Making Sense of Trump's Win
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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Tommy Vitor. So, guys...

Tough day. Emotional support animal on my lap right here. Leo's here. Let's get to it. Donald Trump won. He won all seven swing states. He's projected to win the popular vote by about one and a half points when all the counting is finally done. Republicans will take control of the Senate.

Maybe with 52 seats when all is said and done, Melissa Slotkin, Tammy Baldwin, and Ruben Gallego, seems like they're going to hang on in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Unclear if Jackie Rosen in Nevada will be able to hang on. The House looks extremely close and will not be decided for a few weeks until they count all the votes here in California, which often takes a few weeks. Trump's win was quite broad.

He improved on his 2020 performance in almost every county among every demographic.

So a majority of the country that includes all ages, races, genders, religions, and political beliefs chose four more years of Donald Trump, either because they like him or they like his agenda, or they don't see him and his agenda as enough of a risk, or they voted for him based on battering complete information. Those are the options. Or they hated Democrats. Or they hated, yeah. And it's probably a different mix for each voter, but we just don't know yet.

One thing we do know is that since the pandemic and the record inflation it caused, incumbent leaders all over the world have been losing, incumbents of all political persuasions on nearly every continent. And I just say that as a factual background for context in the political environment we're in right now. With all that said, what are your thoughts on what went wrong in this election? Who wants to start? Dan?

Oh, thank you. You were about to speak, so I figured let's go. That was me trying not to speak, but we're going to get to this moment anyway, so here we are. I think you hit on the most important point, which is this is a brutal political environment. And the polling was telling us this for years now. Three quarters of voters think the country's on the wrong track. Two thirds are unhappy with the economy.

In the exit polling, 45% of voters said that their family's personal financial situation was worse off than it was four years ago. The incumbent president has an approval rating of about 40 or 41%. Those are all of the elements in which an incumbent party loses an election. And then you add to the fact that our nominee, who I believe ran an incredible campaign under incredibly difficult circumstances, has been the nominee for about 110 days, I think.

It was introduced to the public as a largely unknown figure, despite being the vice president of the United States, with 110 days to go against a former president who was running his third consecutive presidential election. He has been running for almost 10 years now straight. And she had to try to mount a campaign in 109 days. And the country shifted to the right.

across the board, right? And as you point out, in every state except Washington State and Utah, Donald Trump did better than he did in 2020. He cut the margins by double digits in places like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, the bluest of states. And so this is a very big thing, and there will be a ton of second guessing and nitpicking and all of that, but we have to recognize the political environment we're operating in

and the changes in the country politically over the last four years. And it's really, the changes have been going on since 2016, that we were able to win in 2020 by a tiny bit, but we've been moving in this direction for a while now. And it, it came home in a really brutal way, uh, last night. Tommy? Yeah. I mean, I think Dan put it well. I mean, the, the, the one thing I just wanted to tell folks is just to be, I really want to know what happened because I want the, to do some personal soul searching and the party do soul searching to fix this and to

do better next time. But I think we just have to tell everyone that we're going to do our best to sort through the information that's available, but it's kind of exit polls that are spotty at best. It's county by county data. And in a few months, there's going to be much more granular data that will almost certainly upend a whole bunch of the narratives that you see in the next few months about why Kamala Harris lost.

And so, you know, everyone just approached this with some humility and realized that anyone who tells you they know exactly what happened or why Kamala Harris lost or that it was the VP pick or Gaza that did it or he did Joe Rogan and she didn't. Right. Like those are be skeptical of those people. I think.

Dan's point about the fundamentals is probably the most important one which was you had a right track wrong track number There was historically bad you had Joe Biden's approval rating. That was very bad You had a candidate with a hundred days to introduce herself to the country And those are very difficult headwinds and Trump was able to take the mantle of the anti-establishment candidate at a time when voters were really really mad and

And he could also point to the economy in his first three years in office and say, things were better then. Why don't we go back to that? And that was a powerful, simple message. Yeah. I mean, what I was thinking about this morning is, okay, the case we made against Donald Trump.

was true the truth is the truth that was a strong and valid case both against laying at the feet of Kamala Harris the frustrations people have with inflation which was global which was following a once in a generation pandemic and the risk that Donald Trump would pose in a second term that case was valid it was a case made broadly and what I think we have to figure out now is

millions and millions of Americans who agree with our concerns about Donald Trump, who agree that he has terrible character, that he has terrible traits for leadership, decided that their concerns about the economy, their anger at the establishment was enough to justify taking that chance. And there'll be a lot of reasons for that. There'll be a lot to unpack about why that happened. But what I was thinking about this morning is only

As Democrats made that case, a lot of people didn't listen.

they may not listen because they don't trust democrats they may not listen because the media environment is so fractured that they either don't hear it or they hear it translated through a propaganda apparatus that makes it unintelligible whatever the reasons those are the places where i i i see places where we have to figure out uh how to sort of attack problems because if the case against donald trump was true we all continue to believe that millions of americans didn't buy it and

I think that points to the importance of investing in progressive media. I think that that will cause some reflection about how Democrats speak to voters and who are our messengers. But I think the details of that and how we think about that will take time to unpack. That's where I'm at. I want to echo what Tommy said about sort of definitive takes right now. She says, like, even when we get.

