared it to playing prevent defense was how he talked about the campaign, which is in football like you're sort of hanging back. You don't want to give up any long touchdown passes. So you let a lot of little things happen in front of you. And I think there's a very similar kind of mentality through much of the political staff culture in democratic circles. 100%.

And I think a lot of it stems from not fully trusting the candidate. When you have a candidate, when you have a candidate, you can trust. Well, I've got messages from people in response to this to say, yeah, buddy, it's like, you sure you want to uncork some of the people I've worked for? And my response to that, which I would like to hear your take on, is it goes down to the level of candidate recruitment to come back to this model that dominates politics. And I really can't emphasize enough when they're recruiting candidates, they are looking for, number one thing, can they raise the money? which is, are they personally rich? Do they have rich friends? Do they have a bank account?

Number two is bio, resume, basically. You know, high name recognition because, you know, they're a sitting elected statewide person. Or they've got a great story. They were, you know, they were a Marine and a Rhodes Scholar and they, you know, now they're a neurosurgeon, whatever. Are they good at talking to people? Are they good at getting attention? Do they have Riz? that actually doesn't rate that high in the candidate recruitment playbook.

And so part of this, too, is about thinking about candidates in a little bit of a different way because those staffers are probably correct that some of the people that have been recruited, you don't want going two hours unscripted in a podcast. Offline is brought to you by Smalls. Does your cat have gut issues? maybe it's time for a diet upgrade with smalls for a limited time get 60% off your first order plus free shipping when you hit to smalls.com slash offline smalls cat food is protein packed recipes made with preservative free ingredients you'd find in your fridge and it's delivered right to your door

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Give your cat the food they deserve for a limited time because you're an offline listener. Get 60% off your first order plus free shipping when you head to smalls.com slash offline. One last time, that's 60% off your first order plus free shipping when you hit to smalls.com slash offline. I would say along with resume and bio, there's other qualification, which is do your politics and your issue positions and your ideology match the voters in your district and your state? And I think this is where the DSCC, the DCC, especially are like, and we're, you know, talk about this, them putting their thumbs on the scales of primary. he's left and right here, but they want a candidate who can win, and of course, ability to raise

money, good bio, but also like politics that aren't too left, really, is sometimes too right, but mostly two left. Totally agree with that, although the one thing I would say is it tends to be the case that those first two do a lot of that job. Yeah, that is true. You know what I mean? It's like, if you're going out to this swing district in Kansas and you want someone, like, are you going to find someone with like a huge fundraising circle and like a Sterling bio?

who's also like a hardcore socialist like probably not so I but you're right of course and I look no shade on that like I want to be very clear like you could not run Zora Mamdani in Cherise David's district in Kansas and expect to win

you would lose by 25 points at least right like this is real and you should 100% be sensitive to that but I also think that like that fundraising thing really I just think it's always so striking to me as a person who talks for a living, the wide delta of the ability

to talk in professional politicians. I don't understand it. Like, I really don't. And I don't know. I mean, I was going to ask you, like, I can't tell if it is a supply problem or it is a, like, a recruitment issue, right? Like, if you talk to the people who are recruiting these candidates, would they just tell you, well, this is who we got. And we can't find really good talkers out there who are normal

human beings who don't sound like robots and spitting out talking points. Like, we just can't find them. They're not signing up. Or are they just not, they just don't care about it, right? Like, I can't tell. I can't tell either. And then on top of that, there's also that people who are good talkers get kind of trained into being very talking point machine, you know, cautious. I mean, look, I really think the fundraising thing is a big part of it, because I just think if you go into a district and you think, like, who can raise $2 million? Like, how many people are there anywhere that can raise $2 million? It's not a lot of people, if that's how you start thinking about people. And that really is the first threshold for all of these races.

And so I think that has a huge effect on who you end up with. I mean, look, McConnell has used this method. This isn't just a democratic thing. McConnell's use this method, and he's, you know, he's run some real lemons out there. I mean, yes, yes. Hobdi in Wisconsin, which is a totally winnable seat. It's like that guy had the bio. He had the money personally.

He's a rich dude, and he has the fundraising, and he had the politics, basically. That was it. He was not a particularly great candidate because he was not recruited to be a guy who could talk compellingly about his vision for the country. The other challenge within the Democratic Party on this is, so there's at the staff level, people being worried that they can't send their candidate into a two-hour podcast. You also, and this is a tough one to tease out, but like you also hear from consultants who make the ads and who then test the ads. So they're in the polling and they do the ads and they're buying the ads and they get a cut of the ads. So there's a self-interest there. And you hear from them that like, this is very important.

that paid ads are still important, that things are changing, but that they're still really effective. And I don't want to dismiss that judgment just based on the fact that there is some self-interest there, because both could be true. But I've seen this forever. And a lot of these people are like, you know, friends of mine, people I've worked with. But you're sort of like, I don't know. It is a little bit more art than just science in determining whether an ad is an effective way to move a voter. Yes, there's a lot of both. And this is the thing about politics, always, right?

