Pod Save America - “AOC calls BS.”

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

Our new Wisconsin poll shows Trump's strengths and vulnerabilities in a pivotal state, the economy shows warning signs of a possible recession, and the White House shows once again that their re-election strategy involves racist policies. Then Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks to Jon about immigration, race, the Green New Deal, and Democratic messaging.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the pod, my interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who joined me at Crooked HQ for a very fun and lengthy chat yesterday. But first, we have the results of our latest 2020 Polar Coaster series with Change Research. We're also going to talk about the rising risk of a recession and the Trump administration's latest attempt to limit legal immigration in America. You won't want to miss this week's episode of Pod Save the World.

Tommy and Ben talk about everything from the escalating situation in Hong Kong to the really scary story in the New York Times about how right-wing extremism is spreading around the world. Boston Celtic center Enes Kanter also joined Ben in the studio for an interview about human rights and why Turkey's president banned him from returning to his home country. And if you want to see the height difference between Ennis and Ben, watch the interview on YouTube.com slash Crooked Media.

You can also see my full interview with AOC there as well. So check out our YouTube channel and subscribe. A reminder that Saturday is our show with the Greek. We'll be joined by Jamel Hill, Maggie Rogers, Amanda Seals, Best Coast, Jim James, and we'll be donating the proceeds to organizations at the forefront of the fight to protect voting rights. So grab your tickets at crooked.com slash the Greek, and also check out our new merch at crooked.com slash store. We got brand new Friend of the Pod tees, which are very cool.

Finally, if you know anyone in North Carolina who isn't registered to vote or isn't sure, please remind them that this Friday, August 16th, is the deadline. There is a special election for a House seat there on September 10th, and if you want to know why, listen to Rigging North Carolina on Crooked Minis with our political director, Shaniqua McClendon. Okay, let's kick things off with the results of the latest in our 2020 Polar Coaster series with Change Research. This time, we polled nearly 2,000 general election voters in the state of Wisconsin, and we asked them all kinds of questions, including whether certain messages

made them more or less likely to vote for Donald Trump or the Democratic candidate in 2020. Now, before we get to the results, Dan, this particular poll was your idea, and a fantastic idea it was. Why did you want to poll Wisconsin, and why did you want this to be a general election poll instead of another primary poll? Well, I mean, a couple different reasons. One, there is a primary poll coming out every three seconds. And the media, friends of the pod, the Democratic voters are not lacking for polls about who's winning the race. And they actually haven't moved that much in a long time. So it's just sort of, we're constantly

getting the stream of content. So my thought was, what is an area that would be of great interest that is not being polled? And Wisconsin is probably the most important state as the map currently stands for what's going to decide 2020 is what we call the tipping point state. It's why Trump became president. It's the clearest path for Democrats to get the White House back as to flip Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, the three states that Trump flipped. And also wanted to do this poll differently, to do it in a way that made it look more like the campaign polls that we've been working on our whole life as opposed to the media polls, which are totally fine. But I felt like this was the right thing to do in part because we wanted to be able to provide some guidance and advice to the larger progressive universe about what the poll says may work in Wisconsin.

Yeah. And so just to go back to what you were saying about the tipping point state, the reason we call Wisconsin the tipping point state is if Democrats win Wisconsin, it is almost a sure thing that we have also won Pennsylvania and Michigan because the demographics in Wisconsin are tougher for us than Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It's still possible that we could lose Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all three of them again. But the reason we say Wisconsin is tipping point is it is the toughest of the three. And the reason it's so important is because if we do lose Wisconsin, as you say, Dan, the path to 270 narrows. We could replace Wisconsin with Arizona,

which is another very important state. But of course, Democrats haven't won Arizona in a presidential contest in quite some time, even though we did win it in 2018. So Arizona is a possibility. But yeah, that's why we call it a tipping point state. And yes, on campaigns, on the Obama campaign in 8 and 12, on other campaigns we've been on, frequently when we put a poll in the field in a swing state like Wisconsin, we would test various messages about our candidate and about the opposing candidates, about the Democrats and about the Republicans. get a good sense of where voters are, what issues are important to them, and which contrasts with the other party and the other candidate are most effective at actually moving voters and persuading them. Yeah, that's the difference, right? A media poll is designed to give readers of said media outlet a window into what is happening in that state at that moment, right? It is a snapshot in time. In a campaign poll,

it's interesting to know what is happening right now, if only to serve as a baseline, but the whole point of the campaign poll is to figure out not what is happening right now, is how to change the outcome on election day. And so we tried to design this poll in a way that more resembled that than a typical media poll. Okay. Without further ado, let's talk about some of the results and we'll start with the standard horse race stuff before moving on to the more interesting message testing. In Wisconsin, the president's job approval rating is 48% approved, 51% disapproved, much higher than it is nationally. His approval rating on the economy is even higher, 50% to 48%.

His approval rating on the economy is even higher, 50% to 48%. Overall, 46% of all voters say they will definitely or probably vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is. 45% of voters say they will definitely or probably vote for Trump. 3% say they'll vote for a third-party candidate. And 6% are undecided. Dan, what do you think of those numbers? Surprising to you? Concerning, but not surprising. I mean, we would love to get a poll that said that Trump's national approval rating, which is 42, 43, depending on what measure you use, was, that would be his approval rating in the swing states. But he is polling at what is a very

viable win number for him in Wisconsin. And just to give you some perspective, viable win number for him in Wisconsin. And just to give you some perspective, Trump is at 48 here when Barack Obama won Wisconsin by nearly seven points on election day in 2012. His approval rating in the exit polls was 48%. That is concerning. And just to dig into these numbers a little bit, there are certain groups of voters who will probably decide the election. You know, one thing we saw with the electorate in Wisconsin, it is extremely polarized. So, you know, Trump is only getting three percent of Democrats. The Democratic candidate is only getting two percent of Republicans. Right. So both parties are very polarized. Independents who are 35 percent of the electorate in Wisconsin in this poll, lean Trump 43 to 41. So he's got a slight lead with independents in this poll.

And then there are a couple other sort of swing groups here. The people who voted for a third party in 2016, who are currently make up about a quarter of the undecided vote in Wisconsin, they lean towards the Democrat by 30 to 22%. vote in Wisconsin, they lean towards the Democrat by 30 to 22 percent. And then the 2016 non-voters, people who did not vote in 2016, but who say they are going to vote in 2020, they make up about 16 percent of undecided voters. They lean towards the Democrat by 45 to 30 percent. So there is some opportunity for the Democratic candidate with 2016 third party voters and non-voters. But, you know, still a lot of work to do in that category as well. Dan, what do you think about the above sort of the swing groups here? I mean, that's exactly right. And it speaks to like what we've tried to talk about in politics

more generally as early as the 2020, which is, you can't find it particularly in these Midwestern swing states. You're going to have to do both. And by that, I mean, we're going to have to persuade some people who voted for a third party candidate or voted for Trump last time and find some people who didn't vote in 2016 and turn them out. There's just very little margin for error in these states. Some other states like Texas and Florida and North Carolina have these very large pockets of unregistered, likely Democratic voters, often voters of color,

that you can go out and organize and get to vote. And that alone, if you could pull off that feat, could tip those states. These Midwestern states have been incredibly registered. The low-hanging fruit has been taken from recent elections. They have shrinking populations in a lot of cases. And so the formula for victory requires new voters turning out the base and persuading some folks in the middle. And I don't even mean the middle ideologically. I just mean people who either identify as independents or voted for Trump in the past. So you're going to like this poll reinforces the idea that the path to victory in Wisconsin and to get to 270 is sort of an is not an and or strategy. It's an and both strategy. Yeah.

So we're not going to talk too much about the Democratic candidates because for all the reasons we mentioned at the top. Also, you know, non early state polls don't tell you too much about the race. This isn't an Iowa poll or a New Hampshire poll. The candidates aren't campaigning here, so you shouldn't take it too seriously. But I will say that Elizabeth Warren has the highest favorability among Democratic voters, at 83% favorable, and is currently leading the horse race in Wisconsin at 29%, followed by Bernie Sanders at 24%, Joe Biden at 20%, and everyone else in single digits. Dan, anything to say about the Democratic race before we move on to the good stuff? No, I think it's interesting that Warren

is winning. It probably tells us more about her surge nationally and in the early states than it tells you about who's going to win Wisconsin because there are going to be several cataclysmic political events that happen that shake up the race and win over the field between now and then the four early state contests most obviously will change the race but it's interesting but it's not why we're doing this yeah and I should say for people who look into the crosstabs, if you look at the favorability ratings for all of our Democratic candidates in the field among all voters, they don't look great right now. They're all underwater. But people should know that one reason for that is because a lot of these Democratic candidates are not getting, you know, high percentages among Democrats right now because they're all fighting it out in the primary. So if you have a candidate that you really like, you're also likely to say that you don't like as much of the other Democratic candidate. Where there's a nominee, usually those numbers will change.

