Tangle - INTERVIEW: Simon Rosenberg, the man who got 2022 right.

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

In our last preview of the 2022 election, I cited Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg as a "unique voice" in a sea of forecasters and pundits who said Democrats were going to get wiped out in the midterms. I also said that if he was right, I'd reach out to him for an interview and figure out why he got it right when everyone else got it wrong. Well, he was right. And I did reach out. And today, you'll hear our conversation about 2022, the people who got it wrong, what he saw that everyone else didn't, and what he expects in 2024.You can read today's podcast here. You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Zosha Warpeha. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I am thrilled for today's show and today's guest. As many of you remember, when we were heading into our final 2022 midterm election preview, which was about a month ago, it feels like a year ago to me, in a sea of columnists and forecasters who were talking about the incoming red wave, I cited in our last newsletter and podcast that went out before

the election, a Democratic strategist named Simon Rosenberg. And this is what I wrote in that newsletter. I said, one of the few voices I've seen bucking the trend of a big night for Republicans is Simon Rosenberg, who I think at least deserves a shout out here for the sake of diversity of opinion. He's an unabashed progressive working for a progressive organization, but his final midterm update, I'd Rather Be Us Than Them, is uniquely bullish on Democrats. His theory rests mostly on the data we have that Democrats are outpacing early vote numbers from 2020. Many late polls have been looking good for them, and Hispanic and youth polling are all trending nicely for Democrats. If Democrats manage to hold the Senate or mitigate losses in the House, his analysis will prove prescient and unique. So as promised, I reached out to Simon, and today he's here to chat with us. Simon,

the man who got it right. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. It's good to be here. So listen, there's obviously a lot of stuff I want to suss out with you. But before we jump into 2022, I'm just curious if you could tell us a little bit about your background. How did you become a Democratic strategist and someone who's publishing their election forecasting online for the world to see? Sure. You know, I started in my career as a TV news producer and writer. I worked for ABC News and some independent production companies. But then I also worked in two presidential campaigns, Dukakis and Clinton. And I was lucky to have joined both of those early before we knew they were going to win the nomination. So I went through a whole primary cycle and then the general for two different winning campaigns. One lost the does, the way to think about it is that we've always

said that there were three big changes happening in the world, globalization, changing media, changing demography. And we tried to equip our political leaders with greater understandings in all three and strategies to be successful to navigate these big changes. I've been a little bit of a sort of forecaster futurist, if you want to put it that way, for a long time and been writing the kind of stuff that you saw for two decades. Sometimes it was more accurate and right than others. And I think this cycle, we got it pretty right. Awesome. So obviously, I mean,

there's been a ton of reflection on the election now. I mean, I wrote in some of our newsletters and we talked about it on this podcast that I think in retrospect, a lot of the polling actually wasn't that bad. Some of it, frankly, was pretty much right on the money or within, you know, that we had this period where maybe the red wave wasn't going to happen. And then towards the end of the cycle, a lot of people started saying, we think it's starting to look bad again for Democrats. I'm just curious, maybe to start there. I mean, what were you seeing? Why do you think your outlook was so different than a lot of other people? So the quick history of this whole thing is that a year ago in late October of 2021, I noticed that Joe Biden's approval rating had come way down, but what's called

the congressional generic, which is this basic question, are you voting Republican or Democrat for Congress, had not changed. And that's unusual because the theory was that the most important number in a midterm election was the Biden approval rating. And if that was true, then the congressional generic should have come down a little bit with it. There should have been similar movement. And there wasn't. And I posited then that the reason what we may be seeing is something I call the MAGA hangover, that the Republicans had made a really big strategic error in the election early on, which is they ran towards a politics MAGA, which had just been rejected overwhelmingly by the country twice. And usually when a party fails in two consecutive