Like, it's always art and science. It's always data and gut. It's there are people who can create new models and formulas that didn't exist before, that you couldn't reverse engineer. And then everyone comes along and it's like, okay, now vertical video is a thing. Like, we'll all do vertical video, right? And, and part of that is useful evolution. The other thing that I think about the risk calculus,

Right? Because I do think that A paid ads are still effective in many respects, and I think there's evidence for that. But I do think the risk factor is a huge part of it. And one of the things I think is really important to think about is it really matters the context of whether you think you're winning a race or losing a race. Like in the same way, to go back to the football metaphor, yeah, like if you're up by three touchdowns with three minutes left, you should absolutely run the ball and not take a lot of risks. If you're down, right three touchdowns you got to throw the ball and there's a lot of confusion i think i think sometimes this is the polling like are we down or up what you know and i think you know if you go back to that main race in in 2020 uh with sarah giddy and i think was a candidate against susan collins yeah look the polling had her up like eight points at some point yeah that was never true that was it wasn't like she was up and then she lost the measurement was wrong. And the measurement being wrong means you take a strategy that's also wrong. If you're up eight, you're doing something very different than if you're down three. And if you're down three

against an incumbent who has shown her ability to win in that state over and over, you got to take some swings. You got to throw the ball down the field. You got to take some risk. And that, to me, is a huge part of this as well. But it's like a, it's like an old political cliche that you're always supposed to run like you're 10 points down. Right. That's true. Yes. I mean, maybe it's maybe it's old and no longer a cliche because maybe people aren't doing that anymore. But I also wonder if, I mean, the Gideon example is interesting, I wonder if because so many races are so close and within a couple points of each other and the internal polling might show that as well, that that causes some of the confusion about whether you're up or down, right?

Like I think if the Harris campaign was looking at all the swing states and they're like, okay, we're up by one or two in Pennsylvania and the blue wall states, we're down one or two. And, you know, so maybe a risk would be bad because it could blow this one point lead we have that might just be enough, right? Now, I think if you have the mentality, no, we're five points down all the time and we should take a risk, then that's great. But I also understand in the Trump era, the level of, oh gosh, do we want to take a risk? Because the consequence of taking a risk that doesn't work is what we're living through right now. So I think there has been extra caution added to Democratic Party staff and consultants in the era of Donald Trump because the stakes are so big. I think that's totally true. And I also think that you end up in a situation where because of that and because there's sort of this war between usually different factions within a campaign, as I think you would agree, right?

people have different views on stuff you know one of the things you can get trapped doing is the less media you're doing the the less you are out there the more amplified every individual hit is and the more possibility there is for some gaff to go viral or to get a lot of attention totally which then confirms the fears of the people who are urging fewer appearances whereas if you say something and then the next day you do five more interviews and the day after that you do five more and you get asked about a bunch and you wipe it away or whatever the stuff just comes out no one can remember anything anymore which is a huge which is a really important point it is and it's you know it's like when we think about the Howard Dean's scream which

is the kind of iconic viral moment that wasn't even it wasn't even anything he didn't say anything wrong you didn't do anything wrong there was literally nothing morally politically substantively objectable at all about the way his voice sounded for four seconds on an overdriven microphone yeah and it was like ended the campaign and it was like looped and it was all nothing sticks like that anymore and i do think that that's something that the right has internalized a little more than the left has particularly because Donald Trump is just so sociopolitic empathic and like has no remorse. So everyone sort of just felt like, yeah, it doesn't matter. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to

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That's Squarespace.com slash offline. Donald Trump is so effective at getting attention. What's the formula? I mean, I think he has a kind of feral pathological need for it that's like not replicable. That's what I was going to ask if you think it's replicable. It's like, why was Napoleon so driven? You know, it's like I think his psychological brokenness combined with, and this I think actually is applicable, coming up in 1980s New York City tabloids, which was an incredible. incredibly competitive media environment. In fact, when you saw Curtis Sliwa on the debate stage, if you were watching the New York mayoral elections, I think people had to admit, like, wow, this guy's good at grabbing and keeping attention.