But I should say even among a general electorate right now, Warren has the highest favorability ratings. That is driven by the fact that she has the highest favorability ratings among Democrats themselves. Okay, so we talked about Trump's strengths in Wisconsin, his overall job approval, and the current advantage that he has on the economy. Let's talk about his potential weaknesses. We tested a series of positive and negative messages about Donald Trump. Overall, the anti-Trump messages were more persuasive than the pro-Trump messages. And the most persuasive anti-Trump messages, the messages that made voters say

they were much less likely to vote for him, largely had to do with Trump being a phony populist who governed as a plutocrat. The most persuasive message was about Trump proposing nearly a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts to pay for his tax cut for the rich. It made voters say they were less likely to support Trump by a margin of 38 points. Several messages were close behind that one. Trump using his office to enrich himself and his family business.

Trump's failed trade war with China and Trump's record on outsourcing. There was also one non-economic message that was very effective, a reminder that Trump has been credibly accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women. Dan, you came out of campaign retirement. You wrote an entire strategy memo for Democrats about these findings. What are your takeaways and what's your advice? Sure. So the first takeaway, as we pointed out at the top, is that Trump is very strong in Wisconsin. He's much stronger in Wisconsin than he is nationally, and that's because of the demographics. But for two other reasons. One, he has strengthened the economy. His economic approval rating in Wisconsin is a few points higher than his actual approval rating and higher

than his vote share in the poll we conducted. So that is an advantage to him. The second advantage he has is that he has managed to weaponize immigration in the state. Immigration is by far the number one issue picked by Trump voters, Republican voters, and even independents. And so that is to Trump's great advantage. But what I was really blown away by in this poll is that for all of Trump's dominance of the media, the fact that Trump has talked about, covered 24-7, and the bulk of that coverage is negative,ers are woefully unaware of very important parts of his record. And because Trump has a history of being a liar, has a checkered past, and has erratic behavior, voters are willing to believe these attacks against Trump. They are persuasive to them. And so I think it identifies both a reality in the media environment that,

you know, there's always that thing about Hillary Clinton, who's the most covered, but least well-known, most famous unknown person in America. And there's a lot of truth to that when it came to who the real Hillary Clinton is, the person she was. But with Trump is people know a lot about a few things about Trump, but they happen to be the things that, according to our poll, are not particularly persuasive to voters. Voters have no idea that he's proposed cutting Medicare to pay for his tax cut. They have no idea what the actual impact of his trade policies are. They have no idea that he supports a new NAFTA plan that is supported by the big drug companies and Wall Street and the big corporations. They have no idea that he supports a new NAFTA.

the big drug companies and Wall Street and the big corporations. They have no idea that he supports a new NAFTA. And I thought this was really interesting. And this isn't included in my memo because I haven't yet figured out the right way in which a campaign could use this. But the fact that they don't know about the accusations of sexual assault against the president show that there's this giant gap between what is being talked about and what is breaking through to voters. And so there is a real opportunity to move the race against Trump by exposing voters to these pieces of information that matter to them that would not get to them otherwise. They're never going to be covered. They're never going to break through all of the noise and the frankly legitimate stories that the

media is covering. And so there is opportunity here. And what is interesting about it is one of the hardest things in a campaign when you're running against an incumbent is to introduce new information to voters because they generally have paid attention to what the incumbent does. They have a sense of who they are, sense of what they've done. But when it comes to Trump, there are huge parts of his record that are entirely unknown to the public, and therefore they are surprised by it. And it makes them question their support numbers that I have rarely seen in a presidential race for an incumbent running for re-election. Yeah, I was also surprised too. And look,

when we asked people, okay, here's some information about Donald Trump. The way that we'd say that the question is, we'd read them the information about Donald Trump and then say, does this make you more likely to support Donald Trump, less likely to support Donald Trump? No difference. And the fact that a lot of these messages are the ones that I just talked about moved not only Democrats, that's obvious, but moved independents who Trump is leading among by two points currently in Wisconsin. among by two points currently in Wisconsin, you know, moved independents by 10, 20 points on some of these issues, said that they were much less likely to vote for Trump. And even some of them moved some Republicans, you know. So and I think the other the other important thing is it is not just negative information about Trump himself, his behavior, his offensive statements that is persuasive to voters here.

It is negative information about Trump's policies and the impact they're having on people. And I think that's a key point. It's about, you know, with the tax law and the Medicare stuff, it's about now I'm going to see potential cuts to Medicare. With the trade war, it's Wisconsin farmers are hurting from this and Trump's bailing out, you know, big agribusiness in China. Right. With the Trump enriching himself, it's he's he's he's enriching himself and his businesses at the taxpayer expense. Every one of these messages that talks about how these policies or his actions or his behaviors actually affected people are more persuasive to voters, which I thought was interesting because I don't think we connect those dots enough. Yeah. So looking at this poll, I identified three areas that Democrats could focus their messaging on. One, eroding Trump's advantage on the economy. And when you tell people about what his actual policies are and the actual impact of them, what it does is it undermines his strength on the economy because it hits him on the fact that he is full of shit, that he ran

as a populist but is governed as a plutocrat. Two, hit him on Medicare cuts. The media narrative is Democrats are committing political suicide by talking about Medicare for all. But in our poll, Trump's Medicare cuts are a much bigger vulnerability for him than any Democratic position on Medicare for all or some form of that plan is. And third is hitting him on his failure to drain the swamp and the fact that not only did he fail to drain it, he's profiting off that corruption. And you can do those three things. And the way to do that is it is not going to be holding press conferences and getting stories in the New York Times. It is going to be through a sustained targeted digital advertising campaign. This part is a hypothesis on my part based on this poll, and you would need

more polling to see it. But what I think makes these attacks effective is, one, it's new information. That's the most important. Second part is it is specific, fact-based information. It is not overheated political rhetoric. It doesn't sound like a political ad. It is introducing voters to information they did not otherwise know in a factual way. In the same way that in a previous non-fucked-up media environment, people just get it from watching the news or reading the newspaper. And then doing it over a sustained period of time, because one important point in this poll is we showed people all this information and it did not move the horse race dramatically,

which tells me that telling people these things once is not enough to fully move them away from supporting Trump or out of the third party or undecided category, but it starts the process. So you're going to have to do this over a sustained period of time. It's also because people who have not made up their mind about Donald Trump, the people who, where politics is not the most central part of their life, they don't follow it 24 seven. I mean, sadly, they may not even listen to this podcast. But so over time, you can move people there. And there is a roadmap here that I think

works in Wisconsin and probably works in a lot of other places. But if it can work in Wisconsin, it can work in all the other states that are slightly easier to win in Wisconsin. Because this, Wisconsin is of the core states, as we pointed out, probably the hardest one that Obama won in 12 for a Democrat to win in 20. and 20. I think your last point about people who aren't paying super close attention to politics is so important, too, because, you know, we live in a world and a bubble of people who pay super close attention to politics. That's the Twitter bubble. That's the cable bubble. That's everyone we sort of talk to. And so you get a lot of people when you say, oh, well, you know, Trump's going to propose this cut to Medicare or this thing or whatever. And they'll say, oh, that doesn't matter. His people don't matter. Democrats already know that.

You know, it's like, no, there's a ton of people out there, most people who are not paying attention to every up and down of the news cycle and every new piece of information about Donald Trump. They are living their lives. They are busy. They are doing other things, right? Like they may catch a chyron on cable news or they might look on Facebook every once a day to check out the headlines, but they are not following every contour of this race right now. And the only way to break through to those people is through a sustained advertising campaign. That is not magic. That is nothing new. That is how campaigns have been run for many, many, many years. But it just seems now like because so many people, a lot of people who listen to this podcast, us, everyone else, because we're so tuned in to the news every single day, we assume that everyone else is thinking the same thing.

