Pod Save America - “Transition to greatness!”

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

The outgoing president's antics consume attention that should be focused on the raging pandemic, while President-elect Biden looks to make progress on climate change, immigration, student debt, and other issues. Then Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha talks to Jon Favreau about how the party can improve its performance among Latino voters.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's pod, I talked to Chuck Rocha, who ran Latino outreach for Bernie Sanders and other Democratic groups about 2020 and beyond. Before that, we'll talk about how outgoing President Trump is consuming attention that should be focused on the pandemic and how President-elect Biden is planning to address some of the country's biggest challenges with or without a Democratic Senate. But first, to help make sure the president-elect has a Democratic Senate,

we have launched Adopt-A-State Georgia. Go to votesaveamerica.com slash Georgia to find opportunities to donate, volunteer, and elect John Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock on January 5th. It's our last chance to take away Mitch McConnell's Senate majority. Thousands and thousands of you have already signed up,

so thank you. If you can donate donate we would love that to split you can go to votesaveamerica.com slash get mitch and split your donation between asaf and warnock uh they need the cash sort of organizations on the ground this is very very important thank you to everyone who's signed up to help we could use more of you. Finally, Lovett, how was the show this weekend? Great, Lovett or Liemann? That's it. No, it was great. We had, no, I talked to Michael Beschloss. I thought we lost you for a second. Oh, no, sorry. I talked to Michael Beschloss about Trump's sort of unprecedented anti-democratic murmurings since he lost the election. I talked to Lieutenant Governor

of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman. And then in the monologue, Naomi Ekperigan, returning champion, was there. It was hilarious. So check it out. Remember early on when you guys would make fun of me and call me Tommy Beschloss if I dared to mention an event before like the year 2008? Yeah, that's a good reminder to use that. Forgot about that. I can't believe you had two guests who are so similar, like Michael Beschloss and John Fetterman. Yeah, created some weather.

All right, let's get to the news. So there are two major stories competing for media attention right now. First story is the pandemic, which is more out of control than it's ever been. Every day brings record cases, record hospitalizations. We're back over a thousand dead per day. Some health care systems are at capacity, especially in the Midwest. It's only getting worse as people spend more time indoors for the winter and prepare to travel for the holidays. Meanwhile, other stories about Donald Trump, who has completely given up on the pandemic in order to focus exclusively on trying to make people believe the lie that the election he lost was rigged against him.

Trump did seem to acknowledge in a Sunday morning tweet that Biden won, but then quickly followed up by tweeting, I can see nothing and has spent the rest of yesterday and this morning ranting and raving about his usual nonsense. the rest of yesterday and this morning, ranting and raving about his usual nonsense. Tommy, at what point is it OK to stop paying so much attention to everything Donald Trump says and does, particularly since he refuses to accept the reality that he lost? Two weeks ago, three weeks ago. I mean, here's a thought experiment. 2015. Yeah. Here's a thought experiment for everybody. Would be good. Imagine if ISIS was executing 1,000 Americans a day. And in response, the president did nothing.

He watched TV, he golfed, and he tweeted. And then imagine if 90% of those ISIS attacks could be stopped by putting a tiny piece of fabric on your face. Like, that's the reality we're living in. There's a daily massacre of American citizens. And yet the news of the day is being driven by these pathetic, lasp gas tweets from Trump, where he pretends that there's some way to overturn the election. So I think, I think we have to take these anti-democratic threats from Trump seriously, because there is no doubt in my mind that he would usurp power and stage a coup if he could figure out a way to do it. But I think it's time for the press and for like Washington generally

to just break its addiction to Trump outrage and focus more on the much bigger problems we have to deal with, right? Like not every question has to be a response to something Trump did or said that day, which is what the Sunday shows have been for four years. And that includes the pandemic, both the immediate mitigation and like the need to pass a coronavirus relief package. A bunch of states are about to go into lockdown again to prevent more deaths. Like we need to figure out a way to help those people. It includes more coverage of climate. There's a category four or five hurricane barreling down on Nicaragua right now as we speak. That comes at the end of Atlantic hurricane season with the most named storms ever. Right. So like Trump's a lame duck. The stench of loser is

wafting off of him. It is getting stronger every single day. We just can't let him be our assignment editor anymore, which is what he had tried to be. It's the only part of the job he really enjoys and has been doing for what, four years now. Yeah, I mean mean like his his legal challenges are failing in just about every case um he there was an ap story over the weekend about how republican legislators in uh some of the critical battleground states have said they're not going to go along with his fucking hair brain plan to uh send a slate of trump electors like his his the coup attempt is just about over. He's failing at it. I like turned off Trump notifications finally for a new tweets. And it's funny because like you, you know, you spend all day not paying much attention

to Twitter as I did yesterday. And last night, you know, like I'm going through Trump's tweets and I was just like, wow, he sounds like a really fucking desperate, sad loser. And I don't really care anymore. Love it. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, look, I think I feel as though we are learning this lesson a bit late in the Trump cycle, which is that his words don't matter. They never really have. Right. He's all over the place.

You know, he it's just such a it's a sad it's just a sad part of our reality. Right. Trump tweets Joe Biden won because of a bunch of lies. And everyone's like, ah, he said Joe Biden won. That's cool. Can we use that for an hour? Got him. And then, it's read to Ron Klain on Meet the Press who responds, well, it doesn't really matter what Trump says because it's not really up to him, which is of course correct. But I do think maybe now at long last, we can finally decide to focus on Trump's actions as the only piece of what Trump can do that actually matters. And what matters is not the kind of stages of grief Trump is going through on Twitter. What matters is what is his administration doing or not doing. And so you can basically just disregard Trump, the Twitter persona, Trump, the

mouthpiece, and you can just focus on whether or not Joe Biden is getting his briefings, which he is not, whether or not the coronavirus task force that Joe Biden as president-elect has assembled is able to communicate with the administration. It's not. They're forced to go around the administration to talk to CVS and Walgreens directly, to talk to governors, to find out if there's anything they need to be prepared to do about the supply chain of vaccines because they don't have access to the resources that they should have from the transition. They're not allowed to communicate officially with members of the administration, with members of, you know, with Fauci or with HHS or any of the other agencies that are working on

this. So to me, I would just disregard Donald Trump as a person and really just focus entirely on what the administration is or is not doing. Tommy, is there anything the incoming Biden administration can do here in this sort of transition purgatory around COVID? Or is there anything else they should be doing that they're not already doing? I don't think so. No. I mean, they're not in power. I'm not sure what the recommendation would be. Right. I mean, there's a, you know, we always used to say this during the transition, right?

