Pod Save America - Can Biden Stop Trump’s Revenge Tour?

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

The White House considers preemptive pardons for the people Donald Trump and his allies have promised to target, setting off a debate among Democrats. Jon and Dan talk through the pros and cons of the move, who Biden could consider if he does move forward, and what Trump or other presidents might do in the future as a result. Then, veteran Democratic strategist Steve Schale talks with Dan about what led to the party's collapse in his home state of Florida, and why he's worried that the damage may spread. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, House Democrats make moves to overthrow the gerontocracy. We're getting more information about who the swing voters were in the 2024 election, the kind of information they're getting and how Trump won them over. Then we get to hear Dan's conversation

with our friend, Steve Shale, a democratic strategist and campaign vet in Florida, about how we got into such a deep hole there, especially with Latino voters, and why he's worried that what happened to Democrats in Florida may not stay there. But first, you heard it on Pod Save America First. On Tuesday's show, Tommy and I both mentioned that it might be a good idea for Biden to issue preemptive pardons for people who Trump and his allies Have said they want to prosecute which according to Politico's Jonathan Martin the White House is now considering

You're welcome Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney Just kidding We were not even close to the first that that raised that and the White House has been working on it in a while Apparently according to J. Mart. He says that there has been a quote, vigorous internal debate about this among a small group of the most senior White House aides, including the White House counsel and the chief of staff.

Though the president himself has not yet been part of the discussions, the news has set off a debate among Democrats over whether it's wise to issue preemptive blanket pardons. Congressman Brendan Boyle, who's a close ally of Biden's, said that Trump's decision to put Cash Patel in charge of the FBI means that prosecuting his enemies is, quote, no hypothetical threat and urged the president to give the pardons, but Schiff himself, who would

and urged the president to give the pardons, but Schiff himself, who would presumably be on the list, urged Biden not to do it, arguing that it would seem defensive and unnecessary. Well, what do we think? Jim Jordan was actually asked about this, the idea of a preemptive pardon. We're going to listen to what he said, and then we're going to listen to what Donald Trump says about what he plans to do. Democrats are now asking Joe Biden for a preemptive pardon, okay, of Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and Tony Fauci. What is this all about?

Preemptive pardons for heaven's sake. This is ridiculous. Donald Trump has never been about retribution. Already hundreds of people have been murdered because of her action at the border, and thousands more will follow in rapid succession. She should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions. Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted for that.

If we win and when we win, we're gonna prosecute people that cheat on this election. Yeah! And if we can, we'll go back to the last one too, if we're allowed. What do you think? You think they're gonna be allowed? All right, what do you think of this pros and cons of blanket preemptive pardons from President Biden

on his way out the door? Let me start with the one con, which I give zero fucks about, which is the idea that somehow doing this breaks a norm or makes it easier for Trump to do what he wants to do when he leaves office. Trump's gonna do what Trump wants to do no matter what, whether Biden does preemptive pardons or not,

if he wants to do the same thing, he'll do the same thing for his people. We should stop reverse engineering our ideas around or our actions around things Trump may or may not do. That is stupid. The pros here are pretty clear. Donald Trump campaigned on prosecuting his political opponents.

He picked someone to head the FBI who published a literal enemies list of people to prosecute. Like it's not, there's no subtlety happening here. And- What an appendix, you know? And this- It's like in the back of the book.

It seems, hoping people wouldn't find it, but we did. The idea of preemptive pardons is a rational response to what Trump is promising to do with his words and his actions. And if you run around saying, and believing as Joe Biden has done and said, and I think we have said and believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, this sort of action, a preemptive pardon,

is a rational response to that threat. The con here is also pretty serious, which is people don't trust government, they think everyone's corrupt, and these people did nothing wrong. Didn't even, like these are invented crimes. Like they're not even, like Trump can't even define the crimes they committed.

And if you offer them pardons, it's gonna give people a reason to believe that they had crimes were really committed, that the Biden administration really was crap, that these people really did do something wrong. Because why would you do that? It's hard to explain to the median voter that we need these pardons

because of someone named Cash Patel. Like that doesn't make sense. And you're just gonna assume because your natural inclination is people are corrupt. So that's the downside to it, I think. It's funny, I didn't think about that downside. I guess if I was gonna announce it and I was Joe Biden, I would like play maybe even a longer super cut

like the one we just did of all the times and all the people Trump said he was gonna prosecute and then put Cash Patel in there too, saying that he's gonna come after people and whoever else is in his administration and be like, that's why I'm doing this. These people did not commit any crimes, they're innocent. I mean, I don't know, you're right.

That's the way that people would consume the news about it could lead them to believe that these folks are actually guilty. I think the other con is, or at least one of the challenges with doing this is where do you draw the line? Where do you stop? Like who's on the list? That's pretty clear.

You start with Anthony Fauci and you end somewhere right after podcasters. Like that's the plan. You start with Anthony Fauci and you end somewhere right after podcasters, like that's the plan. Apparently the Washington Post followed up on the J-Mart's reporting today. They said that people who have been discussed are General Milley, Fauci, Schiff, Cheney, Jim Clyburn, I think gave an interview to CNN.

He said that Jack Smith's on his list, but you can start to see where this grows. Like, all right, so Jack Smith's on the list. What about Jack Smith's whole team? What about Merrick Garland? What about like a whole bunch of other, well, Joe Biden's probably not gonna put Merrick Garland on there now.

It's like Merrick Garland has as much chance as we do is getting on that list. What about like most of the Justice Department? What, I mean, the danger is that you, that Biden saves a bunch of people and then, and Lovett brought this up on Tuesday, then like the next group of mid-level people have targets on their backs.

Yeah, there are one million challenges to this approach. I think if you're gonna do it, you should at least limit it to people who worked in the administration, who did things that Joe Biden asked them to do as part of their jobs. And therefore, like once you start getting members of Congress, I think that's ridiculous.

Once, you know, is it going to be Schiff, Cheney? What about Eric Swalwell? They seem to hate Eric Swalwell and keep accusing him of espionage. What about Joe and Mika? What about Leslie Stahl? What about the producer? Like it just goes down the road.

And so if you want to. I think Joe and Mika secured their freedom. Well, I mean, if they're waiting with bated breath to find out, I'm sure. So this is, you could go down the line forever. If you were to do this, Fauci, Millie, Jack Smith, but it's, it's hard. Like there is no, there is no good answer here. We are in unprecedented and dangerous territory. I do think it's good that they are contemplating it

and thinking about it. Cause I think there has been this sense, and I felt this since the election that it's like, oh, Donald Trump's is huge danger. Oh my God, everything's terrible. And then it's like, eh, it's not really not that bad, as bad as you think it is. And it is an important corollary to the conversation

on the Hunter Biden pardon, right? Where it's not just that, right? And it is an important corollary to the conversation on the Hunter Biden pardon, right? Where it's not just that, right? There is, that one went first, that one went first because of the sentencing, but at least you're thinking of other ways to do it. And if he does do it, this is my main criticism of the Hunter Biden pardon. I understand why, I was kind of mad about it at first.

