Pod Save America - "The ads that defined 2020."

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Jon F. and Dan connect for a special crossover installment of the hit YouTube series "Campaign Experts React" and break down the best and worst of the Trump and Biden campaign ads. Check out youtube.com/crookedmedia for more of the show.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Today on the pod, the crossover event of the year that none of you asked for. Campaign experts react and Pod Save America together in one podcast. Look, two hugely successful franchises. I was resistant to being dragged down by this Pod Save America thing, but I agreed to do it. It's fine. YouTube, biggest star of the year from YouTube. YouTube breakout star, Dan Pfeiffer. That's what I call you.

I am recording this from my own hype house somewhere in the valley. So you're all going to hear a version of Campaign Experts React, which is Dan's hit show on YouTube. You can watch it there, youtube.com slash cricket media. Dan, what's in store for pod listeners for this episode? This is our election end special where we're looking at the ads from the Biden and Trump

campaigns that best define their messages and strategies. And we look at them from the perspective of what we know now, knowing what we know about how much closer the race was, where the polling might have been wrong, to both assess whether they were more effective than we thought, less effective, and what role they might have played. And we tried to take it as a opportunity to have a broader conversation about the role of advertising and messaging in this very highly polarized environment in which we operate. So if you would like to watch the Trump section of this episode, we're going to do some Trump ads first. It is already up on YouTube.

If you'd like to watch the Biden section of this episode, we talked about the Biden ads. The video version will be up on YouTube on Tuesday, December 8th. So you can of course watch the entire series in all its glory at youtube.com slash crooked media. But first, before we dive in just one quick housekeeping note the crooked store is freshly stocked with new holiday merch from all your favorite crooked pods make sure to check it out this weekend for black friday

and cyber monday deals head to crooked.com store now to shop dan i should tell you that i noticed a few people on twitter have been they have their it's not great Dan merch and they're crossing out the knot. It's very important to do it with tape because if you, if you market permanently, you want to give yourself the opportunity to revert. Things are definitely not going to be great again. Right? Like you want to be like, you don't want to, I mean, I guess maybe it's better for business to have to buy a second shirt, but generally for your own life, you want to be able to rip that tape off and get right back to pessimism. That opportunity is there for you. Without further ado,

here's the YouTube sensation, Campaign Experts React. I just read what's written for me. Jon Favreau, welcome to Campaign Experts React. The campaign is over, but like Trump, we can't let it go, and we are still here. Highlight of my life. Yes, as I told you, this is going to be similar in audience and influence to your Insta Live with Kendall Jenner, so just be prepared for that.

Perfect. The purpose of this episode is, this is our campaign and review episode where we're going to look at the best ads from the Biden and Trump sides that best personified their strategies and message and reflect on how that worked given what we know about how the election went. But before we get into that, I want to ask you about how the campaign results, the much closer than expected race in particular, influences your view of the importance of paid advertising in campaigns? I don't know. Because in general, I am trying to, because the polls were so shitty for this election, And because we only have exit poll data, which is also shitty, I have been reluctant to offer confident takes about what happened. I do have a lot of questions,

which I feel like I'll be asking throughout this episode. But, you know, on one hand, in an election where Joe Biden's lead in the closest battleground states was tens of thousands of votes. And, you know, if you take the three states that made him president, it's basically like, you know, he won them by 50,000 votes, right? So in that sense, everything mattered. And then paid advertising, of course, mattered. On the other hand, in a high turnout election, of course, mattered. On the other hand, in a high turnout election where everyone was paying incredibly close attention to the news and to political news about the election, I wonder how much ads had an impact if most people were making their decisions based on the news that they were paying such close attention to. We had our old friend, Obama strategist and resident hack

on tap, David Axelrod, in this series a few months ago. And he made a point that in his experience, and this is coming from the perspective of someone who was a political ad maker for decades, that the importance of political ads is inversely proportional to the amount of press attention that a campaign gets. So in a congressional race where both candidates have low name ID, it gets a little press coverage, the ads are very influential. It's maybe the only way in which voters ever learn anything of substance about the candidate or their opponent. In a presidential race, they matter, but it's much more on the margins. And what matters more is the larger conversation that is happening in the free media and in this day

and age in social media. And I think that's probably even more true in this race, which was the most highly engaged, most highly covered race in American history. I mean, we basically, politics has become a national conversation for four years under the Trump era, which it never had before. But like you said, everything matters. And I think if you look at the fact that Joe Biden started actually underwater with his favorability, I recognize we're operating with bad polls, but that's our baseline, right? Operating within that baseline. And he improved over the course of time and was able to stop the Trump campaign from demonizing him. His huge ad and research advantage probably played some significant role in that, given the disparity in press coverage between Biden and Trump.

