Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Trump Won: Young Men’s Red Wave, the Blue-City Flop, and the Incumbency Graveyard

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Derek shares his big-picture theory for Trump's victory. Then, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson explains how Trump shifted practically the entire electorate to the right. Links: Derek's article that inspired his open: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/donald-trump-covid-election/680559/ The Washington Post voter shift map:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/11/05/compare-2020-2024-presidential-results/ The graveyard of the incumbents: https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893 Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kristen Soltis Anderson Producer: Devon Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's happening? It's Todd McShay and I'm back with a new home and a new show at the Ringer and Spotify. The McShay Show. It's a video and audio podcast coming to you year round with all my NFL draft information, big boards, mock drafts and player movement. Plus, I'll be chatting with some of my best friends in football, including some of your favorite football analysts. During the week, we'll have episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays that'll include discussions about my player rankings, who's rising, who's falling, and who your NFL team should be keeping an eye on. Plus, we'll be reacting each week to the college football playoff polls and giving you previews and picks for each Saturday's slate. In addition, I'll have episodes on Saturday nights

with my immediate reaction to the full day in college football every week. So if you love the college game, the NFL, the draft, or all of it like me, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, and get ready for the McShay show on the ringer, Spotify, and wherever you watch or listen to podcasts. I slept about four hours on election night Tuesday. Went to sleep around midnight, woke up at 4 a.m. And in the customary habit of the chronically insomniac, I looked at my phone for the next 30 minutes, 100 minutes. I spent a lot of time studying the Washington Post's map of the U.S. electorate. This is a map of the country filled with red and blue arrows, denoting which counties were moving right compared to the 2020-11.

election and which counties were moving left. The map was a sea of red, a wave even. Donald Trump won the 2024 election, not by picking off one demographic or another, but by moving the entire country to the right. According to an analysis by the economist Jed Kolko, Trump shifted rural areas four points to the right, high-density suburbs, five points to the right, and larger urban counties like New York and Los Angeles, nine points toward Republicans. Trump improved his margins not only in swing states, but also in comfortable Democratic strongholds.

In 2020, Biden won New Jersey by 16 points. In 2024, Harris seems poised to win New Jersey by just five. Five points is roughly the margin of victory for Trump in Arizona, a swing state. Harris ran behind Biden in rural Texas border towns where many Hispanic people live, and in rural Kentucky, where very few Hispanic people live. She ran behind Biden in high-income suburbs like Loudoun County, Virginia, and in counties that were college towns, including Dane, home to University of Wisconsin. The commentator Jesse Single put things rather mortently when he said, quote, easy way to understand the election.

Number one, pick a group the Democrats and their media supporters. said would be turned off by Trump's remarks. Number two, Trump made gains with this group. For those of you who have been following the show all year, you know I've been particularly interested in the gender gap among young people. I'm interested in this gap because youth is a sensitive period for forming political opinions. The ideologies you grab onto at 20 or 25 tend to shape our ideology at, say, 65. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of 120,000 registered voters, young men have shifted third. 33 points toward Republicans in the last six years, from comfortably Democratic to comfortably

Republican. So how did Donald Trump do this? How does someone lose the 2020 election, deny that obvious loss, oversee an insurrection and riot at the Capitol, get impeached, receive almost universal condemnation from even conservative of commentators, get indicted for hush money, get indicted for concealing and lying about classified documents, get indicted for election interference, be on the receiving end of four years of relentless criticism from established media that reaches tens of millions of Americans and not only win the presidency in 2024, but win the popular vote for the first time by shifting practically

the entire electorate to the right. Today's guest is Kristen Solis Anderson, a Republican researcher and strategist and co-founder of Eschlan Insights. And in a few minutes, you're going to hear her theories and explanations for what just happened. But first, let me give you mine. My big picture, in a nutshell theory of 2024, is that this was the second pandemic election. This election was about COVID, just not in the way that most people today think about COVID. First, this election was about inflation.

And inflation was a part of the pandemic. The pandemic you could think of as a health emergency followed by an economic emergency. Supply chain disruptions around the world combined with a snapback in post-pandemic spending to create a surge in demand chasing a shortage of supply. And that is the macro 101 equation for a global inflation crisis, which is exactly what we got. At its peak, inflation exceeded 6% in France, 7% in Canada, 8% in Germany, 9% in the UK, 10% in Italy, and 20% in Argentina, and Turkey, and Ethiopia, and a dozen other countries. This global inflation surge led to a global incumbency wipeout. The Establishment Party, the ruling party, in practically every country has lost.

its election or lost seats in its election in the last 18 months. I'm including not just the U.S., but South Korea, Slovenia, Australia, Sweden, Italy, Finland, Slovakia, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, France, the UK, Austria, Lithuania, and Japan. All of those countries have in the last 18 to 20 months seen their incumbent government defeated or their seats destroyed. According to an analysis by John Byrne Murdoch at the F.T. For the first time on record since 1905, every governing party facing election in a developed country lost vote share this year.