There's one president at a time. Joe Biden is not the president right now. I do think like, you know, as they get set up, like more, you know, daily briefings about COVID with his task force, you know, he can keep talking about the steps he's going to take once in office. He sort of did. He gave a speech last week, which was a great start. Yeah. But it's you know, it's a it's a unique situation and that we are in the middle of an emergency. Yeah, I mean, I think he should start by changing his Twitter tandal to Joe wear a mask Biden and then take pictures with a telephoto lens to scold people he sees

gathered in groups. I'm just kidding. I think all that self-righteous scolding was probably counterproductive. I mean, I think what Joe Biden and his team could do would be to offer helpful, actionable advice. Like here's what I've noticed in my own life. From March until August of last year, my quarantine was very strict. I saw a tiny group of people. We basically only saw each other in houses or backyards, mostly with a few exceptions. And then in August, I took a couple of days off. I traveled up to the Santa Barbara area with my wife for a little vacation. And we were walking around town and we saw senior citizens out everywhere living their lives.

It was this weird realization that there is a scary in-your-house quarantine reality that is all cable news and Twitter threads. And you can sometimes just miss the fact that lots of people either are living their lives or have no choice but to be out because they have to work. And I'm not saying that moving on is the right answer. What I'm saying is I think the conversation has to be about risk mitigation and not about lockdown and draconian things. And it has to be proportional and it has to be actionable. So that obviously starts with masks and encouraging people to wear masks. But I also think, you know, short of shutting down everything, you could start to piecemeal shut things down like interim dining or bars, et cetera.

Like obviously that is brutal for the proprietors of these places and has to be coupled with some sort of economic relief for restaurants or bars or others. But, you know, the messaging was so fucked up on the first lockdown that I don't think you're going to convince people to do it again, especially when the White House refuses to even try. What are some of the challenges, Lovett, that President-elect Biden will face in getting this pandemic under control once the transition actually happens? So I think you have to talk about, let's say, the politics, the culture, and then the policy. What you see in terms of what they're doing on policy is they've put out, obviously, a cogent plan, which is a huge, you know, a low bar to clear, but they've gone well above

that bar, right? They have a plan. You kind of, reading between the lines in what they're trying to do right now is you seem to see a team that is trying to find out what has been fucked up that will make getting the vaccine out harder. And what would they be doing right now to try to expedite the manufacturing and the distribution and the complicated the supply chain questions? What would they be doing to make that work better now if they were in power so they can be prepared to take those kinds of steps? I think on policy, they've been right. Obviously, we need a relief bill, you know, and Tommy, you know, you're right, right? Like the

messaging has been completely fucked up. And at this point, people aren't willing to do a lockdown. However, at this point, like, I try to imagine what it would have been like, forget the absence of the kind of evil anti-leadership from Trump, like, or just the absence of that would have been an improvement. But if there had been a consistent message of taking this seriously as being bipartisan, if we had had that from a Republican or a Democratic president from the beginning, right now, you might, you could imagine a president in concert with governors across the country, basically saying, I know this is terrible. I know how long this has been. I know how much you want to see your families. We're so close to the end.

Yes. We're so close to the end. We are potentially weeks away from the first round of these vaccines going to high-risk people and frontline responders. We are within a few months of being able to vaccinate on a mass scale if everything goes according to plan. And at that exact moment, when what we really should do is kind of send everybody a message like, stay home. I know that these lockdowns are terrible. We should have paid people to not work. We should have paid people to not have to run their restaurants. We should have paid people to not have to do these kinds of things. And just told people we're so close to the end, just stay home, just make it to the end,

do your duty. But instead we're in this kind of kinetic, like bouncing back and forth. Some governors say one thing, others say another, there's complete inconsistency. It takes hospitals being nearly overrun for some conservative and some Republican governors to finally take it seriously. So I think that that's sort of an epic tragedy, obviously. But in terms of the cultural job of president, I mean, that's the biggest thing that he should do right now. Tommy, you said it. The job of president in terms of being a moral leader for the country is open. Do the job. That's the one place Donald Trump conceded years ago. That job's open. Take that one. He's not trying to keep that one.

The challenges are winter, the Republican Party, and Mitch McConnell refusing to do anything to help the economy with a COVID relief bill. But yeah, I agree. Initially, it was like 15 days to stop the spread. And then it was like, and dot, dot, dot. And then 15 days to lock down indefinitely because we don't know what's going to happen next.

And now there is this vaccine light at the end of the tunnel. And my God, it's unconscionable to let people die in this window. I mean, I do think that the part of the fucked up public messaging is a consequence of policy choices, which is that like and we've seen this here in Los Angeles. Like you hear you hear Mayor Garcetti or our public health commissioner be talking about like, don't see even close friends and family. It's absurd. Cancel all gatherings. It's ludicrous messaging.

And then you see restaurants are open, gyms are open, right? And the reason that those businesses are open is because there's a huge economic cost to this. And we decided not to pay restaurants, bars, gyms, places that like really you can only, you know, you need you need to be indoors. We decided not to pay them to not to stay home and to not have customers. So like the fact that we chose not to reimburse these businesses means that there was more pressure to keep them open, which fucks up the public messaging again. I'd agree with that, except that it's been particularly egregious in L.A. when you had Democratic officials, Garcetti, the governor, others like criticizing people for going to the beach. Right. There were very dumb early messages about like outdoor gatherings,

totally like condescending and sneering at people being like don't get together with your family yada yada yada and it's like no stop with that shit that is over it didn't work then it won't now give me specific concise actionable things that are practical that i can implement in my own life that might actually help mitigate this thing at scale but like hey telling everyone that thanksgiving and christmas is over it's not going to work. It's just not going to work. Well, the problem is because of that messaging being fucked up, now when it seems like it's the worst emergency yet, people are going to be less likely to take that advice. That's the problem. Now I've seen people who were not very alarmist back

in the spring and summer be very alarmist right now. Like I have never seen so many public health experts, epidemiologists, everyone else say that like this is seriously we are about to go into a really, really bad place. And I worry that a lot of the public won't take that as seriously because of how the messaging wasn't as good in the spring. Well, you know, part of this is, though, part of this, obviously, like we keep coming back to this, but so there are going to be mistakes, right? We've never been in a pandemic like this before. There was a there was a big mistake made on masks early on. It was services, not airborne. Then we find out that basically, you know, Trump and Bob Woodward were kibitzing about how it was airborne, but the rest of us didn't know. But the, but there was a deeper mistake, I think, uh, that was never rectified.