The place where I have real questions is the down ballots, particularly the Senate races, where Democrats had massive resource advantage and all their money was on the campaign side, which means that they were running more ads than the Republicans because by law, television stations have to charge campaigns the lowest available rate and they can gouge the shit out of super PACs. And so Republicans were spending similar amounts of money but getting much fewer ads, yet that seemed to matter zero. And I think that raises real questions about where we spend our money when we have resource advantage. And recognizing, of course, that in this campaign, there was very limited on-the-ground organizing,

but were there better ways to spend that money that would have had more impact? And then the other question is, and this is why these are somewhat unanswerable, is maybe it wasn't the fact of the TV ads, but maybe it's what the TV ads were about or the digital ads were about. Was it the wrong message? Because if all of the polling was off, you were giving poor guidance about what voters wanted to hear. And so I think that's a theme we're going to come through throughout all of these ads is maybe our prior analysis of what we thought worked and didn't is incorrect because it was based on incorrect information. So the first ad we're going to look at is a positive spot from

the Trump campaign. In the race for a vaccine, the finish line is approaching. Safety protocols in place and the greatest economy the world has ever seen coming back to life. But Joe Biden wants to change that. I would shut it down. Why would we ever let Biden kill countless American businesses, jobs and our economic future when President Trump's great American comeback is now underway. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. John, what did you think of this ad? So this is one of the ads that, in retrospect, I wonder if it was more effective than I originally thought.

I will say this about this particular Trump ad and most Trump ads. The gap between the crazy shit that Trump says on the campaign trail and tweets every day and his advertising was quite large. His ads were created and produced by your typical Republican strategist who knows that you need an actual message. Trump did not really have a message. But looking back on that ad, I wonder if it appealed to a segment of people who ended up voting for Trump who had lockdown fatigue or pandemic fatigue. And because maybe the pandemic didn't affect them directly, they cared more about the economy than they did the pandemic. And now, again, I think the question

is, did that sway anyone? Or did that just appeal to people who are already going to vote for Trump because they didn't give a shit about the virus, which when you looked at, again, the exit polls, the limited data we have, like if you really cared about the pandemic, you voted for Biden. If not, you voted for Trump. That is too simplistic, but that is generally it generally seems like that is what happened. When I saw this ad the first time, I thought it was probably one of, if not the most effective ad the Trump campaign ran, but it is effective in a different way than I thought. Because I thought

that there was this giant elephant in the room throughout the campaign that the Trump campaign never talked about COVID. It's the single biggest issue in America, whether you are deeply afraid of it or you're deeply afraid of people being too afraid of it, you can't avoid it. It's on the news. It's all anyone talks about. And the Trump campaign just never discussed it throughout the summer. And then in their sort of post-campaign shakeup advertising shift, they started talking about COVID. And I thought that was smart and talking about vaccine smart. And you are correct that I think this is an ad made by an average Republican ad consultant. There's nothing ingenious about it. It's pretty cookie cutter. But compared to the ads that were done under Brad Parscale, which were just Sean Hannity fever dreams, were insane. This one, I think, is pretty good. But I was very, very dismissive the first time around of the attack on Biden for

saying shut it down because of all of this polling I saw that said that people were much more concerned about opening up too soon than staying closed for too long. And I think that polling was clearly wrong. If the polling was oversampling college-educated white voters, then you were oversampling people who care the most about COVID or are the most concerned about it. And I think this ad probably is more effective than we thought. It is a permission structure ad. It is trying to get people who they believe want to support Trump to give them some fig leaf to hang on to, to do it. And I think the other thing about given the turnout in this election being so gigantically high on both sides, that the persuasion that we talked about throughout this series was mostly between, can you get these people who were skeptical of Trump to

vote for Biden or for Trump? I think this is what we were really looking at is persuasion between voting and not voting. I don't know whether this shifted a person out from Biden's column to Trump's column, but I think it probably shifted some people who were maybe not going to vote for Trump to do vote because it gave them, for the first time. He gave them a reason to do that again. Also, like the message of this ad was very different than Trump's message on the coronavirus. Trump's message on covid is covid is not real. You can't really get sick. It's going to go away on its own. Here's some of my snake oil, your hydrochloric and your bleach and all this kind of shit.

Everything will be fine. Like his message was extreme and crazy. Right. Joe Biden's message sort of occupied the middle, which was, you know, we need to take precautions now and we need to defeat this virus and we can defeat this virus. And if we take sort of common sense steps to protect ourselves, then we can both defeat the virus and fix the economy. Right. But what this ad does is it makes Trump's message seem like the sort of moderate middle message, which is like the vaccine's coming. We want a vaccine. We're coming out of this and we can't lock everything down now because we're so close and the economy is coming back. And Joe Biden wants everything to shut down completely, which is not really Joe Biden's

message. So but it's interesting that the message of this ad is much more like the Trump people tried to occupy the middle ground on the virus with this ad, which is not what Trump himself occupied throughout the entire campaign. And Biden's message was much more of the middle ground throughout the entire campaign. Yeah, I think it's important not to throw too much weight behind the influence of this ad because the Trump campaign didn't have a ton of money. Right. They weren't running these ads at a giant volume. And it really was spitting in the ocean compared to the conversation on all the other things that Trump did. Right. Like if you saw this ad, you probably saw this at the same time that you were reading a gazillion stories or seeing tweets or Facebook posts,

whatever about Trump getting COVID, acting like a lunatic, not wearing a mask, all of those things. But just as one piece of political content, I think it was probably one of the more effective things they did and effective in ways that we did not assume based on the incorrect polling we had. The next ad we're going to look at is an appeal to Black voters from the Trump campaign. I was a big Obama supporter. It's okay to be Obama and a Trump supporter because President Trump literally created the best job market and economy for Black Americans and Americans of all races. Joe Biden's America was mass incarcerating Black men.

