Offline with Jon Favreau - What Democrats Could Learn from Republicans with Brian Beutler
Episode Date: December 4, 2022This week, a Crooked Media crossover event as Brian Beutler, host of Positively Dreadful, sits down with Jon to talk all the things Democrats could learn from Republicans. Yep, you read that right. Br...ian makes the case that when it comes to messaging, Democrats should be less shy and spend more energy drawing attention to Republican scandals and controversies — just like the GOP did for Hillary’s emails, the migrant caravan, or crime. He talks to Jon about the obstacles in front of the Democratic party, what will matter to swing voters in 2024, and how the Republican Party is already on the hunt for the next Benghazi. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
can Democrats do a better job of making the people on TV and on social media who
disseminate Joe Biden's message and torque it and make them talk about that more, right?
So he says, give me that House and two more Democratic senators, and I'll sign a bill
codifying Roe in January, like crystal clean message, beautiful message, simple to understand.
You also want the senators to be saying that that and you want them maybe even to be like proving it. Yeah. Take another vote. We got 48 votes to change the filibuster and codify Roe. That means two more and we got it done. Right. There's also going to be some asshole on TV who's like, well, this is just a show vote. This is like the politics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like Democrats are just playing for the cameras. And it's like, okay, yes, we are playing for the cameras
to tell America about this.
And now instead of like playing random clips
of somebody getting beaten up on the subway,
the TV is chitter-chattering
about how Roe might be codified in January,
but it will require this.
I'm Jon Favreau.
Welcome to Offline.
Hey, everyone. My guest today is Crooked Media's own Brian Boitler, our editor-in-chief and host of Positively Dreadful.
So we're trying something a little different for this episode.
It's a crossover between our two shows that touches on themes we've both covered, namely how pro-democracy forces can navigate a noisy, fractured online media environment that seems to favor extremism and disinformation.
Basically, why aren't Democrats better at messaging?
So this is a debate that Brian and I have had for a while now,
sometimes on Twitter, but mostly on Slack because we're not animals.
I want to be careful and fair in characterizing Brian's position,
but he tends to think that Republicans have been more effective at drawing attention to the things they want to be careful and fair in characterizing Brian's position, but he tends to think that Republicans have been more effective
at drawing attention to the things they want to talk about,
whether it's Hillary Clinton's emails, migrant caravans, crime.
And he thinks Democrats should be less shy and more shrewd
about drawing attention to Republican scandals and controversies.
I don't disagree with his overall premise,
but think the goal is a bit more complicated and difficult to achieve.
The two of us have been going back and forth on this for a long time. But now that the midterms
are over, we wanted to give this conversation the time it deserved. So we thought, why not make this
an episode? We talked about the ways the Democratic messengers on cable television and social media
don't always align with the White House, how Republicans are going to be looking for the next Benghazi, and what might matter to swing voters in 2024. Given that this is both my show
and Brian's today, the format will be a little different. You'll notice that Brian does most of
the interviewing. As always, if you have comments, questions, or complaints, please email us at
offline at crooked.com. And please rate, review, and share the show here's brian boiler this is the uh the crossover event of the year the century possibly that's what everyone's been
waiting for offline and positively dreadful we should tell people that we, you and I, have had sort of a long running, I think, healthy and productive debate about the Democratic Party and what it could be doing better, mostly in our like private Slack channel.
Yeah, we should just publish that and call it a day. So I think this is a great opportunity for us to sort of talk about that debate to everyone else, because I think it is actually more productive than most of the debates I see play out on Twitter.
I think that's right. So what would you say you've learned about swing voters that you didn't know before you started doing The Wilderness?
I think the main thing I learned is that they just do not pay attention that closely to politics.
They do not consume politics that closely.
I think that swing voters can be sort of ill-defined or oversimplified when discussed in the media or by pundits.
And there's a tendency to think that they're all moderate. There's a tendency to think
that they don't have sort of strongly held political beliefs or opinions. And that's not
necessarily the case. It turns out the case is that they just don't in the course of their lives,
they might follow the news, they might scan headlines, they might check in a couple times a
week, but they don't follow the news closely.
They often have political views that are strongly held, but sometimes in conflict with one another
in terms of what would categorize them as one as an ideologue in one party or a partisan
in one party or the other.
And they are willing to change parties between elections.
And sometimes they're willing to vote and sometimes not vote at all in an election.
So they come in and out of the electorate and they go back and forth between parties.
So my sense of it is that because they don't pay a ton of attention to the news
and because they're sort of ideologically cross-pressured or inconsistent,
hold sort of conflicting views in their own heads,
that they're very different from one another. And to the extent that they have commonalities,
it's not in their politics so much as in their circumstances in life, right? These aren't
typically like wealthy people, right? They're not business magnates or professionals or
people with graduate degrees who, in general,
do tend to follow this stuff closely. And I think that helps explain why
Democrats like to appeal to them on the basis of their economic circumstances.
I would say that they have a few common traits. We just talked about why they're different.
They're all sort
of similar to one another. I think they tend to be, you're right, they tend to not have a college
degree. There's plenty who do have college degrees too, but most tend to not have a college degree
disproportionately, non-college educated. They tend to be disproportionately a little bit older.
I think in terms of race, there are quite a few people of
color who are also swing voters, even though people wouldn't necessarily think that.
I mean, increasingly so in the last couple of elections, right?
