Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: Election Debrief
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Well, fuck. Usually we do a next level podcast on Wednesdays with my best friends, Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark and JVL, the editor of The Bulwark. It felt appropriate and right to just kind of make the next level the daily podcast today so we could all hang out with you, those of you that could stomach it at least, and go over what happened last night and then we'll do another TNL later this week. Guys, Sarah, JVL,

Hi. Hi. Hey. Hi. This is what I want to do. I want to talk at first about our analysis of what happened in the campaign so we can be a little bit...

so we can build up to our feelings. And then I want to talk about going forward. And then, and then we can kind of close by just talking about how, how everybody's going to cope with this. So the campaign itself, I don't, I guess, why don't you just give them both of you give us the biggest picture after having a night to sleep on it. What, what do you think happened? What do you think explains his victory at the biggest level? Sarah, why don't you go first?

Okay. Look, I think what we're going to wrestle with here is the way in which this election was really out of the ordinary and then the ways in which it was pretty ordinary. And the ways in which it was pretty ordinary were that you had, and we've known this, right? We've known this, and this has been a little bit central to the conversation JBL and I have.

over on the secret pod. And then, you know, if you go back and look at the focus groups, it's all kind of there, which is people did not think the country was in a good place. They were unhappy with Biden. They were unhappy with the economy. The fundamental they were unhappy with the state of immigration, like Trump was always outperforming her on the issues that voters said they cared the most about.

You know, we were the Joe Biden was very unpopular, like right. His approval rating is lower than Trump's approval rating at its lowest. And so, like, in a lot of ways, you're just talking about the fundamentals always being there.

against her and i think that or or that she had a steep hill hill to climb and i think that sometimes people push back on the idea of the fundamentals because they were like well no the the fundamentals of the economy are good and i was like but nobody believes that the fundamentals of the economy are good and so like if you just regardless of what is or isn't the people who vote are going to tell you how they feel about the economy and i think that they did tell us um

I also think, look, my theory of how she was going to eke out the blue wall states rested on independence breaking her way at the end, based on the fact that she was sort of able to not be the incumbent. Right.

That's the piece I feel the most wrong about. Like people thought she was the incumbent. Like she was tethered to Joe Biden and people wanted change and she was the incumbent, not Trump. Like, and I was always kind of like, who's the incumbent? Like, we don't know because they're both sort of incumbents, but like they decided she was the incumbent and independence did not break her way at the end. The other numbers that have stuck out to me are things like

of the people who thought Trump was too extreme, or who thought they were both too extreme, right? Trump won those voters massively. So people who thought she was extreme and he was extreme still preferred his version of extremism. So anyway, I think that's what happened. I think there's a lot of ordinary political analysis in here that doesn't mean anything.

humans are terrible and America is over. It's like, these are the things that happened that we thought could be overcome because Trump was a uniquely flawed candidate, right? That she could overperform those fundamentals. She did not overperform them. And then like, I just think one other data point that's clear that I think a lot of people are going to be talking about is just the Hispanic numbers. Like the bottom fell out of the Hispanic numbers in ways that

I don't, I, everybody thought there was going to be some of that, but like, you know, a lot of people really dislike the analysis of, of guys like Rui Teixeira. And I understand why sometimes it feels like, like I get a little bit frustrated by it too, but like, it's true. It's true that culturally, like,

Hispanics now operate much more just like white voters. Like non-college Hispanics operate like non-college white voters. And they broke that way in a major way this time. Yeah, we can talk about this a little bit more, I think. But there was a lack of willingness to

Mean we can do recriminations on a million things. So that's really not the point of this point of this is just being eye-opened about what happened and There's a lack of willingness by a lot of people in our coalition to just like accept

the numbers that were staring us in the face on Latino voters and black and black voters. And sometimes even in a shaming way, that's like, if you talk about it, it's like, no, no, the real, and it's like, you know, it's true. Like the real, the white voters went for Trump the most, right. Out of everybody. Right. So if you're doing the identity politics thing, but it's like, I think that there was, you know, a, uh, as, as we talk about, Oh, what happened with the Nikki Haley voters? What happened with, uh, it was like,

The gains, to the extent there were any, with that group was just swamped by the losses on the other side. And not kind of accepting that those losses were happening potentially impacted the way, the strategic approach of the whole movement. I'm not sure that people thought that it wasn't happening. I didn't think it wasn't happening. I thought you could make up

Yeah.

Because Trump did better everywhere else. It's because it's that slide, but it's also like, it's the thing that I think the X factor is always like, does Trump have, is there more non-college, are there more non-college white voters in the tank? And it turns out there were. Every time, yes. There's a never-ending supply of non-college white voters, it turns out. JVL, what's your top line thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I fundamentally disagree with Sarah, but I, only because of the results. Like, there is a result of,

There's a version of this result in which I would absolutely buy her explanation, right? If this was Harris 49.1, Trump 48.7, and the electoral college just shook out the same way, I would say, okay, yeah, I can see that.

That's not what we just saw. Donald Trump just won the largest vote share of any Republican presidential candidate since 1988. He did this while his own campaign...

Was basically running for the exits. We, I mean, we all read the Tim Alberta story in the Atlantic in which Susie Wilds and Chris Lasavita were talking about how terrible the campaign morale was, how everybody in the operation thought it was, you know, that the guy had just blown it all up while he's like dancing at the rally and talking about, uh, Arnold Palmer schlong, um,

And we also saw for the first time Trump overperforming down ballot Republicans. This is not he's run behind down ballot Republicans in both of his previous runs. This time, all of a sudden, he's way out in front of them.

And in 2012, people didn't think the economy was great. Objectively, the economy was okay. It wasn't bad. It was a slow recovery under Obama. But people felt like it was very bad. And Obama did fine. You know, he beat Mitt Romney pretty handily. He got over 50%, his second consecutive majority. I...

I do not find a way to see any of this result as anything other than an affirmative choice for Donald Trump and all his works. And I, I,

I mean, nobody cares about bipartisan legislation. Nobody cares that Biden did the CHIPS Act or bipartisan gun reform. Nobody cares about the handling of Ukraine. Nobody cares about any of that. What they care about is...

Demagoguery and grievance. They care about like the Haitians eating the cats and dogs. I mean, we saw the debate, right? We all saw the debate where she absolutely destroyed him. One of the most dominating debate performances of the modern era of television.

