Pod Save America - “The Mitch Who Stole Christmas.”

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Mitch McConnell blocks bipartisan pandemic relief to help his corporate pals, Joe Biden continues to staff up his Cabinet and White House, and Republicans run their 2020 playbook in Georgia. Then messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio talks to Jon about why Democrats need to stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, Anat Shanker-Osorio is back to talk about what messages worked in 2020 and what might work in the Georgia runoffs. Before that, we'll talk about the latest developments on COVID relief negotiations and the next round of cabinet announcements from the incoming Biden administration. But first, check out this week's Pod Save the World, where Tommy and Ben dive even deeper than we will on Biden's selection of General Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense. And absolutely check out next week's Pod Save

the World because Barack Obama, who clearly can't stay away from crooked media, is talking to Tommy and Ben about his new book, A Promised Land. So that'll be exciting for next week. Two more quick reminders. Early voting in Georgia starts on December 14th, but there is still plenty of time and need to volunteer. So go to votesaveamerica.com slash Georgia. Also

tomorrow, December 11th is the last day to place your holiday merch orders to get them by December 24th. So go to crooked.com slash store now to get all your favorite it's not great dan gear is there any sort of special it's not great dan gear i don't know they're selling out fast man it's pretty hard to keep it's not great dan stuff in stock i mean it's hard it's hard i understand that we if i have coming to our house two of the Alyssa cat mugs.

Oh, I saw those. Yes, they are. Podcats. The podcats? The podcats, yeah. Alyssa's cat is a big hit in our house with Kyla, so she gets a mug. Did you stock up on t-shirts of a silhouette of Lovett sitting in different positions? Because that to me is a, that's a pretty, that's a pretty strong piece of merch gear. I'm basically turning that t-shirt into a mural on the wall behind me. So we'll just do that.

Good, good, good, good. All right, let's get to the news. Here's some headlines. On December 26th, expanded unemployment expires in most states. On December 31st, the eviction moratorium expires. On January 1. Paid sick leave expires at the end of the month. Additional aid to cities and states runs out. On December 19th, the federal government runs out of money. And yet there is still no deal in Washington on any of this, even as tens of millions of Americans are hungry, homeless, sick, or out of work. So Dan, last time we talked about this, there was a $908 billion bipartisan framework that Democratic leaders basically agreed to. An additional $300 per week in unemployment benefits over four months, $300 billion in small business loans, $160 billion

in aid to state and local governments, $82 billion for schools, $10 billion for child care providers, $6 billion for vaccine development and distribution, and an extension of the moratorium on evictions and student loan payments. Still not enough. Still does include another round of $1,200 checks. Still includes temporary liability protections for corporations. But it's better than nothing. And yet, still no deal. Mitch McConnell

still says no. Right before we started recording, I just saw that McConnell's staff was telling the staff of the bipartisan crew that was coming up with this deal, this just wasn't going to work. It's not going to work for Republicans, for all the Senate Republicans. Why? Because even though it is meager scraps of what the American people need, Mitch McConnell would prefer to hold aid to workers, small businesses, schools, and everyone else hostage so that corporations can kill and get their workers sick without being sued. This is all about a liability shield for corporations. And it is one of the most morally abhorrent positions that anyone has taken. This

would be in a time of peace and prosperity, this would be an incredibly popular position. But Mitch McConnell was doing this at a time when people needed it the most. He's trying to use the suffering of people and eviction crisis in this country as leverage to help corporations. I mean, like talk about one of the great villains in modern American history right before our eyes doing one of the most incredibly cruel and dangerous things. People will lose their jobs because of this. People will die because of this. And that is a choice that Mitch McConnell is making. Well, here's what I'm trying to figure out with McConnell, though. He so there was there's a temporary liability protection in the bipartisan compromise. So Democrats were at least willing to have some kind of liability protection for companies, at least in the short term. McConnell earlier this week suggested that he would drop the liability protection if Democrats would drop the $160 billion in state and local aid.

Democrats said no. So obviously, look, Mitch McConnell, if there's one thing he has loved since the beginning of these negotiations on the first CARES Act back in March, it's making sure that workers can force their employees back to work. And if they get sick, can't sue them. That's what he loves. That's his passion. But it seems like he was willing to give it up because he really fucking hates state and local aid even worse. I mean, I just I don't know if his love of protection for corporations is really driving this process. Well, I think there is context here that's important, which is that we have these Georgia elections looming. The grassroots money that powered Democrats throughout 2020 has continued into Georgia.

Democrats are raising huge amounts of money, grassroots money, for John Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, outside groups, etc. huge amounts of money, grassroots money for John Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, outside groups, etc. Republicans are keeping pace with huge contributions, mainly to Mitch McConnell's Super PAC. Mitch McConnell's Super PAC raised $70 million in the months since Election Day, $15 million from one single Wall Street guy, Steve Schwartzman. And this is the single top priority of the Chamber of Commerce, corporate America, the people who fund a super PAC, and he is trying to keep the spigots going. I think the resistance to the temporary liability shield or whatever you want to call it that was in the most previous version of the bipartisan negotiations is a temporary liability shield is not worth very much to corporations because you can just wait it out. And I think there's two things. One, it doesn't solve the problem that Mitch McConnell's corporate overlords want to be solved. And Mitch McConnell has concerns that this is his

best chance to get it done because he has less leverage next year when Joe Biden is president. Joe Biden gets to decide what bill to sign. Right now, he controls one half of Congress and the White House. And come January, he controls one half of Congress and that's it. And so he's using every tool in his toolbox right now to do everything he can to help corporations. And it is one of, you know, we talk about the politics of it, but it is an absolutely horrendous thing and he is absolutely getting away with it well so the state local aid thing is it was interesting to me though because he was willing to drop the liability shield altogether if they dropped state local aid which they really seem to fucking hate and the reason now they're saying that they wanted to that that state and local aid is such a sticking point is i feel like i'm getting

like ptsd on this because this was like the story of all these negotiations in the past, is McConnell thinks that holding his caucus together is the most important thing right now. And so even though right now in that Senate there is a majority for a bipartisan COVID relief bill, McConnell seems to be saying unless there's a majority of Republican senators that want the bipartisan deal, there's no deal. And he can't sell state and local aid, nor does he want state and local aid, because all these fucking Republicans in the Senate, or at least a bunch of them, have bought into Donald Trump's crazy fucking bullshit that they're blue state bailouts, even though just as many red states have fucking budget shortfalls right now. Well, this isn't unusual, right? The Republicans in the House. Yeah, this is what they do. They love this. Yeah. I mean, this is something that they named, which in hindsight did not age well, the Hastert rule, which meant you had to have a majority of

the majority to take a bill to the floor. The Senate has not named it in such a notorious way, but a similar approach. And so McConnell does not want to fracture his caucus. I think ultimately these are all negotiating poise that center around whatever the best version of corporate liability he can get. And he also is calling Democrats bluff because he knows how important it is to Democrats to include that. So he's saying, oh, yeah, I'll give up my thing. If you give up your thing, you can't possibly give up because you know it's so important. So how does this get done here? I mean, like, so Democrats said no to McConnell's offer to drop liability protection if they drop state and local aid. Then out of the blue, fucking Steven Mnookin comes with an offer

from the White House saying, all right, I'll give you a $916 billion deal. The bipartisan one is $908. So first you're like, oh, that's pretty good. But then Mnookin says, my deal has no additional help on unemployment whatsoever, and we'll do $600 checks to everyone. And the Democrats said no to that. Did the Democrats make the right call saying no to both McConnell's offer and Mnuchin's offer? Yes, I think so. I mean, Mnuchin's offer you can't take seriously. I mean, the House, I mean, he, even when Trump was still a person who at least pretended to do his job, Mnuchin was kind of a joke and has been for the last six months in these negotiations. He does not – clearly does not bring along any congressional Republicans.

There are certainly no Senate Republicans with him. So he is no different than some random person tweeting a potential deal. Like he has no – like – Like Donald Trump. They turn it down. Who cares, right? Like he has no – like he has no right? He's not an actual player here. Democrats have come down so far from what they passed before, which even they would admit was

not enough to deal with the absolute scale of the devastation here. And you have to, you can't give up all of your leverage. So you have to keep pushing. And I'm not sure McConnell really was going to deliver the deal he offered. And so Democrats should keep pushing. And I'm not sure McConnell really was going to deliver the deal he offered. And so Democrats should keep pushing. There is still more time here. How does it get done? I don't know. And it honestly can't get done if Mitch McConnell decides that he doesn't care enough about

saving lives and saving jobs to help people. And that is on him. We've seen this before. We saw this in the early days of the Obama administration. McConnell deserves no benefit of the doubt. The idea, it is very, very plausible that Mitch McConnell believes that a bad economy for Joe Biden helps strengthen Mitch McConnell's hand to hold the Senate and Republicans take the House in 2022, and that he would be willing to make people suffer for that political outcome. A bad economy, and I think

his strategy is what Republican strategy always is. We're going to prove that Joe Biden, the Democrats can't run a government, can't deliver on anything. Like we're just going to muck it all up, obstruct everything, make sure that nothing gets done, make sure they can't pass anything. Believing that the voters will blame the party in power in the presidency instead of us. Yeah, it is weaponizing Joe Biden's promises for bipartisan cooperation against him. So what is if you're I mean, Biden is not president yet, but if you're Pelosi and Schumer, like what's the play here for the next couple of weeks? I think the and it's really the next week that we have to get the right. Yeah, we're 19th.