Well, I think there is, I'd make two other points. One, what I think proves that Trump is getting a lot of coverage, but the issues that matters most to voters are the things that could change their position on Trump. They have not seen as relevant in this poll in the sense that two of the least effective attacks that we tested were one about the Russia investigation. And the other one was, interestingly enough, about the ACA and Trump's plan to repeal it. And that tells me that voters, let's not say that voters don't care about those things, not far from it, but that people know them, right? Which one of them, the Russia part is obviously due to the massive amounts of coverage it has gotten, rightfully so. But the second one is actually a credit to the Democratic Party.

rightfully so. But the second one is actually a credit to the Democratic Party. Like, look at Wisconsin, which had a governor's race where the ACA and Scott Walker's support for getting rid of it was at the centerpiece. You had congressional races, you had Tammy Baldwin running a Senate race. And so in Wisconsin, Democrats have done a great job of making sure voters know that Trump wants to repeal the ACA, that electing Republicans will lead to the repeal of the ACA. And so that's moved people into our camp. It's probably why a Democrat is winning by one right now. But to finish the job, we're going to have to tell them new things. It doesn't mean don't talk about those things, but of course we've talked about it, but there's new information. But what is different in this media environment than previous campaigns is people would think

you were fucking bananas in a previous cycle if you told them that you should start advertising the general election in the summer of the year before. Traditionally, people might think you were crazy. Some people, these people would be wrong. Some people would think you were crazy if you're doing it in the summer of the year of the election, that you should wait until the part when people pay attention. The problem we have now in our incredibly crowded media environment is it just takes time. And you also have the capacity to target your ads through digital platforms that didn't exist anymore. So there is an imperative to do this now. I will say there's a lot more work that needs to be done. There is some good news.

Priorities USA, the leading Democratic super PAC, has made plans to go into Wisconsin, I think, sooner rather than later. It's a state where they're going to start. I think there'll be other efforts. It's also not just advertising. These messages are also that can be used at the door. They can be used on the phones and they can be used in people doing digital organizing themselves as they are communicating with their undecided voters, swing voters, et cetera, in their lives. You know, either in actual human conversations, if those still exist, but on Facebook or wherever else, like this is a roadmap for how you persuade people. The other thing that popped into my mind as I was reading some of these messages and which ones were most effective is, isn't the best way to run against Donald Trump

to turn him into Mitt Romney? I mean, all of this reminded me of the attacks we ran against Mitt Romney in 2012 when we made sure that voters understood he had plutocratic policies, whether it was the when he picked Paul Ryan as VP. And we talked a lot about Paul Ryan's budget to cut entitlements, to cut Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, to pay for a tax cut, whether it was Romney's record in business of outsourcing. Medicaid to pay for a tax cut, whether it was Romney's record in business of outsourcing. I mean, all of this stuff started reminding me of the ads and the contrast that we made with Mitt Romney in 2012. Yeah. I think it was pushing on an open door with Romney because he was a multimillionaire private equity executive who literally built a car for his elevators. And then would constantly say things like he doesn't care about the very poor and 47% of people aren't real Americans and all of that. And so that was a... So it's a little bit pushing on open door with Romney. It's a little harder

with Trump because he's branded himself as this blue collar billionaire working populist. But the advantage with Trump is the voters did not like Romney's policies. They found him to be – wasn't someone they really wanted to hang out with. But they thought he was a good person. Right. Where Trump has an advantage on some populist credentials that can be eroded enough to move votes against him. But he is someone that you can connect his plutocracy with his corruption. And these policies that he does are benefiting him and he is benefiting from a corrupt system that he is maintaining. And so there is this other area that comes because even voters who like Trump have real questions about his character.

So the other interesting thing we did across a range of issues, we also tested the Trump Republican message against the progressive Democratic message and then the less progressive Democratic message. So the way we did this, like say on health care, we basically said the Republican message is what Trump and Republicans have been saying on health care, right? We want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but we want to protect pre-existing conditions. It's obviously bullshit, but that's their message that's getting to voters. So we tested that. And then on the Democratic message, we tested one Democratic message that was a form of the public option and one that was about Medicare for all. And I will say that we tested Medicare for all in the most favorable way possible. We said that under Medicare for all,

you would have to leave your private insurance for a government plan, but you would be able to keep your doctor. The Medicare for all message did a bit better with Democrats than the public option message. But while independents were evenly split on the public option, they were negative towards Medicare for All by a 13 point margin. So that's something to keep in mind for Democrats. Racial inequality. We had one message from Democrats that mentioned reparations and one message that mentioned investing in communities of color and doing whatever we can to end discrimination. The message that mentioned reparations was by far the most negatively viewed of any message that we tested, with low marks

among independents and even relatively low marks among Democrats. The other message, however, which talked about alleviating racial inequality by ending discrimination and investing in communities of color, was one of the most successful messages that we tested. So language matters. The way we talk about things matters. And context matters too, right? In the Medicare discussion, nothing that I've seen of these says that Democrats can't either win or fight to withdraw on these issues. But the one on reparations, for instance, is I'm sure that came as a surprise to a lot of less, you have to be pretty deep into politics to know that that has been a topic of discussion in the context of the Democratic primary. And so I'm sure that much like the negative information against Trump, hearing that probably has, there's a shock value to it that moves numbers.

Yeah. And so the other thing, and this sort of surprised me, there were no clear winners on immigration, climate, and guns. So on these three issues, the difference in support between the more progressive positions on immigration, that was decriminalizing border crossings and healthcare for undocumented immigrants. On climate, it was the Green New Deal. And on guns, it was gun licensing. There was not that big of a difference between support for those positions than the support for the more moderate positions which were pathway to citizenship for immigration investing in clean energy for climate and background checks for guns they were all sort of within the margin of error

so i thought that was that's maybe an indication that we should be a little less concerned about the heated debate in the democratic primary over, you know, which position is more politically palatable than we currently are. Yeah, I would say a lot less concerned. A few other takeaways I found interesting, and then you can say any more that you found interesting. We did test a series of positive and negative descriptions of Donald Trump, and between 47 and 53 percent of voters agreed with every description, except one. Trump drained the swamp, 47 and 53 percent of voters agreed with every description except one. Trump drained the swamp, which only 33 percent of people agreed with, while 66 percent of independents and even 27 percent of Republicans disagreed that Trump drained the swamp. So no one believes

that that bullshit happened, or at least not a lot of people. And then the descriptions, again, the descriptions of Trump that where most voters, including most independents, agreed, Trump is corrupt, Trump is focused on himself, not you, Trump fights for the wealthy and corporations, not working people, and Trump is an ineffective leader. Those were the most popular descriptions of Trump. One of them was Trump is a racist. Voters are split here. Forty nine percent agree and 50 percent disagree. So that was much closer in Wisconsin. And I think the only other thing I want to mention is that Republican views on race and immigration, as you might expect, are not great. By 56 to 15 percent, Republicans think immigration does more harm than

good. Twenty four percent of Republicans don't have a problem with separating children from their parents. 34% of Republicans think that when non-whites are a majority, it will be mostly a negative thing. And 84% of Republicans think that discrimination against whites has become as big of a problem as discrimination against people of color. What do you think about that, Dan? Not great. It's really not great. Was there anything else that stuck out at you before we move on? No, I think we've sort of hit all the key points. Wisconsin's close, but it is winnable.

All of these things, all the ideas here, the messages, where the race stands, leads us to the fact that Wisconsin's going to be incredibly close when the votes from Wisconsin come in, and they often come in late, that we'll know who's going to be President of the United States, is my guess. And the other thing I'd say is that I'm really glad that, I know this is my idea, so I'm biased, but I'm really glad that Crooked Media and Change Research did this, because I think it at least serves to start the conversation about what Democrats need to do and moves the conversation just beyond simply the state of the Democratic primary, which is very important, but we should be walking and chewing gum. And it was between watching Tommy's Instagram stories about Iowa and writing an old school campaign strategy memo, there have been waves of nostalgia this week for that previous part of our lives. I will also say, too, that our friend Ben Wickler is the new chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. And I sent him these results before we announced them just to see what he thought.