Increasingly so. And so demographically, it sort of runs the gamut, but education is the real
divide. And I also think that what they tend to have in common is distrust of institutions and so
they don't feel that in general government is looking out for them they don't have a lot of
trust in the media either they don't have a lot of trust in in businesses big especially big
corporations and so there's a general distrust of institutions that sort of characterizes a lot
of these people. And so when you ask them about politics, it's like, oh, I don't pay attention
to that as much, partly because no one seems to be standing up for me. And they'll say things like,
I think the Republican Party is actually pretty extreme, but the Democratic Party can't seem to
get it shit together anyway. So I don't really know, you know, what the difference is. There's a little bit of that.
And then the complaints you get when you ask them, like, what issues are most important tend to be,
well, I'm struggling to pay the rent, pay for my mortgage, pay for college, pay for education.
So you do get a lot of economic concerns raised when you ask them what their concerns are about politics.
Given that they're kind of all over the map, but somewhat united by being consumed by their over not, you know, 50 years, but just even the last decade or so on economic growth and job creation and deficit reduction or whatever metric you want to point to.
And these are facts that Democrats do brag about a lot, I think.
And nevertheless, it doesn't seem to affect their decisions about whom to vote for. They don't seem to be asking which party tends to do better at making people's incomes go up.
Right.
So I did a group in Vegas.
It was mainly non-college educated Latino voters.
And one man said, you know, I used to vote Democrat because they were the party of the working class.
Now I think Republicans are the party of the working class.
Started complaining about Obamacare.
Started saying that the Affordable Care Act gave too many subsidies to poor people.
And that the Republicans are for the rich and the Democrats are for the poor and no one's for the middle class. So for almost every issue, there's a theory
about the Democratic Party not being on the side of working people when it comes to the economy
that you hear pop up every now and then. And then you hear from people who do think the Democrats
are more on the side of working people and Republicans are for the rich, but that Democrats
can't seem to deliver for them
and Republicans somehow know how to manage the economy better. So there's this weird split where
they think Democrats are on the side of middle class people and working class people, but
Republicans know how to like, quote unquote, manage the economy better. And so they give them
more credit for that. I just think that some of these views views are so they have been set for decades right and
some to the democrats favor right like the belief that republicans are the party of the rich has
been true for many decades the belief that republicans also somehow have business sense
and know how to manage the economy is also deeply ingrained right and like these are cliches that
i've lived with my whole life,
but they're,
you know,
they're mediated.
You pick them up in the course of listening to something on the radio or,
or catching a snippet of something on TV,
right?
Like these ideas don't kind of arrive fully formed in people's minds.
So,
so like,
like where are they getting them?
And if somebody could reach them with the idea that although Republicans care
too much about
the rich, they're also better stewards of the economy, why can't somebody incept a different
idea into their head? I mean, I think they can. I think Democrats have successfully in the past,
right? I think people in the middle of the greatest economic crisis of our generation, people took a flyer on a freshman senator from
Illinois who didn't have a ton of economic experience because they believed that he would
be a better steward of the economy than the guy who, in the Obama campaign, we framed as too close
to the incumbent president who had just helped crash the economy in the first place.
Right. But it swings right back, right?
Like the old idea that actually Republicans really are better can just roar right back into the subliminal consciousness.
Yeah, and that's why you have to prosecute the case over and over again. OK, so then as far as reaching and persuading and prosecuting that
case goes, what does peak performance to you look like? Like who is the Democrat that other
Democrats can learn the most from? But don't say Barack Obama. I'm conflicting you out of saying
Obama. Let's just like limit it to Democrats serving in office in 2022.
I think two great examples from the campaign we just had are John Fetterman and Katie Porter.
And of course, Katie Porter got elected in 2018. She had a very, very tough race this time around.
And I interviewed her for The Wilderness and we talked about sort of the threat to democracy,
which she is quite concerned about.
But she also said like a strong democracy
depends on a strong economy.
And she's like, I know that sounds cliche or whatever,
but like, I think that if we don't help people believe,
give people good reason to believe
that democracy can deliver for them financially,
can actually make their lives better, can improve their standard of living,
then they're not going to have faith in democracy. And I think that's a core issue.
Similarly, then you've got John Fetterman, who very early in that race, defined Dr. Oz as
an out of touch, super rich guy who was also not from Pennsylvania.
I asked all these questions just sort of as stage setting about the difficulty of getting
economic messages to stick in voters' minds, and sort of either in a lasting way or at least
at the right moment so that you get this perfect storm ahead of an election and it gives you that
boost you need to get over 50%, right? Versus some like sort of lower brow things, kind of like what
you were alluding to about how Fetterman was able to define Dr. Oz by just kind of brutalizing him.
And so I think we agree that Democrats not named Fetterman or not named Katie Porter kind of fumble the ball or throw the game when it comes to picking those kinds of, quote unquote, earned media fights or just trying to attract cameras to cover what they think is important. a step when you and I are having this discussion or even when I'm writing Big Tent or whatever
else, that when I get worked up about like, why aren't Democrats attacking or showboating
or investigating or whatever else?
And the step I'm skipping is the assumption that political journalists are fairly predictable
and that you can draw them in with scandal and high dudgeon and conflict and fighting, but you'll never get them to pay as
much attention to kitchen tables as they will to caravans coming up from Central America.
And so I wonder if you think I'm wrong about that. And if so, what would it look like for
Democrats to do a caravans type messaging blitz, but around the struggles of middle class swing voters?
So a few thoughts on this. The first is I totally agree with you.
It is it's much harder to get reporters to cover economic issues.