President Trump set them free. President Trump believes in rehabilitation, not just incarceration. He wants everyone in America to have the opportunity towards success. That's the type of president that we need. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. I'm very curious about how you think about this ad now knowing Trump's performance among non-white voters in the most recent election? I still think that this was another permission structure ad, right? This is, I mean, he literally, this was Jack Brewer, he's a former NFL player, literally says in the ad, it's okay to be an Obama

Trump supporter. And he is a black man saying this. I think the analysis at the time was that a lot of these ads were not necessarily about winning over black voters, but about letting white voters know that their choice for Trump wasn't a racist choice because there are black Americans supporting Donald Trump. And so if that's the case, you can't be racist for supporting Donald Trump. And it's OK to vote for Donald Trump. That was the analysis then. I still wonder if that analysis is correct and it may be, but some of the results give us an early indication that Trump did a lot better with Latinos among black voters. He didn't do any better among black women, but he did do slightly better among black men than he did in 2016. So I do wonder if ads like this, and again, this is one ad, but this was the Republican convention play, right? They had a lot of speakers that delivered this message at the Republican convention for four days straight, testimonials, all kinds of

stuff. And it was sort of a big play for them. Yeah, I'm very torn on this one as well. I think it's very easy to overread the small shift in the black vote as some gigantic seismic thing. It's something that the Democratic Party has to look very serious about. We've got to analyze. We've got to understand why it happened, because I think it has real long term consequences that we have to look at. In the context of this ad, I still believe

this is primarily about convincing white people that it's okay to vote for Trump and not be a racist. I think I do too. You've seen that. We've seen that in focus groups. You saw it in voters that you talked to in the wilderness. This is a hangup for a lot of people. Some of the most sentimental moments of Trump's presidency where he did the most poorly in the polling were the moments where he polarized things on racial issues after Charlottesville and the neo-Nazi fine people comment, his behavior after the George Floyd protests throughout the summer during the reckoning over structural racism were some of his worst moments. And so I think this is going to fix that at some level. moments. And so I think this is going to fix that at some level. So I don't want to overread into it too much, but the Trump campaign had a clear, they were pretty explicit about the strategy.

And I think we mostly thought it was bullshit that if they could just shave a few points off of Biden's margin among African-American voters, then they could flip some of these states. And they actually came pretty close to doing it, certainly in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania less so. But the gains they made with non-white voters in most cases, other than Florida and Texas, were massively overrun by Trump's losses among suburban voters. So it didn't end up mattering in the end. We should be very clear that the overwhelming strategy of Trump and the Republican Party was to keep Black people from voting, right? That was voter suppression. There was massive amounts of misinformation spent at Black and Latino voters, only some of which we're beginning to understand now. And so I don't think we want to give them a ton of credit for this because their real strategy

for winning was not to improve the margins between Biden and Trump, but to reduce the raw turnout among voters of color. So this one ad or the slight improvement here and Trump, but to reduce the raw turnout among voters of color. So this one ad or this slight improvement here or there, what happened to Miami-Dade or the Rio Grande Valley, does not somehow absolve them of a racist, white supremacist political strategy to win an election, if that makes sense. Yeah, and again, even if we stipulate that Trump may have done slightly better, and it definitely seems like at most it's slightly, slightly better among black men, we don't know what message moved black men towards Trump or just why they voted for Trump. interview when he was talking about his new book that he had talked to an organizer who was canvassing in a majority black Philadelphia neighborhood. And when he was talking to voters, they were talking about QAnon conspiracies about Joe Biden. Nothing to do with the message of that ad. So again, we just it's hard to tell exactly what worked. But I do think the original analysis

that it's about giving a permission structure to white people to vote for Trump is probably still on the mark. The next ad we're going to look at is an attack on defund the police from the Trump campaign. You have reached the 911 police emergency line. Due to defunding of the police department, we're sorry, but no one is here to take your call. If you're calling to report a rape, please press 1. To report a murder, press 2. To report a home invasion, press 3. For all other crimes, leave your name and number and someone will get back to you.