And, you know, Ben's reply was, well, this tells me me what I knew which is that Wisconsin is going to be close and also there's no one single magic message or silver bullet you know there's a lot of good messages here that we can work with but what this really means is we need to organize organize organize in Wisconsin as much as possible we need to mobilize and persuade as many motors as possible this is going to be one on the ground. And if you want to help, if this poll has worried you or concerned you or you care about Wisconsin, which you should, you can go to wisdems.org slash volunteer to sign up to volunteer. If you're near Wisconsin or you're in Wisconsin, you live there, or if you're not, wisdems.org slash pod. That is a special link where you can go and donate to the Wisconsin

Democratic Party. They could use your help. They could use your funding. As we know, this whole 2020 election could come down to the state. And Ben is putting a fantastic organization on the ground there. They're registering voters as much as they can. They're knocking on doors and persuading people. They're finding every last persuadable voter in Wisconsin. So go help out. Do what you can. We need Wisconsin. Okay, so we just talked about Trump's strength on the economy in our Wisconsin poll. Until now, that strength has been based on a steady stream of good headlines about a growing economy and low unemployment. But on Wednesday, the Dow fell 800 points amid several signs that indicate the American and global economies may be headed towards a recession,

including a shrinking German economy, slowing manufacturing in China, and what Trump called, in all capital letters, a crazy inverted yield curve here in the united states uh dan what the hell was he talking about and how concerned should we be about these warning signs well we should be concerned for sure and the i am not an economist which i know will come as a shock to all the time i know i know what is that nonsense but the crazy inverted yield curve is a sign that has been used to indicate a coming recession in previous times. It involves the difference in price between two-year-term bonds and 10-year-term bonds, I think. That's right.

Don't at me if I got that wrong. And so, yes, there are very real warning signs in the economy. Some of them are global and beyond the scope of what Trump is doing. Just as a reminder that presidents only have a limited impact on the economy one way or the other because we live in a global economy, for better or for worse. But the second part of this is that Trump is playing a role in this with his trade war and just generally erratic leadership and bad relations with all of the key players who would help us solve this problem. Yeah, I think that's an important point. I mean, look, like you said, we traffic in political nerd

Twitter. If you look on econ nerd Twitter, you'll find a whole bunch of arguments that say, you know, an inverted yield curve has preceded every recession in the past 50 years. And so we should all, you know, freak out and a recession is coming. There's also plenty of analysis that says, no, it's wrong this time. We're going to be OK. Maybe there are signs of slowing, but a recession is not imminent. So you can you can find either kind of analysis. But I think the important what's what's scary to me is thinking about going into a recession or, God forbid, going into an economic crisis with Donald Trump as president, because you and I lived through both a presidential campaign that then turned into an administration that started with an incredibly horrible economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression. And it ain't easy to govern through that. And the way that the world got through that is, you know,

A, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, a lot of other world leaders worked together. They were incredibly close. They pulled the global economy together back from the brink by all working together. We do not have that situation right now. Trump has pissed off most of our allies. We have sort of right wing authoritarian governments rising around the world. So it to me thinking about what, and our political situation at home and our political situation and the political situation in many other countries around the world is horrible. I mean, people, the political systems and democracies are in crisis all over the world

and trying to imagine Donald Trump and the Republican party that controls most of Washington right now, using the tools necessary to pull us out of recession or pull us back from the brink of crisis, I simply don't have a lot of confidence in that, to say the least. Yeah. We dealt with this both in 2009, when there was an actual financial crisis, but for much of Obama's first term, the United States strengthened as slow as it was, but it strengthened faster and more solidly than Europe. And in part because Europe is so interconnected. And we spent most of the first term spending, Obama spending hours and hours, days and weeks and months working with Europe to help prevent Europe from stumbling into another financial crisis, either spurred by debt in Greece or a whole host of other issues.

And it was incredibly complicated. And we were able to navigate it for a couple of reasons. One, the government was stocked with people who were experts in financial crises, because that's who we hired, because that's what we were in when we were elected. And it's people in these incredibly smart, technocratically brilliant folks in the National Security Council, National Economic Council, Treasury, State Department, et cetera, who had worked on these issues before and had relationships with all the players. They knew how to work with the EU or the European Central Bank or the IMF. And they knew people in all the key countries in Europe. And so there was like a group of really smart people, U.S. and foreign, working to solve this problem. And the other part that was really important was President Obama had very, very strong relationships with Angela Merkel. David Cameron, who while a member of the conservative party who had a terrible austerity agenda, was a smart guy and he and Obama trusted each other.

And Hollande in France, who was in charge of that. And they – like at every summit, they would get together. They'd work on these issues until late in the night. And none of that exists now. You don't have – many of the jobs in which you need people to work on this stuff are empty or they're filled with some Republican pundit who had a good Fox appearance at the right time. And the people in charge of it, the director of the National Economic Council is a TV pundit. The director of the National Security Council is a TV pundit that no one likes and most people are scared of. And the head of the Treasury Department is the guy who was the producer

of Suicide Squad. So we are not sending our best to deal with what is an incredibly complicated problem. And if you want a preview of how Trump might handle a recession or an economic downturn, you just, you know, look at his fucking Twitter feed for the for the last yesterday. He's going to attack the Fed. Attacking the Federal Reserve is like his number one strategy here because he's going to want them. You know, he wants them to cut interest rates even more. He's going to blame China. He's going to blame China. And then he's just going to lie and tell everyone that everything is wonderful, even though it's not. And I don't think he has a lot of other tools in the toolbox to deal with whatever might happen. Yeah, I would just, I'd ask you one question.

John, who appointed the current Fed chair? I believe it was Donald Trump, Dan. It was. It was. He is attacking the guy he picked for the job. Wouldn't be the first time. There's an article in The Post, I think yesterday or today. I read it yesterday.

I don't really know. I think it showed up in the paper anymore. But it basically says that when you talk to people in administration, there is no plan. No one is talking to anyone. The only strategy is to try to cyber bully the Fed into additional rate cuts. And there is a problem here, which is, in a normal world, if the US were to hit recession, there is a strategy for getting you out of recession, which is you stimulate the economy with a combination of government spending and putting money in people's pockets through tax cuts or other ways, a payroll tax or something like that.

And the problem we have is Trump just took, Trump and Republicans took $1.5 trillion out of the Rainy Day Fund and used it to buy yachts for rich people. So the cupboard is empty. We don't have smart people dealing with it. We have already injected, you know, quote-unquote stimulus in the economy, but we did it in did in such an ass backwards way that it did nothing for the economy. And we're staring down the barrel of something very scary. It's not great. Let's talk about the political significance of an economic slowdown. Nate Silver tweeted the other day that he guesses that lowering the GDP by 1% would reduce Trump's reelection chances by 10 to 15%. That was just

sort of back of the envelope math from Nate, I'm sure. But what do you think of sort of the political significance of an economic slowdown? I don't know if Nate's math is right. Who am I to question Nate Silver's math? But I certainly agree with his point, which is the stronger the economy, the better chance Trump has to win. Even in a stronger economy, as we talked about in the section on the Wisconsin poll, there are ways to undermine that economic strength and still win the election. But this is bad news. And there's a lot of smart political analysis that shows that Trump's strength is helped propped up by the fact that the economy is going well, or seems to be have been going well,

and that people that it creates a permission structure for a lot of people who don't like Trump's tweets, they don't like his racism, they'll, they have other concerns about him. But if the economy is going well, why change horses mid race. And so a shift in that dynamic would change the election fundamentally. Now, how do you think Democrats should handle this? Because, you know, I remember, when Democrats were in power, you know, we would frequently point out that it seemed like Republicans were rooting against the economy, rooting for a session, rooting against America. talk about Trump's economic record or how he's handling the economy without sort of seeming like we're rooting for a recession, which I'm certainly not. And I don't think anyone wants a fucking recession. I think it's a twofold strategy. One is don't accept the premise that the economy is good right now. Parts of the economy are good. The stock market is high, or at least it was until

this week. The unemployment rate is low. Those are good. Wages have still barely budged. The costs of healthcare, college, housing have all gone up. The healthcare premiums have gone up under Trump. What the American dream and middle class bargain are purported to be has suffered under this president. And so I think, don't just don't accept the premise of the argument. You don't have to say it's great now, but boy, it's going to get bad, and then we'll show Trump. And the other part of that is Democrats should have policies that, I don't think they need to come out with an economic stimulus package or something like that right now, but they do have to acknowledge that there are storm clouds on the horizon, and their policies and their rhetoric should reflect that. And then I think the third and final point,

not for the Democratic Party, but for our voters is, if a recession is coming, this is the worst news of all, is it may start towards the end of Trump's presidency, but it may not be felt to have a massive political impact until a Democrat gets an office. And so if the idea, like we can't swap out Mueller for the recession in our view that someone is going to save us from Trump. We still have to do all the same work. We still have to make all the same arguments. And there is this always sometimes a sense that like the scales of political justice will balance and something will, some exogenous event will come in here and knock Trump out of the White House. And nothing that's happening here suggests that that's going to happen.