So just so everyone knows how this works, there's two organizations, one called Catalyst, one called Pew. And they, in a couple months from now, they will have the whole voter file and they will match up the voter file to the actual results. And you'll be able to get like a really granular look at who's

who voted and why they voted and you can dive into the demographic groups and stuff like that. Those are almost always different than the demographic splits in the exit polls that we got for last night, which is why we're being cautious. Even when we have that data, by the way, it's still hard to untangle all this shit. It's not gonna give us any easy, simple explanations. So again, caution, don't buy a simple explanation here.

Exit polls are, I think, useful not for which demographic voted which way. They're good for sort of the broader questions about the attitudes among the electorate, right? Which is, you know, Dan was mentioning how people only, I think, 45% said that their financial situation is worse. Only 25% said their family's financial situation is better than four years ago. Also, 75% said in the last year, inflation has caused them either severe or moderate hardship.

So there was this big, you know, we've, you've heard us debate this for years now where it's like, well, maybe people think that the economy is bad because the news is telling them the economy is bad and Republicans are telling the economy is bad, but really their financial situation is great. Not true. Not true. Most people, at least according to the exit poll and almost every other poll that we've seen in the last several years are saying I've faced financial hardship because of inflation.

Just a few other stats from the exit polls that jumped out to me. So Kamala Harris's approval rating in the exit poll, 48-51. It's a pretty good approval rating in American politics today. Donald Trump's approval, 44-54. So she was more popular than him.

And were Harris's views too extreme? 46% said yes. 51% said no. Were Trump's views too extreme? 55% said yes. 43% said no. So likability, favorability, extreme ideology. These were not what defined vote choice for people. Joe Biden's approval rating, 40%.

disapproval 58 and then the second most important candidate quality who can bring needed change donald trump on those voters 73 to 25 73 to 25 economic so again again we don't know exactly what the explanation is but a lot of it is pointing to you know you had an unpopular president because of inflation and she couldn't overcome it yeah i i do think that like you know

There are a lot of, and I hope nobody's paying attention, a lot of people kind of, just as on the left, I think it is worth discounting people who are talking about how much this result confirms their priors. I think we see a lot of people on the right doing all kinds of victory laps and ascribing this victory to their personal set of issues and reasons for their own involvement. But as of right now, and again, we will see, this looks much less likely

Like a vote for Trump than a vote against people's frustrations with the current administration and the current economic conditions than it does like any kind of embrace of Trumpism or Trump remaking America or any of the grand and sweeping conclusions that some would like to draw.

One place you can look for early demographic shifts is the county by county results, because even if a sub sample and an exit poll isn't enough to make judgments, you know, if there's a county that is heavily Latino, young, it's a college town, right? You can start drawing some inferences. Dan, it does seem that the trend that happened between 2016 and 2020, which is Trump gaining ground with Latinos, as he did between 2016 and 2020, has also accelerated again.

And that's, again, not just from the exit polls. That's just looking at these heavily Latino counties all across the United States. What's your take on that? Yeah, that seems clear. I want to be very skeptical of the exit poll top line numbers for any of the demographic groups and be particularly skeptical of either the subgroups because there are these numbers going around about, you know,

You know, how Trump did with Latino men or how he did with black men. In a state. In a single state. And then the second part is then when you get to states, you'll be very skeptical of that too. But if you look at, as you point out, you look at the county data, it is very clear that Trump made some gains over 2020. You look at Osceola County, Florida, which is right outside of Orlando, it is 50% Latino, 33% Puerto Rican.

And Trump gained about 14 points over his 2020 margin. You look all across the heavily Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley, huge shifts, double digit shifts in those counties. Same thing in New Mexico. And so all across the board, you're seeing it.

I don't want to say though that we know the magnitude of that. We're going to have to wait for the Pew and Catalyst data to truly understand that. But it seems very clear that he made significant gains. And that's why you're seeing these Latino heavy states, Texas, huge shift. New Jersey, huge shift. New York, huge shift. We'll see what happens in California. But if you look at the performance of the other states, reason to be worried about a shift there. And so it is very real. We spent a lot of time debating this.

This over the course of the last couple of years, like what was real, what wasn't. He made huge gains in 2020. He clearly made more gains in 2024. And that is electoral checkmate if those trends continue. Right. Absolutely. At a presidential level and really a Senate level, too, because it puts states that we need like Arizona, Texas, eventually Nevada, if the trends continue out of reach and there aren't enough states to get anywhere to even sniff 50. Right.

Yeah, a friend of mine sent me some details from Lawrence, Massachusetts. Right. So Massachusetts, obviously not a competitive state, not a lot of ads running there, not a lot of field programs, not near the border, not part of the complicated multicultural Florida political scene.

Clinton got 82% of the vote in 2016. Biden got 74% in 2020. Harris got 57% of the vote in Lawrence, Massachusetts this cycle. Is Lawrence heavily Latino? 80% Latino. My cousin's a teacher there. Lawrence is 80% Latino. So that tells you the sort of story. And then, you know, the CNN exits found...

seven in 10 Hispanic voters said the economy was not so good or poor. And 40% said the economy was their top issue. So it seems like, you know, again, you're right, Dan, we don't want to take too much from these subsamples, but there's clearly a problem of erosion of Latino support in the party generally. And there was a particular emphasis on the economy and the exits. This podcast is sponsored by the Washington Post. If

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Can you guys think of another explanation aside from the pinch of inflation and the fact that wages have not outpaced inflation in most parts of the country over the last four years when Trump's shift is so uniform? Like every kind of county, rural, urban, suburban, like what other explanation do you have?