And I, it was that the whole posture from the federal government to, to, to local government was we need to pause life for a very brief period of time and then things will be okay. Yep. And yeah, there was never a moment where anyone, because there was no leadership from the white house and there was no one who could fill this vacuum other than people like Anthony Fauci, who carefully measured how critical he could be of the administration's failures, that basically said, we're now transitioning from a short period of time to try to control this to the fact that it is now widely spread and in our communities. And it is about actually finding a way to live sustainably in a way that prevents the disease from spreading, which is like, to your point, Tommy, like we went from like criticizing people to being on the beaches, which felt incredibly draconian and about being outside, which we now know is like really safe. And by the way, part of what makes this fucking sustainable is being able to go outside and be six foot apart from somebody you care about and having a conversation and catching up.

There is never a moment where they said, here are the things that you can do to make your life sustainable and okay during this time. And so now we come to the holidays. Everyone is burnt out. Nobody knows exactly what's right. Everybody's been kind of thrown to the wolves of their own version of risk mitigation. And it's actually never been worse. You know, it is it is less

safe to go out of your house in most of the country right now than it was in March or April when we were at our most draconian. And that inconsistency isn't addressed. It isn't it isn't part of the conversation. Nobody really wants to be honest about about what's happening. Yeah. And back to our original conversation about sort of news coverage, I think for casual news consumers, a lot of coverage about a very dangerous deadly spike could help shape behavior and stop the spread. You know, public health is obviously primarily about communication and education. And I think, you know, if all we're talking about is Donald Trump and his crazy tweets, that doesn't happen as much.

So I think that's one thing that could help the situation. And the other big thing that could help the situation is a covid relief bill. So negotiations over the relief bill in Congress still haven't gone anywhere. Biden, Schumer and Pelosi all back the House's two plus trillion dollar bill. McConnell won't go for anything over 500 billion dollars. And then on Saturday, Trump urged Congress to pass a, quote, big and focused bill. All of a sudden, there's Donald Trump again. Tommy, what are the chances of passing a covid relief bill in the lame duck session?

And how much should Democrats be willing to compromise? I mean, I have literally no idea what the chances are. It is impossible to follow where anyone is on this. I know that the difference between the McConnell proposal, which was like half a trillion, Gene. I don't know. Like we're in a very tough place once again, which is you don't want to pass something that is woefully insufficient to meet the moment. And then have Mitch McConnell spend the next six months to a year saying, no, we already did something. I'm not going to pass anything else in a naked attempt to sabotage the economy in the Biden administration. But I do think like the obvious public policy answer right now would be to pass something that gave people money for at least six months that also led to the closure of like indoor dining and bars and things that are high risk until we get to a vaccine. It seems like the obvious thing to do. The fact that the two

parties can't come together to pass that shows primarily how broken the Republican Party is, even in the face of a pandemic, but also just like why people have all but given up on politics in this country. Because again, it seems very obvious what we have to do. And the fact that we can't seem to meet the moment is absurd. It's absurd. I think I would be more open to a compromise than I even was before the election at this point on behalf of Democrats, because I sort of worry that like you don't get anything done in the lame duck, which, again, we have no idea if we can. But if we don't like we could get to a Biden administration where Mitch McConnell is just going to block everything. And maybe maybe Mitch McConnell has like, you know, more of a chance to pass something

with Donald Trump as president than Joe Biden as president just because of his politics. But I think that like people are struggling and they're going to be struggling even more as the economy gets worse because the pandemic gets worse. And I would be sort of for passing something rather than nothing in this lame duck if it's possible. But I don't know. What do you think? So first of all, it's actually really hard to totally understand what the transition from a Donald Trump to a Joe Biden presidency does to Mitch McConnell's calculus. Donald Trump is a non-factor right now. He's just not. He'll sign. If something passes, he'll sign it. He's not going to veto something passed by the now. He's just not, he'll sign, if something passes, he'll sign it.

He's not going to veto something passed by the Congress. And, you know, he can claim he wants this or wants that. But like, you know, we talked about this before the election, that Mitch McConnell was getting away with murder, allowing this to become Donald Trump's problem when he has been the main obstacle for the past six months. You know, the only, you know, politically, like what, what are the, what are the places where we could see ramifications of this quickly? It's Georgia. I don't know what they are. I don't know what happens if you pass it. I also think it shouldn't

be a concern. Yeah. I'm kind of where you are now. It's like, you know, the midterm elections are now two years away. The politics really have, have changed. I'm kind of where you are. Like, you know, I understand the posture that, that Democrats are taking. I think we should get the biggest deal humanly possible. But but man, I mean, it's just it's just hard to keep going month after month without getting relief to people. It's just it's it's liability for businesses that stay open, a little bit of relief to states or for hospital systems that does nothing and like some more money for the PPP program that wasn't particularly effective. I just think that's that's insufficient. I mean, something is better than nothing. But, man, that's that's a tough bargain to have to swallow. I would also say like Trump again. Trump is a non-factor.

He's given up on the job of president. But I wonder if he also understands that he might be president if Mitch McConnell had worked with Pelosi and passed another significant coronavirus relief bill. It's pretty clear from the anecdotal evidence from the exit polling, et cetera, that people liked getting a check with Donald Trump's name on it. And they screwed up massively by not more seriously pursuing something that would have been significant in advance of the election. Well, I sort of wonder if it's, you know, you could play to Trump's ego a little bit, give him whatever, give him a win on the way out the door since he thinks he's fucking, you know, going to run again in 2024. So maybe that's sort of an incentive. I think to your point, Tommy, about what's in the bill, like, look, if you get, you need to have some kind of unemployment relief, an extension of unemployment

relief, you need to have some money for state and local governments, even though I'm sure it will be woefully insufficient for what the what the Democrats proposed versus what they will get from Mitch. And I think, you know, the PPP program did have some success after after a while. But you're right, I think I think unemployment and sort of state and local relief are the most important parts of that bill. One just other piece of this that I don't, I feel like I know enough about, which is, I'd be curious what smart people who are thinking about this imagine is going to happen when we get to certain kind of must pass bills as the year goes on, because we will finally have an actual president. I mean, it's not it's not just that Donald Trump was a Republican. He was an absentee president for so much of the time that a lot of this was outsourced to Congress. But what happens

when you have a Democratic president who's part of these negotiations, who is using, you know, budget negotiations for government funding negotiations? He has a drink with Mitch McConnell and then it gets fixed. It's all solved. Yeah. I mean, look, look, we have said this for years. It is time. No, you, Joe Biden, get a drink with Mitch McConnell. It's time. Get that drink. Let's talk about Biden's transition, which we're going to try to make a regular feature here through the inauguration. The pandemic and the recession are the two most immediate issues the incoming administration will face. But they're also going to try to make quick progress on several others, including climate change, immigration, potentially student debt. How much progress Biden can make, of course, depends on whether or not he has a Democratic Senate, which will be decided by the two Georgia Senate runoffs in January. But let's start with climate. Tommy, what could Biden do

about climate change on his own? And what would he need a Democratic Senate for? So there was a great piece in The Washington Post about how Biden is planning to set up his entire government to tackle climate change. And so what that means is you don't just have the EPA involved and you say, hey, EPA, you're handling climate. You tell the State Department, you tell the Treasury Department, you tell Commerce that you have to figure out actions and things you can do to address climate. And they have a big plan that helps you work through all of this. So that's a good thing because, you know, to your question about Congress, like the odds of passing a big cap and trade bill through a Republican

