Offline with Jon Favreau - Have the Democrats Decided to Win?

Episode Date: November 8, 2025

Something happened in 2016 that led Democrats to campaign on unpopular issues. Researcher Simon Bazelon digs into extensive polling data—and on-the-ground-results from tight races—to explain where elites steered us off course, how we can neutralize Trump’s advantages, and why voters might not actually want radical change. Then, he and Jon discuss the pitfalls of an attention economy that gives clicks but NOT votes to viral, trendy policies. 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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for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada 2. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash offline, free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com slash offline. One way to get people to talk about economic ideas is to not have unpopular positions on other issues that voters care a lot about. It's going to be harder for you. It's going to distract from your economic message if you're getting hit from the right on issues like immigration or crime. I think you can see this with something like Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. So for example, Trump took some issues off the table for us by becoming more moderate on those issues. Trump just said, look, I'm not going to cut Social Security. I'm not going to cut Medicare.

If you want reporters, if you want journalists, if you want voters to care more about economic issues, a really good way to do that is to take that lesson from Trump on Social Security and Medicare and to neutralize Republicans' advantage on these other issues that voters care a lot about, particularly immigration, particularly crime. I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from Simon Bazelon, a Democratic public opinion researcher who just published a much-discussed report on the future of the Democratic Party called Deciding to Win. for as young as simon is which is like college young uh simon has been in the trenches in democratic

politics for a long time helping out with polling and research at some of the party's most influential political organizations then after 2024 he and some colleagues put together one of the most extensive postmortems of what went wrong and what needs to go right and the amount of data they collected is wild uh they talked over 500 000 voters which is unheard of for a polling sample and they did a ton of those interviews after 2024 so it's all pretty fresh we recorded this as the results were coming in on tuesday but as we both mentioned in the conversation we were pretty sure the outcome wouldn't change simon's analysis which is the rare prediction that turned out okay and that's mainly because simon's findings are both in line with what happened Tuesday and their

advice for a party that needs to win in much redder places if we ever hope to take back the house the Senate and the White House. I agree with a lot of what he says. I had some questions and concerns about other parts, which you'll hear. But overall, I think this is an incredibly valuable conversation for anyone who cares about pulling the party and the country back from the brink. So here's Simon Bazelon. Simon, welcome and offline. Thank you for having me. So we are recording this on Election Day before we know any results, which I actually prefer. because this is a conversation about broader national electoral trends over a longer period of time. And I imagine the results won't change your analysis all that much, right?

I don't think so, yeah. So you and some colleagues just published a massive report about the Democratic Party called Deciding to Win. Before we dive into the report itself, maybe you could start by talking a little bit about who you are, what you've done in politics, the genesis of this project. and how you guys went about actually doing the research? Yeah, thank you for that. So my background is in public opinion research. So I've spent the last five years, you know, sort of sitting in a pool of an enormous amount of survey data and academic literature and things of that nature. So I previously worked for a data for progress.

Then I worked for a Democratic polling firm called Blue Rose Research during the 2024 election. I worked for Future Forward, which was the primary super PAC supporting Kamala Harris and Joe Biden during their election bids. And, you know, deciding to win really came out of, you know, sort of the aftermath of the 2024 election. Obviously, we did not win. It came out of sort of some of my frustrations around the reckoning that I felt sort of wasn't happening within the party about where we needed to go and what we needed to do differently in order to win going forward. And just so people know, from the jobs you've had, the amount of polling you've seen is extensive, to say the least. And compared to public polls, you might see where they sample 500, 600 people, 1,000 people, even in states, 500, 600 people, 1,000 people.

This is like an order of magnitude larger than that over a much longer period of time. And I also believe that a bulk of your research involves survey data of voters post-2020, right? Absolutely. So, you know, we surveyed a huge amount of people after the 20th. 2024 election. So in the six months following the 2024 election, we surveyed more than 500,000 voters. That's a lot of people. It's a lot more than sort of traditional polling outlets. And I think that allowed us to get really detailed into the data and really see what voters are thinking. So here's your top line diagnosis of what's wrong with the Democratic Party from the intro

to deciding to win. Quote, since 2012, highly educated staffers, donors, advocacy groups, pundits and elected officials have reshaped the Democratic Party's agenda. decreasing our party's focus on the economic issues that are the top concerns of the American people. These same forces have pushed our party to adopt unpopular positions on a number of issues that are important to voters, including immigration and public safety. Give me your best case, based on the research, that Democratic candidates and campaigns decreased their focus on economic issues and adopted unpopular positions. Yeah, so, you know, on the focus question, it's a little bit hard to measure what every single candidate in the country is doing. The simple way that we did it, which I think it's a pretty good proxy, is we just looked at the Democratic platform. Obviously, I don't think most people, most voters, are looking at the Democratic Party

platform. But I do think that the party platform reflects a lot of what Democratic elites care about. And when we looked at that, we just looked at sort of terms in the platform and how that changed. What we saw was really striking. So we saw the massive increase in terms related to identity, terms related to race, terms related to gender, but also terms like climate, gun, equity, hate was a big one that increased a lot. Criminal justice. And then on the flip side, we saw terms that really decreased in frequency, terms like economy, economic, middle class was one that declined by about 79%. Job and jobs. America, work, responsibility. And so I think, you know, that tells a pretty clear story to me about what the party has changed its focus on during this time. It's surprising to

me because I don't know if it was in your report or someone talking about your report, but I saw the 2012 platform, which is the last platform I was involved with, and the 2024 platform. And they are quite different in emphasis. They're very different documents. At the same time, I feel like every consultant, pollster, you know, senior strategist and candidate for the last decade, their advice has been, we've got to talk about the middle class, the economy, the bulk of the ads, the advertising is about focus. on middle class, economic issues, middle class almost to the point where it's been like

a running joke for me and my friends is that like, you know, just like candidates sound like talking point robots, talking about the middle class. So I was sort of surprised that for some reason this is just not breaking through and that it doesn't reflect the platform. Because, you know, if you look at the, even the 2024 convention, and I think the 2020 convention and probably the 2016 convention, there are a lot of other issues that were probably emphasized more than they had been in the past, but there was still a lot of focus it felt like on the economy, middle class and jobs and affordability. Absolutely. Look, and we're not saying that Democrats focus more on climate or LGBT issues or guns than they do on the economy. I think we still think that