Since 1905, you simply cannot listen to any analysis of this election, or take seriously any analysis of what one party did right or another party did wrong that does not take into account the fact that every establishment party is losing, everywhere. The last 20 months have been a graveyard of incumbents because of a global inflationary crisis that was as contagiously international as the coronavirus. The shadow of the pandemic, though,

isn't just economic. I think it's also cultural. I think many people feel that blue states abandoned society during the pandemic, and they're still angry about school lockdowns, angry about the Biden administration's attempts to regulate speech for public health reasons, angry about vaccine mandates, angry about progressive lockdowns and other pandemic-era excesses that they associate with the Democratic Party. I disagree with them about the validity of some of these policies. I agree with them about the validity of some of these concerns. But fundamentally, it doesn't matter what I believe. I'm one voter out of 160 million. and roughly 80 million of them voting for Trump, enough of them believe that the Democratic Party

overreached in the last four years enough to deserve this conclusion. I also think that the cultural and economic arguments, or the cultural and economic legacy that pandemic, helped to explain Trump's extraordinary surge in urban America. Remember, the last time that Donald Trump won in 2016, the most obvious, The obvious demographic trend was that rural America was moving to the right, but the cities were shifting to the left. We can't say that at all today, because in fact, today cities are shifting to the right even faster than rural areas.

New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all seem to have moved 10 points toward the Republican column. These are holy shit numbers, and they're telling us that Americans who live in cities governed by Democrats simply do not seem happy about democratic governance. The bottom line, as I see it, is that in a year where incumbents lost everywhere, the incumbent White House represented by Kamala Harris, Trump's victory was in large part a reverberation of trends set in motion in the pandemic, global inflation, and domestic frustration.

In nature, the largest tsunami, the largest tsunami, following an earthquake is often not the first oscillation, but the second. In 2022, polls predicted a red wave, and Democrats exceeded expectations. In 2024, polls foresaw a close election, and the second wave wiped them out. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Chris and Soltus Anderson, welcome with the show. Thank you so much for having me.

So I just took up a bunch of oxygen in my open explaining what I think happened on Tuesday night. You're not only closer to the ground in terms of understanding the polls and how to read them. You also published an article in the New York Times the week before the election sticking out your neck a bit and explaining why you thought Trump had a better than even chance to win. So I think the way we should start here is that I should shut up and give you the floor. Tell me two things off the bat. One, what did you see before the election that made you think this was leaning toward Trump? And number two, looking at the map, at the most macro level, what strikes you most intensely about the returns as we understand them today?

So I don't want to take too much credit because I really was adamant that I did not want to make a prediction. Anytime friends would text me and say, what's your gut say? I'm like, my gut is not a process. I'm not responding to this test. But we did find, you know, in some of our polling, we found Trump doing better than expected in Pennsylvania. We showed the battlegrounds perhaps a little closer than some of the other major media polls had shown. And I think part of that was that we were really showing men swinging pretty heavily toward Donald Trump.

We were showing that the gender gap cut both ways. We were showing Donald Trump consolidating more support among voters who are not white, particularly Latino voters. And if those trends came to pass, and if Donald Trump was adding more Latino voters, more non-college-educated voters, more men, even at the same time that he might have been losing more educated voters, these sort of upscale suburban voters, the math just in terms of what these battleground states looks like was going to be favorable to him. The other thing that I think was an interesting hint for us, we asked a question in our last poll. who do you think your neighbors are voting for? And this one has been bandied about as a potential way to detect a shy Trump or shy Harris vote. And you may recall there were ads run trying to make the case that there's going to be this shy Harris voter, right? That there's this woman who owns a Republican sparkly maga hat and she's going to walk into the voting booth.

But wink, wink, she's going to vote for Harris. And it turned out that instead the voter that was shy was the woman whose book club was a going to go door knock for Harris over the weekend and said, oh, I'm sorry, I'm so busy, because she was voting for Trump. And so in our polling, we found by an 11-point margin, people were more likely to say they thought Trump was going to win over their neighbors. And side note, there is a guy who made $50 million betting on Polly Market because he was doing his own private surveys, asking that kind of question and finding that same thing. He bet on Trump because of that. So I don't want to take a big victory lap here, but I do think that the vibes

were moving toward Harris at the end, but it was all based on data points that to me didn't seem terribly credible, or it was harder to weave that narrative together. What struck you most intensely about the return? Let's keep it at the macro level first, then we can dive into some demographic specifics. But what was the most surprising takeaway from Tuesday night for you? I think when we look at analyzing elections, we're always looking for interesting nuggets that say, ah, this thing explains it. That thing explains it. The gender, gap grew, et cetera, et cetera. What was notable about this election is you can't say, ah, it was men that did it, or oh, it was this voter group or that voter group that did it. Everywhere moved right.