elections, they tend to run away from what they did, not towards it. And so by running towards MAGA, I felt that they were creating a low ceiling. Or what I posited in that memo was that, you know, it could mean that we're going to see an atypical midterm, that it could be a close competitive midterm because the Republicans had, it was going to be very easy for someone to be disappointed in Joe Biden and still have no interest in voting Republican because they didn't like MAGA before. They were even more MAGA this time, right? So I was kind of open to the idea from the beginning that this was not going to be a typical midterm. And then I was involved in some polling in May. You know, the Dobbs leak happened on May 2nd. And I think the election really started to congeal

in May and June. And the election that we came to know was already evident in polling in May and June. We did a series of Hispanic polls in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania in mid-May, and that data came back very positive for Democrats, where we saw Democrats overperforming 2020 and Republicans underperforming 2020. I then looked at 538, and we saw similar things in a lot of polls all across the country. North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, we were doing better than we would have assumed. And so I wrote a piece in mid-June saying there's no red wave. This looks like a close competitive election just

based on the data that we had. And to acknowledge that we had a little bit less data than usual because there were so many late Republican primaries that there wasn't polling in a lot of the battleground states. I think if there had been, the media would have seen these trends earlier. But then we know what happened next. Uvalde happened. There was another mass shooting. The January 6th committee hearings began. And then Dobbs happened on June 24th. And then we had five House specials where Democrats outperformed their 2020 numbers

by seven points. If it was going to be a red wave year, we shouldn't have been outperforming 2020 at all. We should have been below 2020 in our results. And then we saw fundraising. Our fundraising was far better than Republicans. Their fundraising for their candidates was anemic. Ours was robust. And then I started collaborating with Tom Bonior, who became part of my partner in a lot of this analysis, because he started doing all this analysis showing that voter reg numbers had really dramatically changed, and that in virtually every state in the country,

after June 24th, there was a huge shift towards more Democrats voting, more women registering. I mean, more Democrats registering, more women, and particularly young women. Not a surprise, childbearing years, more affected by the ending of Roe. So we went into the final few weeks of the election saying, look, based on the data that we have, all the indicators for Democratic intensity were positive for us. All the indicators for Republican intensity were not positive for them. And would that actually, would that trend then show up in the election itself? We just didn't know, right? I mean, this is what happens when you look at this stuff. And it started showing up in the early vote. And we had better tools to look at the early vote than we've had because Tom's company, Target Smart, produced

this site called Target Early, which gave us an unprecedented window into the early vote. We had more data. We looked at it over time in every state. And I did the analysis on the early vote every day. And what I was seeing was across the country, very similar to what we had seen earlier, which was Democratic overperformance, Republican struggle. And then that memo you referenced, the one I wrote the day before the election, saying, look, I mean, we've seen these basic trends over the last six months. Will they actually show up on election day? They are likely to. The idea that you'd see one trend for six months, and then all of a sudden election day, some other completely different thing happening just wasn't likely, right? It could happen, but it just wasn't likely. And that's why we argued up until the end that this was going to be a close competitive election, and that was off. In 2022, the polling was not off. The independent media polls were actually pretty accurate. We saw even in Georgia,

the final polls done in Georgia this past week were also very, very accurate. What happened was there was an organized effort by some Republican organization to game the polling averages. Nothing like this has ever happened before in all the years I've done this. There were more than 40 polls dropped in seven states by 10 different pollsters that were clearly designed to push the averages down to make the election look more red wavy than it really was. The media basically got bamboozled. The media and the pundit class got bamboozled by this Republican campaign to game the polling averages, which is why, to your point, everyone kind of ended up back with red wave at the end. I mean,

Chris Salizzi even said the bottom's falling out for the Democratic Party that last week. Meanwhile, what we were seeing in the early vote was that every day of the early vote, it was getting younger and more Democratic. In fact, the opposite was happening in the early vote. So we stuck to our guns. I mean, the data all pointed in the same direction, and we fought the concept of the red wave. And I will tell you the big story of this election is how many people that we respect and admire who interpret elections for us really blew it. And it wasn't, to your point, it wasn't bad data. It was bad analysis. And that's in some ways scarier for us because we need, the press needs to be telling us the truth. It's critical for our democracy, right? For the media to be truthful. And the truth is that a lot