Democrats put, you know, the economy as a higher issue than those other issues. But we're really just looking at is the change and, you know, the differences over time. And I also think it's important to just note that Democrats get a lot of our sort of set pieces right. I think we do paid media pretty well. I think we do the convention pretty well. Harris, you know, she's going out in her convention speech. I think a lot of it hits a lot of the right notes. The question is, you know, what we're doing when there's less focus, when, you know, campaign staffers are firing off tweets, politicians are co-sponsoring bills. A lot of that is happening outside of the realm of people really thinking seriously about exactly how it reflects in our party,

but all of that, you know, contributes to voters' perceptions of us and what we're focused on. And I think that matters. So what's your theory as to what happened starting in the 2016 election that cause Democrats to take on popular stances on issues that weren't the top priority for most voters? Yeah. So, you know, grand theories of history, you know, don't have such a great track record. So I don't want to lean into any specific account too much. But I do think a couple of things are relatively clear. So one thing that we did in our polling was we have this long list of issues. And we just ask, you know, voters how much they care about the different issues. We show them two at a time. We measure how frequently each issue gets picked. And then we can

look at this for different demographic groups. What we see are these really striking differences. So, for example, college-educated voters who voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election have dramatically different priorities than working-class voters, then swing voters, than, you know, the general electorate. And those voters, those college-educated Kamala Harris voters, of which I am one, of which you are one, of which I imagine, you know, the vast majority of people listening to the show fall into that category. Those folks care dramatically more about issues like climate change, about voting rights,

student loans, political division, issues like guns. And they care a lot less about issues like border security, about crime, terrorism, national security, the budget deficit. And I think, you know, what we've seen in the last 12 years is an increasing share of democratic communications and governance and substantive policymaking has been driven by, you know, elites in the party who are, you know, fall into that highly educated set, who have pretty different priorities and pretty different views from the median voter. I guess my question is, hasn't it always been the case that the people who staff campaigns and are in this sort of political professional class in the Democratic Party,

haven't they always been sort of a college-educated set that potentially has these priorities? Or is it the people that changed, or is it their priorities changed over time? I think it's some of both. I think, you know, some of the people in this group just sincerely a lot of them changed their priorities to care more about those issues that I mentioned and also just became a lot more left-wing during that time period. I also think there was sort of a revolution in democratic politics around public opinion research, which is that sort of,

old conventional wisdom. When I talked to, you know, I talked to a lot of people. You were one of them. I talked to a lot of people while putting this document together. And one thing I really noticed was when you talked to sort of old school Democratic political consultants, people who came up in the 90s or the 2000s, they're sort of this conventional wisdom that they didn't always know exactly how to, you know, put it into practice, but it was important to, you know, win over voters in the middle. And then I think somewhere along the way, there was a revolution where people thought, well, actually, you know, voters in the middle don't always have consistently moderate views. In fact, on some issues, they might be quite progressive.

then on other issues, they might be quite conservative. And so we're going to try to, you know, use polling to identify the specific issues where those voters are actually quite progressive, and we can win them over with a progressive message. The problem is that once that happened, I think there was immediately a really big incentive for a lot of folks in the democratic ecosystem to start putting out polling that, you know, was sort of slanted or, you know, framed in such a way to get the results that people wanted. And so that's how you end up with polling from advocacy groups showing that all kinds of democratic issues are super popular, you know, even when we see on the ballot initiative results that they don't line up with reality. So you get, you know, advocacy

groups saying affirmative action is super popular nationally, even though in your home state of California, it went on the ballot previously and it didn't win even in a very liberal state. And I think that kind of change in public opinion research led a lot of Democrats to start thinking, oh, actually, like, we can win on a very progressive message. And so they allowed their true preferences to shine through and they stop sort of, you know, trying to meet voters where they are. I think this is a really important point. And it also surprised me a bit on not necessarily an affirmative action, but I heard you on some podcast somewhere talk about background checks for guns.

Yes, absolutely. And I remember when we were, I was in the White House still, I think, in the Obama administration, we were trying to pass background checks, and the president would go out all the time and say that it was a 90% issue. And you're saying that the polling that says background checks are supported by upwards of 90% of voters are just not accurate? Yeah, I think it's really hard to say that it's accurate. So I'll give you a couple examples. In 2016, there were two ballot initiatives on universal background checks. So one of them was in Maine. One of them was in Nevada. The one in Nevada got 51% of the vote. The one in Washington state that got 63% of the vote a couple years later. And I think the one in Maine is really instructive because sometimes I'll bring this up to people and they'll say, well, of course, you know, the NRA outspent the background checks people. It was the money in politics, convinced voters, there were too many ads. The pro background check side of the main ballot. Initiative referendum in 2016 outspent the anti-background checks side by seven to one margin.

So about $7 million to $1 million. And I think it's just really hard to look at that result and say, you know, that's actually an 85% issue. It just doesn't line up with what we see at all. You know, we find in our polling the background checks is about a 55% issue. And that's, you know, a lot closer to the ballot initiative. It's still a popular issue relatively. But it doesn't have, you know, universal support. And if you just go sort of across the Democratic agenda, we think that, you know, there's been really an effort by a lot of advocacy groups to kind of confuse Democrats about our agenda and convince people that every single one of our policies is super popular. But unfortunately, you know, for a lot of the policies that I think are good

ideas, that you think are good ideas, voters don't necessarily support them. Offline is brought to by Mando. It's official. The holidays are around the corner. That means lights, gifts, and get-togethers. While political debates with family might turn up the heat at the dinner table, you can count on Mando to keep you fresh and odor-free during those sweat inducing conversations with your conservative relatives. Not something I sweat about. Why is Mando the MVP? Mando is clinically proven.