We're either going to get the government funding done, either like actually done or just kick the can down the road, and then everyone's going to go home. And then nothing is going to happen until the new Senate, the new House is sworn in. And from a Democratic point of view, that is somewhat risky in the sense that we're going to get Joe Biden in the White House. Our House majority is going to get much, much smaller, which we'll talk about later. I think the only thing you can do is Republicans have given Democrats a messaging opportunity on this corporate liability thing. And I think you have to hammer the living shit out of Mitch McConnell and the Republicans for doing this now until we either have a deal or people go home and you hammer him when he goes home.

And the reason for that is twofold. One, we're in the middle of these Georgia elections. This is a, like, we polled this question back in the spring in our Michigan poll. And corporate liability shields are incredibly unpopular, even with Republican voters, obviously, right? Picking corporations and American workers is unpopular. You don't have to have, you don't need to be a pollster to know that. But so you hammer him for the chance that you could deliver political benefits. But it also puts pressure. It strengthens your hand in the deal, right? If people begin to feel political pressure.

If this becomes an issue in Georgia and Republicans fear they could lose those seats because of this, then McConnell will cut a deal much faster. And so this has been my thing the whole time is make this a fucking issue in georgia make this the issue in georgia and i see like i've seen warnock and asaf at least tweet about it i haven't seen any of their ads i obviously not down in georgia so i didn't see the campaign up close but you see asaf tweeting about the 1200 checks you see warnock talking about this too like i i think making this the big issue that the race turns on is a pretty good is a pretty good idea. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is something you've been talking about this long time.

I've been sort of obsessed with the corporate liability shield for a while. I wrote about this morning in the message box. And you're actually like and this is this is completely unrelated to my newsletter this morning, but it's shifting quickly. Katie Porter had a great Twitter thread about it last night. Nancy Pelosi this morning when speaking to reporters made the point. You can see like we need to as a party speak with one voice loudly, relentlessly, ruthlessly about this. And one of two things is going to happen. We are going to make Republicans

pay some measure of political price for this, or we're going to get a deal. Either way, this helps us. And I get we are in the middle of a pandemic. It's after an election. We're trying to figure things out. Biden's trying to get his cat. Like there's a lot happening here, right? Biden's going to Georgia next week. I was just going to say, if I was Joe Biden heading to Georgia, my entire fucking stump speech would be focused on there is one reason that we do not have relief from this pandemic right now. There's one reason you don't have another round of checks, that you're going to get kicked out of your homes, that we're going to have trouble distributing the vaccine, that people can't get child care, they can't get rental assistance, we can't open the schools. And that reason is Mitch McConnell. And if you don't send Ossoff and Warnock to the Senate, then Mitch McConnell is going to run the show for the next two years. He's going to block all of this help for you. He's the one person standing in the way of progress right now. Yeah, I mean, I would love to see that. You would

love to see it. Joe Biden's not very Joe Biden, Joe Biden's not Joe. That's not very Joe Biden. I know. And he Joe Biden needs to when he shows up in Georgia, be the Joe Biden that people voted for in Georgia one month ago. And right. So all of a sudden turning into like ripping Mitch McConnell's head off on the stump is not him. But there is a way to make this point that is a Joe Biden way of doing it and talking

about the stakes and talking about what is blocking aid and how we could get around that, talking about the corporate, like that can happen. I'd love to see it. Well, the biggest Joe Biden thing to do would be to say there's a bipartisan deal. It's not the greatest deal. It's not everything that we want as Democrats, but Republicans and Democrats have come together around a deal to help people. And Mitch McConnell and Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are standing in the way of that bipartisan deal. Yeah, that's right. That's very Biden. You know, like I would kick the shit out of him on that. OK, so speaking of Biden, let's talk about the latest round of

cabinet picks from from Biden. Big one this week was General Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense. Austin is a retired four-star general who served as commander of U.S. Central Command and oversaw the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. If confirmed, he'd be the first black Secretary of Defense. But there's a potential snag here. In order to maintain civilian control over the military,

the law states that Secretaries of Defense must be seven years removed from military service. Austin has only been retired for a little over four years, which means he'd need a waiver passed by both houses of Congress. Only two other waivers have been granted in American history, most recently for General Jim Mattis in 2017. So why do you think that Biden went with Austin over former Obama Pentagon official Michelle Flournoy, who was widely believed to be his top pick just a few weeks ago. I don't know. That's not a satisfactory answer. Biden, obviously, and this was talked about in some of the news stories about it.

He worked very closely with General Austin when Biden was working on the Iraq withdrawal. He worked very closely with him when General Austin was overseeing the campaign against ISIS in Syria in 2013, in the second Obama term. And so they obviously have a relationship. He obviously knows Michelle Flournoy as well. It's hard, like, you and I have worked with a lot of people who are on Biden's team or, you know, cabinet nominees. I have never worked with General Austin or Michelle Flournoy. So it's hard for me to judge what the right thing here is. People that you and I know and respect a lot say very positive things about both of them. So I assume it is because of the relationship they had and the respect that Joe Biden developed for him when they were working very closely together on those two really important issues.

And it gives him a measure of confidence. And I don't know that this may say more about how he feels about General Austin than anything about Michelle Flournoy, who's obviously incredibly qualified and incredibly experienced and talented, et cetera, is Biden has clearly gone with people he knows in a lot of these places. And it makes sense. And Amanda Littman, our friend from Run for Something, pointed this out today talking about some of the announcements that happened today is the thing you have to recognize is that Trump hollowed out the government, right? And she referenced the Michael Lewis book, The Fifth Risk, talking about how Trump just gutted career professionals from every element of government.

And so Biden's response to that seems to be putting in people with deep amounts of experience in the departments they're working on and taking fewer sort of roll-the-dice risks with out-of-the-box people. You know, like, I don't know, maybe picking the CEO of Exxon to be your secretary of state because you had a meeting with them. But, you know, he's also I mean, it's like it also mirrors what the situation that we were facing. We got to the White House in 2009, which is you're in the middle of a crisis, multiple crises, a pandemic, a recession, right? Like whatever Donald Trump's done all over the world. And so what do you need in a crisis? You need experienced people

and you need to fill the jobs fast. So how do you find experienced people that can fill the jobs fast? You turn to people that you know that you've worked with. Yeah. You know, that's not a very complex answer, but it's the simple answer and it might be what's happening here.

Now, in this position, in this scenario, Michelle Flournoy would fit that bill. Absolutely. Because Biden's worked with her. I sort of wonder if it's and, you know, again, Tommy and Ben dig into this more in Potsdam Save the World, so you should check it out. But I wonder if it's like policy differences, you know, slight policy difference, but still policy differences about the use of force, withdraw, you know, like all that kind of stuff. I'm wondering if that at the end of the day was sort of why he went with Austin over Flournoy. Yeah, that may be. I mean, and it clearly he made a judgment because the confirmation of General Austin,

perhaps surprisingly, but will be more complicated than I think it would have been for Michelle Flournoy. Yeah, well, so I count at least four Democratic senators who've already said that they won't vote for a waiver for Austin. A bunch of others say they have concerns. So then the question is, why would Republican senators help Biden out here when the Democratic opposition gives them a chance to sink one of his nominations? I mean, this is, when you think about your nominations, it is always critical that you, particularly in a closely divided Senate that you don't have control of, at least as of yet, that you can keep your house in order and therefore you limit the amount of agency that the other side has. Because for every nomination, right, whether it's General Austin or Michelle Flournoy or Neera Tanden or Tony Blinken, for every one of them, let's just presume status quo in the Senate

right now, prepare for the worst, I guess, you're going to need two Republicans, right? And so you're going to have to find some way of getting, you know, there's, and there's, we should also presume that the vast majority of Republicans will vote against every Biden nominee because that's the state of the Republican Party. No matter how qualified they are, no matter how nonpartisan they are, they will vote against them, even if Biden picks someone out of the Republican caucus. And we know this because Barack Obama picked Chuck Hagel to be his secretary of defense, and most of the Republicans opposed him. So now you have a limited pool of Republicans who are possible votes for any nominee, right? You have Susan Collins, maybe Lisa Murkowski, maybe Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, maybe a couple of other ones on the national security stuff.

But that's it. And every time you lose a Democrat, you've got to go find another Republican, and that gets hard. And so it adds to the degree of difficulty to an already difficult endeavor. The only thing I keep wondering, I mean, the Biden team is pretty experienced. They've been around the block a couple of times. They know how to count votes. I would I'd be surprised if they chose Austin, went through this whole rollout without having any idea that whether he'd have enough support. Yeah, no, I, I, I do. I'm not, I don't presume they stumbled into this, but it just,

it is, if you lose four Democrats, that gets tricky. It just gets that much harder. Um, so they must have some measure of confidence that there's going to be some number of Republicans who are okay with a nonpartisan general. And almost the entire Senate voted to give this waiver to General Mattis four years ago. So it's sort of harder to flip-flop on it for a bunch of them, perhaps, maybe. Yeah. And I do, I mean, I think, you know, reading a lot about this, I think a civilian control over the military is a very important principle. You know, I do think it's like Austin's been retired for four and a half years, a little over four years. The law says seven.