of the media misled the public about what happened in the final few weeks because there was no red wave. There was never a red wave. There wasn't a blip of a wave. There was nothing. And it was a fake out basically by the Republicans, which too many people fell for. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I talked about this a good bit in our post-election analysis, which was just comparing certain polling outfits to the actual results of the election and some of these more conservative, you know, overtly conservative polling outfits. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. They just were. That were like 10, 12, 15 points off in some of these elections. From their perspective, I guess, from the people who are funding those kinds of polls, what do they think the benefit of that is? I mean, is that a good way to juice encouragement

for voters if they see that there might be a red wave? Why do that? You know, I don't know that we're ever going to really know. I mean, unless people who are involved in it come out and talk about what happened. I know there are major news organizations that assign reporters to look into it. I mean, I think my own view, where I've come down in sort of the most plausible explanation, is that if you were involved in stacking the Supreme Court the way it's been stacked, where there's now a 6-3 kind of, you know, I'm going to use my own language here, extremist majority that is doing things like the ending of Roe, there's a whole movement behind that that's worked very hard for a very long time. And I'm sure that for those people who finally had this

happen, the Dobbs decision happen, to see a popular uprising come about because of the extremism of the decision and also the extremist abortion trigger laws that went into effect shortly after, that it just became something they couldn't stomach. And that the idea that the energy in the election was because of a rejection of an extremist Supreme Court also meant that that court could end up being more circumscribed and less able to follow an extremist course that they've been on because there had been this popular uprising and the Republicans were losing the election or underperforming the election because of their embrace of this extremism. I think there's a

very large chunk of the Republican Party with a lot of money that would want a different story of the election to be told, right? That it wasn't the ending of Roe drove this popular uprising and gave Democrats energy and frankly sucked energy out of the Republican Party, that in fact there was a red wave and that everything was going to be okay. Because remember, the red wave was the opposite of what happened. It wasn't a miss. I mean, the energy intensity and overperformance was on our side, not on their side. And Rick Scott, the head of the Republican Senate, even said famously, you know, we had real turnout problems just a couple of days after the election. And so I think that for some, the idea that there was this sort of very strenuous rejection

of the Republicans because of the ending of Dobbs was just too much to bear. And so they would have a vested interest in trying to create a different narrative and story of the election. But we don't know or we'll find out. We will all learn, hopefully, someday from the people involved in this about why they did what they did. Yeah, I mean, were there more mundane explanations that, you know, there was suppressed Democratic enthusiasm and cause us not to work as hard and all that? Yeah, I think all those are part of it, too. And I just don't, I don't know. But I think there was so much effort made at the end to change the storyline away from what was happening with abortion that it just seems to me to be the most plausible explanation. election, I essentially, you know, looked at the five or six big arguments about why things happened the way they did, whether it was the polling was wrong or youth voting turnout was higher than we expected. And, you know, made the argument that this election in the battleground

states, at least, was really about abortion and kind of adopted the, you know, the thermostatic voter idea that's been put forward by people like David Shore and others who just said, you know, voters were reacting to major change that unlike what usually happens when one party controls the White House, came from the party that wasn't in power by, you know, the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. So I'm curious what you think about that analysis. I mean, do Democrats do as well as they did without Roe v. Wade falling? We have to acknowledge that David Shore was really, really wrong about this election, right? I mean, I know he's become sort of a popular kid in town, but I mean, I don't think anybody was more wrong about this election than David Shore. And it needs

to be said because he has influence and he needs to do a better job explaining why his big argument about the Democratic Party was disproven by this election. But I will say that here's what I think happened. I think this was a stay-at-the-course election. I think that incumbents in both parties won. I mean, there are very few incumbents lost anywhere in the country. And I think having come out of the trauma of COVID and the disruption of COVID, the disruption of MAGA and just the craziness in our politics, that people were starting to feel like things were settling down and everything was kind of okay. And that they didn't want to rock the boat. They didn't want to bring craziness and nuttiness back into their lives. They want to