Our estimated wait time is currently five days. Goodbye. I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message. So looking back at this ad, I think it was probably effective in turning people against the idea of defunding the police. the idea of defunding the police. I still don't believe it was effective at connecting the policy position of defunding the police to something that Joe Biden would do as president. You know, there's images in that ad of, you know, Joe Biden's America and there were riots and all that kind of stuff. And we said at the time, like, that's not Joe Biden's America, that's Donald Trump's America. And we said at the time, like, that's not Joe Biden's America. That's Donald Trump's America. And Joe Biden made it clear numerous times that he was definitely know what the actual policy proposals around shifting funding from police departments to, you know, substance abuse counselors, mental health counselors and all that, if you didn't know the actual policy and you just

heard that ad and you think that defund the police means that if you fucking call 911, no one's going to be there, then, you know, it could have been effective at sort of turning people against that policy. We looked at this ad earlier this summer when it came out, and I was pretty dismissive of it and thought it was you have to make believable attacks. And I don't think you convince anyone that Joe Biden is going to let people get killed or raped or just commit crimes. That is not a credible attack on him. I still hold to that view. I think this ad, if the goal was to demonize Joe Biden as someone who would defund the police or do those things, the ad failed at that.

Agree. Agree. What I think, there are two elements of it, though, that I think now appear more successful in hindsight. And I do want to be clear that I think the people who were in the Trump campaign stumbled ass backwards into this. I don't think they really knew what they were doing. I think they were definitely trying to demonize Joe Biden. Trump's Twitter account makes that very clear that that was what the strategy was here. But raising the salience of law and order issues helped Republicans. It absolutely did. And I think Trump was more successful in doing that than we gave him credit for. Not long after the unrest in Kenosha, the New York Times had these

polls come out. And it showed that law and order in crime had risen near the top of voters' concerns in those states, but they did not trust Donald Trump more than Joe Biden on that issue. So I think it was basically a tie. But I think because the polling was oversampling the wrong voters and undersampling Trump voters, we didn't get the right picture of that. And so this ad did have real success in changing the issue environment. And so therefore, the other part of it, I think we need to explore more, but I think you can at least credibly suggest that it is not unrelated to the sky-high turnout among Trump's base. Like whenever you and I would have conversations about these ads over text or Slack or in person, actually, I take that back. We have not been in person in nine months, so it was not in person.

But in whatever virtual forum that we are continuing our friendship, the sort of takeaway from this is this ad is terrible unless it's designed to turn out all of these unregistered white non-college voters in the Midwest that Nate Cohen and Dick Bosman were worried about. Yeah, turns out that's what happened. Guess what? Turns out that's what happened. Whether this ad, not this specific ad, but this strategy did that or not, we do not have precise info in,

but it is certainly something worth exploring. And it bodes very poorly for politics going forward, because if very explicitly racist appeals designed to scare the living shit out of white people turn out to be incredibly effective ways to turn out Republican voters, we're going to see more of that, not less, now that Donald Trump is headed off the scene. Well, and I think the next question, of course, is so what do Democrats do about that? And I think what happened in this election is you had a group of activists and some politicians call for defunding the police. You had a bunch of other Democrats believing that that is a very unpopular position.

And so they did not talk about it, ran away from it, did not contend with in 2018, I think we said this then, you can't really ignore these controversial policy proposals and pretend that they're just going to go away since we know the Republicans are going to use them. You have to find a way to take them on. Like there was a poll that Data for Progress did when defunding the police first became a slogan where they asked, would you support a new first responder agency that addresses issues of addiction and mental health so that when there's an addiction or issue or mental health issue,

police aren't showing up with guns, right? That was the question they asked. Overwhelming support for that. 70% of people supported that, right? And again, polls are a little off here and there, but when you get 70%, that's a huge number. But most people don't know that that's one policy proposal around defunding the police. If you just hear the words defund the police,

like, I don't know how you can be blamed for thinking it means that the police are just not going to be there at all, or the people just want to get rid of police ever, even though the actual policy position that a lot of advocates are talking about are just diverting funds so that police aren't doing the work of people who, you know, doing the work of mental health counselors and substance abuse experts. And so I do think that Democrats have to figure out a way to respond to ads like these as opposed to just ignore them and hope that the issue will go away. I think that's part of it.

But I think the thing that I take away from this election, based on all the imprecise and correct data that we have, but one of the things that I'm really sort of wrestling with in my head and thinking about is one thing Republicans did very, very effectively in this campaign was they changed the conversation to more favorable issue territory for themselves. So yes, we need to, you know, like we can't, you can't sit on an edict that says only use poll-tested language. We should not try to in any way, shape or form stem the ambitions of activists who want to push the conversation forward. It would be the wrong thing to do. It would be impossible.

It's the wrong thing to do, but also we can't is what I'm trying to say. Even if you want to, you cannot. You can't do it. We have to understand that in our head and be able to push back on it the right way. And I don't think you can ignore it. But how like what is the Democratic version of the law and order strategy Republicans? What emotional issue can we tap into that moves the conversation into a place that is more friendly to us? Can you run a ruthlessly effective campaign that is as emotional and taps into people's emotions on economic issues as Republicans do on race and culture and law and order? That is a big question I think we have to explore because given how this election played out, we have to explore, because given how this election played out, we can never assume low Republican turnout again. We have to both persuade and mobilize. And given the constraints of the Senate map and the Electoral College, we don't really have a choice there.

