Pod Save America - “Pardon me?”

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Covid relief has new life after a bipartisan group of Senators announces a new plan that wins the support of Joe Biden and Democratic leaders, and Donald Trump prepares to leave the White House by potentially handing out pardons and announcing his 2024 presidential campaign. Then Obama data guru Dan Wagner talks to Dan Pfeiffer about why the polls were so wrong in 2020 .

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, Dan talks to Obama data guru Dan Wagner about what really happened in this election and why the polls were so bad. Before that, we'll talk about whether we might finally get a COVID relief bill and what Donald Trump plans to do next, including a bunch of last minute pardons for his family and friends, and a potential announcement that he'll be running again in 2024 because hell is real and this is it. Running again in 2024 because hell is real and this is it. But first, check out the latest episode of Pod Save the World, where Tommy and Ben talk to Senator Chris Murphy about the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist and what it could mean for the Biden administration's potential efforts to reach a new nuclear agreement with Iran.

If you're not already, also go subscribe to our fantastic What A Day newsletter. The hilarious Sarah Lazarus gives you a quick, smart, very funny rundown of all the important news you may have missed. Check it out at crooked.com

slash newsletters. If you're not already reading What A Day, you are missing out. Check it out. Would it be controversial to say that Sarah Lazarus is the funniest person at Crooked Media?

It depends on which other employees and podcast co-hosts are listening to this right now. Well, I bet we'll find out, won't we? Yeah, I was going to say, it'll be a real test. A real test of who listens. Alright. She is...

I edit the newsletter along with Brian Boitler every every day both of us and every single day i laugh out loud to myself in my office about something that sarah writes in the newsletter so that's just my perspective um finally we are only a few weeks away from the january 5th runoff in georgia that will decide control of the Senate. Early voting starts on December 14th. And if you want to help, please sign up to adopt Georgia at votesaveamerica.com slash Georgia. We will send you all kinds of opportunities to donate and volunteer. What we're sending you doesn't come from us. It comes from the organizers on the ground in Georgia

who know the state best, who know what kind of help they need. So this has all been coordinated with the people on the ground. Please help. This is enormously important. Literally everything we've been talking about since the election, like so much of whether next year is, you know, easier for Biden's administration, easier for progressive causes, like whether we actually pass legislation that improves people's lives. So much of this depends on what happens on January 5th. As we said before, it's not going to be an easy race, but the votes are there for Democrats to win in this race. So I really think we need to treat this race just like we treated the presidential race because the entire progressive agenda is on the line in Georgia. So help out if you can. All right, let's get to the news. The most important story in the country right now is the pandemic. Record cases, record hospitalizations, and unfortunately now record

deaths. It's forcing more businesses to shut down right as the money from the last relief bill is running out. People are losing their jobs and their homes. They are getting sicker and hungrier. And for the last few months, Mitch McConnell has refused to negotiate over another round of relief. And Donald Trump has, of course, refused to pay attention. But on Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators, four Democrats, four Republicans, proposed a $908 billion emergency package that includes relief for small businesses, unemployment insurance, rental assistance, and state, local, and tribal governments, as well as funding for COVID testing and vaccine distribution. It does not include another round

of stimulus checks, but it does provide what the group calls, quote, short-term protection from coronavirus lawsuits. But this bipartisan compromise apparently isn't stingy enough for Mitch McConnell, who reintroduced his $500 billion plan that includes help for small businesses, but no money for unemployment, no money for rental assistance, and no money for state and local governments. So Dan, Schumer and Pelosi are now supporting the bipartisan compromise. Biden is supporting the bipartisan compromise. Before we get into the politics of actually passing something like this, what do you think about the substance of the plan? It is obviously nowhere near enough to deal with the devastation from this pandemic, economic, health, societal, etc.

But people need help. They needed help months ago. And if we can get them something, then we need to do it. And I think Schumer and Pelosi are exactly right to try to do everything they can. And Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and Biden are exactly right to try to do everything we can to get some help to people before the end of the year. Because if we do not do it before Congress leaves, it'll be after inauguration, February, maybe March at the absolute earliest, and people cannot wait. We have a bunch of revisions that expire at the end of this year. So proceeding like this is trying to get this done is the absolute right thing to do, in my view. Yeah, I mean, Jeff Stein of The Washington Post

has been an outstanding reporter covering these negotiations. He was tweeting the other day, you know, a reminder of what the U.S. faces next month if Congress doesn't act. The eviction moratorium expires. That's 30 million people at risk of being kicked out of their homes and apartments. 12 million lose unemployment benefits. Millions lose paid family leave. Millions face utility shutoffs, enormous blows to restaurants, hotels, et cetera. There's a real crisis in this country. Also, there is a big difference between acting now and acting months from now when Joe Biden is president. If we get into a double dip recession, you have you could have a recessionary spiral where the more that people can't afford rent, the more people pull back spending from the economy, the worse the recession gets and it becomes a vicious cycle. So you want to sort of act as soon as possible.

But, you know, like like you pointed out, this bill doesn't come close to what we need. It's got $160 billion for state and local governments. The shortfall is calculated at $800 to $900 billion. So it's a drop in the bucket there. Unemployment is currently, unemployment insurance is $600 a week on top of unemployment benefits. This gives an extra $300 a week for the next four months. You know, rental assistance, there's a $70 billion shortfall. This is about $25 billion. So it's nowhere near enough. But at the same time, you know, Republicans

haven't wanted anything for the last several months. Mitch McConnell has been blocking negotiations. Donald Trump doesn't give a shit about this. So something here is absolutely better than nothing because people's lives are at stake. And it's even worth noting, I think, that even when you talk about those shortfalls and we talk about how big the HEROES Act was and all of that, even those policies, as bold as they may be and is what the need is, still suffers from a poverty of ambition, right? What ultimately we should be doing in a pandemic is paying people to stay home, paying businesses to stay open, right? Like so many of the times we've had these spikes is because state and local officials

feel the pressure of small businesses, restaurants in particular, who go out of business. So we open up indoor dining, we open up bars, we open up other things. We could stop the virus in its tracks and slow its spread if we gave people an economic incentive to stay home, right? Where you didn't feel a choice between your paycheck in your life or your livelihood in your life. And so I think like it's important to know what we should be doing in an ideal world, what we could be doing within the context of American politics, and then what we may, if we are lucky, going to end up doing and the wide gap between those things.