I know that as recently as 2007, Congress was debating changing it from seven to five anyway. Like, I'm not sure if the difference between four plus years out and seven is, you know, worth this much concern over it. But, you know, there's sort of good arguments on both sides. Yeah, it's a it's kind of a weird situation because in the Trump administration, a bunch of Democrats voted for this waiver because they thought General Mattis would be a preferable as defense secretary to whatever Yahoo Trump yanked from the set of a Fox show to do the job. And so most of them voted for it. And I think when you compare how Mattis handled the job, and I am not one of those who was prepared to etch Mattis onto the resistance Mount Rushmore. One interview with Jeff Goldberg does not undo the damage of enabling Trump, but he clearly stood up to Trump more. The former military leader with the waiver stood up to Trump more than Mark Esper, the political hack that Trump put in the job to

replace him. And so it is not necessarily that the military person is going to do a better job of handling the complicated situations than the non-military person. But in doing research on this, the Marshall waiver was pretty bad. And George Marshall actually sided or refused to step in when there was a huge civilian military crisis with George MacArthur during the Truman administration. And so, like, it could go either way. The real thing here is, Biden ran, in some sense, on kind of restoring norms and getting back to normal. And he made a choice to sort of swerve out of his lane to ask Democrats to not restore this norm. And that's going to have, it may be worth it given the kind of defense secretary he believes General Austin would be, but it is a little bit, it just, like I said,

adds a degree of difficulty to something that should not be that hard. Your defense secretary should be a relatively easy confirmation. Yeah. And it's, you know, he's, Biden's really asking everyone to trust him on this. And that's basically what he said in the Atlantic piece he wrote about this is like, he knows that this is unusual, but he strongly believes that Austin is the right person for this moment. So he's got to make that case. And so does Austin to a lot of these Democratic senators and House members who have to vote for the waiver. Few other cabinet announcements or rumored announcements from this week. Ohio Congresswoman Marsha Fudge, a secretary of housing and urban development, and Tom Vilsack reprising his Obama administration job as secretary of agriculture. primary, lobbied for Fudge to lead agriculture, partly because it's a position that has never been held by black women, partly because he hoped she'd refocus the mission of the department on hunger. What did you think of that? And why do you think Biden ultimately went with Vilsack?

I mean, Tom Vilsack was a phenomenal agriculture secretary. He is just someone who just does the work, right? He focused on it. He wasn't trying to – he wasn't doing the job as a platform to something else. He wasn't trying to get attention from it. He wasn't on the DC cocktail party circuit. He was just trying to help American farmers and help get food into the mouths of hungry people. Like that was his job. He took it incredibly seriously. He did incredibly well. He earned the respect of everyone in the White House from Barack Obama on down for just doing the work. And I guess Tom Vilsack wanted to do it again

and had felt like he had more work to do. And he was a loyal supporter of Joe Biden, campaign for him in the Iowa caucus, endorsed him. And they know each other, obviously, very well. And I think this is a little bit like the Austin decision or putting Tony Blinken at state or, you know, Avril at OD and Avril Haines at ODNI is Biden is like he knows he is coming in during a recession, a pandemic, perhaps the hardest presidential transition in nearly a century. And so he's going to put people in jobs where he just knows they can do the job.

All the job training, no training wheels, just get to work and do it. And we obviously haven't heard him talk about why he made the decision because it's still sort of a confirmed rumor, I guess. But that would be my assumption is you have someone who you know will do a great job who was recently confirmed for the job. So let him do it. So one other issue here is that Biden has now given jobs to two Democratic members of Congress, Marsha Fudge and Cedric Richmond, which means Democrats will likely have a 220 to 213 majority in the House, which is the slimmest in modern history. There will eventually be special elections to fill these two Democratic seats. They are safe Democratic seats, so that's not really the concern. But how much of a problem could this

narrow majority be for Biden and the Democrats in the first 100 days? I think it's very notable that this was done at the request of Clyburn, and Clyburn would not have made the request without having talked to Nancy Pelosi about it. So there is some – there's clearly some confidence among the people whose job it is to count the votes that they can – that this will not matter in the short term and that these are incredibly safe Democratic seats. So that you're going to get those members in some number of months. I can't remember what the special election provisions are in those states. So yeah, it makes things harder. But it's clearly, in the risk-benefit analysis, the House leaders made a decision that they could handle it. We'll see, obviously. But Nancy Pelosi is very, very good at counting votes. So she obviously knows what she's doing here.

I will say one more thing about the Marsha Fudge-Vilsack thing is Tom Vilsack is great. He'll do a great job. I do hope that he follows the lead of somewhat of what Clyburn said and tries to refocus the department more on the hunger side of it as opposed to the farmer side. You obviously have to do both, but we have a lot of hungry people in this country. We have food bank lines that stretch miles and there is an opportunity and imperative there to focus on that. And I think Clyburn was exactly right to push for that, whether it's Martha Fudge or someone else in the role. The other focus that ag should have this time around is on climate change. is actually pretty excited about that to sort of turn the attention of the department on,

you know, how we can make sure we have sort of sustainable farming in this country that helps reduce carbon pollution. Back to the narrow majority for a second. It does make me think that there may not be other Democratic members of Congress coming to the cabinet. And that's notable because a lot of activists and organizers have been pushing for Congresswoman Deb Haaland from New Mexico to be, she would be the first Native American to run the Interior Department. But I don't know if he'll take her out of Congress now. I would be surprised if that would happen. I think it's disappointing because I think she would have,

obviously, the idea of having a Native American in charge of the Department of Interior is incredibly historic and powerful and important. But there was clearly a choice made probably in some measure of concert with the House leadership that if there was going to be one spot, then it would be Marsha Fudge is my assumption. Do you know if Holland's seat is safe? Is it a swing seat? Is it? I think she won relatively easily in 2020. It's nowhere in the neighborhood of the Marsha Fudge seat or the Cedric Richmond seats, which are majority black districts in the middle of

very blue cities. That's what I was sort of getting at is that those two seats are very, very safe seats. And I saw some people now that Javier Becerra is going to be HHS secretary say, oh, Newsom should appoint our good friend Katie Porter to be California attorney general or Katie Porter should get something in the cabinet. She's another one where she has a seat that like, yes, she won in 2018 and she won again in 2020. But like, did she win comfortably enough that if you take Katie Porter out of that district, you know that the next Democrat could win in that district? Probably not. It's an R plus three district. That is just not.

Yeah, it's Katie Porter has some special sauce there in that district. She has figured out how to win there. But like, maybe not the next person, you know, a Democrat less talented than Katie Porter probably would have lost that district in 2020. For sure. Yeah. All right. So a few other announcements. We just learned this morning that Dennis McDonough, Obama chief of staff, our good friend, is going to be nominated for secretary of the VA. And Susan Rice got a job as the head of the DPC, the Domestic Policy Council.

What do you think? So let's start with Dennis. Um, I've known Dennis for ever. We worked together for Tom Daschle way back in the day. And you can be someone who thinks you work hard. Like you get to the office early, you stay late, you're committed to the cause.

You think that until you meet Dennis, who is the hardest working human being I have ever met. And people say that about a lot of people, but it is, I mean it about, Dennis is just like another level. Yeah, it is. I mean, it is a level of commitment to the cause that is unbelievable.

And he would get to work at the crack of dawn and he would run to work. And you're like, how far did he live away from work? Five miles. He would run five miles to the office, be there at six. And then he would stay until late at night. Like, I mean, he, like, no one works harder.

He is a great human being. He, with one very important exception we'll talk about, Dennis may be the person who designed in a lab to do this job because the VA has been a bureaucratic morass for decades. People go, they say they're going to fix it, and it just feels like this intractable problem. I have seen Dennis solve theoretically unsolvable problems just by sheer force of will. If you just want to give someone a problem and get them to find a way to just fix it no matter how many hours it takes, no matter how hard it is, no matter how many people you have to bring in, Dennis is the person to do that. And that – Biden knows Dennis incredibly well, and that is clearly what he thought. And it is interesting because Dennis is not a veteran, which is an important point, and that is very unusual, if not unprecedented, for a non-veteran to be nominated to be the head of the VA. And some veteran groups have what are completely legitimate

concerns about that element, about that fact. But Biden clearly looked at this and said, what I want to do is make this a lot better. And the person that I have worked with in my life, who I think could best do that based on everything I saw him do is Dennis. And so that is a very clear choice to take on some measure of political risk and some measure of turbulence by picking a non-veteran to do something that Biden believes, and I think he is correct, Dennis would be very, very good at. I will say that brings up another point about sort of all these Obama folks who now are getting jobs in the Biden administration, though. It's not just experience that sort of unites them all. It is a specific kind of experience, which is they are all really fantastic managers. They like run a really good process. That's the same with Jeff Zients. That's Dennis. That's Susan. It's Tony. That's Tony.

