The Bulwark Podcast - Simon Rosenberg: I Think We're Going to Kick His Ass

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

The polling isn't there yet, but Biden is delivering on the job, MAGA is extreme and dangerous, the GOP is a dumpster fire, and Trump is the ugliest political figure in our lifetimes. After a hellish week at SCOTUS, some hopium for the weekend pod from Simon Rosenberg. Plus, Tim Miller reads from the mailbag. show notes: Simon's Hopium newsletter Tim's playlist George Conway's hat Tim on Dan Savage's pod Send your mailbag questions here: [e-mail]

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enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. Hey JVL, it's been months since I've seen you without a screen intermediary. I'm just dying to lick your face and put my hands on you and so are you gonna come do some public events with us and human contact human contact yes yes i'm gonna do it i'm coming out of the house i'm leaving the basement for two days may 1st in philadelphia and may 15th in washington dc this the first Bulwark event where we encourage jeering

because it's Philly, people, so jeer us. Yes. May 1st. If we have a bad show, I expect the Philly crowd to boo us. Please. Or anyway, even if it's a good show, boo us anyway. We deserve it. May 1st in Philly, May 15th, 6 and I, Synagogue in Washington, D.C.

Come hang out. Go to thebulwark.com slash events to get your tickets. Thebulwark.com slash events. And JVL, I just can't wait to get all up on you. Hello and welcome to The Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We're going to do it. It's a weekend show.

We are bringing you good tidings. The Denver Nuggets are up 3-0. It's spring. There's Jazz Fest in the air in New Orleans. And I've got Simon Rosenberg, the author of the Hopium Chronicles on Substack. He's a veteran Democratic strategist and consultant. 2022, when Nate Silver was talking about the red wave and mocking Simon Rosenberg, he was out there saying, no, it's going to be a good year for Democrats. And that is when Nate Silver suggested he was smoking hopium that inspired the new Substack name. Simon, I brought you in to give the people a weekend injection of hopium. Tim, thanks so much for having me and a big admirer from afar.

Oh, thank you. We're going to do it. There have been requests sometimes, I don't know if you've heard, but sometimes there's some Bulwark contributors, yours included, who can be a little dour, you know, a little, we can fret, we can be concerned. And so, we need to bring a little balance to things. So, you kind of inserted into my life, I don't know, two years ago on the internet. And we never hung out. I didn't know you before. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your backstory? Are you like that guy? You remember the Milhouse episode of The Simpsons where everything's turning up Milhouse? Has that just been your whole life? Or is this a new thing? Give us a little speed.

Listen, I started my career as a TV producer and writer for ABC News and grew up in the media business and then went into politics. I worked on two presidential campaigns, the Dukakis and Clinton campaigns. I'm dating myself here a little bit. I was part of the Clinton war room 32 years ago, got yelled at by James every day. After we won, I came to Washington as the comms director at the DNC. In 96, I started the organization NDN that I ran for 27 years. And NDN was part of the Clinton wave of trying to build the next Democratic Party

after many years of losing presidential elections from 68 to 88. And that organization had sort of two incarnations. First, we funded candidates and swing races and swing districts to try to help, you know, to grow the Democratic Party. We invested in leaders like Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker and lots of the people that you see today who are leaders of the party. And then the second thing we did, we became, in our second iteration, sort of like a private think tank for the Democratic Party and for the center-left. And we produced policy work, you know, strategic thinking about our coalition, how to use things like the internet more effectively to communicate.

Some of the stuff we did was public, some of it was private, you know, so I've been in the game here for more than 30 years. And a lot of the work that I did, I didn't need to be a public figure, I didn't need to have a following, because I was sort of an insidery place. But that all changed in 2022 when my analysis about the election sort of went viral. My more optimistic analysis of the election went viral. And here we are two years later, fighting it out together, saving our democracy. I appreciate that. You do make a little appearance in the war room, right? I do. I do. I'm in there twice. And the other thing is for Republicans, I mean, you may be familiar with me because I was a regular guest on Fox News

for 17 years. I mean, I was on two to three days a week. Many of my Democratic friends didn't know that. But for people who are watching and listening today on the Republican side, I, you know, I was a regular guest on all the shows, but particularly Megyn Kelly's show, you know, on Tuesday afternoons, I was on for many, many years. Do you and Megyn still talk? Has she had you on her podcast? I'm in touch with Megyn. I'm actually in touch with Megyn. And, you know, I always admired Megyn, actually, in those days, because I felt she was true to herself. You know, that show was always the toughest show to do. I mean, she was smart,

and she challenged people. And so I really enjoyed going on Fox News. I learned a lot. First of all, it kept me sharp in my work and to have to go on what was a pretty hostile environment live two to three days a week. But also, it taught me a lot about the right and Republicans. And I felt like that experience has really helped me understand what's happened to the Republican Party. You know, I was on air when Trump came down on the escalator in 2015 on Fox, and they cut away to Trump. We waited, and they had us come back after. And I said, I just want to go on record thinking, and I said, I think he can win the nomination. And at that time, that was an outlier position.