Well, I mean, is this did did Pelosi and Schumer and Biden have any other options but backing this bipartisan compromise? Because, you know, I have seen some griping that why didn't they just go big? Right. Why didn't they like, you know, propose the another round of stimulus checks? Why didn't they propose something bigger? Why didn't they make this a messaging battle and and go to voters and say, this is what the economy actually needs. This is what people need who are struggling right now. And this is what we're fighting for. And then put pressure on the Republicans that way. Well, because you're playing a game with people's lives. I mean, that's what you're doing, ultimately. And it is not, I mean, there is a world, I guess, where you could say, if you were Pelosi, Biden, and Schumer, and say, we're going to bet on Georgia.

We know that if we take the Senate, we can pass a very large bill. We can pass the HEROES Act. We can do it the first day that John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are sworn into the Senate. Biden will sign it the second it arrives. We can get aid to people. But if we win the Senate, we can also do that, right? You can pass this now and do that then. And so if you get a chance to help people who desperately need help, then you should do it. And trying to fabricate some version of fantasy congressional camp or

four-dimensional chess, which I see a lot of pundits doing, about a better way is not the right way to do it. This is the best chance we have to get people some measure of help before it's too late. And they should do that. And they are right to do that. Because, for example, if they decided to back a bill now that has a more powerful message for voters with the hope that this would help win georgia and then we lose georgia then you didn't get any relief for people from december through to when joe biden is inaugurated and then joe biden is inaugurated with the republican senate and then we're still not getting much because now mitch mcconnell can do whatever he wants to block joe biden because joe biden doesn't have a democratic senate so if you you gamble on Georgia and you lose, the people who really lose are all the people who didn't get help. And then the other, you know, talk about proposing a much bigger, more ambitious bill. They did that, right? The $2.2 trillion Pat Heroes Act that Pelosi introduced in May couldn't find a single Republican that would go along with it. Not a single Republican. So we have to operate under the reality that we have one House of Congress right now,

and we don't have the Senate and we don't have the presidency right now. So you actually need Republican votes. And the only Republicans that have stepped forward for a package that's bigger than Mitch McConnell's shitty package is these four Republican senators who joined in the bipartisan compromise. Mitt Romney, Bill Cassidy, Murkowski and Collins. So that's who we have right now. And that would be a majority in the Senate if all the Democrats went along. Of course, of course, we still need Donald Trump's signature on this, which brings me to my next question. Can this compromise even pass even this bipartisan compromise?

McConnell says that his shitty bill is the bill that Trump will sign, and he may decide to attach it to the larger spending bill that has to be passed by December 11th to avoid a government shutdown. So that way, McConnell's plan here is to jam Democrats and say Democrats have to either vote for McConnell's shitty bill or essentially vote for a government shutdown. So that's one thing that could happen. Now, McConnell's deputy, Majority Whip Senator John Thune, did tell reporters that the bipartisan compromise was, quote, reasonable and that maybe they could merge that bipartisan plan

with McConnell's plan, which now we're getting to an even worse conclusion here. But like, how did Democrats and the Republicans who support the compromise bill get something passed? Like, what is the strategy from announcing this bipartisan framework to actually trying to pass it into law? It probably requires the Republican senators who support the bipartisan compromise to say they will only vote for some version of the bipartisan compromise. They have to deny McConnell the votes to do what he has suggested he would do, because if they were to do that, he can't get it done. So far, Collins and Murkowski said that they do not want to vote for McConnell's plan. The question I wonder, McConnell's strategy I'm betting is, oh, well, I'm at 500 billion, they're at 900 billion.

Maybe I come up to 600, 650, and I peel off Collins and Murkowski and some of the Republicans, and then that's the plan we go with. Yeah. And that is very possible and probably highly likely. What ends up happening. Yeah. And that's some of the critique from some folks on the outside is by coming down, you made the gap between, like in an ideal world, people like to think, well, Democrats were at 2 billion, Republicans at 500 million. Well, let's meet in the middle, right? And then now Democrats are at 900 and they're at 500. So the middle looks something like 700, right? But here's the problem. We control one half of one branch of government right now. So we have – like we should not pretend we have a ton of leverage.

And if we want to get something done, we're going to have to do something that is not as good as we would like and maybe much less good than we would like. But we have to – then we have to decide. Pelosi, Schumer, the other Democrats have to decide. Is this good enough to pass? There are things that McConnell could add to it that make it not. The full liability shield that McConnell wants is probably a red line Democrats cannot and should not cross. And there may be some things McConnell wants to keep out the Democrats can't sort of sign off on keeping out. But we are negotiating in a narrow world of not greatness. And that is just sort of where we are. We're going to control the White House in January and ideally potentially control the Senate. And then we just have a very different

capacity and calculus. Yeah, I guess that the calculation here for Democrats is when does McConnell's bill and then maybe McConnell's compromise gets so bad that it is worth saying, fuck this, we're not voting for it. We'll threaten to shut the government down or we're just we're not going to vote for McConnell's horrible compromise in this in this in the spending bill. And we'll take our case to the voters of Georgia and see what we can do. Like, when does it get because I think if it was just McConnell's $500 billion bill added on to the spending bill, and that's the only game in town, like it's a pretty bad bill. It helps small businesses. It has no other help for anyone else. It doesn't seem like Democrats would vote for that. But I don't know. I wonder what the I wonder what the calculus is there.

Yeah, I mean, the hard part, like you and I want to believe and we said this before the election, Republican senators are the reason people are not getting help. And we are going to batter them over the head with that and win the election. And we didn't in the Senate. That did not defeat Tom Tillis. That did not defeat Susan Collins, right? That did not defeat Joni Ernst. And so we should not be super confident that that is the winning political

issue in Georgia because there is not evidence of that happening in 2020. I think that if there was one part of it where I thought you could potentially, if you message it correctly, that I think is A, a policy red line and B, a political opportunity, it's in the liability shield, right? That you are going to give legal immunity, unprecedented legal immunity to corporations to prevent them from being sued for getting their workers sick or killing them. I don't love the limited liability shield that is temporary in the compromise bill, but it is temporary, right? It's something that can be dealt with on the back end. If you were to just do full legal liability, which is what McConnell wants, then I think that is a bridge too far for Democrats, in my view. But it's tough. It's tough. So thinking about Georgia and how, like, John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock and Democrats in Georgia talk about these COVID

negotiations, if at all, I have to say I'm a little more bullish on the ability to make this a big issue in this race for a few reasons. Number one, I don't think anyone tried to make it an issue in the presidential race or the Senate races. Like there just wasn't for a million reasons that we could go into forever. But like there wasn't a lot of space to talk about covid relief negotiations at the end of that race. It's the Trump show. He's saying a fucking million crazy things a day. It's all focused on him. That's what the national news environment is all about. It's sort of hard to break through with negotiations. So I think if you're more focused, especially now when so many

people are hurting and you talk about like, hey, you know, if you send the two of us to the Senate, we're going to make sure that there are unemployment benefits for people who need it, who are stuck at home through no fault of their own. We're going to keep people in their homes with rental insurance. We're going to make sure that we don't have layoffs of teachers and health care workers and firefighters because of state and local government. We are going to protect people and we're going to help people in this time of crisis. And what Republicans want to do, what Mitch McConnell wants to do is nothing. He wants to do nothing to help you go through this recession. I think that could be a pretty powerful message.

