Election Post-Mortem
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Hey, pull up a chair. It's Hacks on Tap with David Axelrod and Mike Murphy. There's no job like this. This is the most important job in the world. Just as I did in my first term, we had a great first term, a great, great first term. I will govern by a simple motto. Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises.

Well, I hope not, but go ahead, David, bring us in. He has a list. He's checking it twice. Yeah. Well, boys, WTF, man. Yeah. Got a lot of splaining to do here.

Well, I tried to warn you guys, you know, but you kept pounding on that. I mean, you want to talk how we got it wrong? I have a theory about how I screwed up, if we want to start there. Well, let's talk about that at length. Yeah, yeah. No, it's multi-part. Are we going to do the self-flagellation thing first or the explanation of what happened in the election first? Well, they're kind of the same. Let's hear Murphy do the self-flagellation thing. Yeah, yeah. Axe has been waiting for this.

ever since I predicted Biden would be driven out by a bad debate. All right, here we go. From the heights of that to the absolute gutter of saying I had, I think I said I had medium confidence she was going to win. So a couple months ago, I think a lot of us who've done this looked at this and thought,

particularly during Biden. He's toast. Inflation politically kills presidents. This is going to be a change election. And when people want to fire an incumbent on economic pain, stuff costs too much. Their bar for the new person is pretty low. I think the Carter people woke up to that surprise. They thought Reagan was an old clown. Nobody would take him seriously. But, you know, same thing. Big ejector button. Try something new.

So then I found myself going down the rabbit hole of, well, this time could be different when she isn't Biden. She looks different. She was in the background during the Biden years. She's generational change. She's tone change. All that stuff seems different. Uh,

The dobsing has made the Democrats overperform all the way down the row. That should be different. Trump's ceiling, you know, we all talked about a regular Republican would have been dancing on the Democratic ticket under all the economic pain change argument. And now Trump's so bad, so crazy. The last week, the fact I was hearing from top level people around Trump land that, you know, all the people there who were waving from the podium, they're

Tuesday night, all thought he was going to lose. And so I kind of came around, this time it's different. And then Seltzer, who probably had the toughest night after Kamala Harris, who I have a lot of respect for and has traditionally been really on it, was yet another log on the

on the fire of, you know, I think she'll head shit out. Trump's so bad. She kind of lost her fizz this time, I think. Anyway, just to wrap this up, it turned out we all got a little too smart, or at least I did. We should have looked at it simply. 65 to 70, wrong track, inflation, fire everybody connected with the status quo, and blow it up with the orange guy who may be scary, but things were a hell of a lot better for my pocketbook.

when he were president. And I think in many ways, it's simple as that. Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think that it fundamentally 28% right track number, 40% approval rating for the president of your party, for whom you're the vice president,

you know, economic numbers or attitudes towards the economy sour. Just there are two numbers I would give you. One is Biden had a 40-59 approval rating. Among the 59 who disapproved of him, she lost 82 to, I think, 16.

And the second is who can bring—they gave him four choices as to reasons to vote. And one was ability to lead. That was 30%. Trump won that 60-33. But number two was can bring needed change. And Trump won that 74-24.

Yeah. Reject her button. Yeah. I mean, you know, we will talk about, I'm sure, things the campaigns did. And I think the Trump campaign did a lot to fan the thing here. But I'm not sure, Heilman, that these forces were not immutable. I mean, you know, I think there may have been...

Nothing. You know, maybe if the Democratic Party had nominated somebody who was completely divorced from the administration and could kind of run against incumbency generally, they would have had a shot. But I'm not sure. You know, I'm not sure. The tide was big and it's been big all over the world. Incumbents are on the run now.

have been on the run all over the world so you gotta you gotta counter spin to any of this not a counter spin but just uh i think that the that the phrase you keep these used acts which is incumbents that they are on the run you know and i guess you could say incumbent parties there's a lot to talk about about the democratic party and what it what it doesn't get about the country and what it needs to do if it's going to recover from what is now you know

going to be a 12-year period in which Donald Trump has dominated our politics. He dominated our politics when he was president. He dominated our politics when he wasn't president. And now he's going to dominate our politics for the next four years. That's, you know, as long as you consider George Herbert Walker Bush...

part of the Reagan era. That's a 12-year period where a form of politics associated with a certain charismatic leader is going to dominate our politics a long time, and Democrats are going to have to really make a bunch of changes. But I do think the incumbent thing really matters because