This is still all going to happen on the margins. And Trump will be running for – even absent a serious immediate financial crisis, Trump will probably be running for re-election in a much better environment than Barack Obama was in 2012, when Obama won by a pretty large margin. So one of the economic headwinds that Trump is directly responsible for is the trade war. He started with China that he is now losing. And so according to Business Insider, quote, on Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross went on CNBC to explain the administration's decision to delay a portion of the planned tariffs until December 15th, which would have affected the rest of Chinese imports into the United States. He cited a desire to protect shoppers from any adverse effects during the holiday season, given the goods affected had included laptops, cell phones, toys, and video

game consoles, among others. Asked by reporters about the delay on implementing tariffs on Monday, Trump said, quote, we're doing this for the Christmas season just in case some of the tariffs would have an impact on consumers. Dan, what's going on here? I could have sworn our president has told us over and over again that China pays for the tariffs, just like Mexico pays for the wall. What's all this about the consumer? Well, it seems like perhaps Trump may have diverted from his traditional role as fact-based straight shooter and may have been lying to us about these tariffs. Yeah, it's a great cell phone there by Donald Trump just admitting that he's been fucking bullshitting us for a long time on this. How should Democrats talk about Trump's trade war? I mean, we tested a pretty great message in our Wisconsin poll.

Great because it was one of the most persuasive messages we tested it basically read like this donald trump started a trade war with china that is hurting wisconsin farmers and he's now borrowing more money from china to bail out huge corporate farms including some based in foreign countries again this is all true to go yeah it's all true it's all true yeah i mean i think trade is, even before these economic headwinds, trade was a massive political opportunity for Democrats because it's a huge part of Trump's strength. It is what I think helped him appeal to a lot of the Obama Trump voters in these Midwestern battleground states. Because it was different than the message that Romney was giving or McCain was giving in 08 or any traditional Republican.

But what he campaigned on and what he's done in office are two very different things. And you can hit him both because it is an incompetent execution of his trade strategy. And I mentioned this in the Wisconsin section, is the fact that he is pursuing a second NAFTA that is good for corporations and bad for workers is another huge vulnerability. So I would run very hard at Trump's strength and sort of ignore the traditional political advice where you go at their weakness. I would go at Trump's strength on this. interesting, you can, the politics of this are really interesting and you can connect a lot of Trump's recent tweets with his decision to enter a trade war with no exit strategy, which is a very Republican way of entering wars. And he has been unable and unwilling to side with the protesters in Hong Kong or criticize the Chinese directly, because he is in a place now

where the Chinese can help control his ability to get reelected, because he needs them to blink in some way, shape or form to let him back out of the corner on the trade war to give Trump some sort of win to help him. And so because of that, he's forced to side with the autocrat over the Democratic protesters in China. incredibly offensive, incredibly disgusting tweet today about Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, because he's trying to change that. He knows he needs to change the conversation away from the economy and his own actions on the economy. And so he definitely is, you sense a vulnerability in what he's doing by reading his tweets. I think it's important you mentioned that last part about the tweet today,

because the other thing that happened this week that sort of illuminates Trump's strategy, which is to make the race all about race and immigration and white identity politics, is that the Trump administration announced it was moving forward with a plan designed by C-plus Santa Monica fascist Stephen Miller to deny green cards to legal immigrants who currently use or are likely to use public benefits like Medicaid, housing assistance, and nutrition assistance. The rule expands the so-called public charge language that's been on the books for more than a century. During the press tour for the announcement, acting director of citizenship and immigration services Ken Cuccinelli offered his own Emma Lazarus remix when he said that the

words on the Statue of Liberty read as follows, and I think we have a clip. Would you also agree that Emma Lazarus's words etched on the Statue of Liberty, give me your tired, your poor, are also part of the American ethos? They certainly are. Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge. stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge. That plaque was put on the Statue of Liberty at almost the same time as the first public charge law was passed. Very interesting timing. Yeah, very interesting. Very, what a historical fun fact, Dan.

I did not know that that was the end of that poem. Did you? Most people don't know about the Statue of Liberty B-side. I mean, it's like, what the fuck? I mean, we have taken, Ken Cuccinelli is one of the dumber men in all of politics. I mean, obviously his views are atrocious and offensive, but it's also just a sign of what a fucking knucklehead he is

that he would stare in the mirror, give that answer, and then think it was a good idea. That it would be believable and not laughable. Yeah. And I think, look, it's important to understand here in context of the whole conversation we've been having on Trump and the economy and his potential weaknesses on the economy with the messages that contest against him. This is a rule that could hurt up to 26 million legal immigrants in the United States, to 26 million legal immigrants in the United States, people who are here legally. And the attempt is to try to get them to leave or to try to deter people from coming to this country, immigrants who are people of color, who are poorer, from coming to this country in the first place.

And what Trump wants from this rule, what Miller wants from this rule, is for people to think, okay, they're protecting working class and poor white people, and they are punishing working class and poor immigrants who don't belong here, right? This is the message that they want to get out. What they don't want people to know is their policies are hurting working class and poor white people as well. They're cutting Medicaid for everybody. They're cutting food stamps for everybody. They're fucking over everybody with their tax cut that is going to the wealthiest people and to no one else,

with their trade war that's hurting farmers in the Midwest, with all of the other bullshit they're doing. Donald Trump is enriching himself and his family, and he is fucking over everyone else in this country. But what they want you to think, what their message is, is that they only want you to believe that they're fucking over immigrants. And I think that's an important point to make. Yeah, and just a couple other points on this truly un-American, inoffensive policy proposal from the Republicans, from Trump. inoffensive policy proposal from the Republicans, from Trump. One is that it is not going to save us money. It's going to cost us money because people are now not going to get to see a doctor

when they're sick, so they're going to go to emergency rooms. People are not going to have access to food and other welfare services, so they're going to get sick faster and it's going to cost the public more money. It is short-sighted and disgusting. And it is the proof in the pudding, to your point, that this is not about building walls, protecting us from fake right-wing fever dreams of MS-13 or anything else. It is about making America white again. This is about getting people of color to not come here and the immigrants of color who are here to leave. That is what this is. It is saying the quiet part out loud. People can have all kinds of positions on immigration in this country, but what this

is is about, it is white nationalism. That is exactly what this is. And the third point I would make is it is fucking disgusting to do this days after a white nationalist inspired by the rhetoric of this president and the Republican Party went to a Walmart in El Paso and shot people because they weren't white. It is a specific policy delivered in the White House briefing room that speaks to the fears of white supremacists and tries to paint this inaccurate picture of who immigrants are and what they bring to this country. And it is disgusting. And he should be called out on that. And, you know, before the conservative intellectual Zamboni machine comes and tries to say, oh, this is about saving money. And this is all this is about saving fucking money. Because if the Trump administration wanted to save money,

they wouldn't have spent billions of dollars to bail out foreign farms because of their trade war that's hurting farmers in the United States. They wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars on a tax cut that went to mostly wealthy people. They wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars on a tax cut that went to mostly wealthy people. They wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars on a tax cut that also encouraged companies to outsource jobs from this country. They spend all kinds of money on things that help rich people and don't help most people in this country at all. So it's not about fucking saving money either.

It's not about saving money. It's not about illegal immigration. It's about making sure that this country is whiter. That is it. That's the reason. We should have some sort of public charge rule for corporations and billionaires. Yeah.

Right, where if you must depend on some sort of government subsidy, or if you declare bankruptcy in one of your businesses, you should have to forfeit your tax cut. Donald Trump is the biggest fucking public charge in this country. All right. When we come back,

we will have my interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. With us in studio today, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Congresswoman, welcome back to the pod. Hi, thank you for having me. So this is the first time we've had you on since you took office. I remember in the first year of the Obama White House, there were quite a few times where we looked at each other and said, wow, Washington is even worse than we said it was on the campaign show. Have you had moments like that? Yes, I have had moments like that. In other ways, though, it has been better than what I expected.