I now understand why Biden did it. I probably would have done the exact same thing. In fact, I'm a hundred percent sure I would do the exact same thing. But if he were to do it, he's got to go out and explain it. You can't do a paper statement on Sunday night. You have to just go out and defend it.

And just like the way you said it, we don't want to do this. This wasn't our choice, but he picked a guy to head the FBI who published an enemies list. So maybe I should protect the people on the list, right? Like maybe just use that list. Yeah, I mean, look, we talked about this Tuesday.

I, if I was in his shoes, I probably would have done the same thing too. I do think that if you imagine what you just suggested, which is like, imagine if Biden comes out and includes the Hunter pardon with this blanket preemptive pardon for all the people who have been part of the administration or worked closely with Joe Biden that Trump has specifically mentioned that he wants to prosecute. And same thing with Cash Patel and same thing with anyone else in his orbit who's explicitly listed people that they want to prosecute and you did it all at once.

You probably don't get the blowback or at least you don't get as much blowback as he did by just, and I still think like if he decides not to do these at all and only pyridons hunter and then we're in 2025 and Trump's president. And suddenly there's a whole bunch of prosecutions. Like, you know, that's a con for not doing it. Because, but I don't think it's like, I was in favor of this, you know, when I first heard about it, it's not like cut and dry and easy.

Also by the way, the other thing is that the pardons don't protect you from a crazy red state prosecutor, attorney general, someone in a red state, like state level crimes, right? You're not protected from. And then the other challenge here is the hunter pardon was this very sweeping blanket pardon,

any crimes that may have been committed over a 10 year period. The only other time there was a pardon that sweeping in modern history was the pardon that Ford gave Nixon. It was preemptive and it was pretty complete. These kinds of pardons have not been tested at the Supreme Court yet. Pardons for crimes that have not been committed

that are not specified in the pardon. So there is like a risk there, but it's fucking crazy by the way, that we're just, we should have said at the outset, it's crazy that we're talking about this. And that it's not insane that Biden's thinking about it, right? That's the thing. It's fucking nuts.

It also, it's like the pardon power is, wow, really stupid. Bad move from the founders because- It's not their only one, John. But like your point at the beginning where it's like, oh yeah, Trump's going to do what Trump's going to do. That is true. But like, I mean, Trump could just basically come into office and say, everyone, uh, should go commit crimes, go kill people, go do whatever. And, uh, I'll pardon you afterwards.

No big deal. And now the Supreme court has said he can't be prosecuted for that. He wasn't, he wouldn't be impeached for that because, you know, Republicans do whatever he says. And so that's it. Yeah, we, we have been with the Supreme Court's immunity decision and all of this conversation around pardons just sort of codified something that became obviously true during the Trump administration, which is a president can

commit, at least a Republican president can commit any crimes they want. They can't be charged while in office. They cannot be impeached because of the radicalization of the Republican party and polarization. And now because of Supreme Court, they can commit crimes out of office. Yeah. Well, did you make a shift comments about, I mean, I, I would say that I think if you want a preemptive pardon, you probably wouldn't publicly say that you want a preemptive pardon first, first rule of preemptive pardon club, uh, guess we broke that, but do you think, do you think he just cares about the norms?

Cause he's a norms guy. He, he is a norms guy. I also, I think it about the norms because he's a norms guy? He is a norms guy. I also, I think it's the norms and trust that this, obviously he's very, very smart. This is incredibly complicated. This is sort of things that White House advisors and lawyers and legal scholars consider and discuss for 17 straight days

and come to no conclusion and end up not doing it because it's so complicated because there is no obvious way to do it. I do think, I imagine the shift is also concerned about what it says to the public about the party. People are gonna think you're guilty of crimes. And it's just, it reinforces their view that everyone's corrupt.

Like if Trump, going out of office, if Trump had just unilaterally pardoned all of his people for anything that may have happened, imagine what we would have thought about that. Imagine what the average voter would have thought about that. I mean, he tried to overturn the election and cited a violent insurrection, and then everyone was like, yeah,

let's take another flyer on the guy. Well, you got four, the point is Democrats will have a few years to fix the problem, but. So I don't know, man, I don't know. Like, I actually, I don't, I really, the one thing I doubt and I am, I think I'm in favor of this idea, but the one thing I doubt is that the public would be like,

oh, they're all guilty. I think the public would be like, well, he's got the power, he can do what he wants. It feels like one thing I have learned from this last election is that most people in this country do not give a fucking shit about norms. I don't think it's the norms. I agree.

I wrote an entire book about breaking norms. I am very anti-norm. I've been anti-norms for a long time. Norm-izing is the only norm I like. Not you norm-izing. Yeah, that's you. Norm-izing is the only norm I like, I guess. Anyway, the way in which we are going to get back to power

is to be able to convince the median voter that the other side is corrupt and that we are gonna fix Washington. I get that, but like- And that gets harder to do in this situation. Yeah, but it's not like there's allegations against those people that are real. Well, I mean-

It's not like, if it was Hunter, right? Like the Hunter stuff, you're like, oh yeah, he, I mean, a jury convicted him of crimes. Well, I mean, jury convicted Donald Trump of crimes too. Right, but like- The right feels about the Trump crime. Yes, the problem we have here is that it's all fake. It's all fake.

And like, of course the MAGA people would be like, yeah, he gave them pardons because they're all really corrupt. But most people would be like, oh yeah, Donald Trump ran around saying he was gonna prosecute people. So I guess Biden used his like special, you know, his special power to, to help them out.