be able to cook dinners with their family on the weekends and coach Little League and do all the things that people were getting used to again and enjoying, by the way. And I think so what happened is that the Democrats did a good enough job. Joe Biden's been a good president. Things are better in the country. There's no question in my mind. And Republicans are a little too crazy. And I think that's what happened. The problem for the Republicans is that that basic dynamic, that they're a little too crazy and we've done a good job, is likely to be the fundamental dynamic in 2024 as well. And as we've just saw, even just in the last few days, I mean, you would assume that the Republican Party would have read the tea leaves in this election that, you know, if they

put too much of a MAGA face forward, they're going to be again, have another bad election. They've had three in a row, right? And I think that the challenge for them is that they already, you're already seeing extremist voices, you know, sort of dominate their discourse in the days after the election, showing that I think it's going to be very difficult for them to shake MAGA and shake their extremism before 2024. I mean, they're going to try very hard, but it's who they are. I mean, it's what the party's become. I mean, polling shows that 80% of Republican voters basically are on board with most of MAGA. There's only 20% that aren't. And I think that's a reasonable assessment of where the Republican Party is. What's interesting about this election

is that it was not a nationalized election. There wasn't one thing that happened. There were really two elections. There was the bluer election that happened in the battleground and a bunch of Democratic states and a redder election that happened outside. And my two basic takeaways from that is one is we go into 2024 showing Republicans that we're in control of our own destiny in the presidential battlegrounds, that we were, despite unbelievably adverse circumstances, we were able to increase our margins in some of the most important states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, Michigan, right, where we're actually stronger today than we were in 2020. And we also showed that we have a far superior ground operation that can take

advantage of the early vote, where we not only did well, but we also just beat them on the ground in basic campaigning, which is something they're not going to be able to fix in the next two years. I mean, they're at a tactical disadvantage as we head into 2024. But for Democrats, the thing that we have to be worried about is that we saw a drop off in the four biggest states in New York, California, Texas, and Florida. And I think the lesson for me there is that where we don't control the information environment, where we don't have these robust, fully funded campaigns and strong grassroots and good candidates, then the Republican noise machine, this thing that just dominates and dictates, even creates this fentanyl candy thing on Halloween, which is the most absurd thing,

it has a lot of power. And when we don't counter it, it can beat us. I think that that's the other lesson. I think the good news for Democrats is that I'd rather be us than them as we head into 2024. But we still have work to do about making sure they don't dictate and dominate the information environment every day, like they did with the red wave. I mean, the red wave was essentially a Republican creation that ended up bamboozling and winning over the national media in the final few weeks. We've got to learn from this and be more aggressive at a national level. I'm an old war room guy, and I believe in contesting the information war every day. I think we've got to get a little bit more aggressive about contesting the information war. We've got to build more of our own institutions to carry our narratives and stories to the American people. We can't be so reliant on the mainstream media,

and particularly with one of our most important tools, Twitter, going through some kind of degradation right now that we're going to have to innovate to make sure that we're heard in the national debate every day. Yeah. I'm curious if you could flesh out that tactical advantage for me a lot, because I've heard a few other people say that. What does that look like in tangible terms? What are Democrats doing on the ground that you don't see Republicans doing or what are they doing better? So Republicans, one of the differences, because I don't really believe in this idea of a left and a right being mirror images of one another. I think we're very different in many, many ways. We're asymmetrical. We're not,

I don't really believe that there's symmetry in our politics. Twas the season of chaos and all through the house, not one person was stressing. Holla differently this year with DoorDash. Don't want to holla do the most? Holla don't. More festive, less frantic. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. The flu remains a serious disease.