But I also think to your point on this is that like Democrats aren't doing as good a job on this as they could be. Because I think the Fetterman campaign did this.
We did this against Mitt Romney in 2012, right?
These were not campaigns about economic issues per se,
but they were campaigns about the economy, about who is on your side.
So it was much more of a character campaign on both the federman case and the obama
case than i think we usually see from democrats when they talk about the economy in which they
just sort of like list out various economic issues like like john federman's whole campaign was like
dr oz does not give a shit about you he is a rich guy who is not going to fight for you i am going
to fight for you here's what going to fight for you. Here's
what, here are my policies, here are his policies. So you still talk about the policies, you still
talk about the agenda, but you do it in a way that sort of fits in with the larger characterization
of your opponent that is about their values, that is about what they care about, what they stand for,
who they are, where they come from. Like you've got to fit all of that into the story. And I don't think Democrats do that well. And I think that if you do that in a way that Fetterman did or we did
in 2012, then reporters are more likely to cover the conflict because now it's sort of like your
traditional conflict and it's more about character attacks. Reporters love things that are about
characters instead of about policies. Right. And so I do think that the I think the reason that some Democrats shy away from this is actually because there's this fear of economic populism that comes from, like, you know, a lot of the people that Democrats hang out with now being a very college educated party, whether it's donors, whether it's media elites, whether it's whoever, they don't approve
of economic populism. They think it's, I don't know, it's like beneath us or something.
A little dirty. Well, so I mean, I am obviously a big fan of Barack Obama's political skill and
John Fetterman's political skill. I think these are very talented politicians. In defense of all
the other Democrats who don't tend to do as good a job as those two, I mean, both of them were blessed to run against obscenely rich guys. who got rich because he was a TV guy. Obama had to contend with Mitt Romney, who is actually a
pretty talented politician and had done some stuff, could point to things that made the case
for his business experience, the thing that made him rich being good for regular people.
But I think Obama lucked out a little bit insofar as they chose to go that route, right? Like,
Mitt Romney chose to pick Paul Ryan as his vice president and just say, we're going to run on the Paul Ryan budget plan
and cutting taxes at the top end and slashing entitlement spending
and Medicaid.
We're going to lean into it.
It ended up being like the most substantive campaign I've ever covered
as a reporter and probably like the most honest campaign
I've watched a Republican run, even though they obviously like, you know, hit the ball about all
kinds of numbers and stuff like that. And Democrats writ large can't, I don't think they can take a
flyer on always being able to draw, you know, a club for growth Republican who is worth $50 million or
$100 million and wants to cut his own taxes, right? Like, and when you can, then you've got
everything you need to run exactly the kind of campaign that you're talking about. But when your
opponent is not kind of like a caricature of himself, it becomes harder. And maybe you have to look even
like deeper than their wealth to like deeper down into the mud for like things about them that are
just kind of stinky. Do you know what I mean? Yes. We were definitely helped by Mitt Romney
being the opponent and Mitt Romney picking Paul Ryan, right? Who's like you said, who's planned
to cut Medicare and Social Security and the tax cut. It was just it was like a gift to Ryan, right? Who's like you said, who's planned to cut Medicare and Social Security and the tax cut. It was just, it was like a gift to us, right? A political gift.
But Obama laid out a speech during the Republican primary before Romney was chosen as the nominee
that was all about how this election would be defined by like, who's going to fight for the
middle class. And the reason it was is because that anxiety is what kept popping up every focus group, every voter that we spoke to.
And we also knew that no matter who the Republican nominee was going to be, that would be a nominee who either had voted to support Paul Ryan's plan or had a lot of the same policies that Mitt Romney did.
Or was it now?
Were they going to be some rich out of touch guy?
I don't know.
Right.
Like, what if it was Newt Gingrich?
Right.
Right.
That's a very different, but we would have been able to prosecute an economic
case against Newt Gingrich based on contract with America, everything he did in 1995. Right. So like
you do have to have, make sure that your case is true to the person that you're running against.
But I think that you have to start with, okay, what is it that people care about right now?
What do they want to see from their government? And then make a case based on that and then figure out why your opponent, in what ways your opponent stands in the way of that vision. gingrich 2012 race that never happened and screaming at the tv that obama refuses to talk
about gingrich's extramarital affairs or whatever else and not get down in the mud and like why
won't you do it well but no this is this is a great point because i think that sometimes
the way this debate plays out is like there's people who want democrats to talk about kitchen
table issues and in fairness a lot of democratic politicians do just talk about kitchen table
issues and then there's people who say like you got to hit harder and you got to go after character. And we got to talk
about things like democracy and abort. And I don't, I don't really think that's the right
way to think about the debate. When I talked to focus groups, when I talked to voters,
they did talk a lot about costs, right? That was like the first thing you hear.
But I also heard in a lot of these groups, at least in this election, I heard about abortion, especially after Dobbs.
And people were very, very afraid about abortion bans. I heard about gun violence.
Like this is the first year now where I had like multiple focus group participants talk about friends that had been involved in gun violence, like gun violence that they seen, gun violence that affected their communities. And then when I say in every focus group, I would say like, what does the media
cover too much? And what does the media cover not enough? And when I say, what does the media cover
too much? I heard over and over again, the January 6th hearings. And then I would say, okay, well,
what do you think about January 6th? And they were all like, oh, it was awful. It was heinous.