I guess that's what you get to do when you're president, because they're all fucking corrupt. I guess we'll test this proposition maybe one day. Oh, really bad, really bad. All right. Let's talk about what's going on with

house Democrats who are going to end up with 215 members now that Adam Gray officially pulled off a win here in California by less than 200 votes. 200 votes! What do we say? Every vote matters. This is why you go out, this is why you knock on doors, you make phone calls, because Adam Gray won by 200 votes and now Democrats have 215. There will be 220 Republicans, but with Matt Gaetz not returning and Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz leaving for jobs in the administration, that is a 217 to 215 margin for the opening stretch,

meaning that if all Democrats vote together and just one Republican joins them, you'd get a tie, which in the House means the vote fails. Even so, being in the majority means Republicans will get to chair every committee, hire staff, send out subpoenas, control just about everything. The most powerful Democrat on each committee will then be known as the ranking member. And since they're in the minority,

their main job is basically representing the opposition party during hearings and generally making Republicans lives difficult, which is why Democrats have decided that their best shot here is to bounce some of their older ranking members on key committees in favor of younger, more telegenic folks. On the Judiciary Committee, Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin announced a challenge to New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, apparently at the urging of Gen Z sensation Nancy Pelosi. Nadler couldn't shore up the votes and announced that he is bowing out. So Jamie Raskin will be the ranking member on judiciary. On the oversight committee, where all the fun investigations take place, AOC has said that she's interested in taking Raskin's spot as the ranking member, since he's going to

judiciary, but she hasn't made a final decision. And then similar scenes are playing out on the agriculture and natural resources committees. I know those are two committees that you're very excited about. We don't talk a lot about congressional committees here since Dan just fell asleep while I was talking, but this seemed worth getting into you.

Do you think this is, what do you think about this overall move towards sort of younger, more telegenic Democrats on these committees? Why is that valuable? What does it matter? What do you think? I don't want to overstate the importance of the

ranking members on committees. Like it just, there are some exceptions, which we'll get into. I don't know if there's that much of a danger, but yes. But I, what I appreciate is that this is a recognition of the fact that Democrats have lost touch with younger voters, right?

We had, that has been a trend that has been going on going for eight years here. We have a, we had an 80 year old president. We had congressional leadership in it and their seventies, we had two consecutive nominees, and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who were at best young voters had lukewarm feelings about, did not feel like that they represented them.

That was something that came up in all of it. Kamala Harris did much, even though she did not end up doing as well as we would like with younger voters, she at least was more culturally connected with at least parts of our base than Democrats, but we have a real problem here. And so trying to put younger faces forward is absolutely essential. And the House leadership to their credit, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, they stepped aside, they made room for Hakeem Jeffries and his team who are younger. They are more modern media

savvy and that's good. And so doing that here is a good thing. It does, I will say, speak to the challenges of the gerontocracy that we are pivoting from Jerry Nadler in his seventies to Jamie Raskin, who is 61, I think. Um, we're so excited. We're not exactly getting a bunch of like, we're not getting like Maxwell Frost there yet, but it is, it's progress, it's progress.

Yeah. I mean, look, I, I mentioned gerontocracy at the beginning and sort of a joke. I think it's less about age and more about, um, performance and being good on TV, right? Like committee hearings, let's be honest, are about performance these days. I know a lot of staff work goes into committee

hearings. They are important for legislation, but especially when you get to what the Republicans have done to the Oversight Committee, where it's just like a place to have these investigations and it's a circus and they do all these hearings. What you need is people who are good on TV and who are good performers and who get it and who are going to have moments that end up going viral. And I think we saw that even in the difference between some of the hearings we've seen, the

January six hearings, for example, I think probably were, went better than most people expected, partly because Liz Cheney was excellent during them. They also like didn't let every single person on the panel speak and give five minute speeches. Right? Like just the entire style, forget about the members being old.

The entire style of communication in Congress is old. The rules, the way people do it, the chart, like all of it. And I think when you have people who are new to Congress who tend to be younger or people who are just practiced being on TV, speaking to voters, speaking to reporters, like it's just going to be, it's going to be more compelling. And especially if you're in the minority and you don't have that much power to begin with, all you

really have is the performance that you deliver at these hearings. And so you might as well go with, go with your best. Yeah, that's exactly right. What do you think about AOC, AOC, AOC's move for, for oversight? I love this idea. I mean, let's just be frank. AOC is probably the best communicator in the democratic party right now.

What she says, how she says it and where she says it. And she is obviously very good at getting attention. She is quite relatable. is obviously very good at getting attention. She is quite relatable. I was on TikTok and I saw this video of AOC making an espresso martini. It was like, get yourself a member of Congress who can make a homemade espresso martini. And the thing that's interesting is I'm pretty sure I didn't even see it on her page. I saw it on an AOC fan page, which just, how many members of Congress have a fan page on TikTok, right? Where their content is so compelling that other people are trying to draft off of it for engagement by reposting their videos.

And so- Dan, do you know that I can make an espresso martini as well? How often do you make them? Once in a while. Is it good? You guys are pretty good? Ask Emily. I hate to really age myself here, but I don't think I can have caffeine that late at night. No, I'm sure you can. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, like, I really tap out at about 10 AM. I need a steady drip of caffeine from 5 AM right through bedtime. So that's me. It's weird. It's weird that, I mean, I recognize I'm up at the same time you are, but it's weird. You're such a, uh, not a such, not a great sleeper. It's just polishing that diet coke off with dessert.

Anyway, I want to check out AOC's recipe, but go on. Yes. Anyway, I think she, she is a phenomenal communicator and there is a benefit in the fact that Republican, she drives the Republicans insane. And that is good because it just means more attention. If we had picked a, AOC being the ranking member on these hearings, it means they're gonna get more attention,

more coverage, more, certainly more, what is gonna matter even more than whether CNN takes it live, is whether people are gonna clip parts of it and put it on social media, and that will happen with her. I think she's very smart, and she's been very good

in these hearings and she speaks like a human. So I think this is great, I hope she does it. I hope people support her doing it. I will also say that she does drive Republicans crazy, but when she speaks during these hearings, it's not the typical like, like she doesn't just make the whole thing about the Republicans

on the committee or about Republicans in general. And I do think that's important because I think there are a lot of members and moments that go viral that like, you know, libs share. We all share with each other and we all think it's amazing and blah, blah. And I think if most voters saw it, they'd be like, it's fucking people are yelling at each other. The Republicans are an asshole, the Democrats are an asshole. They're all going back and forth.