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Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. We are not in mirror image of the Republican Party in any way, right? We're different, right? We're a different party. And one of the big differences is that they have more regular voters than we do. We have more irregular voters. The Democratic Party has more voters. We're bigger than they are, but we have more irregular voters. And so what it means is that we spend a lot of money getting our irregular voters to vote and building large field organizations and get out the vote operations to get our voters

to vote. They don't have that kind of apparatus. They haven't needed it historically. They do do it in some races, right? But it's not like they have a generation of people like General Malley Dillon, who's in the White House, who oversees all the politics with Joe Biden, who grew up as a field organizer, which is how I started in politics too. Many of us started doing field where we were doing voter contact, not through television, but through

door knocking and all the ways that we reach voters face to face, right? Or now with texting and phone calling too and all that stuff. What's happened is that we've always had an advantage in that regard, but our campaigns have gotten much bigger. We're raising much more money than we used to. So those field operations now have gotten enormous and much bigger than anything we've ever had before. What that means is that we can now reach more lower propensity voters. The whole way that a field operation works is that, you know, you move your what are called prime voters. You get them to vote. Then you move. You have a score in our databases. Right. We have a score of one to ten of most likely to vote.

If you can get to 7 or 6, you're doing a good job. Now we're moving all the way down to the 3s and 4s because of the size of our campaigns and also because the early vote where we can be touching voters for 2 to 3 weeks, right, because every time someone votes, they come off the voter rolls. We know they've voted, so we can move down to more lower propensity voters. The combination of us having much bigger campaigns, more sophisticated campaigns than Republicans, and also the length of the early vote has created a structural advantage for us. You're seeing a lot of discussion in the Republican Party now about the need for them to not concede the early vote. Well, they may not want to concede the early vote,

but they don't have the kind of experience that we have in doing voter contact work. And so they may catch up someday. There is no chance they catch up between now and 2024. Our execution, I mean, I saw it in the early vote data. In that last week, every day as our campaigns kicked in and the machinery kicked in, the electorate got more democratic and younger. So I could see it in the data. I could see this machinery that I'm talking about play out in the data. In Michigan, our early vote numbers were 20 points better than they were in 2020. In Pennsylvania and Georgia, 10 points better than 2020. Those are crazy numbers. And because we spent, the DNC and the Democratic Party spent more money on field in this midterm than we ever had before, in part because we just have much more money than we used to, right?

So we can build more robust campaigns. So the Republicans have a problem raising money. They raise a lot of money, but it goes into these outside super PACs. Their campaigns are anemic. Our campaigns are strong. Our entire ecosystem is campaign first, big, robust, muscular campaigns, and then we add stuff on top of it. They have weak anemic campaigns and they add stuff on top of that. Our model is a better model. This is not a different model. Our model

is better than theirs. And it just kicked their ass really badly in this last election. And they're not going to catch up in the next two years. And so this is a serious problem for them. And what's been amazing is how many Republicans are talking about this openly. This has been a really big topic of conversation. They are worried. We crushed it in the early vote. And that wasn't just an accident. I mean, that was because we tried. Our party historically was not the early vote party. They were. We did election day stuff. That's all changed. And this has now given us, at least in the short term, next couple elections, a significant

tactical advantage where we can build these kind of campaigns. One of the things you said in your, you know, the latest analysis you did, which came in late November about the election and in your postmortem, was you cited an exit poll that frankly floored me. I mean, I'm a politics reporter. I read a daily politics newsletter and there was a data set in there where 52% of the country said that they were better off or the same as two years ago. And Democrats won those voters 74 to 24. I mean, that shocked me just based on the media I consume from the right and the left and the inflation narrative and everything about

this election that told me that voters were struggling and were feeling like they were worse off now than they were when Biden came into office. What's that data that you're looking at? Why is it so different from everything else that's out there? I'd love to just hear you talk about that a little. Thank you for asking this because this is something that before I challenged the red wave, I challenged the inflation narrative, and I failed on that one, by the way. I was successful with the red wave. I also challenged that the Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party narrative, which I think now I've also been vindicated on that. But let's just talk about the economics stuff for a minute. I always believed that voters were sophisticated enough to know that things were

better, but also things cost too much, and that both of those things could be true at the same time. In the last few months, we've had the lowest unemployment rate in a peacetime economy since World War II. We've had the lowest poverty rate, the lowest uninsured rate. We've seen five times as many jobs created in Joe Biden's first two years as were created under the last three Republican presidents combined. I think it was obvious and clear to everybody that things were better and that things cost too much. And both of those things could be true. And the second thing is that when you drill down on polling and ask people why they thought things cost too much, two-thirds of voters didn't blame Biden. They blamed supply chain. They blamed