Trumpy counties moved right. Biden counties moved right. Cities moved right. Suburbs moved right. Places that are very white moved right. Places that are super diverse moved right. If you look at the New York Times' map of how much did each county swing, I mean, really, really like Washington State didn't move, but I mean, almost everywhere else in the country, there were these really seismic shifts to the right. And it's not explainable by any one individual demographic group. I've been telling a demographic story for the last year. And I understand that it's probably too early to validate any of those theories. For example, been talking to people like Richard Reeves about the fact that it seems like men in particular, young men, in particular young non-white men seem to be moving right.

Do we know enough to say anything demographically? Like, it seems like Hispanic shifted right more than other groups. It seems like the right word shift that you just described as being essentially national was led by men rather than women or educated voters rather than non-educated voters. Is there anything we can say for sure about the demographics of this shift yet, or do we just have to wait for higher quality exit polling? Well, if we're looking at the exit polls that we have now, which as you noted are imperfect, they get refined as more and more ballots get counted. And we know that there's still lots of ballots outstanding in places like California. But with the imperfect data we have now, it looks like men and women both shifted toward Trump, but the shift toward Trump among men.

men was pretty extraordinary, and especially among younger men. If you look at the exit polls, you find that men under the age of 45 outright voted for Donald Trump. And young women, that was another group that I think people really thought there's no way they'll move. They move too. I mean, younger voters seem to move much more than seniors. Seniors, oddly enough, didn't actually move that much at all. They were a very slightly Trump-leaning group. I suspect when we get higher quality data, we will actually see that senior women, voted for Kamala Harris. That was like the one thing

that was the big narrative over the pre-election weekend and Selzer's poll in Iowa shows that senior citizen women are breaking for Harris in huge numbers. I actually think when the dust settles, you will find that senior citizen women broke for Kamala Harris

and maybe even by double-digit margins. But it was so overwhelmed by this sea change we saw among Gen Z voters, particularly Gen Z men and particularly Latino men. When you look at the demographic divides between Latino voters by gender, you see that outright Trump won Latino men by 12 points in the exit polls. And Latino women swung, I think, 17 points on the margin toward Trump, too.

They still voted more for Harris. But it is hard to tell a story that is just focused on one demographic, because when you scan through the exit polls, it's just like, oh, this group did, and this group did, and this group did. I think younger voters and Latino voters are the most interesting story. But you also had Trump winning white suburban women. I mean, this just just so many things that defied the pre-election narrative and defy a simple demographic explanation. In my open, I shared my theory that 2024 is best thought of as the second COVID election. That's in part because I think inflation, which was clearly such a significant actor in this election, is, I think in many ways, a pandemic or post-pandemic phenomenon.

It's because I think a lot of voters are still upset about what they see as progressive overreach in terms of pandemic policy. But look, I'm a guy in an attic in North Carolina looking at screens and writing down thoughts. You have polled thousands of people. You have convened focus groups. Did you hear about COVID or the legacy of the pandemic from voters you spoke to, especially these newer Trump voters, these persuaded voters?

So the first way that I think it still has an effect is, I think the Make America Healthy Again, Mom's Movement, is real. And it is a big piece of why, when you look at these numbers and you see, oh my gosh, Trump is winning white suburban women, like that's a big piece of it. It is women who may have been available to vote for Democrats in the past, but they no longer feel like they get trustworthy information from experts about health topics, a real sea change driven about from the whole COVID everything, not just the vaccines, but just everything about our public health officials on the level with me is what I'm hearing about the safety of the products I'm consuming, the food I'm eating, all of that.

I mean, this is the sort of moms who are really worried about microplastics in their kids' food, who may have been totally available to vote to debt for Democrats in the past, have now been organized into a political movement. And I think that that is one of the things that we're going to be studying a lot more over the next year. I also think that this government overreach in terms of things like closed schools. I mean, the backlash against, I think, teachers unions and schools and this openness to things like school choice and maybe I want to homeschool my kid, like that is all a very big movement. And a place where you saw that pop up before this election was actually when you go back to the Glenn Yonken election back in 2021,

you know, that was a moment where there was this backlash against things like school closings, et cetera. And you saw a county like Loudoun County, Virginia. It's the most upscale, I think highest income county, possibly in the U.S., had swung blue during the first Trump era, but had then become a place that Glenn Yonkin could win back. Well, when we look, how did Trump do in Loudoun County, Virginia? He did nine points better this time than he did last time. That's exactly the kind of place that we've been told over and over. Republicans are losing the Loudoun counties of the world. They're losing these upscale voters. It turns out maybe not really. And I do think that, let me just take like one even bigger step back.