Especially on Fox, by the way. Well, but you could also feel it on Fox. I mean, I could feel the admiration for him. You know, they were ready for him. So, look, I think that it's helped equip me and make me better at the work that I do. Because I feel like, and I've written a lot about the evolution of the Republican Party and the right in America over the last 20 years. And it's been heavily informed by my time actually engaging and talking to Republican voters and talking to prominent Republicans

regularly for a very long time. Well, send Megan my love. I would love to argue with her if she wants to re-engage with me. We used to DM. She doesn't DM with me anymore. I've had some negative thoughts about her recent podcast turn, as you might imagine. I want to do a little news first before we get into kind of hopium analysis. Well, I guess maybe it's kind of related. The SCOTUS hearing yesterday, we had a report from Mark Joseph Stern outside the Supreme Court on yesterday's podcast. It was pretty bleak about just kind of what he was hearing there. George Conway explains it all. People can go check that out with Sarah Longwell. George had a more nuanced take. Where do you fall

down on what we saw from the Supreme Court yesterday? Yeah, look, it was disappointing they even took up the case, right? I think that the idea that we had a lawyer for a former president making the case that it would be okay for the president to assassinate people while he's in office is kind of a low moment, I think, in this MAGA era. You know, that what SCOTUS was playing with yesterday was unraveling what is in some ways the core foundational design of our entire democracy, which is that a president can't be a king, you know, and that there needs to be accountability. I mean, as a whole, it's the core of how our country was imagined

and the sort of the right that they, or the wrong they were writing back in the 18th century, which was building a political system that was governed by people and not by a hereditary monarchy and by oligarchs, and that founding fathers tried to imagine an alternative system. And the core of it, right, the White House was small, the Congress was big, right, was this idea of a highly contained chief executive is, in essence, the foundation stone of our entire democracy. And so I think the SCOTUS yesterday was playing with something so foundational to America that if they end up in the wrong place on this, it will change our democracy profoundly in obviously, I think,

terrible ways. I will say one other thing, though, is that I think it's really important politically. I have this theory that, you know, we made a mistake by waiting for Mueller, meaning that we didn't engage publicly the issue of the Russian penetration of the Republican Party and Trump because we were waiting for Mueller to do it for us. And so we waited two years rather than engaging the public and educating the public. You know, we then waited for Mueller and it didn't happen the way we all expected. We shouldn't be waiting for the courts to do the work that we have to do to inform the public about who Donald Trump is in 2024. And I know that all this coverage and it's fascinating and it's incredibly riveting. But, you know, we have to take this discussion about who he is out of the

courts and out of the legal domain and bring it into the political domain and prosecute it in politics and campaigns and ads in the ways that we communicate. And I can get into that a little bit more if you want. But I think we have to stop waiting for Jack Smith or waiting for the prosecutors. He's already done enough. We have enough material to, I think, severely degrade him. And we have to not make it contingent upon him being found guilty because I don't know that that's going to happen. If it happens, great. But if it doesn't, we have to fight the election that's in front of us now. Here's an area where we agree 100%, just 100%. This thing cuts two ways. And one way that's in front of us now. Here's an area where we agree 100%, just 100%. This thing cuts two ways,

and one way that's a scary and one that's an opportunity is that they're telling us what they want to do, and it's not what the American people want. Charlie Kirk yesterday talked to this guy, Curtis Yarvin. Let's just listen to that. In order to remedy this sort of great imbalance or this usurpation of the legislative and judicial branches over the executive branch, which has become the democratic branch with a small d, and thus has been rendered utterly toothless in the sense that the president himself has power over the government. The only remedy for this wrong is to put the president entirely in charge of the government. And that essentially means that the executive branch,

far from being checked and balanced in a way that does not work and has left the executive branch not checked and balanced, but simply hogtied and held a hostage, is to render the executive branch completely unilateral. Curtis Sharvin, he's saying there on Charlie Kirk's show that he wants the president to be able to be a king, to your point, to be able to do anything, and that we have the Supreme Court dithering over all this. And so that's really scary on the one hand. And I think that it's worth, you know, the people that are raising alarm about this.

I get it. But also, the American people don't want this, right? And it is up to us to show videos of these weirdo boys in their basement. They're planning to turn Donald Trump into a king and make sure that enough voters see that so that they reject it. And that's basically what happened in 2022, right? Yep. Listen, let's go through the six things that voters are about to find out about Donald Trump that they didn't know about him in 2020 when he lost, right?

Number one is that he raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room. Number two, that he oversaw one of the largest financial frauds in all of American history, has been fined half a billion dollars for it, and he and his two sons have been banned from doing large amounts of business in New York State. Three is that he stole America's secrets. He lied to the FBI about it. He shared those secrets with other people. It is without question the greatest betrayal of America by a former president. Four is that he tried to overturn an election. He led an armed attack on the Capitol on one of the only days that all 435 members are there. And he's promised to end

American democracy for all time if he stumbles into the White House in January of 2025. Fifth is that he and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any political family in the history of the country. And sixth, he's singularly responsible for ending Roe and stripping the rights and freedoms away of more than half the population. Any one of those six things are going to be difficult for him to overcome. I don't think he can overcome all six. And none of those things are contingent upon him getting convicted in a court of law. These are all just facts on the ground. We know they happened. And it's important that we start prosecuting our case against him with force because the American people deserve to understand who they're voting for in this election, this Donald Trump. This

Donald Trump, to me, is far weaker, far more degraded. His performance on the stump is far more atrocious and disturbing than it's ever been. And he's a far more dangerous and extreme figure than he was. We can't wait for Mueller. We can't wait for Jack Smith. We can't wait for the Supreme Court. We got to go get this done now ourselves together. 100% agree with that. You've got me ready to put on my battle skier. I'm going to grab my battle axe right now. I'm ready for you. You guys do it every, you bring it every day, man. You bring it every day. We're doing our best.

