Offline with Jon Favreau - The Progressive Populists Make Their Case

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

Is economic populism the key to Democrats retaking power in 2026 and 2028? Faiz Shakir, political strategist and founder of the media organization More Perfect Union, joins Offline to make his case that progressive populists are just as—if not MORE—electable than center left candidates. He and Jon break down Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win in Michigan, how the progressive movement has evolved since Bernie’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the role of DSA in all of this…both positive and negative.Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.To watch this episode with subtitles, click here and turn on closed captions (CC).You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

Hey, it's Ryan Broderick, host of Panic World, a weekly podcast from Curry about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. We cover everything from deep dives into J.K. Rowling's downward spiral to how a cartoon mouse inspired an erotic cult in Russia. Panic World keeps you up to date on the movements that break out of the internet and find their way into the real world. And so find us wherever you get your podcast and you can listen to audio versions of these episodes. There's a sense of greed and exploitation that is about. in our society manifested by Trump and not exclusively him, by if anyone's flown on an airline recently, if anyone's tried to buy a ticket online recently, if you try to just get a rental car, I mean, any damn thing you want to do in society, through the concentrations of wealth and power,

have made life difficult, hard, and to make you feel like you're a pawn, that you're suffering, your economic dignity, your freedom just doesn't matter to us. We've got the money, you've got nothing. And as a result, all around us in society, you sense that this sense agreed that exists, the sense of exploitation that exists starts to affect human relationship. We do not want that as society. We want a sense of solidarity that my life is better when your life is better. But we also want to change a culture that respects people who may not have a college degree.

There's respect and dignity in what you do to improve America that I think is being lost. I'm John Favro. It was a big week for the ongoing debate over the future of the Democratic Party. Abdul Al-Said's primary win in Michigan will now be the most significant test of the left's political theory that progressive populist candidates are as electable, if not more electable, than more moderate center-left candidates. A few weeks ago on the Pots of America Sunday show, I talked to Matt Iglesias to get the center-left perspective on what Democrats should do to retake power in 2026 and 28. So this week I wanted to talk to FAS, who I think is one of the smartest political strategists out there

and can articulate the left's theory of the case better than just about anyone. For those who don't know him, Fas was the campaign manager for Bernie's 2020 presidential campaign and still serves as a senior advisor to the senator today. He's worked in the offices of Speaker Pelosi, Senator Harry Reid, and, as I mentioned, founded More Perfect Union, the nonprofit news organization known for its incredible video coverage of labor issues, corporate greed, and most recently, data centers, and we'll talk about that as well. I thought FAS could offer a perspective on how the progressive movement has evolved in the

decade since Bernie's 2016 presidential campaign, what it'll take for Abdul to win the general election in a purple state like Michigan, and what role the DSA has played, both positive and negative, in the movement's successes. I also wanted to talk to him about data centers, an issue that more perfect union began covering in detail over a year ago, long before they became the defining issue of men. many of the nation's most contentious democratic primaries. It was a great conversation, and we'll get to it in a moment. But before we do, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Friends of the Pod.

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All right. Here's Fas Shakir. Fas, welcome to the show. Hi, John. Always good to see you. I talked to Bernie for Pod Save America this week, but I thought I'd have you on to get into the nitty-gritty of Democratic Party strategy, since you're one of my favorite people to do that with. I also want to talk about your wildly successful media venture, more perfect union. But let's start with what has been a huge week for the left

or progressives or populists. What term do you prefer? I never know how to describe the movement. If I were running for office, which I am not, I would be calling myself a progressive populist, but I would welcome all the terms that other people have used, yeah. Okay, good. All right.

So in Michigan, Bernie endorsed House candidates, Will Lawrence, Donovan McKinney, won their respective primaries. And of course, our friend Abdul El-Sayed won the Senate primary, which has led to no small amount of consternation among more moderate Democrats and establishment types. The consensus seems to be, yes, Abdul can beat Mike Rogers, but the race is much harder now. Why is that wrong? Because it doesn't account for the changing constituency and the potential of attracting different voters. And obviously, let's have 20, 24 as a backdrop here, and you look at the Kamala Harris vote and the Slocken vote. And I think one of the takeaways that hopefully we would all have

is that not enough people voted. People stayed home. And so one of the first things you've got to do is you look at the campuses, right? So if you go to Lansing, we all know the state of Michigan well, so we'll go to Lansing, we'll go to Ann Arbor, we'll go to Kalamazoo, and we'll say, hey, on August fourth when the primary occurred, the campuses were not even in session. So now we go into November and we assume doubling, maybe tripling of the voter turnout. We'll see. I don't know what the turnout numbers will be in the final tally, but I'm hoping that the droves of young people will vote in a major way. And then, of course, you've got, in addition to that, hopefully disaffected working class people all over the state saying, I voted for MAHA, I voted for MAGA,

and man, have they let me down in a major way? This guy, he seems like he embodies the best version of what I was trying to accomplish with some of that. So I asked Bernie a version of this question, but Abdul's primary win sort of followed a pattern of progressive candidates performing really well in places with greater concentrations of highly educated voters, younger voters, wider voters, and less well in some of the more working class, blue-collar cities and towns, where I think progressive populist would expect a more economically populist message to resonate. Why do you think that is? The first thing is, obviously,