And for not only that to not matter, but for him to then overperform even what his own people thought they were going to get. And this is with no turnout operation, right? Famously, this campaign outsourced all their turnout to Elon Musk and a bunch of Tesla engineers. And they won. The proof of this is that Elon Musk's turnout operation didn't matter is that in Iowa, the

He's like plus 13 in Iowa. Like he doubled his margin of victory in Iowa from, yeah, I want to just, can we just sit on the campaign operation thing for a second? Cause this was one of my things I just wanted to talk about before we get into the, the more moral, big moral pictures. Um,

This is the third presidential campaign in a row, actually, where the winner did not have a meaningful ground operation. Joe Biden famously ran a basement campaign. The Democrats were concerned about COVID for good reason, so they weren't doing the organizing that they did in other elections in which he won. Donald Trump has had essentially no campaign both times. I guess in 2016, there was an RNC ground operation, but even still, it was very late to the game. I

I've been on this since 2015 and I just... At a presidential level, all of the money...

all of the campaign strategists are basically worth nothing. Like, like it just does. It doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter. And people don't want to believe that some people don't want to believe it because it's part of their whatever, um, remit and mandate. And it's like the campaigns themselves are one based on the, um, the, the candidates performance, um,

are one based on external factors and one based on dominating the, what you call the meat space of the news. So there's some things that can be done. You probably have to give the Trump campaign credit, as gross as it was, for spending $100 million on the trans thing to make the trans thing an issue where it wasn't. Bill Kristol, I was complaining about this sometimes with the Kamala ads, how they were very gauzy and she'll help the middle class. And it's like,

You can insert something into the conversation with $100 million, right? You can do niche things, right? Like you can do little things on the margins. Like I think that, you know, having outside groups target a particular group, like what Sarah's group did, like some of that makes sense, but that's a much smaller, like the budget for that compared to these billion dollar campaigns. Right.

Nobody just will accept it. And it's been 12 years now. And so just from a political strategy standpoint, everybody needs to realize we're in a different world. And that does go to the going into things. I mean, Trump won for a million reasons. So I don't want anybody to take me like, oh, this one thing is why she lost or he won this one tactic. He won literally. He did better with literally every group except college-educated women. Yeah.

So it's not like, ooh, if only the Hispanic outreach would have been better. You know what I mean? It was an across-the-board victory. But the Rogan thing, one of my regrets from analysis is I got wrapped up a little bit at times watching the Rogan thing, and there'd be three things that he said. It's like, oh, this is crazy, and we'll do a thing. It's like, oh, look at this crazy thing he said. But if you watch the Rogan thing for the whole two hours, the people that were viewing it were looking at him, and they're like, this guy isn't Hitler.

Like this guy is just a guy that can just shoot, you know, shoot the shit. And,

And like that stuff matters now more than the like tailored campaign messaging. Like we're in a new world where everybody knows everything about each other. We're all on each other's phones. And like the candidate needs to be able to carry their own message and go into places and talk and sound normal. And Kamala, we all kept saying she ran a great campaign. She did. She ran a very solid by the book 2004, 2008 campaign. Technical.

technical campaign. She did. And she was faced with a lot of challenges because of the situation that she was put in. So, but it's like,

To the extent that there's a 2028 campaign to talk about, to me that is the biggest. To just go through the motions again with inertia of we're going to run the Bush 04 operation, we're going to do a lot of ads and have a door-knocking program. It's all fake. It's all for basically nothing. Can we talk about the woman thing? Well, hold on. Let me just step on this point that Tim's making because I think it's a really important one. And I think that...

You know, one of the things we we talk a lot over on the focus group pod is about this thing voters say about the thing that they like about Trump is that he's not a regular politician. And one of the things I kept worrying about Kamala is like she sounds good to us. But I kept saying I worry that she's going to sound like a regular politician. And I remember DeSantis being cooked.

When I heard the voters start saying, yeah, I like him. Okay. But he sounds like a regular politician. And that's always been Trump's superpower. The not a regular politician. Cause we are in a different era in terms of what people want. It's the reason it's like the same things in our brain that make, I don't like Tik TOK, but like,

The same thing that makes TikTok and its informality, frankly, the thing that makes us, you know, sort of better than cable news is like the reason people aren't as interested in cable news and they're more interested in personalities, the more interested in finding people they can trust. They're more interested in having like an honest, like who's being authentic with me? Who's telling me the truth? Who's given it to me straight? And like they'd rather take

a politician who they think is telling them the truth and that truth contains some really ugly things than a politician that they think is lying to them just to earn their vote. Except that Biden beat him like a drum.

Biden did not beat him like a drum. He beat him by extraordinarily narrow margins in across a handful of states, 11,000 votes in Georgia, 11,000 votes in Arizona, 30,000 votes in Wisconsin. And it was like slightly bigger in Pennsylvania and Michigan, but it was not big.

We didn't beat him like a drum. And we were in the middle of a pandemic. It's the second largest majority in a generation. What do you think explains then the difference? This is fine. This is a good thing to chew over. What was the difference between 2020 and 2024 for you and JVL? I mean, so we don't know the overall turnout, right? We know that Trump is already at his 2020 number. He's at 71 million votes. Yeah.

I mean, as you said, like there are like two dozen explanations. Right. One of them I think has to be the Democrats can never run a woman at the top of the ticket again. I mean, never is a very long time, but I mean like not in anything that looks like this version of America because again, just the fact that he overperformed her, uh,

And, you know, and overperformed downed out Republicans like in places where Tammy Baldwin did OK, because people were OK with having a woman as senator and they liked the Democratic woman as senator. They did not want a woman as president. And I'm not saying this is all of it, but I think this I think it would be crazy to dismiss this as being a significant part of it.

Maybe it's not all of it and it's not none of it. I thought it was Wallace Harris. Just hypothetically, I don't think the result is different. If it was, I agree with that. That's right. I think the result is exactly. Can I can I say this is a baseline? I want to hear you guys react to this. My view is that there is no Democrat who could have beaten Trump this cycle because the voters wanted Trump this cycle.