Senate are next to zero. It might even be hard if we won both Georgia seats. So Biden is going to have to figure out how to use executive orders and executive action to do it. Some of the recommendations that have been put forward to him include like creating a White House National Climate Council, which is sort of like the Domestic Policy Council or the National Economic Council within the White House. You make that a very senior job that speaks to the importance of the task. You could establish a carbon bank with the USDA, and you could pay farmers basically and forest owners to store carbon in their soils and lands. You could use the Department of Transportation to accelerate the purchase of

electric vehicles and just use the purchasing power of the government. There was a great op-ed last week by the former Secretary of the Navy, Ray Nabus, who actually tried to change the Pentagon and do more on climate when he was at the Navy. But he pointed out in this op-ed that the Department of Defense uses more fossil fuels than any other organization on earth. So there's ways within the government that you can implement things. You can roll back Trump era regulations that made cars less fuel efficient. You could roll back ways they allowed more oil and gas exploration or Trump allowed companies just to like pour methane into the atmosphere. You can fix that. There's the international piece of this as well. He'll get back into the Paris Climate Accords on day one. A bunch of Biden's early calls with European

leaders have focused on negotiating a stronger agreement through Paris. And that's critical, right? Because only 15% of global emissions come from the US. The rest are abroad. You have to deal with all of that if you actually want to deal with climate. Now, the scary thing is the courts and what they may or may not strike down when it comes to regulations. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Yeah, it seems like the two biggest levers they have are sort of the purchasing power of the federal government and just the federal government in general, the cars they buy, the buildings that we have, right, like that you can you can do a lot without Congress to sort of reshape what the federal government does. And then in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act applied

to carbon emissions. And so that means the EPA has the power to regulate them. So there's a lot you could do there. But again, the big challenge is the courts right now are not necessarily friendly to the executive branch regulating a lot of things on its own without Congress, to say the least, to say the least. You know, Tommy talked about going through different parts of the government. You know, the Defense Department recognizes that climate change is a threat in their, you know, look at like long term planning. They acknowledge that one of the biggest risks to facilities to the security of the country is climate change and the instability could cause as climate change has been internalized by, you know, the progressive movement, certainly,

but industry as well, right? Insurance companies understand that climate change is a real threat when they when they model out what they're going to charge people in flood zones and storm areas, right, for example, you know, David Roberts, who's been a great climate writer, he wrote about how the presidency has an extraordinary amount of power around systemic risk to the economy through the Dodd-Frank Act, right? Well, climate change is a tremendous systemic risk to the economy. And so I think one other piece of this is just what I would like to see is just an administration that is honest about the threat posed by climate change, which demands that you use all the levers of the presidency, maybe in creative and experimental ways, especially when we're going to have to throw a bunch of shit against the wall to see what Amy Coney Barrett thinks is originalist. You know, so no, I was going to say like creative and ambitious and then the court will strike down what it strikes down.

The court will strike down what it strikes down. But like you got to just you got to move. And look, this is when I talk about immigration. This is sort of what happened to us on immigration is how long did it take the Obama administration to finally take an executive action on DACA, on the Dreamers to reprioritize deportations? Didn't happen until the second term. And a lot of it was because a lot of lawyers and a lot of people say, I don't know if we have the authority to do this or we're not sure. And the lesson is, like you said, Lovett, you sort of just try everything, see what the courts strike down and what they don't strike down. That's a win. But you don't you can't really wait on this kind of stuff. What do you think on immigration, Lovett, the Biden folks can do both

with Congress and without Congress? Yeah, it's worth noting, too, that I think today, as we're recording this, a court in New York ruled that acting Chad Wolf at the Department of Homeland Security is not technically authorized to make the decisions he's making around DACA. So the decision to create DACA that has been moving through the courts for years, that was contentious, that was attacked for being illegal by conservatives, and that is even recognized as being a stretch for presidential power, has kind of survived to this point, despite the onslaught that the Republican administration waged against it, though largely it survived thanks to the incompetence of the administration and their reasoning they offered to the court. But that said, they can immediately protect the

dreamers. They can immediately suspend the Muslim ban. They can immediately move to reverse some of the Stephen Miller policies around refugees. They can immediately halt deportations of everyone except violent offenders. There's a whole host of things that they can do on immigration. On day one, it's a lot of reversing the nativist policies that Stephen Miller and Donald Trump have put forward. But they also have some places where I think they can move things forward to. Tommy, what about you?

What do you think? Yeah, listen, Biden is going to erase everything Stephen Miller ever did. You can't undo the damage. That is permanent. But all of the immigration policies that they put forward were pretty much through executive action and not through Congress. So Biden can unwind it. So I'm very excited for someone on that administration to write an op-ed that says, Stephen Miller, you are canceled, you are erased, you are gone. Yeah. So like, you know, Lovett's got the big ones, DACA,

the Muslim ban. You can get rid of the public charge rule that basically allowed the U.S. to discriminate against people from coming to the U.S. based on whether they might conceivably fall on hard economic times in the future and need assistance. The list goes on and on. But, yeah, it's a place to be hopeful. And obviously family separations. Family separation. Done, right? Of course.

Sorry. No, no, no. Of course. I mean, get rid of it forever. But, like, look, you could also put decent human beings in charge of these policies. That's a that's going to be a huge piece of this because you have to go through this like fucking regulatory process. And Trump really fucked it up so bad that it's going to take a couple of years. But best to start immediately. The real challenge on immigration is what the main policy objective that we've been trying for for the last 10, 15 years, ever since Obama took office, which is a pathway to citizenship for every undocumented immigrant in this country, that you can only do with a Democratic Senate. And that is just yet another

reason to focus on winning those two seats in Georgia, because without a Democratic Senate, you will not be able to do anything on citizenship for undocumented immigrants. You'll be able to protect the dreamers. And that's about it. Tommy, are there other executive actions that you were looking at that Biden can take quickly and make some real progress with? Yeah, I mean, look, a few quick ones. And like, this sounds simple, but it's a huge deal. Like just putting competent people in charge is going to make such a difference. I mean, watching Ron Klain do interviews over the weekend was just such an unbelievable relief. It was like, oh, a pandemic expert is now the chief of staff, especially as we're reading stories about Trump's like

30-year-old meat jockey body guy who is now leading a purge of people across agencies, despite the fact that he was fired for like gambling on the job or whatever in 2018 and came back. Then Biden can undo, you know, a bunch of Trump era policies. Wait, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt. I've just, I don't mean to interrupt. I just have a quick follow-up question. Did you say meat jockey?