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shifts among any groups on any issues, or is this just largely a story of the Democratic Party and I guess the Republican Party shifting their positions and emphasis on certain issues? Yeah, well, you know, I didn't survey 500,000 people. in 2012, so it's a little bit hard to have sort of a cross-time comparison. I think we do see in the data that the country is slightly, slightly more liberal than it was in 2012. Maybe not on every single issue. Maybe on immigration, we've become a bit more conservative, sort of a backlash to some of the Biden-era stuff. But, you know, on most issues, I think the country is slightly more liberal. I think the issue is just that the Democratic Party has moved left a lot more quickly than

the country has. So one way we measure this. There's a lot of people arguing with me about this on Twitter. People say, no, the Democratic Party has moved right since Obama. It's moved right since Clinton. It's moved right since Mondale, which I think, you know, it's hard to argue that the Democratic Party of 2024 is more right-wing than the Democratic Party of 1985, which is, I think, what some people are trying to say when they say that. I think that's a little bit confusing to hold in your head. But generally speaking, you know, one way we found to do this is just to look at the rates of co-sponsorships of bills in the U.S. Congress. So, for example, you know, in 2012, 24 percent of Democrats in Congress co-sponsored Medicare for all. And in 2024, that was double.

It was about 47 percent. A reparation study bill went from about 1 percent to 57 percent. You know, an assault weapons ban went from 41% to 88%. And you just see these big shifts across the board. And then you also see new legislation being introduced, things like the Green New Deal, things like Universal Free College, things along those lines. So there just has been this big shift left. I think it's really important to just set the stage and say, you know, that's a true thing that happened. And then the other thing we see during this time period is that the perception of the Democratic Party has changed a lot.

You know, in 2013, about 46% of voters said the Democratic Party was, quote, unquote, two liberal. In 2025, that's nine percentage points higher. It's a majority. It's 55% of voters. And I think, you know, what we see is the country has gotten a little bit more liberal, but the Democratic Party has gotten a lot more liberal. And so the share of voters who think that Democrats are, quote, unquote, too liberal has gone up by a lot. And I think that's making it a bit harder for us to win. Is it possible to tease out the extent to which voter perception of the party is based on what the candidates and particularly like the, the national candidates are saying and what they believe versus, like, the general sense you get

about the Democratic Party from the constellation of candidates, strategists, online commentators, pundits, all the rest of it. I think it's really hard to disentangle these things. I think it's really hard. I think, you know, we're out of the era of smoke-filled rooms. You know, everybody kind of contributes to the Democratic brand. But it is also just true that Democratic elected officials themselves are significantly more left-wing than they were, you know, 10 or 15 years.

ago. And I think a lot of people are going to say, you know, I agree with that. I think those shifts have been good on the merits. But it's a real thing that's happened. And I think as a result, the perception of the party has changed. So you mentioned how issue position polling has been broken or just misused. How did you guys measure issue preference in this research? So we use a pretty different format. And I'm happy to walk folks through it right now. So basically, you know, first we start by telling people which party supports the policy on the idea that, you know, when voters hear about a policy, they're hearing about it mediated through, you know, which party is supporting it. So take a policy, you know, Joe Biden had a

policy to increase the number of refugees allowed into the United States every year from 15,000 a year under Trump to 125,000 a year under Biden. So we say, you know, some Democrats in Congress are proposing a policy to increase the number of refugees from 15,000 to 125,000. And then we show people an argument from a Democratic side, an argument from the Republican side, something like, you know, Democrats say this would be good because refugees are hardworking and contribute to the American economy. Republicans say this would be bad because, you know, we can't properly vet this many refugees and they might increase crime. And then we just ask people to pick between these two arguments. We ask, which party do you agree with more? And there's this really nerdy, really wonky thing in

public opinion research. It's well known among, you know, the nerds like me, which is called acquiescence bias, which is just that people are much more likely to say yes. They really like to say yes in surveys. So Nate Cohn had a really, the New York Times election analyst, had a really good demonstration of this the other day. He had a survey where he asked people about Zoran Mamdani's policies. He asked them, do you support universal free buses? And then he said, do you think New York City should enact universal free buses? Should we make that happen? And it went from 60% saying they thought the buses should be free to 44% saying they thought the New York City should make buses free. I think that's just a really good example of how issue polling doesn't always

necessarily mean what we think it means. So the way that you guys did it to sum up would be to sort of force the choice after offering arguments from both sides, which I think is a little bit more how people actually interact with policies during campaigns. I think it's also important to note the issue polling that we did, there's 190 policies, 500,000 voters. It's a lot of stuff. People have been yelling at me on Twitter all week about various wording choices that I made. There's a lot of it, so there's a lot to criticize. That's all totally fair game. People are welcome to do that. But one thing I would say about all of this is that what we find in our issue polling is that it really lines up also with candidate performance. So we did a big analysis where we

looked at how candidates do relative to the top of the ticket in their district. So candidates who run top of the ticket, that's a good thing. Candidates who are running behind. That's not such a good thing. You want to be getting more votes, obviously. And then we just looked at how that correlates with actual positions that candidates took. So for example, voter ID is one of the most popular Republican policies that we tested. It has almost 70% support. And we found that Democratic candidates who voted for the Republican voter ID bill ran about 5% ahead of Democratic candidates who voted against it. And then on the flip side, a policy that we found to be on popular, Medicare for All, we found that Democratic candidates who co-sponsored Medicare for All ran about

2% behind Democratic candidates who did not co-sponsored Medicare for All. So I think those are good examples of how some of our issue polling really lines up with the actual candidate performance that we see in the real world. Is there like a correlation causation challenge there? Of course. There's that, but there's also, was it Medicare for All that made them perform worse? or was it the voter ID thing that made them form better? Was that another issue, you know? Of course, of course. I think, you know, teasing out causation in politics is always very tricky.

What we try to do and what we really tried to do in this report is just assemble as much evidence as possible. And, you know, you could look at any individual piece of evidence that we put together and nitpick and say, you know, I think this doesn't make sense for this reason. I think it doesn't make sense for this other reason. And that's totally fine. We're, you know, happy to engage on any of those fronts. I think what I will say, though, is that I think the totality of the evidence really tells a pretty clear story. And when you look at all of it together, it becomes, you know, hard to argue that these positions, these shifts don't matter and haven't affected how voters think of our party. So I want to talk about sort of the different issue sets here and start with economic issues.