when you're progressive populist or progressive in general, you're fighting uphill against the culture of society and the understanding of the status quo of politics. And the status quo of politics is there's a certain kind of Democrat

and a certain kind of Republican who tends to win, and you generally are not funded at the same level. So a status quo politician will have an inordinate amounts of money, maybe sometimes 12 to 1, 10 to 1 differentials to reach people who are not deeply engaged in politics. So now you take a low-information voter and you've pumped them, bunches of ads wrongly suggesting that Barack Obama has made an endorsement in this race, that somebody's mean to Michelle Obama, that he's a sexist. And so that if you are a low-information consumer, that is probably what you hear in a lot of places where you are not highly engaged in this race. And we have generally felt, and progressives have experienced this across the board, is that when you're campaigning for office, you're fighting uphill for voter education because you're starting from a place of needing to move people off the post from where they ordinarily would be in their voting history.

So you'd say, where have you voted in the past four or five cycles? Now I've got to move you off to a very different, call it radical, kind of revolutionary position for them. And it takes time. But then the goal and the hope is that you get into office and you take them on the moment. Donnie and you say, hey, over time, people will move and change because they said, oh, I didn't realize you were like this, that you had an agenda that spoke to working class needs. I may have heard a different thing. I mean, we did a video, you mentioned more perfect union with Bernie Sanders.

We went out to West Virginia. And the first thing we heard from all these people, like, oh, man, I've only heard about you from Fox News and you're very different than what I thought. You're like, right, that's what you're dealing with. You're low information consumers. And, you know, you've never really heard or seen this guy. And now I'm going to introduce you to them and you hear a very different agenda. I think it tends to be one of the biggest barriers for progressive candidates as you're fighting uphill against a status quo sense of what the voters already know.

And now you need to do persuasion that takes a longer period of time. Well, so this brings up a question of money. APEC spent an ungodly amount of money to defeat Abdul. They've announced they're going to spend even more in the general. All kinds of other outside special interests will spend a lot of money as well. do you think that Abdul winning proves that all that money didn't have the effect that APEC clearly thought it would? Or is all that money why the race ended up so close? Both, right?

They're both true, right, John? I think you'd probably agree with that. And first of all, you start with, does money matter? I believe it does. When you spend, what, what are we going to call this final tally? 70 million plus? I would think that it has some effect. And now you ask, well, what effect?

And you're like, well, I think she overperformed. And then you say, well, how did she overperform? Well, one of the effects is what I was just talking about is you pummel lower information voters and maybe even some Republicans and you convince them to get involved in this process in a certain way when they haven't heard from Abdul directly. So Abdul has to kind of get out like Bernie in a primary and say, I got to hold tons and tons of town halls. I think he did over 500 of them.

But he's got even more, right, to just try to reach as many of those people that are getting pummeled with TVS. the other part of this, as you all know, is lit. So you say, okay, well, if it's a mail ballot election and everybody's going to receive this mail ballot and hear, what do you think a lot of these people are going to receive in the mail next to that mail ballot, right? They're chasing and they're hearing things that are terrible about Abdul. And often, with literally no counter.

I mean, Abdul is much more limited. If you look at how much money he spent, how aggressive their mail program was probably very low. So when you looked at the mail ballot in this cycle and you looked at the numbers, she crushed it. And you say, well, that was in part, not entirely, in part driven by the fact that money does have an effect. That if this is the one person they've heard things about and the only negative on the other and then it's mail and then it's digital and TV and reaching people who he didn't have necessarily a chance to talk to, it has an effect. And he was able to overcome it by holding as many town halls, reaching as many people, generating enthusiasm around an agenda that I think most people were very interested, not only in Michigan, but as you know, across the country. So one question now is the message for the general. So over in Maine, when Plattner was still in the race,

I remember he was getting criticized for sort of trying to define Susan Collins as corrupt and going after the establishment in both parties, as opposed to just making the case for a Democratic Senate that's a check on Trump. Abdul in the primary. He's had a similar message about the Democratic establishment. He's also been trying to define Mike Rogers as corrupt. though I noticed today when the jobs numbers came out, recording this on Friday, he, you know, posted a video where he talked about, you know, we don't want Mike Rogers to be a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. But what do you think is the more effective message, you know, is it just orange man bad? Don't don't give him a rubber stamp Congress?

Or how do you sort of mix that in with the anti-establishment corruption message that you hear from a lot of progressive populace in primaries? Right, it wouldn't be honest and a version of integrity of a progressive populist candidates. They weren't also talking about the agenda that helped them win. And so you do have to talk about Medicare for All and a vision of health care expansion in the context of this general election. It's core to one of the reasons why you both want a primary and the case for what you think could appeal to people disaffected by Trump and an upset, certainly rightly so. with why are we cutting Medicaid? What can we do something different about health care in this country? So you have to go make the case.

And obviously he fights with the same obstacles that he did in the primary, that you have to kind of fight uphill because the MAGA world and Rogers will have unlimited amounts of money to pour into calling and trying to define him as something he is not. And one of the strongest arguments around the country in the case for a blue wave is somebody's got to be a check on this guy. We should not be in this war in Iran. You don't think, Mike Rogers is definitely not going to end this. war in Iran. Like, how are you going to end it? Well, you're going to first have to change the composition of Congress.