I want to explore in a little bit some data that undercuts some of those points. And I want to kind of hash out how we can bring the reality of Donald Trump to meet the data. But first, to your point, just about how bad he is on the stump and how many opportunities he's providing day in, day out. I want to listen to him yesterday outside the courtroom talking about Charlottesville. He was talking about Charlottesville. He was talking about Charlottesville. Charlottesville was a little peanut and it was nothing compared and the hate wasn't the kind of hate that you have here. I mean, this guy, again, still years later, trying to downplay the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville,

led to the death of Heather Heyer. You know, this is not what the American people are. Listen, my niece spent years working in a dementia ward, in a memory loss ward, in a nursing home. And one of the first things that happens when you start declining is your impulsivity gets out of control. You have impulse control problems. He is demonstrating unbelievable impulse control and impulsivity issues. He can't help himself. I mean, every time he speaks, he's making horrendous mistakes. I mean, coming out against the ACA, I think just in the last few weeks, this idiotic decision that he made to the state's rights on an abortion, which I think he thought was some kind of genius move, right?

He sort of threaded the needle. And yet what he was doing in his idiocy was actually endorsing the most extreme abortion bans in the country. And if he's okay with Idaho anywhere, he's okay with Idaho everywhere. And what he did was that he cemented himself as the most dangerous abortion extremist in the country. And he thought he was doing something else, right? And I think that his campaign is now being driven by these impulsive outbreaks, where he says things that, as you know, as somebody who's been in the business, he's making the kind of mistakes that candidates who lose make, right? Coming out against the ACA was idiotic. The decision he made on the abortion issue was idiotic.

He's making idiotic, impulsive statements, which is why they're trying to keep him away from the camera. He's barely doing campaign events because I think they realize that every time he spoke, he was digging his hole deeper. Look, he's got a very serious problem. And something I think you understand is that he has no capacity to make positive news. Right? I mean, he's not in the White House. His business is a total, you know, S-show. Right?

I don't know if I can say that. You can say shit show on this podcast. Shit show. Right? I mean, his new company has dropped from 79 to the low 30s, right? He's campaigning for the courthouse and not the White House, as I call it, right? He doesn't have the capacity the way that Biden does to generate positive news stories. And I'm sorry, you know, him being in court and being funny and having guards around him is not helping him in

this election, right? It's reminding people about, you know, that he's a serial criminal and one of the most awful people to have ever walked the face of America. And so I think that over time, Biden's ability to be president and continue to generate positive news stories and talk about all the things he's doing to make things better versus this historically awful, the line I use is that Trump is the ugliest political thing any of us have ever seen, that over time, that contrast is going to be very difficult for the Republicans, you know, as it manifests in the coming months. I've been resisting the, you know, kind of, oh, Trump's declining, he's deteriorating thing. And

I just, I happen to spend some time this week re-watching some of the 2015 video. And he's deteriorating thing and i just i happen to spend some time this week re-watching some of the 2015 video and and he's still the same person right like he hasn't changed as a person but he is angry and lashing out to your point and the impulse control and and he's lost a little bit of i it never appealed to me his kind of devil may care you know joie de vivre kind of thing like i that never landed with me at all but i can objectively see and look at and say okay that's kind of i could see how somebody could laugh at that joke or that's kind of funny and he's lost that completely some of the charm some of the charm yeah some of the charm i mean i think having watched i was on midas touch a few weeks ago and they played a series of clips for me that i had not seen and And it was shocking. He's much more erratic and more impulsive than

he used to be. And, you know, people that have worked for him, I've watched people who've worked for him say on air and MSNBC and other places that they feel that he is, you know, he was very disciplined in 2016. That's all gone now. And he's just sort of saying, you know, whatever he wants. He's not scripted by the campaign. He's not paying any attention to that. And again, over time, that's a problem. You know, look, we're in a very close election right now, right? If you look at the 538 averages today, the election is tied. You know, we've made gains in recent weeks, and I feel better about, you know, where we are. And I think we have a little bit of momentum now. But, you know, we've got to continue to make gains. And this is we've got six and a half months or six months now. I think a lot of the structural things favor us and are problematic for him as you play these things forward over time. And I think it's why there's been this quiet confidence in Biden world and among many of us that once the general election turned on and people got to see this Trump and Biden got to make his case for what he's done to make things better, because I think he's been a good president,

the country is better off, that over time that that would matter and that we would pick up and make up some ground. I think that's begun. I think we've seen that happen over the last few weeks, but we still have a long way to go in this race and we are not where we need to be. And we've got a lot of work to do. Yeah. i want to i want to start digging in on that then i just want to mention you mentioned the idaho law we've talked about arizona a bunch on this idaho is also in front of the supreme court right now it's a ban for folks haven't followed it closely that allows abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman but not to prevent her health from deteriorating and it comes with a jail sentence for doctors that do.