And I'm like, they came up in the same milieu. Literally, when I grew up in New York City, two of the people most likely to be on the wood, as they called it, at the bus stop in the tabloids, was Curtis LeWine Donald Trump. man like these are creatures of a very particular attentional environment that is now all of our environment all the time yeah it was very weird back then because it was very competitive you had three different daily tabloids you were fighting for attention among them big controversy polemics negative attention got people's attention and you could sort of trade off that so i think he honed his skill in this particular environment that just happens to be very good for what we now live. I have this theory that it's much easier to get attention when you're willing to

set yourself on fire every day. People would pay attention to that. It would not necessarily be good for you. It would not necessarily be effective in trying to win a race. But Donald Trump is willing to do that, right? And he is willing to sort of take on the negative attention as well. Yep. But I do think that it is, it is especially harder for Democrats because I think the kind of content that is most likely to go viral today and grab our attention, right, is content that makes us angry, afraid, more polarized. It tends to be sensational, gossipy, dramatic, not a lot of nuance, not a lot of gray. And it's basically everything that is antithetical to a functioning democracy. And so, I've always wondered if it makes it especially difficult for the pro-democracy party to break through without sort of undermining their political beliefs and political goals. It's a really great question, and it gets to a foundational question, which I sort of touch on in the book but never quite come out an answer, which is, is the current attention marketplace, like, structurally reactionary? Yes. Right?

Like, is it the case that in highly competitive. attention markets, what out-competes are lurid, base, rage-filled kinds of bait. And I think the answer is kind of yes. So I do think that, for instance, the evening news is structurally reactionary when it comes to crime. Yeah, has been for, and local news especially. That's what I mean. Oh, yeah.

I'm saying local evening news is structured. Now, that's not to say that there are. amazing crime. Like, these are people that I have known and respected. No one's doing anything wrong individually. It is a news story of someone in your city is shot and killed. And in fact, the survivors of that and the victims deserve that acknowledgement. But in the aggregate, right? Like, what it does is it produces a kind of reactionary mindset. So part of that is the problem, yes, algorithmic social media, competitive intention marketplaces. They look like Times Square, casinos, and tabloid checkout counters. That's what we're.

what they are. And that's Donald Trump right there. And that's what Donald Trump is. But I will say this. I do think, like the Jeff Jackson example that I give in the piece, people talk a lot about AOC and Mamdani and, you know, the left Joe. Jackson's a really interesting case because this guy, he's a sort of center-left Democrat. His politics are not super left in any way. And the way that he started going viral on TikTok was just like explaining to his constituents what they were doing. Like, here's what we're doing in Congress today. We got this vote. And we got to take that vote before we do this vote. And it was just like plain spoken and really effective.

And I do think to your point of like, that to me was going viral in a way that was not all of the worst impulses lowest common denominator. And what I do think is people got to try stuff to discover what's out there. And the Mamdani innovation of being the interviewer was a brilliant innovation. Brilliant. That's a new thing. I'd never seen a candidate do that. that before. I have never seen a candidate interview people on camera. Brilliant. I'd never seen someone explain congressional procedure and what their day was like, like Jeff Jackson did.

Like, you got to try new stuff. There might be stuff that does work in this format, and that also isn't rage bait. Yeah, I also think humor works to get attention if you can pull it off. I mean, that's Trump's secret weapon. It's why when Curry Lake or other people try to pull it off, it doesn't work because they're humorless. DeSantis. I think on our side, inspiration can work too, even though it's a much more cynical time,

so that's tricky. You have some advice for Democrats in the piece. Just going to go through some of them. Go everywhere, right? We sort of talked about this with Harris. I do wonder, though, like, isn't it weird that you have, you know, you talked about in the piece,

AOC, Mamdani, you brought up Jeff Jackson. I could probably count on two hands how many Democrats I would feel comfortable putting on Rogan, right? And I'm not the cautious staffer. I think that people need to take risk. But I sort of wondered about that after the whole Kamala Harris-Rogan story came out because I'm like, okay, they did try. It didn't work. Could she have tried harder? And could they have moved the schedule. Yes, they could have. But then I was like, how would that have gone? Yeah, that's a fair question. James Tolerico, I will give a shout out to the.

the Texas state senator who's running for Senate in Texas who did go on Rogan and acquitted himself very well. If you're worried about your candidate and you don't know that they can go on Rogan, do you send them on anyway? Like, is it better to go and do the two hours that might be a little rough and then that's what people remember? Or is it like, no, I'm just going to, I'm going to find something else? I think that really depends on who the candidate is. Yeah. It really does. And how good they are at talking in that setting. But it's also a little bit of a reps thing. For instance, it's interesting.