Are you guys thinking about are there any other explanations that we're missing here? Because I just it the fact that it's so uniform and that it was in so many counties and so many across so many demographic groups just makes me think that it's it's hard to pinpoint like one single issue that doesn't affect every person. The only one is anti-establishment. You know, we hate Washington and that guy seems like the one who's going to burn it down. Yeah, I think that's right. And

Yes, I believe inflation is the major driving force here. We're seeing it replicated all over the world. It's obviously happening here as well. There's a way to make that a crutch that allows us to avoid some of the tougher conversations because just the mere presence of inflation does not mean that we should lose on that issue. We have better policies for it. And so we have lost trust as a party.

Across a wide swath of issues. And we have to address that part of it. Because if the idea is inflation has come down significantly, it will continue to come down. We can't just bet on a lower price of eggs in 2026 as our strategy to take the Senate back. We're going to have to confront why people found Trump interesting.

such a compelling solution to that problem. If we had just won by a, you know, in a, we've lost a point here in the battleground states points here, that would have been one thing. But when you see the shift, particularly in the parts of the country where there was no campaign, where we actually waged a campaign and ran ads, it moved. It's a, I have the stats here. Yeah. In the battleground states, Harris underperformed 2020 by 1.6 points.

In the non-battleground states, she underperformed by 3.9 points on average in the state. Right. Which just goes to tell you something that like the campaign...

worked well. Didn't work well enough. But like, the campaign mattered in the places where she campaigned, where they spent money on ads, where they organized, where they knocked down doors. They did better, which tells you how bad the national political environment is. Yeah. So I think that's important. And then I also think you look at like the delta between

kamala harris and some of these senate candidates and how they ran their races even races where you lost like dan osborne or how far ahead john tester ran against kamala harris and you start to see okay there is to dan's point i mean this was talking about earlier like there is this you know there

There are millions of people who are just not listening to Democrats. They don't either, I think like years of correct anger and fear about Trump becomes kind of the noise of Trump. I think that is a problem. And then yes, like how are we the messengers on inflation when people simply don't believe that we'll deliver?

And that's a vicious circle, right? Because we've now lost power. We're now even less of a position to deliver on what we claim would be a better agenda. But like, that's, I think the, the hard work we now have to do to, to find places where we can build power and demonstrate a reason to put trust in Democrats. Just, just off that point you made, John, I did want to address the elephant in the

Crooked Media and Pod Save America, which is the entire goal of this company after 2016 was designed to encourage people to get more engaged in politics and run for office and knock on doors and volunteer. And after a result like last night, it is easy to feel like, did any of that matter? And I certainly feel it too. And in my darker moments, you know, like wonder if anything a campaign does matters in an environment like this. But I do think it's, again, worth pointing out that

Trump did better in non-battleground states than battleground states, which suggests that this stuff matters on the margin. But more importantly, look down ballot. Because where you see Democrats winning by very small margins, like Alyssa Slotkin in Michigan or Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, that is where years of organizing really did matter. All of our donations to the Wisconsin Democratic Party, that really mattered. And so, you know, I think...

It sucks right now. I understand people want to throw up their hands and never be a part of the political process again. But I do think that people fighting made an impact. Yeah. And I think that's another piece of evidence that, yeah,

This was an economic problem and people blame the top of the ticket for bad economic conditions. And they don't necessarily blame their senator, their house member, their governor, because we have popular democratic governors across the country. We had a bunch of democratic senate candidates who did well. We have a bunch of democratic house candidates. Both the senate and the house candidates outran the top of the ticket, right? And so...

there are definitely questions we need to answer as a party to like regain trust with people. But we have, we have democratic candidates in tough States who win, you know? So Harris had a great convention. She won the debate, impressed undecided voters and focus groups. She closed strong rallies were packed. Any lessons about the campaign or, or thoughts about her campaign things they could have done better or,

assessments of the campaign that, you know, either hold up in light of this result or don't? I kind of want to try to hold two independent thoughts in my head. One is that the political environment was such and the scope of Trump's win was such that the idea that some sort of tactical or strategic miscalculation is why this happened is an absurd proposition, right? I think she ran, wasn't a perfect campaign, but she ran a hell of a campaign, right? They were very smart people. They did the best they could under impossible circumstances. Having said that,

I think we should take a step back, not just look at the Harris campaign, but the last three presidential elections and recognize that as a party, we are struggling mightily to communicate and persuade less engaged voters. We crush in midterms. Who happen to be the most economically vulnerable. Yes.

But we are not reaching them. And that's actually borne out by the fact that on a day-to-day basis in life, they are getting in the states where they're not seeing a billion dollars of Democratic ads, they are clearly getting Republican messaging. So I think we have to look at two things, right? And I don't have answers to it, but we should be willing to have the tough conversations, question all of our priors. One is, it's just worth noting that we've invested all this money in field.

Right. We have put together massive operations run by the best people in the party in three consecutive elections. Trump has done no field. Yeah. None. Right. The idea that I will not for one second believe that Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk put together like a real plan. They did just they had organic turnout.