So the conventional strategy, if the Republicans raise an issue that's favorable to them, is like you said, how do we change the conversation so it's on territory that's favorable to them is, like you said, how do we change the conversation so it's on territory that's favorable to us? In this election, that was easier than most elections because we were in the middle of a fucking pandemic. And so like when the law and order, when the law and order, when Trump tried to make law and order issues the major part of the conversation, I thought it would be different this time around because we're in the middle of a pandemic. People are dying. Obviously, like people trust Joe Biden more in the pandemic.

People trust Democrats more in healthcare issues in general. So as the news naturally moved to that topic, I thought that the salience of law and order issues would sort of recede, But maybe that didn't happen. Yeah, I think that the real huge thing is, and there are a number of theories about why the polling goes wrong, we don't have to get into here, but we were clearly operating under the wrong impression about the political salience of the pandemic. It was much more of a 50-50 issue or one that just became an issue of political identity.

One day, we're going to have a vaccine. We're going to go back to life. We can see our friends and family again. So what do Democrats do that moves it back to the things we care about? They really get to that question of identity. Because I think identity is the most important signifier in politics, more important than policy, more important than ideology. And we have to understand it in that way. And than policy, more important than ideology. And we have to

understand it in that way. And identity is not just race and gender. No, it's partisan identity. I mean, we may learn from this election that we've always known that polarization and partisan identity were one of some of the strongest forces in politics in this entire country, and it has been for a while. Polarization and partisan identity may have even been stronger than a global pandemic and terrible recession. It may have been a greater indicator of how you're voting, what your partisan identity is and where you stand on Donald Trump. That may have been more important than how you felt about the pandemic, or it may have dictated how you looked at the pandemic, which was another. Or it may have dictated how you looked at the pandemic, which was another, right? Like perhaps people's views of the pandemic and how those views connected to politics didn't actually change with the severity of the pandemic. Perhaps like if you were a person who liked Trump or voted for Trump, you saw the entire pandemic unfold through a different lens than if you were someone who hated Donald Trump.

That could be what we end up finding out. who hated Donald Trump. That could be what we end up finding out. This is a pretty depressing finding when you think about how we tackle even bigger challenges like climate change. Well, and it's depressing in what you just said, which is how do Democrats find issues that are more related to identity, particularly around economics, that might help us in the future if Republicans try to demagogue race and law and order issues. The next ad we're going to look at is a positive spot from the Biden campaign. I started this campaign saying we're in the battle for the soul of the nation. I believe that even more deeply today, who we are, what we stand for, and maybe most importantly, who we are going to be, it's all at stake.

Characters on the ballot, the character of the country, and this is our opportunity to leave the dark, angry politics of the past four years behind us. To choose hope over fear, unity over division, science over fiction. I believe it's time to unite the country, to come together as a nation. But I can't do it without you. So I'm asking for your vote. We need to remember this is the United States of America. And there's never been anything we've been unable to do when we've done it together. I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message.

Here's my question on this ad. I wonder if this ad and this message were the absolute right message to beat Donald Trump, but perhaps the wrong message to sweep in a Democratic majority down ballot. Because we talk about ads as permission structures all the time. I wonder if this ad was offering a permission structure for independents, Republican-leaning independents, even some Republicans saying, you know what, this election is about character. It's about Donald Trump's character. It's about dark, angry politics that Donald Trump represent. And you can vote for Joe Biden to get rid of that and still maintain your own partisan identity, perhaps by voting for Republicans down ballot. And I don't know, I do not know. I do not know the answer to that question.

That could be wrong, but it's one of the answers I'll be looking for in the months to come. I mean, it is true that Joe Biden over-reformed his party. He did better than Senate, in most cases. It's not exactly the same. And just to be fair, it's not apples to apples because there were some third-party candidates in Senate races that did better than third party candidates at the presidential level. So there were some people who probably voted Biden and then the libertarian third party candidate. But there was still a historically low level of ticket splitting, at least between Senate candidates and Biden and congressional candidates and Biden and Trump. candidates in Biden and congressional candidates in Biden and Trump. And I think there might have been more when you got to your state Senate and state legislative candidates, because some of those candidates in some of the state, like Texas, North Carolina, that we thought would be very

close, the margins were greater than the Biden-Trump margins. I mean, this is definitely the right message for Biden. When Biden did his very first ad announcing he was running for president, this was his message. And people like you and I, who are professional political observers, we hate Republicans with the passion of a thousand suns. I did not love this message when it came out, right? And Biden was ultimately right about this. The context changed, but he was right all along. He was where the country was, or at least enough of the country to win. It, but he was right all along. He was where the country was, or at least enough of the country to win. It's where it was authentic to him and it worked. And I think the other part of this ad that I think is very important to think about is