Her situation was so complicated because of the fact that I think we would all agree, maybe, you know, I don't know if you guys would agree, but given how long it took Biden to decide to get out of the race, where we were, how close you were to the Democratic convention, I think she was the best available choice. I would have been terrified.

verified sending someone like who I otherwise might think would have been a stronger candidate, someone like Gretchen Whitmer, who has never run in a national campaign, not once, hadn't been vetted by anybody ever, had never had to play on that level. In a short, without going through the rigors of a primary,

I think Harris was probably the best choice and the most unifying choice and Democrats had to get unified at that moment. So, but she's also the sitting vice president. And so she get, you know, if change was what this was about, it was a complicated thing. I think for all of us, because was Trump, was Trump change? No. Is,

Is the sitting vice president change? No. And I think what ended up being the case was that her association with the Biden administration, which obviously she's intimately associated with, became more dominant. You know, that looked like more like stasis. That looked more like what you had to move away from than Trump's brand of politics, which in fact have also been

I'm saying hers ended up being the unmovable, the thing that was the most obdurate. You couldn't get rid of her connection to Biden, and that ended up to David's point. But maybe some other Democrat, if you'd had a proper primary, I think they probably could have beaten Donald Trump. Well, a primary is a great credentialing thing. You get to win stuff, beat other people, beat somebody. I agree with most of that. I disagree on Whitmer. I think we overlooked...

The expectations for Harris were very low because she was such a train wreck in 19. And I agree. I thought it was a B plus campaign. If it had been an A campaign, I think they still would have lost. Yes. That's what I agree with. You know, because it was about hit the ejector button. And I think a lot of us fell for this kind of overthink.

Trump was change because they knew that everybody in power now, including in the pop culture and the media and the woke establishment, as they would say, was going to be able to do something about it.

all hated Trump. So enemy of my enemies, who I remember was better at running the economy. I don't care that he's Andrew Jackson and pisses on the white house carpet. He's not this crowd. And I want to punish them led by Joe Biden. Now I do believe the biggest blame has to go to Biden who should have been one and done a year out. So we could have had a primary and, and a Gretchen Whitmer could have beat some people or, or somebody else, you know,

Might have, right. It's all hypothetical. But I don't buy that Kamala was better than Whitmer would have been. Let me just get in here for one second, Heilman. You know, I said a year and a half ago, I started raising these concerns about Biden that I said were actuarial concerns, and they were.

And, um, and the reason I started saying that a year and a half ago was because I was hoping that he would get out and allow for a primary because primaries are how you do find out.

who people are and how they can, you know, like I wasn't sure Barack Obama as gifted as he was and as good an experience as, as I had with him when he ran for the Senate in Illinois, I didn't know how he'd stand up to the kind of rigors of a national campaign. He was pretty thin skinned as a Senate candidate. I didn't know how he would handle that as a presidential candidate. Uh, you know, he grew enormously through the process and,

And, um, we threw her, we threw Harris into the deep end of the pool a hundred days before an election. And, uh, I actually, she well overperformed my expectations, uh, was she, but, but she had one, you know, the one fatal flaw was something she couldn't change and didn't appear willing to even try to.

deal with, which was she was the vice president. She was the number two person in the outfit that they wanted to fire. Right, right. That's a Gordian knot. I don't want to get too, Mike, just to be clear about what I was saying before. Yeah.

I don't think that Harris necessarily would have won a competitive primary against the field. I don't think she was necessarily the strongest candidate. I think maybe Whitmer would have been or Bashir or Westmore. I don't know. But all I mean is that if part of the problem, as David has said before, was that you give in the last 90, 100 days of a campaign, it's like a boxing match. And if you ask one candidate to be

to just fight the boxing match and the other one to fight a boxing match and also deliver a tone poem to America about who they are. You can't have one person who has one job and the other person who has two. And given that, I think that the reality of picking the best known Democrat nationally is

given the terrible circumstances they were under, made Harris the best pick in a bad circumstance. But I don't think that means that she would have been the best candidate or would have won a primary or in the ideal circumstance. Yeah, no, I get you. And it's a totally fair argument. I think Whitmer would have been, you know, there are a bunch of candidates I think might have beaten her in a primary, but we don't know. And to David's point about the primary, not only do you get tougher and better and get to do a dozen live,

to televise presidential debates but like barack obama you get to go campaign in 50 states and everybody gets to know who you are yeah yeah no you build a national persona right it's a great horse to ride totally agree with that and i don't disagree with you because i think the reality was it would have been very hard to do anybody else but knowing what we know now which nobody knew then you know uh

not so good, you know, we gotta, I mean, I don't know if she could have been better and I don't know if there is a miracle candidate. I would have tried something else. And that was my gut at the time. I was for the Carville mini primary anything. Cause I've always thought she's not a strong candidate though. That said, I'd still doubt in this environment of the big, simple, get them out. Any Democrat could have been right. Yeah. Well, one thing, one thing, one thing that speaks to the, um,