Do you guys agree with that or disagree? I only disagree with it in the context stuff because who knows how everything shakes out. But like, hypothetically, there could have been a process that would have let somebody win the differentiated from Biden. I don't actually think that that would have happened though. Right. So I think my real answer is no. My hypothetical answer is yes. Right. Because the Democratic constituency is basically JVL. Right. Like they were not unhappy with Biden.

This was not really a time where both parties were unhappy with the status quo and it was throw all the bums out. There were some parts of the Democratic coalition that were throw the bums out. Muslim voters,

you know, like working class black and Hispanic men, right? But like the coalition that elected Biden, older black voters, suburban college educated people, they were happy with what they got, right? So even if Biden had dropped out earlier and then Kamala ran a campaign, she ran as good of a technical campaign as she did here. It's hard to see the Democrats then going for like, I don't know, some governor that was running on, oh, the Biden economy has been terrible and we need to go a new direction. Right?

I that might have worked, actually, like, I think a Democratic governor that's did that. But I just don't see how that would have ever happened in practice. I mean, I've spent one second thinking about that. But that's my initial reaction.

Sarah, what do you think? You know, I certainly... I think that one thing that I won't do is be like, if she'd had Josh Shapiro as her vice president, she would have won. Because I don't think that's right. I don't think it could have made... I always thought that Josh Shapiro as the number two on the ticket mattered in Pennsylvania. She loses it by 9,000 votes, and that was the tipping point state. Then I'd get on my high horse about Shapiro. I wouldn't in this scenario. I do think if you'd had somebody...

you know, like Shapiro who could have broken with Biden, but who still read, like somebody who read as a moderate. And this is going to be a big debate. Like there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be like, don't tell me she needed to be more moderate. She ran, you know, with Liz Cheney next to her and like an incredibly moderate. That's true. But one of the ways you get the handouts

Hey, this person is just a regular politician is by people thinking you're inauthentic because your positions change between the times that they see you. And I just I think that that did hurt her. And I think that Donald Trump in the swing states dropped a gajillion dollars saying that she was a San Francisco progressive. She was. And she was his mind on abortion, which is a very high salience issue. And it had almost no effect. Right.

Right. And that like it's a very recent change. So I'm saying like all of these rules we construct, they only hold for one side. Yeah. But this is JBL. This is where I do get like on it is the tension between your and my positions. But I think that there is.

there is frustration that with the world that it, that as it exists. And I can, I can share that frustration with you, but I think sometimes you try to demand the world be different than it is, as opposed to like, it is what it is. Like you wanted to, you wanted to demand, right. That voters accept that the economy was good. And I kept telling you, they don't think it's good. Like that doesn't mean she can't potentially overcome it by separating him. They don't think that Joe Biden was a good president. I agree with Tim that like,

A key part of the coalition thought he did a good job. And so like running explicitly against him, it seems like how would somebody have done that? I don't know. I can kind of think of ways somebody could have done that because actually people certainly, including in a big part of the democratic coalition did not think he should run again. And I will say,

It is not super great to spend a lot of time picking apart everybody and pointing fingers at everybody. Because I do think we should, as part of analysis, like figure out where the flaws lie. But just like hurling invective at each other is not good. But I will say Joe Biden deciding to run again was a catastrophic mistake. And if he had...

said early on he was going to be a bridge candidate, right? And that he was not going to run again and let the Democrats have their primary. That is a counterfactual we can't test. We have no idea how that would have turned out. Maybe they nominate Bernie Sanders. Like, I don't know. But like, I'm not saying Josh Shapiro comes out of that, but that is how this should have gone. Because by the time you got through this election with,

The challenge for her was just so enormous. And it felt like she was meeting it. You know, it felt like she was meeting it. But at the end of the day, it wasn't enough. Can I agree in part and disagree in part? I am now you're going to love this era. I am retconning my Joe Biden greatest living president. And I'm actually going to write this week about how Bidenism turns out to be a catastrophic failure. But on the

On the subject of me demanding that people agree and how this is the wrong way to do it, isn't that actually how Trump's messaging always works? Right? And you say this all the time. Trump would just go out and say, greatest economy ever, greatest economy ever. You just say the same thing over and over. Eventually, people just say, oh, I guess it was. Right? Why is it that he gets to do that and...

Like Democrats are supposed to like put twist their toe in the dirt and apologize for like, no, no, we understand it's really bad. Like just know.

Create your own reality. Sure. Isn't that the name of the game? That requires somebody with, I think, genuinely Trump's salesman's ability. Sociopathy? Yeah. Sociopathy. But that sociopathy has led him to a salesman role that both understands what people want and how to give them what they want. He understands, in a lizard brain kind of way, how to get people. And some of it is, the economy was good when Trump was.

It wasn't that the economy wasn't bad, right? It was that, but he is willing to, he was willing to- Except for the final year. Sure. But he was willing to say all day, every day, he was relentlessly on message about how good the economy was when he was the president, which is why, and that stuck. And that's why when people looked back, like when I say it's the economy, you're right. People don't remember the pandemic. Right.

They continue the pandemic to be an exogenous event outside of him. They remember the pre-pandemic time and the pre-pandemic economy. And he wrote a lot of that. All right. We need to take a quick break for an ad. We'll be back on the other side.

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Yeah, if you are mad at the Biden administration for being too nice to Bibi, you should be for me. And also, if you're mad at the Biden administration for being too... Look at the splits, right? And it worked. Yeah, it worked. It worked, Tim. Yeah, I know. He was on both sides of it and it worked. I have a question. I want to chew over something with you guys. Because I can't... There's part of this that's like, we're in hell. We had bad luck.

Incumbents are being thrown out everywhere. People hated the fucking post-pandemic economy. There's nothing anybody could do. And Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell not fucking convicting Donald Trump and letting him run again was really the curse of this. And if not, it would have just been whoever came out of the Republican primary would have won. Anybody would have won. That's one way that I look at this.

And the other way I look at it is, I don't know, maybe it wasn't that. Like there is something fundamental, this goes to JVL's point, there's something fundamental about the country wanting this.

I look at, to me, the most jarring results are not any of the swing states. Illinois, New Jersey, Texas, New York. She lost by four in Illinois. Things will roll in. It might end up being eight or whatever. But last night at 6 a.m. when I was on fucking MSNBC and Steve Kornacki pressed the Illinois button and she was up by four and a half points in Illinois. It was similar in New Jersey. Yeah.