I think that voters elected Joe Biden because they said it feels like things are in chaos, it feels like things aren't working. We're in this pandemic. Everything feels terrible. And I want to change. And Joe Biden was elected to be the guy who was going to bring about calm and stability and putting the adults back in charge. And when you ask voters now, they don't feel like they got what they were promised.

And so I think there's just an element of buyer's remorse going on here where some of these voters, who voted for Joe Biden, don't feel like we ever actually reckoned with or undid some of the damage from COVID, that they still don't feel like they can trust institutions that they think led them astray. And that discontent made them much more open to a Donald Trump. I think you're absolutely right. I, you know, as a progressive, agreed with a lot of the policies that I think have made a lot of Americans unhappy. I think the vaccines worked.

I think a lot of the vaccine mandates, especially at the federal level, were justified. I supported the early spring 2020 lockdowns, did not as much support the continued school lockdowns. There's a lot of these policies that I'm on the fence about or actually support that I nonetheless have to admit aren't popular like they are with me and my friends among a large majority of the country or among a large enough group that their shift could be meaningful in the election. And I just want listeners to know, like, as I go through these things, I'm trying to see this shift objectively, even as I think maybe some of the causes of the shifts might in fact be policies that I'd support. And that's, you know, some of the tough things about just having a

public policy that there's a lot of people who will agree and some people who won't agree. On the issue of inflation, I think you're really intelligent to point out that in many cases Joe Biden was a represented a kind of ticket to normalcy. And when you buy a ticket, you expect that ticket to be redeemed and meet your expectations. And his four years did not meet people's expectations. We had surprising inflation. We had surprising recurrences of COVID with Delta and Amacron, but in particular, we had surprising inflation. And I think it's very important to point out that inflation, while it seems to most Americans like an American phenomenon, was a truly global phenomenon. And incumbent parties around the world have fallen in the last 18 months.

I mean, here's just a partial list of countries where the incumbent party was. defeated or lost major seats since the spring of 2022. South Korea, France, Slovenia, Australia, Sweden, Finland, Slovenia, Finland, Poland, Portugal, France, UK, Austria, Lithuania, Japan, and now the U.S. Canada, by the way, Justin Trudeau is polling somewhere in the negative 3,000s. So if they had an election yesterday, they would have seen the exact same result for incumbents. I do think, Kristen, this leads to a natural and inevitable question, which is, could anybody associated with the incumbent party, with the Biden White House, could anybody realistically have won

the 2024 election against Donald Trump in your opinion? I do think so. But I think the break would have had to have been more decisive than Kamala Harris was able to achieve in the short amount of time that she had. And with the, sort of understandable challenges she had in not wanting to throw Joe Biden under the bus. I think it was a tough, tightrope to walk. But I do think there was a chance to say, we as a Democratic Party are turning the page. Joe Biden was elected to be this bridge to a next generation. And here we've had this process that we will now choose someone new who can be the next generation

of Democratic leader. I do think there was a way to shake off some of that malaise and say, no, as Kamala Harris often said, I'm going to be the one to turn the page. She said it over and over. It just doesn't seem as though enough voters really found it to be credible coming from her. And instead, you had the nostalgia factor working in Donald Trump's favor so strongly. I mean, when Donald Trump left office, make no mistake, he was deeply unpopular. His job approval on the last day he was in office, which comes, you know, weeks after January 6th, all of it.

His job approval was disastrous. I think it was in the low 30s. when you ask people now, did you approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump did as president? His job approval is now higher than Joe Biden's is at the moment. It's up close to like the 48, 49 level. So people are remembering just these good things about Trump and they thought, man, we gave Joe Biden a shot. It didn't work out. I do think that a new fresh face on the Democratic side could have pulled it off if they had enough time to make the clean break rather than the situation. Am I wrong to rephrase your point that for the Democrats to win the 2024 election, you essentially needed Joe Biden to make the decision he made this summer last summer,

so that the Democrats had an actual primary process whereby there was a competition to prove who could essentially establish the right, I'm not Joe Biden, message going into 2024, for, as opposed to Kamala Harris, who, as you said, I think I wrote it in a previous piece, she was like a quantum superposition between incumbent and non-incumbent. She would sometimes say, I am Joe Biden, and I think she said on the view, famously or infamously, that she had no policy ideas that would necessarily deviate from the president. And at the same time, would say I, rather than we, when she wanted to sort of eke out a way in which she was different than the president.