Russia. They blamed the war. They blamed other things. Well, that was a pretty accurate read, right? I mean, it actually wasn't Joe Biden's fault that inflation was so high. It was far more Vladimir Putin's fault than it was Joe Biden's fault. The rise in energy prices and food prices in 2022 was almost entirely due to Russia and what Russia was doing. So the American people, I think, had a more nuanced understanding of what was happening in their economic lives, which is usually the case, right? Because people have to pay the bills. And we also know that wages were way, way up. I mean, wages, even though things were costing more, wages, at least for a big chunk of this period, were actually ahead of inflation.

things were costing more. Wages, at least for a big chunk of this period, were actually ahead of inflation. And they only fell behind inflation once the Russian war began. And so people were also making much more money, although things cost more. Finally, where the inflation was really hurting was on gas prices. And so if you're somebody who drove a lot with a fuel inefficient car, your economic life changed in 2022, right? You were significantly disadvantaged. If you didn't drive a lot and you didn't have an inefficient car, your economic life didn't change all that much. I mean, it was on the margins, right? Things cost a little bit more. You don't buy those things. You buy things that cost less, right? I always believed that the inflation story was grossly exaggerated in terms of the actual impact on people's lives.

And I think, frankly, this election bore that out. I think that if inflation was really as crippling as Republicans would say, we would not have had the election that we just had. And I think people were able to parse all this and say, you know, things feel pretty good right now. It's not as good as I want them to be. Gas is still too high. And remember, gas prices came down a lot in the final three weeks of the election. I don't know if we would have done as well in the election if that hadn't happened. I mean, I just don't know. Because I think on inflation, I mean, there's a lot of polling to suggest that there was

a very direct connection between gas prices and people's understanding of costs, that it wasn't about food and all this other stuff, that it was really about what they were seeing when they were driving around with their eyes, with the prices up on the pumps. I think that the inflation thing was always exaggerated. And I still go back to this basic idea. Joe Biden has been a really good president. The country is far better off today than it was when he was here. And I think voters suggested that was an important dynamic. You can't have a stay-the-course election if people think things are going badly. And because virtually no Democratic incumbent lost anywhere in the country, this was not a throw-the-bums-out election. This was a, hey, things that were coming out of COVID,

things aren't, you know, they're choppy here, but they're choppy everywhere, right? We want things to be better. I think what we have to recognize is that the power of the Republican noise machine to take a criticism of Democrats and turn it into a national meme has no analog on our side. We don't have the ability to do that. And this inflation thing was another good example that like the red wave, it got exaggerated. And I think a lot of people in the media and even Democrats got intimidated into believing this was a bigger issue than it really was similar to the red wave. got intimidated into believing this was a bigger issue than it really was, similar to the red wave.

Yeah. I mean, I guess the sort of final piece of this, well, I mean, there's a few other three ways, I think. Abortion, inflation, the polling, the misanalysis on the red wave, the youth vote we've spoken a lot about on our podcast and in the Tangle newsletter. But I'm interested to hear you on the Hispanic vote, because that was another idea that I think you fleshed out a little bit more in some of your election analysis than I saw other people talk about, which I've always been really frustrated. As somebody who spends a lot of time in the Southwest and on the border, I have a lot of family down there and family in Mexico. And it's so frustrating to hear the Hispanic vote spoken about as this big monolith, you know, that like Cubans in Florida are the same as the Mexican Americans

in the Rio Grande. But I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about, you know, what you guys are seeing high level in terms of the Hispanic vote and its relationship to the Democratic Party. So my history with this is my wife grew up in New Mexico, and I have a lot of family out in the West Coast of the United States. And so I introduced bilingual polling to the Democratic Party in 2002 with Bob Menendez. And we did the first Spanish language ads ever in Florida and the four Southwestern states in 2002 and 2004. So I helped create the national strategy of the Democratic Party towards the Hispanic community. In 2004, Bush won Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico. The Republicans controlled,