Texas went from six back to 14, 15. Like these are this country's, this is not about finding more white working class voters. Cause he did that.

But these are the country's biggest, most dynamic, most diverse states. And he won across the board victories in them in places where the campaign wasn't really waged. Right. So it's like it's not about the ads. I mean, they got the national trans ads during sports and stuff. So the campaign was aged a little bit. But like that, I just like that.

I mean, the hardest part of me to process is going to be segment two coming up here where we talk about what comes next. But the hardest part for me to process of the looking back part is that. It's just like regular people across the country that were not targeted by the campaigns in any meaningful ways, like across demographic groups, every group except college-educated women were like, yeah. Yeah, which is why actually I think that the recriminations around like

What ads did they run? Or who was targeted? We can do it, and it's actually an important part of the analysis for understanding how we do things better in the future. But you can sort of see it happen everywhere. Everywhere it moved to the right, which meant that the factors were less about the individual messaging and everything else and much more about broad factors of

that made people who didn't usually vote for Republicans, like a lot of people move. Hispanic and Black voters, like there is a shift to the right that cannot be offset. There's not enough college educated women to offset them.

Yeah. So let me, I'm sorry, I started rambling and I didn't get to the nuts of the question, which is, was this a contingent random thing, bad luck because of the economy and the timing, wrong time, wrong place? Or like, do the Democrats have a fundamental brand problem that must be fixed and that like, or not?

Does Donald Trump have some special appeal? You know what I mean? What are those things? Because I come to this and I'm going to come to this over the next year totally open. Obviously, my natural prior is the Democrats should have run a center-left whatever that I like. I don't fucking know. I don't know. Maybe they should have run a socialist. I don't know.

I'm like literally open to any possible thing. Maybe they just need a culture warring. Maybe they needed like a tough guy of their own who like codes as a culture war. So I guess my question is, was it something that could have been fixed about the brand or was it a contingent element of the post-COVID economy? Can I take this first, Sarah? Go ahead. I think it is very clear that one of the things that happened that was a large driver was that Trump has been totally normalized.

And he just added to his vote total each time. And that suggests that people just got the sense that like, yeah, no, it's fine. And it didn't matter that new facts and new things were happening about him. Like, for instance, he attempted a coup or that he was convicted of a bunch of felonies because just the fact of him having been on the ballot for the third time just made it normal and built permission structures.

And so instead of like getting instead of it was like the opposite, he he dismantled the anti-Trump coalition simply by being there.

Right. And the fact of him made him seem normal and allowed the Democrats self implode their coalition. So I don't think so because of, again, the down ballot stuff. Right. And so down ballot Dems did. Okay. Right. I mean, not great, but there's still a chance. Like they could still win the house of representatives, which is a key thing. There's a chance they could win the house of representatives. It's going to be a very narrow. It's going to be very narrow. Right. Tammy Baldwin held on. I mean, there are. Listen, but Casey lost.

Uh, you know, Sherrod lost like all the places that are, that are getting sort of redder, um, more red. Trump pulled those this time. Like this time Trump had coattails and I don't know, man, there was a lot of anti-incumbency bias. This is, if you listen to the Pennsylvania episode, one of the things that we were talking about is like how in the group that the swing voters that went for Kamala, there were two people who were voting against Casey though.

they were like Kamala McCormick voters. And it was just like, there was just like, this guy's been here for forever. And we got the same thing about Sherrod Brown. Like there was this, and you could even get it from Tammy Baldwin. There was like a lot of people who were like, I like Tammy Baldwin, but like she's been there a long time. And so I think there's, and look, incumbents, so listen, just to answer Tim's question in my own way, I think that number one, incumbents across the globe

are getting tossed, right? And that has to do with the global post-pandemic economic environment. That is like the big, and big immigration patterns that people are unhappy about. Those are happening globally. They are having repercussions for political parties globally. And it is, and we're living now in a time when incumbency maybe helps you on a hyper local level,

But the higher up you go, like the more people are like, what is this person doing for me directly? And you like end up actually getting more of the blame even when you're less close to the person's actual life. But here's the thing. So to Tim's point about the Democratic brand and our Democratic Democrats imploding.

I think imploding is too strong a term for what just happened. But I do think that Democrats have a big problem, which is that they are culturally out of step with the vast majority, with the majority of Americans on a bunch of cultural issues. And that this is where Republicans have been cleaning up and that Trump does it in a crass way, in a horrible way. But people are annoyed enough about a lot of it that they'll take his crassness. And here's the thing. I almost don't want to give Trump...

too much credit because I think Nikki Haley would have also won this election handily. Like, I think that if she had been the Republican nominee, I also think she would have crushed. And that's why I'm also a little bit on like the woman, the brand. Like, I think that this has more to do with Democrats and their brand.

And people rejecting where they are, like their ideas on the economy, which, you know, Kamala Harris said middle class a lot. And that broke through to a lot of voters like that repetition. They didn't have like a clear economic pitch. And they didn't. And they certainly didn't have a pitch on immigration. And immigration has been a vulnerability for a long time. So I just those things do matter. And I do think that's why people but like Democrats are going to have to reckon with the fact that.

That the Republicans had, I think, what was not actually in many ways a good nominee, did everything he could to self-sabotage, and that people still took him in large part because people were rejecting the Democratic Party. Not because they love fascism. The Democratic brand did fine in 2018 and 2020 and 2022.

So but here's the difference. And this is this is important, actually. And I think we knew this. Twenty eighteen was a corrective on Trump. Right. From a bunch of people who were like, didn't know what they were getting. And frankly, I think something like that could happen in in in twenty six. Right. Because I think we still have elections and like the world moves forward politically in 2020. I think that Joe Biden, I think it's always been unclear which way the pandemic cut.

But it is possible that the pandemic hurt Trump enough to let Joe Biden win and that Joe Biden not having to really campaign and Donald Trump being in everybody's face and people having this anti-incumbency bias was enough to get rid of Trump. And again, the margins were very narrow. And then we entered a high inflationary period, which damns candidates all the time. It's like a surefire way to

To kill a presidency is to have high inflation during it. Yeah, I guess we're...

lose the rest of our lives to talk about this. But I think my final point about the Democrats that I want to move forward and how to think about this is, I want to say this because it is an omission against interest. The way in which I am a moderate is foreign affairs, economic affairs, not really social issues. I'm not a cultural moderate. I pretty much agree with Kamala Harris on every single one of her cultural issues. I'm sure I could think of one that we disagree on. But

Do you believe in gender reassignment surgery for prisoners? Because that seems to be a very big issue. Yeah, I don't think I would have paid the two. That is how we – do we have a number on how many prisoners have undergone gender reassignment surgery? Two. I don't think I would have given those two prisoners the gender reassignment surgery. Taxpayer funded probably, but I actually don't know the situation. So maybe I would have. I don't want to say that. Here's the thing.