They don't care who started it, right? And I think that AOC, like I think on the oversight committee if she ends up being ranking member, and then part of this is a play where like, if we take back the house in 2026, then she gets, has subpoena power and then she can sort of hold her own hearings

on oversight, right? And I would imagine that she'd be more like a Katie Porter model than a like, just beat up Republicans. Like imagining AOC bringing in a bunch of CEOs and corporate interests and lobbyists, and just sort of holding them accountable of these hearings for like why they are screwing

most working class Americans. I think that is even more effective than like, oh, did you see this AOC dunk on Jim Jordan, right? Yeah, the dunk thing is very important because we, you know, you and I saw this at the convention. We saw so many of the speeches that the, especially the democratic house members were doing were basically reverse engineered

from a dunk on Republicans moment that could go viral. And AOC doesn't have to do something to go viral. There's a certain set of politicians who have this ability for whatever reason, Trump is one of them. Obama was one of them. You can just, Pete is very good, same thing, where you don't have to, just your presence doing

what you do authentically gets attention in traffic on the internet, as opposed to trying to come up with a thing where you don't have to just your presence doing what you do authentically gets attention in traffic on the internet, as opposed to trying to come up with a thing where you're just gonna like really take down Marjorie Taylor Greene or, you know, in front of everyone is a way to do it. And it just, it makes it easier to have a conversation in that committee that speaks to voters as opposed to speaks to political junkies

who will hit the share button. AOC destroys Marjorie Taylor Greene. I mean, right now, Elijah's thinking that's great SEO. Yeah, that's right. I want that as a YouTube thumbnail. No one wants us more than Elijah because we're gonna crush on YouTube if that happens. All right, before we get to your conversation with Steve Schale about how Democrats can win again, I want to talk about some new findings that the party might be able to draw some

lessons from. Shane Goldmacher at the New York Times dropped a long story on Thursday in which the Trump campaign explained how they went after swing voters on streaming services. So according to campaign officials, they put together an actual list of 6.3 million individual battleground state voters that they thought were persuadable. That was about 14% of battleground state voters. They tended to be young, non-white, and they heavily use streaming services

like Tubi and Roku. The Trump campaign believed that about half of this group of persuadable voters watched streaming TV exclusively. The Trump campaign referred to these voters as, quote, streaming persuadables. And I had no idea, but apparently a lot of these streaming channels now allow you to target ads to individual households rather than just regions.

Trump campaign said they took advantage of that feature, but the Harris campaign didn't, which meant that they were spending huge amounts of money on viewers who had already made up their minds while the Trump folks were able to make their money go further. This is of course, according to the Trump campaign. This general theory of swing voters media consumption is backed up by new data from Navigator. This is based on their big survey of 5,000 people who said they voted in the election. Whereas half of Harris voters said they get their news from broadcast television, only 38% of swing voters said they did. They were

much more likely to get their news from YouTube and Facebook. 61% of swing voters said they watch live TV through a streaming service. And only 42% of them said they get their live TV through cable or satellite. All right, there's a lot in there. What'd you think of the times piece? And do you buy the Trump campaign's take

on how much this targeting mattered and what was happening with the Harris campaign? I think we should stipulate that the Trump campaign did a very good job of communicating with their target voters through a variety of means. Paid advertising, including this individualized targeting on streaming, all of his media appearances, the work they did with influencers

like Aiden Ross and the Milk Boys, they knew who their target voters were and they went after them and they clearly reached them. I do feel a little bit like in reading this story that they're taking what is a relatively common tactic for political advertising and treating it as sorcery. So I think it was good that they had a challenge. Democrats had more money than Republicans. They had to spend their money more efficiently. This was an efficient way to do it. It's not as brilliant, I think, as maybe they would like us to believe, but it obviously worked.

So what am I to say? What do you make of the Harris campaign side of this? Why were they not targeting individual households on streaming and instead doing it by region? They're doing it by zip code. They're doing it by zip code, which to zip code. By zip code, which is, obviously that's a smaller population of people than the metro area of Philadelphia or the state of Pennsylvania.

And the reason why I believe the Harris campaign did what they did is pretty simple. In the battleground states, the Trump path to their win number was pretty simple. It was base vote plus some slice of this swing voter university was overwhelmingly male and younger. That gets you there. The Harris campaign path to these swing states, which are bipartisanship and political performance, a couple of points to the right of the nation as a whole, was to get their base of core

democratic voters. But then they also had to get some of the nation as a whole, was to get their base of core democratic voters. But then they also had to get some of these same young men voters. They had to get older black voters. They had to get, juice up their numbers with college educated suburbanites. They need Republicans and Republican leaning independents. They needed some of these Nikki Haley voters.

They needed to juice the numbers with seniors. Their math was so much more complicated that it was more cost efficient to do it by zip code than it was to do it on an individualized basis. And the other thing I just say about the individualized targeting is many of the streaming services do not allow political ads. Like YouTube is the big one that doesn't allow it.

Well, YouTube TV uses it. You can do political ads on YouTube TV. That's what I meant. I meant YouTube TV. You can't do individualized on it. You can't do individualized. You can do political ads on YouTube TV. That's what I meant. I meant YouTube TV. You can't do individualized on it. You can't do individualized. Netflix, no political ads. And the vast majority of Netflix subscribers

don't use the ads here. But we brought up 2B and all of these fast networks. It's free ad-supported TV. It's like if you buy a smart TV today and you just turn it on connected to your internet, you'll see a bunch of icons. 2B is one of them. There's a bunch of free TV you can just watch of them. There's a bunch of free TV that you can just watch with ads.

And I'll, and a increasing number of people do it. And particularly young people who get their, their, their diet is like Netflix, uh, maybe another streaming service. And then if they're just like flipping the channel or looking for something, they'll just go on to these fast channels and that, and you reach those people. And so it's not that the Trump campaign is smarter than the Harris campaign. The Harris campaign was very smart about how they did a lot of their advertising. It's just there they had to reach a much more diverse group of voters to get to their win number so it was

probably much more efficient. You think about this way, you're doing zip code, you're gonna do a certain number of people in Waukesha, Wisconsin or you're gonna do a certain zip code in Waukesha, Wisconsin, or are you gonna do a certain zip code in Waukesha, Wisconsin, right? And so it's kind of little six here, half dozen the other, I think. But it is the future. This is the future. And this has consequences for Democrats

because our advantage in a world where Republicans have a massive advantage on free media and social media was in paid linear television, right? Particularly targeting people on cable, on people who are watching live television, news, sports, et cetera. And that advantage is dramatically diminished and is gonna be just, given the rate of cord cutting

and the rate at which the cable business is collapsing before us, it's hard to imagine what 2028 is gonna look like, but it's gonna be very different from this election. Yeah, I just think that, I don't know, at some point, the utility of all of these ads and like just one after another that sounds the same and looks the same and on your phone

and like you can't watch anything else. I just, I feel like there's gotta be diminishing marginal utility at some point. Yeah, I mean, it is the greatest waste of money in modern American history. Like billions of dollars were spent to reach like 12 million people in the country. Not even 12 million people, right?

Just a few million people. I know, I could go on this forever, but like- I have a YouTube show about this, you're always welcome. Well, it's just like, I feel like we're like really, there's always a step that's being skipped, which is like, well, this ad tested really, really well. And it's like, yeah, of course,

you showed it to a bunch of voters, and the voter's like, yeah, this is persuasive. This might make me vote more, blah, blah, blah. And then you run the ad, and then you know the ad reach people. But like, we still don't know, but like once the ad reaches the actual voter, does it move the voter to actually go take the action?