I hope so. I would like to believe that. And I agree that it was not a fully tested proposition in the November. I don't even know if it was a partly tested proposition. I don't remember whoever said it, a partly tested proposition. I don't remember whoever said it, whoever talked about it. Yeah. I mean, there was some paid media on it. There was some digital media on it. It was part of the stump. How much of that stuff broke through in the avalanche of noise and news that was the election is probably relatively limited. Yeah. I think the Democrats should make their decisions about what bill to pass, agree to, compromise on, separate from what they think is most politically beneficial in Georgia.

Because I just don't think we know enough to make a decision that affects whether people get evicted from their home based on some idea on some potentially flawed poll about what will move an unknown electorate in Georgia. an unknown electorate in Georgia. Separate from that, though, I think there is an argument for Ossoff and Warnock about the benefit of what would happen if they were elected in terms of the additional

economic aid that would come to Georgia families and Georgia small businesses, right? That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Actually, yeah, I should have said I wanted to separate it.

Like the negotiations that are happening in Congress should be separated from the Warnock-Ossoff messaging. And I think those can sort of run on parallel tracks just fine. Because I think that like if they get a deal, right, and we end up signing off on a deal, I think the Georgia candidates can say, well, we had to take this shitty deal because of like Mitch McConnell was stingy. And so was Donald Trump. And if you send us there, we're actually going to give you an economic package that lifts up Georgians and actually helps people who are struggling in the state.

And if there's no deal, then you can say no deal is the kind of Senate you're going to have for the next two years. If you send Perdue and Loeffler back to the Senate, you're gonna have no deal, no progress, all obstruction, all the time. Okay, let's talk about Donald Trump, who is still duping his own supporters into believing that he can overturn the results of the election. He can't. He knows that. And the reason we know he knows that is because Donald Trump is getting ready to hand out some pardons and potentially announce his presidential campaign in 2024. The one term loser is reportedly considering preemptive pardons for his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, his son in law, Jared Kushner, and his three eldest children,

Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka. Sorry, Tiffany. Sorry, Barron. It is unclear what he would be pardoning any of them for, though I suppose there are plenty of potential crimes to go around. Dan, before we get into Trump's decision on these pardons, like, how is the pardon process supposed to work in a normal administration? Well, I would say this, not this. The normal process is a cable news host picks up a cause and talks about it in primetime. And then the president responds.

That's, oh, wait, no, that's not normal at all. The normal process is individuals, through their attorney, apply for a pardon through the Department of Justice. through their attorney, apply for a pardon through the Department of Justice and the Office of the Pardon Attorney, who then goes through all of these applications, thousands upon thousands of them, and then makes recommendations to the White House that are provided to the White House counsel, who then calls them down some more and then provides them to the president to make decisions. That is the normal process. It has this very assiduous, careful process.

Can I ask a question? Yes. Part of that is part of that process that you offer bribes to the White House. You offer to just to funnel money into a political. Well, generally, there's like an eBay style auction for like what you want to do. No, that's exactly why. Because apparently that happened. The Justice Department is looking into, we found out this week, the Justice Department is looking into the fact that a lawyer for someone who is in prison, we don't know, it's been redacted, was talking to the White House about a pardon,

asking for a pardon, and there is potentially a pardon for bribe scheme that went on there. And we don't know much about it, but that's also happened. The Department of Justice has since said no government official is the subject or target of the investigation referenced in the court opinion. So maybe not anyone in the Trump White House that's in trouble, but perhaps the lawyer for the person who's looking for the pardon is in some trouble.

I mean, I don't want to speculate recklessly or irresponsibly, but do you know of any... That's what we're here for. Do you know any people who are attorneys of sort who kind of hang out with the wrong group of people, have some nebulous moral code, might have been mayor of New York in the early part of the century? Yeah, I mean, well, until you said might have been mayor of New York in the early part of the century. Yeah. I mean, well, until you said might have been mayor of New York, I was like,

I don't know any of the lawyers that work around Donald Trump, like five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 of them. They're all crazy. Well, I mean, to me, to like step back into seriousness and normalcy, the reason the process that I talked about exists is because of the danger of corruption and bribery. Because the pardon power of the president is so absolute and so consequential to the person who benefits from it that there is a grand fear of corruption and bribery. And it has happened in the past. There have been allegations of contributions for pardons where people have tried to corrupt the process. And it's why the process exists is to try to insulate the president from – it's definitely unusual, but it's not unexpected that some people would try to profit

off of this situation, right? A lot of attorneys go to people and talk about the access they have to the administration in previous administrations who tried to get pardons. And you have this process with the Department of Justice, the White House counsel, before it gets to the president, to insulate the president from possible perceptions of corruption or nefarious actors on the outside trying to profit off of the process. And the reason that's worked in the past is because most presidents care about the perception that they are corrupt. This one does not.

I mean, this is what we're seeing. The problem with the pardon is what we've seen with almost everything else for the last four years, which is, like you said, in the Constitution, the power to pardon is nearly absolute. And the only guardrails around that have been feeling shame that you issued a pardon that was corrupt. And when you have a president that has no shame, suddenly there are no guardrails around the pardon process anymore, which is yet one more thing that we've seen in the last four years that if it's not codified in law, if it's just a tradition or a convention or a norm, it is gone. It is gone from our government. And the times there have been controversies and scandals in the past have been when administrations have gone outside of that process. Most sort of most famously, although nothing official came about, there are a lot of allegations around a pardon that Bill Clinton gave to one of his donors, Mark Rich, at the very, very end of his

administration. And part of the controversy was it did not go through the normal process. And therefore, the checks and balances that would normally be in place to prevent such a thing from happening did not happen. And so that's why in our administration, we were so careful about that because the goal is to protect the president from stuff on the outside. Here, that is not necessarily the approach of this set of government attorneys. Not the concern. Yes, no. Not the concern. So we've been saying that the pardon power is absolute. Can you really pardon someone for a crime they may commit in the future,

which seems to be the trouble that Trump is running into because in terms of his children, right? Like, you know, some of them have been deposed, they've been investigated, but how do you actually write the pardon so that it's not, you know, I pardon Ivanka Trump for whatever federal crime she may commit for the rest of her life. Like, is that, is that legal? You can't do that. You, you do not get to give away a, a lifetime, get out of jail free card.