at the beginning of the general election, one of the biggest concerns that a lot of Democrats had was about the ability of Trump, the right-wing media, the Republicans to paint Biden as someone who was not up to the task of being president, right? There were all these doctored videos circulating. This had become a message of some people on the far left during the primary. And research showed, as I understand it from the Biden campaign, that the best way to combat that was just let people see Biden speaking. And this ad was one of his closing argument ads. It's one of the ones they ran at nationally and at big football games and big events at the end. And I think it was quite effective in that. So I think message was good, message worked, and it served a strategic purpose. It was very important

to some set of voters. They clearly needed to persuade at the end. And he won. So, you know. Well, I mean, you know, you said we're political professionals who hate Republican politicians, and we do. But we've also seen focus groups and polling data for a decade now where people in the country, a vast majority of people in this country, want unity. They want politicians to come together. They want bipartisanship. And this is like the conundrum that we face right now. You and I know that that is bullshit and not going to happen because the Republican Party is not going to let it happen. They're going to like Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are getting ready to gum up the works, prevent Joe Biden from doing anything, gridlock all the way. And yet that never changes voters'

feelings, especially the median voter, swing voters, from their feelings of like wanting politicians to work together, wanting unity in this country. It works as an ad quite effectively. It works as a message quite effectively from Joe Biden. It worked quite effectively for Barack Obama for two terms. I think the challenge is you have a country where voters want both parties to work together. You have one party that's willing to do that, and you have another party that's not willing to do that and knows that if they obstruct all the time, then they will cause the other party to fail. then they will cause the other party to fail. This is going to be the challenge for Biden is to do two things once he assumes office.

One is he's going to have to make it clear that healing the soul of the country is not the same thing as healing Washington, D.C. You can help when people want unity. They obviously want bipartisanship. They would like it if Washington, D.C. worked better. But they also want to be able to go to Thanksgiving and not get in a scrimmy match with their uncle. They also want to not have to go on Facebook and see that their dentist is a member of QAnon. They want a more unified country and they want to feel better about being American. And that's not just getting Mitch McConnell to do better things than Mitch McConnell.

You're not going to you can maybe you can heal the soul of the country. You're not going to heal the soul of Mitch McConnell. For one reason. No soul. No soul. That's right. Set you up for that. But the other part is,

is he's going to have to make clear, and this is something that I think we missed the boat on in the early days of the Obama administration, is bipartisan is a two-way street. Joe Biden should get caught trying. Yes. But ultimately it's up to Mitch McConnell. And so if he chooses not to reach out to Joe Biden's outstretched hand to work together on

things like COVID relief, healthcare, other things, that's on Mitch McConnell. And then it's incumbent upon Democrats to make Republicans pay a political price for doing that. And that's a very, very important thing. Joe Biden cannot make Mitch McConnell do the right thing for the country. Only Mitch McConnell can do that. But Joe Biden and Democrats can make Mitch McConnell do the right thing for the country. Only Mitch McConnell can do that. But Joe Biden and Democrats can make Mitch McConnell pay a political price, or at least his incumbent senators and states, Joe Biden won, pay a political price for not doing that. The next ad we're going to look at is an economic message from the Biden campaign. The next ad we're going to look at is an economic message from the Biden campaign. When you walked in to that mill, you had a good wage.

You had good benefits. You were able to take care of your family. I worked 47 years in a steel mill. Trump said he was going to save the steel industry and the auto workers. But in April this year, my steel mill closed. He said, elect me and you'll see the best days yet. And all I'm seeing is the worst days. This is his economy.

This is his problem right now. And he keeps telling how great it is. We lost 1,300 good paying jobs. I lost my job. That was on his watch. Joe Biden is what American manufacturers need. Joe grew up in the nighttime. He comes from a family that are hardworking Americans, union people. He knows what manufacturing jobs are

and he's going to be the one that brings them back and make them stronger. He's got a plan. He's done it before. He comes from a blue collar background. He is one of us. Joey's one of us.

You can debate him all you want, but you can't take away his character. What do you think? I thought it was a great ad. I thought it was a great message. It is your traditional economically populist message from a Democratic politician running for office that we have seen for many years now. The question I have about this is, so, you know, the polling that's now bad showed that Joe Biden was doing better than Hillary Clinton among non-college educated white voters. It turns out from the results that he did not do that much better, if at all, in some places than Hillary Clinton among white non-college voters. But in certain counties, because we do have county level results, even though we don't have reliable exit polls yet, in certain counties that are made up predominantly of non-college educated white voters, particularly in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and especially in Pennsylvania, it does appear that Joe Biden at least didn't do worse and held enough of those voters to put him over the top. And the margins, of course, were very, very thin. And as we were saying earlier, like politics now is so much about identity. And that ad towards the end there was about identity when that guy said he comes from a blue collar