It was scary. Trump was responsible. And then like later in Vegas, when I talked to some guy who was like leaning towards Ron DeSantis in 2024, I was like, oh, are you going to then vote for
Adam Laxalt over Cortez Master? And he goes, oh, no, no, no. Adam Laxalt, a big lie supporter,
big lie believer. And so like, so it's a weird thing where people are sick of the coverage and they think it's like there's just certain things that voters don't like.
And it's usually things that don't directly affect them. Right.
And if you can make your case about yourself and about your opponent, if you can talk about that case in terms of how that affects the voter and not abstract theories or not just attacks on someone else, but like attacks on what someone's going to do to you if they are elected into office, then I think you're much more effective.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I don't disagree with that at all. And like the best thing they did all Congress other than like the Infl Reduction Act, was finally impaneling the January 6th committee. And I find myself wishing that they had leaned into it even harder
in the aftermath of the election because, you know, I always detect this sort of palpable unease,
at least at the leadership level, you know, okay, we'll try to get Republicans to buy in on a
January 6th investigation and waste six months when they finally throw it back in our face. Then we'll do a House Select Committee, and they true. And also, I think that they wanted Democrats to kind of be a little bit aside from the ugliness of investigating and rubbing in America's face how awful Trump was.
And then the election happens, and it turns out that, like, even if people say that their top concern is the economy or costs or whatever, like they think the Trump stuff, the MAGA stuff is disgusting.
And like the Republican candidates who did the worst were the ones most tightly identified with
January 6th and the big lie and Donald Trump. And I'd have to do a rundown, but like it only
took Republicans to give themselves a little bit of distance from that for them to perform really well, irrespective of the kitchen table attacks that they were on the receiving end of.
And to me, it was just like, here's a case in point where if the leadership was just willing to be a little bit more nimble and confident, then I think they'd all be better off and they'd have more members. And and like, you know, I guess this is where I get confused about like where you where you stand on this,
because I'm like, I don't know that if we talked more about January 6th or if Democrats have leaned in more.
And I don't I don't even know what leaning in more actually look like.
I think most people in the country, we've seen this in polls for a long time now, thought January 6th was horrendous.
Hold Trump at least partially, if not fully responsible.
Abhor the violence around January 6th and sort of penalize him for that, as well as Republicans who embrace that and embrace his attempted coup, right?
His attempt to overturn the election. And I think that in a way is baked in
and I'm not sure who is out there,
what voter is out there that is like,
I have not made up my mind on January 6th,
but if I hear more,
then that will be what makes me vote
for a Democrat over a Republican.
So when I sit down to write anything
that's sort of like Democrats should lean in more,
I don't want to like leave it at that. I want to try to like say specific things that would make me feel like
they were pushing in the right direction and confident that this was an effective line of
attack and sort of like understand what the value was. So to me, the value is that when you're in
the like last two weeks before the election, there is some population of voters that are going to make a call.
These are the swing voters.
And we don't really know what it is that at the end of the day
makes them choose one candidate over another.
And one thing that might be decisive for a fraction of them
is what's kind of ambient at the moment, right?
And Republicans, I think, understand that.
And so they're like,
let's make stuff that's good for us ambient. And I think they do it in all kinds of disgusting ways.
And usually it's about stuff they don't even personally think is super important.
But they're kind of flooding the zone with that stuff. And I think Democrats don't do that,
really, with the issues that they think,
like, sort of like what you were saying, like, look, we have maxed out on outrage against Trump,
nothing we do or say now about him is gonna affect the way the election comes out, and I just don't
know if that's true, right? Like, we're talking about how people's minds can be changed about
who's better on the economy from day to day, from election to election.
And so they could just as easily be like, OK, yeah, I didn't like Trump when he was doing January 6th, but he's not president anymore.
And that's yesterday's news. And today's news is crime. And have a homestretch of a campaign and you want to catch people wherever you might happen to catch them with ideas, basically, or memes or whatever you want to call them that remind them of what they don't like about their opponent is an easier thing to accomplish than like we pass the Inflation Reduction Act.
It does this this list of things. And we'll do more if you give us more votes.
How do you think Democrats closed in the final weeks of this midterm campaign? Because if I had to summarize
how the campaigns closed by both what the candidates were saying, what their advertising
was saying, what they tried to make news about, and then sort of what party leadership tried to
make news about, I would say they closed an abortion. They were very tough on republicans it was it was a contrast right it was here's what
we're for and i know uh this happened because of you even though you don't get credit for it but
um and you know the party at least party leadership coalesced around two more pro-choice anti-
filibuster senators keep the house and then we'll codify roe so there was a positive message there
was a contrast message and then on democracy president President Biden gave that big speech in a couple of days before and brought in the Paul Pelosi attack. And then I heard candidates do this at a couple of the events we went to. They would say, you know, inflation is a huge deal. Republicans talk about inflation. They don't have a plan on inflation. And by the way, you put them in power. Not only they're going to not reduce inflation because they have no plan, they're going to ban abortion and take away a whole bunch of our other freedoms. That was the
message I heard over and again. So to me, that's sort of how Democrats close. Yeah, I think that's
basically how I see things too. And like, you know, to give them a grade or whatever, like,
I think they did like better than I was anticipating they would do in like April when it looked like
they were going to get wiped out. And all they could think about was like, how are we going to overcome the inflation anchor around our ankles? And, you know, things looked really bad then. And I thought that they were just going to slip and just apologize for existing. Right. And then that's not really what they did. the line at like who's propounding the democratic message like if it's the candidates themselves
they did pretty pretty well if it's like the democrats who go on tv as surrogates i think
they did really badly like they were just spooked and talking about how like oh we really blew it
like we went all in on abortion and uh and democracy and in the summer and and it turns
out voters only care about crime and and inflation And really, they were just responding to like Republican propaganda, telling them that that's what voters cared about to the exclusion of everything else.