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Now available in Canada and the UK 2. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash offline for free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com slash offline. One thing I wanted to ask, you know, Bernie was very clear in our conversation that he is, he's not into abolishing prisons, police, or borders, never has been. The DSA is in a different place. There are a bunch of DSA candidates or progressive candidates who have at one point called for defunding the police or abolishing prisons or borders or abolishing ICE, which is, you know, more popular than it used to be, but still not broadly popular. Some candidates running have

walked back some of these policies. Some have been more convincing than others. Do you worry overall that the leftist positions on crime and immigration will undercut support? for candidates with, you know, economically populist policies that are that are much more popular and much more your focus? Obviously, first off, I want this contest to be around economic populism. There's plenty of issues on that front to wage fights over. I don't want to disregard, and I'm not urging anyone to disregard social justice issues. On that score, there's two things that they want is, does it candidate? What do you honestly believe? Let's start there. You know, too often.

Often we hear pundits, you know, centrist pollsters, people say, hey, here's what you have to go say. Before we get there, can I just, can I just ask you, what do you honestly believe? And then say it, you know, just let's be on, let's run these as a democratic experiment. Let's be honest with the voters. Let's tell them what are your views on ice? What are your views on public safety? As you do that, two things here. One is you need to allow for persuasion to occur.

So, in my view, you want to hear from constituents as much as. you're talking to the constituents. You know, open it up as a dialogue. Here's my views on ice. What do you think? What are, how would you deal with these issues? Make it clear that you aren't coming from a place of hell bent. No one can tell me otherwise.

Allow for persuasion to take place. It's a two-way street. You talk and you listen. Also, we've had this debate, you know, John, for a while now, in groups, the role of groups. And in my view, Groups should engage in advocacy. That's their job. DSA is Project 2025 or you name anybody in Third Way. Get out there. Advocate for your positions. Apak, great. Go for it. A candidate needs to

stay on their own two feet. So I hope it would not be persuaded or dissuaded by the vantage point of a group. I want to know what you believe. And I think voters want to know what you believe. And I think for a lot of people are supported by DSA, it's also important that they also acknowledge that there's places that we disagree with the SAA. Those places are, you know, you have to be of your own independent mind. You look as Zaraamandani, he's kind of, he's been pretty clear on public safety issues. He is of his own mind and his own views and not everybody in his coalition is always going to agree with that.

And that means you become an independent voice for your constituents. Do you think it's okay and helpful for, you know, candidates to just say, yeah, I talked about defunding the police back in 2020. And since then, um, I've talked to the people that I want to represent, and I've talked to police officers, and I've talked to other groups, and I've changed my mind. And, yeah, there's some services that I think that police shouldn't have to do, and that's a burden on them.

And I certainly, you know, want to do everything we can to prevent police violence. But, yeah, no, I don't think we should defund the police. Yes, and I hope all that is true. I wanted to come from a place of conviction, like sincerity. I hope that that's also, you know, in some cases the way that they have moved, if they haven't moved that way. You say, hey, this is the way I feel about police. I still have some grand concerns about them.

You know, I think of someone like Darya, Lisa, and New York, I think one of the things often missed about her in her campaign and the why she was resident there in that particular area is her geography. A lot of working class candidates are coming from a place. They represent attitudes of a place. And that's when they're really good. Because now you think of the Columbia University. That's all around her.

What is Columbia experience? Oh, we got ice running onto campuses. where you get free speech restrictions, where you're literally jailing people for points of view on Palestinian causes? Like, what is this craziness? And so, therefore, you would assume that the attitudes of that constituency

are far more concerned about the role of police, concerned about the role of ICE, and then that candidate may reflect that. It may probably also true, and I'm sure you agree, John, that what happens there is also not necessarily the experience of people in Ohio, the experience of people in Nebraska,

the people experience in Michigan. They all have varying experience, the better a working class candidate performs, the more willing they are to hear and represent the viewpoints of people. And all on public safety in particular, I would hope that a lot of the candidates we support are willing to go and have honest discussions with people with whom they disagree and allow themselves to be persuaded if they've ever been saying things

that have been critical of police officers. My own personal views, a lot of these people who sign up both in ICE and CBP and police, They are unionized folks. They tend to sign up for these for mission and cause. They believe in protecting this nation. They believe in doing positive things. Not all of them are terrible.

In fact, the vast majority of them are good, decent, hardworking people who are trying to improve this nation. And you should not be categorically, you know, describing them with a broad brush in oppositional terms. Let's, I want to talk about the broader Democratic Party. What is your theory as to why voters are so fed up with the Democratic? establishment. Well, there's a lot going on there. So I don't want to be too long-winded about it, but we'll try to be brief. So we'll go through the fact that COVID happened. And during COVID, I think we saw essential work and people get disrespected for work and then saw greater wealth and income inequality rise and anger at the elite. And if you looked at the attitudes of now and

you'd describe hopefully America as an angry populist nation, right, that they've seen this and felt it viscerally. The things that Bernie Sanders was talking about for years and years before this, they felt it viscerally during COVID. Then you get, now, if Trump comes along, and on Trump two versus Trump one, one of the major differences of Trump two is that kiss the ring of the oligarch. He says, this whole presidency is of by and for them. And I love Elon Musk. I love Tim Cook. I love anybody who's a billionaire and I want to be one myself. And so that, those attitudes are the things that are governing. And then you look at a Democratic Party and say, do you really feel in this most, moment, as we're dealing with the concentrations of the wealth and power, is the Democratic Party the