I do a lot of public speaking. But I'm never giving speeches. And I'm certainly never, I don't think in my life I've ever given a political speech. And one of the things I've noticed is I'm a pretty good talker and I'm pretty good at speaking. But I can't do that thing that really good politicians do, which is like crescendo and like get to the end and like the, audience gets up and swells and that's like a that's a particular skill if i were running for office and i got the reps and i think i would be able to do that so it is a kind of a reps thing that is very true david a xrod would always say this about obama that when he was a state

senator traveling around illinois he was not the guy who appeared on the stage in 2004 at the convention and gave that speech and in fact gave pretty lengthy sometimes quite wonky speeches and learn to be a really good speaker. I don't know if you've ever read the Chicago Reader coverage of the Bobby Rush primary, which is just like this nerd professor doofus, like showing up. This is Obama, we're talking about. Obama challenging incumbent former Black Panther sort of beloved iconic figure on the south side Bobby Rush. and basically getting his ass handed to him.

And that really, those contemporaneous accounts of him losing that primary really speaks to the fact that, like, he got better and he got better at doing specific things. So I think part of it is if part of what the Times demand is just talking a lot to people, then you've got to both recruit candidates to do it, but also they've got to do it a lot to get better at doing. Yeah. The reps thing is important, and, you know, one of your pieces of advice is always be posting, of course, absolutely. Yeah. And you note that one thing, successful content creators will tell you about excelling in the world of digital attention, there's no penalty for quantity. No one's keeping a batting average. Which is true.

Sadly, I mean, I kind of wish we lived in a world in which everyone did less and tried to make it better. That would, I would love to, I say this is like a cable news host. But this is my question. I do wonder if, like, a level of basic quality control is necessary, especially when you're putting out that much content, because I always think of, like, the people who are only casually consuming political news. And if the moment that they tune in and look at their phone, you have some fucking terribly cringy post or a video clip where, you know, politician sounds like they were trained on

a Democratic consultant version of chat GPT, then you might be like, I'm. I'm done. I'm not coming back to this, but like, I don't know, who knows? Maybe then, you know, then Chuck Schumer shows up in your phone again, and it's better than the last time, and maybe you change your mind. I don't know. Right. I mean, I think that does go back to this idea of how long does the impression last if you're not constantly creating new stuff. I mean, Vance was really interesting to me, right? Because Vance is a fairly able talker. He's quite smooth. But I also think is kind of charmless. It certainly doesn't have the kind of strange charisma that Trump has. He also just gave a ton of interviews during that Ohio primary, right?

Which was like, again, when people talk about the groups and the groups were the ones that killed off the Kamala and because she took position in the primary, all of the really problematic things that Vant said and the people he spoke to were in the context where he was like vying with a bunch of other complete right. fringe figures to win the Republican primary. And it did come back to Biden, like the cat lady thing, and giving the interview with the guy who thinks that the age of consent is too high and, you know, on and on. Yeah.

Even as these sentences come out of my mouth, right? It's like, right, right. This is the world we're living in. This is the world we're living in, right? The guy who thinks. And I just think he overcame it by just, like, talking so much. It just kind of got buried under quantity a little

bit, right? Don't you feel like that was the case? I do, and I wonder if he is making up for the lack of charisma now by just being in everyone's face all the time, which is what he learned from Donald Trump. And like, we sort of all make fun of him for like shit posting all the time. He's just tweeting. He's tweeting at me, tweeting, he's tweeting at all of us all the time. And it's like, maybe that's helpful in the long run. I don't, I can't tell because maybe people are like, okay, well, he's, you know, he's at least

responding to questions. He's out there. He's on Twitter. He's on TV. He's given interviews. I can't tell if that will make up for the clear lack of charisma, at least in relation to Donald Trump that he has. But it is certainly, it's worth thinking about. Yeah. And I wonder also how, I mean, whenever you're talking about this, there's a few caveats too, right? Like, none of these rules are universally. One thing you can always point to is like, look at Roy Cooper, right, in North Carolina. Like, you know, Roy Cooper is perfectly good at talking. But he's, you know, He is a very traditional old school politician. Yes.

He's careful with his words. He's not doing a ton of viral stuff. He's not courting negative attention. He was a very popular two-term governor, Democratic governor of the state of North Carolina, where he won in really difficult terrain, you know, consecutive elections and managed to pass the baton to a third straight Democratic governor. That is a huge thing. He left with very high approval ratings. And he doesn't do anything that I'm talking about here. Right.