I'm not saying that we did anything wrong, but we should just like look at how things may have changed over the years, like what we could do. And the other one is communication, right? Like how do we reach these voters, right? In Trump's bizarre rambling speech last night, you know, Dana White gets up there because why wouldn't the head of the UFC speak at the presidential acceptance speech and talks about all the podcasts that Trump went on, the milk boys, Aiden Ross, all these people. I'm not saying we should do all those things. This is not about Rogan, but I'm

We are not on a day-to-day basis. We are not reaching voters or a certain set of voters organically. And we should spend a lot of time trying to figure out why that is and what we can do about it. Yeah. To Dan's point, I mean, my primary concern is just how we're able to take back the mantle of being the party for the working class, because I'm worried that we've lost it. And the Democrats too often talk about politics as like an intellectual exercise and not a thing that impacts people. But to your point about, you know,

Dana White's speech last night. I do think sometimes Democrats view campaigns and elections as like a math problem where you stitch together coalitions and field and policy and then you win. And like Trump did some of that, right? Like no tax on tips was like a discreet, savvy thing to reach an audience. And we know it was smart because Kamala Harris then stole the idea.

But I think big picture, Trump views politics as an exercise in dominating the narrative at all times. And he's found a savvy way to do that that creates no friction for him, which is constantly talking to these right wing influencers, podcasts, YouTube stars, whatever they may be. And there was a lot of conversation about like Joe Rogan or no Joe Rogan. I think that's a little bit secondary to the fact that he is.

doing constant care and feeding to shows that we even, people who are listening have probably never heard of, like Dan Bongino or PPD or like whatever these shows are called, but they have big audiences. They keep his base motivated and fired up.

Fox News is the elephant in the room here, but he helps them over time build out a massive, powerful right-wing media ecosystem that the Democratic Party just does not have. We run our stuff through the mainstream media traditional filter. We're getting better at talking to influencers, Instagram Live, YouTube, sports podcasts, etc. But Trump...

basically only did that and managed to reach the people he needed to meet. We need to think about communications in a new way. When you were talking about how as Democrats, we try to stitch together different things, I thought you were going to go this place, which is Trump has put together the most diverse coalition that a Republican president has had in our lifetime.

in this win. And if there's one thing that we are seeing and we saw it start happening a little bit in 2020 and it's happened more now,

People's racial, ethnic, gender identity are not the most salient factors in their politics. They're becoming less salient over time, I'll say. And I think that we as a party need to stop treating them that way. This party cannot be the sum of its identities and interest groups. There has to be a bigger message about improving people's lives,

The idea for a while that Latinos only care about immigration or black voters only care about criminal justice reform or women only care about reproductive freedom. It's patronizing. Yeah.

And it's just wrong. And we've got to have a message that reaches everyone, that everyone can see themselves in. Because if you're just piecing different things together, different groups together, and you're targeting every single different group here and there, you know, the message is going to get lost.

- Yeah, I mean, I actually think it goes to what Tommy was talking about as well. 'Cause really like, I think Tommy's describing kind of two now connected, but distinct ecosystems. One is the right wing,

purposeful political media apparatus. And Republicans have invested in that, conservative billionaires and wealthy backers have invested in that. Republican politicians are like supporting that right wing information system. And we at Crooked have been trying to build something of a countervailing force to that, but-

there is just no equivalent to the scope of what the right has. Then beyond that, you have this sort of right wing adjacent, less political,

set of shows, the Theo Vaughns and the Joe Rogans and a whole host of other shows. And I think it's worth thinking about, okay, wow, Donald Trump was smart to go on those places 'cause those were friendly places. I think it's worth asking, why are they so friendly? Why did those become places that were much friendlier to the right that feel like they are part of some kind of a counterculture? How did we give up that mantle? Like that is an incredible trick

that the right has pulled, right? They are somehow both counterculture and rebellious while pursuing some of the most old fashioned and traditional norms and social values that most people find puritanical and actually reject in their daily lives. And so like, how do we have that space that is a place where everybody feels comfortable, everyone wants to be a part of that doesn't, especially kind of younger people and,

Yeah. We've talked about appearing on these kinds of podcasts and these spaces that Trump and... But I think it's also a matter of like what Democrats say. Yeah. And how they say it. And I think it's telling that we could probably, I don't know, list on like two hands the number of Democratic politicians that we'd feel comfortable sending on Joe Rogan. One hand. One hand. I don't know if that's one hand. One hand. Yeah. I was being generous. I was being generous. And I think that's a big... Look, and...

Donald Trump, he got through all those podcasts. He was the best version of Donald Trump, for sure. Like J.D. Vance, you know, I saw some clips on him on Our Next Vice President. I thought you were going to give him a swirly in the middle of the thing. Yeah, he was pretty terrible. But he was terrible in a different way. Like there's still we still have a talking point thing because we're all so Democratic politicians are still on message.

which is a good thing, right? But the way it comes across in a setting like that is like you have to be able to mix it up and you can't be afraid that you're gonna say something that the rest of the party is gonna come down at you because you said it the wrong way, right?

And I think that is something that the Democrats have to think hard about as well. Well, people hate politics right now, and we sound like politicians. Yeah. And well, that's the other... This is the other big challenge, I think, that the party faces. And I think this is not necessarily just a challenge of our own making, because we are facing an authoritarian movement in our country. And...