Right. You know, it's like, well, forever else. Like she just parks on the wrong side of the street, takes something from a store. And it's like,

Hey, just pulls her pardon out of her pocket and shows the people and just walks away. It doesn't work that way. But like, if that's the case, like what the fuck Obama, where was ours, you know?

Yes. Do you have a bunch of crimes you were planning on committing that I wasn't aware of? Yes. You know what? It was parking on my street for more than two hours.

Hanging out with 10 of your friends in your own backyard. Was that one of them? Yeah, right. Exactly. That was it. And I'll... But what Trump's really talking about is not pardoning Ivanka, Jared, Don Jr., etc., and Rudy for crimes they may commit.

It's for crimes they did commit that have yet to be discovered. And for that, there is precedent for that. Ford pardoned Nixon for any and all crimes he may have committed as president. George Washington pardoned the members of the Whiskey Rebellion, which is something that I read on the internet but don't exactly know what it is, but he pardoned them. You missed that day in civics class?

Fucking American educational system. And Carter pardoned the people who dodged the draft in the Vietnam War, right? They had not been charged with any crime. They had not been convicted of a crime. But if you were someone who dodged the draft, you now had immunity for that fact. Now, none of those things, I think, ever got tested in court, right? No one tried to bring a case against Nixon that then was thrown

out because of that pardon. So there is precedent, but my understanding is it has not been fully legally tested, right? And even in the Flynn pardon that- I was going to say, yeah. Yeah. The pardon that Trump gave Michael Flynn is basically for all crimes committed under a set of scenarios for which he may not have been charged yet. There's been some discussion that he could be charged with perjury for telling the court under oath that he was guilty and then changing his plea and saying he wasn't and then a whole bunch of other crimes.

And so he is theoretically has a pardon for like in the pardon, it says anything and everything investigated by Bob Mueller. Right. So if we were to discover. Which is very broad. Yes. Right. If we were to discover a bunch of crimes that Flynn committed that had not been charged, like through some sort of retroactive investigation process done by a future Department of Justice, he theoretically is pardoned for those crimes.

The big question here, can Trump pardon himself? We believe no. The Department of Justice in the 70s put together a memo with Nixon in mind saying that a president cannot pardon themselves under the legal principle that you cannot serve as the judge in your own trial. And I say this with full knowledge that I'm neither a lawyer nor went to law school, but that's my understanding of it. Now, that is just one opinion, a piece of legal guidance from a Department of Justice 40-some years ago. There are some people who believe that a president could pardon themselves, that the pardon power of the president is so absolute that you could do it. One of those legal scholars who is known for his objectivity and general moral center, Alan Dershowitz, believes that Trump could pardon himself. But ultimately, if Trump were to pardon himself, the way this would play out, as I understand it is, he would pardon himself.

Some federal law enforcement official would seek to bring him up on charges and then it would go to a court. And then ultimately it would be in the hands of a number of justices sitting in Supreme Court seats that he stole. Which means that we should all expect him to pardon himself. Because you can totally see on the way out the door, he tweets, I hereby pardon myself of all offenses forever. Everyone flips out because he knows the only way it's tested is if DOJ actually decides to indict him and then he goes to court. So it's basically just a free tweet until then, which means nothing stopping him.

But the one thing, and, you know, people probably read about this, but the pardon power doesn't extend to state crimes. And so, you know, the Manhattan district attorney, the New York attorney general are looking into Trump and his family and the organizations for all kinds of potential crimes. And Trump would not be able to pardon himself or his children to avoid being indicted on any kind of state crime in any state. So that is one thing to keep in mind for all of you who are just, you know, chanting, lock him up at home. That's a big crowd. him up at home that's a that's a big crowd so one reason trump wants to hand out these pardons is that he needs all these criminals free to work on his 2024 presidential campaign here's what the two-time popular vote loser reportedly told guests at a white house holiday super spreader event on

tuesday quote it's been an amazing four years. We're trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I'll see you in four years. There's also a report that Trump might announce his 2024 campaign during the week of Joe Biden's inauguration, which he will not be attending, reportedly. So will he actually run? Will he pretend he's running and then drop out? Will he ultimately be unable to run because he's in jail? We have no idea. Let's take a shot at some of the easier questions. How should Joe Biden, the media, and the rest of us handle this fucking loser's desperate plea for attention once he's out of

office? Well, I know how we, I think we should handle it. I think Joe Biden should handle it and maybe how the media should handle it, but it's kind of up to them. But we don't have to pay attention to him. Yeah. There's absolutely no need that we have to do that. And I think it is important to remember the history of Donald Trump and running for president, which is in basically every election from like 1984 on, Donald Trump pretended to run for president for a long time before he decided ultimately not to do so, which is why people were so surprised he actually did it

in 2016. Because he was in New Hampshire doing birther shit in 2011. Several times in the 80s, he talked about running. He talked about running as a third party candidate in 2000 or 96. I can't remember. There's a long history of this because he knows one of the best ways to get attention is to declare yourself a potential presidential candidate. And he craves attention like normal people craves oxygen. So like, I think there's a reason to be, just because he ran in 2016 doesn't mean we should assume that because he says he's going to run, he's going to run in 2024. Yeah. I think denying him much like a wildfire, denying him oxygen is the best way to snuff him out, right? Like, there's a difference between, because I could already hear some people say, well, a lot of people didn't take Donald Trump seriously as a candidate in 2016.

And look what happened. We should have taken him seriously. You know, we should have been alarmed by his rise. There's a difference between taking him seriously as a candidate in 2024 and showering him with attention. And I think it's less, like you said, I think it's less likely that he'll be a candidate if we can all stop paying attention to him. Because what he needs, what he needs is the attention.

That's his fuel. That's the way that he runs and wins. And if he is denied that now, look, he won't be denied that by Fox Newsmax, OAN, Trump TV, whatever he decides, he'll do it. Wants to do one on NBC, he'll do it. Wants to go on CNN and call them fake news while they ask him questions and he doesn't answer the questions, they'll give him the interview. So like, it's probably easier said than done. And if like, look, if Trump goes on CNN, sits down with Jake Tapper,

Tapper completely eviscerates him, Trump sounds like a fucking moron, are we gonna be talking about it on Pod Save america probably so it like right this is i'm just trying to just trying to game out the next four years here yeah i mean it is really hard like there have been all these sort of movements over time about how about ignoring trump like unfollow him on twitter that'll show him right let's get his father. That'll do it. Yeah, right. And I am sympathetic to the motivations behind those ideas because they are similar to what you and I just said, which is if we can deny the man attention, then you sort of neuter some of his political power.