place that you go when you say, I am angry about the concentrations of wealth and power? For some people, it is for not enough people. And I think that we have to more definitionally present ourselves as that working class, willing to fight for the underdogs, willing to take on concentrations of wealth and power party. It is not universally felt. And then it hurts our case when And then we see, you know, millions and millions and millions of dollars in super PAC spending going into these races to influence the outcomes. It does not feel Democratic, nor is it Democratic. So I want, you know, if we were in charge of our Democratic Party, you and me, John, we hopefully

be working together to say, hey, get the damn super PACs out of the primary process. I mean, you opened up this Pandora's box, and of course, now APAC can do it and anybody else can do it. Now, guess what? They do, Republicans do it, and spend money in Democratic primaries. Let's shut it down. You know, I hear a lot of people I know upset about Hong. and there's Republican spending in it. I'm like, yeah, because you've allowed this to occur in our primaries.

You've opened the door. So we should be the one setting the benchmarks of saying, no, we're getting this corporate influence out of our party. I don't know if you've, if you saw Matt Iglesias's piece in The Times this week, but he leveled to critique at Bernie that I've heard from a number of more moderate center left Democrats, which is this big reason people are mad at the Democratic establishment is because the party lost to Trump in 2024. Big reason we lost is because the Democratic establishment told us that a man who most Americans didn't think was up to the job was actually the only person who could beat Trump. But even after Biden's, you know, awful debate when some more moderate Democrats were urging him to drop out, Bernie, AOC, other progressives were still making the case that Biden should stay in the race because he was the strongest candidate to beat Trump. When you look back at that, Do you think that complicates the story the left is telling voters now about the Democratic establishment?

Well, you know, I like Matt. Matt worked for me for a period of time. So I'm a fan. I read some of the stuff he writes. And I don't always agree with him to this point that we're just discussing. We're allowed to disagree with each other. I agree with Matt Iglesias. I think it was in Vox. I want to say if you go back in January, maybe I would call it January 2020. He wrote a great piece in Vox about the case for Bernie Sanders. And I'd like to go back and channel that. Not to say Matt's a lot to change his own views and welcome him doing so and anybody else doing so. But I liked his views of January 2020 more than I do now. I think from my vantage point, the progressive case for change, for really kind of drastic economic justice change is one of the strongest things we've got going for reforming the entire Democratic Party. When I look at the status quo of where many who don't. don't agree with Bernie, where they want to be. It is not as if I'm hearing a great alternative option of an agenda that they want to run on. It's a version of what I've heard James Carville

say candidly and openly, which is to play dead. Just say, hey, you do nothing, you say nothing, and you be for nothing. And I don't think that that's a good path forward for a political party. The point of winning elections is to govern. And when you govern, you govern on behalf of doing things. And you should try to build a mandate for doing those things and talk about them candidly and openly so that people know when you're voting for a party, these are, these are the things we can expect of them. So it's been disappointing to me that here we are in, I don't know, we're in the election year. We're in August of election year, and it's not as if you and I are talking about, hey, the five things that the House Democratic agenda under Hakeem Jeffries are the five

things that the Senate Democratic agenda of Chuck Schumer are X, Y, and Z. It should be the case. We should be talking about a taxation of the rich. We should talk about some kind of health care expansion for sure. And we should be talking about, you know, improving the economic conditions and reducing costs for working families in concrete in specific ways. That's what we should be learning from Zoran and so many others. And it feels too often to me like the progressive populace when I look at AOC and I look at Zeran and look at all these, that we're the only ones wanting to do that. You look at the centrists. We're often, they're almost pointing out of saying, well, how dare, why are you proposing ideas? We should just like, just run on nothing. And I know, we're, we often left

with the ones you talk about Biden, what are we being faulted for? Because you were advocating for an agenda and build back better. You were advocating for certain stimulus checks in American Rescue Plan. You had a vision of what Biden should campaign for in the next election.

You liked Lena Khan. You liked rural hit troper and the CFPB. You liked, you know, the pro-labor movement that was going on. We shouldn't be for those things. You know, it feel like that too often, the tension here of like an agenda. We want things to campaign upon.

That is the point. of a political party, not merely to win elections, but to win elections to do things. The tension I always wrestle with is the tension between having an agenda that is ambitious enough to meet the moment, they can appeal to voters where they can say, okay, I can see that that would make a real difference in my life,

and making sure that that agenda has a realistic chance of passing if Democrats return to power for the reason that, A, it would make a difference in people's lives, but B, if it doesn't, then you're dealing with a low trust situation anyway where people don't have trust in government and if they were promised something and then it doesn't come to pass, then that makes it even harder for us to go to voters next time and say, oh, vote for us again. We're still going to do this thing. So, like, how do you think about... You got to agree. Like, I'll just turn it back over to you real quick.