background. He's one of us. That was the message of that ad, right, that Joe Biden is not sort of the whether you believe a QAnon conspiracy, whether you believe the dementia stuff, whether you believe that he's been in Washington too long, whether you believe he's leading Antifa, whatever the attack against Joe Biden is. Here's a guy who's just like sort of a working class guy from the Midwest who's validating Joe Biden as a working class hero. He's one of us. And I think that's probably very effective. Yeah, I think that's right. You're right. It is an identity ad. It is saying that you're hearing all these things about Democrats, right? They're the party of the elites. They're the party of the rich, the party of Hollywood. They're the party of black people and brown people and the most base, morally offensive, racist appeals that have been really at the party of Hollywood. They're the party of black people and brown people and the most base morally offensive racist appeals that have been at this really at the center of the Republican messaging about Democrats going back to Reagan, right? And before that, Nixon and on. And this,

like, this is an ad that is defending Joe Biden against a vision of Democrats that easily fits within the strategy of people like Lee Atwater and Karl Roof and others. And I think clearly was effective the tiny shifts in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin show that it worked. And it arrested the slide, as far as we know, with Democrats and white working class voters. The question over the long term for Democrats is, if Joe Biden can't outperform Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama with these voters, what Democrat can? Here you have someone who is an older white guy from Scranton of humble beginnings. What does that look like over the long term is a very interesting question.

They had a very clear strategy, and it worked. question, but they had a very clear strategy and it worked. And one thing I'd say about all of these Biden's ads is I have watched hours of Biden ads over the course of this campaign for this series and otherwise, and there is just a straight line of message and strategy and really even aesthetics through all of them about who their targets were. And their targets in most of their paid advertising looked a lot like that guy who was testifying to Joe Biden's blue collar credentials. And again, the arresting the slide of non-college educated white voters away from the Democratic Party may not be candidate dependent, right? Like the black guy from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama did better, much better

among non-college educated white voters than Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden. And so like it may not be it may not be the candidate. We have to be open to that, that there are larger forces at play here that are pushing non-college educated white voters away from the Democratic Party. And it may not be a simple message or candidate quality from Democrats that gets them back. And that's sort of what we have to look into now, because it just may be larger forces at play. Well, if we don't solve that problem, we are not going to win the Senate. And we're going to really struggle in the Electoral College for a very long time. I think what happens is, and this happened after 2016, Aaron's like, why is there so much focus on non-college educated white voters? These are Trump voters. A lot of them have racist views. Why are we spending so much time trying to get them back? It's not because it's like out of the goodness of our hearts that we want to get them back. It's a math problem.

is that, and we saw that very clearly in this election, is that we boosted turnout by a ton. Joe Biden turned out more Democrats, more Democratic voters than any presidential candidate in history. And that's true across the Democratic coalition. But Donald Trump did the same thing. He boosted turnout. So in a high turnout election, when you have just a ton of non-college white voters coming out, and you have high turnout, astronomically high turnout election, when you have just a ton of non-college white voters coming out and you have high turnout, astronomically high turnout among the Democratic side, like you can't win some of these states that add up to 270 without persuading some of those non-colle for more voters that should vote Democrat, younger voters, voters of color, women. But we did that in 2020. We registered a ton of them. They all turned out and it was still close. And that I think is the big challenge going forward. I mean, this is a question of having to do both, right? And I think you and I have talked about this many times, you made this point a gazillion times on the pod, is the media, politicians, everyone needs to pay as much

attention to Black, Hispanic, Asian American non-voters as they do the Trump voters, right? These are the people who decide elections. And the focus of attention is there. The lesson of this election is Democrats have to do both. We have to mobilize more voters. We have to find even more voters than we found this time. We have to turn them out. We have to improve our margins with Latinos and other groups where we've lost some ground in some states. But we also cannot continue to lose the white non-college vote by the same amount. So Barack Obama won, I think, 34% of the vote, according to exit polls at the time. Hillary Clinton won 29. I can't do the math in my head, but if Joe Biden won 27, we lose this election. If that number dropped by the same amount it

dropped from Obama to Clinton, Joe Biden would lose in a pretty significant electoral college landslide. And we have to watch that. Well, and again, this goes back to my point that everything mattered in a close election, right? Like black voters don't register and turn out at the levels they did in this election. Joe Biden loses. If Latino voters, even though there was a big swing towards Trump, we still had incredibly high Latino turnout for Joe Biden and other Democrats. You don't have that turnout. Joe Biden loses the Democrats. You don't have that turnout. Joe Biden loses the election. You don't have Native American turnout at the level it was in Arizona. Joe Biden loses the election. You don't have Asian American turnout to the level it was in 2020. Joe

Biden loses the election. So you're absolutely right. Like we cannot sacrifice mobilizing and persuading one demographic group at the expense of another as we think about how to broaden the Democratic coalition. We cannot afford to do that. It has to be addition and not trading one group for another. That's also math. The next ad we're going to look at is an attack on Trump's COVID response from the Biden campaign. Now it's turning out it's not just old people, Bob, just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It's not just old people, to plenty of young people. Well, I think, Bob, really, to be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down.