So when you fight an authoritarian movement, the instinct is to defend democracy. But and Dan, you've talked about this, too. Like if we are always in the position of defending democratic institutions that most of the people in this country do not think are working for them.

then it's not going to work. Then we're going to be the defenders of a broken system. And Donald Trump and his folks are going to be the ones who are going to, they want to burn it down. We should at least be the party that doesn't want to burn the system down, but wants to fix it and wants to reform it. I would say I 100% agree with that. This is something we've all been screaming about since 2022. The Harris campaign, to their credit,

did not adopt. They abandoned the Save Democracy messaging that was so prevalent in the Biden campaign. But you have to go one step further. And this was probably an impossible position for her to be in as the

sitting vice president to the incumbent president taking over the reins with 100 some days to go is we have to become a party who wants to reform democracy. And that is getting money out of politics. That it's very I mean, it's getting out of politics. It's dealing with lobbyists. It's dealing with court with the influence of corporations like we have to take that on. And that becomes easier.

in the opposition, which is where we now are. - Yeah, that's what Bernie, when I interviewed Bernie, that's one thing I said, what do you wish Democrats were saying more here in the home stretch? He's like, I wish we were talking more about money and politics. I don't think we're talking enough about the corporate influence. What I had thought, we talked about this in the pod right before, which was that, well, if the polling era looks like 2020, Donald Trump could win all seven states. If the polling era looks like 2022, Kamala Harris could win all seven states. I did think that the connection between

you know, freedom and democracy as an abstract concept, that you could connect that to reproductive freedom and abortion, and that that would be real and tangible enough. I did. Like, that's what sort of my hope was, at least. I don't think I knew, but that was my hope. I just think about, like, our experience knocking on doors. You know, you talk about we can't just be the party of democratic institutions. We have to talk about reforming them. I just remember having this feeling, we all talked about it at the time, that, like,

When you're knocking on somebody's door and a working class neighborhood in a suburb of Las Vegas, and they open the door, you don't say like, hi, we're here because we're trying to defend freedom and democracy. And we're trying to reform our institutions. You say, Donald Trump is for a national sales tax. He'll make things cost more. Kamala Harris will make things cost less. And you get, you realize in that moment, just how simple and to the point and kind of

and non-abstract you have to be. And like, I think Democrats collectively on some level, we know that, but I think that our instincts, because I think our party is now the party of an educated cosmopolitan minority. It's also a place where people, I think instinctively, uh,

intellectual and intellectualized politics. And I think that is very dangerous. And I think it comes across in a lot of how we sound. I think that's been true for a long time. We've talked about it before. It's not new, but I think now we're facing in stark relief the effect, at least in part, of that problem. - Just a quick data point on the money thing.

A new set of super PACs revved up by the crypto industry spend $130 or $135 million this cycle, including dumping $40 million worth of negative ads on Sherrod Brown's head in Ohio.

That is an unbelievable amount of money, a disgusting distortion of our politics by a few crypto billionaires like the Winklevoss twins. We're talking shit about it on Twitter last night. It's a couple of the venture capital firms. I mean, like that kind of thing, I think.

would offend everybody. You know what I mean? Like 99% of the country is like, that is gross and wrong. And I do think that's something we need to run on and run against. I mean, Barack Obama, I think very effectively ran against money in politics in 2008. Fixing it will be a much bigger problem. The other just last sort of piece that I worry about for the Democratic Party is we have to get back to being the anti-war party again.

Again, this is my hobby horse. 4% of voters in exit polls said foreign policy made their decision. So people say this was just a Gaza vote. That's not true nationally. It's very true in some precincts in Michigan where you saw Donald Trump winning Arab American and Muslim American voters and Jill Stein getting second place and Harris taking third. But I think people were offended not just by the war in Gaza, but also...

concerned about the amount of money the US is spending on weapons for Ukraine. And we need to either think about a new way to talk about why that's important or why we're doing it, or refocus our foreign policy priorities. But I think, you know, you heard a lot of people say Donald Trump is going to be the guy who keeps us out of World War Three. And that is the opposite of the conversation in 16. Yeah, I also again, it's like,

democrats talking about you know protecting freedom around the world and people like but i like i who is going to bring cost down right like like where it's i don't so to me the point i'm only making is like yes i i think that what tommy's talking about is absolutely true but again a party that has trust on these economic issues is a party that doesn't necessarily feel unable to make the case about why democratic by why supporting democracies abroad and standing with our allies abroad is ultimately in america's interest

I think it's worth, because you just say like, oh, it needs to be about the economy or more about the economy. And it's so broad and ill-defined that it's almost useless to say that. Because I think the challenge here is, like Kamala Harris did talk about the economy a lot.

But there's a way to talk about the economy. And I think that, and this is a problem that the Democratic Party has had, like that predates Harris, Biden goes since we started in politics, right? Which is all the pollsters and the message testing people, they test an economic policy and it tests really good. And they're like, all right, this policy, talk about this policy. It's going to test really well. So then a candidate talks about the policy. It's one line about one issue. And we tend to think that our economic agenda is like a collection of like,

lines and policies that poll really well and it's not a theory of the case. Like, and the theory of the case can be, it doesn't have to be ideological in one way or the other. Like, Bernie Sanders, like, you know what he's about when he's talking about the economy, right? He's talking about the billionaires and the millionaires and the corporations. Barack Obama came up with a theory of the case. You know, the middle class was like the defining issue and there's wealth inequality and we're going to take on corporations who aren't playing by the rules, right? Elizabeth Warren has her version of it. You can go...

on and on and on. But you do need a story to tell. Even Joe Biden, I think in 2020, I think had a good, a good economic story that he was, that he told as well. But you've got to, you've got to have that story and like a collection of policies that look good in an ad that tests well is just like, it's just not going to cut it.