This is like a sort of an offline pet peeve here for it's like the Democrats who did that.
Right. Who like went on TV and were like wringing their hands.
Right. It's like like Hillary Rosen did this on CNN, right?
And that clip gets shared.
And then everyone online gets really mad about Hillary,
Hillary Rosen for saying that.
And there's a few others.
It's not, it wasn't just her,
but there's probably like a handful,
like five or six,
because there's just not that many pundits
on cable television.
And then they go on there
and they say something stupid.
And then it gets everyone else in the sort of Twitter sphere.
And I would just say like in the media, the media and the punditocracy, right?
It gets everyone riled up.
I saw it.
I was like, why would you say that before the election?
Right?
Like whether it's true or not, why would you say that before the election?
But she did. her position become like like the democratic party gets assigned with like hillary rosen's
pre-election take right on what the party did wrong and i'm like you know what like joe biden's
out there giving a fucking democracy speech his 10th democracy speech that that's why that's why
i caveat it is like it's hard to know where exact like who falls on what side of the of the
responsibility line i assume though that if you, senior Democratic strategists are saying that on TV, that it's, you know, there's a sense
within the party, if not, you know, probably contested, not everyone agrees, that that's
actually correct analysis. And that maybe what we need to do here at the last moment is really
change everything. I'm glad that like that didn't prevail on Democrats.
They didn't spend the last week apologizing
for the blue crime wave or whatever.
But like, I thought Joe Biden's abortion messaging
was correct.
It's the one that I wanted him to adopt.
The way I would embed a critique into that
is to bring us back to what this is all about,
which is like, can Democrats do a better job
of making the people on TV and on social media who disseminate Joe Biden's message and, and,
and torque it and make them talk about that more, right? So he says, give me the, give me that house
and two more democratic senators, and i'll sign a bill codifying row
in january like crystal clean message beautiful message simple to understand
you also want the senators to be saying that and you want them maybe even to be like
proving it like yeah take another vote we got 48 votes to change the filibuster and codify row that
means two more and we got it done right and you And, you know, it's like tacky or whatever.
And it's like, you know, there's also going to be some asshole on TV who's like, well, this is just a show vote.
This is like the politics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like Democrats are just playing for the cameras.
And it's like, OK, yes, we are playing for the cameras to tell America about this. And now, instead of like playing random clips of somebody getting
beaten up on the subway, the TV is chitter-chattering about how Roe might be codified in
January, but it will require this. And like, you could fantasize at least about an election where,
you know, like it was in the states where abortion rights were ballot referenda, right? But everywhere, because every regular Democratic voter who cared about abortion rights knew that their district mattered.
And, you know, they tell their friends, like, this House seat matters, even though we probably aren't going to win it.
You know, obviously, you can only run the election once. But it's that kind of not just here's what we stand for and we'll lay it out
in a speech, but like we're going to make some kind of performance out of it to draw attention
to it so that it sticks in people's minds, especially the minds of people who are really hard
to reach in general and don't normally pay attention to like a presidential speech.
So that's sort of how I think about it.
You know, I was pretty happy with how the election came out. I like lean into the criticism thing
because like I think that it's healthy for the party to think about how they could do even better
still. So I don't want to like be here presenting myself as somebody who thinks they just totally
fucked it up because I don't. But it could have gotten better probably. And these are
ways I kind of think might help. But that the people in charge of the party, maybe not Biden,
because Biden actually is in charge. But like the people in charge of like the congressional
campaign committees and the House and the Senate don't agree or else they think it's too risky or
something like that. And that's the source of concern for me about like, where's the party
going to go from here? And how are they thinking about dealing with the fact that Republicans just
keep buying up more media to disseminate more ideas? Well, yeah. So I think that the source
of the problem here is not, and I'm not saying that you think this, but I think that it is not Democrats feeling like it's too risky, like they're afraid, like they need to go high when the other team goes low, that they don't want to fight.
Like, I don't think that's the source of a lot of the problems here, because I think we have seen the Democrats, especially in this last election, will punch pretty hard if there is an issue that arises where they feel like they have the upper
hand, right? I think the abortion fight is a great example. I think the democracy fight is a great
example. I think that to deliver a message in this fractured media environment requires an
unbelievable amount of coordination and repetition. And that coordination and repetition is far easier on the right because
of the propaganda machine that you just mentioned and because of the homogeneity of their voters
and caucus, right? The more they shrink, right? And that they're a minority in this country,
but it is a minority of mostly non-college educated white folks and they sort of are you know bound by similar beliefs
at least in the in the especially around in the MAGA crowd right they believe the same things they
have the same views they can get consensus among their leaders among their politicians far easier than we can now representing this sort of broad pro-democracy coalition that spans
AOC and Bernie Sanders all the way to Joe Manchin and the never Trumpers.
Right. And that's and so it's much harder for us to have one consistent message
that everyone feels like, OK, I'm going to deliver that message because there's a lot of
individual actors in this coalition who are like, you know what? My politics and my state, I don't care if
Joe Biden told me to say, you know, two more pro-choice anti-filibuster senators and we're
going to codify Roe. I'm Joe Manchin and I don't fucking want to codify Roe, you know what I'm
saying? Or I'm like Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin is the exception that makes like, we need the votes
because of this guy, Joe Manchin. It kind of helps the arguments.