I hope you would feel, like I was I asked you, John, when you say realistic expectations of what can change. I would hope in the last two years watching Donald Trump, watching how Biden governed, I would hope your own senses of what is realistic are moving underneath your feet, right? That a next president of the United States is thinking, oh, shoot, I have way more executive authority to think about what we can and should be doing, should be constrained by lawyers. Legislatively, we see, you know, a lot happening with 50 votes to to move the nation. We should be thinking aggressively in that score. My point would just be that too often when I hear what's realistic, we're reverting backwards

and we're saying, well, precedent tells us that 10 years ago, this is how you pass this legislation. It requires 60 votes, and we can't get that until the blah, blah, blah, blah. I think the world is changing. And I think it's demanding that we change our sense of what is, quote realistic. And so what you see in the tensions of the Democratic Party right now is, I think, a progressive populist movement that's saying, we better be bolder. And we've got to change the notions of what we think is possible. And Bernie, I think, to agree, if you look at his own trajectory, stimulus checks, right, the only reason that happened was because he just fought on the Senate floor at that period of time and say, no, we're not going to go for just whatever your rescue plan is here.

Mr. Trump, we're going to go for stimulus checks. And that changed the course of what was possible and got us two Democratic senators in Georgia who campaigned down those stimulus checks. Then you go forward and you say, okay, well, you know, what is not possible is we can't shut the Senate down over health care.

We were all engaged in this. No, we're going to shut it down over health care. And it changed the politics of the moment and said, yeah, that's possible. We can and should do these things. So my point would just be that we get too constrained in our sense of what is realistic and what is possible by people who in some sense,

in my view, do not have our best interest of expanding the scope of what's possible for working class people. There is a corporate class that feels like this system works just fine. Don't play around. Tinkering is good. And I think for the vast majority of people who find government to be dysfunctional, they're demanding, no, you got to think bigger than that. Well, let me ask you this way then, which is let's pretend that we can dream that we have a Democratic president in 2028 and a Democratic Congress. And we have a majority in the Senate that now includes Mary Poltola and Josh Turrick or some combination of those senators and an Abdul and Troy Jackson in Maine.

And I think in that scenario, we probably have the votes finally to get rid of the filibuster. What is on your agenda? What would you suggest that a Democratic trifecta does after, you know, four years of Trump destroying everything and, you know, everything that they're going to walk into to really, again, meet the moment, pass something that's going to make a difference in people's lives and sort of start restoring people's trust that, you know, a bigger, more, you know, better governing agenda is actually possible. And I would hope, you know, you still got President Trump. So in the first two years of this Democratic agenda, I'd go back to when Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi

had the House and the Senate while President Bush was still president. And in those two years really formed the basis of what became a lot of things. things that President Obama then governed upon and, you know, that the future campaigns were waged on it. It started with a train of Democrats saying, hey, we just got the House and the Senate, we're going to demand certain things. And that becomes, you know, that's when we first heard the words affordable health care, right? And it became, we later had an Affordable Health Care Act. So my point would just be, think bigger. I don't want just investigations of Donald Trump, subpoenas, and got it. That'll happen. I understand it's valuable. That's a reflexive and

defensive posture. We've got to just go after the harms that he's all. already done. Yes. And what do you want to do for working class people? And on that score, I would like to force some votes that pass the House and the Senate and sit in front of Donald Trump. So let's start with that. Let's think of that psychology. What makes it hard for President Trump to veto? Well, I got to think, you raise the minimum wage. Go ahead. Tell the President of the United States you want to veto this minimum wage bill. You're 725 an hour. That's what you're happy with. let's see how his coalition performs over a period of time when you say, I'm going to go give the American public a raise right now. That's what they need. Then you say, okay, well, health care

expansions. We got to put things on and not just merely restoring Medicaid cuts. I don't think that's sufficient. I mean, we'd have to believe and understand that people thought the health care system was broken before President Trump decided to cut Medicaid. So we've got to think affirmatively of ways do you want to expand health care. And I think there's ways to do it. Obviously, we've got to do as a team, we got to get the votes in the House and the Senate to get it done, got to expand health care. And then so in addition to all those things, I'd like to see some things that we put in front of them on capping credit card interest rates, taking on private equity and its role in housing. These are things these. The role of AI is a huge one, saying people shouldn't

be fired by robot bosses, you know, making sure we're constraining the role of the AI oligarchs and how they can displace labor in this country. All of these things would be, in my view, fantastically popular for a Democratic brand to pass out of the House and the Senate put in front of Donald Trump, I think would fracture its coalition and therefore also build a more lasting and durable majority for Democrats as we head into 2028 and beyond. I agree with all that. I was sort of asking if then we win in 2028 and we have the trifecta. Like what is the what is the first thing? What is the what is the priority for a Democratic president? Sorry. Yeah. Okay. So a Democrat president. Yeah. You're going bold with the trifectus. Sorry, I missed that part. Okay.

No, no, no, no. It's good to know the next two years I'm interested in as well, which, but like, I'm just wondering, because I think these things come down to, and you know this, because you've worked on the Hill, it comes down to prioritization, right? And you can't do everything. Definitely. Definitely. And but if we, and you have like two years before you get to the midterms. And it's like, how many times have we gone through this where even when Democratic presidents pass something big, Affordable Care Act is an example, not as, not as big as we'd like, but it's something. you know, people didn't feel the effects of that until years later, and there was a huge backlash, and then we lost power. So like, what do you do in those first two years? Well, I would love to just see a reform government plan. And I don't want to constrain whoever is the president of the United States from thinking this way. But I thought you'd come into the presidency saying the democracy has been broken by the preceding guy and government was dysfunctional even before him. and the first thing we're going to do is make this government work.