And look, this has been the case for years now, as long as I've been in politics, that anyone will tell you that economic issues, affordability, jobs, taxation, now inflation, health care have always been. or at least as long as I can remember, the top, if not one of the top, issues for the most voters. Absolutely. And we've already talked about how a lot of Democrats will spend their whole campaign on all the set pieces talking about economic issues, middle class. And some are better than others at doing this. Some are more disciplined than others are doing this. Zoron incredibly disciplined. Zoron incredibly disciplined.

There's also something, though, where Zoron is incredibly disciplined talking about a four, He also has issue positions on affordability that are probably not, I would say, popular with most voters, rent freezes, free public transit, and yet got him a lot of attention. He did not wage a campaign on affordability based on, you know, making prescription drugs more affordable. Be tough to do as mayor of New York City. Right, yeah, exactly. or like, you know, whatever your sort of incremental economic policy might be. And so the question is like, if you're just a regular Democrat trying to break through with an economic message and your policies are pretty standard, fairly moderate, and we can get into the whole conversation

about getting attention, but like it does seem like it's kind of hard to get attention for that. Absolutely. Yeah, so let's talk about this. I think this is a really important issue. And earlier today, I was actually listening to you and Chris Hayes talk about this in your show for a couple weeks ago. And I think I can't remember, but I think when we talked about this report now months ago, this was like the big question that I had. Absolutely. So there's, I think this is a really important question. How do Democrats get the media to talk about our popular economic ideas? How do we get, you know, the terrain of the campaign to be fought on these popular economic ideas that we have? I think there's a couple things that we can do to make this happen. So I think the first thing is just that one way to get people to talk about economic ideas is to not have unpopular positions on other issues that voters care a lot about. it's going to be harder for you. It's going to distract from your economic message if you're getting hit from the right on issues like immigration or crime. I think you know, you can see this with something like, you know, Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. So for example, Trump, you know, took some issues off the table for us by becoming more moderate on those issues. And those, I think, were big issues for Obama in 2012. They've always been big issues for Democrats. I think the two big issues in that camp are Social Security and Medicare, which are huge issues for Democrats. They've been the core of our platform for, you know, decades and decades. And Trump just said, look, I'm not going to cut Social Security. I'm not going to cut Medicare. And I think it became a lot harder for Democrats to get attention on attacking Republicans on Social Security and

Medicare once Trump said, I'm not going to cut them. And you know, Republicans are in Congress right now, and they're not trying to cut Social Security and Medicare. And if they did, it would generate a lot of attention. There'd be a lot of media coverage if, you know, George Bush, as you're well aware, tried to privatize Social Security in 2005. It didn't work. There was a lot of media blowback. I mean, I think there's this question for Democrats, which is like, you know, I think a lot about somebody like Janelle Stelson, who very few people on this list of this podcast have probably heard of. Janelle Steltsin is a Democratic candidate.

She ran way ahead of Kamala Harris. She lost by about 1% to a very right-wing Republican named Scott Perry on the Pennsylvania 10th. And Stelsohn had a debate with Perry. And, you know, the headline coming out of the debate was Stelston and Perry differ on abortion, agree on immigration. And I think there's a real question of, you know, that's a very good headline for a lot of Democrats to get because that, you know, emphasizes this position of abortion that

voters really agree with. And the question is, you know, how did Stelson get the media to write an article about that? Well, it's because she neutralized Perry's advantage on immigration by saying, you know, she really supported a secure border and she cared a lot about that. I think this is, you know, should be instructive for a lot of Democrats, which is if you want, you know, reporters, if you want journalists, if you want voters to care more about economic issues, a really good way to do that is to take that lesson from Trump on Social Security and Medicare and to neutralize Republicans's advantage on these other issues that voters care a lot about, particularly immigration, particularly crime.

Would you say that then Sherrod Brown, who's one of the most disciplined economic populists, but in a way that is not, I think, super, super progressive, like still, you know, economic policies that are in the mainstream of the Democratic Party, but just focus like a laser on talking about them, that one reason he lost to Bernie Moreno, used car salesman, who's committed fraud, is that he just couldn't outrun the image of the national party or that he just didn't moderate on other issues that weren't economic issues? Look, so I think there's multiple things going on.

As always, elections are multi-causal. I never want to tell a single story. I think the biggest problem that Sherrod Brown had is that in 2012, when he ran for re-election and won with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, Barack Obama won Ohio. And then in 2024, when he ran for re-election with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket,

Kamala Harris lost Ohio by about 11%. That's a big change. And that's a really hard thing for any candidate to outrun. Now, Sherrod Brown, he got more votes than Kamala Harris in his home state. He was an incumbent. I think that helped him a lot.

But there's this question of, you know, if we're going to win Senate seats in these more red states, we're going to have to compete better in them at the presidential level. And so you have two questions going on, which is one, why doesn't Sherrod Brown run ahead of the top of the ticket

by as much as he used to? And then two, why is Ohio a lot more red than it used to be? And I think the big reason that Ohio is a lot more red than it used to be is that voters in Ohio are more conservative than voters nationally, especially on issues like immigration crime, but also energy production is a really big issue in Ohio. They have a lot of energy production. And also, you know, I think Democrats as having become out of touch as we've become more focused on these cultural issues. But then separately, I also think, you know, Democrats have sort of forgotten what our old Senate moderates used to be like. I mean, you were around in 2009. You remember what these folks were like. They were a lot more conservative than Sherrod Brown. You know, Sherrod Brown didn't really try to. pick any fights with the Biden administration. There are things he could have done to do that. He didn't really try. Joe Manchin did some of that. He didn't run for reelection, but he did some of that. And Sherry Brown could have done more of that. And I think that probably would have helped him at the margin. But again, I do think the biggest thing is just that Ohio is a lot more

Republican of a place than it used to be. I think that's mostly because of the Democratic Party's shift left. And I often told people over the last couple of years, like, if you think Joe Manchin's annoying, he's like further to the left than some of the Senate Democrats we had when we passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which I know it's hard to believe for people, but it's true. Offline is brought you by Wild Alaskan Company. What challenges do you face when buying seafood? So many. Swimming.