I mean, I know that you can. You can do regression analysis on this stuff, but you never really know because it's impossible to test in a lab the actual impact of watching all the ads you see. I mean, we spent some time in battleground states at the end. If you watched, I watched football in Philadelphia,

I'll be way before our show started. And I mean, holy shit. We left Philly and you voted for Trump. That's right. And a lot of hair stands actually. But then it's also how does it fit with all the, and what you really can't test is how the ad fits with all the other surround sound you're getting, right?

From social media, the regular news, stuff like that. So it's, a lot of money is being spent and we're not really sure why. Cool, cool. One other perennial post-election debate is the question of turnout versus persuasion. The way this goes is, did Kamala Harris lose because more Biden 2020 voters stayed home

or because more Biden 2020 voters switched to Trump? The answer is always in every election, some of both. But one reason it's heavily debated is that if the loss was mostly caused by voters staying home, often there are lefty types who will argue that it's because the candidate didn't sufficiently excite the party's liberal base. If the loss was mostly caused by voters switching parties.

Centrist types will argue that it's because the candidate failed to win the middle, moderates. Nate Cohn at the Times waited into the debate this week with a piece where he makes a few points. One, lower turnout among Democrats was a big part of the story in non-battleground states this election, but not in the battleground states where turnout was much higher.

And then a second point is the Times polling data suggests that the Biden 2020 voters who did stay home in 2024, weren't necessarily deciding between Kamala Harris and the couch, as is often the phrase. They were in fact, more moderate voters, less partisan, less ideological voters who if they had turned out, could have just as easily supported Trump.

What do you think? Does this settle the argument once and for all? This argument would never be settled, John, for the exact reasons you laid out, which is people have an interest in continuing the argument. It's happened in every losing election in my career. We're always looking for simple ways to tell ourselves a story, right?

Like this idea that there's this ocean of potential democratic voters that if we could just reach with our very compelling democratic, very progressive message would turn out that like that would be a great world to live in because your path to victory forever is obvious. A simple another simple story to tell ourselves is if we could just sand down the edges on this issue or that issue, then we could get this mythical group of centrist, very focused policy voters who line up the white papers of both campaigns

on a dining table somewhere in Wisconsin, and they make a decision. No, voters are complicated, and they have different reasons for turning out and different reasons for making their decisions. They are cross-pressured in thousands of ways. I do think in this election, the most brutally honest thing we can say to ourselves

is that Donald Trump convinced our voters to leave us and join him. Yeah. That is what happened. And we can't shy away from that because if you shy away from that- And you know what? He did it in 2016. He made more, he added more votes in 2020,

even as he lost by 40,000 votes. I mean, Donald Trump added like millions and millions and millions of votes to his total between 2016 and 2024. And a good portion of that is people who have voted for Democrats, Barack Obama, Joe Biden. It's just, that's what happened. Yeah, there's a bunch of Obama Trump voters, got a bunch of Biden Trump voters, like it is.

And it just, it is hard and dark, but I think you kind of have to just like reckon with the absolute wreckage that we're currently in so that you can right size what the solutions are. Because if you want to tell yourself an overly simplistic story, and I think people in the center and the left are doing that, then you're not gonna do all the work

you have to do together. Because we have to win. You know, I know this was a very, I don't know if you've heard this, John, but I did an interview with the Harris campaign. Not a lot of people. Happened over the holiday break, not a lot of people noticed it.

I gotta check that out. Yeah, I think you would like it. I gotta check that out. Yeah, I think you would like it. I hope you were tough. Well, I would say that Jada Mali-Dillon is still walking the earth, so I was not as tough as some people were like. But in that interview, David Plath made the point that in these states, we have to crush it with

moderate voters. And people got very mad about that, right? That like that's a mistake. But the thing is, you have to, if we're going to win, we have to win moderate voters, we have to be better with independence, and we have to get all of those young voters who either went to Trump or stayed home. And some of the young voters definitely stayed home, those young voters who either went to Trump or stayed home. And some of the young voters definitely stayed home, who were voters who should have been with us for a variety of reasons, including Gaza. And we have to get them all back here. We have to do all of those things.

It's not as simple as one or the other. And we just like that. I think that's just the most important takeaway from this is that we have a very complicated task before us. It is the problem of having a big tent coalition. But is that big tent coalition that has given us the ability to win the popular vote in all the two elections since 1988. If we wanna continue that, we have to figure out

how to do all the things. Yeah, I mean, the most simplified version of the argument that both sides are making, which is they are not actually making this argument, but this is just for the sake of talking about it. This is the Twitter version of it, yes. This is the Twitter, yeah, right, which is like, there's this economic populist button that if you press it, suddenly just thousands and thousands and millions of voters who are just hanging out at home are just going to just leave their houses and run to the polls

as fast as they can because now the Democrats actually stand for something, economic populism, that all these voters will come out and vote for them. And also if, you know, in this instance it had to do with Gaza as well and Michigan, which did make a real difference in Michigan. And then on the other side it's like if only, if only on on cultural and and social issues, if Democrats just sort of, you know, said, no, you know, I'm gonna, I'm not for trans rights. I'm not gonna talk about it anymore.

I'm not gonna talk about cultural issues anymore. I'm not gonna talk about immigration anymore. I'm gonna be as tough as Republicans are on the border. And I just gonna take all these positions, then suddenly all the moderate voters, all the swing voters are gonna come. And it's just, that's just, we talk about the data and everyone's like,

the data, everyone's too into the data. It was like, don't call it data then, just go talk to fucking voters. It's math, it's math. I swear to God, just go out there, talk to fucking voters, people that you don't know, people that aren't like you, like sit down with them. And I mean, what I take from this,

and this drives me, it's because I've been doing this, and I've been having this conversation, this this debate since like when I did the first season of the wilderness in 2018, 2017, eight years ago now, uh, seven years ago, whatever. And the way I think about it is the voter who the, the democratic voter, or the person who has voted for Democrats in the past, who decides to stay home. Is not that much different than the person who's voted for Democrats who then switches to vote for Republicans.