It's just an absolutely insanely extreme bill. And it has an anti-trafficking statute. So it's got and pioneered, Idaho is particularly awful in that it pioneered this idea that if you traffic someone under 18 out of the state to get an abortion, you're also criminally liable. And so they actually have efforts to try to contain and prevent people from leaving the state, right? Which is, there's no question that that stuff will all get knocked out, yeah, in the courts. But Idaho is the most extreme bill that has passed. And it's why, you know, even yesterday, I mean, you saw in the court hearings, right, one of the lawyers for Idaho, defending Idaho, said that loss of an organ by a woman would not be sufficient reason to trigger the Idaho law, you know, that it would be okay for women who are... Who needs a spleen.

Who needs a spleen, who needs whatever, right? And that we're really at a point where, you know, it's unbelievable where we are in this issue and how crazy, you know, look, I mean, Dobbs was one thing. Right. But the extremist bans that have taken place and look, we're about to have, I think, a big moment in the election is that there's a very high likelihood that over the next few weeks, both the women of Florida and the women of Arizona are going to lose their rights in reproductive freedoms in the middle of the election, you know, and they're going to be replaced by some of the most extreme abortion bans in the country right now, live fire, you know, in the election itself. And I think it's going to have a really significant impact in making the danger of MAGA very proximate for people, not distant, not far away, but proximate, that this is a movement that's growing more dangerous and it's expanding,

it's not retreating. And I think that if both of those are implemented, I mean, Florida is going to be implemented right in the next few weeks. If Arizona is also implemented shortly afterwards, those two things could start to change the election in ways that, you know, that will be advantageous, I think, to us. Because if fear and opposition to MAGA has been the most powerful force in our politics since 2018, when these moments come where MAGA becomes manifestly terrifying and dangerous, it shifts the election. It's part of what happened in 2022. And so we could be entering a very critical phase in the general election over the next few weeks. They always called me rain cloud on campaigns. All right. Now, I lost most of the campaigns that I worked on. So I always pushed back and said I was reality cloud, not rain cloud. I was warning people I was a Cassandra.

So, you know, maybe our nature might be a little different here. Basically, I agree with everything you said so far. I think things are getting better for Biden. Things are moving in the right direction. I think there are a lot of fundamentals that are going to work in his favor. And yet, like there are some things that concern me. Biden's approval rating is still at 35. 73% say Biden's too old to be president.

Here's the one that's the most concerning for me. Do you generally remember the years that this candidate was president as good, bad, or not really good or bad? This is a recent Times poll. Biden's is 25, good, 27, not really good or bad, 46, bad. Trump was 42, good, 23, not really good or bad, 33 bad. So that part is the one that I'm like, man, people have the data and they have diluted themselves into remembering the Trump era as differently than it is. That's the part that concerns me. Does that not worry you? I think that we, I think, have a reflex to kind of flush the disruption of COVID out of our mental understanding of the world. COVID was a massive disruption to the country. It was a terrifying period in our history.

Biden is going to have to argue that he was elected in 2020 to get us to the other side of COVID, and he did so successfully. And then on the fundamental promise he made to us that he obligated and met it. And I think that's going to have to become, I think, more central to their, because of the things you're talking about, right? And he's going to have to remind people about how terrible everything was when he came into office. The economy was crashing. The vaccines hadn't been distributed. There had just been the first not peaceful transfer of power in American history. The city, our city, Washington, was essentially under military occupation for 50 days. And he's going to have to talk about how things have gotten better. I mean, I think this is going to be really, really important to us. But I think that part of what he's dealing with is that there is just this hangover from COVID that like things got crazy. And that's why these campus protests and

these other things, the sense of unsettlement, the Republicans are so desperate for a 1968, like either urban riots or student disruptions, right? Because in the history of the Republican Party, their great run of success came after 67 and 68, which had urban unrest and student disruption. Well, here, worry work, Tim, here. Aren't you worried a little bit about that? I mean, that is kind of happening. Yeah, but it's happening on a very minor scale. This isn't 1968, right?

I mean, the Vietnam War had been going on for years. It was not publicly popular. The truth is, if you look at the Harvard IOP poll for young people last week, the gold standard poll, you know, they asked the most important issue, Israel-Gaza was at the bottom, right? I mean, there's a handful of people that this really matters for, but for the overwhelming majority of young people, overwhelming majority of Democrats, this is not a central issue and it is unlikely to be a central issue in the election, because things like loss of bodily autonomy and loss of democracy and healthcare and the economy

will matter much more to people than Israel-Gaza, which is a distant and faraway thing. However, let me just come back to what you were saying. Part of the reason I'm optimistic that during the campaign we can address and fix the concerns that you have is that in the Wall Street Journal poll, which was not a great poll for us a few weeks ago in the states, they asked, how do you think the economy is doing nationally and how do you think it's doing in your state? And in every one of the battleground states, a majority of people said things are good in my state and things are good here. And it isn't a big leap to be able to then say, well, they're good here because of Joe Biden.