If you look at Zoron, there's lessons to learn from them, and I think they apply nationwide. They aren't just New York City. But you come in like a ball of fire with, you know, one, nothing is too small and nothing is too big, really. But you're a couple of all of those things together. And saying every day is a day of action. That's one thing to learn from President Trump is that it's a day wasted.

If you aren't rolling out some new, you know, regulatory power, authority to do something to change something. you're reforming government and you're willing to say certain things are broken here. We're going to reform entire agencies. I mean, if you look right now on AI, which is one of the biggest things that people are thinking about, government is not even positioned to deal with AI, right? Is there a government agency that deals with AI? There's a human being, David Sachs for a while, right, corrupted, dealing with AI.

There's nothing dealing with AI. And it's got to be one of the biggest issues that we're going to be dealing with. So first off is, how do you reform government? How does the Commerce Department now address AI? It's not Howard Lutnik. out of here, now we're bringing in some honest working class ethos to say the whole place is going to change. If you can shut down USAID, we can reform an entire Commerce Department to make it work for actual laborers in American commerce and actual promoting of small businesses. So the first thing

I would do is just to have a really ambitious and bold reform agenda that says right out of the box, you are going to see this government perform and do things that you did not see in the last 30 and 40 years. And if you can have that, the possibilities there are endless, right? How does HHS? How do we negotiate drugs? Everything just changes as a result of that. And the possibilities are actually greater because of, sadly, you know, the destructiveness of Trump. It's a two-edged sword. He kind of raises the government down, but he also tells you there's things you can do in different and boulder's ways, if you so choose, with the public support. That's fundamental here, that you're acting on their behalf and saying the government is, or the people are demanding the government change, and we're going to meet them. because we as a Democratic Party believe the government has to function, has to work, and we want it to work for working people. Offline is brought to you by Remy. Listeners of this show will know that I usually run pretty high stress, so I'm no stranger to teeth grinding.

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from now until the end of August with Remy, subscribe and save. That's 55% off at shop remi.com slash off with code off. Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring this episode. You mentioned AI. I wanted to ask you about data centers since more perfect union has probably done more than any outlet to turn data centers into a political issue. You followed AOC to a deep red data center town. You've done electricity bill reporting. What do you think this issue has broken through when so many corporate power stories haven't broken through to this extent. It's where the rubber meets the road out there

with regular working class people are feeling a deep sense of lack of any democracy. They did not vote for any of this. In fact, they were told and foisted upon by AI oligarchs that we're going to take your land or take your water, take your air, and we're going to do as we will with it. You do not get a say. So it's a microcosm in a major way of what is going on

with their entire political and economic systems, all the frustrations you would have felt across, the board in any industry are now being materialized by you, this meta jumping into Louisiana and saying, hey, this is all our land and water. You guys can go to hell. And so as a result, what I've been most heartened by is that people are standing up to it. I don't think most of the AI industry believed or saw that they could go into generally red areas, not entirely red, but generally red rural areas, and that people would just take it laying down was, I think, their assumption. They were wrong. And thankfully, there's been a whole bunch of people who've said,

No, no, no. We are going to demand a voice in this. So the first thing is the data center moratorium because it says the beginning of this negotiation, dear AI company, is zero. So you get nothing. How about that? That's the beginning of this negotiation. So we'll reset the terms. Now you want to come talk to us and say you want to develop, let's hear what you got. And as a result, you know, in the last few months, you've seen even, you know, some community say, you will give our teachers $50,000 bonuses, right? That has happened now. because communities are standing up and saying, we're going to get a better deal. And again, this goes back to the progressive populist thing.

It's not just progressive populist, by those obviously conservative populists who've been very engaged on this. But progressive populace, say, you know, that kind of radical notion of saying moratorium, moratorium, stop. This is how you negotiate with wealth and power.

In that AOC conception, Bernie conception, there aren't that too many co-sponsors of it right now, but I think it's what's needed in a democratic party to say, we're going to be bold with power. We're going to tell the AI companies you get nothing. And then we're going to set out some terms but say, you do it, if you want this so bad,

you do it in ways that help working class people. And so many working class people, to your point on this real quick, is that there's been nothing put on the table prior, when they were trying to develop these data centers for years and years, nothing put on the table to tell them your life will be better as a result of this. They were literally just told you'll get grok. How about that? Like what?

Are you kidding me? I don't want GROC. No, it doesn't improve my life. That's not what I'm after. And so I think it is going to be our job to be a grassroots working class party that says, here's the specific ways, the teachers, hospitals will be built here, right? Workers will have specific jobs. We're going to improve a lot of, by the way, federal jobs. You're going to have to have a new president of the United States who says part of my job is to think about where we do public investment to create good, well-paying jobs because we cannot rely. in the private market, especially at the private market, is saying, you know, we're going to

displace 20% of all labor in America. One of the things that struck me about this issue is, well, first of all, it's such a, like it's become a bipartisan issue, not maybe among politicians, but, you know, like you said, there's red areas where people are very upset about data centers. I think AI is an issue. You can see from voters across the political spectrum, it feels like there's a loss of control that they have no voice in what's happening. Like things are happening to us,