I think that's true. I also think we are also suffering from a generation of Democrats saying we're going to tax companies that bring jobs to America and stop giving tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas in a set of populist economic talking points that we've been saying forever that people feel like haven't been delivered on. And so I guess what I think back to when we were talking about

whether Joe Biden should step aside. And we're seeing these polls and we're sort of, we need a chance, we need a fighting chance to win this thing. And I think looking back on it, it was difficult to separate the flaws that Joe Biden had because of his liability around his age versus the flaws he was going to bring to this race as an incumbent. We just knew that both together probably spelled certain defeat. Over the past hundred days, we watched as Kamala Harris slowly fought back from

from those low numbers to put herself in a position to win. And we went into this seeing the numbers as being tied, and they were tied for the last couple weeks. Turns out, looks like there was a polling bias similar to the one we saw in 2016, similar to the one we saw in 2020. Smaller. Smaller, but still a bias, right? But a point or two in the swing states and maybe a point or two nationally. Yeah, it's about two points nationally. And I think what we have now seen, right, is that like...

whatever story she was telling. I'm sure there are ways in which the campaign could have done slightly better. I have no idea. But ultimately, I don't know what you could have said to overcome that weight of incumbency, right? Because part of what we're talking about here is it doesn't matter what she said. People didn't trust it. They weren't going to trust Democrats right now. And so what I think what we...

What we had hoped to see, right, is that could Kamala Harris overcome Joe Biden's liabilities? The answer is maybe she couldn't. And actually what we needed was somebody who wasn't an incumbent at all. That is not to say we didn't do everything we could and did the right thing in desperate circumstances to try to claw our way to some kind of a victory. But I think looking back on it now, I think that's what I'm starting to feel.

Kamala Harris, when this race started, Joe Biden had a 20-point deficit on the economy. He had a deficit on costs, sometimes as high as 30% in the polling. By the time this was over, Kamala Harris narrowed Trump's lead on the economy to four points. That is stunning progress. And she did that in 109 days, or whatever it is. I keep saying 109. Maybe it's 109. I don't know. Okay.

Basically, the number on who do you trust more in the economy ended up is going to end up being the popular vote delta. It's like Trump wins 51 47. That's that's about what I'm sorry. That's in some of these states. Yeah. The thing with like maybe you're right. Maybe we don't know is what she was being asked to do was virtually impossible in the period of time when she did it.

And so we just don't know if we would have had a better chance, right? Right. With if she'd had a year to do this or two years to do it or nine months to do it. Yeah. Or if, again, the other counterfactual here, which we could, we'll be debating forever. I'm sure we'll have time to do it. Is like if after the midterms in 2022, Joe Biden announced that he was not running again and then you had a real primary.

And you had a bunch of candidates and you did the whole thing and maybe Kamala Harris emerges, maybe someone else emerges. But I do think it is harder. It was harder for her to separate herself from Biden. Even you can talk about it tactically. The view answer obviously like broke through to a lot of voters. We saw this in polls and she could have handled that differently. But even if from day one she had tried to separate herself from Joe Biden, it's.

there's obviously a lot of reasons why that's hard to do but she was the vice president to joe biden to the to the unpopular incumbent and you if if it was someone else

that other candidate would have had to from the beginning in this primary, this imaginary primary rating, like said that Joe Biden didn't do well enough, right? Like, which is also something that it would be hard to imagine at the time. Like Joe Biden says, announces in 22, he's not running again. And then Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro and Kamala Harris, and they all, they all run against each other. And who's going to take the first shot at Joe Biden and say, we're from outside of the Democratic party at that point. Right. So that's what's, that's what's true. The thing, look, it's all counterfactuals. We don't know. I, I,

will go to my grave believing that in the situation in which we were found ourselves with 100 days to go, no one would have done a better job than Kamala Harris did.

in this race. That was not enough. That's because she was flying against tremendous headwinds. Yeah. I think we did not grasp how tremendous those headwinds were. Well, that's what I mean. I think it was impossible to separate Joe Biden's unique liabilities from the broader conditions and the polls being just a little bit off made it harder to see as well. The other point too is there'll be people that say, oh, she didn't do enough to separate herself from Biden. It is totally possible that we would have been sitting here right now. She had tried to run away from Biden.

It became the story is, is she different from Biden enough? And then the story we're sitting here right now is people trying to claim, oh, it's because Kamala Harris tried to create distance from Biden and it divided the Democratic Party. And that's why we lost. I just think these tactical explanations are going to be are just people are going to it's a choose your own adventure. I could because I'm older than everyone else. I worked for Al Gore. I knew this. And the critique at the end was that he did too much to separate himself from Bill Clinton. Exactly.