Like you can't just tell the big, the biggest demographic group in the country, non-college white people that like, you don't really care what they think about cultural issues. Like it's just not a winner, especially in with the elect. I didn't end up being an electoral college factor, but, and, and by the way, that non-college white group now kind of includes on college Hispanics too. Like that's sort of like they're being assimilated into the, into the American experience. Um,

And, you know, it's just like I'm not saying that you throw trans people under the bus to to come back and win elections. But there has to be an ability to speak the language culturally and to try. And like they just haven't really tried. Like they'll say that they try. They'll check this box and they'll be, you know, a couple of lines in a speech. But like there still is a dominant feeling among that group that the Democrats look down on them, don't care about them.

And is that unfair? It's true. Maybe. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm sorry. I know this is unpopular, but like, if it is true that there were two gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners, and yet these ads were wildly effective with those, those groups, um,

then why shouldn't they be looked down on? Because that ad isn't a democracy. Well, yeah. Well, number one, we live in a democracy, but also, but JBL, because that ad is a stand in, right? The, the stand in the gender reassignment surgery taxpayer funded is a stand in for all of the ways that people believe Democrats are culturally out of touch.

Well, sure. But this is like all the ways that people believe that crime is through the roof. Right? I mean, again, I understand that I'm demanding that the world be different than it is. And I get that. Yeah. I'm just saying, look, you look at the map. Just look at it. I'm not like the, oh, red, like land doesn't vote. But like,

if, if, if they, you know, we, we've said this before on this, if like working class white people in rural America start voting like black people do like by share a vote, like,

We're going to live in a mega autocracy for the rest of our lives. So just as a practical matter, maybe they deserve to be looked down on. Maybe they have views that are gross. Maybe they have views that are wrong. Maybe they're swimming in disinformation. But that's just the facts of life. And not trying to offer something to them is a mistake as long as we're in this democratic world.

environment that I guess we're in. Yeah, I just think it's going to be hard to outbid a demagogue. I mean, what these people care most about is demagoguery. That's what they want. They don't care. You can, I guess this is where I'm trying. You could reach those people if you're operating in a world in which you believe that they are motivated to

by reality and outcomes where you could say, we're going to do things that are better for you. We're going to pass the Affordable Care Act, which makes it easier for you to get access to health care. I'm saying actually no.

I'm saying no, actually. Don't try to sell them out. I think that's what they've tried. Right. I'm saying you've got to go and hang out and be like, oh, yeah, I share your concern about whatever the thing is. You know what I mean? That's what I'm talking about. Bill Clinton. I'm talking about Bubba Clinton stuff. I'm not going to say Latinx, and I'm not going to say birthing person. It's that stuff. But Kamala Harris didn't say those things. But this is my point about it being a stand-in, right? It's about Democrats broadly. Right.

I guess. It's like unfalsefied. Those people, the people who run around saying Latinx didn't vote for her. They voted for Jill Stein. Nah. We're going to have unlimited time to chew over that. All right. Hey, we have one more commercial break. We'll be back on the other side. So we fell back to standard time. And as a result, things are getting a little chillier in the evenings in New Orleans. And so I'm living in the perfect jean.

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at theperfectgene.nyc with promo code BULWARK15. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. I want to do quick forward-looking and then feelings. We're taping this at 11.30. Kamala Harris is going to concede a little later than my taste, but whatever. She's going to do it. There'll be a peaceful transfer of power. There are no Democrats that are right now saying, I was on MSNBC for hours. I didn't hear anybody say anything irresponsible about

about it. I was with the people at the Bannon event last week, and the MAGA folks truly believed that the Democrats were going to try to keep him from power and that they were going to do what they did. That was a deep, true belief. After the event was over in private, two of them came up to me and was like, would they really let him win? They truly believed that the Democrats were going to do what Trump did to them. Obviously, they're not going to,

yay for the Democrats for that. So I guess my question is on the forward looking, what are, what is, I guess, what is your top line thing that you're worried about or that you're thinking about as far as the next year of Donald Trump assuming the presidency again? Can I tell you mine if you want to think about it? Okay. I'll start with mine. I'll ask the first question to myself then. It's a host prerogative. And then you guys can riff from there.

I said this a little bit at the end of the podcast or the end of the live stream last night. I continue to think about it to me. Like I, I think that the aperture is extremely wide on what Donald Trump does and tries to do. Um, you know, I think he's a fickle human and, um, I, I think it can range from bad, kind of a little bit bad to extremely bad. Um, but I, I think that the nature of what happened with the Senate, what happened with the Supreme court, uh,

And what happened with Donald Trump as president. I like the mindset of I fucking I'm not even going to say the resistance, the mindset of the people that are in coalition against this.

Like to me, it feels more like the mindset of what the opposition feels like in like Hungary or Eastern Europe. I like that the job, that the job going forward is not really about stopping him or thinking about like how the next 20 years more rights can be gained. It's more about thinking about what, what can be protected, right?

what can be protected in the meantime, because he is a wrecking ball that if left to his own devices, I could conceivably try to wreck all of the structures that govern our domestic society, as well as our international norms and alliances and the rule-based order of the world. Like,

All of that could collapse in the next four years is the worst case scenario. Some of it could collapse is the median case scenario. Just a little bit of it could kind of get rolled back is the best case scenario, right? And that sucks as a mindset to think about. I understand why people might be like, I'm checking out of that because my whole life has been thinking about how are we going to progress? How are we going to gain more rights? How are things going to become...

Like that's just not the world we're in anymore, at least for a while. And so to me, like that is just what I keep noodling over in my brain when I'm able to process that. So anyway, you can riff off that or if you have other thoughts on kind of what is up next, I'd be happy to hear them. Sarah, do you want to go first or do you want me to?