That's very different than someone saying, essentially, you know, like an AOC or a Jared pollists running a primary through the end of 2023 and essentially saying, I think Joe Biden's a great guy. I'm happy he's the president. I think he did these five things wrong. I think prices are too high. And here's five things that I would do to bring it down. That kind of message allows, I think, the Democratic flag bearer to demonstrate a clear difference from the deeply and popular president rather than essentially say he's kind of at my hip, Joe Biden is. But also, just remember, I'm not him. I'm my own person. I think that it would have made it possible.

No guarantees, but I think it would have made it more possible. The downside to having that primary process, though, and the one thing that I do think Harris got as an advantage of this very quick switcheroo at the top of the ticket leading to a very fast, unifying and energized convention, is that if you look back at the things that she said in the 2019-2020 primary season, those were some of the things that made it really hard for her to make that outreach to voters in the middle. And so in some ways, Democrats got a bonus

that they didn't have to go through the knife fighting and base pandering and all of the stuff you do in a primary that then makes it harder to win in a general election. But the downside is it then just made it harder to break from Biden because that hadn't. The new direction had not been litigated or discussed in public at all. You know, right now, lots of people

in my Twitter feeds are debating whether or not Kamala Harris was a good candidate. Just briefly, before we move on to the next topic, which is probably the one I find most interesting, do you think Kamala Harris was a good candidate? I think she played a tough hand in mediocre fashion in some ways. And look, that's mostly because the number one question that she should have been able to answer is, who are you and how are you different. A lot of times my Democratic friends would get very frustrated with me when I would say, I don't think voters know who Kamala Harris is. As they would say, she's talked a lot about her bio, right? She says, I'm from the middle class. She talks a lot about her record. I say, no, no, no, no, that's not who you are. When confronted with a crisis, what are the values that are driving you?

When confronted with a new policy, how do you evaluate it? And then they say, well, but she's laid out all of these policies. And I'd say, yes, she has laid out policies. She's got, I would do this homebuyer tax credit. I would do this tax cut for you. This is what I would do with this and that. But what I don't know is like, what does Kamala Harris think the appropriate role of government is? What does Kamala Harris think? Like, those are the sorts of things where, I mean, love or hate J.D. Vance, but like he has a worldview. And you can cook up in your mind, scenario X, Y, or Z, and say, how would a vice president or

President J.D. Vance respond to this? And you can probably imagine what it would be. And I think Harris was the ways in which she tried to define herself never had enough teeth to them that voters felt like, oh, okay, I can see how this would be different. And as a result, she just became Biden 2.0 to too many voters to overcome those headwinds, those global headwinds that you just talked about. We have to talk about the urban wipeout because the single most surprising thing about this election is that the last time Donald Trump won in 2016, Democrats could console themselves by saying, well, the rural parts of this country are moving to

the right. But urban America and the near suburbs are moving left, and that's where populations are growing. We cannot, Democrats cannot console themselves with that same excuse in 2024. In the New York City metro area, New York, Manhattan shifted nine points right, Brooklyn shifted 12 points right, Queens shifted 21 points right, and the Bronx shifted 22 points right. Orlando, 10 points of the right. Miami-Dade, 19 points to the right. In Texas, Houston Antonio shifted eight points to the right, Dallas shifted ten points to the right. Across the Blue Wall States and near the Blue Wall states, Pennsylvania, five points right, Detroit, nine points right. Chicago, 11 points right. Los Angeles and San Francisco have not counted more than half

their ballots as we record this. It's Thursday afternoon, which, by the way, California, Jesus Christ, get your act together, counting ballots by Abacus over there. But it's from what we can see in the returns, L.A. and San Francisco seem like they're also going to shift. 10 points toward Donald Trump. This is fascinating. This urban shift is absolutely fascinating to me. What do you think is going on here? So I think this is an extension of your, this is the second COVID election thesis, which is, it's so easy to say this is, it's the economy stupid, right? Inflation was really high. Voters consistently told us cost of living is their top issue. That's what's going on. And cost of living is high everywhere. And maybe if you're in a big

city affordability is even worse. So there's a way to make this an economic argument, but I think it's bigger than that. I think this was an election where people just feel like everything's dysfunctional, but nothing feels like it's working right. And whether that is continued hangover from everything breaking down during COVID, but crime in cities is a piece of that puzzle. And I'm well aware that there's all this data that says, you know, violent crime is actually down and, oh gosh, these Republicans are just fearmongering. But I think if you live in a city, And you walk along the streets and you see more homelessness, you see more antisocial behavior, you see more just a sense of civic breakdown, that then you want someone who's going to be the tough guy.