And particularly when you have a Democratic governor making that case and the entire Democratic establishment in the state, we have Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Arizona, right, in North Carolina, and we don't in the other two battlegrounds, right? But we do have a big, important democratic establishment in Las Vegas and Nevada. And so I think that the underlying ability for us to say, hey, you know how you think things are good here? Well, it's happened because of our economic strategy. And I don't think that's like the hardest thing to do in a campaign. So yeah, look, we have work to do. I'm not being Pollyannish here. I mean, the election's tied. I don't think

anybody should be happy with that right now. Some of our coalition is wandering. We got to go get them back. You agree with that. You're not doing poll trutherism here. You agree that the election's basically tied right now. So just really quick, though, you talked about how the Biden team seems very calm. I forget what word to use, or sanguine about things. Quietly confident. Quietly confident. Yeah. That worries me a little bit, because I've heard from high-level Biden people,

personally, and in the New Yorker article, we interviewed Evan Osnos about this, where there are high-level Biden people that think the polls are broken, that do think that they're misrepresenting the reality. And I don't really share that view. I think this has been a little bit kind of not, and I've been accused of poll trutherism, right, by people. I was not accusing you. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. So I'm aware. Let me try to explain the reality of this versus sort of the caricature of this, right? The reality is that I think there's a quiet confidence that once we push the chess pieces forward, that Joe Biden's a good president, the country's better off, we have a strong case to make, we're raising tons more money than they are, our party's very unified,

right? You know, we've been winning elections all across the country. When voters have had to go vote, we keep overperforming expectations. They keep underperforming. And then there's their dumpster fire shit show on the other side, right? Where the RNC is completely broken, broken. There's an unprecedented rebellion against the Republican nominee and the likes of which we've never seen in our lifetime. You're talking about the primary vote? Yeah, well, no. I mean, all of you, right? I mean, Romney, two former Republican vice presidents, Republican nominee of the party, right? Many other Republican party leaders are open. Chris Christie this week just said, there's no way I'm voting for Donald Trump. We've never seen that kind of open rebellion

against the nominee of one party. And I think, as you know, the whole premise of your work is that in creating this permission structure for Republicans to not vote Republican, we have more powerful tools to do that than we've ever had. And it's why I'm, you know, I think that this never Trump or never MAGA wing of the party is going to be, you know, this is an existential threat to Trump in 2024, because I think something broke inside the Republican party with Dobbs. And that for many Republicans, it was just like, okay, this is a bridge too far, we've gone too far, the party's become too dangerous. And what you've seen happen in virtually every election since the spring of 2022, is that Democrats have overperformed

expectations and Republicans have underperformed and struggled. That has happened in 2022. It happened throughout elections in 2023. It's been happening in 2024 by Trump's, because I think as people go through the process of having to vote, right, where they go from being a registered voter to a likely voter to a voter, right, that process. When they start looking at MAGA, the ugliness of MAGA is causing Republicans to both lose votes and to lose money. There is a hard dollar fundraising crisis in the right now that I think is a much bigger issue than is being reported on, because I think that a lot of the Republicans that have

become loosened, I'm not saying they're going to vote a lot of the Republicans that have become loosened, I'm not saying they're going to vote for us, right? But have become loosened from the Republican Party are the people that wrote the $500,000 checks. The establishment Republican Party was the hard dollar fundraising base for the Republican Party. And you're seeing discrepancies now in hard dollars being raised that we've never seen before in these elections. And I want to remind your listeners and your viewers that you can't make up hard dollars with super PAC dollars because of what's called the lowest unit rate, right? In Las Vegas in 2022, to match a super PAC had to spend $7 for every dollar we were spending in hard dollars. So for Trump to match what Biden's about

to do in hard dollars, they're going to have what Biden's about to do in hard dollars, they're going to have to raise three, four, five times more than Biden does with super-packed dollars. And that's not going to happen, right? And so I think this financial advantage we have is very significant. So long story short on your question, I think there's a quiet confidence that when you play all this forward, the fact that Biden's been successful, Trump's the ugliest political thing we've ever seen, over time should allow us to win this election. And what they're saying about the current polling is they don't believe the current polling is reflecting the reality of an informed electorate that's going to be hearing from the campaign, right? And what's the evidence of this? The evidence of this is, to your point, is Trump's repeated underperformance of public polling in

these early primary states, which is an example of that process where people are going from a voter to a likely voter to a actual voter, and they have to go through the process of thinking on what they're going to do. And when they go vote, Trump falls and loses ground. That is still, to me, the likely scenario of what's going to happen in the fall, that people just, he's too ugly, it's too much, it's too far, and Biden will win. But, you know, we got a long way to go and a lot's going to happen between now and then. And we have a lot of work to do. I think there's smart folks out there that look at that same data, look at the recent

election since 2022. The Democrats, there's no doubt Democrats have been on an unprecedented streak of overperforming in these midterms, the special elections across the board. Some people say that might be more about the nature of the coalition, that the Democrats have kind of coalesced the most hyper engaged voters, you know, and this new my people, the people that have left the Republican Party that used to be independents have gone to the Democrats, they hate Trump so much, they'll turn out to a pointless primary to vote for Nikki Haley, just to give them a middle finger. And that a general

electorate is a different group of people that maybe Trump might have more appeal to, folks that are less engaged, less whatever. What do you say to that kind of case? I know the argument, and I don't really agree with it. And I don't agree with it for a couple reasons, right? One is that since 1992, there have been eight presidential elections, and we've won more votes than seven of them. We can't say we on this podcast, we're going back eight presidential elections, because we are on the opposite side on some of those. Okay, okay, on some of those. So the Democrats, the Democrats, sorry.