What we're talking about here that the die was cast was we all sat here a couple of days ago, a few days ago and said she closed. Well, he closed badly. Uh, the truth is he got, if the exit polls can be believed, very few people decided in the late, in the late as, uh, stanzas of the campaign, the late, the last week or two. And he got more of them, uh, than she did, which, um,

But one little postscript on the Biden thing, and this is me taking advantage of the fact that we have this platform to vent. I read a quote from an unnamed Biden aide yesterday.

saying, you know, they ran, you know, the Obama people ran Biden out in 2016 and he would have beaten Trump and they ran him out again this time and he would have beaten Trump again. Bullshit. First of all, if, if, if I agree, go for it. Don't, I don't hide behind some anonymous, you know, some come out to the daylight and say what you have to say.

Put your name under it, and then let's have a discussion about it. But don't be such a sniveling little coward that you put an unnamed quote out there saying what is absolutely bullshit. Look at the guy. Look at the guy. If Biden had been a nominee, the Republicans would have the House by 25 seats today. Locked in.

It is so ridiculous. But David, you know, his performance on that Zoom call with the Latinos was, or the one in New Hampshire where he said that Trump should be locked up. I mean, the garbage line, that put her on a rocket path to victory. That's the Zoom call I'm talking about. Every time he went out there, he was sterling in the late part of the campaign. How can you say that Joe Biden wouldn't have won? Well, let me add one thing.

We talked about the fact that he should have gotten out earlier. The people who are giving these unnamed quotes are the people who are in this kind of bubble of enablers that should have gone to him long ago and said, cash in your chip, your chips boss, you'll be thought of more highly. Right. And you'll give your party a better chance to win. Uh,

but they are all, you know, holding hands in the circle of denial. No, they were part of the cover-up. Let's call it what it was. I wrote a piece two years ago, I think, of 18 months on Substack. Joe Biden needs a friend, and I made exactly that argument. Someone's got to tell him. If they loved him, they would. And let's just acknowledge that beyond the... David, I understand why you're pissed, but if... And then I'll be pissed, too, if somebody... I think it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous argument, but...

But here's the thing is that it would have been better for Biden. You know, this is why I think much better was the was the he needs a friend was Joe Biden's legacy is going to take a beating over this. And the truth is, like the best chance of Joe Biden to have the legacy he deserved would have been for him to say, I beat Donald Trump and save the country from him.

I, in the wake of COVID and an insurrection, I passed bipartisan legislation and I stopped the red wave from happening and helped led the Democrats to a successful, relatively successful 2022 midterm. And now I'm going to do what I said I would do, which is pan the baton onto a new generation of Democrats. That is the highest probability path towards a great legacy for Joe Biden. If he'd done that. And it's what he promised he'd do.

This was an act of not doing that was an act of narcissism and self and self destruction. Yeah. You know, and you know what, if he had what? Yes, you were right. Both of you guys are right. If he had walked away, if he had walked away, which is an unnatural act for a politician, completely painfully walked away, it would have been country over self.

And country, you know, country first, as John McCain used to say. And I think people would have admired him for it. And and, you know, it really the I'm just anyway, I've said my piece. Well, no, you're factually right. It's an inarguable position, which is why they're making it off the record. OK, let's take a break right here for a word from our sponsor. We'll be right back.

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But there's one other thing. I'll get out my very dusty and torn little Republican flag here. I think another lesson in the election. Do you still have that thing? Oh, yeah, yeah. Are you crazy? This battle-stained thing that's been for 40 years and a hell of a lot of campaigns with pride.

There is, and this was part of Harris, and it's a bit of the Democratic cataract sometimes. I had a really smart Democratic consultant that you both know, but I won't put him in trouble by dropping the name and say, you know, we got all the smart-ass pop culture people. You know, we have all the elites. We all have money. We just don't have any votes. And the woke stuff that's cool when you have mid-70s,

six figures on your tax return or higher, we just got to understand how off-putting that is to so much of America. And, you know, they're,

There was some of that to this Trump thing, too. And she carried that. Oh, my gosh, yeah. You know, that was kind of her vibe. And it feels very comfortable if you're having a dinner party at Tina Fey's house. But out there where they're bending metal and parking squad cars for a living, it's not only a shortcoming, it's an off-putting vibe. And that's something that Dems got to figure out how to rediscover. I had a friend of mine, a UAW Detroiter,

watched the convention a couple of conventions ago and said, you know, I'm supposed to be a Democrat, but I watched the Democratic convention and I never see anybody I think can change a pickup truck tire.