That's Avril. Right. Like all of these people are known for just working well with others and running a really great process and getting shit done. It's not necessarily like, you know, a deep experience in any specific policy area that that sets them apart, though all of them are brilliant in their policy areas. But it really is sort of the management stuff, which speaks to Biden saying like, yeah, Trump fucked up the whole government. We're now in crisis and I need a bunch of people who can clean shit up. Now, what do we think about Susan? I was surprised hearing that Susan was going to run DPC because she has an extensive foreign policy background. Now, DPC, we should know that like, you know, it's the Domestic Policy

Council. But of course, there's like a whole bunch of people handling economic issues. There's like a separate healthcare team, right? So some of these domestic issues fall under different departments and teams. DPC does a lot of work on education issues, on sort of diversity and racial equity issues, on immigration, national service. So there's like a lot of other issues that sort of fall under this, fall under that category. Yeah. And the whole suite of issues that Biden has promised to make at the top of his agenda dealing with structural racism that will fall under the DPC. Like you, I was surprised. I know Susan as Obama's foreign policy

advisor in the campaign, the ambassador of the UN, and his national security advisor. And so as I was thinking about what role she could possibly play in this government, domestic policy council was not high on the list of things I thought of, or on the list at all. But the things that are worth noting are Susan is brilliant, just brilliant. Biden clearly trusts her to the point that she was apparently the runner-up to be vice president. He clearly wanted her in his administration, a place in which he could leverage her tremendous talents. And this was the place he picked. And I'll be very interested to see how everything is structured.

Every White House is different. We had a health care czar in Nancy and DeParle. So health care was sort of adjacent to the DPC. Maybe health care will be in here. I'll see how all of it works. But Biden saw someone that he trusted and liked and believed had a lot to offer and went and found a place to have her. And I think it is to her – it just sort of speaks to her dedication to public service that she's going back in to do this. She certainly didn't need to.

It is a very different job than she had before. And she was someone who literally was on the cusp of being vice president of the United States and is coming in in a staff level, a very senior staff level, but still a staff level. And it's – I think you see this from a lot of the Biden people and the Obama people, how you think about it, who realize what an important moment it is for the country and what a dangerous moment it is. And they think they have something to offer. So they're rushing in to do that. I think that sort of lies behind Susan, not just Biden's decision to ask Susan to do it, but Susan's decision to agree. Last big one that's out there, cabinet position. There's a couple others, but the biggest one is attorney is uh attorney general um reports are that doug jones is the front runner um with merrick garland still

on the mix uh and it seems like sally yates who was in the mix maybe a little down the list partly because if you do have a republican senate she could have some confirmation issues since she was part of russiagate i put that in quotation marks in the sense that she informed trump about a crime in progress being committed by his own national security in this in the sense that she followed the letter of the law perfectly and was an outstanding public servant who proved herself to be i have the utmost integrity yes yes in that sense in that sense and that's it she She anchored Republicans by trying to stop crime. Yeah. Yeah. Big strike against you there. OK, so. So Doug. So Doug Jones. It does seem like it's pointing towards Doug Jones. I guess Merrick Garland could be the surprise there.

I love the idea of Jones. I think he, like, first of all, you know, one of the reasons that he was such a strong candidate in Alabama the first time around when he won the special is not just that he is a man of integrity and like a progressive who could figure out how to win in the South. But also, you know, he's a long history in civil rights, as civil rights activist as well um and and talked about that a lot during his race um so i think that makes a lot of sense at justice um which obviously hasn't had a stellar track record on civil rights over the last four years yeah i i look i we love doug jones we think he is great um i didn't realize this until i read some of the stories he actually has a very long relationship with Biden, endorsed him in 2008. They've known each other for a while. And so I think that is one of the threads that run through have people around you that you trust, you're asking them to take over in an incredibly difficult position where you're not going to have time to manage every single department.

So you've got to put people in that you can trust to do them. And I think that's how it feels about Jones. Look, Sally Yates would be a good choice. Merrick Garland would be an insane choice. Not because Merrick Garland is not awesome. He is an incredible person and incredibly talented, a whole host of things about it. But he also sits on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and you're not going to take someone out of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and allow Mitch McConnell to block that seat. McConnell would – when Barack Obama was president, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is the second highest court in the land.

It's where most of the big government political decisions happen before they get the Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell, a man who practiced court shrinking back then, refused to confirm a single member in Obama's second term to that court up until the, is what eventually forced Harry Reid to eliminate the filibuster for judicial domination. So if we, if we win the Senate and Biden wants to do that, go. But we creating a vacancy on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals seems insane to me. Yeah, I also think I mean, AG is one where you really need to select someone who you think is going to sail through confirmation. The fact that, you know, Jones would be voted on by a lot of his former colleagues might help. Right. He has had good

relationships with Republican senators, too, though this is going to be a tough one. Like Lindsey Graham's already saying, I won't vote for any attorney general, confirm any attorney general who doesn't promise not to investigate Donald Trump. There's also going to be a bunch of attention now on, you know, there's news yesterday that that Hunter Biden is under federal investigation for tax issues, like what's Joe Biden's attorney general going to do about the fact that the Department of Justice is looking into his son's finances. So like, it's it's that that's not a walk in the park, either the confirmation for attorney general. So you kind of need someone that you think is going to get through. Yeah, I think and I would imagine and hope that Jones is I mean, it will not be easy.

Like we've seen Republicans vote against Senate colleagues before. But Jones, I think, would at least start with a stronger base of support and a greater ability to win over that handful of Republicans that we would need in a in a situation where we don't take the Senate. So let's talk about Georgia, since what happens in those two runoffs affects everything else we've talked about today, Joe Biden's entire legislative agenda, and maybe the future of democracy. What do the polls say? Who cares, right?

Actually, the general election polling in Georgia was quite close to the final results compared to all the other states. But all we need to know is that these are two very tight races within the margin of error. On Sunday night, there were two debates, Raphael Warnock versus Kelly Loeffler and John Ossoff versus an empty podium since David Perdue didn't respect Georgians enough to even show up and debate. At least Kelly Loeffler was thoughtful enough to send the robot version of herself. Let's play a clip. The Democrats want to fundamentally change America and the agent of change is my opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock. You know, my opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock. Radical liberal Raphael Warnock has partnered know, my opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock, radical liberal Raphael Warnock has partnered with Stacey Abrams in these voter suppression conspiracies. Well,

predictably, you've just heard more lies from radical liberal Raphael Warnock. You've just heard radical liberal Raphael Warnock lie again. And my opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock, would be a rubber stamp for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. But my opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock, would be a rubber stamp for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. But my opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock, is a socialist. They want to radically change our country. And their agent of change is radical liberal Raphael Warnock. Well, thank you to everyone who tuned in to this important debate. So, poorly executed strategy, but she definitely has a strategy and a message.

Jonathan Martin and Ested Herndon of The New York Times had a good piece the other day about how the overall Republican strategy is to focus on Warnock over Ossoff. Why is that, Dan? I wonder why. I mean, kudos to The New York Times and these two reporters for just being very explicit about it because he's black. Yeah. I mean, Kelly Loeffler's, from an aesthetic point of view, her debate performance was horrendous. Like you said, like robot is kind, right? That is a...

Well, I had never spent time watching Kellylly loeffler speak nor do i know what david purdue sounds like you just see them uh and you just see their attack ads they don't say much about themselves so um but like watching her that debate i was just like oh my god just just robotic repetitive but you know what it was it It was fucking honest. It was perhaps the least subtle Republican articulation of their message. Yeah. I mean, she called Raphael Warnock, a black man, the embodiment of the change that Democrats want to do to America, which is the entire Republican message, which is black people, brown people, immigrants, Hollywood elites are coming for your white American culture. That is what MAGA means. That is what they are doing. And that like that is on display here.

And it says, I will say the way that that story was written, and this is not a criticism of the reporters. It's just sort of the way the Republicans explained it to the reporters is, you know, that whole thing where David Perdue was too much of a wimp to defend his insider trading on stage that works to our advantage. Right? Like there is a little bit of like retconning how shitty one of your two candidates is to, to make it seem smart.