I mean, I'll start and then JV, I'll jump in because I do think this idea, which is a very bulwarkian perspective, right, is that our job now is to focus on

I think, and I think we're doing some of that right. I think you have to understand the nature of the problem clearly. I think we have to do the work to understand the nature of the problem clearly and not just fall back on it was race, it was sex, it was people love fascism. Like, I think we've got to dig as deep as we can to understand what's happening in the country so that we can figure out how to push back against it.

Trump was running to stay out of jail. Like, I believe that Donald Trump ran so that he wouldn't go to prison. And now that he's president... What? Congrats, Donald. Yeah, that's right. Instead of prison, he'll be president. I think the question is, like, what does he do with that? And...

I think that there will be a lot of things that he and his team are going to do. Maybe they won't do much, actually. Like, maybe Donald Trump's appetite for the things that he said is like, actually, he's an old man who just didn't want to go to jail. And now he's kind of like, meh.

Like now I can play lots of golf and like, you know, piss into a microphone and I don't actually have the stomach for real work and neither do any of these clowns that I'm surrounded by. I don't think that's going to happen, but that would be the best way for him to be popular as if he did nothing like doing that, literally doing nothing would be the best way for him to be popular. Yeah. I do think though, when I think about what's about to happen, like I,

That, right, that's like the best case scenario. It's like maybe he just doesn't try that hard to destroy things because he's lazy and he just didn't want to go to jail.

And that the people around him are like Elon. And there are a bunch of people who are just trying to do things that enrich themselves. And so, like, ultimately, they're not massively damaging. They're just self-enriching and corrupt. And that's bad. And we should, you know, fight against that. But I think the bigger issues, the things I worry about most are, like, the international policy side of things that Trump –

you know, buddies up with all the strong men, that he abandons Ukraine, that he abandons Taiwan, that maybe he pulls us out of NATO just because that's a hobby horse of his, and America's rule in the world. And this is not me being some kind of unrepentant neocon. This is about just like abandoning allies, like dropping everything that we do that is, you know, around diplomacy and everything else. We just completely retreat from the world. That scares me a great deal. The idea of

But like these things, right, like these things will engender backlash when they happen, right? If he does the things, like our job is to be there to fight them because just because he was elected with this mandate does not mean that the things he does, if he does the worst things we imagine, will be popular, right? And so the way, and this is the world that we have lived in

And I think this is what I've been saying to myself over and over again today is like, the history is long. And you can look back and see lots of times when one party shocked the country, right? And you thought, well, man, it's over. But it's never over.

So is another election. So there's new voters coming in and out of the electorate. There's always, he will be the incumbent now. He will do a bunch of things that are unpopular. It is our job to help voters understand why they are bad, right? To be better about our messaging. Because I do think that the reason that

One of the reasons Joe Biden was so unpopular, and I complained about this literally all the years, was about how little they did to promote the agenda that they had, to talk about it, to make it stick. Anyway, our job is to be the bulwark as these things happen and to make sure that voters understand when they're bad and to try to stop as many bad things from happening and then get a corrective in the House in 2026. Jonathan?

Three things. The first thing is that Ukraine is fucked and that is regrettable and it will have very bad outcomes for Europe and the world, but it is no longer America's problem. We do not have the luxury as a teetering democracy to expend any political capital to help them anymore. And I'm sorry, but that's just the reality of it.

When Trump tries to fuck Ukraine, like, you know, Democrats should make whatever political hay they can out of it and try to make Trump pay a price for it in terms of popularity. But in terms of stopping it, don't spend any chits on that. Like that. We just don't have the luxury of that anymore. Number two is tariffs.

Tariffs are a thing that he can do quasi unilaterally. And what tariffs really are is a mechanism for bringing the entire business community of the United States to heel.

Tariffs are the way in which he establishes an Orban-like control over the actual economic base, the private sector economic base of America. And that is going to work. I think it's very clearly going to work. Jeff Bezos tweeted this morning. Yeah.

Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th president on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities wishing at real Donald Trump, all success in leading and uniting the America. We all love that is now going to be the official posture for anybody at any level of business everywhere in America. And again,

Once you own the business community, your hooks are really in deep to the political sphere as well. Number three, his promise to deploy the military against protesters. There will be an anti-Trump protest shortly after his inauguration. I don't know what it'll look like. I don't know where it will be. It'll probably be something like the Women's March.

And when that happens, Trump. Yeah, I agree with Tim here. I'm not sure there will be. There might be. That's not a snarky. Are you sure? This is a genuine. Are you sure? Because I'm not sure. At some point, right? Maybe it won't be shortly after the inauguration. Maybe it'll be after he fires Jack Smith or something. I don't know. But at some point there will be a protest.

And Trump will see that as a dare to carry to make good on his threat to deploy the military. And I would be surprised if he didn't do it because not doing it will look like backing down. And he always feels like he can't back down. And once that's been done once, I think the.

ability and willingness of people to protest publicly at scale in America is going to decline precipitously. And I think that's just like all between now and March. Those three things are all between now and March. So I'm just going to sit on that because I don't know if I agree with that, but I don't know if I disagree either. So I want to, we'll sit on that and, um, we'll have more, we're going to do another next level here later in the week. Um,

Is there anything else of substance you want to talk about before we talk about feelings? No, I'll just say on this idea of sitting on it, I do think I've tried to – I spent the night and then this morning trying to figure out what's happened. I'm trying to make sense of it just like we all are.