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more popular than unpopular, Medicaid expansion, paid family and medical leave, protections for workers who organize and strike, prohibit non-competes and a public option for health care. Unpopular democratic economic policies. 3% tax hike on incomes over 75K to finance health care and education, subsidized EVs, people do not like that, $3,000 child allowance, requiring cities to build more multi-family housing, universal free child care, universal free public college tuition, student loan relief, Medicare for all. Those are the unpopular ones, right? And then further down the list, meaning slightly more popular, but still unpopular overall, means tested student loan forgiveness, lower Medicare age 60, Medicare for kids, means tested free child care.

means-tested college tuition, antitrust enforcement. I realize that's a lot. But my question is, like, why do you think some of these economic policies are popular and some aren't? Are there certain similarities in the popular group versus the unpopular group that we could extrapolate from? I think there's a lot to learn here. And I think it's a sort of nuanced answer. I'm going to try to do as much justice as possible in a short amount of time. Look, I think the most important thing to understand is that raising taxes is pretty hard.

It's hard at the state level. It's hard at the city level. It's hard at the national level. And so the bigger your public program is, the more money that it's going to cost, the more voters think that it'll require tax increases or an increase in the deficit that they don't want. And they become a little bit more skeptical of it. The other thing I will say is that one thing we find really consistently, which I think that surprises a ton of people, is that means tested programs are more popular, generally speaking, than universal programs. That stuck out at me. This is very confusing to a lot of people because they think, of course, you know, everybody getting the thing will be more popular to people than just, you know, a specific targeted group getting it.

But actually what we see in our data is two things. One is that, you know, means-tested programs are just a lot cheaper. It's a lot cheaper to provide free child care to only people, you know, making less than $50,000 a year than it is to provide it to everybody. Same with free college. But then secondly, voters actually don't like the idea of giving money to rich people. They don't like the idea of giving government benefits to people who already have a lot of money. So they don't want, you know, your kids to get free public college. They're much more likely to think that, you know, free college for means tested is still unpopular, but it's much more popular than, you know, Jeff Bezos's kids getting free college.

So I think those are the two. main through lines, which is that voters are actually pretty sympathetic to targeted aid to vulnerable groups, particularly low-income seniors, disabled folks, poor folks, children, and they become more skeptical when those benefits are being extended to wealthier folks. And actually, I think there's a lot for Democrats to like about that, because, you know, our goal from an economic program should be to help the people who are lower income, to help people are worse off. And we find that a policy like increasing, you know, Social Security benefits for low-income

seniors is incredibly popular. And that's something that is a lot cheaper than Medicare for All or student loan relief and would really help a lot of folks. And that's quite popular. This confirms one of my previous biases, but on this issue, which is like the argument in favor of universal over means tested for people who don't know is you need a universal program like Social Security and Medicare because then the political constituency for the program is everyone, right, as opposed to if it's a program that is mainly targeted to low income and even moderate income folks, then it could be less popular because people say, oh, let's throw the poor people under the bus and just cut the program. that always struck me as a sort of a complicated argument to make to people and be not necessarily fundamental to what we believe as Democrats which is that we should help people who actually need it yeah absolutely can't afford it so I do get that the other difference I noticed is policies that seem to ask more of corporations yes for sure tend to be more popular than policies geared

towards creating new government programs. And I heard Ezra Klein had someone on talking about working class politics a couple episodes ago, I forget his name. But he was saying that there's something about predistributive versus redistributive policies where you say, okay, I want the company to pay a higher minimum wage. I want them to make it easier for people to organize, more protections for people who go on strike. That is more popular than, okay, now you've made money.

And because you didn't make enough, we're going to give you something from the government. Yeah, look, I don't want to make too strong a pitch. favor of predistribution or redistribution. There are lots of academic and arguments about this online, whatever. I do think that, you know, there's a lot of anti-corporate sentiment in the electorate. There's a lot of anti-elite sentiment in the electorate, anti-establishment sentiment in the electorate. And I think, you know, I just sort of want to use this to make a big point that we try to make, which is that, you know, the pitch we're advocating for and deciding to win is very much not a sort of corporate centrist approach, where you're, you know, you're opposing tax

increases on the very wealthy, where you know, don't want to expand social safety net programs. The thing we're trying to say is we need candidates who are taking voters' frustration seriously about the power of elites and the super wealthy and big corporations in American life and who have policy agendas that will help working families, but who also take working families concerns about issues like immigration and crime seriously, which are important issues to a lot of voters. Did you guys test a wealth tax? We did not test a wealth tax.

Because I noticed that making sure people don't cheat on their taxes or evade taxes is quite popular. Very popular. And I always thought that raising taxes on the wealthy is a pretty popular idea. It's a pretty popular idea. We're going to raise your taxes. We're going to raise your taxes. Great. Saying on the topic of economic policy, I want to talk about the difference between campaigning and governing. So we all now realize that people were very pissed at how Biden managed inflation. Yeah. What could he have done differently? Like, more importantly, because without looking at the past, you're running in 2028 and you're asked what you would have done differently than Joe Biden, where you disagree with his economic policy, like, what would

be the smart and popular thing to say that's still credible? Yeah, look, so, you know, let me just say I'm non-economist. This report is not an analysis of how the Biden administration handled macroeconomic management. So, you know, take what I say less seriously than what I say on other parts of this podcast, where I have stronger feelings and a little bit more data. We're just brainstorming now. Yeah. What I will say is that I do think the Biden administration didn't necessarily pay enough attention to issues like the cost of living. I think they were slow in their rhetoric. They called it transitory for a long time. They were sort of throwing rallies for Bidenomics at a time when inflation was really high and people were really frustrated,

which I think came across to a lot of voters. It's kind of out of touch. And then I do think that at the margin, there were policies that they were pursuing that were inflationary in terms of, you know, adding stimulus to the economy at a time when inflation was much too high. So something like student loan relief really sticks out to me about this, which is that's an unpopular policy, that's inflationary, that the Biden administration pursued a lot, they fought it in court. They tried really hard to get that done. And I think that came across to a lot of voters as kind of confusing and out of touch when what we really needed was sort of a pivot to, you know, standard economics says, you know, when inflation is high, you want to be reducing