And I think that feeling of everything feels like it's lost its mind, everything feels crazy. What do you mean? I'm not supposed to be upset that like the laundry detergent is locked up at the CVS down the block. Like those kinds of things, I think, are not about right versus left, but are about fun. versus dysfunction, and that four years ago, people did not think Donald Trump and Republicans were the party a function, but they have seen more dysfunction over the last four years to the point where this, we just need to do something different, has pervaded so many different fragments of American life that maybe weren't feeling quite this way four years ago, but now we're just saying, we have to stop the madness. There's something in that answer that I find

really interesting because I have a personal theory that you may or may not share, which is that most people, especially in politics, most people process the world in binaries. Democrats are for one thing, Republicans are for something else. There's left and there's right. There's those for order and those for disorder. But it can be very revealing when new political parties or coalitions can find new binaries around which to orient people's sense of the world. I'm very much involved in a project

that is trying to get people to see the world through a lens of abundance versus scarcity. There's a lens or binary that you just mentioned, which is urban governance is not about left versus right. It's about function versus dysfunction. It's about do things work in your city or do things not work at all? I don't even necessarily have a question

coming out of this observation. But I do think there's something really powerful there. And I know a lot of people who are working on building a coalition within the Democratic Party that is trying to reorient its sense of progress around an access very much like that one. This isn't about the old binaries of left and right and socialist versus corporatism. This is about does the city work? Does the place where you live function or is it defined by the opposite? I think that's a really powerful frame.

Do you want to follow up on that or should I move on to the next question? I think you can look at there are places like where you have had some Democratic governors who have been elected and are considered rising stars in the party. I mean, look at Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. I don't know how many people remember this because I don't know how big a news story this was outside of like the northeast corridor. But there was, I believe, a tanker truck like exploded underneath the highway and a big piece of I-95 collapsed.

And this is like right outside of urban Philadelphia. This is like the main artery up the, you know, East Coast. And it has collapsed. And Josh Shapiro's governor and he goes in and that road is rebuilt. Like you just imagine in your mind, like how long is it going to take government to rebuild this massive highway? And it turns out that when government's functioning well, it actually didn't take that long. Like Josh Shapiro rebuilt that highway really fast.

And that's the kind of thing that I would hear in focus groups when I would talk to voters in Pennsylvania. And I would ask this sort of like hypothetical, well, what if she had picked, what if Kamala Harris had picked Josh Shapiro instead? I'm not saying that that would have changed the election, but I'm holding him up as an example of people who probably voted for Trump, but might say they view Josh Shapiro as an example of competent, effective gun. governance and why he might have been, he might have put a little more fear in the hearts of the Trump campaign if he had been the vice presidential choice. Getting I-95 reopened is not a left-right thing. No, it's not left-right. It is about function versus dysfunction. And in dysfunctional California and San Francisco, where it takes about 10 years to permit a new apartment building, Philadelphia rebuilt I-95 in 12 days, less than two weeks. And I do think that's exactly the sort

a point that I think Democrats need to find a way to make canonical in their messaging. We make the places that we govern work. And right now, they can't do that. You can't look at San Francisco and say, oh, well, at least the progressives who run that city make it work perfectly. At least the people who run Chicago or New York make it run perfectly. Instead, we have, are lots of examples where progressive governance has not led to its citizens feeling like the cities are functional. And I think it drives people out of those cities, and I think it leaves people in those cities thinking, well, who else can I turn to? And they end up moving 10 points to the right during presidential elections, which just happened. I think that's absolutely a plausible

explanation. I want to close by talking about something that I frankly don't talk about that very often, which is cultural messages. I want to ask you a sensitive question about the way the Democratic Party elites have talked about race in the last few years. The Democratic Party came into the Trump era in 2015-2016 as a coalition of white progressives and non-white Americans. And in the last eight, nine years, there have been a lot of Democrats that have proposed to hold and grow their advantage among non-white Americans and women by appealing to what they call identity politics, to directly addressing coalitions. of non-white Americans and sometimes women, pointing out the ways they are disadvantaged,

sometimes putting them against majoritarian demographic coalitions in America, and hoping that that comparison will pull these groups to their side. And what's happened instead is that eight years later, eight years into this exercise, educated women have moved left, and it seems, at least from the results we can look at today, that everybody else, and in particular Hispanics, has moved right. The Democratic coalition seems to have lost minority support during the same period that it embraced a specific strategy to identify and speak to minorities. That seems like a very important thing to scrutinize.