Because what ultimately he is is a great person at getting attention. is a great person at getting attention. He is not great at utilizing that attention to make himself more popular or to enact some sort of agenda or win more votes than the person he's running against, but he has been very good his entire life at getting attention, right? Like, he is famous for being famous, right? Before that was a thing in the reality TV world, that's been Donald Trump, right? He was just a rich guy who was famous for being famous. And he will continue to try to get attention later. I think there is going to be a big debate within the Democratic Party about, like, Donald Trump is probably going to be less popular over time. Like, here you have this absurd, ridiculous person probably doing more

absurd, ridiculous things to get more attention. Because when you have the White House, you just can walk out and say things that people pay attention. When you're just some guy who is hiding out in Florida, hoping that Ron DeSantis doesn't extradite you to New York for prosecution, it's hard. You have to be more absurd. Birtherism came from the fact that in order to get a ton of attention, Donald Trump had to say something incredibly outrageous. Right. And so, like, as Democrats, do you take this absurd, ridiculous, unpopular person and try to make him the face of the party that you are running against to hold the House and take the Senate in 2022? Or do you focus on other people? I think that's going to be a big debate within the party. Well, and this goes back to the election we just had, right?

I think Joe Biden didn't really have a choice but to run against Donald Trump and make it a referendum on Donald Trump, partly because Trump commands a lot of attention. Trump is the news all the time. You often make a campaign against an incumbent president, a referendum on that president's time in office. Right. But and that was probably the easiest path for Joe Biden to win, which he did. So the only right move. Right. The only it was the only path.

It was the only path. But as we saw, like that didn't translate down ballot. And in 18, for example, in the midterms, the message was much more about the unpopularity of the Republican tax cuts and their attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. So thinking ahead, if it is Joe Biden versus Mitch McConnell for the next two years, because they're the actual two people running both parties in government, not Donald Trump. Do you try to have a message about Republican obstruction, Republican economic philosophy, which is cut taxes for the rich, cut taxes, cut regulations for corporations, cut health care and education for millions of struggling people? It's that party versus our party who's fighting for the middle class. Like, do you make that the

message? And then that could be more effective at not only sort of doing better in the midterms in 2022, but setting up for whoever the Republicans nominate in 2024, whether it's Trump or someone else. Yeah, I mean, I think that's also the question. You're going to need more data to know the answer. That question also depends on what you're trying to do, right? Are you trying to win in 2022? Are you trying to damage Trump in 2024? Where are you running? Right? Like, we're going to be defending people in 2022 in districts where Trump did quite well and probably remains quite popular. We're going to have to, you know, you have three very vulnerable Senate Republicans in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida. Pennsylvania, a state we won by a small amount. Wisconsin,

a state we won by a tiny amount. And Florida, a state that does not seem to be trending in a direction in which we would like. And in part, because Trump has demonstrated real strength in those states. And so what is the approach there? And so I think this is a very, I'm kind of still sort of formulating my view on this. And I think it gets to a larger question about Democratic branding, Republican branding, who we're appealing to, how we think about it, and the fact that we have probably been appropriately maybe, but definitely distracted by Trump's antics over the last four years. Like, how do you not pay attention to someone who is engaging in massive corruption? He tried to extort an ally into election interference who- And that was his opening act for the 2020 campaign. That was the opening act. How do you not pay attention to someone who is engaging in this horribly cruel racist immigration policy? Like he is an existential threat in the moment to the lives of millions of Americans and people around the world. How do you not pay attention to it? dangerous shit with long-term implications that is happening that's being done by McConnell, the remaining Koch brother, the Federalist Society, Brett Kavanaugh that is also happening.

I'm like, where is the balance of attention? And just to go back to the point we were saying before, there has been this discussion about, well, Joe Biden had no coattails, right? He didn't bring all his people across the finish line. He ran against Trump, not against Republicans. People cross the finish line. It is he ran against Trump, not against Republicans. I find that argument to be somewhat absurd because Joe Biden has he's running against Donald Trump. He has no choice to run against Donald Trump. Like that is that is the fact.

Like you're in it again. You're in a campaign like that. You're looking at a map every day. You're looking at data. You're like, how do we get to 270? That is that is your job as a person who is running for president in a campaign like that, you're looking at a map every day. You're looking at data and you're like, how do we get to 270? That is your job as a person who is running for president in a campaign. Whatever it takes to get to 270, you do it. That's it. You have no other obligation. And I would say, I actually think the Biden campaign does not get enough credit for some of the ways they went out of their way to try to help Senate Democrats.

Yeah, no, that's why he was, I mean, he went to Iowa. He went to, right. Kamala Harris went to Texas, right? And that's not just about MJ Hager and John Cornyn. That's about the Texas Statehouse, right? Which we obviously also did not get. That's why Barack Obama was in Georgia, I think, on two occasions before the election. You know, FiveThirtyEight has a piece about this, too, about like, was there ticket splitting or not?

And they come to the conclusion that there wasn't that much ticket splitting. But so the other possibility for what happened in 2020 is because Trump brought out this surge of Trump voters who sat out in 2018 and may even have sat and a lot of them sat out in 2016. And so you bring in a whole bunch of new Trump voters into the electorate and they vote Republican up and down the ticket, then it's enough for Biden to squeak through in these states that add up to 270. But a lot of the seats we won in 2018 were Trump districts. So if it's a Trump district, a district that Trump won in 2016, like Biden still didn't win that district in 2020. And which is why the Democratic House member lost it too. It was a Trump district in 2016. So if you bring out more Trump voters in 2020, you're going to lose if you're the Democrat.

And the same thing in a lot of these Senate races, right? Like Joe Biden didn't win North Carolina, which is why Cal Cunningham didn't win North Carolina. And even if it was at one of those random Hillary districts in 2016 that had Republican members that we won in 2018 because Democratic turnout was up. Republican turnout was up as well, but not by as much. When turnout goes up equally and there were more Trump voters than Democratic voters in that district, you're not going to win that district, right? That's the answer. It's very simple.

You know, I worked in South Dakota in 2004, right? So I did two Senate races in South Dakota, 2002, 2004. 2002, we won by 524 votes. And 2004, I was working for Tom Daschle, and we knew what our vote goal was. You know, we had to turn out. Virtually in South Dakota, you have to turn out basically every Democrat to possibly win.