the deficit, which will help reduce interest rates. So I think what we needed to do was kind of, you know, have some sort of deal where we're going to raise taxes a bit on the rich, cut some spending, lower the deficit, reduce interest rates for working people. And I don't think the Biden administration really pivoted to that, particularly in the second half of the term. Though I will also say, you know, I think most of the inflation was not the Biden administration's fault. Right. Absolutely. So from your research, it seems like voters' biggest problem with the Democratic Party has to do with immigration and public safety, more so than cultural and identity issues like abortion and trans rights. When you go back to your list, two most unpopular democratic policies are abolish the police and abolished prisons, which I'm pretty sure like no Democratic candidate or official supports currently. Yeah. So one thing about this, when we say democratic policies, we're just saying policies that we tested as democratic policies. It's not meant to imply that every Democrat is supporting the policy just to get that out there. Yeah. Also at the top of the list of unpopular unpopular popular democratic policies, free health care for non-citizens refugee admissions. You talked about that. And then lower down the list. So just slightly unpopular, comprehensive immigration reform, which surprised me.

But here's my question. Like, the border is basically closed right now. Yeah. We're not accepting any refugees except for like white Afrikaners. And I guess now like, you know, Europeans who are also opposed to immigration or whatever they come up with there. But we have an unknown number of non-citizens in the millions. Some are here illegally. Some are here legally. But they're still non-citizens. And they're currently being hunted down, arrested, deported.

You're a Democrat running in 26 or more importantly. 28. What do you say and do about immigration? It's a really hard question. So, you know, I'll say a couple things. I think the biggest problem that Democrats have on immigration right now is not necessarily our specific policy stances, but more a question of credibility, which is that voters, they don't trust Democrats at all to handle border security because when we were in office, we governed in such a way that really produced a very large influx of unauthorized immigration at the southern border. And I think that kind of credibility gap is the biggest thing that Democrats need to address. And it's one that I don't think that Democratic elites or Democratic elected officials have done a very good job putting to rest.

I think actually, you know, somebody who did a really good job on this the other day is someone like Bernie Sanders, which I was sort of a little bit surprised to see, but it's kind of in keeping with some of his older views on this issue, which is that he said, you know, in an interview, look, I don't support illegal immigration. And we need to have a secure border. If you don't have a border, you don't have a country. And look, Joe Biden didn't do it. And I got to give credit to Donald Trump for securing the border. I think that's something that's going to be hard for a lot of Democrats to say. But I do think that if we're going to regain credibility on the issue of immigration, it is the kind of thing that we're going to need to say. We're going to need to say that, yeah, we messed up.

And yeah, you know, Donald Trump, for all his flaws, for all the horrible things he's doing, he is handling the border in a way that was better than the way Biden handled it. And I think that would do a lot to get voters to trust us more in immigration. Yeah, I think it's a really tough one. And of course, I'm sure you notice that even Bernie saying that he got some blowback for saying, if we don't have a border, we don't have a country. And I get that argument because, you know, a country is not just borders, but when you ask people, do you want a secure border and do you want the government to have control over the border? Of course, they say yes. I also think, by the way, I mean, I have been hair on fire about the deportations and what ICE has been doing. I think if you care about that and you're a Democrat who wants to talk about that, one way to be able to do that is to have more credibility on the border issues. And on immigration writ large. I think that if I was to criticize the Biden administration, and I know that how they handled the border is probably more complicated than people might think.

And I think people are like, okay, the groups push them one way and they let everyone in. And I think it was a little more complicated because our immigration system is a mess. The asylum process is a mess. It's been like that for decades. But I do think they saw the issue as, and this happens across a range of issues where sometimes democratic positions are unpopular or people trust Republicans more is we think, okay, since people don't trust us on it and since it's a tough issue, let's just not talk about it and let's not have a message on it as opposed to figuring out a message that you feel comfortable

saying whenever you get asked about it or whenever it comes up, because you don't always control when the issue comes up, that is popular. I don't know how you can run in 2028 without talking about what ICE has been doing right now. But that does. doesn't mean we shouldn't say, like, okay, our position is decriminalized border crossings. Yeah, I think there's a big difference between abolish ICE. AOC, I think she does some things well. She did send a fundraising email a couple months ago calling for the abolition of ICE. I don't think that's a particularly popular policy in this country, regardless of what you think about what ICE is doing. So I think there's a wide spectrum of positions that Democrats can take.

And I don't think that Democrats need to go around saying, you know, we think that what Donald Trump is doing with ICE is amazing and we fully support it or anything. But I, you know, I think, somebody who I think is a really good model, I think it's important to look at, like, are candidates who win in tough races. That's kind of always my default. It's like, what should the Democratic Party be doing? Well, let's look at real candidates who really win tough elections. I think a person who's been really impressive on this issue is Tom Swazi in New York. He won a tough special election. He went right at the immigration issue. He didn't avoid it at all. He made clearly that he supports border security. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times recently about criticizing some of the Trump administration's actions, but he was doing it from a point of credibility because he has established himself as somebody who sincerely thinks that border security is important. I think a lot of Democrats don't necessarily necessarily have that credibility. So when they say, look, the Trump administration's approach isn't focusing resources on violent criminals. It's focusing resources on people who aren't really breaking any other laws other than being here, you know, without authorization. That is a position that I think a lot of voters are going to hear differently than when it's coming from somebody who said, you know, let's decriminalize border crossings, give free health care to

undocumented immigrants. I think I shouldn't exist at all. I think that's an important distinction. Offline is brought to you by Zbiotics pre-alcohol, whether you're raising a glass to your team winning, catching up with old buddies back in town, or just trying to stay sane with a house full of relatives. how you feel the next morning still matters. That's why I drink pre-alcohol. Zbiotics, pre-alcohol, probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists. To tackle rough mornings after drinking, here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut.