Oh yeah, that's worse than a meat head. What's a meat jockey? So like, you know, Chris Cuomo, basically. Wow. Yeah. Cool, okay, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Tommy,y thank you if you're posting your workouts on instagram if you're posting a picture of yourself lifting weights

that's your meat specifically dead lifting you know what i mean there's a high there's a hierarchy of meathead workouts right like the clean and jerk is way up there. You know, like anything sort of glute forward. What, love it? Go on. I should stop. I didn't say- I had you at glute. It's so stupid to post a deadlift. You look so stupid.

It doesn't look cool. Every deadlift looks exact. Wow. A deadlift. You leaned over. No, yeah. Well, no workout Instagram looks cool is the truth here. But look, I know.

So Trump had a bunch of policies that restricted reproductive choice, right? There's the global gag rule that prevents nonprofits receiving USAID from even discussing abortion. If they want federal funding, that can go away. There's all this discussion now about Biden canceling up to $50,000 worth of student loan debt. We talked about getting rid of the ban on transgender people serving in the military, get back in the Iran nuclear deal and support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. I mean, there's a million things that Biden can do quickly that will be enormously

beneficial that I'm very excited about. I just cannot wait for this transition purgatory to end. Love it. You have some favorite executive actions you want to throw in there? No, I would also just add, too, on the lifting of the trans ban for the military. That's something that can happen right away. That's just something that they can do pretty quickly without having to go through a long process because it was already policy and it was already kind of put through those paces. So I'm glad about that. I don't I'm trying to think if you missed any off the top of my head. It's like it's an article two quiz. Yeah. I was gonna say I have a few from our friend Elizabeth Warren, who wrote in the Washington Post in addition, in addition to student loan debt, which she just wrote about.

There's also apparently the ability to bypass patents to bring down some drug prices that you can do through executive authority or so she so she says. Health and safety standards so that companies can't force employees to work in unsafe conditions during COVID. One of the concerns, of course, is these liability protections we're talking about in the COVID relief bill, but it seems like you might be able to do something through executive action on that. And minimum wage for all federal contractors. You can increase it to $15 an hour for anyone who contracts with the federal government, which is a lot of people. I'll add from Elizabeth Warren's list, which heaven forfend, I briefly forgot,

and shame on me, shame on all of us. But she also mentions that we can refocus on having antitrust regulators that actually care about stopping monopolies and the effects of monopolies. I continue to believe that that is one of the biggest and most important challenges facing the country is the consolidation in industries, not just in tech, which we talk about all the time, but across our economy that has created a lot of the inequality and inequities. And I think also just the kind of lack of agency and control that has created so many sort of economic challenges, not just sort of in a broad macroeconomic way, but in the way that it impacts actual people's lives on a daily basis. Box jumps too. Box jumps. I know it's tough to pivot back and forth between workouts that are acceptable to post on Instagram and executive actions that Joe Biden takes.

None are acceptable. That's what we do here in this podcast. None are acceptable. That's what we do here. So, Lovett, we talked a lot about the executive actions, but obviously there is like, you know, much of Joe Biden's agenda requires legislation, which requires a Democratic Congress. How does all of this affect how Democrats should frame these Georgia races? Like how much should Ossoff and Warnock talk about what's at stake nationally versus sort of making the race about Georgia? Well, I mean, I don't know what

it means to make the race on policy. I think making it about Georgia and making it national are not that different. I do think it's, you know, given that we saw, you know, places like Florida raise the minimum wage, we saw weed expansion in Montana, we've seen Medicaid being popular in red states across the country. I do think focusing on the kind of policies we could have in a democratic Senate,

maybe not focusing so much on the kind of political process of who controls the Senate, but the fact that if we win these two seats, we not only remove two of the most corrupt members of the Senate, and I do think corrupt is the word for them, right? These are two people that play down the pandemic while trying to profit on it personally. I think there can't be anything more corrupt than that. And they've been incredibly craven and trying to serve their party over their country, et cetera. I think that all can be part

of the negative messaging. But the possibility of raising the minimum wage hangs on these two races, the possibility of expanding healthcare, of giving people a public option, expanding protections for preexisting conditions, all hinges on these two races, investing in infrastructure, investing in the kind of clean energy jobs that we want. Those things hinge on these two races. So I think like, I don't look, I'd be curious what polls say. I, but like my instinct is to make it about those issues that the balance of the Senate will determine less about Mitch McConnell as a person, less about national politics. Polls, who cares about polls anymore? Well, that's the other thing. What's a fucking poll? I'll go, me, I'm going to start my own Trafalgar. I'll start my own Trafalgar and whatever we want the polls to say, they'll say,

they'll say whatever we need them to say. Tell me, what do you think? What's your gut tell you? Forget the polls. I mean, look, my gut tells me I want to look at some polls. Like I would, I would, I would pull the shit out of these races and see what Georgians want to hear about. Now, if you told me like, okay, you have to nationalize this, like make the case for some things. I agree that with Lovett, that a $15 minimum wage would be way up high on my list. I would think about whether talking about marijuana legalization, at least for medical uses, is something you want to talk about because it's an incredibly popular policy. I would talk about, you know, how to deal with price gouging credit card companies that, you know, give you high interest rates if you default. Like I would look for as many sort of like populist bread and butter economic issues as I

could possibly find. And then if you wanted to make sort of a broader argument, the case is pretty simple, which is if we win these two seats, we can do all of these things. If we don't win these two seats, we can do none of these things. It becomes very binary and I think easy to sharpen for people. I also am quite compelled by the videos circulating on Twitter and elsewhere about just how corrupt Kelly Loeffler is and just how corrupt Purdue is. They are the exact elite, super rich aristocracy of America that it is very easy to make people hate. And we should try to do that more often. I very much agree with you that I think a simple binary choice between two years of complete gridlock versus progress on issues that could actually improve your life in a tangible way

is probably the best way to go here. I also don't know that Democrats have a choice between nationalizing it or not, because what we know so far from the Republican messaging is that they have decided to nationalize the race. And they're saying Loeffler and Perdue and Trump and everyone, every other Republican who's now fucking gone down to Georgia and held a indoor rally without masks like Marco Rubio and the rest of the gang. They're basically saying this is your chance to save the Senate. This is your chance to stop the radical left Democrats from taking over the world and socialism. They've nationalized the race. So I think Loeffler, I mean, I think Ossoff and Warnock need to have a response to that. That's also national, which is like, look, you elect us.