It's so funny because I was listening to Jamel Bowie a couple weeks ago with you.
And he was like, well, the one thing Democrats really have to do now is codify Roe because they said they were going to.
And I'm like, no, we're not going to be able to.
Like, well, we didn't get the two when we get the House, number one.
And then we even in the Senate, we're still one short.
And so, like, is that now is that
going to be laid in the feet of joe biden the democrats it shouldn't be it's not we just didn't
elect enough people no yeah i mean i when we recorded that in in in partial fairness to jamel
like the house had not been called yet um and i think his idea was like look if you get the house
in 51 you gotta at least make an effort and effort. And I think probably that if that had happened, there would have been an effort and it probably would have
failed and we'd all be tearing our hair out. I think there are some Democrats who think
that the, you know, the very partisan fights, the like, just savaging your opponent in that
Fetterman-esque way is beneath them. And that like, you know, Democrats are liberals and they want to persuade people and not just
by making people hate the other party.
So I think that there is some of that in the party, but it's not the main thing that I'm
concerned about.
I think that there's a lot of, if we say what's on our minds about these people who want to
throw out the democracy, establish a dictatorship,
make women carry pregnancies to term, it's going to be really hard on Abby Spanberger,
and thus not worth the risk. Fortunately, Abby Spanberger won despite a more punchier campaign than I was expecting. But I think that that explains why Nancy Pelosi
was so reluctant to do to Donald Trump what Republicans are about to do to Hunter Biden.
But I think it goes, this is why I brought up emphasizing how issues or fights will affect
people's lives. Because I think that the reason that the Democrats leaned in more on January 6th and some of these democracy issues than your typical investigation
of Donald Trump, let's say the first impeachment, right? Right. Is because you could more clearly
draw a line from Trump's actions and potential future actions and what that could mean for the average voter, which is that
either there's violence or even in the best case scenario, you vote for someone and your vote is
thrown out. Right. That is like a real life effect on someone. Abigail Spanberger, the reason she was
ran a bunch of very tough abortion ads in that race is because that is an issue where it's like
this is
about your freedom and your body and they want to take it away and i don't and and and she was not
afraid of that but if you're investigating someone and it's like oh donald trump had some shady
dealing it's horrible but it's harder to make that connection to like people's lives i think
i go back and forth on how much the people's lives, I mean, with the abortion thing, obviously, like, it's not just like, yeah, that seems wrong to me. It's like, this is fucked up in very obvious ways and ruining people's lives, oh, well, like, you know, if elections aren't free and fair, then down the line, that might cascade into my own life and have a personal impact on me.
Or is it just like, these guys are thieves and liars.
These are crooks.
And sometimes, like, maybe it's just a case-by-case thing where, like, when there's, like, a real nexus to people's lived experience, you'd make the connection. But when it's just that you have the goods on them as a crook,
like that should be enough. Like that's really good.
It should be. I think the challenge is a lot of voters, particularly some of the swing voters that
we started talking about originally, believe that both parties have crooks in them and that all politicians are
corrupt. And it's a matter of degree. And maybe Republicans are a little more corrupt than
Democrats. And this is partly the fault of a mainstream media that for decades has tried to
prove its worth by saying, I'm going to take down Democrats and Republicans, right? I'm going to be
tough on both sides. And the result of that is sort of degrading people's faith in institutions writ large and both parties.
And so sometimes institutions suck. Yeah. No. And sometimes they do. Sometimes you have to.
But the result is a lot of voters thinking about politicians. Oh, yeah. He's a crook and a liar. But I guess that's what politicians are. piece of data on this election which is that these republican maga secretary of state candidates
who were like very willing openly willing to overturn the next election and do donald trump's
bidding like they did worse than even the other republicans on the ticket the senate candidate
or the gubernatorial candidate whatever like and i was worried about that because i thought these
are races where people aren't paying as much attention and they might just go and vote their party and so it might look
closer to the split the partisan split in the state or the district and sure enough like those
candidates lost badly and i think it's because people were like oh this fucking person is going
to like overturn an election and that i'm gonna go vote in? No, that's crazy. So I think the election shows, although it might take time to actually prove this mathematically,
that as a Republican, you'd be worse off as a big lie Republican who had no
dirty hands about social security. You claimed some level of economic populism.
Then the reverse, you'd be better off as like,
I want to privatize social security, but I think that the big lie is nonsense, right?
Like, which I think that there's like a lesson to draw there about like, you know, the how powerful
the pocketbook rhetoric is, when you're talking about two people head to head who are at least
viewed by by voters as being honest arbiters or whatever,
like re you know,
reasonable people.
But apart from that,
like the question of whether they were voting against these big lie
candidates,
because they were offended by the notion of these people meddling in the
elections that they had just voted in versus them just being liars is like, you know, I acknowledge that when Trump was president and he was, you know, having Secret Service pay for the privilege of him golfing every weekend so that he could line his pockets with Secret Service money and having emirs come to his hotels to overpay for, right?
That you could do an investigation on that and like it's obvious corruption.
It's terrible.
It's hard to make a connection to people's concerns.
And it's harder still maybe to make them realize that that's worse corruption than anything that we've seen from any president in history,
any American politician probably in history,
right? I think it's, A, it's doable, but you don't always know what you're going to come up
with when you begin one of these fishing expeditions, right? And like, it was Benghazi
that led to emails that led to, I don't know what the live connection to Hillary Clinton's email
server is, but it pissed off a lot of people.