And I'm going to just say that, like, I have said the things that I said here and they're my takes generally because they've been my takes all along. I'm just now looking at them with the knowledge of how the election went. Yeah.

but I'm going to reserve the right to be like, we probably have a lot to learn here. I think this is like sort of not a time for the hottest of hot takes. We got exit polling, but we don't have like good catalyst deep data yet. And so I'm still trying to figure out exactly, you know, with the different demographics and stuff like there's a lot we don't know that might sort of shift our thinking a little bit, but like the big broad picture, right.

tells us sort of what we need to know in terms of like, there was a repudiation of Democrats here across the board. And we're going to have to figure out what to do about that. And I think people who want to spend too much time

As part of the analysis, we can sort of say like this was a bad move or this was a bad move. Sure. But I think like living in the recriminations is going to be unproductive and that people are going to need to like take good hard looks. Think about it for a second. Don't just react. We're going to have to think about this for a little bit. And then we're going to have to figure out how to reorient a movement going forward to forestall the worst of what Trump might try to do.

and to build a different, more durable coalition. I agree with that. The thing I agree with the most is that like,

really you will see on social media and on cable I already saw it last night people that go out there and they're like it was Gaza or it was it was race I it was this with us I don't want to pick up the guys because Israel it could be anything right and it's like it was neoliberalism right like I've seen all of that already right and it's like

I don't know. He won a broad... Again, I repeat, he won... He improved with every demographic group except college-educated women. And he is going to win a record number of votes. Irrespective of whether it was advertising, any of those things, he improved. He improved across the board. And so it's like, what do the Democrats need to do to create a majority coalition? It might need to be very different. It might need to be the same. Maybe it should have just been...

the Tim Miller dream of Josh Shapiro, but maybe it really shouldn't have been at all. And it should be something totally different than that. And I'm, I just, I think that it's going to take time to think through it. Um, all right. Uh, feelings. Um, I guess I'll just start. So, um, you know what, what I'm looking for here. Um,

I just want to say, like, I know that some people listening are probably like, can I list, can I do this? Like, can I do, I want to become a monk. My friend Dan Savage tweeted, like, what is the liberal version of the Benedict option? For people who don't know what the Benedict option is, that was like a far right thing about like getting away from society and creating a, you know, a little religious sect in the woods. And I understand that sympathy or I understand that impulse and,

And I like woke up this morning and just you start to think about just the day to day of like Trump picking cabinet people and Trump doing Trump having an outrage. And I just it's going to be very just in candor. I'm not a coal miner. Like, you know, I'm not looking for sympathy, but it's going to be very challenging to have to care about that. Right. Like it's going to be very challenging for me to have to care about that.

I really dislike these people a lot. I think that we can do this sober-minded analysis, but a really good thing happened to really bad people.

And that's tough. And I spent a lot of time not on a podcast between 2016 and 2018 in yoga and therapy, like dealing with that before I started doing commentary. And it's like the notion of having to spend this transition talking about it all out loud, um, is tough. Uh, but I'm going to do it. It's important to do it. This mission has felt good, even though it was not successful. And, um,

And there are things about it that are going to suck. And if people don't want to tune in for a little while, I get that. But there are going to be other people that do want to tune in and want to kind of talk it through and want to think about it and want to process. And I think it's important to be a part of that processing and then important to be a part of what Sarah just talked about, which was how we can make a difference on the margins as far as protecting the...

being a bulwark against the real threats that are coming. So as I laid in the fetal position this morning, that was what was going through my head. So I just wanted to see if you guys have any additional feelings on that or anything related that you'd like to share. JBL? I mean, I will echo Sarah's that we have a lot to learn. But for me, that primarily takes the form of

We allowed ourselves from I'll just speak for myself. I allowed myself for the first time since 2016 to suffer from a failure of imagination and You know 2016 was me Suddenly discovering things about America that I never knew and maybe other people did know but I didn't and I I made a real concerted effort over the the next eight years to not let that happen to me again, and this is why I

You know, like we joke about how like, yeah, I just, you know, pick the worst possible outcome and it always turns out to be right. And with this race, I didn't allow myself to

to envision the worst possible outcome, right? I was happy to envision Trump winning. I kept saying, yeah, no, look, is it better than even chance that he's going to win? I said this all the time that, you know, like Harris isn't doing enough, doesn't look good. And then, you know, for the last three weeks, it looked a little better. And we got the Seltzer and Time Sienna polling. But I, you know, I thought he could win. Never imagined.

that he could wind up getting the second largest, no, I'm sorry, the largest Republican majority of the vote since 1988. That is not an eventuality, which I ever considered to be possible. That is a failure of imagination. And I am determined not to allow that to happen again. Uh, but I will say this, and this is where Sarah and I will disagree. Um,

Sarah's gift is to never suffer failures of the imagination about how things could be better. I don't have that ability. My gift is to never suffer, hopefully, for another eight years I can learn this, not suffer from failures of the imagination of how things can be worse. And so I am going to try to be very vigilant about myself on that. Because, I mean, I think...

Everything is on the table, right? Maybe like I wrote this like six months ago before Biden dropped out. I was like, you know, look, here's the best case scenario for a second Trump term. And I basically did what you did, Sarah. Like, you know, maybe he just gets in there. He's tired. He just wants to stay out of jail. And like, it's all basically fine. And that's that's one possible outcome.

But another possible outcome is Hungary, right? That is not... Worse than Hungary. That is not a thing which is off the table. Worse than Hungary is possible, actually. Yeah, worse than Hungary is possible. Russia is possible. Maybe Russia isn't likely. Maybe Russia is much more unlikely than Hungary. But, you know, like it's there. And...

I think, you know, for people, I don't know. I got dunked on for saying like, if he wins in 2028, a hundred or 2024, a hundred percent chance he runs again in 2028. People like, you know, like a dash for you're like, Oh, his brain is broken. It's not possible. And I'm,

Last night was again, another like, don't tell me that it's not possible. Don't tell me that some little piece of paper that says 22 at the top of it is going to stop this from happening. Um, you know, like we've got a client Supreme court, he will have appointed a, at least five members of it by that point.

And the 14th amendment said it wasn't possible for an insurrectionist to run either. Right. Don't, don't suffer from failures of imagination and all this. Um, and don't blind yourself to how bad it could actually get. Those are my feelings. It's not great feelings, Sarah. Yeah. I mean, I guess JBL is right a little bit about me in the sense that, um,

It's not that I'm blind to how bad things are going to get. I just don't see any other alternative but for us to figure out what to do about it and then to do it and to try to get... That's your gift. I didn't mean to say that you were blind to these things, Sarah. No, no, no. I know you weren't. I'm being very sincere. I know you weren't. I will say, though, what's interesting was just thinking about blind spots. One of the things I've been wrestling with just for myself is that, you know...

if you go listen to the focus groups, like it's all in there. And like my analysis, I was trying to think about like, and I was a little, I'm a little sheepish about even talking about like pundit accountability and like, was my analysis right? How is it wrong? Because it's like, that's about me. And so it's a little bit stupid, but I am trying to, I am trying to figure out, right. I started doing the focus groups because I wanted an answer to how Trump happened in 2016. And so like, I can't help but look back and be like, okay,

I saw all of it in the groups. I did Hispanic groups and played them for people. They were, and people here will tell you how, you know, Oh no. Like they were, they were a rip shit about immigration.