But like, this is very consistent with the strategy Republicans ran in 2020. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a couple of things with Warnock. Obviously, it is, you know, number one in the Republican playbook is inflame racial division. They love that. Right. So you have a you have someone who would be the first black Democratic senator in the South ever. And so perfect. Right. Racial division. There's a couple other things, know Warnock ran um in

the uh in the general because it was an open primary you know a lot of the it was Leffler and Doug Collins going after each other and no one went after Warnock there as much and so of all four of these candidates Warnock has the best favorables and the lowest unfavorables of any of them and he's relatively unknown so this has been a race about defining Warnock, right? So that's number one. Number two is there's a race strategy, but there's also the 2020 playbook strategy that you just said, which is accusing Democrats of being radical liberals who want to defund the police and usher in socialism. What, if any, evidence do we have at this point about the effectiveness of this attack

in the general election that we just went through? We don't yet know enough to say this was the thing that happened, right? We do know that Democrats not named Biden running against Republicans not named Trump tended to struggle in swing states. and running against Republicans not named Trump tended to struggle in swing states. And we know that Joe Biden ran against Trump. His messaging was about Trump. The political conversation was all about Trump. The Republican message – so the Democratic message, but Democrats ran – this is a dramatic oversimplification, but Democrats ran against Trump and Republicans ran against Democrats. And that is actually because Joe Biden was such a strong candidate. Trump went

looking for every possible way to soften Biden up. He was going to run that he was in the pocket of China, that he had dementia, that he was corrupt, that he was an Antifa super soldier, that he was for defund the police. And none of that ever stuck on Joe Biden because it was absurd and people knew Joe Biden. But what they did run in those Trump ads ran, and you and I looked at some of those ads when we did Campaign Experts React a few weeks ago, is they tried to inflame their base by running against radical Democrats like AOC, Ilhan Omar, socialism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they're trying to rerun that play. And that message in my gut could potentially be effective in a world in which people don't split tickets anymore and they default to partisan identity.

And so if you were branding Democrats in a certain way, and it is a message that is completely consistent with the programming on Fox News and right-wing media for well over a decade. And so it has context. And so they're trying to do that because they do not think that there are going to be any people who come out who vote for Kelly Loeffler and John Ossoff. That is not a thing they think is going to happen. So they just want to get as many Republicans out as possible by scaring them about Raphael Warnock and just presume those people will also vote for the other Republican who engaged in insider trading around a pandemic on the ballot. So it is clearly true that the message from Democrats, at least the message that came through the filter, was all about Trump in 2020 and that the message from Trump and the weeks ago where they said that actually there wasn ahead, over five, I think it was eight

points ahead of Sarah Gideon, might have been 10. And there were a couple, there were only two other states where Joe Biden ran more than five points ahead of the, or behind the Senate candidate. But like overall, House candidates ran about 0.5% behind Biden, which is nothing. But it's the difference between winning and losing. Yeah, although Ron Brunson pointed out that Biden won 223 House districts, which is almost the exact same number as the seats that the Democrats will have in the House. So basically, these Democrats that lost in the House, Biden also lost their district. So it's not that like he won the district and then the Democrats just. lost their district. So it's not that like he won the district and then the Democrats just.

And then when you look at the senators, right, like Steve Bullock, Mark Kelly, Jamie Harrison, Barbara Bullier all ran ahead of Biden. Hickenlooper, Gideon, Ossoff, Cunningham all ran behind. So there's also like not a ton of rhyme or reason for who ran ahead of Biden and who ran behind in some of these states. I only bring this up because I think when we figure out we try to figure out like what we do now. I wonder if we can settle on. I wonder if it's right to settle on the idea that there was something about Biden where these attacks bounced off him. That wasn't true for other Democrats. If it looks like Biden actually ran close to a lot of these Democrats in a lot of these places. Well, so I'd say a lot of these Democrats in a lot of these places.

Well, so I'd say a couple of things about this. One is even, you know, Biden only won by whatever it is, 45,000 votes over three or four states. Like it is. So that's the that's the big thing here. Yeah. So we're not like we because of Trump's been trying to steal the election. It's good that we've all pointed out. Yes. Seven million votes. Like it's good that we've all pointed out, yes, 7 million votes.

Like it's a big margin. But when you get down to it, 40,000 votes go the other way. It's 269, 269. And then Trump wins in the House. 40,000 votes. That's fucking nothing. So that's one. And so running just a 0.5% or 0.8% ahead is the difference between winning and losing. So that's one. Two,

I think it's important to maybe even just take Biden out of it because Biden was running statewide in purple states. Because of the way House districts are drawn, the way the Senate map works, is that Democrats are going to have to outperform their party approval, and these states do have power. I think we should look at how Republicans branded us and think about what we do about that. Now, I think there are two ways you can say, well, Republicans ran against us and they had success and were able to get people to vote against Democrats, right? And in a case where it was Biden or it was a Democrat, they knew who had the resources to out-advertise his opponent, he was able to succeed, even if it's on the margins. So you look at that and you say, do Democrats have a brand problem, right? Democrats not named

Biden, right? Because the presidential candidate is always bigger than the brand. Cal Cunningham, not bigger than the brand. Sarah Gideon, not bigger than the brand. Random House candidates are not bigger than the brand. Totally. And so you say, do Democrats have a brand problem? Well, Democrats are on, historically and most recently, the Democratic Party is more popular than the Republican Party. Democratic policies are more popular than Republican policies. Way more popular. Way more popular. Now, as Dan Wagner pointed out.

Well, some of them. Some of them. Yeah, some of them. Yes. Well, some of them, some of them. Yeah, some of them. Yes, if you were to take the entire Democratic agenda, poll it, the entire Republican agenda, poll it,

we would win way more of those than they would. And the best example of it, as Dan Wagner pointed out on last week's episode of Ponce America, is in Florida, Joe Biden's on the ballot. He supports $15 minimum wage. Donald Trump's on the ballot. He doesn't support a minimum wage, period. He's not sure it should exist. There's a $15 minimum wage ballot initiative. He's not sure it should exist.

There's a $15 minimum wage ballot initiative. It gets 60% of the votes. Joe Biden supported $15 minimum wage, gets 47% of the vote. Same thing has happened with Medicaid expansion in deep, deep red states all across the country. Undoing right-to-work laws in Missouri. You see a bunch of these. Now, of course, people will support, don't agree with the party on 100% of things. You can be a Republican and also think the minimum wage should be raised, you can be a Democrat and think something, you know, something, I don't know, whatever else. But you should be

able to narrow that gap between 60 and 47. But so that one way of, so it was like, what, like, how do you deal with the Democratic brand? The other thing is that I am more interested and more obsessed with is what is our version against Republicans of the radical Democrat attack? What is the way in which we describe Republicans not named Trump in one specific, consistent way that can undo or separate briefly, separate even on the margins, this very tenuous alliance they have between a base that is working class and agrees with the Democrats on the majority of sort of core economic issues, and a donor class that dictates the policy agenda that is pro-Wall Street, anti-regulation, pro-tax cuts for corporations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Like, what can we, what is our version of that? And so there is. Well, and specifically on economic issues, what what what is most popular, right? Corporate accountability and attacking corporate malfeasance, as you have pointed out with the corporate liability shield, that is like at the top of every list. And then economic policies that give working Americans a boost, whether it's minimum wage, whether it's expanding health care. Those are the policies that are most popular, not just among Democrats, but among independents and even a small segment of the Republican base

as well. Then the folks at Navigator Research had a really interesting poll in the last couple weeks that looked at cultural preferences and economic preferences, and that a lot of the voters who went for Trump, who were sort of available to us, are conservative culturally. And that can be on police issues, which the Republicans sort of grossly raised to the top here. It could be on reproductive freedom, a whole host of things, but agree with those economic issues. And I think the history tells us that simply saying making a policy case is not sufficient, right? Just saying. And I would say, and simply saying, I'm going to make an economic case and just ignore

immigration, police violence, racial issues. You can't do that. Both because it's not what we believe, like we believe in those issues and it's important to talk about those issues. But also if you don't talk about them, Republicans are going to talk about them for you and they're going to distort your position on those issues. And there is something condescending about the way Democrats have sometimes done this, which is, hey, you fucking yahoos, don't you want more, you know, higher minimum wage or like, like, why are you too dumb to recognize that we're the right party for you?

Like that is voting against your interests. Yes. Assholes. Yeah. Like we have to paint a vision of America in a vivid way that has good guys and bad guys and shows that the Republican side with the bad guys? How do you take these sort of economic issues and tell a story about it in a way that has the same emotional pull as the cultural story Republicans tell? I don't have the answer to how that works, but that is the only path. There is no other path to success here that does not involve changing the margins among some of these demographic groups.