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the party's ability to deliver on what they promise. And I asked that because I just saw it, like, Madaglasius wrote a piece based on deciding to win where he, like, proposed just a sample, like, six-point agenda for the midterms that Democrats could run on and it's, you know, ban congressional stock trading, expand Medicare to cover dental vision and hearing, that was a Bernie policy, raise the minimum wage to $12, crack down on tax evasion, spend on reducing lead pollution and guarantee abortion rights nationally before 12 weeks. He writes how some progressives might not be thrilled with that because it doesn't go far enough

on abortion rights and minimum wage. But I have two different issues on it. One is voters are going to know that Democrats, even if we take Congress in 26, we're not going to be able to get any of that done. We can pass it. Donald Trump's going to veto it. And does that then sort of deepen people's cynicism about politics or at least about the Democratic Party that these are just a bunch of politicians who said stuff to get elected

and then they couldn't deliver? Look, so I think this gets to a lot of questions that what's very clear in the data and what's very clear if you talk to people and just look at the country is that there's an enormous amount of frustration with elites. There's an enormous amount of frustration with elites on both sides, both Republican elites and Democratic elites. And I think elites themselves interpret this frustration as the idea that there hasn't been enough radical change in this country yet, that either we haven't delivered socialism or we haven't delivered basically fascism or some crazy libertarian fever dream. And that's why people are frustrated. at quote unquote the system. I think that's one way to read it. Another way to read it, which I think is much more consistent with stuff that we see at the state level, is that, you know, the most popular governors in the country are people like Phil Scott in Vermont, Republican governor, someone like Laura Kelly in Kansas, a Democratic governor. And those are not people who are delivering absolutely radical change. What they are doing is making incremental improvements to working people's lives. People who follow politics, if you're listening to this podcast, if you

work in politics, chances are you care a lot more about policy change than the average American does. And so there's a tendency to read frustration as a desire for exactly the kind of policy changes that you personally want. I think it's important to say, you know, voters don't necessarily think that way. Voters want elites to be focused on the economic issues that they care about, but not to necessarily be radically overthrowing the American economic system. They want politicians to be working hard to deliver concrete improvements to their personal standard of living. And I do think that we got pretty dinged in 2024 for not delivering concrete improvements to the standard of living.

I don't think all of that was our fault, but I do think some of it was our fault. But I think it's just important to say, like, look, these results at the state level, they really don't line up with the idea that frustrations at the status quo mean that voters want a radical reshaping of the political and economic system of the United States. I take that point for sure. I do wonder, just from a pure affordability standpoint, looking at your list of popular Democratic policies, definitely popular policies that would help seniors, veterans, veterans, children, kids, low-income folks, if you are in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and you are worried about

rent or ever buying a house or your health care covering an illness, like, what's in it for you voting for a Democrat? Yeah. So, you know, I think there's a couple things. So one thing is like, I think housing is a big issue, particularly in California. I saw you and some of the other co-hosts tweeting a lot about SBCC. The big housing reform bill that Gavin Newsom did end up signing. I think, look, we found that some of these national zoning reform with not on a bipartisan

basis, I think would be a pretty politically controversial thing and very difficult for Democrats to do. With that said, I think we need to distinguish between things at the state level and things at the national level. Just because, you know, zoning reform nationally Democrats sort of preempting all state zoning laws would be unpopular. That doesn't mean necessarily that California passing zoning reform would be unpopular in California. You know, not all politics happens at the national level. Also, we care a lot about national politics, and you care a lot about national politics, but

there's other levels of politics, too. And so I think, you know, there's differences at the state level, and people need to, like, look at the public opinion of their specific place to see exactly what they can do. We'll also say, look, like, this isn't going to, you know, draw tons of virality online, but I think it's a meaningful issue, which is interest rates matter to a lot of people. When there's high interest rates, it's hard to buy a home. It's hard to buy a car. And Democrats have, for whatever reason, become a lot less interested in trying to reduce the

deficit than we used to be. This used to be a big issue for Democrats, trying to reduce the deficit, raising taxes on the wealthy to reduce the deficit. And reducing the deficit reduces interest rates. And that, you know, makes it a lot easier for young people who are trying to get these loans to move on with their lives. And I think that is a concrete thing that Democrats can do for young people. I think the question of how the deciding to win theory of the case plays out in the 2028 primary. That's where I'm thinking the most. Me too. We need a Democratic nominee who can win over a predominantly moderate electorate in the general, right? Obviously, I think all of your research

very much backs that up. The candidate also needs to be able to. to win over a Democratic primary electorate that is more moderate than some progressives might think, but still fairly liberal. Joe Biden? Right. Still fairly liberal, especially in states with a lot of college-educated white voters,

which are at the front of the calendar. The candidate also needs to capture people's attention in order to introduce themselves to the country, break through all the noise, stand out in a crowded field. I cannot think of a moderate Democrat who's done that on a national level over the last decade. I don't count Joe Biden because he was a vice

president with near universal name recognition. So it's like we are running out of people in this country who have near universal name recognition that could be in politics and the people who do get known, who get attention, get attention for exciting, you know, people in their base, whether it's the Democratic base or the Republican base. Yeah, look, I think both parties are dealing with some pretty perverse incentives and perverse dynamics right now. Often I think it's easier for Democrats to be clear-eyed when we just look at the Republican side.

So let's just talk about the Republican side for a second. I don't know exactly what's going to happen in the Republican primary. But what I do think is probably going to happen is that J.D. Mance is going to run. And there are going to be some other people who he's either going to try to sort of box out or they're going to run themselves. And in order to win that primary, he is going to have to appeal to some really dark, crazy forces in the American electorate. Forces like Nick Fuentes. You know, I had to learn what the word Groyper meant the other day. I regrettably Googled this term.