They are, they're, they're different, but they are not as different as this debate makes them out to be. Yes. They are less ideological. They are less partisan. They tend to be, and what's, what confuses Democrats is they tend to now be

younger and non-white, which liberals think, oh, that's our voter. If they're young and they're a black voter or Latino voter, an Asian voter, then they must be progressive. And it's just the wrong way to think. It is not supported by the facts. And so the problem, you know, and I think the same thing for some of these voters that switched to Trump, right? And that doesn't mean that they're not, that doesn't mean that they're out of reach for us. That doesn't mean that a good chunk of them would respond favorably to more progressive positions on X or a more economically populist position on Y or, you, or more cultural moderation on something else. But you can't make blanket statements

about entire identities of voters in terms of their behavior and how they're gonna act in an election. You just can't do it anymore because people are just too different. I think one thing we should, there are several things I think we could do going forward that would help our mentality on this.

One is we have to just eliminate the term GOTV as a part of a messaging strategy. Like everyone is a persuasion target. They're all, I was just gonna say that. They're all persuasion targets. The second is we do have to just untrain ourselves from how we thought about politics for a long time. Like I think the term identity politics is obviously overused and has been weaponized by Republicans

in really gross ways. But this idea that you used to be able to make real predictions about how people would vote based on their race, that is no longer true in politics. So we should abolish the idea that we have any sense of how people are going to vote based on their race because that's clearly not true anymore. And finally, we probably ought to stop using the term moderate because moderate, and this isn't the way in which Plouffe used it in the interview is,

that's how people self-identify. That's how they describe themselves to a pollster. I think people miss that from that. That's why I was surprised that clip got so much reaction because I'm like, the moderate thing you're saying, like in an exit poll, it's how you self-identify. The exit pollster says, are you liberal, moderate or conservative? And then you pick one and you tell them.

And that is different for every voter, right? That you, that needs some combination of maybe I am very liberal in economic issues. I am certainly Carolina Social Security and Medicare protecting those and I might be a union member. But also maybe I'm concerned about the border. And then for other voters, it's the reverse, right? Where it's like, they are very liberal on social issues, like trans rights and marriage equality and all that, but they're deeply concerned about spending and

taxes. And so we create these avatars of fake voters when it's like, everyone is different, everyone has a different point of view. And we, so the other thing is stop thinking about voters ideologically, because that puts them in the wrong bucket, I think, particularly when you get to the moderate. Yeah, well, especially when the central divide in American politics now is whether or not you have a college degree,

that is the best predictor of how you're going to vote. And what we have seen since Donald Trump took over the Republican party is you have a coalition of voters who do not have faith in institutions, who are anti-establishment, who don't think the system is working for them. And most of them don't have a college degree. And then you have a coalition of voters who do have a college degree, who generally do think the system is working

and wanna defend institutions. And like that is the axis of American politics right now. And it just, it does scramble the traditional ideological positioning that we've talked about for the last, you know, much of the century. Yeah, instead of thinking of politics as left versus right, it's insider versus outsider. Like that is the way in which our politics moves now.

Yeah. All right, when we come back from the break, you'll hear Dan's conversation with Steve Schale about what the hell is wrong with Florida and the Democratic brand and strategy more broadly. But before we do that, the latest episode of Hysteria dives into some of the biggest questions from the last election.

Erin and Alyssa are joined by our friend Erin Haynes, editor of the 19th News, to break down the role that racism and misogyny played in Trump's win and the latest revelations about Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hagseth's problematic past. Tune into Hysteria today wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Steve Schale. Joining us now is a Democratic strategist who calls himself a 26-year survivor of Florida politics, Steve Schale. Welcome to Pod Save America. Hey, thanks, man. Good to see you.

Good to see you. All right. You spent your political career in Florida. You helped Obama win in 2008, 2012. You wrote a piece for the Bulwark with the title, I watched the democratic collapse in Florida. I fear it's happening nationally, which certainly caught my attention.

You were also on our list of people to talk to about what the hell happened in this election. So all those is a great time to bring you on. Let's, I wanna get into your recommendations for the party, what you think is happening nationally, but I wanna start with the party collapse in Florida. We won in 08, we won in 12, we barely lost in 16, and we lost, Democrats lost Florida in 2024 by a margin,

not dissimilar to what we used to see in places like Montana. What the hell happened in your state? Yeah, I mean, I think finally, just the weight of the coalition falling apart. I mean, if you go back to, say for example, the Clinton years, I mean, we were winning Hispanics in Florida by 30 points.

And we began to see the slippage among Hispanic support here as early as 2018, certainly in 2020, a county, Dade County, that we won with Obama by 20 some odd points, Biden only won by seven. And you saw particularly those Hispanics that were non-Mexican, the exile era type, your Cubans, your Venezuelans really just kind of almost repelled to some of the rhetoric that was out there defunding the police, you know, the some of the socialism talk.

I mean, I remind folks all the time, like if you're from Venezuela, you know, you came here to avoid socialism so when you hear people wax on poetically about socialism that brings back an immediate bad trigger and You know So we saw some of that kind of began to slip away and then in 24 the combination of non-college whites Which again we've seen kind of go the wrong way here added to the issues we've had with Hispanics And it's just it all just added up to a disaster and frankly, I added to the issues we've had with Hispanics. And it just, it all just added up to a disaster, frankly.

I remember after 20 talking to folks in Florida and reading folks, I think you made this point that one of the things that happened between 16 and 20 was that the, you know, a lot of the rhetoric around democratic socialism really had an impact on people with Cuban and Venezuelan, maybe Salvadorian backgrounds in Florida. That was a unique situation.

But this time around, we saw in like Osceola County, a largely Puerto Rican county, just a massive collapse over the previous year. So it seems more widespread than that. Thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I think there's, you know, listen, when you get this, you just, it goes your whole life. I mean, there's a permission structure

in almost any community you go into. And so, you know, we used to talk about it, you know, back sort of college educated white voters does it your whole life. I mean, there's a permission structure in almost any community you go into. And so, we used to talk about it back, sort of college educated white voters who were Republicans in Florida, the Obama days, like our permission structure was talking about cutting taxes. And if we talked about cutting taxes,

they would listen to us on other stuff. And a lot of the permission structure in these Hispanic communities, Puerto Ricans for example, starts at sort of understanding that there's a cultural politics, communities, Puerto Ricans for example, starts at sort of understanding that there's a cultural politics, which are a cultural sort of part of life that is different, that's more conservative, you know, that you know they may be

with us on education, healthcare, but they may not be where we are on for example abortion. And you know I think that you know the sense in a lot of these communities is that we've gotten away from, But I'm not saying it's totally accurate. I think it's the sense, the reality that they see, that we've gotten away from focusing on things like the Affordable Care Act on good schools, good jobs. And we are now entirely focused on these social issues, which often kind of runs contrary

to sort of the faith-based sense of who they are as a people. And that's a real problem. And I think there was that interesting story that came out in the Atlantic. You may have seen, there was something like, I think it was the voters thought that the number two issue we cared about around the country was trans issues,

and number three issue was abortion. And that, and again, I'm not saying we don't fight for those issues, no fight for marginalized voices, but when the perception is that is our primary goal, those communities where faith is a big part of who they are, it's hard for us to kind of get in the door to talk about other issues. Democrats have struggled.