I don't know what the strongest implication of this argument would be. I don't know if it's clear that so-called identity politics is fully phased. the left, but certainly the experiment has not yielded positive returns for Democrats in terms of keeping non-white American voters. What do you make of the legacy of identity politics, looking at it as we are now 24 hours removed from the 2024 election? I think that the assumption that people will think about themselves, first and foremost through the lens. of either race and gender is politically problematic for the Democratic Party. And I'll give you two examples.

So the first is obviously in the week leading up to the election, you had that Madison Square Garden rally that Trump held where he had this insult comic who called Puerto Rico an island of trash or an island of garbage. And the backlash was immediate, right? You had bad bunny come out and say, and here's one of the things that I will confess as a wrong prediction. I thought, oh, my gosh, this bad bunny endorsement against Trump, like this could potentially have an effect. He's a really big deal. He's massively famous. But I had also been watching this

county right near where I grew up. So I grew up in South Orlando. Osceola County is a county right near where I grew up, very heavy Puerto Rican population. And it's the sort of place that used to reliably vote pretty democratic, working class, you know, type place and has trended a bit more to the right over the years. And so because Florida, unlike California, counts its votes very quickly, I was like, okay, Florida, even though it's not a battleground state, if I want to know to what extent Donald Trump's attempted inroads with Latino voters, has it worked or has it failed? Did this Madison Square Garden thing actually move voters like Osceola County is where I'll see it? And Osceola County voted for Joe Biden by 14 points in the 2020 election. So I pop open the election returns and I'm refreshing my screen

and it shows Osceola County is close to tide. And I'm like, oh. And then you refresh it again because more votes got counted. And suddenly, Trump is winning Osceola by one. And then you refreshed again, and in the end, he won Osceola County by two points. This is a week after, everybody said Puerto Rican voters are going to abandon Trump and droves because of this. And not only didn't they, they surged toward him. And it's not just Puerto Rican voters. I mean, if you look at places like Star County and Texas, you look at Allentown and Pennsylvania, places that have large Latino populations, they're among the most that swung toward Trump. The other example I was going to give of an example of appealing to identity politics that didn't seem to work is, as you noted, white educated

women did swing a little bit more toward Democrats, but white women on the whole still voted for Trump, white women without college degrees, huge Trump demographic. And I think back to when Harris first became the candidate, and there was this Zoom call that was like white women for Harris. And I thought, to me personally, getting on a call that's like, hey, white women, let's all hop on a call, just like it just feels like an off note. It doesn't feel like the sort of Zoom link I want to click on. Because I don't, just thinking about myself with that as the identity label, you are a white woman, is I think not the way most voters like to think about themselves. I think people think about themselves as I'm a gator fan. I like watching car racing. I work really hard as a pollster. I'm a mom.

There are all these other identities that come to me first and foremost before I think about myself in terms of my race or even specifically my gender. And so by leaning so hard on messaging that says, no, no, think about yourself as a white woman for Kamala Harris or think about yourself as a Latino woman for, I just wonder if that's a, it's a gamble on people thinking about themselves through an identity lens that is not the one that they think of themselves, that they think about primarily. And that's why you've seen these shifts across the board for so many different groups for Republicans this time around. Yeah, I want to keep this question open for myself,

and I want to keep it as complex and naughty as it deserves to be. I'm not one of these people who, for example, thinks that the term Latinx moved a million votes toward Trump. I also think it's probably fair to say that, you know, Kamala Harris herself did not exactly race toward identity politics. She seemed actually interestingly loathe to identify herself as or play up the fact that she was a woman. Obviously, she wasn't hiding from the fact that she was a woman. But I think if you compare the language of her campaign to the language of the Hillary Clinton campaign,

she was trying to keep things a little bit less identitarian than Hillary Clinton did on that front. But at the same time, I do think that, you know, a party is a combination of economic arguments and cultural argument. And I wonder what's going to happen to cultural progressivism, looking at this election, and really reconciling oneself to the fact that years and years of calling Trump racist and sexist and anti-Muslim actually seems to have coincided with a period where he became more popular among working class women, more popular among non-whites of white. both genders and all genders and all ethnicities, I think that's a really interesting phenomenon. The very last question, you know, this era of vote out the bums, which we're seeing sort of sweeping the world, is, it's clearly economic. It clearly has something to do with the international nature of inflation and the fact that people simply hate it. I wonder whether you think this era of anti-establishment, anti-incumbency, is also cultural.