Where has it been worse and where has it been better? Worse in that I see how laws are made and I am shocked. You know, I sometimes I feel as though if people really saw what our legislative process was like, it would be a national scandal sometimes. But it's been better in that I actually, I think I was more cynical about the capacity for change even going in. And now I actually surprisingly believe that it's even more possible than I had thought going in. Not that I thought it was impossible going in, but seeing how a lot of these dynamics work, I feel more hopeful now more than ever about the possibility of grassroots politics. What has made you more hopeful than you thought you'd be? Well, I think so many of our decisions are

based on public sentiment. And I believe that if we can really unlock the ability to transform and change and focus on moving public sentiment, then we can really open up our possibilities possibilities of what we're capable in D.C. And granted, I think that I and our team and some other members are in a unique capacity. We haven't had this strange fusion of politics and pop culture in this way since, I think, frankly, the 60s. But it's an enormous opportunity that we have and I think we should use it. So on an issue like immigration, where Democrats couldn't pass on their own a clean humanitarian funding bill that included protections for migrants and children. Like, where do we go from here? Do we is there no choice on immigration but to wait until 2020? What progress do you think we can make between now and then? Well, I do think that out of all of the issues, immigration is probably the most difficult within the Democratic Party. I think that it is the single most challenging issue within the party because we have members from all over the country. And we have members that

won really tough districts. And immigration is the one issue that really touches a big nerve. And so it's a challenge. It's a really big challenge. And it's one that, for me, coming from a district that's 50% immigrant, I come from one of the most diverse districts, arguably the most diverse district in the country in terms of languages spoken. Over 200 languages are spoken in my community. And it's tough to reconcile that. It really does get very difficult. What lessons did you learn from the last sort of immigration funding battle for next time? the last sort of immigration funding battle for next time?

Well, I learned where a lot of the fault lines are. And a lot of these decisions, you know, when we talk about how legislation is made, it's made a lot of times. There's a long process where people are kind of writing it and toiling over it. But really, the chips fall within 48 hours. Everyone finds out whether we're going to vote on a bill 48 hours before that vote happens. And so a lot of times there's this massive scramble looking for things because a lot of people who see these bills initially are only those folks where the bill has moved through that committee, where they've been able to really comb through it.

Not everyone may be on that relevant committee where there may have been a hearing on it or not. And so one of the things that I've learned is where those fault lines are. I've also learned where some of our strong points are as a party and where some of our weak points are as a party. I think internal communication is a weak point within the party. And even between the Senate and the House, you know, that immigration bill, I think Schumer thought some things were happening. Pelosi thought something else might have been happening. And members within the caucus didn't know what other members of the caucus were trying to do. And so it created this huge tension out of a lack of communication, I think. It does seem like so much of the immigration debate is driven by fear.

Politicians have the fear. Obviously, there's fear among voters. I mean, to me, it seems like even hopefully long after Donald Trump is gone, this is going to be a dominant political issue, not just in America, but around the world. We're going to have more asylum seekers, more refugees, more climate refugees. How do we start changing the politics around this issue so that in districts that aren't like yours or that aren't on the border, it's not driven by fear? Well, this is really tough because there's the short-term political work that a lot of people are engaged in, which is winning elections. And then there's the long-term political work, which is transforming the ethos of the country

and really debating our long-term values. And immigration, as you said, this is going to be a global issue. Climate change alone is going to drive hundreds of thousands of people to be changing and migrating across the world. And people say that, and especially on the right, they think it's a joke. But a lot of our wars and a lot of our conflict is going to be over droughts. It's going to be over lack of resources. It's going to be over food shortages in many parts of the country. People are going to be forced to migrate. They are already migrating because they once lived are no longer livable. And frankly, migration is within our human nature. Ever since the dawn of humanity, humans have migrated. It is as natural as eating and breathing. And we're going to have to figure out how to show people that it's

actually really not a big deal. We see, if anything, it's positive where migrants go, regardless of their background, regardless of how poor or rich they are, where migrants go, prosperity follows. And there is a myth that the president is peddling because he's peddling a zero-sum vision of the world. But it really deepens to having national conversations about race, and they're very uncomfortable. And I think that a huge part of this moment right now is because we've been kicking this can down the road and it's been getting worse and worse and worse. And there's a huge fear around a changing America. And we can't avoid that conversation.

And we want to in the short term to win an election. Yeah. But if we keep not talking about it, it's only going to get worse. If we keep not talking about it, it's only going to get worse. Well, this is, you know, I keep having this thought about the 2020 election where to me there's this central tension where, you know, Donald Trump wants to make this election about race and immigration and white identity politics. And I think that's a fight that Democrats have to join that we can't avoid. At the same time, you know, we just did a poll in Wisconsin and it was a messaging poll. And the messages that moved voters furthest away from Trump were economic in nature. It was about his Medicare cuts, his tax cuts, his trade war with China.

his tax cuts, his trade war with China. How do we sort of reconcile the need to, you know, battle Donald Trump on race, on issues of race, but also get an economic message through that we know will sort of galvanize a majority of people? Well, I think one of the things that we need to do is really dismantle this idea that it's either race issues or class issues. We need to learn how to talk about this intersectionally. And it's going to take a lot of white people. We need white people right now to do the work. We need white people to organize themselves and to do that kind of work. We need white people to organize themselves. And to do that kind of work, you know, in my campaign, there was this really phenomenal local organization, but they're also national in nature.

They were once known as, well, they're still known as Surge Stand Up for Racial Justice. In our community, they've kind of spun off into their own local community organization. of spun off into their own local community organization. But it's white people talking to other white people about race. And that, I think, is a lot of what we're going to need in addition to a whole lot of other work, because racism is economic. And we need to, a lot of the long-term work that we have to do on a lot of different issues is educational. And there's a reason that Donald Trump is using racism as a cudgel because it's how he gets away with his corruption. It's how he gets, that's how he steals the bag. You know, it is, it is with racism. Well, it's a point too, where racism

doesn't only hurt people of color, it hurts white people as well, because Donald Trump's base isn't making out any better. Right, right. From what's happened. And he's going to use racism and he's going to try to, the reason he's trying to center issues of race, of immigration, et cetera, is to sink the economic agenda. He's trying to eclipse it. And the only reason that that has power is because we refuse to talk about it. And so race is going to be an issue. And the key is if we're going to allow him

to define that conversation or if we're going to assert ourselves into that space and define that conversation. You gave a speech that went viral last week where you called on young people who find themselves being radicalized by white supremacy to, quote, come back because there's a mother waiting for you. I know there is a teacher waiting for you. We will love you back. You are not too far gone. It struck me as a message that conveyed something that you don't hear much in our political conversation, which is grace. What made

you want to say that? Well, a lot of it does have to deal with the fact that I have listened to those moms. I was maybe a day or two before I was actually at the mall in Queens. My now goddaughter, we were getting a christening dress for her. And I was in this, I was actually in a Disney store. And one of the employees at the store came to me and said, I'm so thankful that you're representing us. And she said, my son has been, is kind of falling into this funnel. And it's really hard to feel like I'm losing him. And I hear this all the time about families that are being torn apart by this radicalization. And it's hurting so many people. And this political polarization, it's not just within our, and it's hurting so many people. And this political polarization, it's not just within our politics, it's personal. People's marriages are strained,

their friendships are strained, they feel like they can't even talk to their loved ones. And that is the power of white supremacy. That is what this cult-like culture that the president is cultivating is doing to us. And the only way that we're going to get past this is with grace. And it's not grace on both ends. It's not just the white supremacist and it's not just young people that are falling into this funnel, we need to have grace with ourselves to acknowledge our past mistakes. And I think in our conversations about race, the immediate emotions that come up are defensiveness. You know, like if I, for example, pointed out something that you may have said in this conversation, it's like, well,

I didn't mean that, you know, there's this defensiveness that comes up. And I think that we have to show that conversations about race can be safe. They can be, even if you have made a mistake or even if you have stepped into outright hatred, that the conversation can still be safe. It can be loving so long as we are at least open to the possibility of moving forward together. Yeah. I struggle with this all the time because, you know, I'm an Obama person. I worked for him for a long time. You know, I have this desire to not see this constant polarization and political warfare. Trump becomes president. And there's this debate about, you know, are Trump voters racist? And clearly, you see the rallies, you see some of the stuff online, and there's racism there. And then I wonder, like, I don't necessarily want to

vilify people who vote for Trump. But at the same time, you also need to call racism out. And I don't know how, even beyond Trump, I don't know how we ever sort of piece this back together. Or where are the spaces for these conversations? It's not Twitter. No, it's certainly not. Well, first of all, I think the biggest mistake that we have, and it's a trap that gets set by the right, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is just the frame of asking, is blank racist? That is something that we have to pull ourselves out of. It's not about asking whether Trump voters are racist. We need to talk about racism, not racists.