We won, obviously, we won Florida at the presidential level. Bill Nelson had some success there for a while in recent years. But Democrats have not had the governorship in Florida in more than a quarter century now. Is there any lessons you see there about sort of the organization and funding of the party infrastructure

that can apply nationally, sort of what you've seen over the course of your time there? Yeah, I mean, it's funny. I was talking to our mutual friend, Sam Kernally at the DNC earlier, and I mean, the places where state party infrastructure has really been bad, we've really struggled in. And, you know, Florida is a place where we just frankly

haven't invested in the partisan infrastructure. And honestly, man, I'm a homer for our old guy, but a lot of the stuff that we did coming out of the Obama years, and I think the organizing for America infrastructure, a lot of which got kind of moved away from sort of partisan infrastructure into a lot of these C3 and C4 groups in states

that have weak political party infrastructure to begin with really kind of set us on a not great course. And, you know, the challenge we've had in Florida is that when we've had presidential elections that are engaged, we have this huge infrastructure. It's here for six months, you know, bread and cheese, hundreds of thousands of voters, puts hundreds of kids on the ground, and then it leaves the next day, and there's nothing to take its place. And so as you know, as we got into 2020, for example, it had a very different kind of campaigning list. I don't blame the campaign for not putting boots on the ground. We were dealing with COVID, we didn't know what we were dealing with.

But I think not having that real infrastructure on the ground, even for presidential campaigns, and then having sort of nothing in between, you know, it just at all, it atrophied to really nothing. I mean, the Florida Democratic Party at this point literally operates out of a rented third floor building in an office downtown, and they maybe have three or four full-time staffers in a state of 23 million people. It's hard to win from there.

I mean, Florida's obviously a state where there's a lot of money, right? A lot of the big Democratic donors come from Florida. Is it just, is it struggle? Is it, people think it's a lost cause? We've spent way more money in Texas over the last 10 years to try to turn that one blue, obviously with less success there as well.

But I just sort of curious as to what the struggle is to get actual investment. And I will say, I think it's important to note that we did almost win the governorship in 2018 in Florida. And we almost re-elected Bill Nelso. We came within basically a point, I think, or close to a point in those. But just-

9,000 votes. Yeah, much less than a point. So as for someone who's former political experience was Al Gore's election in the recount, that seems like a landslide to me, but I get the point. But just what is preventing broad scale investment in state party infrastructure in Florida? And I take your point on Obama and 08 and 12.

I was part of some of those decisions. I understand why we made them. They had downstream effects that I think have been not awesome, and Florida's example of that. But we're 10 years past that now. Well, I think, listen, a lot of southern states have this problem in that the political party infrastructure never existed in the same way that a state like Michigan that

has a strong union base, has had a lot of governors, like a partisan infrastructure is part of their DNA. In a lot of these southern states, the political party existed, frankly, just as a way for governors, old southern governors, to run money through the get around contribution limits. And so we've never really had a real party to begin with. And then, you know, not having a governor who can help drive money to a political party has been a tough issue. And so I think all of these things, you

know, I tell donors all the time, listen, the Democratic Party is whatever the donors make it. You know, if you put eight or $10 million into it, it's going to be something better than it is today. But it's just there's just never been a real culture to build the political party. And that's been frankly, I mean, if I've been setting myself on fire about one thing down here for the last decade, it's been that, which is if we're ever gonna get Florida

to a better place, and I'm not even saying at this point, getting a place where we're competitive in 26, 28, I'm talking about a better place to make sure that Jared Moskowitz gets re-elected and that Congressman Frost can grow and just kind of win seats at the local and congressional level. We still need to invest in that permanent infrastructure at the partisan level.

We've just never really done it. So in your piece for the bulwark, you offer to see it. You talk broadly. I should recommend everyone should read it. It offers a lot of very interesting thoughts about where the party has been, where it's going. You offer some specific tactical recommendations, which I will summarize here.

You should feel free to correct my summary. But they include spending more money early in campaigns, using data less smartly, more smartly. I'll let you explain that one. And sort of diversifying the number of groups who are campaigning on behalf of the nominees sort of in the Super PAC universe. So can you just maybe sort of explain

what you're arguing for here? Yeah, no, it's funny. So I ran a Super PAC in 2020 and sort of a little bit in 2024 called Unite the Country. And it's one of these things, I never thought I would ever run a Super PAC until our mutual friend, Greg Schultz, called me me at like 930 on a Friday night at a friend's 40th birthday party in a weak moment of weakness.

I said yes. And it was a great lesson about not answering phone calls at that hour after five or six beers. And you know, what was interesting about 2020 and when you guys had Puff on the internet, this is kind of what drove that. You know, David talked about the infrastructure that existed in 2020. And again, I don't have any experience before that. I never ran one of these things. But in 2020, you know, there wasn't really a primary super PAC. And what was interesting about that is it forced all of us to kind of figure out together how to support, you know,

then Vice President Biden. It brought lots of interesting voices to the table. You know, like, for example, I never had known a woman named Adrian Schoppshire, who runs Black Back. I'd never met her until 2020. She's one of the smartest people I've ever talked to in my life. And because of that lack of sort of singular entity, you know, her voice was elevated in ways that it certainly wasn't this cycle. And I think that, you know, we bet that Biden benefited from having that,

you know, that chorus of people on the outside, all raising money, all working together. It was hard for donors. Donors hated it because they would get 35 pitch calls instead of one. But in the end, you had so many more voices with so many more views at these tables. And I think collectively, we ended up in a really good place. So for example, we learned we ran solely pro Joe Biden ads. That was Arlene in 2020. American Bridge ran these ads where they would find former Trump voters talking about why they were voting for Biden. Well, what we found is that our ads and their ads were really good. Our ads, if they were on the same buy schedule as their

ads were amazing because we would tee up people talking about why they were not leaving Trump and then you would fast forward to us. And so you had, I hate the word synergy, but you had kind of that thing that happened because you had that. Whereas this cycle, I mean, I like a lot of those guys are all friends of ours at Future Forward,

but they had a theory of the case. And if you weren't part of their theory, you just weren't at the table. And in the end, I mean, they believe the science says spend money late. I totally agree. Running ads late, something we all do. But the foundation was so bad. I think that folks made this point on your pod last week. We were in such a bad place to begin with that I don't care how much money you put in, you couldn't move the foundation.