We're going to have progress for the first time in a long time. We're going to have health corruption. We're going to have a higher minimum wage. We're going to have all this stuff. You don't. We're going to have shit. Yeah. I'm super interested to see if Trump actually cares about these races. Right?

Like he. Me too. He's trying so hard to get four more years of a job that he hates and doesn't do. So why then do we assume that he cares about the United States Senate? He's the most selfish person in the history of the world. I have more faith in him parking his lazy, slobbingly ass at Mar-a-Lago for a couple of weeks than actually campaigning for these guys. Like I could be proven wrong, but like, can you imagine what that rally speech would be like? It would just be like one long whiny. Well, I've thought about this too. The only thing that might compel him to campaign

hard is he might think to himself, if I get a win in Georgia, if we win these two Republican races, I can leave office bragging about how I won. That's true. Like one more fake win for Donald Trump on his way out just to sort of, you know, feed his ego. And then he can start talking about how he wants to run again in 2024 because he saved those Senate seats in Georgia. But but he is lazy. He is lazy. So, yeah, well, I do think, well, yeah, he's lazy, but, you know, he's also incredibly disciplined when it comes to seeking out applause. I agree. I actually think he'll watch if it looks like they're going to if it looks like they'll win, he'll want to go. He'll want to rail against Joe Biden. He'll want to be on television. He'll want to claim that he did it. He'll I do think he will be talking immediately about 2024, not least of which

because of his legal problems. And like, I do think him being a potential candidate in 2024 will be one of the things he will be saying, which is my people yell, lock her up. And everyone tells me I'm so terrible. Look at Joe Biden trying to put me in jail because he doesn't want to run against me. So like, I do think that that's coming for all of us. Him being political is like one of the only ways I think he can talk his way through at least some of the legal challenges that will likely face him after he leaves office. So, you know, that'll be fun. Well, yeah, he'll probably go campaign down at the Augusta National Golf Club and leave it at that. Just hang out, hit balls for a few weeks, call that campaigning. OK, when we come back, we will have my interview with Chuck Rocha. Chuck Rocha is president of Solidarity Strategies and Nuestro

PAC. He was also a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign and the author of the book, T.O. Bernie, the inside story of how Bernie Sanders brought Latinos into the political revolution. Welcome to Pod Save America, Chuck. Hey, thanks for having me. So among Latinos who voted in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders did well in 2016. He did phenomenally well in 2020, especially with younger Latinos. Can you talk us through your very successful strategy that helped increase Bernie's vote share with Latinos between 16 and 20. And also I should ask just to start off, like given the huge diversity within the Latino population, is there a better way to be talking about the Latino vote in general? You know,

John, I appreciate you asking. I recognize that you asking that because we all go by so many different, you know, what we call each other, you know, Latinos, Hispanic, Latinx, and all of those for all of you at home, they're all right. It all depends on who you're talking to and where you're at. The way I like to think about is I say Latino. So I'd like for us to use Latinos today for everybody. When I walk into a space and they want to use Latinx out of respect, that's what I do. Non-gender bias. I get all of that point. And so I like to reflect however somebody else is talking about it that way. I don't make nobody upset. But thanks for asking the question about 15 and 16 and 20. I think the biggest things I think the biggest reasons why we had such a success was we had included Latinos into the operation of the overall campaign. You know, I've been doing this for 31 years.

doing this for 31 years. And what I've always seen is Black people, Brown people, Asian people, even women, siloed off into their own departments, given no budget, given no say-so, where they really don't know the overall strategy of the campaign. So they never can really intersect in the overall messaging field apparatus, political work that's done. And so since I got to be a senior advisor, and in my book, I wrote about this, about getting to build out literally the infrastructure of the campaign, I very purposefully put women and people of color in positions of power so that I knew that there would be intersectionality within every aspect of the campaign. And what that led to was us starting our Latino outreach six, seven, eight months before that caucus. It was very culturally competent. So there were Latinos making every bit of the products,

all Latino consultants, Latino staffers. We ended up having over 200 Latino staffers on the campaign. And I think Bernie's message also really helped because it really is a working class message that as you look at what happened this year, and I know we'll get into it, Latinos are a very working class group of folks, no matter if they're Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican. There's lots of us, since we're such a young demographic that still have to work a lot of our jobs, hourly jobs. So that economic populism is something that really works. So it was the perfect storm of having a good candidate who always stays on message, starting early, having a Latino in the room where they happen, me, John, me and Jeff Weaver and Faz and the senator. So I was in the room. So I could say,

let's make sure we keep this funding going and do this work. So I think that all grew into having the most historic Latino outreach in the history of American politics. So in the general election, your group, Nuestro PAC, helped persuade Latino voters in key battleground states to turn out for Joe Biden. Can you talk about the difference between Latino voters who turn out in a primary and those who might turn out in a general election? It's not that much different than white primary voters. They have more information, so they're more high information voters, right? So they're regular voters.

But what we proved in Nevada specifically with Bernie is that if you'll go out and talk to non-primary Latinos, they'll actually show up and vote. What the problem is and the larger problem with the overall democratic infrastructure is that we've become so reliant on data and micro-targeting is we leave out huge swaths of voters who would participate if we would literally ask them. So a targeting became a big part of Bernie's success and the success we had with Nuestro because we expanded that target beyond what we call a prime voter to a non-prime voter and even put in newly registered Latinos in every state and every aspect of what we did with the

Bernie campaign. And then we did the exact same thing with Nuestro PAC because we wanted to build off of what we had just tested in real time. So you warned months ago that the Biden campaign might underperform with Latino voters. What were your concerns at the time? They didn't know who he was. They know of him, but they didn't know who he was. And at a time when we started doing focus groups right after the primary, even during the primary, let's go back because we spent a ton of money on polling and focus groups then. Folks like Joe Biden, and I like to tell people, and you'll love this, you're such an animal on this, is that when we did the first political poll in Nevada, Joe Biden was beating Bernie Sanders with Latinos by five

points. That was in September of 19. So I had six months to move Latinos that were supporting Joe Biden. And by the end, get this, we won 73% of those Latinos. So when folks say that Latinos aren't a persuadable audience, I was like, I've done this in real time. They are persuadable if you'll spend a whole lot of money to go talk to them where they're at. So what's your take then on getting to 2020 in the general, what happened in the election itself? I'd love to hear your thoughts because I know they've got to be very different in each area, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on what happened in the election itself? I'd love to hear your thoughts because I know they've got to be very different in each area, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on what happened in Florida, what happened in the Rio Grande Valley, and then maybe you can talk about where