Yeah. Racists, it's a very two-dimensional, boring conversation. Is something racist? Yes or no. And then you debate it. What do you do about that? We need to talk about racism, its contours, its histories, where it manifests, how it's used, because like all winning political phenomena, whether they're good or bad, in your opinion, they rely on coalition building. So Trump relied on a coalition and a core part of that coalition were racists building a coalition with all sorts of other people that could be susceptible to racist views if they were blanketed and layered and made people feel good about it not being a racist thing. And so there are a lot of people who support Trump that genuinely don't believe that they are racist because we do not talk about or educate people on recognizing racism.

And because we do not do that, it just allows itself to just, we get caught in this debate of, is something racist? And then a person uses their defensiveness and they say, well, it's not racist because I'm not racist. And I believe this thing because it's economic in nature. Right. So I was just listening to a podcast where some of my democratic friends who are very smart, have been on winning presidential campaigns, said that their biggest fear in 2020 is that we nominate someone who has taken positions that are not supported by a majority of people in states that add up to 270. Do you think there is anything valid about that fear? And what do we sort of do about that fear? Yeah, I think I tend to think that people,

a lot of folks, especially in D.C., sometimes misunderstand the average voter. I think that people think that voters are more ideological than they are. I think that people think that voters cast their votes based on policy positions more than they actually do. And I think that what is actually important is how we message our positions, how we not even defend them, how we evangelize them, how we talk about a vision for our future. And the only vision for our future that I think is winning is an audacious one. And whether you like it or whether you hate it, a wall is a vision. It's a tangible vision that is symbolic and representative and galvanizing vision, I think we risk losing even more. And it's not about, you know, and it's all about how you message these issues that I think is more important than the actual positions that people take. And that, I think, has always been the historic

weakness of the Democratic Party. It's something that we do not have institutions for. Republicans, messaging lines. I mean, you see, you watch Fox News. Any old schmo that's in the Republican Party goes on CNN and says or goes on Fox News and they'll use the same words, the same terminology. Their messaging is completely unified. And it's aggressive in winning over the electorate. I always wonder why we have this problem on our side, because a lot of these messages from Democrats are polled, right, which is a problem all in itself. But the polling is not completely off, right? Like we know that the polling would probably tell us what you and I believe, which is some of these economically populist messages really resonate. Somehow, though, when they say it, when the candidates say it, it doesn't ring true. You know, I mean, you ran a campaign where whether someone agreed with you or not, they saw you as authentic and inspiring and believing in what you were saying. What advice do you give your colleagues and friends who are running in some of these

tougher swing districts? Well, I think, first of all, we have to become master storytellers. I think anyone who's in public service needs to be a master storyteller. It's not just about being a legislator. We have to be, it requires so many different skills. We have to be legislators. We have to be policymakers. But there's this idea that if you're a good enough legislator, you should just win re-election because you're good at your job. But that is clearly not how politics works. We have to be master storytellers. And so my personal advice in terms of storytelling is to tell our stories and to make arguments with your five senses and not five facts. Use facts as supporting evidence. evidence, but you need to communicate and tell the stories in terms of, you know, the smells that other people are smelling, the stress, how your heart is beating. We need to show that we are having the same human experience.

And too often, it doesn't come across that way because, frankly, a lot of people aren't in D.C. A lot of policymakers aren't having the same human experience as a lot of people in the country. And that is what Trump has tapped into, the visceral. And I think our politics is our best when our head and our heart align, when the visceral also matches with the academic. also matches with the academic and when our facts are not separated or not that we have this hierarchy, but that they are put together because emotions are also information as well. And if we, I think the amount of resentment that happened in 2016 that I think led to the Democratic loss was the fact that we were telling implicitly, I feel like we had been telling people that what they are seeing is not what is happening. And that created a lot of resentment and people wanted to punish those who were doing that.

And I think that was an outlet for that. How much do you think sort of our own history plays a role? I see you do this a lot, which I think is really effective, is talk about FDR or, you know, sort of line up progressive beliefs with progressive traditions and American traditions. progressive beliefs with progressive traditions and American traditions, you know, and I think Obama used to do this a lot and say that, you know, patriotism isn't sort of airbrushed history and wearing a flag pin. Patriotism is the civil rights movement. That's at the core of what this country has been about. Do you think the Democrats do that well enough? Do you think we should do it more? I think we need to do it more. And it's not just about recounting the story. It's about saying this is who we are. We need to— At our best. Because America has always been a story of people who want, of some folks who want to cling to their own small vestiges of power and prevent us from progressing.

And those who have been able to galvanize and bring us together and move us forward. And it's always a stutter step between those two things in that move towards progress. in that move towards progress. And we need to tell our story because a huge part of hope is not just, you know, hope isn't optimism. And it's not just this naive belief that things will get better. Hope is saying, this is where we've been. We have already done this. We can do this. There's a strategy for doing it, but we need to take a leap and we need, it will only happen if we are courageous. It will only happen if we take a risk. And there's this idea that we can win without taking any risks. And that is not, it's just not how the world works. I know. One of the things that sort of scares me about this coming election is, you know,

in a way, we were able to run by saying, you know, the greatest risk you can take is doing the same thing over and over again. And because George W. Bush wasn't going to be president again, there wasn't as much fear in the electorate. And so people were willing to take a risk on someone completely new. I feel like heading into 2020, the emotion that sort of pervades everything, especially my Democrats, is this fear that we're going to lose to Trump again. And it's making a lot of Democrats more cautious than they would be. And I sort of worry that that caution could lead to a bad place. I completely agree. I mean, just from your gut, and it's unfortunate because this is how authoritarians typically come into power, but coming from your gut, which so many voters vote on their gut more than people want to admit, especially in Washington. But if you have two options in front of you,

and one is self-assured, has a direction, saying this is where I want to go. I know some of you may disagree with me, but I believe that this is my diagnosis of the country. This is our solution. This is how we're going to move forward. Versus another person that's like, I think this may be what it is, but not quite that, but this, that, and the other.

You have a self-assured leader and you have a timid one. People are going to go to where they feel a sense of certainty. Right. Just policy questions aside. Yeah. And so if you have someone that's constantly stutter stepping and back, you know, backtracking, that does not inspire confidence in an electorate, especially in a time as tumultuous as this one. And I think what folks also need to realize is that this time is not just scary because Donald Trump is president. This time is scary. This time has been scary because people don't know if they're going to be able to pay their rent at the end of the month.

People don't know if when you wake up, if you walk out of your house, if, God forbid, you get hit by a car or slip off of a curb, if your life is going to be over because your health costs are going to be out of control. And that is the uncertainty that people are actually feeling. And Trump is a huge destabilizing factor on top of all of that. But at the end of the day, a lot of people are feeling an insane amount of economic insecurity as well. And it's concentrated in the people that Trump is hurting the most. Right. And layered on top of all this, of course, is the climate crisis. You know, so you propose the Green New Deal. This is something that requires a mass mobilization like we haven't seen since World War Two. And it requires it urgently. And it requires it at a time

when our political system is in crisis because one of our parties has been radicalized. Where do we begin to make real progress on this when, you know, our best hope is a Democratic president, 51 senators, no filibuster, and then you're still dealing with like Joe Manchin? It's a huge challenge, especially with Manchin as chairman of Energy and Commerce in the Senate. This is where I think a huge amount of public sentiment comes in. And when we first introduced the resolution, one of the biggest critiques that we get on the left is that it's too much, it's too sweeping. But energy policy is not just about putting solar panels on everyone's roof. Our entire system is incentivized to destroying our planet and the only home that we live on.

And so long as fossil fuels are profitable and so long as low wages are profitable, people are going to be economically marginalized and feel like a coal mine is their only hope. And so the reason it has to be so sweeping is because we need to give our entire economy, I think, a golden gate of retreat and decarbonization. And so that's why we have to make a renewable energy job just as good of a quality as a coal job because coal jobs are unionized. And a lot of solar panel jobs are like these ad hoc, weird, hourly, or like you have horrible, catastrophic health insurance plans. And that's a lot of the reason why people don't want to switch over too.

And so we need to address a lot of those underlying economic issues. And frankly, the Green New Deal, I think, in many parts, is also an economic stimulus package for Main Street. You know, we had no problem blinking or snapping our fingers and passing the stimulus package, which created a large amount of political resentment as well because we bailed out Wall Street and did very little for Main Street. oh, this is so expensive. Well, we don't care when these expenses go to bailing out big banks. But for some reason, the idea of bailing out a generation seems unconscionable. Do you think that the next president should prioritize a Green New Deal, even over Medicare for all, like knowing that a president has, I don't know, two major legislative initiatives before the midterms? Well, I think scientifically we have no choice but to put climate front and center.