This is sort of why I started by bringing up the point about the ticket splitting and all that. It looks like from all the data we're seeing that the story of this election was like, you can go state by state, swing district by swing district. Joe Biden turned out more voters than Hillary Clinton in almost every single one of these districts and states, even in purple and reddish areas. He just turned out more voters than she did in 2016. It wasn't enough in a lot of these places because Donald Trump fucking supercharged Republican turnout in these same places. So if you look at the 2016 results, you see like Biden overperforming Hillary, just getting more votes. And then you see Trump 2020 way overperforming Trump 2016. So if that's the case, if what we're facing here is not a bunch of people who are like,

well, I voted Democrat last time, but now the Republicans are all making this argument about, you know, I'm going to change parties, but it's just a whole bunch of voters who didn't even vote last time coming out to support a Republican. then the only way forward after we have had record turnout on the democratic side, which we did is to say, okay, how do we actually reach some of those voters? I mean,

this is sort of why I brought it. Look, it's not because we like love these voters. It's not, it's not for any moral. It's literally fucking math. We there's, there is no other path,

right? We are playing on a tilted play field. It is. If you were in a football game and it on a tilted play field it is if you were in a football game and it's a rigged it's a rigged fucking field and it's sort of as if you were playing football and their touchdowns counted to seven points and our touchdowns count as five like we just have to do it's just harder for us and we can yell about the electoral college yeah eliminate it fix gerrymandering right uh the senate Senate's fucked up. D.C., Puerto Rico. We can yell about all this. We should. We've been yelling about on this fucking podcast for years. We should do all of it. Guess what? We have to gain power before we can do any of that. We will never eliminate the Electoral College or fix the Senate or fix gerrymandering with a narrow majority in the House and barely any majority in the Senate, even if we have a

Democratic president. We won't do that. We have to win power first. And the path to power is through some of these very red and purpley districts and even where we have turned out almost as many base Democratic voters as we could find. Yes. And the reason why I brought up the party approval ratings earlier is so you still look at it like, well, Democrats are more popular than Republicans. Our policy is more popular. Why aren't we winning more? It's because in order to gain power because of this rigged political playing field, Democrats have to win over more voters that are skeptical of us than Republicans do. these states, and they will control the Senate for as far as the eye can see, and have a shot at the Electoral College, even when losing the popular vote by 7 million votes. And so, it's just fucking hard to be a Democrat. We have to turn out every base voter there is, and we have to persuade a bunch of people who are skeptical to us. The way I think you persuade a bunch of people who are skeptical to us is a two-step process. We have to begin to make them

more skeptical of Republicans first, and then we can win them over. And that is sort of where we get to the argument of, like, we can have one gazillion meetings with a million pollsters, a million senators, a million political activists, organizers to try to figure out what is the Democratic slogan, brand, et cetera. What is something that inspires our party that requires and needs everyone from people who love Joe Manchin to people who love AOC. We need everyone, both those ends, everyone in the middle.

So what did that slogan look like? It would look like fucking verbal applesauce. It wouldn't mean anything. But what we can probably agree on, what we could get people who support Joe Manchin agree on, people who support AOC agree on, is some way to describe the Republicans. And then you take that message and you use it relentlessly and repetitively and you hammer them over the head and you try, you don't have to win, you don't have to get anyone to take their MAGA hat off. You don't have to win a single person who's been talked to in a diner by a New York Times reporter. What you have to do is just shave the margins. Cook reported this amazing tool before the election where you can adjust the percentage of the vote by demographic group,

by white, non-college whites, college whites, like black voters, Latino voters, to show you how it changes the margins in states and overall. And it is stunning what two points will do. Just go get me two points better. And the reason it was so off or the i played with that thing a lot the swingometer from dave wasterman and cook um is because all the polls were showing that biden was doing significantly better among non-college whites than hillary and that was not the case and there's a lot of there's a fucking lot of non-college educated white people in the states that add up to 270 more than anyone would imagine. And there ain't nothing we can do about it, but just try to get them to vote for us or hope that they stay home.

In hindsight, why do we believe the polls? I don't know. Like it's like I was talking to someone very smart about this. Because I thought they fixed their fucking problems from 2016. I thought they fixed their problem from 2016, number one. And number two, they were pretty accurate in 2018. Though, as we were saying, like some of the Midwestern ones in 2018 were still a little bit off. And we didn't notice it as much because like, did Gretchen Whitmer win in Michigan?

Yes, of course, she won by a lot. But she still won by a couple points less than the polling averages. Did Tom Wolfe win in Pennsylvania? Yes. But did he win by a couple fewer less points than the polling averages? Absolutely. So there were still those fucking problems. And Wisconsin was ridiculous. It was like like Tony Evers won Wisconsin by like a narrow, tiny margin after Hillary Clinton lost by a tiny margin in 2016. And yet we were supposed to believe that suddenly Joe Biden leapt out to a six to seven point lead. We're fucking out of

our minds. Yeah, it's it is insane. And I'm mad at particularly bad at myself because and not because of any brains, but just out of natural cynicism. I was very like I argued for a long time that the pandemic would change nothing, right? That we'd still be in this place. And then, but if we just think about everything that's happened, not just since Trump won, but over the last 20 years, there was nothing that should have let us believe that there had been such a dramatic shift in the demographic makeups of the party. Like, it's just, we are in trench warfare and it's going to be really fucking hard.

It can be done. We can win it, but there's not going to be some magic exogenous event that is going to undo where we are. We just have to go do the work to do it. And it's a lot of organizing and a lot of strategizing and a lot of persuading and motivating at the same time. Well,

one very smart person who has thought a lot about this, who's going to help us figure this all out is Anat Shankar Osorio. And I will be talking to her right after this break. I'm now joined by communications expert, founder of ASO Communications and friend of the pod, Anat Shankar Osorio. Thanks for coming back to the show. Thanks for having me. You and I talked a lot before the election about democratic messaging. Do the results and the data so far tell us anything about what worked and what didn't?

It depends who you're asking, but luckily you're asking me. Perfect. That's what I'm looking for. So what I can speak to in particular, what I know best is are the states that we worked most in, which is the Midwest. And when I say we, I mean the Race Class Narrative Action Project that I'm thrilled to have played a role in alongside incredible team of organizers, strategists, creatives, et cetera. And so specifically when we look, for example, at Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, minus Minnesota, the states that we've, among the states we flipped, of course, I do not want to forget Georgia and Arizona. We just didn't happen to have been working in those states.

And we look at what actually happened both in terms of turnout and persuasion. And of course, if you're a carpenter, everything's a hammer. So take with a grain of salt that you asked me. So I'm answering. What we find is that our approach in those key battleground states of not just deploying the race class narrative and blunting the assault of unrelenting right wing race baiting, but speaking decidedly and relentlessly to what we're for alongside a lot of coalition building and in-state organizing is what carried the day. And can you just, for folks who haven't tuned in before, to talk a little bit about what it looked like to deploy the race class narrative in some of these states? What did it sound like? Was it ads?

Was it, you know, organizing and phone calls and text banks and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, all of the above. So one of our core principles is that if your words don't spread, they don't work. And if you have this supposedly magical narrative and it lives and dies as a PowerPoint presentation, right? Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. And if that's the beginning and end of your narrative, then you don't have anything. What we deployed, our strategy was always equal parts songbook and choir, if you will allow the analogy. And what I mean by choir is bringing together the multi-racial democracy that we are purportedly trying to build. And so in Michigan, for example, the Race, Class, Narrative Action Project was anchored with an organization called We the People Michigan. And it included folks from SEIU, from the Teachers Union,

from farming groups in the Upper Peninsula, from Detroit Action. In Wisconsin, it included Citizen Action. It included, it included Citizen Action, it included the Farmers Union, it included the Teachers Union, and I could go on and on and on state by state by state. And so it was that choir equipped with a messaging guide that allowed them to speak coherently across issues. So we had for them a storyline about education, a storyline about the coronavirus, a storyline about racial justice, a storyline, yes, about protests, and a shared brand. So an overarching brand that was both a visual look, so a logo, a color scheme, all of the things that you expect from a brand. And they deployed it through peer-to-peer texting, through deep canvas conversations,

through digital ads. We had a very, very robust digital ad strategy and through events. I wanted to talk to you especially about Minnesota because you and I talked about Minnesota so much for the wilderness. And it was interesting to me that of all the Midwestern states, it's the one state where Biden improved most on Hillary Clinton's performance in 2016. And Minnesota happened to be the site of the George Floyd protests where it began, where he was murdered and where the Republicans tried to do their shit.

What what was the what did the campaign look like in Minnesota and how did you sort of grapple with the various challenges and events that took place over the last year there? Yeah, I want to add one more thing to the pot about Minnesota, which is Minnesota is also the place where the Minneapolis City Council put forward a proposal to, quote, unquote, defund the police. So I just want to be very clear what exactly we were doing in Minnesota and how and and what was going on in the place that we not just won, but won handily, decidedly, as we do every year in Minnesota, had the highest voter turnout in the country. Yeah. So in Minnesota, it's interesting. This is perhaps a greater level of detail than required.