So there's not one model. The other thing I would also say is that I really think the stuff that I say about attention stops working below a certain level of district. A friend of mine and I were talking about this whose spouse is actually a state legislator, you can't win a city council race by going viral. Like, it just, the way the algorithm works is not geolocated enough. It doesn't work that way. You have to go knock doors and send mail. And so, like, there's a theory of attention. for how you get people to know that you're running in a local race, state rep, state Senate,

city council, school board that's like shake hands at morning drop off, send out four pieces of mail, hit the doors of your staff and your volunteers. That still works. And if you think you're going to like game that online, like, I really think that's not going to work. Yeah. And also, I'm fascinated to see how Roy Cooper does running a national race statewide but national in in this media environment yeah um because i think that if he if he does well i think that's a very good data point that would make me rethink at least some of the attentional uh dynamics it does although the one thing that i would say about that is in the same way it matters right are you winning or are you losing about how you you know what your strategy is

if you have a hundred percent name recognition among your voters you're just in a different attentional environment, what you need from them. Yeah. If you're trying to take on an incumbent, if you're a Graham Platner or, you know, or whoever, it's like, how does anyone know he's running? This guy was the governor for a year. So he just has a very different mission. And, and, you know, to Schumer's credit, I think that's one of the things they look for, right? Like, that's a good recruit. I don't think anyone could possibly second guess. Roy Cooper. brought to you by bookshop.org. Where you shop for books matters. When you purchase from

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purchase financially supports local independent bookstores uh we love bookshop.org uh have an independent bookstore uh called uh chevaliers uh book store at one of the oldest in in los angeles good people great people great people and you know you go to bookshop dot org you probably have a favorite independent a bookstore, too. You're helping support it. So check it out. Use code offline 10 to get 10% off your next order at bookshop.org. That's code offline 10 at bookshop.org. You mentioned mom, Donnie, and those videos and him interviewing people. Why do you think that worked? Like, from an intentional standpoint, like, I've been wondering that myself, because it's unique. I hadn't seen it before.

It is very watchable. He seems very reasonable. He seems genuinely curious talking to the people that he's interviewing. I don't know. One, he has charisma. You know, he's a charismatic dude. And that's a huge part of why it worked. Two, they're very well done.

The videos. Like, technically, they are quite assured. They do not feel schlocky. They feel tight. so there's some real crafts people working on those and then three that first one which is the first time that i i knew there was this democratic socialist assemblyman in the what's sort of tongue-and-cheek called the commie corridor in in new york city which is a certain section of northern brooklyn and and queens where you know a lot of sort of dsa activism and a lot of electoral success has come

out of. Yeah. I sort of generally knew, but I didn't even, I don't think I even knew what he looked like. And then that video where he goes to two different districts, one in the Queens and one in Bronx, actually, in Ford and Road, which had two of the biggest pro-Trump swings in 24 to talk to people about it, it perfectly grabbed the zeitgeist. And the fact that he was not front and center, but other people were. Yeah. Was so smart, but also super manipulative. Because I watched the video. And then it was like, okay, well, this is interesting. And then it's like, oh, I'm running. You're like, well, wait a second. What interviews did you edit out? I was like, oh, this is just propaganda for your campaign. You're not doing journalism. You're not like, it's like, who knows what

the things that got left on the cutting room floor said. But as messaging, it was so powerful to hear those people. I think that's part of it, though, because if you knew he was running, you would think this is another ambitious, self-interested politician doing this. So I'm going to take it with a grain of salt. Totally, but it was completely disguised. Right. The end is a reveal. I really thought it was like a journalist, I guess, or an influencer doing it.

And then at the end, it's like, this is why I'm like, oh, wow. I was like, wow, that was clever. There was this very online debate, as most of them are, after AOC one, where, you know, a lot of folks on the left. said she mainly won because of her, you know, populist progressive agenda. And a lot of other people said, you know, she won mainly because she's a generational talent. Yeah, she's incredible. And how she communicates and connects with people.

I can feel this coming with Mamdani as well. Yes. But I also, like, I still feel this way. I felt this way then with AOC and I feel it now with Mamdani. There have been plenty other candidates with populist progressive agendas who just have not been as politically successful. And it just, it feels like these two are just special talents. I totally agree that they are special talents.

And I also think that everyone wants it to be the case always, right, that every victory shows why they're, you know, their... Confirms their priors, yeah. Confirms their priors and also is the, the roadmap for their side in a factional dispute to emerge to victorious. There's so much that's so generous about that first AOC victory. But just to talk about Mondani, because I've been closely following the race, I do think the affordability message is what has allowed him to transcend some of the ideological barriers that can pen in left-coded candidates. I agree with that.