So no one fucking knows. Yeah. I think the thing that is true is that it was a mistake for Joe Biden to run for reelection. Yeah. Yeah. And that everyone took the wrong lesson from the midterms in 2022, uh, or not everyone, the white house took the wrong lessons from the midterms in 2022. And they didn't listen to obvious voter concerns about Joe Biden's age, uh, and anger at the economy. And that does not in any way guarantee that a messy, messy democratic primary would have led to a better outcome last night. Um,

But the thing about primaries that's great is it's where the rubber meets the road in terms of your message and your policy and your candidate quality. And voters get to tell you with their votes, not with polling, what they actually think. And, you know, I suspect we would have been in a better place because if you're not the current sitting vice president, it's a lot easier for you to say, you know what? I actually think the president's Gaza policy is really bad.

and I will take affirmative steps to end this war or find other creative ways to put distance between yourself and the administration that is like just frankly impossible when you were the VP and now you have 110 days to define yourself. - And more broadly, someone would have said, all right, my lane is gonna be the lane where I rip the shit out of Joe Biden for not doing enough about inflation. Oh no, look, maybe that caught fire with people. Maybe that resonated with people. Like we just don't know, but we were denied that opportunity to fight it out.

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This month is all about gratitude. And along with thanking family or friends, there's another person we don't get to thank enough. Ourselves. A little pat yourself on the back, you know? It's sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we're trying our best to make sense of everything. And in this crazy world...

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Looking ahead, a lot of people are pretty scared right now. We're facing another Trump presidency. We believe in what we were saying about him this whole election. It wasn't bullshit. So we're all worried. People are worried. It's going to be a Republican Senate, very likely to be a Republican House, though hopefully we can hang on. We don't know. Do you guys have sort of

parting thoughts on like what people can do because you know people are going to be coming out to be like what do we do are we going to be okay what should we do you know I lost a vote once on a show called Survivor and no but there's literally an oh my god from the back of the studio here that I think

What I was going to say is only this was, this was going to be a joke, but basically I remember when I, no, I can't do it now. One step at a time, you know, like,

We don't have to face every one of our worst expectations or concerns at the same time to figure out one day at a time. We have weeks now between this election and Trump's inauguration to think about the best ways to fight back. I remember what I said after Donald Trump the first time, and there are multiple places to put your concerns and anxieties that can make a difference. We have to...

Think about how in the short term, we blunt the worst impacts of a second Trump term. We have to think about the ways in which we can support organizations that are protecting vulnerable people.

And making sure that even as we try to fight Trump, we are doing everything to protect the people that might be hurt. And then the third is thinking about how to build political power over the long term to build a Democratic party, a progressive movement that I think after 10 years of fighting Trump, look, Donald Trump winning in 2016 was a great shock and it lit a fire. And we've been stoking that fire for a decade and people are tired. I know you're tired. We're all tired.

But a friend of mine texted me this morning and said, "Hey, I need you to tell me what I'm supposed to feel this morning." And I said, "Well, I need you to tell me what I'm supposed to feel this morning." And that to me was sort of the answer. Like when we started, when we did this the last time, Crooked Media didn't exist.

It was just the four of us. Dan wasn't there the day, the morning after we pushed my car to the side of the road. And when I came in this morning and I walked in, everybody was putting on a brave face for each other. Everybody was smiling and trying to be their model, what they hoped other people would see in them, right? And I feel like that's where I'm at right now, which is somebody's texting me, what do we do? And I need to help them find an answer. They need to help me find an answer. And day by day, we will start to figure out how to respond, but we don't have to take every single horror all at once. Yeah.

You asked me the first question here, which I objected to, but didn't answer it anyway. And I immediately defaulted to sort of an emotionally detached response, explanation for what might have happened, which is sort of- You? No. I know. Which is, I mean, that- That's why me and you get along so well. That's right. That's right. And so I do just want to say that

I know everyone listening is angry and scared and heartbroken and frustrated and just in some state of shock and that we all feel the exact same way and are still trying to process how this happened. We obviously knew and said for months that this was a coin flip election. Anything can happen. But the scope at which Trump won and the way he won is shocking. And it's scary because it says something about our country that we don't want to reckon with.

And we're going to spend a lot of time talking in the coming months about the dangers of what that means and the kind of President Trump will be and how we push back on it. But I just want everyone who's listening to know that we feel the same thing that you guys are feeling right now. And you're listening to us process it in real time on very little sleep. And we're going to be in your ears a lot in the future to sort of continue through that process with all of you.

Yeah, I mean, it's gonna fucking suck for four years. I mean, I there's no two ways about it. And I, I go to some really dark places about this stuff, in particular last night, you know, watching Trump's speech and then laying in bed and thinking about watching him for another four years and the goobers he's gonna put in his cabinet and RFK handling healthcare. It's just like, it's, it's horrific.

Um, and it reminded me of 2016 this morning. I got the same text. You did love it. If people are being like, what do we do? How do we fix it? And there again, then there was no easy fix and now there's no easy fix and there's no easy answer. It's just going to be a grind, you know? And in 2016 people were constantly saying like, this is not normal. You know, we're not like, this is not who we are. Well,

It is who we are for another four years, at least. A whole lot of people normalized them. A whole lot of people normalized them. And we're in a deep hole and we're gonna have to fucking battle our way out of it. And it's going to be awful. But the country has done this before. You know, if you think about the 60s, like JFK was assassinated. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Like,

Country went to a real dark place. Vietnam was raging like things have been really bad and we've come through it and so we just got to have some hope and keep plug in because No other choice. Yeah, I will say to everyone like we've all grieved and if you've if you've grieved a loved one, you know that there's no wrong way to grieve and

You can be mad, you can be sad, you can be numb, you can be darkly funny at times. And I do think as you are talking to other people in your life who are dealing with this, like giving everyone grace to sort of deal with this their own way. I know for one, like I don't wanna spend a ton of time blaming allies, people who are on our side and like yelling at them and fighting with them. We're gonna have a debate, we're gonna disagree. I think we can do so respectfully, but we're all on the same team here.