That's okay. Point taken, the Democrats. And by the way, it is fun to be with you now and to be in this pro-democracy coalition that we're in now. It's exciting actually, right? To be, to hang out with all of you guys. So one is,

just to go through this, is that one is that the Democratic Party's success at the presidential level since 1992, we've been on an unprecedented run. No American political party has won more votes than seven out of eight elections before. And in the last four elections, we've averaged 51% of the vote. The last time we did that was in the 1930s and 1940s. So in actual voting, not in extrapolation of recent polling, and when people have gone to go vote, we're on the best presidential run that we've been in since the 1930s and 40s. And as you pointed out, we're also in an unnaturally successful run as a party in power, right? So we've been kicking ass in both now in recent years. And so Trump, I think, has a lot to overcome because those people have voted,

right? Those are not poll data. 51.4% voted for Joe Biden last time, right? So the second point about that is that what I think is missing from this whole school of thought is the impact of all this money we're raising from this higher educated, hyper engaged set of voters that are building the biggest campaigns that we've ever had, which are allowing us to control the information environment and also reach lower propensity voters in our coalition that we could never reach before because we just didn't have the resources. And so one of the reasons we're doing so well in these elections is because we have the biggest campaigns that we've ever had. And those campaigns and the grassroots that the Democratic Party has are pushing our performance in all these elections to the upper end of what's possible. And the most recent example of that was in New York three. In the special election in New York, public polling had us up two to three points, right? We won by eight in a district we had lost by seven and a half points just a few, you know, 16 months earlier. And we made 2 million phone calls in New York three,

which is the number of phone calls you make in like Michigan in the general election. Every Democratic household got five handwritten postcards. You know, and 175,000 households got five handwritten postcards. We've never been able to touch voters like this and reach voters like this because of the money that we're raising. And so I think the calculation, this whole school of thought about how the electorate gets bigger, you know, it gets better for Trump. I have a different take on it is that I think as the electorate gets more informed and gets closer to voting, Trump fades. I have a different take on the same data that we're seeing, and it leaves me more optimistic. Just this week, right, Joe Biden had the single best poll that he's had in the entire election, which was the Marist poll, a very highly ranked pollster, right, that had Biden winning by three

nationally and winning by six among likely voters. And what that is to me is that as voters move from that path of being registered to likely to voting, what you're seeing is this consistent pattern that things get worse for Trump as people go through that process. And I think that that's why this school of thought you're describing, I think, is not really accurately capturing what's actually happening with real voters. But we'll see. I mean, I could be wrong. Obviously, I don't think I am. But we'll see. You know, we're about to find out. You're warming my heart a little bit because the arguments here all resonate with me, right. There's a version of your argument that I find a lot weaker about like, oh, the polling companies aren't reaching certain people and that people

lie. I don't like that because 2022, the thing, it was you and Bill Kristol were both right about 2022 and it was because you were mostly following the polls. It was the pundits, it was the rest of us that were wrong because we were projecting midterms. Oh, there's always a late breaking wave in midterms or blah, blah. Like there are other factors and the polls are actually pretty good in 2022. Okay. Wait, can I just say one last thing on this argument? Because I think that it gets to people that have worked on campaigns versus people that write about campaigns or do data.

The idea that one party just keeps winning all over the place is not important, can only be articulated by people that have actually never worked on campaigns. Because the idea that winning is somehow simple and easy and people just show up versus you having to have a really good candidate and you have to have a strong argument you have to raise lots of money and you have to then go execute and produce good ads right this idea that there's some kind of like well you know higher income voters move to them and they just keep winning elections i mean i listen to people say this and i'm like you've obviously never actually worked in a campaign where 80 million things could go wrong, right? It's a clockmaker god view of the campaign, right?

Like there's some outside force and there's a data and everyone's ones and zeros and it just happened. Right, right. It's like, have you ever been around a really crappy candidate who's like really made big mistakes like Donald Trump, for example, right? Like Donald Trump's awfulness is actually, I mean, going back to what we were talking about earlier, if I can just make this point for your audience, is that part of what Tom Bonior and I did in 2022, we didn't dismiss polling, right? We just looked at lots of other things. I mean, I just had a meeting with Julie Merz, who's the head of the DCCC, to go through all the house races. We didn't talk about polling in the entire meeting because basically all the polls were really close. So we talked about all these other things, right? How's the candidate doing

on the stump? Are they performing well? Is the party holding? How good is the campaign team? How are the ads? How's the narrative? What's their bio, right? In the real world of politics, there are all these other things you look at to assess the health of a candidate or a political party. And in my analysis, I'm looking at all of those things because I've been doing this a long time, right? And when I look at all of that, I think we're going to kick his ass, is what I think, right? And is it based, is the polling there today?

No. But will it be as we inform the electorate? I think that's the likely scenario. I want to talk about one other group on this. You've done a lot of work at the Hispanic vote. When I think about the little worrywart side of me in my brain, the non-college Hispanic and black voters are one group. And that is going to matter in Georgia, particularly black voters, Nevada, particularly Hispanic voters, and Arizona, more Nevada. You've done a lot of work there. I'm curious your take on that demo. We're in a period of transition here, and we have to be humble about what we're seeing for a few reasons, right? One is that I think some of this is being driven

by the shutdown Democrat argument that Republicans made in 2020, which I think for younger men of color who were less well off, this stuff really stuck. And I think that Biden's team, when you look at the exit polls in 2020, we won COVID voters by three to one. Economic voters, which was the second category, we lost those voters by four to one, right? You know, Biden went into the White House in a structural deficit on the economy. He did not make a powerful connection to voters on economic issues. But that's okay, because we won the election, right? But it meant that he went in, I think, with a weakened position with many working class folks who felt that Democrats were trying to deny them the ability