And we did, but Bush was on the ballot. And Bush generated huge turnout in that election, which is how he beat Kerry, despite being somewhat unpopular for invading the wrong country after 9-11. But we just ran out of voters, right? We turned out, we hit our vote goal. And then there were just all these more Republicans because it's a much more Republican state. We saw that happen in a lot of places. And one takeaway from this election is the deck is just really fucking stacked against Democrats in the Senate and in presidential years, right?

With the exception of Maine, we won Senate seats where Joe Biden won and we lost them where Joe Biden didn't, right? And that, the one exception, I guess Georgia is the other exception because Joe Biden did outperform John Ossoff in that. We have to save another bite of that. But critically, in Colorado and Arizona, where we won Senate seats, Mark Kelly and John Hickenlooper outperformed Joe Biden.

Yeah. You know, and they ran a little bit to the right of Joe Biden and they outperformed Joe Biden. Now, I think in Colorado, you probably could have a more progressive candidate because Joe Biden just crushed it in Colorado. But in Arizona, with Joe Biden only won by 10,000 votes, like Mark Kelly ran slightly to the right of Joe Biden and won by a little bit more. Well, we're going to talk about all of this in the coming weeks and months because there's a lot to talk about. But you're going to talk about it more with our next guest, Dan Wagner, who knows more about data and polling than we do. It's a very fun conversation. We'll let the listeners judge that, whether he knows more than us. Are you kidding? I'm like Trump.

I'm just going to go with those like drudge online polls. We're going to do that at Crooked Media now. We might as well. We're going to put out one of those polls on Twitter, and then the winner then the winner that's gonna be the winner that's how we are with polling now um all right when we come back we'll have dan's conversation with dan wagner i'm now joined by the founder and ceo of Civis Analytics and the chief analytics officer for Obama's 2012 campaign, Dan Wagner. Dan, welcome to Pod Save America. Hi.

I want to start with the polls, obviously. Yeah, that's a thing. That is a thing, yes. The polls were, of course, different than the actual election results. And there's been a big debate about what that meant afterwards. On one side is this view that pundits and political observers have unrealistic expectations for how accurate polls should be. And this is something that happened somewhat within the realm of a normal polling error. And there are others who believe that there's a fundamental methodological problem that is failing to capture an accurate picture of the election. Where do you fall on that? Well, it depends how nerdy you want me to get with my description. Feel free to get very nerdy. Okay. Very nerdy. Okay. So polling 101, when you do a poll, there's kind of three big steps.

One is among a population, you want to pull a sample that you think is as representative of the population itself. You conduct that poll and you're hoping that people respond to that poll at similar rates. That can be a phone poll, an online poll, et cetera. And you're hoping as well that people are presenting information about your behaviors that are as reasonable as possible. Most importantly being whether or not that person's actually going to vote, right? So the sample that you get, whether or not people answer it, whether or not people give truthful answers, yes or no. And the thing that you learn is that like, those things never happen. And so you have to introduce statistical controls at each of those different levels. So when you pick a sample in a phone poll, for example, you're hoping that there's an even distribution.

However, that's not true because the people who have landlines are not representative of the population. Second is you hope that people respond at the same rate. But we've learned that since 1996, when 40 percent of people used to respond to phone polls, that's now below 1 percent in some populations. to phone polls, that's now below 1% in some populations. So in 2012 and races after that, less than 1% of young African-Americans respond to a poll where over 10% of old women respond to polls. So that population of people A to B is not responding at the same rate. And then typically you have a final bias, social desirability. What you know is that everybody says that they're going to vote, but that's not true, right? Many people voted in this election, obviously,

you know, a majority of registered voters, but everyone presents it that they're going to vote. So you have this error and that error compounds at each step, sampling who's responding and who's saying they're going to vote or not. And those errors tend to compound over time. That first part, which is the sample of people that you're getting, especially over phone polls, has become really, really difficult and so problematic that phone polling may not really be of value in capturing the true sentiment of the population. It may be reliable in really homogeneous states, think Iowa, Minnesota, etc., etc., but it's probably less and less reliable for kind of, you know, standard diverse American states. So that part of it is probably a fundamental flaw for phone polls. response bias, which is something that is especially prevalent in the polls this year and in 2016, where we know that Trump supporters respond to polls regardless of the mode at higher

rates. And that is really fundamental to that population. We know in the research that we've done that those voters tend to have less social trust. And as a result of that, they tend to participate in surveys at a lower rate. And that's inclusive of political surveys, commercial surveys, et cetera. And there's a lot of research on why those people are less trusting of society, less trusting of medical research, less trusting of vaccines. And we're going to see that probably in the next two months. And that's a kind of intrinsic barrier in polling and political research generally. And then the final one, which is social desirability, that's something that's going to be prevalent no matter what. So sampling, a big problem, probably makes

phone polling existentially difficult and maybe retires the value of it. Non-response bias is something that's prevalent, especially in these political surveys. However, we think that you can introduce, you know, good controls to get that. And then social desirability bias also prevalent, but we think we can get away, we can get around that with good statistical controls. So long-winded, nerdy explanation. I don't think polls are done forever, but I do think that phone polls, at least in kind of big, diverse American states, may have hit their end. If phone polls have hit their end in places other than Iowa and Minnesota, I guess, even though the Iowa polls, other than the Ann Seltzer poll, were pretty off as well. She does a bunch of novel weighting

and she deserves a lot of credit for what she's done that other people haven't done. And other people should be incorporating that, but she's very smart in the things that she's done that other people should do. Can you help our listeners understand what the alternative to phone polling is and whether that was proven to be at least a little more accurate in either 16 or 20? Yeah, online polling, I think relative in this election is moderately better. And I think a lot of the people who are using a combination of online polling with good statistical controls against the voter file, doing better in different terms of weighting, geographic stratification, blah, blah, blah. There's a set of things that you can do online

because you have a bigger pool of respondents because everybody's online. You can do good and novel statistical controls among that to get a better view of the population. But you still do have this non-response issue and that Trump supporters on average, anti-vaxxers, this population is still less likely to respond. But marginally, that mode of measurement is going to be better for those reasons. And when you talk about Trump voters being less likely to respond to polls, that is different than the quote unquote, shy Trump voter hypothesis, correct? Yeah. Can you explain why that is?