And if we want to figure this out, then I think we've got to, you know, we've got to be good to each other right now and in the months to come, because I think solidarity is important. I also want to be like very clear eyed about what voters want, what they chose.

and realize that here in a democracy, you have every right, if you want, to blame or scold your fellow citizens for their political choices, but that is just not the best way to persuade them to join your side and build a durable majority to actually win. So part of this in the next couple of years and months is gonna be talking with people and empathizing with people who do not share your views

and in fact have views that you might find terrible. And it's not necessarily because you want to be nice. It's because you want to be smart and build a political majority. And that's what politics is fundamentally. Also like,

you know, if you guys want to take some time off, unplug, not listen to us for a little bit, that's okay. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. It's understandable. We need to listen. We need to listen, yeah. But I do hope that everyone gets back into the fight eventually because that is literally the only chance we have to build the society that we want is to get up every day and try to do better.

And, you know, love it. I think you like the saying, when we fight, we don't always win. Well, right. Well, that's the problem. If we don't fight, we definitely win. Right. It was the tragedy. It was the fallacy of the converse. If we don't fight, we lose. Right. We don't always win when we fight. And that's an important lesson.

Today. What do you guys think happened to the 13 keys? You didn't see what happened? Yeah, well. He was doing a live stream and had a tough one. I just, you know, to John, there was one, I was thinking also about. Missing a key. We're missing a couple keys. The punnies are going to be wild this year. I lost my keys. Anybody find a set of keys? The keys, set of keys found in the parking lot. Like,

Kamala Harris talked about joy. And I do think part of what made the last hundred days give us a sense of hope was seeing that joy. And that is not invalid because we lost. If there's anything that I find

noxious and awful about what Trump represents. It is the way he wants everyone to dislike everything and everyone except him. He turns his supporters, not just against us, not just against Americans, turns them against Disney, football, baseball. I mean, just that he wants a country that is angry and at each other's throats. And I do think like, especially in the next couple of weeks, but even beyond, like we can't let Donald Trump

make us the angry and awful versions of ourselves that he wants us to be. Not just because it is bad for our souls, but because we have to be a movement people want to join. And one of the ways we do that is not becoming kind of weird, online, broken fucking weirdos because we're so sick of Donald Trump.

And like, you know, let's be honest, obsess over him all the time, which, by the way, is going to be hopefully easier now that he is a lame. He's going to be a lame duck president. Yes. And so I think it's going to force Democrats to actually come up with a theory of the case that does not just revolve around Donald Trump. And, you know, I just take it back to there's gonna be a lot of takes already, like.

you know, is door knocking and organizing, useless and all this kind of... Like, I do not regret at all and will still look back fondly on the two days we spent in Arizona and Nevada just this last weekend, even though we are dealing with this horrific result today. Because...

talking to all of you that have come out to these events, Vote Save America, everyone else who's volunteered, and just being with people in person, talking about politics, getting energized, and then knocking on those doors, right? We knocked on doors of middle-class folks in a suburban neighborhood in Vegas, working-class Latinos, Asian-Americans, and a working-class part of Las Vegas, Mesa, Tempe. And it's like, you just realize...

when you're out there talking to people, like people, they just want a government that's gonna like make their lives better and just like, and like fight for them. And all the bullshit,

None of them knew about the Ann Seltzer poll. Ann Seltzer poll. May her memory be a blessing. Yeah. None of them knew about the Madison Square Garden thing. She's being distributed across Des Moines as predicted. Right? They just want, some of them just didn't even know, like, okay, who's running? Donald Trump and that new woman, what's she stand for? Like, politics can be that simple. And it can be that, and also like in convincing people can be like that, that's how you win. Can't believe we're going to have to watch Donald Trump give the presidential medal of freedom to Tony Hinchcliffe.

That's a fucking bummer. Oh, but it's going to get worse from there. Don't worry. Yeah. Seems like a good place to end it. Think about the Elon Musk Medal of Freedom ceremony. I can't. I can't. All the worst people are having a great day. All the best people are sad. We're noting that, uh,

Ivanka Trump really hasn't been around the entire campaign, but she was up on stage last night. Fairweather daughter right there. It was a real warm moment between Trump and Ivanka too. It was a collection of real goobers on that stage. I couldn't watch it. I couldn't watch it. That's why we're not playing a clip because it's just, you know what? You didn't miss much. I took a horse dose of Unisom. And the next thing I knew I was in this chair.

I'd like to take a horse dose of Unisound, but we're going to be on Jimmy Kimmel's show later today. Oh, yeah. We'll continue this processing on late night television. Can't wait. All right. Everyone take care of yourself. Get some sleep. And we will be back tomorrow. Bye, everyone.

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Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Reid Cherlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.

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I'm Yara Shahidi, and I'm the host of The Optimist Project. This is the podcast that asks, what gives you hope? Each week, I sit down with changemakers you may or may not know from comedy, music, academia, and more to uncover what inspires them to create a better tomorrow. Join us as we find out ways that we can cultivate optimism in our own lives. You can find The Optimist Project wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to follow the show so you never miss an episode.

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