And I think he's been very smart and savvy. And I think starting that campaign by talking to working class people of color, and Road in the Bronx, talking about why they moved to Trump, wasn't just propaganda. Because I think it actually did animate what the campaign is centered, which is affordability. And she did that, too, by the way, in 18. She did that too in 18. And I do think that if you look at those swings and you look at those precincts, working class folks were feeling the effects of inflation the hardest. and particularly in urban environments where rents were really squeezed.

So I think it's both, right? It's the message and the messenger. But in Mondani's case, I think that focus on affordability has been a very key part. And I think the one thing I'll say about focusing on affordability is, in his case, it's sort of left coded. But it doesn't necessarily have to be. Like, you can have other solutions, you know, plausibly. but focusing on that has been a huge key to building the coalition he has.

It's funny, though, it's like there's so many other Democratic candidates who have clearly read the memos and the polling on affordability because it's, you know, it's left-coded or at least the way that Mamdani has talked about it is, but this is one area where

the mainstream Democratic consultants and the center left would agree with folks on the left and like everyone should be talking about affordability, but for some reason when a lot more mainstream or moderate Democratic candidates do, It's not necessarily just the policies that might not be appealing because they don't really talk as much about the policies, but just the way they talk about affordability seems like they are just reading off the polling memo. This is my real problem.

No, I mean, I totally agree. And this is a real question about like, I don't know. Does it matter or does it not? I don't know. I want to say that it matters when you sound like a fluent human and not like someone reading off a sheet of paper. One of the things you always have to remember, right, about any organization that's doing things at scale is that the process has to be optimized for the bell curve of talent in any domain. Yeah. Like, you can't run any organization where it's like, we're going to do it in a way that's optimized for the top 10% of performers.

Because by definition, you can't just have a top 10% of performers. Right. So the same is true of politics at some level, right? Like, it does have to be optimized for kind of the median candidate who's like, I am here to tell the Donald Trump is tearing down the ballroom. That doesn't do anything to lower your costs, you know, like. I know. Because to do things at scale, that's kind of how things work. But I agree with you that it feels different when you see someone doing it intuitively and fluently than when you feel like you're watching the polling memo being read.

Yeah. And it's almost like too many median candidates, right? now and not an like that top 10% is you know I don't know it's like a top 2% I don't know it's just not a you know but I also do think like for instance I think in Michigan you have three pretty good candidates they all have their I think they're advantages they're I think they're all pretty gifted politicians yeah yeah I think this primary season can be very interesting because there's a lot of potential for races to be the like person with the traditional bio and not a great attention getter or maintainer or talker and the person with the non-traditional vial who is good

at that yeah and i think we'll see those pitted against each other in primaries a fair amount it'll be very interesting to watch how that plays out well let's talk about platinum because um when i read your piece i haven't heard of him when i when i read your piece can we can with can someone pull the plug on the internet for a second on cramp platinum discourse i'm like i i can't this is too much Which, honestly, it's like why I waited this long in this interview. But when I read your piece, it was like Monday, and I reached out to you because I was like, I got to the part of your piece of advice where you said, don't worry so much about negative attention. And I'm like, we have a really interesting test case right now on negative attention. What are your thoughts on this whole, on the whole planner thing?

Let me first start with just my substantive thoughts on it because I think it's worth. I mean, I did not know, personally, that the tattoo, when I saw it, was this fairly infamous Nazi symbol, personally. I did not know. Nor did I, no. The context of I was drunk in a bar in Croatia and got this tat seems totally possible, and I don't have any reason to think he's lying. And that seems exculpatory. Does feel like if you do find out later, then you got to get that cut. covered and weird that you didn't.

Yes, unless you are, like he says he is, a person who thought, I'm never running for office. I'm not going to do politics. I'm just like a guy living in rural Maine, and I'm kind of embarrassed that I got this, but no one's saying anything to me about it. And every time my shirts off, no one's ever, and the army checked me when they, you know, like, you could, I could at least imagine, I'm not saying that that's what happened. No, and agreed. And it doesn't, I think that connects to the original part about it, which is that like it's not so obviously legible as that such that it's not having a swastika on your chest, right? So because it's not legible, then that rationale makes a little more sense. I still understand why people are skewed out by it.

For sure. You know, so I'm not going to weigh in about like, you know, this is disqualifying or not. I understand why people are skewed out of it. I sort of understand the story, but sort of don't. The broader question now is, okay, A, substantively, if you're a voter, like, how do you feel about this and how do you feel about what he said? And, you know, or a donor, you can make up your mind about that. But now there's this real question. There's two questions. One is, does this hurt him in the primary? And the latest polling is like, he's up 30 points on the end of it.