to make a living, and particularly for Hispanics, because COVID was worse with the Hispanic community than any other community, right? More Hispanics had to work in in-person jobs, fewer have health insurance, right, all this stuff. So the way I describe this is that we need to reestablish ourselves as the party of economic opportunity, you know, to these voters who are wandering right now. I think it's unlikely that Black and Hispanic voters wander into Trump's camp and the Republican camp because he is the most profound racist that has appeared on our, in the country. He's the most profound anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, xenophobic candidate. And the amount of ammunition we're going to have to remind voters of his just historic racism is significant. So I think we have tools, right? Both in terms of

the economy for Black and Hispanic workers is better during Biden than any period in American history. And we're going to be able to make that case. The uninsured rate is lower for Hispanics than it's ever been. I mean, we have arguments to make, but I want to just say one really important thing, because I think there's, this has been lost in the Hispanic understanding in 2004, because Bush, you know, I started getting into all this Hispanic stuff during the Bush era, because Bush was really good on this stuff. Spoke a little Spanglish. Yeah, he spoke Spanglish, but there was also a desire and an intent to make a connection with the Hispanic community.

There were high-ranking Hispanic staffers, both in the Bush governorship and in the Bush White House. This was real for him. This was not BS. And so Bush represented a serious threat to us in that period. And you could make the argument that he became president in both 2000 and was reelected because of the Hispanic vote. Now, if you look at the Electoral College map and which states flipped, right? So my work in the Hispanic community began in 2002 as a response to Bush's strength and

performance in 2000. And in 2004, Bush got 44% of the national Hispanic vote. He won Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Mexico. And Republicans controlled five out of the eight Senate seats in those four Southwestern states and 14 out of the 21 House seats. And our net margin with Hispanic voters in that election as Democrats was 700,000. We won 700,000 more votes. In 2020, Joe Biden won Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, the first Democrat to do so since 1940, right? The Republicans don't control any of those Senate seats any longer. And we control 14 out of the 23 House seats. Since 2004, six states have shifted from Republican to Democrat, only

six, by the way, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia and Georgia. The shift in the Southwest is because of the Hispanic vote. Even though we're getting a slightly smaller share, it's a bigger electorate, right? So- In that total, right. So smaller percentage, but at more, more. So a smaller piece of a bigger pie is still more pie, right? And let me give you the number here. So in 2004, our net margin, right, was 700,000 votes. In 2020, it was 5 million. Wow. The party that's eroding with Hispanics is the Republican Party. It's not the Democratic Party. And because what's not being calculated, you cannot look at a very fast-growing part of

the electorate purely through share. You've got to look at net vote margins. And the truth is, our success with Hispanic voters has fundamentally altered the electoral college map and the political map in the United States. And I would argue that our success with Hispanic voters has been the most successful party-wide project of the Democratic Party over the last 25 years. And what we could happen in this election, I mean, Arizona, there's a possibility. The state is more democratic today than it's been since the 1940s, by the way. But we could flip both chambers in Arizona. And Arizona could now be looking more like Colorado, right? And, you know, what happened in California, right? Colorado and New Mexico are not even competitive battleground states any longer.

Bush won those states in 2004. You know that the Kerry campaign in 2004, Colorado was not a targeted state for the Democratic Party in the general election. That's how far gone it was. And now there is no Republican Party left in Colorado, right? So I think that people have to take a deep breath here about what's happened with Hispanics. It's actually been a very successful project. Is it being threatened by what's happening now?

I view it more as a challenge than a threat, meaning that we have tools, we've got to engage. And I still think that they've got a fundamental problem, which is their guy is an unbelievable racist and an unbelievable xenophobe, and that we have enormous ammunition to help inform an electorate that may not understand that about Trump in the coming months. All right, Simon Rosenberg, any one last injection of hopium? Anything else? Anything else we didn't get to? Yeah, listen, my basic take on the election for all of your viewers and listeners is that Joe Biden's been a good president. The country's better off. The Democratic Party is strong, winning elections, unified and raising tons of money. And what do Republicans have? They have Trump, who's the ugliest political figure that we've

ever seen in our lifetime, and a political party that looks far more like a dumpster fire than a well-oiled political machine. We may not be where we want to be, but in every way imaginable today, I would much rather be us than them. Amen, brother. How's that for some uplift, listeners? Simon Rosenberg, come back. Whenever I get too dark, please come back in a couple months. And unless you get dark too, then don't come back because that would really take people into a hole. Hope to talk to you soon. Thank you for all your work. Check out the Hopium Chronicles on Substack. I'm going to be back on the other side with a quick mailbag, and we'll send you into the weekend.

Peace. Take care, everybody. All right. How good was that? Simon Rosenberg. I want to have a cigarette after that conversation. Boy, we're feeling good. A little bit of house business for everybody. I do have a Spotify playlist. We have a couple thousand people that have signed up for it. We're putting it in the show notes every Friday for those asking about the outro songs. I mentioned on the pod, George Conway explains it all to Sarah Longwell. George's view on SCOTUS yesterday is a little bit different. I think worth your time. I also told George that I would pimp his hat that he's selling. It's at store.georgeconwayexplains.com. It says vote for Joe, not the psycho.

Get that hat. It looks good. That's going to look good. It's a nice beach hat for you here in the summer. Black out the sun and let people know what you think about Donald Trump. Also Bulwark Plus. You can go to the bulwark.com slash free trial to get Bulwark Plus and support us if you are up for that. One of the things you get as a live stream periodically, there was one last night with Mona Charon and Kim Whaley and some of the legal experts that give a, I think an even deeper dive into SCOTUS.