or if you saw some bright spots in terms of Biden's performance with Latinos. Look, I break this down in a couple of different levels. I've been doing this a long time. This is my 31st year of doing it. And for all you folks that are listening at home, I sound like an old white man, but I swear to God, I'm Latino. I just sound like an old white man when I talk. So I've been doing and watching our community evolve. And there's lots of Latinos like me who sound like an old white man who grew up in East Texas hunting and fishing since I was a little boy who actually worked for Bernie Sanders. That seems like a lot of conflicting things, but that's just a really good representation of who our people are. In the presidential

campaign, Joe Biden did a good job with Latinos. He spent a lot of money. He started relatively early and he had a pretty decent operation in a time of COVID on what he could accomplish. And because he threw so much money at Latinos advertisement, at least in Spanish, in Florida, Arizona, and other places, he did good. Could he have done better? Sure. We could have started earlier. We couldn't have had COVID. There was a lot of little things you could have done, but overall, Joe Biden and his team did a good job. The problem is below that, below that at the Senate level, at the congressional level, and at the state Senate level, you saw a huge dramatic shift in the Latino vote because there's

nobody actually having a conversation with those voters at that level. They knew who Joe Biden was. And of course, they knew who Donald Trump was, not depending if they were a conservative, like a Cuban in Miami, or if they were a Mexican who'd been fighting Joe Arpaio in Arizona for 10 years. They acted much differently. But below that, because the party infrastructure just assumed that Joe Biden and the DNC would take care of Latino outreach. There was not a lot of work done there. So you saw this dramatic difference between the ways Latinos acted in the border towns of Texas, in Miami, or in Tucson or Phoenix, where there was dramatic differences. You saw Joe Biden so underperformed in Miami, day by 20 points. You saw him overperform in Phoenix and get almost 72

percent of the Latino vote. And then in rural Texas in the Valley, you saw unprecedented underperformance where neither one of the candidates spent one dollar talking to Latinos. So the single biggest divide among white voters for quite some time now has been education, with Democrats winning larger and larger margins, with college-educated white voters, and Republicans, especially in the Trump era, doing better and better with non-college whites. Do you see any kind of educational divide occurring among Latino voters? Not as much educational as you do demographically.

Let me start by saying that the average age of a Latino in America is 27. So we're just so much younger because we haven't been in America as long. So you have these old school Mexicans like me or my father, who's passed away now, who are good Democrats who came up under a system, knew that Democrats kind of were for working class people. But then you have this whole new demographic of people who have come of age. Let's make a point in Texas that 69% of every school child in Texas is non-white. There's just this huge explosion in Texas and Georgia, places of Latinos coming of age so quickly. And when they're coming of age, because we have micro-targeted these universes out of

talking to them, they're all registering as no party preference voters. They don't really like the Republicans because of Donald Trump. They really don't like the Democrats because they're most socially progressive. They're kind of a Bernie Democrat. So they're just registering as no party preference. And that's the biggest divide right now is the younger compared to the older, not really on an education level because so many of our people don't go to college. What about a potential gender divide? There's been a lot of analysis about how Trump's appeal to some non-white voters, particularly Latino men, had to do with a certain machismo. You are so right about that. The gender divide is very real. And let me go on record now to once again say for the 10th time, women are

smarter than men. And it continues to be proven over and over again. And again, it's proved that brown women are smarter than brown men. So let's start with that synopsis. But what you're saying is there's a dramatic underperformance in non-college educated brown men. And as a non-college educated brown man myself, I'm one of the few national political consultants who do this work who've never been to college a day in my life. You can tell by the way that I talk, but also how I run campaigns. I'm an emotional beast. And what we've done is taken emotion out of the way we've done campaigns. If I've got to watch one more ad about preexisting conditions, that wasn't moving a Latino man because we still have the same group of pollsters, the same group of consultants, and the same group of people

running every one of these cookie cutter congressional campaigns. And there's nothing that really motivates a brown man who's not getting a bunch of information, who is a little sexist, who is a little sexist, who is a little machismo, right? And he likes that Donald Trump is a tough guy, even though it's just ignorant as hell. But they do get drawn to that, not the majority of them, but enough of them to make a difference. We could have a counter narrative to people who were like me when I was in my 30s, a single father trying to make it with my son who's never been to college, who is a rough and tough kind of person. Like I have gotten in a way more fistfights than I have gotten fights on

Twitter in real life. That's how these folks are. And they like somebody who's going to compete and fight for them. And sometimes we leave that out when we've had this same group of consultants writing another ad about preexisting conditions. So here's one thing I've been trying to figure out. It appears that that Bernie had some real success with his very economically populist message, particularly among Latinos. On the other hand, you have people after this election like, you know, Donna Shalala, who lost her house seat in a heavily Latino district in Florida, said the party didn't do enough to rebut Republican claims that were all socialists. You hear a lot of concerns about rebutting the socialist charge.

And yet Bernie, who, you know, identifies as a democratic socialist, had a lot of success in the primary with an economic message. How do you sort of square that circle? Where do you come down on the whole socialism debate here? It's just so different. You know, this state by state, did it really have effect in Miami-Dade? Yes. And also because there was this huge campaign down there with this misinformation about that, just in Spanish, just to this huge group of people. Everybody listed this podcast, loves politics. Miami-Dade is just a different county. There's a ton of Cubans and they're all registered as Republicans. Their sons and their daughters vote as Democrat and the mothers and the grandmothers vote as

Republican. So it's different there. But let me draw something out here that many of you may not know. We're going to end up losing like 10 congressional seats from last week's election. Of those, six of them are in districts where people of color make up 30 to 80 percent of the electorate. That means that there is a problem. And it's much different with Donna Shalala and with Debbie Mercosel Powell in South Florida than it is with Gil Mercosel Powell in South Florida than it is with Gil Cisneros in Orange County or TJ Cox in the Central Valley. All Latinos, all 70 percent Latinos. And we lost them dramatically because we're not having the right conversations.

A little part of that is about socialism in South Florida. But the other part is culturally connecting to people in these other places, these working class brown, black and Asian voters who Democrats aren't doing a good job at talking to. So I want to get to the disinformation campaign in a second, but even before that, what do you think the more effective conversations sound like? What are the issues that should be emphasized? How do you sort of cut through the socialism attack? What's been going on there? The key is starting early. Let me tell you what we did with Bernie Sanders.