I'll give you an example that I think is interesting, kind of lives outside of politics, but sometimes having examples outside of politics is more interesting. So we did a study on vaccination and HPV uptake. So why is it, who are the types of people that are likely to vaccinate their children against the HPV disease and who are the parents that are? And it's a fascinating result and probably indicative of what's going to happen next and what's the next vein of research around who's going to get the vaccine? Who's, you know, who's not. And what we found is that anti-vaxxers who tend to be, you know, uniquely Republican tend to correlate very highly with the Trump base, get their information from very different pools of people than people who believe in vaccination. Overwhelmingly,

than people who believe in vaccination. Overwhelmingly, people who believe in vaccination against very critical illnesses get their advice from their personal physicians, their personal practitioners, and other experts about the disease itself, where anti-vaxxers, who again, it's a lot of them, this is not a small population of people who tend to be Trump supporters and Republican get their information about vaccination from the media and online. A large majority of them get their information from that. So what's important here is that they don't believe in the guidance from experts and they don't believe in the guidance from medical practitioners, which is super interesting because they don't trust the guidance from medical practitioners, which is super interesting because they don't

trust the guide from that. They tend to trust the guidance from their specific media channels and the guidance from their online friends and family who are repeating those things from their media channels. Thus, they have broadly lower trust in the guidance of experts and the guidance of these types of mode of measurement in general. And the consequences of that tend to lead towards how much these people are participating in these kind of like, you know, expert driven public opinion measurement exercises that are so prevalent. So that, you know, that bias is going to be present in the political survey,

and that bias is going to be present in other types of surveys, especially around the COVID vaccine that we're likely to see. As you're thinking about what polling and research looks like 2021, 2022, have you thought about what recommendations you guys are going to do or you have for others about how to ensure that we get a more accurate picture of the electorate? Because that's what I think some of us may not realize is, at the end of the day, do we care if Nate Cohn's needle is correct? Probably not. It's not consequential. But for campaigns, we're making decisions. And a lot of campaigns spent money in ways at the end of this election that was based on bad data, right, and had negative results. Yeah, I mean, the utility of

polling data is to help. So just like backing up, you know, what does a campaign do? There are, you know, two critical things that a campaign does. One is spend money in the right place. And two is to say, messages work that resonate and persuade voters. cycle was to say where we should spend money or where we shouldn't spend money. The utility of that in a presidential election, you know, isn't as high because you're trying to build a map to 270 and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to say we need to invest our money in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. Like you don't need a PhD in social sciences to do that. And largely the spend patterns that states had or the campaigns had were largely right. You know, the team invested the 90% of their money in the states that we needed to win to get 270 electoral votes, even though we are, you know, biased by two to three points. And the outcome, they still spent money

in the right state. So it wasn't super consequential in that regard. I think the part that is overlooked, especially in the public conversation, is, you know, given the excitement around the horse race that we and other probably, you know, private firms are much more focused on is what is the message and what is the messenger that is more and more effective at persuading people who are deeply, deeply skeptical about Democrats and deeply skeptical of the kind of body politic in general. That is a much more important strategic question that I don't think gets as much public conversation, or maybe it does kind of like superficially, but not in the same regard that the horse race conversation gets, that we and the campaigns probably internally think much more about.

So just as an example of where we spend our time and thinking, this cycle, we tested around 3,000 different ads in which there were hundreds of different messages and many different messengers. And that is the big strategic questions that campaigns now are really trying to think about for a few reasons. One is I think people like us who live within our own eco chambers are increasingly or intrinsically, but also increasingly out of touch with the people that we're trying to communicate with. We exist on our own eco chambers. Other people who don't vote for us live in their own eco chambers and our standard intuition about what we should say

and about the messengers that we use to persuade people are increasingly off. And we noticed that in a large amount of ads and messages that we put together this cycle, those ads actually caused backlash and they weren't effective at actually persuading people to vote for us. And that was like the bulk of the research that we were doing using these online randomized controlled trials to figure it out. And when you look at, you know, some of the results of this, it's really just kind of fantastically interesting that the traditional kind of guidance was a highly negative, high production ad, where you kind of like talk negatively about Trump for on and on and on. And we found routinely that those ads didn't really persuade people very well. In fact,

they cause backlash, you know, so that that's a half a billion dollar discovery, because that's kind of like the prevailing wisdom about, you know, what ads are good is you beat the shit out of your opponent for six months, you try and set the narrative about it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what tended to work at a higher rate were, you know, surprisingly, were low production quality ads that were either positive or positive contrastive and ads that had people or messengers that reflected the communities that we were trying to persuade. So like normal, authentic, personal conversations that tended to, you know, cost less, but provided more of, I think, a deeper connection

to the people that we were trying to persuade due to the authenticity of it. It wasn't kind of like these elite Republicans standing up and saying, you know, I've changed my vote, but rather the kind of messengers from the community that we're trying to persuade, speaking on behalf of themselves and speaking on behalf of their own stories. And, you know, that is the probably the more interesting part, at least within a campaign of where research and science is going is what's the message and who's the messenger. And in terms of our company at Civitas, that's the primary place where we were putting our research. I mean, that's, there's a quiet story behind that. You know, it doesn't have the same kind of like fun

narrative about the horse race. But that I think is the interesting part of going in a campaign. And again, the root cause is that I think we as like, you know, elite fancy pants, Democrats are increasingly out of touch with this population and you know and how we need to build a conversation with them going forward. Are Republicans equally out of touch or are they more in law, elite, fancy pants Republicans to the extent that exists, or are they more in touch with these voters because they live closer in a similar ecosystem? Same. Same. When you look at the results of this election in terms of both how Biden won and then how Democrats disappointed in a lot of places down ballot, do you have any sort of broad takeaways for what it says about sort of the political environment where we go from here? Oof. Hey, man, that's deep.

Oof. Hey, man, that's deep. Well, let me make it maybe less deep, or at least is. I look at this from my perspective and feel incredibly elated that Joe Biden won and find that to be not a particularly replicable situation. People like Joe Biden. He was an incredibly strong candidate, and Trump was actually a relatively weak candidate. And it's very problematic that with the political environment we at least thought we had, generic Republican did better than generic Democrat. And that becomes challenging in the elections we have to come. Yeah. I think an underreported story this cycle is that people overwhelmingly voted for ballots that support progressive policies, whether that was the minimum wage increase in Florida, where, you know, a state that, you know, Biden lost, we lost, you know, up and down the ballot, but they voted for a material increase in the minimum wage. South Dakota, I think it's South Dakota voted for like making weed legal. So this kind of like wide base of progressive policy was endorsed by people, by citizens all across the board. But those same people who voted for a minimum wage increase and those same people who voted to like, you know, smoke pot recreationally voted for the candidate who didn't support that,

that policy writ large. And, you know, that that's a brand problem, which that's, you know, the definition of that brand problem in corporate market research, where if people like your products more than they like you, then you have a brand problem. This is like Hyundai cars circa 1998. People would get in the car and be like, oh man, this has got great handling. I love the steering. It's got a lot of power, but gross. It's a Hyundai. And that is a little bit of the problem is that people like the democratic product, but they don't like Democrats at the same rate that they like the product. And that's a definition of a brand problem and where a lot of the investment needs to be put. I mean, the uncontrollable problem is group consolidation within echo chambers.