and we don't have agency here. And it makes you think about sort of the story the Democrats are going to tell about the country in 2028, which is not, you know, we've just gone through, we've ended the Trump era, but what's next? What's next for the country? And you said something during a panel,

we were on together at last year's CricketCon that really stuck with me about a vision that speaks to the cultural decay in our society right now. And I was wondering if you could expand on that, maybe talk about how your thinking may have evolved since then on the story that you would like to hear from Democratic presidential candidates in 2008. Yeah, especially if we're talking to working class,

people who are not attuned in listening to every political debate. And we know that, you know, for all of his faults, Donald Trump is somebody who doesn't suffer for lack of attention. And he reaches a lot of people. and people have sensed and felt a certain thing. So you're coming after Trump. And what is it that they've sensed and felt about him? I do tend to think that there's a sense of greed and exploitation that is abound in our society

manifested by Trump and not exclusively him. If anyone's flown on an airline recently, if anyone's tried to buy a ticket online recently, if you try to just get a rental car, I mean, any damn thing you want to do in society, through the concentrations of wealth and power have made life difficult, hard, and to make you feel like you're upon, that you're suffering, your economic dignity,

your freedom, just doesn't matter to us. We've got the money, you've got nothing. And as a result, all around us in society, you sense that this sense, a greed that exists,

the sense exploitation that exists, starts to affect human relationship. So then you say, well, why do we have so much loneliness in society? Why are we have a challenge with kids in their declining cognitive skills in the age of AI in which you might have deeper relationships with chatbots? What is going on? To drive you to a better and deeper sense of the human calling, this is not the way we want to go, where we are always in fear of one another, always stepping on one another. This is what I was talking about with respect of a cultural decay.

That for those who can do well in the top five percent or one percent, it's all good for them and they want to step on anybody else. We do not want that as a society. We want a sense of solidarity that my life is better when your life is better. And as a result, I'm going to not only think about policies that improve that. So we can all talk about policies that do that and have a good, healthy debate. But we also want to change a culture that respects people who may not have a college degree. God forbid, well, you know, a college degree. Oh, you repair cars for a living.

You drive Amazon trucks for a living. you're an Uber driver, there's respect and dignity in what you do to improve America that I think is being lost. And so part of it, you see it was Zoron again. I mean, my example for so much because he's a uniquely good at this. But there's a, you can sense in the respect and in the integrity. I'm going to host, you know, some of these gatherings of a soccer game for you all to come together and watch this for no other reason other than I want your life to be happy. I want you to improve. I want you to be with one another and see that with my power as a government official, I care that you might have a better enjoyable life. And that is thinking beyond just policy, right? Now you're thinking in arts culture,

using all of the soft power that a president has to change culture because we are living in the wake of a president who's really degraded culture all around us with his own greed. And we can repair it, somebody who has that vision of saying it's not just policies. It's just we are a better, wonderful nation when we all respect and see the value of each other, a more perfect union, if you will. Who among the potential 2028ers has impressed you so far? Well, I don't think I was to declare, John. We have to wait to see who's in the field.

I mean, I know we get a lot of soft declarations. We got soft declarations, but I'm waiting to see the field for them because if you and I start talking about these names, and I'm like, I know you and I don't even know that there's like five or six or seven or eight people who we just weren't never thinking of who are you know hopefully planning to run or are playing or is anyone in the party right now speaking in speaking about the country in the future in a way that you find particularly impressive or inspiring or just different than the usual uh you know talking points we get from politicians well how many times in this conversation have i referenced the name zorad bumdani and

obviously I have a lot of respect for just the way he cares about public life and public authorities and public responsibility. And, you know, he's doing it in a way that is completely true to the values that in which he campaigned as a progressive populist. He's still upholding it and expanding the coalition as he goes and getting, earning more and more trust respect. You correct me from wrong from all the kinds of people. I think, you know, if I go to New York City, you look at people who maybe voted for Mayor Adams or Mayor Cuomo or, you know, other people. You know, they're moving in a direction of respect, just appreciation that, you know, this guy believes. There's a lot to learn from him and certainly, you know, there's others, obviously, I'm a huge fan of AOC, of Bernie, obviously, and like a whole progressive movement. I think you're going to have a healthy competition of that.

Rokana, I think, wants to run. There's a lot of people I think are going to introduce progressive ideas and debates and it should be a good and healthy one based off of, you know, what people think. like if you think of an AI debate that is so desperately needed, where is it going to come from? Well, I bet you where O'Connor's going to have some compelling and interesting things to say about it and will spark a movement around it. I'm more anxious and interested to see, you know, who runs. And then I think, I don't know how you feel about this job, but I also tend to think as somebody who's not a politician, somebody who's kind of outside the system,

this environment really more than one that I can think of in my adult history is really conducive to that, of people wanting somebody who's just, you know. By the way, on this point real quick, like the candidates we've endorsed, you know, with Bernie and I, like, looking across the board, we've had more candidates win in primaries who did never run for anything in their life before. And it's been pretty amazing.