And at the very least,
it was something that was in their heads when they went to vote,
like, you know, the Gallup word cloud
of things that voters said
that they had picked up during the election.
It was like emails was the biggest one.
It was like, that's the, like,
sort of the power of, like,
creating media around your opponent
that's negative,
even if there's no nexus to the everyday lives of people. And like, that's why I think that Republicans want to do the same thing with Hunter Biden. Like, I, you know, I don't know what they're going to find. I'm pretty certain it's not going to be anything actually disqualifying about Joe Biden, but it might be just enough to get, you know, that hamster wheel turning again.
And that could be very damaging. And like the fact that Democrats are hesitant to do that
because they're thinking two chess moves ahead and how it's going to play in swing districts
seems like just leaving opportunity on the table, especially when the people you're investigating,
it's not really a fishing
expedition. They're the most corrupt American politicians in the country's history.
They have opened a lot of investigations over the last several years. I think the question is,
there is a finite amount of time and space to discuss politics every day, particularly in a fractured media environment where it's hard to get a message out.
And what do you focus the message on? What do you make news on and not make news on or try to prioritize over something else?
And those decisions, I think Democrats are more likely to prioritize, OK, what are these swing voters going to care about?
Republican politicians, for good or for ill, and you could argue for the last couple elections it's been for ill, tend to prioritize what's just going to get our people excited and angry.
Well, I think it's kind of two at once.
Like, I think the Democrats think we're going to meet the swing voters where they are.
And Republicans think we're going to tell them where we want them to go.
And it happens to be where our base already is, right?
Like, that's what emails was about.
It wasn't just about the base.
It was about swing voters.
And I think that the Hunter Biden thing they hope is going to be similar.
And I think that that's smart when you're dealing with a subset of the population that has proven election in and election out that they're pretty whimsical about what what drives them to vote.
Even the even the Hillary thing, like the emails became like it played into longstanding concerns about Hillary Clinton.
Right. Sure. I think what did Kevin McCarthy do the last couple of weeks?
There's all like the Hunter Biden stuff is swirling around there. There's all the
investigations he can do. He goes down to the border and he makes it about the border, right?
That is something that on the flip side, a democratic leader would do because he's looking
at polls and he's thinking to himself, their real political liability, the administration is how
many people are upset with
what's going on at the border. And even folks who are in favor of a pathway to citizenship,
there's enough of them that tend to think the border is out of control, rather whether they
think it should be tighter border security or less restrictive border security, they think it's out
of control. And so they feel like that's pushing on an open door. Like, I don't think that Kevin
McCarthy right now is thinking like, oh, this Hunter Biden thing, this is political gold for us. Like, I don't think and that's why some of these some of the moderates or at least some of the Republicans, not I won't call the moderate, but some of the Republicans who were just elected in Biden districts are very wary of going down this path on some of these investigations. But I think McCarthy thinks, well, I can I can get everyone together on this border issue. That's going to be easier politics.
So I think Kevin McCarthy is just smart enough to do both things at once, but no smarter than that, because he's going to say, yeah, I wouldn't give him that much.
Because of this same Kevin McCarthy who like lost the speakership in 2015 or whenever Paul Ryan took over because he went on TV and he said,
we created the Benghazi select committee to trash Hillary Clinton and look at
her poll numbers going, right? Like that's the same guy.
And so I think that he's like, he's not sure what the, what the hundred,
and he has no problem letting it like letting Jim Jordan run wild on that.
And like, he's going to let whoever the Comer,
I forget who's going to run point on impeaching mayorkas just cuz just for fun um you know some something about the border probably uh
uh and just like just like see where it goes and not you know yes probably the like the newly
elected new york republicans who if they want a second term, are going to
need some distance from that kind of thing, or think that at least, are going to plead with him
to not let that get too out of control. And like the flip side of it is, Kevin McCarthy could go
to them and say, look, if we drag Joe Biden's approval ratings from 46 down to 40, you're
going to get reelected. And he will. He'll say, I mean, that's exactly what I'll say to them.
Yeah. But like Nancy Pelosi could say that to whoever's nervous in her caucus about
whatever else um and and this is ultimately the core of what like exasperates me is like
the risk reward calculation seems all off to me like the risk of going after your opponent
seems very low the reward if you strike gold seems like you win the election.
It might be easier to sort of like, let's look ahead over the next couple of years and like what Democrats could do, should do to get themselves in a better position for 2024, to get themselves in a position to win 2024.
Right.
Like, I would argue that the economy is still going to be a huge issue
right and if inflation continues to stick around or gas prices go up again which is are two things
that it the president biden has very little control over they are going to have to prosecute
a case on the economy that is sharper and breaks through more than it has over the last several years, right?
But they are also going to have to be opportunistic in terms of jumping on controversies,
issues, and creating controversies and issues around positions that Republicans have taken
that are incredibly unpopular or associations they have that are
incredibly unpopular. So for example, we're recording this on Monday, but the news is all
about Trump's dinner with white supremacist, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. And I'll
tell you, like I saw the reporter asked Joe Biden over the weekend, like, hey, what do you think about this?
He's like, oh, you don't know. You don't want to know what I think about it.
And I was like, yeah, I do.
Yeah, I mean, this is a free one.
This is the worst answer there is I don't think about him much, which he's said before, which.
The best answer is he's a disgrace and any Republican who doesn't condemn it owns what he did.