I mean, I think like, you know, some of the most interesting research is in looking at the kind of tone and feel and the persuadability of the organic conversations that tend to come up on the internet. You know, the stratification, the polarization, and you know, everybody has seen the data is that areas with, you know, elite, highly educated people, democratic vote share has been growing. And in areas where you have less educated people or non-college educated people, support for Democrats has been going down. And that's a trend that's continued, that's accelerated since 2012, and maybe, you know, all the way going back to 2008. And that's not a reflection of, some people would say that's a reflection of like education itself and like critical thinking and all that stuff. I think that's a pretty elitist point of view. What it's more reflective of is, you know, what are the cultural differences going on between these two populations and reflective of the information systems that people live in online and the cultural entrenchment and psychological entrenchment

that that tends to cause and how people actually kind of live within those different online information networks. And it's interesting when you look at like, what is the fundamental content that those two different communities are absorbing within their own ecosystems. And a predominant narrative and a fundamentally interesting narrative in people who are living or kind of like, quote, less educated people in their networks, that's a little bit derogatory, but rather these kind of cultural centers of people online is a message about, yes, I'm not as educated, but I am smarter than you are. You can call it street smarts or whatever. I'm not as quote, formally educated than you are, but I'm actually

smarter than you are. Or you are advanced, the things that you believe in terms of progressive politics are out of touch or reflective of kind of like your own underlying problems as opposed to something that's going to be truly beneficial, whether that's attitudes on education or, you know, other things like that. Maybe this is a, you know, kind of a digression, but, you know, my favorite meme this cycle is a picture of a teacher and a mechanic. cycle is a picture of a teacher and a mechanic. And the teacher is talking about how hard it is or why it's unfair for that person to support their students with funding and why it's unfair, the student loan situation. And it's contrasted with a mechanic who is looking over his toolbox and that mechanic is responsible for buying his own goods and

supporting his own education without government support. And it's this kind of truly like interesting story of privilege and government subsidy versus a story over here about self reliance and personal independence and freedom. And they have all these kind of like conversations about how they contrast out of touchness and personal privilege versus concepts about independence, freedom, and self-reliance. And, you know, those are kind of like these macro themes, but those macro themes are reflected in these kind of like cultural anchors that people are created and they're recreating on the internet that are reflective of some of these broader macro themes. And, you know, that, that is the fundamental, I think, you know, cultural problem that we are

competing with are these kind of like psychological narratives on the internet or social psychological narratives on the internet that we have probably understudied and best been less compassionate about. I do think, you know, the methods that we've developed in terms of message testing, you know, very objective veil of ignorance message testing have been a great way to understand what forms of communication and messenger we can get to actually reach out to those people into those chambers. But fundamentally, it's a hard problem because it is a condition of the internet and is a condition of the America we've created. created. Last question for you. At least from 2012 on, there's the, you know, the quote-unquote education gap had been, we believe, primarily centered around white voters, Democratic share of the college. Oh, yeah. This is interesting. Yeah. And so this is the first election where it appears to, at least in some small but significant ways, affected non-white voters

as well. And I wanted to get your sense of whether that is an aberration or a trend that is deeply dangerous to Democrats. Yeah. Deeply dangerous. I thought you might say that. Yes. So we, you know, we did a, we did a study and I hope, hopefully I'm not getting myself into trouble talking about this, but it is what it is. But we did a study this year where we asked people just kind of, you know, generally about the social themes that, you know, Democrats versus Republicans were advocating along a few dimensions. One was just kind of like general progressive policy. And two was some of these kind of like attitudes about like beingness, like being in freedom as kind of like, you know, broad themes like being in freedom versus just policy.

So one is policy and two is kind of like place and country. And we asked about, you know, kind of like the most critically was defund the police. was defund the police. And we saw that overwhelmingly Latino voters were the least supportive of defund the police by a massive margin. Black voters didn't support it, white voters didn't support it, but Latino voters were really the least supportive of defund the police. And they shared, I think, a lot of these attitudes that were kind of found in some of these lower education communities. You know, one might just be like reinforcement because like they live in the same areas and they tend to kind of like coexist with other folks. And that might be just kind of, you know, those things kind of rubbing off. exist with other folks. And that might be just kind of, you know, those things kind of rubbing off. But you can see it in terms of just like basic sharing of policy attitudes, you know,

looked more Republican. And some of these kind of like feelings of cultural association tended to be more kind of what shared more by republicans another piece of research on this um is that a lot of the kind of you know message messages that trump used around um the radical left and all that other stuff were effective but like not that effective what was really effective that he used was his kind of like connection to normalcy and his connection to economic progress and underlying feelings about self-independence and freedom. And I think we kind of like, you know, kind of undersaw those themes is like how much were they truly believing in some of the policies? And like, second is we believe, you know, we like elite fancy pants Democrats believe that he's kind of like this crazy, abnormal character, but, you know, he did a good job with the communities that we don't have

exposure to connecting to normalcy. And that was a big thing that he did. And that was largely, you know, reflected in some of the message testing work that we that we had done. Well, this is a fascinating and deeply disturbing conversation. So we got a lot of work to do. We have a lot of work to do, you know, but I think like, just from our perspective, there's like two things we need to do. One is just like the broad introspection. Like we get it. And we have to like, kind of like put on this kind of like new veil of ignorance and say, like, we don't know as much as we think we know. Second is to admit

based on the election results versus the ballot results that we have a brand problem, but people actually believe in the policies that we care about. So like that Delta may be recoverable. And the third is that like, we do have effective messages and we do have effective messengers that we've identified through the message testing that we've done. it's a matter of how we identify those things and then consolidate a lot of, you know, our discussion and the people that speak on our behalf that look more like those communities that we're trying to persuade, but ultimately are more effective based on both kind of like logic, but also the testing that we've done. So, you know, there's a path and it's a reasonable path and it's not alienating the

stuff that we care about. It's just a matter of, you know, proper introspection and, you know, doing some of the work that we need to do. So yeah, I feel better already. Dan Wagner, thanks so much for joining us on Pod Save America and we'll talk to you soon. All right. Thanks, Dan. Bye-bye. Thanks to Dan for joining us today and hope everyone has a great weekend. We will talk to you next week. Bye everyone. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production.

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