So if you want lots of SCOTUS, you've got that Thursday night bulwark with Mona Charon and George Conway explains it all. Go check both of those out. Okay. Quick mailbag. Taking one question. Met to this last week from Max.

He's a 17 year old college student. Thanks for listening, Max. Oh, and if you have a question for the mailbag, remember it's bulwarkpodcast at thebulwark.com. Max asks, my campus is a highly politically active school, but also extremely left radical. I'm a leftist who identifies closest to Bernie Sanders, but I want to be highly active in organizing for Biden this year. So my question is this, how should I motivate my leftist peers, not only to vote for

Joe Biden, but also to campaign for him too? Man, that's a good question. In a lot of ways, you might have thoughts on that last part more than me. But I can give some perspective on how to help motivate leftist peers to get to Joe Biden. And sadly, it's the same way that a lot of people are being motivated these days. It's through negative partisanship. I think that, you know, a lot of those folks like you're 17, you know, there's no memory of pre-Trump for 17 year olds. And so I think really highlighting all the dangers and all the threats of Trump and kind of reminding people about that, since it's not as fresh in their mind. Shoot, if you're 18, even when Charlottesville happened, you're in middle school, right?

Elementary school, you know, so some of this stuff was not at the top of your concerns. And so I went on Dan Savage's podcast. We'll put that in the show notes too. Sex and politics. Dan is a longtime progressive activist, gay rights activist, also does sex advice if you're in need of any of that. And I went on his podcast and he had a listener call in and ask this very question. And him and I went off for about 15 minutes, if you want the long version of what the case is. I think it's especially compelling to send to friends because Dan pushed back on this argument that's the lesser of two evil arguments. Saying that he's a little older than me. And so he lived through the AIDS crisis. And he's like, I voted for Democrats who did not want me to have a right to marry, who did not want to address the AIDS crisis as quickly as possible,

who supported don't ask, don't tell Bill Clinton, and enacted DOMA, Defensive Marriage Act, Bill Clinton. And he did it because progress takes time. And, you know, sometimes you do have to choose lesser of two evils. So I don't think Joe Biden is evil. But if you're talking to people who do, I think that's a compelling argument. Because if you look at the other side of this, we just talked on this podcast about the Idaho law, the risk to women in a Trump administration, you know, in some of these states having zero week abortion bans, where if you have an ectopic pregnancy that and you have a risk of your life, some doctors are going to be scared to do it because they don't want to get prosecuted. And that's crazy. Even if you're pro-life, that's crazy. You know, the risk to these vulnerable

women is in a Trump administration is insane. The risk to trans folks in a Trump administration and the new rules that would go into place targeting trans folks are extreme. The risk to immigrants, he's promised deportation camps, okay, the risk to migrants. So, if you're a progressive voter that cares about vulnerable communities, think about poor women that live in Alabama, Idaho, Arizona. Think about migrants on our border. Think about, probably not gays so much, but, you know, trans and non-binary people that are dealing with gender dysphoria. Think about the potential threats to them. Think about the potential threats to our whole democratic system. You know, that's a little bit more esoteric. But, you know, I think that the tangible threats to real people that your friends on these campuses are going to know are as great as they've ever been in any election. You know, you can say what you want about Mitt Romney

or Bob Dole, but the threats to the well-being of marginalized people was not nearly as great in those elections than it is in 2024. With Donald Trump coming to the White House and with these little guys, like I showed earlier, Charlie Kirk and Curtis Yarvin and Stephen Miller, you know, wanting to essentially turn America into a urbanist, quasi-fascist state where they can target their foes. The threat is too great. We need young people turning out for Joe Biden. They can turn out for Joe Biden and also express displeasure with Joe Biden over Gaza or over anything else they disagree with Joe Biden on. That's fine. That's part of the American system. So go check out that Dan Savage podcast if you want a longer version of that.

Hopefully that's helpful. You can send people to me if they live in a swing state. I'll take them one at a time. If they live in, you know, Oregon, whatever. They can vote their conscience. Max, I hope that's helpful. Everybody else, thanks so much

for being with us on the Bulldog Podcast. Another great week. We'll see you back here on Monday. Enjoy your weekend. Enjoy your hopium. Get some sunshine. See you all soon. Peace. Mom's doing the best that she can Takes hope in a hopeless world

Heard his son stayed in school Listened to his mama never drag or use Get every job he wants, gets refused Takes hope in a hopeless world Looking for hope in a hopeless world Try to find love in such hateful times Try to stay strong but my mind is weak Looking for hope in a hopeless world Now the churches are full

The plans are not heard Saturday's child Don't want to go to Sunday school Now what have happened To the golden rule Is a hope in a hopeless world. You've got to call upon a hopeless man. It's barely change for the soldiers who fought the war. Put a little money in those hats and those tins Give them hope in a hopeless world Looking for hope in a hopeless world Shot a bottle of love in such hateful times

I just stay strong when my mind is weak Looking for hope in a hopeless world Looking for hope in a hopeless world Trying to find love in such hateful times I'm a steady storm but my mind is weak Looking for hope But I'm hopeless We can't be standing still the bulwark podcast is produced by katie cooper with audio engineering and editing by jason brown