in those four states, five out of the eight Senate seats and 14 out of the 21 House seats. In 2020, we won. Biden won Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, the first time a Democrat had done that in 80 years, since 1940. We controlled all eight Senate seats, and we controlled 14 out of the 23 House seats. The biggest geographic shift in America over the last 20 years has been the change of the Southwest from a lean Republican region to a lean blue region. I mean, Colorado and New Mexico are almost functionally one-party states now, the way California is. And the big change, obviously, was in Arizona. We now control the two Senate seats there. I'm putting Sinema in as a Democrat for the time being, because she's caucusing with the Democrats. And we control the two Senate seats in the governorship there for the first time since 1951.

We've seen incredible progress. The way to think about this is that in 2004, the national margin for Democrats with Hispanic voters was 700,000. We had 700,000 more votes than Republicans. In 2020, it was between four and a half and five and a half million. The thing that the analysis on this often misses is that a slightly smaller piece of a bigger pie is still more pie. We could be getting slightly lower margins in some of these states, but because of the populations growing, we're actually netting more votes. We got at least 4 million more Hispanic votes than we did 16 years ago in 2020.

I haven't done the math in Arizona, but let's just say that we got 500,000 more Hispanic votes than Republicans did in 2020. That number in 2004, you know, Bush won the state. So, you know, we're talking about huge margins that are going into the Democratic kitty all across the country, the exception of Florida, right? Florida is the exception of that. And even in Texas, I mean, you heard the Republicans crowing about South Texas and what was happening in the Rio Grande Valley. And oops, that didn't happen either. So while we had a little bit of a dip, Democrats have now had their two best showings in the Southwest in the last 80 years in two consecutive elections. The Republican brand continues to erode in that region of the country. Democrats outperformed all expectations in the Rio Grande Valley.

But where we do have problems is in Florida. But in the rest of the country, the Hispanic vote is doing just fine. And that I would argue that our success with Hispanics has been the single most successful party-wide project in the Democratic Party in the last 20 years. We do need a rewrite on that story. And I would urge people to take a look at Natasha Karecki's new article in NBC News. It's a print article on the NBC News website. It sort of takes what I just said at face value. I'm quoted in the piece. She used a lot of my data. And I think we need a rewrite on this Hispanic thing. I think there was a lot of really bad analysis this election cycle by Democrats and Republicans about the Hispanic vote, about the red

wave, about inflation, about a lot of stuff. Hopefully, there'll be more humility by many as we head into this next election cycle. If I can make one final comment, I think the fundamental mistake that everybody made in 2022 was they overly discounted the ugliness of MAGA. MAGA is ugly. MAGA is dangerous. MAGA is an abomination. MAGA is not Republican. MAGA, I distinguish between the two. I mean, there are lots of good Republicans. Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney, we can go down a long list of, I think, very virtuous and patriotic Republicans who played an important role in this election. But MAGA is a problem. And the key for the country and for your kind of work that you do is we have to do everything we can to loosen the grip of MAGA over the Republican Party.

We need a more traditional center-right party again in the United States. I think too many people discounted the extremism of MAGA, and the voters didn't. The voters saw it for what it was. And the problem now the Republicans have is that they've had three consecutive elections where MAGA has underperformed for them. If they come out of the box as MAGA in 2024, they're going to have another bad election. My hope is if that happens, it will start to really erode the ability of MAGA to dictate the politics of the modern Republican Party. But as we've seen, Kevin McCarthy now, more than a month later, still doesn't have the votes to become Speaker. This is still a MAGA party. MAGA party.