So in terms of that aspect, we have to do it. But I do think that in making these massive investments, like if we're going to make millions of jobs, I want those millions of jobs to have health insurance and high quality. And that's why I don't think it's necessarily either or. It's going to say, we're going to make this investment and these are the requirements that this investment is funding. Yeah. So Republicans have already tried to make you the face of the Democratic Party heading into 2020. It's a curious decision to me. I mean, I will tell you that in our Wisconsin poll, your net favorability is higher than most of our presidential candidates, including Joe Biden. What do you think about this? How do you,

you know, do you feel like there's an added responsibility because you have been made this notorious star on the right. I mean, I think there's certainly a responsibility because there's a certain power in that. And so if they're going to make me the focus, then I get to determine as a proxy what they focus on. And so if they're going to spend all of their time trying to trash the Green New Deal, I think that's great because the Green New Deal is enormously popular. Or like yesterday in this like little tiff with Barstool Sports. If we want to get into a fight and you're going to be the anti-union side, I will take that any day of the week. Please go on the record bashing unions.

Please go on the record saying we shouldn't have health insurance. Go on the record saying this country should only be for white people. And I will gladly take up that mantle and force them to be on the defense because people say, oh, like, how risky is this if a presidential candidate, you know, wins the primary on Medicare for all? Are they going to be too far left? These other schmoes are literal white supremacists and they're not worried about that. So, I mean, come on. This is an outrageous point to make, and we have to be as galvanizing as possible.

Is one of the reasons you jumped in on that yesterday because it's so hard to get coverage of the labor movement and unions? it's so hard to get coverage of the labor movement and unions. Like I noticed that you sort of pick your battles on Twitter. It seems to me very strategically thinking that there are some issues that just never break through in the normal political conversation. And if you were saying earlier, if you can sort of fuse the politics with pop culture and what's interesting, you can sort of get more people to pay attention. Yeah. No, I mean, that is something that I enjoy doing because at my core, I come from the

background of community organizing. And in my primary election, I won because I expanded the electorate 68% over the last off-year midterm primary. I talk to people who don't vote. That's my jam. I talk to young people. I talk to people of color. I talk to working class people that say, why should I consent to be governed by the lesser of two evils? This system doesn't work for me. You know, I think one of the biggest misconceptions that we have in politics is that people who don't vote are apathetic. And if anything, sometimes I find them to be the most passionate about politics and they're just very heartbroken and dejected. How do you overcome that cynicism about the system that I think, I understand it. I mean, I've talked to a lot of these non-voters too and Democrats say,

these should be our voters. They're younger. They're predominantly people of color. They're poorer. And then, you know, some of the solution is like, well, we can get there by just sort of proposing more ambitious policies. But by the way, because one of the one of the worries I had when Democrats won the House is there's gonna be a lot of expectation from people who don't pay super close attention to politics that Democrats won the House. Now everything's going to be great. Yeah. And we only control one House of Congress. So we can't promise that much. But is that going to create more disappointment? Well, I don't I when I go back home, it's not about winning. And it's not about winning. It's about fighting. And every time I come home, people say, thank you for trying. Thank you for fighting for us. That's the number one thing that I hear when I go back home. And it's because they know it's not. I come from a district that is like D plus 24 or something like that. People in my community vote for Democrats no matter what, but they don't like Democrats. They don't love the party. And I think that's the mistake that we have. We take young people for granted. We take communities of color for granted. We take

working class people for granted. And we just say, oh, well, you're going to vote for us no matter what because we're the lesser of two evils. So like you should, there's this entitlement that's like, it's your fault you don't vote. It's your fault that you don't vote. And if you only voted, we would pass all of these things for you. That's bullshit. That's bullshit. And that's why I unseated a 20 year incumbent that was the fourth most powerful person in the party. And the argument that I made, people, you know, some people were saying, oh, well, he's going to be the next speaker. Do we really want to give up that power to our district? And I said, how much of that power has been used to improve our lives? Yeah. How much of it? And I think that's when people were saying,

you know what, we should have a change. Yeah. And I don't always understand it because like I think politicians and people who've been in Washington for a long time believe that people who are disengaged from politics, like they believe that everyone pays as closely attention to politics as we all do. And so if they don't automatically know that Donald Trump is the worst person on earth, or they don't automatically know that voting for a Democrat is the best thing to do, then it's their problem. And I think we don't realize that people are busy and living their lives. And there's a certain obligation that comes with citizenship, but there's also an obligation on behalf of our leaders. Well, not only that, but deep in that message that you're talking about, where it's like, oh, well, you should know that if you don't vote, Trump will win.

What you're saying, well, what people say, what that argument says is you should vote for us for your survival. Right. We don't tell white folks in the Midwest that. Right. It's like we tell communities of color, the other side will kill you, and we won't. Right. Isn't that an inspiring message to get to the polls? Right. And so why is it a surprise that young people don't vote, that working class

communities don't vote? Why is it a surprise that the union vote did not turn out in 2016? vote? Why is it a surprise that the union vote did not turn out in 2016? Because none of these messages were galvanizing. And, you know, I think that we could have permanent majorities if we told the truth and fought for people and actually took a risk. And I think the reason people appreciate, even if they disagree with me, I hear this a lot from even Republicans that I talk to that say, I may not agree with you, but I respect to that say, you know, I may not agree with you, but I respect you is because they know that it's not a show like they know that I am legitimately risking things to make people's lives better. And I think that that's what a public servant has to do. And I think that's what all public servants have to do, regardless of your party.

It is a service. We have to risk and sacrifice real things of ourselves, not pretend things. And I think that that is what is winning. And I think in terms of that ethos, people vote for ethoses as well. They vote for vision and ethos and how their communities are galvanizing in a moment. I think that was a huge reason why Bernie Sanders was successful in 2016, because no one had ever heard of Medicare for All and tuition-free colleges. Like those were, I think we underestimate how much these policies were put into the map and how they've become underestimate how much these policies were put into the map and how they've become mainstream in such a short period of time. Well, and it wasn't just his policies, too. I always remember thinking back to Bernie's announcement speech in 2016. And the very first line of the speech is

just, I believe we need a political and economic revolution. And she's like, oh, you know what his worldview is. I saw you talking when you spoke to David Remnick about sort of trying to understand different candidates' worldviews and how important that is. Yes, yes. What do you believe is the worldview that succeeds in 2020? Well, I think the worldview, you know, and this is also very much from Obama's practice and Marshall Gans, too. You have to tell the story of me, us and now. And that story of me, us and now should coincide. You know, the worldview is the diagnosis after telling those three stories.

And so I think the worldview right now, and I think a lot of candidates have kind of gotten this, but I don't know if they're getting it just because it polls well, or because they've deeply internalized the reality of America today. And it's that our system and our politics, our structure is designed to help the powerful. And we do need to have these huge changes. We do need a political and economic revolution. But we are at a crossroads right now. And the crossroads, and I think we have to tell the story of the crossroads, where our nation is coming apart and it will continue to come apart. Or we can use this moment as an opportunity to transform. But there is no going back to where we were.

And I think that is the bitter pill that is very hard for a lot of people to swallow. But the America that we had, even under Obama, is gone. That is the nature of time. The America that we had with Obama, the America of George Bush was forever gone. And we have to decide how we're going to transform, but there is no staying the same anymore. And taking that step forward requires a certain level of courage and ambition, but that's always been the way it was. Right. And as I think, as humanity evolves, we can always evolve for the better. And I think we're almost scared of living in a more advanced world because I think

that the way we advance as a society, a more advanced society is one where everyone can go to the doctor. A more advanced society is one where every person has the opportunity to educate themselves as far as they see fit for their own lives. That, you know, it sounds like science fiction to a lot of people, but science fiction is written for the societies we're going to live in decades from now. And these policies are the ones that are policies of an advanced society. So we're going to have to decide if we're going to be a regressive society because we're used to it, because we're used to barbarism, and we're used to $300 insulin. And we think that not having $300 insulin is, quote unquote, unrealistic, or we can actually realize that reality is what we create and that we have all of the money to do all of these things. We just have to decide that this is going to be our value as a country. Congresswoman, thank you so much for joining us. This is great. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

No, absolutely. Thank you for having me. Thanks to AOC for joining us. And we'll see you at the Greek on Saturday night. I'll see you at the Greek on Saturday night, Dan. I will be there. So, by the way, that will be our pod on Monday. And then Dan and I will be back on Thursday. Bye, guys.

Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media. The show is produced by Michael Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Caroline Reston, Tanya Somanator, and Katie Long for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these bad boys every week.