It's horrible. It's not great. It's really bad stuff. And that's not popular. Voters do not want the Nick Fuentes. view of America. So J.D. Vance is going to be running to his right in much the same way that Mitt Romney was running to his right in 2012, and he's going to be taking on unpopular policy positions in order to win that primary. I think there's going to be a pretty similar dynamic probably

in the 2028 Democratic primary, which is that the person who's going to be able to capture social media attention, who's going to be able to capture the hearts of, you know, the progressive college-educated base that I'm talking about, that person is going to be able to do that. The way they're going to do that is not by looking like Jared Golden or Marie Glouc and Camp Perey. or Mary Peltola, who are all representatives who are really good at winning over voters who voted for Trump. And I think this puts Democrats in a really tricky position and really suggests that we're going to have a really hard time in 2028. So I think there's this question for Democrats, which is really just like, how do we get, you know, Democratic voters excited

about, you know, we used to be able to do this, right? We used to get, you know, Barack Obama, people were really excited about Barack Obama, and he was committed to a lot fewer unpopular policies than I expect the 28 frontrunner to be committed to. And so there's a lot of this real question, how do we get, both Democratic leads and Democratic primary members, how do we get everybody in the party before it's too late to realize some of the realities of public opinion? Because I think, you know, one way that this happens and how it's happened historically is that when parties lose enough times, they eventually sort of learn their lesson. So you see this in the United States. The Democratic Party lost five of six presidential

elections from 1972 to 1988. And then we got Bill Clinton. In the U.K., you know, they had a long period of losing with Margaret Thatcher, and then they got Tony Blair and they won again. They had Jeremy Corbyn, and then eventually they ditched Jeremy Corbyn, and then they won again. So we see these sort of cycles where parties lose, and then they sort of recalibrate their positions. They start meeting the voter where they are, and then they start winning again, and then they get overconfident and triumphant, and then they start losing again, and you get these cycles. The problem for Democrats right now is that we're in a legitimately very scary time for the United States of America, and if Republicans win the 2028 presidential election,

or they win, if we lose three presidential elections in a row, the same way that we did between 1980 and 1988, some really bad things might happen. Some things that you and I are very worried about that everybody listening to this show is, I'm sure, very concerned about. Some existential threats to democracy, perhaps. A lot of people are going to get hurt. A lot of low-income folks are going to get hurt? So I think there's this real question for Democrats, which is, are we going to be able to course correct before we lose, or is it going to take another couple losses for us to do that? And I think my biggest hope with writing deciding to win was to try to like wake up a lot of forces in the party to some of the realities of public opinion before we lose.

rather than after. I think the way that both Clinton won and Obama won is instructive because they're different. Clinton in 92 was like very intentional and public about like breaking from the party and moderating, right? Like he was unafraid to talk about that he was more moderate than other Democrats. We did not consciously and intentionally talk about how Barack Obama was more moderate. And in fact, I don't think people. and the primary voters in the primary necessarily thought he was the most moderate candidate

because we were running against Hillary Clinton and she sort of had an establishment vibe. The one thing I take from that is there were certain ways that Barack Obama signaled to people that perhaps he was more progressive. I mean, first of all, his name was Barack Hussein Obama. He was a black man from Chicago. So I think identity-wise, that probably signal to people that perhaps he was more progressive. And then I think when you're talking about substance, his opposition to the Iraq war went a long way. And that's a lot. an interesting issue where he read as sort of more left wing than he was because of the opposition to the war, but it was also a position that was quite popular at the time, even if

people saw it as anti-war, which reads more progressive. Look, I think the other thing about Barack Obama, not to, you know, you guys did an amazing job, particularly on the 2012 campaign. It's very impressive stuff. With that said, you know, I think part of the story with Obama 2008 has to be also that there was a huge recession right before the election. Yeah. And look, like, to be honest with you, if there's a huge recession, like in 2008, starting in September of 2028, Democrats can almost certainly win the presidency without doing a single thing that I'm recommending. They can, you know, ignore every poll in the world. President AOC? If there's a huge recession in September 28 and AOC's the nominee, she's probably going to win, regardless of what she does. With that said, I would think it would be a little foolish for Democrats to count on there being a huge recession right before the election. We can't guarantee that that's going to happen. It would also be pretty bad for a lot of people if it happened.

And it's just not the kind of thing we want to pin our political hopes on. So I think there's just a really important question for Democrats, which is like, you know, I'm feeling pretty worried about our ability to do this. But we need to come to terms with political opinion before the voters deliver us another rebuke in order to, you know, prevent some really bad consequences for our country. Since we're recording this before, the election results care to offer a pre-take on what, if anything, the results might tell us about the national environment and more specifically, what are you going to be looking for? Look, so, you know, I don't want to overlearn lessons

from off your elections, but of course, you know, let's talk about it. It's the thing on everybody's minds. So I think I've been pretty consistent in my views on this over the last couple months in my public writing. All three of the candidates, I think, have run pretty smart discipline campaigns. They've all been focused on affordability, which is voter's top issue. I think Spanberger has been focused on it. Zora and Mamdani might be the most affordability focused candidate I've ever seen in my life. I'm watched an incredible CNN hit he did. yesterday, which they did a lightning round and asked, you know, tried to see how fast he could bring every answer. It was MSNBC. Ariely did it. It was so good. It was amazing. It was absolutely

incredible. Somebody asked him, you know, what do you think about Trump saying he's better looking than you? He said, I'm focused on affordability. It's amazing. It's, you know, the stuff of democratic political consultants like me. It's the stuff of our dreams. So I think that's been really impressive. And Spanberger, I think, has also done a good job in Cheryl as well, though I've been following in New Jersey a little bit less closely. What I will say, though, is that the electorate and those states, those are all states that come. Harris won. We're in an off year, Donald Trump's in office. Those electorates are going to be even more blue than they were in 2024. The median voter in New York City, the median voter

in Virginia, the median voter in New Jersey, that's a person who voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in 2024. The median voter in the United States of America voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024. And so I think it's really important for Democrats to be clear-eyed about what we can and can't learn. Zoranam-Dani, you know, I like Zornemondani a lot. I think there's a lot to like about him. He, you know, his closing ad really got me last night. I don't know if you saw that one, the Bob Dylan ad, really got me. With that said, he's quite unpopular nationally, I think, in the polling. So it shows that he's, other than maybe Chuck Schumer, he might be the most unpopular Democrat nationally. So I think, you know, again, there's

this, there's this question of like, what can we learn, what can we take away? What are the good things? And what do we need to, you know, be a little bit more careful about? Well, I very much appreciate your contribution to the discourse since, unlike many contributions, it's backed up by a lot of data from a lot of people. And I always like that. So, So, Simon, thank you so much for joining offline and giving us the download on the report. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Take care.

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Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Jerich Centeno is our sound editor and engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seiglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.