MAGA is replaced conservatism as the governing ideology of the Republicans. And as long as that is, this is not a simple left-right story anymore, right? This is not like there's one, well, there's, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans are all kind of the same. We are not the same. We are not a radicalized extremist political party. We're a mainstream political party that's governed well when we've been in office. The Republicans can't say the same thing. I do think that part of the dynamic here and what Republicans have to be worried about is that their party has been

taken over by extremists. And as we're seeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene right now, right? And I don't know that they're going to be able to put that genie back in the bottle in the next two years. I mean, it may happen eventually, but I just don't see it happening between now and 2024. I guess my last question for you before I let you go is sort of in that vein. It's about 2024. I mean, A, I'd be remiss not to ask you what you think about President Biden and whether he should run for reelection or not, given everything that's going on? And I suppose, B, if your answer to that is no, who do you see? You talked a lot about in your post-election analysis, the really deep bench Democrats have that we've seen and who we should keep our eyes on heading into 2024.

Look, the Democratic Party is very strong right now. Joe Biden's been a good president. The three big bills that he passed, the CHIPS infrastructure and climate bill, are going to be creating growth and economic opportunity for a generation to come. I mean, these are farsighted, historic investments in our future. And also, as I said, our bench is deeper and stronger than probably any time since I've been in this business. And we, at least in the short term, I think have a significant tactical advantage over the Republicans on the ground in our campaigns. And so when I look at that, what I see is a very strong party right now. We're strong. We've done well in three consecutive elections. We've fought off MAGA. And as we look to hit 2024, I'd rather be us than them. I think Biden was going to run for re-election. And I think if he does, I think what he's counting on is two things, or three things, really. One is that the economy will be strong because of the investments that he made, the far-sighted investments that he made. There will be evidence on the ground, all these factories that are getting built.

You could be able to see them, right? I mean, there's going to be physical evidence of his economic policies that will make it, he'll have more of an ability to win the economic argument with the Republicans in 2024. I think we hope, we all have to hope that Putin is severely wounded by his failure in Ukraine, something that Biden will also be able to take credit for, landed this blow against authoritarianism and defended the West against this grave threat. And then I think the third calculation is that they're still going to be too MAGA. Look, all I said during the election was that we got a shot and that this was going to be a close competitive election. When I look ahead, what I look at is that I think we have an advantage heading into 2024. I think

Joe Biden will be able to say, I've been a good president and there's no reason to unelect me. And they're still a little too crazy. And then when we go into the battlegrounds, we just demonstrated that we have an advantage over them into the battlegrounds, we just demonstrated that we have an advantage over them in the battlegrounds. You know, I think they're the underdogs going into 2024 now. The House could easily flip back to the Democrats, particularly because the Republicans won a lot of seats in California and New York that will be difficult for them to keep in a general election. And also the Senate is going to be very competitive. I mean, the Senate could go either way. Democrats are going to have to defend seats in tough places like West Virginia, Montana,

and Ohio. But many of the Senate races that we're going to be competing in are in these same battlegrounds where we just showed a lot of strengths. The way I view it right now is we're favored to win the presidency. And this could change, right? A lot of stuff could happen. We're favored to win the House back. The Senate is up for grabs, maybe even leaning a little Republican, right, you know, today. And so that's where I see things today, sitting December of 2022. And of course, they're going to change 75 times between now and the summer of 2024. Happy to come back every few months and do a check- in to see if my forecasting abilities can go beyond a single cycle and if they can carry on to this next election cycle.

All right. Well, Simon Rosenberg, first of all, I'm going to take you up on that. We will definitely talk again before the 2024 election is here. And I appreciate you giving us some of your time today. Congratulations. Look, I mean, on a successful cycle in the sense that I think you saw some things some other folks didn't. And your analysis certainly helped me out in my reporting.

So I appreciate that. I think you did a great job. Look forward to chatting again sometime. Thank you. And keep up the good work. I really appreciate the seriousness that you bring to this. It's important. I mean, this is an important time in the country.

And, you know, the media is wobbly right now. And so Voices of Reason and Thoughtfulness, more the merrier. Happy to support you in any way I can. Thank you, Simon. I appreciate it. Have a good one. Bye-bye. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited by Zosia Warpea. Our script is edited by Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Vakova, who created our podcast logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75.

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