And, and I said in the thing, I remember Rui was on, people hated that episode. It was Rui to share it. They hated that episode. But I think if you go back and listen to it, all the stuff about Hispanic men is in there, right? It's just, it is. And if you look at the swing voters, which we really focused on, the thing that I said is like, yeah, in every group, you're losing one or two people. They're backsliding to Trump.

You aggregate that in a way like, and you can't, they're not numbers, right? You can't treat it like that, but you could see it there. The flags were there. And you ask people how things are going in the country, which is the opening question every single time, and they say bad. And they talked about immigration, they talked about crime, and they talked about the economy. And our intellectual impulse to say, well, that's wrong,

you know, I, I think there's, um, there's this question of like, how do you, how do you make people see reality for what it is? Or do, how do you meet them where they are is like a thing we have to grapple with. But I just, what I, what I hope for people who listen to this, like who are bored people, I want you to come to us for two things. Um,

One, like we're going to do our best to be honest with you all the time. Like we don't have any, I don't know, there's nothing like we're trying to protect

protect for ourselves. Predetermined outcome. Yeah. Like we just, I think we want to figure out what happens so we can be part of the solution. And I think if you want, you know, I was watching the live stream last night and like JBL was characteristically bleak, like pretty much from the outset. And I was trying to kind of be like, Hey, let's wait, let's wait. But like, it was true. Like it was going South and people were so mad. They're like, I'm signing off. You guys are too negative. Yeah.

And I think like, it's important for people to know who are part of this community, which is an amazing community. And last night was open to everybody. So it's like kind of hard to know who's like a subscriber versus people who just like casually or whatever, like know what you're getting with us, which is like, we're going to go through this moment by like

really grappling with what is going on. And we're going to put everything on the table and we're going to try to turn it over so that we can figure out what really is going on. That's why I do the focus groups. And I want to make sure that we're looking at it hard without a lot of priors so that we can then figure out how we can best focus

stop Trump from doing the worst damage that he can. Us sitting, like we can speculate how bad or not bad it might be, but the fact is our role is to do the analysis, but also, and this is why it's different from everybody else. Our role is also to do everything we can to protect this country and the democracy and the institutions that undergird it.

uh, from somebody who wants to burn them to the ground. And like, we can't do that without being really clear eyed about what's happening right now. And so like, if you want to be part of figuring that out and then doing the work to stop Trump, this is a good place for you. You should come, you should come with us. But like,

If you're somebody who's going to be like, well, you guys are too negative or, you know, I don't, I will breach. It's, it's, it's racism and sexism. Anybody who says anything else, you know, I don't want to listen to like, then we're not good for that because like, maybe you can get some of that on MSNBC or, you know, some other, but like, we're going to try to figure this out together and do something about it. Cause that's who we are. God, I love you, Sarah. You're the best. My only nitpick with that is the word stop. Stop.

He's not getting stopped anymore, but slow, control, contain. I don't know. We can think about words, but. Well, that's what bulwarks do. Yeah, sadly. Yeah, exactly. All right. I've got one final thing. Or if you have a final thing, the final thing, that's fine. We've got no shortage of time. All the time in the world with Donald Trump. I do feel cursed about that. Sam last night was talking about how there was a part of him that felt invigorated by this. And like, I don't. Just like in Canada, like I don't.

um at all um but part of the reason why i don't feel invigorated by this is like it is just insane to me that i'm going to spend the prime years of my life having to spend time thinking about the stupidest most disgusting fucking person in the entire world like i just it boggles the mind it's like i do feel like i'm cursed kind of it's like like this is a curse and there was a witch and like i just i could it could be like there could be it could be anybody

But it's him and that is awful. And I'm very unambiguated by that. That said, Ben Rhodes, who I have plenty of policy disagreements on, but wrote a book called

After 2016, where he was really going through his own processing and he went and interviewed the people that were doing that were fighting for freedom in Hong Kong and Kiev and Hungary. I forget who the other characters were.

And some of those people are fucked, which really sucks for them. But like that is the little node of invigoration that I have. Right. Like there was like those people have real purpose and it's a different purpose than the purpose that we wanted for this life. Probably that they did have a real purpose and they weren't. It was inspiring to read about them.

And I think that we're kind of in their shoes in America right now. We're kind of in our own Hong Kong or Kiev. Well, all three of those groups are going to wind up on the losing end of those historical struggles. So let's hope not. Right. I mean. Well, no. Well, you know what, though? I got to say, like, I think it's okay for us to take a beat and feel like,

you know, to take in the pain of this, right? And what it means. Because I always said this election, it wouldn't be what it said about Donald Trump. It was going to be what it said about us. And like, we're going to grapple with that and it's going to be hard to do. And it makes me sad. It does. Like, it makes me sad. But like, this is why we do this is because, and I presume the people who listen to this and they say that they were in it to preserve democracy, that means they care deeply about the country.

And if we care deeply about the country, like we just have work to do. Like, that's just the truth. Like it's our job and we care about it. And we are in a position to be people who are rallying people to fight. So it's okay to be in our feelings for a little bit, like, and to figure out what happened, but also like it is our job to figure out how to get people motivated to get back in the game. Because if everybody checks out, then we are fucked. Excuse me. JV, you looked like you had a final thought.

No, no, that's perfect to end on. We're going to keep your final thought in your head for this time. All right, guys. Well, for those of you that made it an hour plus through this podcast, uh,

kind of good okay show sad show long show how about that sad show long show uh i'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the borg podcast i don't know when me and sarah and jv are gonna get back together for for the next level we owe you but we will do that at some point as the week goes on and um thanks for sticking with us we'll see you on the other side peace

♪ And your high class games ♪ ♪ Solve, solve what you know ♪ ♪ Something tells me I was done and ♪ ♪ Solve, solve ♪ ♪ I tried to find it but I couldn't resist it ♪ ♪ I knew just how much I missed it ♪ ♪ Solve, solve what's solved ♪ ♪ Solve ♪

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water? Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold. Butter? Yep. Chocolate ice cream? Sure thing. Barbecue sauce? Tide's got you covered. You don't need to use warm water.

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