You know, one thing that I find so interesting is that since 2000, pretty much every midterm election and presidential election in the U.S. has involved a change in control of the House-Senator White House, except for 2004 where George W. Bush barely eeked out a win by about 100,000 votes in Ohio, and 2012 where Barack Obama won re-election, but Republicans retained control of the House. The U.S. isn't in this era of unusually close elections that are constantly swinging back and forth, as if the electorate is always looking to hate the incumbent and then vote them out by a narrow margin and then hate the new incumbent and vote them out by a narrow margin. And then hate the new incumbent and vote them out by a narrow margin. And I wonder if there's something

cultural to that, whether it has to do with the sort of negative anti-establishment vibes of the internet, the negative anti-incumbency vibes of modern media, I suppose you could chalk it up to luck. But what do you think explains the fact that this isn't just a year of anti-incumbency? This is really a young century of anti-incumbency, at least in the U.S. I think the one point you just made about the information environment we're all living in is a big part of this. If you think about how most people are getting their news, they're not getting their news by turning on a TV. They're not getting their news by subscribing to a daily newspaper. It's coming to us fed through algorithms that are primed to find the stuff that's going to make us feel something. And so that's why you get the

phenomenon of doom scrolling. It was not possible to doom scroll in the year 2002. It was not possible to dooms scroll in the year 1998, years where we actually didn't see midterm elections that may have been, weren't seeing this big, like, anti-incumbent type thing where whoever's the president, there's this massive effect. And I think there's a change in our information environment that has primed us to feel more negatively about everything. But I also think we are living in an era where trust in everything is down. Trust in government is down. Trust in academia is down. Trust in media is down. Trust in everything. You look at any of those numbers. Do you trust institution X, Y, or Z to do the right thing. All of it's down. And so that means that at every point in time, people are going,

well, maybe if we put new people in, they will behave in a way that is worthy of our trust. Maybe I can begin trusting our government again. Maybe I can begin trusting that when I get told something on the news, I can believe that it's accurate. Maybe once again, I can believe that law enforcement or the media or, I mean, it's like, or not, that law enforcement or the military or religious institutions, trust is down everywhere. And in that low trust environment, does that just prime itself for people constantly feeling discontented, constantly feeling like nothing is being delivered on? And that means they're constantly looking for what's the next thing? That didn't work. Okay, let's try it again. I love everything that you said, except I have a bugaboo about the idea

that trust is down. And I have like a rant on this. And maybe I was thinking about saving this for a totally different show, but I'll try the rant out on you and see how, it works and we'll see if it actually becomes its own show. I don't think trust is down. I think trust's vector has shifted from top-down trust to bottom-up trust. So for example, if someone says, I don't believe the CDC and the FDA about the COVID vaccine. I believe Joe Rogan about Ivermectin. Is trust down or did trust shift from the FDA to Joe Rogan? It requires an extraordinary amount of trust to put a substance you don't understand into your body because a podcaster in Texas told you to. That's actually a very high trusting thing to do. It's just not trusting the sort

of establishments we think of as being trustworthy. And I think that one thing that's happening, especially in this Maha, Make America Healthy Again movement that you described earlier in the show, is not the disappearance of trust, but rather in a context in which trust like matter can either be created or nor destroyed, you go out in the world and you necessarily trust things in order to live. It's simply shifting from the establishments, the institutions, to the revolutionaries, the upstarts, the bottom-up influencers. And what seems to be happening in American politics is that the outsiders crash the gates, they become the establishment, people distrust the establishment, vote out the bums, use to be the outsiders, give me a new set of outsiders,

and we repeat the cycle because every group of outsiders that wins an election inherently becomes the establishment because that's what a government is. It is the establishment of all establishments. So I think that I'm just reacting just to the language of trust is down. I don't think trust is down. I think it's a vector has changed. I think we used to have top down and now we have bottom up. How do you feel about that general thesis? I think that's completely correct. I think it is the trust in institutions is down, but trust in individuals is still in play. And so I think from a political context, I bet if I go ask a bunch of voters, do you trust the Republican Party?

They're not going to say yes to that question, but do you trust Donald Trump? Oh, yeah, I trust Donald Trump. Like, I do think that there's an individuals versus institutions and industries component to this that you have nailed. And I think this is a really, really interesting and problematic phenomenon going forward because the world needs institutions. The world needs groups of people to solve problems. The State Department cannot simply cease to exist.

you can hate the Department of Health and Human Services, you can hate the CDC or the FDA, but someone needs to do those jobs, or more specifically, someone's need to do those jobs, that's not a one-person job. And so a world in which we only trust individuals who are not infused with power

and distrust any individuals who belong to a group that has power is a weird future to walk into, and as always, I do blame our information ecosystems, which is to say, I do again blame the Internet. Kristen Anderson, thank you so much. This is fun. Thanks for having.