Which, honestly, that shocked. I mean, like, I didn't. Shocked me. I would have guessed that it would not have hurt him. as much as the internet has been saying, I would never have guessed that the margin would be that big. And who knows? It's one poll, so we'll wait for others.

Right. So totally shocked by that. So now we come to this very interesting set of test cases of the things that I've been writing about, but also a kind of recurrence of what we saw happen on the right in the Tea Party primaries, right? The insurgent candidate closer to the base beating the hand-picked can. candidate by the party establishment, oftentimes to the detriment of winning the seat. The Delaware Senate seat being the most obvious one in which Mike Castle, who had been the at-large congressional, beloved moderate Republican, lost in a shocking primary upset to a woman

named Christine O'Donnell. For the young ins here, it was a whole thing. Google it. She had to have a ad where she said, I am not a witch. she got absolutely trounced in what would have been probably a very winnable race for Castle. And there were a whole bunch of candidates like that. People that were more extreme but also looser and said all sorts of things and got a lot of negative attention, more polemical. The base loved that.

They loved when they riled up the other side. They elected them in the primary. Then they ran the general. They got their butts kicked. And there's probably, you can probably count between four and nine Senate seats. that were winnable Senate seats over the course of 10, 12, 14, even if you look at Blake Masters and, you know, and on and on, that Republicans have just gone with the person that the base liked

because they told it like it is, and the median voter was like, no, thank you. And I don't know if that is what happens in Maine on both fronts. I don't know if it's very early in the race. Maybe people come around. I also don't know if like the intentional environment has changed such that that backlash and the negative energy created by a Christian O'Donnell means you lose the race because people are like, who's this guy who's never held office and also has a Nazi tattoo and also maybe as a communist, as he said and read it. And like, this is a vetting nightmare for all the reasons that the person reviewing this would be like, please do not. We're not going to have you as a candidate. Or maybe the attention environment has changed so much.

No one remembers that. And he is a very talented communicator. I mean, 100%. He's a super interesting dude. He's a good talker. His own politics might be closer to the median voter in a weird way than any Democratic like person I've seen in a long time in the same way, kind of, I mean, not in the same way, but in a kind of similar way to the way Trump is.

This is what I was thinking about when you were mentioning the Tea Party stuff, right? Because I think, and I think this is how a lot of the Democratic establishment, is viewing this race. If you look at the race as Janet Mills is the mainstream Democratic, electable governor that the whole state knows, and that Graham Platner is this insurgent leftist that the base will like, but in the general independence and even a few Republicans will be like, absolutely not, right? And I think if you look at it that way, then it is obvious that he shouldn't be the nominee and that she's the better bet. But I think the test for him and for other candidates potentially like this, and this is what

happened with Trump as well, by the way, is, like, is there a case that Graham Platner could have a more appeal to unaffiliated voters, independent voters in Maine, which there are many? They just also have some just interesting, different kind of quirky politics in Maine. You know, and in that same poll, you know, Janet Mills' approval with independence is like sitting at 35%. Yes. You know? Which is a real issue too. Which is a real issue too.

And I'm like, that to me is what's interesting. And if, look, and if he can't break into independence and Republicans and get some of those votes, then, yes, the establishment is correct. But I just, we are in a moment right now where I think for Democrats to win, not just in a fairly blue state like Maine, but especially in some of these redder states, we have to do something to scramble the coalitions. Because we're not going to get there just by, you know, winning the Democratic base and then, like, reaching out for a few independents here and there. Yeah. I mean, and I think that that scrambling is really interesting. And I think that I don't know where this all goes. But I also think it's kind of good that it's all happening. Like, maybe that's a cop out. But I truly, I'm like, I'm glad he got in the race. I'm glad the op-o dump happened. Like, yes, no is the time. Thank you. Not two weeks before the election. Not like, yes. Yes, this is what primary is for. Yes, maybe there's a million other things that come out. Or he just falls in. his face or he just proves to be like incredibly adept candidate you know you know like good you know everyone go out there and make your case and you know the other thing about all this is i genuinely don't want to discount people being like there's a lot of people who are like a nazi tattoo is disqualifying like like that's the full sentence and i don't think that's at all a crazy instinct i don't know i want to be very clear um but i was thinking about i was thinking about like

people are talking about like another fetterman right i've seen this sort of trope of like that you know fetterman was very much progressive he was a big burning guy and he he was elected and he's become a kind of i would describe him as sort of like a mackain of the democratic party a little bit like maybe even more like i can't remember the last time that he's like sounded like a regular democrat yeah i mean what mccain was very good at as you recall is he had a few issues where he was very high profile at war with the Republican Party, but would vote with them like 95% of the time, right, yeah. The ACA thumbs down was such a departure from his usual MO, in fact, and really a remarkable one, he saved the ACA. But what he figured out, he kind of figured out this kind of space that was very good.