I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic. I still like playing it down. Yes. Because I don't want to create a panic. This, I would that he was purposely playing down the pandemic for political purposes. It is one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard at the time. We were all shocked, maybe not surprised, but certainly shocked. I wonder how much this ad changed any opinions on Donald Trump or on the pandemic. I think if you thought that Donald

Trump was mismanaging the pandemic before this ad, you continue to think he mismanaged the pandemic. If you thought that it was just something that happened to him and he was doing the best he could before this ad, you might have continued to think that as well. I just I'm now wondering if opinions on the pandemic and Donald Trump's handling of the pandemic were so polarized that another one of these ads about what Donald Trump knew and when he knew it. I wonder if it moved any voters. Maybe, but I just I'm a little more doubtful now than I was before. Yeah, I think that I think that's right. We just we just can't get a real handle on how important the pandemic was to people's votes.

It is clearly less important than we thought, given who turned out by the margins. That is very clear. Yes. Because it is very different than what the pre-election polling told us, which, like the margins, was also different than the pre-election polling. But what I think about this ad is it should be thought of not just in the way we think of these television commercials that air during the Michigan-Ohio State game, and it needs to be thought of as

part of their communication strategy, right? Which is, here you have a story that you believe, based on your polling, right or wrong, could hurt Trump with voters. Because of the limited reach of the media and the hyperkinetic media environment we live in, a lot of the voters you're trying to persuade who are less engaged followers of the news than we certainly are, will miss this story. To us, Bob Woodward tapes about Trump as the biggest deal. It's on the cover of the Washington Post. Anderson Cooper led his show with it, right? Bob Woodward sat right there on the Morning Joe roundtable and talked about it. But most voters will have no idea who that is or what it is or anything. They probably think Bob Woodward, if they even know who he is, may think he's a fictional character from a movie. Even in our very engaged universe, this story was over.

The Woodward story was over in two or three days, maybe less. Right. Yeah. And so the smart thing to do, the Biden campaign, I thought, did very well down the stretch of this campaign was they took stories that were happening in elite media circles and paid to put them in front of voters who might not otherwise see them. They did the exact same thing with the story in The Atlantic, which is the personification of elite media circles about Trump's comments about the troops. They did a number of different videos, one with just images and Trump's quotes. They did some videos submitted by veterans reacting to the

news and put it on Instagram and showed it to people. And so this is, I think, the future of how political campaigns are going to operate, which is you are paying to put things that happen in the news in front of voters you think they're going to care about. Whether this was a thing enough voters cared about, we have no idea. But I think it's a sign of the future and something I was very impressed by what they did down the stretch. And again, if your theory of the case is that this election will come down to a referendum on Donald Trump's character and that you can win enough voters, both, you know, in your own base and swing voters and also voters who don't pay much attention to the news and

are sporadic voters and don't come out that much. And the way that you can build the largest coalition is by making people believe that Donald Trump is unfit for the job and his unfitness for the job has caused death and destruction in this country. Then that ad fits very well with that strategy. And guess what? That is the coalition that Joe Biden built and won. Yeah, that is exactly that. Ultimately, in the end, we don't know what was the tipping point, ad message, direct mail piece, whatever it is. But Joe Biden built a coalition that won a huge

popular vote margin and won a very significant electoral college margin flipping to critical Sunbelt states. And so you can't say that everything worked, but their view of what the electorate wanted and who the key people were to persuade and mobilize and get out was correct. And how Joe Biden and his identity and his career and his experience fit within that message. It was exactly right. I would say this about the entire messaging of the campaign, whether it is his tweets, whether it is the speeches he gave, the press conferences, all the ads, is they were all of a coherent piece. There was one message. It never deviated.

The circumstances behind it and the context changed, but the message did not. And I think that is to the tremendous credit of their campaign. It was a remarkably disciplined campaign. There were, as we know, a lot of concerns among a lot of Democrats about what kind of general election candidate he would be. And he turned out to be a great one. Right. And I don't it may be the only one who could have pulled any of this off. And by the way, if, as we were saying earlier, the pandemic wasn't as determinative in this election because people's views were polarized before the pandemic, it's even more impressive what the Biden campaign pulled off. Right. Because like if views were that divided, more divided than we thought because of the polls and they were still able to drive this message right up until Election Day and make it the same consistent message and build a coalition that won 270 with it. That's pretty damn impressive. Yeah, there's a like there was this way of thinking about this, that Biden was going to have all of these political tailwinds behind him, a recession, a pandemic who's dividing people, Trump getting COVID at the end. And then you thought, oh, if he barely won, then that would be sort of him kind of tripping over the finish line. But that is absolutely not what happened. He turned out every voter there was to turn out at more. And Trump did exactly that, too.

The asset they had was a very unpopular president. Now, still popular enough that, you know, 47 percent of the country turned out for him. But for an incumbent running for reelection, he was polarizing, divisive and fairly and relatively unpopular compared to other incumbent presidents running for a second term. And that's the asset they had more than anything else. And they recognize that they had that asset. All right, that's our show for today. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Hope you're enjoying the holiday, even though it's a little different this year and hope that you're all staying safe. I hope you have the opportunity to rub it in your Trump loving uncle's face via Zoom.

Bye, everyone. Bye. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Quinn Lewis, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmal Konian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.