In 2018, the branded campaign that folks there implemented that we helped co-create was called Greater Than Fear. And our affirmative tagline was in Minnesota, we're better off together. And we went back and forth and back and forth about whether we should continue in that branding or whether actually fear was so palpable and so tangible and so top of mind that we needed to go at least for now in a different direction. And that was the choice that we made. So, and principally organizers in the state made. And that was the choice that we made. So and principally organizers in the state made. And so we went with a brand called We Make Minnesota, which was really about a contestation of what is Minnesotan-ness, if you will, and what makes up that state? What does it mean to co-create a culture that the right wing is demanding and is absolutely,

you know, insisting and trying to demonstrate is white, is, you know, rural, is salt of the earth, heartland, et cetera. And how do we actually contest for that state identity? And so what We Make Minnesota was, like Greater Than Fear, was a fully realized brand. It had a look, it had a logo, it had digital ads, it had social media properties, and it had organizing. And what it also was, was a relentless insistence on speaking to what we're for. So one of my many ways of chiding the left, and I have an entire, you know, encyclopedia, is that I believe if the left had written the story of David,

it would have been a biography of Goliath. And what I mean by that, maybe it's obvious, is that we just love to talk about our opposition. It's our favorite thing to do, right? Like, we cannot get enough of talking about the other side. And particularly, you know, Trump is like the nth degree of that, but it's our favorite pastime more generally. And what We Make Minnesota really was, because it's built out of Race, Clause, and Narrative Insights, is speaking about who we are and how we stand

with and for each other. And that was true in terms of, for example, making an affirmative demand, we need a government who cares for us, just like we care for each other. And yes, I'm stepping straight in there. It was evident, and it continues to be evident right now, this week, as there are negotiations going on with the Minneapolis City Council around what actually is going to be implemented around policing in that city. An insistence that we know what keeps us safe. And a call to, and I quote, fund our lives and to move money from the destructive, toxic, harmful caging and

controlling of people based on what they look like, where they come from and where they live toward the priorities that every single family, black, white, and brown needs to get and stay well. That's an interesting way of talking about defunding the police. I mean, it's funny, you know, Barack Obama answered a question on defunding the police? That's I mean, I was it's funny, you know, Barack Obama answered a question on defunding the police from Snapchat to Peter Hamby that caused some consternation. Like, I'll just ask you the question exactly how Peter asked Obama, which was like, if you're a young activist today and you believe really passionate in a slogan like defund the police, what's your advice to the activists knowing that a lot of politicians won't go

near that phrase, even if the nuts and bolts of the idea might be popular? Yeah. So I have so many answers to that question. The first is that I don't believe that it's my role, especially as a white person, but I don't believe it's my role to tell black people how to protest their own genocide. I just, I fundamentally believe that that's wrong. Yeah. So there I'm in disagreement with the president. Right.

Not the first time, but you know. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that all God's critters got a place in the choir. thing is that all God's critters got a place in the choir. And the way that you actually alter public perception of a concept and an idea is by having a left flank. And it is only because, let me underscore, there was a strategic, coordinated, intelligent, well-carried out, and long-time demand to defund the police that we were able to, in Minnesota, for example, carry forward a message of fund our lives. The only reason fund our lives actually had meaning for people, and we know what keeps us safe had meaning for people, is because there was

the yin and the yang of an activist demand to defund the police. So our message was occurring inside of a context. The next thing that I would say is that, I mean, it's almost laughable. It's almost laughable. You know, it's one of these like, I will laugh so I don't cry notion that people's perception of Democrats is made, Democratic candidates is made out of what those candidates say. I mean, I, that'd be great. That'd be a nice reality to live in. But it's just simply not. You and I both know that, like, regardless of what you support and what you believe in, you're going to be pilloried as an Antifa-hugging socialist, you know, and lots of other descriptors, which may or may not be, you know, which have nothing to do with

reality. You know, the notion that Joe Biden is a socialist, like, that's ha ha ha, right? He was the senator from MasterCard. Like, a socialist he is not. So what we need to do, and, you know, this is really my pushback on the kind of hand-wringing around defund the police, unless you have a clear and well-articulated stance of what you are for, and that's what I mean by we know what keeps us safe, and we need to move our money into the priorities that will fund our lives. If you're running as a Democrat and you are carrying a message of what you are for, then the defund the police conversation should not be freaking you out because it's what's making you look moderate and reasonable. If you don't have a message because you got scared to death,

and anytime a conversation about racial justice or race or protest came up, you were taught to deflect and to not answer, that's part of why you are getting tarred and feathered with a concept that you may not even endorse because you haven't actually said what you're for. Yeah, well, it makes a lot of sense because it's a very tricky issue in that you look into the data, right? And around the time of the protests and even after, you have large majorities supporting Black Lives Matter, feeling better about Black Lives Matter than at any point in history. And when you start pulling the details around what sort of reforming police departments would look like and essentially defunding them.

And if you ask people like, would you rather have a first responder agency that's not made of police? Would you rather have more mental health professionals and substance abuse professionals? You see that's very popular. And yet like what you have to figure out what to say to the people who are like,

there's too much police violence. I think we need drastic police reform. But I still want a police department because I'm worried about what might happen to me. And it's like, how do you reach that person who's going to be with you on the reform side and say, yes, let's drastically reform the police departments. But I am, there's part of me in the back of my head that's a little worried I might not be safe. You know, like, it's figuring that out, which seems like the real challenge. Yeah. And that is precisely why we leaned into that hunger by talking about we know what keeps us safe.

We know what keeps us safe. It's living in communities where black, white, and brown, we know our neighbors and we look out for each other. We know what keeps us safe. It's knowing that at the end of the day, regardless of what we look like or where we come from, our loved ones will come back to us healthy and whole. Many of our police target, detain, and even kill Black people while we send ever more dollars to militarize police whose budgets are already out of control. We need to move our money in order to fund the priorities in every one of our lives. Great mental health, quality schools for our kids, making sure we can all get the care we need. I'm coming up with this off the cuff, so I would edit it back. But basically, yes, people have a hunger. You have to understand what the underlying psychological desire is, and you have to meet that desire. And you have to set it up in contrast to the present day, which is both not meeting their actual desire, present day, which is both not meeting their actual desire, they're not getting what they need and what they want. And it is completely and totally unacceptable and unjust. And it's

horrifying, right? So that's the way that you do it. That's the way you talk about it. And, you know, if you need any further proof, the kind of underreported thing about this election cycle. I mean, there are many, but like, look at Indianapolis. Indianapolis passed what is arguably one of the most comprehensive police oversight initiatives ever. We don't talk about it because like Indianapolis, what? And they did it also using the race class narrative and leaning into this idea that we know what keeps us safe and we know what we need and we need to fund the priorities of our lives. Were you surprised that after four years of Donald Trump, it looks like the electorate was less racially polarized than it was in 2016 with more white voters moving towards the Democrats, more Latino voters moving towards the Republicans? Data's not all in yet, but it seems like Black voters either didn't move at all or maybe there was the slightest movement towards Republicans. Yeah, I think it's really, really important to parse apart racial attitudes and racial demographics. So internalized racism is a real thing.

So to say that we were less racially polarized, I don't think that's accurate. I think even if we get into accurate data, and let's be clear, exit polls are not accurate data by any stretch of imagination. I know you know that. No exit polls allowed here. Yeah, exit polls, bad, bad. Even once we have the full voter file available and we're able to look and say this many African-Americans this, this many Latinos that, et cetera, that is actually very different than measuring racial enmity among those groups. And while we tend to do a conflation where we talk about racial polarization being, you know, white people did this and black people did that, I think a far more useful analysis is people who harbored racial resentment against some group or who bought some sort of argument that it was because of some vilified other, whether that other be, you know, delivered in the form of the simple invective

Milwaukee or Detroit, which of course is code for black people, or they don't believe in our way of life, which is code for Muslim, or they're taking our jobs, which is code for, you know, the magical immigrant who is both doing that and not working. That's a higher degree of racial resentment. And from the studies that we have seen most recently, that's increased drastically. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I was listening to your colleague, Ian Haney Lopez, was talking to Ezra Klein on his podcast. And he said something interesting to me that was, you know, because we now see and hear what a lot of Republicans and Donald Trump are saying as not dog whistles, but bullhorns and just full out racist. Right. But a lot of voters, maybe even the majority of voters, still there's still dog whistles to them. And I noticed that in your guide, you know, you sort of advise against just saying someone is racist as opposed to saying they're inflaming racial divisions or they're pitting races against each other. Can you talk a little bit about sort of why there is the need to do that and sort of the difference between people hearing something as racism or hearing it as a dog whistle. Yeah, completely. So I wish that

everyone had the chart in their office or in their home of the like all the kinds of racism, right? Institutional racism, interpersonal prejudice, strategic racism, et cetera. But it turns out, shockingly, that's not the poster they grew up with. Right? They had, I mean, I don't know who they had. I'm going to date myself. I guess they had NSYNC poster. I don't know. Perhaps.

Right. LeBron? I'm not sure. So people, unfortunately, still, there is a dominant understanding of racism among obviously non-well-informed scholars or just really, really socially and politically active people. you know, when one kind of one group of people doesn't like another group of people, or when a person harbors negative attitudes towards a group of people based upon their racial characteristics. And of course, what we know is that that is not the definition of racism, right? Racism is interpersonal prejudice plus institutional social cultural power. And so unfortunately, social, cultural power. And so, unfortunately, what we see in experimentation is that when we say so-and-so is racist or this is racist, it actually reduces the enormity of what they're

doing to seeming like, well, you just don't like X kind of people cause reasons, cause your prejudice. When in fact, what racism is meant to convey is this much, much broader, accurate idea of, you know, built into the structure of our society where we are advantaging and privileging one group of people over the other and have since our founding. So it's that racism, you know, I guess the joke I or the way of making light of it I would offer is racism is simply too important a concept to talk about using an unhelpful word like racism. It's not communicating what we need it to. So that's the first issue is that it falls short of its job. The second issue is that it's unbelievably important to ascribe motivation. That is perhaps the biggest lesson that we can take away in terms of how we talk about

what we oppose. Even though we need to spend more of our time talking about what we're for in the bits where we do need to talk about what we oppose, because we do, we need to be clear not just the what they are doing, but the why. And so need to talk about what we oppose, because we do, we need to be clear not just the what they are doing, but the why. And so when we talk about so-and-so is racist, or that was a racist thing to say, what that takes away is the fact that there is a strategic purpose behind it. And so the calling out the dog whistle, the narrating the dog whistle approach is to say they're dividing us from each other, or more pointedly, they're shaming and blaming Black people, new immigrants, Muslim Americans, you know, whatever is going on in the particular

case, so that they can keep us from joining together to demand what all of us need. Or they're shaming and blaming whatever the group is in the particular case, hoping we'll look the other way while they pick our pockets and dismantle social security, or so they can distract us from their failures in this pandemic. So we don't just want to say what they're doing. We want to make it clear that there's a reason behind it. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. So because we're Democrats, we almost immediately engaged in a very public debate after the election about why we didn't do better. You tweeted, I love this, the fact that we're having this whole progressive versus centrism debate in our outdoor voices is proof positive that we have not learned to stop selling the recipe and start selling the brownie.