I mean, the guy had incredibly high national approval ratings from much of his career because of this. And the reason I was thinking about Federman is, like, I understand why people are. appalled by some of the things Vetterman has said about what's happening in Gaza and said about Palestinians. I mean, some of the things you've said, I've found, like, really deeply, deeply gross and offensive.

It's also the case that, like, to the best that we can tell, his approval rating has increased in Pennsylvania. Mostly because of Republicans. Well, right. Exactly. But that's the point.

Right, yeah. I think he's lost some with Democrats. He has, but his overall net approval in Pennsylvania, has gone up yeah that's fairly clear and it's like right having huge high profile attention getting fights with your own party is particularly voters not paying a lot of tension a signal of moderation yeah like and that signal of moderation that signal can be sent in many different ways Bernie Sanders being a great example of someone who was independent and in his rhetoric attacked

Democrats and Republicans all the time and signal to his voters that he was a moderate in some ways because of that. There are different ways to send these signals to a fairly checked out voter that you are not just like a down the line partisan or ideologue. And I understand why people who are down the line partisans and idyllogs hate that and no one is blaming you for hating it. But it's not like that is a crazy political approach. to the median voter. I always thought one of the silliest attacks from Hillary Clinton on Bernie

in the 2016 primary was, well, you're not really a Democrat. I'm like, him not being really a Democrat is probably what attracts so many people to them. People don't like the Democratic Party. They don't like either party. You know, like people are just, they've been steadily disliking both parties

for some time now. Totally. Even if you're like a socialist from Vermont, if you can say you're an independent, that's helpful. It's better than say you're a socialist, I think. Totally. Final question.

on this because we've been talking about state races and house races. We're going to have another election in 2028, hopefully, for president. And I do think that trying to nominate a candidate, and again, and you mentioned this in the piece that it is so obvious that it almost feels weird stating it, but like nominating a candidate who is extremely charismatic and can talk well and get attention like it's got to be at the top of the list and when you think about the last okay Hillary in 16 Biden in 20 Biden and then Kamala in 24 like it has been and you know some have been better than others and and and fine at communicating but like and I think that Kamala Harris did a good job in her 107 days on in communicating yeah I agree but we've talked about the sort of prevent

defense and the risk aversion um I think that's just got to be at the top of the list. Like, I don't think, I don't think, like, your good resume and you're electable here and there, the other thing, like, that's important, too. But I do think that if you can't grab and keep someone's attention, I don't know how that person wins the presidency. The inverse of the point I was making about local race is that it matters the most at the presidential level. Like, it matters at least, like, you know, your school board, your city council, like, you don't need to go viral. Attention at the, at the national level is deep. That is so important. Yeah, it is, like, strange, you take a step back and think there are all sorts of virtues as people or as politicians that the last three Democratic candidates had, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.

And Joe Biden in 2020 was successful, and he won by four and a half points. I don't think anyone would say, like, their biggest skill and the thing that sets them apart is how good they are at communicating. people did say that about Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. And they said it about Donald Trump. And they said about Donald, like, they said about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, like, that was the thing people said about. Like, the number, there's a lot of other things they said about them, but kind of the defining thing. And I think some of that in our perception is gendered 100%, but I also think there are genuinely talented, incredibly talented communicators. AOC is maybe one of the best in the party.

probably the top five so i take that seriously i think it's real but yeah like it is a little weird when you go back and think right like that's kind of maybe necessary and i do think look 2020's different and the combination of covid incumbency and biden had a unusually high level of name recognition like there's all things that came together but yes i agree with you personally i think that has to be at the top of the list. We'll see. Because right now I look out of there, I'm like, okay, I don't know. People are doing a lot of talking about a lot of different people. And I'm like, I'm still waiting to see that. And of course, a campaign changes you, or at least as Axelot always says, reveals who you are. And people also grow during the course of a campaign and become better.

So that could happen. But yeah, it is, it is striking to me how little attention within the party is paid on, okay, if the person is going to win in 2028 and we're going to nominate them, they've got to be a really good communicator. I'm just thinking, like, there are people that are really good communicators in, you know, again, there's a distribution here, you know, throughout the party, as there's going to always be. But I think that thinking in those terms is actually really important for everyone is going to be along for this ride.

Yes, me too. Well, we'll leave it there. Chris, thank you, as always, for joining offline. It's fun to have you. That was fun. All right, I'll talk to you later. Bye. Thanks a lot.

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