That tells you something. Like, Annalia Mejia is now a congresswoman, Adam Homoie, like Sam Forstag, a smoke jumper in Montana. You look at Bob Brooks. You look at, Bob might run for State Ledge before, but Brian Poindexter and Ohio, there's so many of these people who just never run,

and they're getting rewarded. I think if you look at the way voters are, like, oh, great, you're coming in fresh, and you not wedded to a system. I'm hungry for that. So I tend to think that also carries over into a presidential. Speaking of impressed, I've been blown away by the success you guys are having at More Perfect Union. I think you've racked up, you know,

three million plus U-2 subscribers. You got an Emmy. Talk to me about what you guys have gotten right. Two Emmys. I'm sorry. I was down an Emmy. Talk to me about what you guys have gotten right and what your ultimate goal is. Well, I mean, first of all, back at you.

I mean, you're not sneezing at anything there. You've built a substantial media empire of your own right. And I'm glad to be in an ecosystem with you in which a thousand flowers blooming. I think all of us, and I speak for you here, but we want scale. I mean, one of the things we were responding to is the sense that, you know, if you look at the right in the MAGA environment, they were reaching tens and tens and tens of millions of people. And on the left of center, we were just not doing enough job, a good of a job of reaching people at scale. So we came along with a certain vision of how do you reach people at scale. And it was to tell economic justice storytelling through the lens of by and four working class people, get into issues of corporate greed and corporate concentration, discuss them with the level of depth. Don't talk to people as if they're done. talk to people as if they're intelligent. They really care and want to know more about the economy. And it tends to be that that has been rewarded, you know,

in millions and millions of views. And one of the more exciting things that I'm witnessing in the growth of more perfect union is every day we're getting more and more people who watch Tucker Carlson or who watch Joe Rogan or even people watch Mr. Beast. You know, I'm looking at the back end of our YouTube algorithms there and looking at what our viewers are watching. And that has been a sea change over the. the past year or so, is that more and more people coming to us, not from necessarily the stripes

that you would have assumed. They're just, you know, Bernie supporters, AOC supporters, progressives, left-of-center people, more and more and more, the growth is around people who are coming to us off of, you know, dissatisfaction with MAGA or just, or independence. And I'm hoping it, it, it, for portends, the possibilities of a different, lasting, bigger coalition in America, a remade coalition. One of the things that fascinates me is so often it is the identity-inflicted issues and the culture war issues that tend to get the most attention, that tend to go viral when people have

those debates and politicians talk about those issues. And a lot of the economic issues that we know resonate most with people, we see it in the polling, we hear it from actual voters. It's harder to get attention for them. It feels like you guys have flipped that dynamic. And I saw that you talked to the post about this and said that actually videos you guys have done on abortion or immigration don't do as well as these videos that you have about economic justice. And I'm wondering what you make of that and why you think, though, the videos you did on economic issues have done so much so well. Well, with the great team that we have a more perfect union, we've owned that we're going to do depth, depth. I mean, we raise the bar and try to write scripts that you may think you know something about,

let's say, United Health's power over the marketplace. I would argue to you that if and when you watch a more perfect union video about United Health's vertical and horizontal consolidation and PBMs and how they engage in health care pricing and then the potential solutions of people who are fighting United Health, you're going to learn something. Even if you thought you knew a lot, you're going to learn something more. And that, I think, is really critical because when you think about economic issues, to your point of social justice. A lot of those tend to be, I want to say, easier to understand. So a lot of people gravitate to them. It's kind of like, hey, you know, here's your trends view on this kid, that kid, got it, you know. But on economic justice issues, there,

it's a level of complication. There's a reason why there's so much money spent on K Street, lobbyists, accountants, and lawyers. It requires a depth of understanding. And one of the things I think most working class people know and understand is there's a rigged lockbox against them, against their level of knowledge. One of the ways that they feel screwed is the fact that somebody's got knowledge somewhere and they're making tons of money off it, and I ain't in that club. And so then you have to kind of get into a place

if you're advocating for working class people, you're unlocking that level of knowledge. And you're raising the bar on the amount of information we're trying to provide because you're breaking into the bubble of the elites and you're saying here's how the business model works. And you're showing that you really, truly do give a damn on their behalf by quite frankly criticizing and observing how those companies do their business to make billions and billions of dollars and ideally coupling that with people

who are fighting to change that, whether you're an academic or your tenants union or a labor union or a legislator or person running for Senate, whatever the case might be, here's a person connected to what a specific idea of how you could change this dysfunction in society. That simple remedy, it almost feels like a monopoly for us in the marketplace and it's doing quite well. And I would urge more people to compete with us to tell very, you know, in-depth stories of the economy because people are hungry for it, knowing and believing that most of the information they consume about the economy comes from a place of wealth on CNBC, Walshry Journal, places where, you know, they're told about things, but they, their own experience of a John Deere tractor writer

knows I am getting screwed here. Somebody unpack this for me. Well, I would urge everyone listening and watching to go to More Perfect Union's YouTube channel and like and subscribe and check out the videos. They're fantastic. And Fas, thank you so much, as always, for joining and chatting with me. I could talk to you for hours, but I know you're a busy guy, and I appreciate the time. Sir, always great to see you. And knock on wood, let's all get the house in the Senate here in a few months. Absolutely. Take care, buddy. Offline with John Favro is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Emma Ilich-Frank, and Anisha Banergy. Our team includes Dilan Vilaueva, Mia Kelman, Charlotte Landis, Eric Schute, Rachel Gaieski and Will Jones with support from Adrian Hill and Matt DeGrope.

Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.