And then like the middle answer is like, I would say swear words if I, you know, it was like, it's better than the worst possible answer.
But yes, I want to know what he thinks and like what the rest of the party thinks.
And there have been Democrats who have said their piece about Trump dining with Nick Fuentes.
But it's, you know, basically backbenchers here and there.
There's like,
there's no party communication around it.
Here's where I would get into strategy and maybe even tactics,
less than strategy,
which this is what bothers me about this because they think about these swing
voters,
right?
What do we know about them?
They have a loose connection to politics.
They don't consume the news very closely.
So if they hear,
or they see that like Donald Trump,
had dinner with some guy who might've said something anti-Semitic, right?
Right. That like that's what because it comes across everyone saying there's no place for anti-Semitism.
It's like, OK, there's a lot of anti-Semitic people out there.
There's a lot of statements that could be classified as anti-Semitic.
Nick Fuentes like wants Jewish people to leave the country he believes in racial
segregation and I think
Democrats can't just if they're going to
talk about it it's not enough to just condemn
Donald Trump and ask people to condemn
Donald Trump like you actually have to give
people the information
about the controversy
and especially someone this extreme
in a very clear way
over and over again and i would
if i was i would joe biden if i was the leaders of congress i would have every democrat out there
talking about this for at least a couple days to get it out there yeah and i mean and and let it
ride because some republican is going to come to trump's defense and then it it snowballs and you
just keep it going and like you know i want want to defend Biden because I think that he's actually been kind of a bright spot in all this.
Like he's the first Democrat who like decided he should say that what Republicans are embracing with the big lie and, you know, trying to subvert elections is semi-fascism, right?
Like he got half the way there.
And like if and when he breaks his silence
which he might by the time this yeah totally like i think that what he would say about trump dining
with the neo-nazi will be pretty good it's just like i don't think that ilan omar is not a neo-nazi
but like she doesn't even have to say anything that's even that controversial for the whole
republican party just in an instant you know they send an email around to all their members. They're all talking about it. There's a vote on the House floor. Democrats joined to condemn her. And it's that like instinct that sort of, oh, this is of course an issue that benefits us. We should definitely press it that I think has been missing from the
current congressional leadership. So I guess maybe we can close the conversation by talking about
what you anticipate from the new class that's coming in. Because since the last episode of
Positively Dreadful, Nancy Pelosi announced that she will not seek the leadership position again.
All the existing senior leaders are stepping down. They're all very old. They've all been
there forever, but they've essentially anointed Hakeem Jeffries to take over as minority leader.
And sitting here, I'm going to forget the other two.
Catherine Clark.
Aguilar and, yeah, Catherine Clark and Peter Aguilar, right, are going to be the two deputies.
And I'm curious for your sense of like, whether you think that that's going to bring with it a bit more of this kind of nimbleness, the willingness to like, just jump on the Nick Fuentes thing. fact that they were sort of hand-selected by the outgoing leaders is a sign that they were
selected for their willingness to continue running the machine the way it's been running.
I think Hakeem Jeffries will be a bit more pugnacious, probably not as pugnacious as you
hope. Probably not. I would imagine. But look, I think what we're seeing, at least what I've seen
over the last couple of years, is the example you use of like the entire Republican machine turning on a dime, you know, to condemn a statement that Ilhan Omar makes.
I think that the Democrats over the last couple of years have gotten better at that.
There's still there's always like a couple day lag, which we're in right now. You know, like I would look, I'd be shocked if by the end of the week, like most
Democrats hadn't come out and said something about Trump and Fuentes, right? Unless they just like
avoid the cameras and the microphones and they're all crazy, right? Like they shouldn't, right? Like
they shouldn't shy away from it. I think it takes us a little longer to get there, but I think it's
it's like, it's sort of like, you know, figuring out how to use a muscle, right?
It's like they're trying to exercise that muscle and they haven't for a long time.
So I think it's going to get better, but probably not as fast as we'd like.
I saw that Brian Schatz, who's friend of all of the pods, make the point, which is true, that if Raphael Warnock wins the runoff in Georgia, the majority will go from 50-50 to 51-49, which frees up Democrats in the committees where they'll have a one vote majority to issue subpoena for subpoena, investigations for
investigations, real investigations to both neutralize the Benghazi effect and root out
real corruption. And I guess the importance of the Warnock race and a good place to end
is that we'll have like a little test case of whether they would put that extra increment of power to real use and if they don't if they like uh hold their fire because they're worried about mark warner's senate
seat or whatever then you'll haul chuck schumer onto pod save america and make him explain himself
look i yes yes i will and i will just say like Chuck Schumer, I have given him a lot of crap over last year. Like Chuck Schumer did okay.
He did.
He did okay.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, like he landed the Inflation Reduction Act. He kept that they kept the Senate. You know, it's pretty, it's kind of, you know.
Yeah, I don't want to end up any place sticky but like the look i am not
i am not some huge no no no i'm just like i give him some credit i give him a lot of credit
yeah i mean the senate democrats performance in 2020 and 2022 i think in general was better than
the house democrats performance those same elections and look i think and obviously you
know but the 2024 is going to be a brutally tough election. Yeah. But I agree with you that
Republicans start down this investigation path and Democrats have the power to go subpoena for
subpoena, then they should, of course, if nothing else than to defend themselves. Yep. All right.
Why don't we leave it there? Perfect. This was fun. I think now we can agree on everything, yeah. Thank you. and share our episodes as videos every week.