Whereas you go back to say 2012, like the work that was done by Priorities and Bill and those guys to define Romney in the spring, just made it easier for all of us in the fall to go do our jobs. And that was my frustration. I think had we run, for example, a bunch of anti-Trump ads in the spring of 2024, like we might've been at a place to actually close a deal

in the fall, but the floor was so low. This one is so hard because like, at least there was a ton of pro-Biden spending early, right? In 2023, Future Forward and the Biden campaign spent tens of millions of dollars to do it and moved literally nothing, right? Any person you talked to said, move nothing. Now, it's like, what's the right answer? Is that because it was too early? Is it because people's minds were made up on Joe Biden at the time and nothing was going to change anyone's

mind? It's there. Was it the ads were just, they were like the right strategy, wrong execution, because the ads were bad. I generally agree with you. I've heard several people all associated with the Harris campaign and other super PACs make the same point that Pluff and Jen made to me. And you're making now that diversity is better, right? You just see, it's sort of, you have more fail-safe in the system where if one,

and I'm not arguing the future forward, what they were doing was wrong or their theory was wrong, but if you have more people, you have more theories, you're less likely, you have your eggs in multiple baskets. But then it's also hard to set like, this is why I find this election so hard to talk about because there are all these tactical things that we can debate till the end of time

that the Harris campaign did wrong, the rest of us did wrong, but do any of those add up to victory, hard to say, right? Just like it's close, but it wasn't that like it was like close in margin. But when you look at the movement among groups, it was so widespread that it's hard, it's hard to get to, it's hard to

argue that the more money wins this race for her, but does more money make it closer is more money better than less money? Probably, like hard to say, right? Yeah, and I think part of why the first line of my blog or the piece for Bulwark was essentially like, I don't wanna talk about 2024 anymore. And I know I talked about it in the piece, but my frustration has been,

I think we've gotten to a place where, I mean, we're very cycle to cycle, that's collections. But we've had some macro level trends that, in part because frankly, Biden was old and a lot of people were kind of, that was baked in. Some of it's Trump being what he is, but like the macro level trends, for example, with Hispanics, that didn't start today.

The macro level trends with non-college whites, that didn't start today. And I think my point on a lot of this stuff is, A, we have to get back to some basic organizing, some early organizing. I do think, particularly in some of these communities that we consider to be base communities, that we do need to spend more money communicating earlier. We have to treat voters who I think we've treated by, particularly just a turnout target is persuasion.

And part of the point I made about the data thing is, we've gotten to this- Yeah, please, will you make that point for our listeners? Yeah, so you know, for your average, the way we look at data as a party, your average voter is going to have a score from 1 to 100, 1 being 1% that are going to vote for our candidate, 100 being the sure thing.

And we tend to sort of chop up the electorate by that way. And so if you're, for example, an an African American male who's voted in four elections in a row and has a primary voting history, like you may have a persuasion score of a hundred, we think you're gonna vote for us. So we don't talk to you anymore, and accept to make sure you vote. Well, if we're not talking to you anymore

and the other side is talking to you, yeah, that's not gonna work out well for us. And I think at the same time, and you know, Stanford, you know, the Obama years, one of the things that our guy doesn't get enough credit for you guys can't pay no Get enough credit for is He kept the floor in a lot of these places very high You know in a part because you know, frankly we had money so you could communicate widely but like, you know Take take you know, take the panhandle of Florida, you know, very conservative area

I mean, you know Take the panhandle of Florida, very conservative area. I look at where we were versus where Harris was, and it's not changed dramatically, it's still white, still non-college, but we spent the money there, put the people on the ground there to keep those floors high. And nowadays, if you were to look at data,

they'd be like, oh, that area always was Republican, so waste your time and your money, so you don't spend any money there. Well, all of a sudden, the floor is gone from 40% to 25%. And so my point is, like, I just, for me, it's, it's, I'm not a smart guy. I'm smart enough to add up to 50%. Like, if we're not talking to enough people, to make sure we're getting to that number, then we're not going to win very many elections. And so I think we have to cast a broader net and we have to kind of sometimes accept

where the median voter is, even if it's not where we want them to be. It's just my view of the world. One question before I let you go, because I know you got a fight to catch, but just the real canary in the coal mine for Florida and the country is the massive shift in the Latino vote. As someone who saw that firsthand,

what recommendations would you have for the party to begin to not just stem that tide, but reverse it? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I mean, if we don't do this as a party, we are not gonna elect presidents. I mean, I think- Or senators, frankly. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean,

because I think the other thing that's really important to keep in mind here is that the next redistricting, our reapportionment after the next census, is going to change the map in fundamental ways. The path to 270 through Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan will be a path to like 255 to 257. So we're gonna have to win Nevada's.

We're gonna have to win Arizona's and Georgia's and potentially Florida's, North Carolina's. All these states have much bigger Hispanic populations than you have in Upper Midwest. So A, we have to do it. You know, I think a lot of, I mean, the upside is, listen man, like before Barack Obama, we weren't necessarily doing great with Hispanics either. I mean, we were able to change that pretty quickly. A, we had an amazing candidate, generational candidate, but also I think just kind of getting back to redefining who we are. I mean, I think this perception that we are a party that is more

focused on sort of niche social issues. And again, I'm not saying we shouldn't stand up for the marginalized. We absolutely should. That's what makes us all Democrats. But redefining that, you know, we are there, you know, whether it's, you know, for helping people go to college or tech degrees. I mean, just getting back to those core issues, which is going to require us to spend a lot of money. But I think we have to just engage in redefining who we are in those communities. It's gonna be slow, it's gonna be painful. Again, I think that some of the work that,

I mean, I'm critical of a lot of things. I'm not critical of like what the DNC has been doing on the ground in a lot of these states. I think it's been very good. We should build on that going forward. But I mean, we'd have to, I mean, it's just gonna have to claw back and redefine who we are as a party with those voters.

Steve Schale, thank you so much. We will count on you to turn Florida back around in the next 48 years. So it's great to talk to you. I'm getting old, man. I'll do what I can do. Good to talk to you, buddy. Thanks, man. That's our show for today.

We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday morning. Have a great weekend, everyone. Bye, everyone. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free or get access to our subscriber discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our friends of the pod community at crooked.com slash friends or subscribe on Apple podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed. Also, be sure to follow Pod Save America on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for full episodes, bonus content, and more.

And before you hit that next button, you can help boost this episode by leaving us a review and by sharing it with friends and family. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Reid Cherlin is our executive editor, and Adrian Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Kiefer. Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming.

Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefkoat, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pellavive, and David Toles.