You don't think of Bernie Sanders as the second coming of Cesar Chavez when you think about Bernie Sanders. So we needed some time to tell people who Bernie was and that he liked Latinos. So six months in advance, the first TV commercial I ran, the first mail piece, the first digital ad was all the same piece. And it said, my name is Bernie Sanders. My father came here from another country and could not speak English and didn't have any money. I won't forget my immigrant experience when I'm in the White House or growing up in the projects of this building in New York City. Now, what I just did there, John, and you know this, is I just built some commonality between you and Bernie. He's one of us. Like,

he don't look like us. He don't sound like us. But housing project, couldn't speak English, didn't have any money. The walls come down. Let's have a conversation. And because I didn't do this in the last two weeks, I could then say, let me tell you about Medicare for all. Let me tell you about college affordability and get rid of your student debt. Let me tell you what $15 an hour would mean to, we could do this right now. Oh, well, the key and what Democrats forget is if you'll treat Latinos like a persuadable white woman in the suburbs to start talking to them six and eight months in advance, you can get 70 and 80 percent of that vote. But you can't start that conversation three, four weeks in advance and say pre-existing condition health care. We know health care is your number one issue. So now we're going to talk to

you about health care in Spanish. I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense. So how do you how do you battle some of the disinformation campaigns that we've seen? You know, the Republicans directed them against Latinos, especially Spanish speaking Latinos. They were lies and conspiracies about Joe Biden, about Black Lives Matter. You know, the Republicans love to sort of turn brown people against black people. They've done that for a long time. Lies about socialism. What do we sort of do about that in the future to try to combat these sort of crazy conspiracies that are floating around out there? You need to have brown validators. You need somebody that somebody knows who says that old white man is with us and don't believe this crazy shit these people are trying to tell you because it's a lie. If Joe Biden does that, it's natural that he's defending something that he's wrong about. So that's why I created New Estro Pack, because I wanted to validate Joe Biden with people like Kristen Urgeza, whose father had died in Arizona of COVID, who you saw at the convention.

She's on our team. We made an ad of her. She was validating that Donald Trump is bad and Joe Biden is good. What you needed was Democratic Miami Cubans pushing back on their radio stations and pushing back on their YouTube stations, at least taking them on face to face going, you're wrong. You're right. You're wrong. Let's have an argument. The Democrats left that on the table and wouldn't have that argument. Right. I remember a former congressman from Miami calling me four months before the election going, Chuck, you got to get people on TV down here. You now to get people on these radio stations pushing back on this. And I'm like, look, I don't run Joe Biden's campaign. I run a super PAC. We're going to do a lot of mail, a lot of TV and a lot of digital, but I ain't in charge of staff on the ground. So I knew that there was some things down there.

So the way you kind of take it on is you have a trusted messenger who looks like the community, sounds like the community going, them some bitches is lying. You've talked a lot about sort of the need to have these conversations and to have them many months out. How much did COVID and the inability weren't knocking on the doors for six months that it affected that much. Anybody who's really worked in campaigns knows that your field operation can make up one to three points. And that we all know that real field operations talking to everybody can never be scaled at the level. And what I'm doing is getting really deep with you for somebody who does this for a living. Field is great. Don't let me tell nobody that field's not great. Is it the most persuasive? Absolutely. Is it the most inefficient? Absolutely. So it's just one piece of a pie that's very important. It's one cog, but losing that cog does affect your operation and where the races are

super tight, it can have an effect. The problem is, is many times, and John, you know this, they'll take all the brown voters and all the black voters and put a bunch of money into putting kids into those neighborhoods just in the last three weeks for GOTV when they could have been there year round with grassroots organizations that are doing more community service and then transitioning into politics, which is the great example of why Arizona was so good and why what Stacey Abrams built in Georgia end up helping them win the entire state. Well, speaking of Georgia, you've written that there's about 300,000 persuadable Latino voters in Georgia who are registered but don't identify with either party.

In addition to that, Georgia has a lot of younger Latinos. What's the best way to turn these voters out in the January runoff? This is not an operation about persuasion. It's how we get those folks back. And what we have estimated now is about 185,000 of these Latinos showed up and voted in November.

So we gotta go get them and get them back. That means we need to make sure that they ask for a ballot, get a ballot. Like we feel like we can do that. But the problem, what none of us knows is that a lot of Latinos, a lot of Asian-Americans, a lot of black people showed up not because of Ossoff or Warnock. They showed up because they hated Donald Trump. Our big thing now is how do you get them back to vote for two Senate races and how you get them to come back to let them know that the majority in the Senate can affect

their everyday life. Do you know that the state minimum wage in Georgia is $5 an hour? That is crazy. If you can go in there now and have a debate about just the minimum wage with working class Latinos, and that would turn out a lot of people. The reason there's so many Latinos in Georgia is Georgia has exploded over the last 20 or 30 years. And what you're seeing now are the sons and daughters of all of these Mexicans who came to Georgia to literally build all of these houses 20 years ago, who are all now between 18 and 30 years old, who are high information voters. They're more progressive. They're more liberal. They're voting Democrat. So these are the ones we got to get back. And me and you both know, John, younger voters are just harder to get back to the polls sometimes. So really, I mean,

a very simple message. It sounds like, you know, these two senators are the difference between a $15 minimum wage and five and five what you have right now. And that's it. That's the that's the election, man. But I'll bet your ass we run more ads about preexisting conditions. You just wait. I mean, you've talked about the preexisting condition thing a few times. How do you think or do you think health care should be part of the message and how should it be part of the message? Look, I joke in gist that and my thing is, is that I really feel like we can have a two hour conversation, John, when you have me back about what we need to do to fix the party overall. Right. And what I'm getting at is that there's there's just not anybody in there

putting emotion back into politics on the Democratic side. We need people who are stand up and start having an offensive message instead of always figuring out how we're going to react to them. And because polling, who we've all seen is broken, says that healthcare, and it is the number one issue, talk about it as if you want to take care of your own children. Bernie Sanders made Medicare for all popular because he would talk about what that means to your life. And if you don't have to pay a copay, let's pay for this other thing. Now, however, Democrats want to talk about health care. If you talk about giving people health care and having more access to health care, it's all a winning message. But why can't we roll that into health care, a minimum wage and standing up and fighting

for a community that nobody cares about? One thing that we learned with Bernie Sanders is this thing about the rigged system, Latinos really do get. Latinos feel like, and they've all come from countries where they're a corrupt government, so they get this shit, right? If you say the government is supposed to work for us, but just the people at the top are getting these breaks, they get that connection.

And that was one of the secret weapons we use with Bernie Sanders to make connectivity. Chuck Rocha, thank you so much for your insights, your heart and wisdom. And I will take you up on the offer to come back. And so we can talk even more about how to fix the party. One of my one of my favorite topics. Thanks, John. Thanks to Chuck for joining us today. And we will talk about the rest of the schedule, what you can expect from us. This week, Dan and I will have a Thursday pod. And then for Thanksgiving week, we'll have two pre-recorded pods that we're going to do this week.

One's a mailbag and one's a very special episode of Campaign Experts React that Dan and I are going to record this week. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye, everybody. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed,

and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.