What do you mean by that? I mean by that, and credit to Dave Metz, who's a pollster from California, that he's the originator of the brownie analogy, which I use to death. What I mean by that is multiple things. First and foremost, I mean, can you imagine going to, if we were in theater, which we are, right? Politics is

just theater with real bullets. But imagine that we were mounting a theatrical production, that that was actually our line of work, which, like I said, it sort of is. It is, basically. Yeah, it basically is. But so we're mounting a theatrical production. And John, you and I were like, you know what I think the audience really wants to see? I think they don't want to see the show. They don't want to see us on the stage knowing our lines with our costumes already. Our voices warmed up singing in harmony. They don't want to see that.

What they want to see, they don't even want to see the table read. You know what they want to see? They want to see the debate you and I have over how we should prepare the actors and whether we should use method acting or Stanislavski and, you know, which directorial perspective we should use and whether we should have blocking that is more realistic or that is like surrealistic to heighten the draw. Like, can you imagine if the way that theater operated was instead of like actually seeing a show, you were treated to an endless conversation

about not even the table read, like I said, like, but how to rehearse the show. So first of all, it's just fucking boring. Like, let's just say that. It's just fucking boring. It's not a thing that should be discussed in an outdoor voice because the thing that should be discussed in an outdoor voice when we are on stage, not backstage, is what we're going to deliver for people. So the recipe is where we like to take our policy talk out in public, right? Paid family leave, raising the minimum wage.

What actually moves and motivates people is not the recipe, but the brownie. You're there the first time your newborn smiles. Every single one of us can make enough to put food on the table and be home in time to eat it. We need to stop selling our policies, stop taking those out in public, and start selling the outcome, the beautiful tomorrow, the lived experience of what it would be like to actually come home to and reside inside of those Democratic policies. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. In terms of the Senate runoffs in Georgia, obviously,

the people who know the state best should be taking the lead on message. They don't need to hear too much from us. But what, in your opinion, has been most effective in terms of what you've heard from the candidates or seen in their ads? Yeah, um, uh, huge underscore, huge, uh, agree with you a ton. Georgia's got Georgia. If we don't believe that by now, you didn't notice the presidential election. Incredible black-led organizing there, strategic, smart, relentless, all the things.

My friend and colleague from Way to Win, Jennifer Ancona, pointed this out. Georgia is like from central casting for the race class narrative, right? You have this Jewish investigative journalist, millennial guy, you have a African American, charismatic, incredible speaker, pastor, and then you have plutocrats. Like, if ever you, I mean, they like, they are the race class narrative. That happens to be how they cast that show. So, obviously, that, to me, makes a lot of sense, if it were to make sense to the organizers there. And what I mean by that, so that's one thing. The second thing, and we do see this from the folks in Georgia, is that it's incredibly important to cast your audiences as the hero of the story and actually not the candidates. research out of Georgia is just a lot of really basic confusion around like, what is this runoff? We just voted. Why do we have to vote again? Like, what just happened? How is there an election? There was an election. Did you miss that? And then just confusion around like, why are there two people? Why are we voting, you know, for these two Senate seats? It's very confusing. So needing to do a lot of name recognition stuff around Warnock and Ossoff, but then also just needing to cast Georgians in terms of our GOTV

as the heroic agents here, right? So they couldn't keep us from voting. They couldn't stop us from counting. They didn't keep us from swearing in and having Joe Biden, you know, they will not keep us from swearing in Joe Biden, having the will of the people prevail. Georgia leads the way. And if they think they can do anything to block us, they got another thing coming. Georgia delivered for America and we're doing it again in January. Do you think that like there's a place there for talking about sort of these covid relief negotiations in Congress. And if not, just in general, I'd love to know what you think about how Democrats should be messaging this COVID relief, because it sort of seems to me, again, talking about plutocrats, that like Mitch McConnell

as the enemy here, who is, you know, Dan and I were just talking about this, who is basically like doing everything he can to help corporations force their workers back to the job and get sick without dealing with any lawsuits. That's more important than putting food on your table or keeping you in your home or giving you health care or anything like that. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. And yes, I think that it's not possible to talk enough about the pandemic. I use the word pandemic because it seems to convey a broader meaning that is more than just the immediate health things, but also just kind of generalized crisis around economic insecurity and, you know, all of the attendant things that are part and parcel of the coronavirus. So pandemic tends to be like a bigger catch-all kind of a word. So we definitely can, we cannot talk about the pandemic enough.

We need to be like putting this like a noose around their neck because they merit it. noose around their neck because they merit it. I mean, the notion that a tiny handful of senators are deciding literally who will live and who will die in order to make sure that someone can buy another yacht, it's kind of mind boggling. I mean, they could just with the stroke of a pen decide that fewer people, that people can eat, right? That people's children can make it through without starving, that people can maintain

a roof over their heads. That literally is a stroke of a pen for them and they just choose not to in order to further enrich and exculpate people who have profited off this pandemic. I mean, it's disgusting.

It's gross. It's almost unbelievable. It's almost like I can't even. I mean, it is unbelievable. It's like the caricature of what people think Democrats would say about Republicans, except it's like 100% true. Yeah. I don't know how you sit and know that by merely,

I mean, and you know, it's probably even a metaphorical pen. I don't even know what they do literally in pandemic times. But it would take nothing, literally nothing. It would require no effort out of them to just actually make sure that people could be okay. Not even do well, but be okay. And they choose not to. It's aggravated impoverishment, right? I mean, there's a certain point where the charge goes from murder to genocide, and we choose not to. It's aggravated impoverishment, right? I mean, there's a certain

point where the charge goes from murder to genocide, and we're past that point. So I think it's absolutely essential to talk about the pandemic. Your question was specifically about the Georgia runoff and how we talk about that. So here is the issue, and here is the trick. talk about that. So here is the issue and here is the trick. GOTV, getting people to vote, is a very particular thing. It's not just a belief that we need people to hold, it's a behavior we need them to engage in. So vote is a verb and we need to remember that we have a huge body of data around what makes people vote and what makes them not vote. And many times what is intuitive to us as deeply politically engaged people is actually absolutely the wrong instinct in terms of how we mobilize folks I like to call high potential voters. I refuse to call them low propensity because we make our own reality. We're not going to do that. So we think through this lens of, you know, we're politics junkies, right?

Like it's a sickness, really. I mean, junkie is an apt word. Deep sickness. Right. Like we're like doom scrolling on Twitter all day long and like doing damage to our own mental health. It's not good. And so we understandably think through this lens of like,

if we just make it clear, you know, vote for these two, you'll have $15 an hour. Vote for these two, you'll have pandemic relief. Vote for these two, like, you know, let's tie it to there. Actually, what we find over and over again is that the messaging that makes people go vote is talking about voting. Talking about voting itself is the most effective way to make

people go and vote. I know it sounds facile. I know it sounds impossible. But that is true, and it has been tested against every single possible issue area. If you want people to engage in a particular behavior, you need to talk about that behavior. And you need to make people the heroic agents of that story. So what does that mean for talking about the pandemic? Inside of the context of getting high potential voters in Georgia to go vote. of getting high potential voters in Georgia to go vote. It means that we always need to begin with the agency and initiative of our target audience.

So for example, we have proven as Georgians that we will stand with and for each other. We delivered meals, we delivered masks, and over the summer we delivered protests to defend black lives. This fall, we turned out in record numbers despite everything they tried to stop us. And this January, we will turn out again to pick a government who cares for us by voting for Ossoff and Warnock. We can make sure

our families have what we need to get and stay well. So you always want to anchor back to you have agency, you have power, you have agency, you have power. And if your message is just, this is horrifying, because it is, this many millions, you know, this many hundreds of thousands are dead, this many millions are, you know, scrambling, unemployed, all of the hardships, then what that does to people is not make them think, oh, I know, I'll go cast a ballot. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I always learn so much from talking to you. Thank you so much for joining the program and offering us all of your insights and come back again soon. Thanks for having me. Thanks to Anat for joining us today.

And we'll talk to you next week. Have a great weekend. Bye, everyone. 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.

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