Right. You know, just the vibe of it. Well, because everybody takes public transportation. Yeah, right. Solar-powered boom buttons. But listen, this is exactly what I've been saying for a very long time. The Democratic Party is a self-styled party of the working class that approaches the working class like missionaries.

and doesn't have a real connection to approaches the working class people in this country in a way that is patronizing. And that has to change. And there are cultural dimensions to it as well. I mean, there's this sense of disdain. Go ahead, John. I'm sorry. No, no. I was just going to say, I think this is a little bit, but I think this is a little bit, uh,

With all due respect, I think this gets at the challenge that the Democratic Party faces because the Democratic Party is not the party of the working class anymore. It's not. The coalitions have shifted, and this is probably a result of what Trump has wrought. The Republican Party is now the working class party in America, whether you like it or not, in terms of how the results of the election is. People who are non-college voters favor Republicans overwhelmingly, and college-educated

People favor Democrats overwhelmingly. That has certain advantages to the Democratic Party, but it has other disadvantages. And one of the things that has this disadvantage is the cultural thing you're talking about, David, because largely college educated people, not all of them, but certainly the most high profile ones, they come across often as elitist and condescending. And so you have now an alignment where the people who make up the

base of the republican party not just the mega base but the the mass of the republican party the people who voted for trump and are going to give him a popular vote victory this uh in this election for the first time republicans gotten that since 2004 are mostly working class people who look at the democratic party as uh cultural coastal elites and whether that's woke or not i think there's a lot of woke overhang mike i think that's right but that's the challenge for democrats how do you

exploit the advantages of being the party of the college educated without... while ameliorating the disadvantages of being seen as culturally out of tune with most of the country. Well, you know, I mean, first of all, Mike was around and he was part of this. You know, we all remember the Reagan Democrats. You know, we've seen these shifts before. And then, you know, a Bill Clinton comes along and...

and redefines the Democratic Party in a way that puts the party in a position to win. But part of what Clinton brought was respect, respect for working people and respect for, you know, culturally and economically. And, you know, we should talk about sort of what the

I mean, the Trump campaign, Trump himself is a runaway train and he has a feral genius. And I think sometimes he doesn't get credit for

I think some of the firestorms he started were that everybody sniffed at were meant to begin conversations that helped him. So, I mean, it's not like he's... I mean, he is smarter than his detractors give him credit for. But the campaign itself will go down as a strategic triumph because...

They, with great discipline, hammered this connection between Harris and Biden. We're using our own words, Bidenomics is working and so on. And then the unfortunate comment on The View where she couldn't say if she differed with him on anything. And they just they just were disciplined, disciplined, disciplined. And then the second piece is and we need to talk about it is Biden.

That transposed. Those transposed.

They also look like the sociology department and Sarah Lawrence, and they get it all on paper. And I can just see, I can hear La Cevita chortling about, well, attack her for paying for sex change for prisoners. And there will literally be a debate inside the top of the Democratic Party. Is it too mean to push back on this? Because why not?

And it's true. So they, you know, tied them up in their own spider web. And she did come out for that before when she was being a lefty candidate. That's life. You'd come out for stuff. You own it forever. So it was a perfectly effective old school Republican wedge issue right up there, you know, flag burning for Dukakis, et cetera. And while there's a lot of sniffing and, oh, I can't believe it, it places where you can get a $17 cup of coffee and,

Out in real America, it had nothing but traction, and she never handled it. Just like fracking, where she gave every answer like it was a white-collar criminal deposition. And it's a tonal thing that Dems get easily tangled up into. I remember once upon a terrible...

terrible Southern politician I knew in a tough Senate race once said in a meeting, you know, we're getting killed on cutting Social Security or some damn issue and said, well, we need to change the debate here. I think we ought to bring out an idea where it's time to build a monument to our fine Confederate War veterans, which was a perfect evil, cynical wedge issue to break black Democrats in the South away from poor rural whites.

And so that's an ugly politics, but it's easy to tangle the Democrats up in that stuff. And she...

She walked into a buzzsaw there and never walked out. Look, that video was from 2019 and she was at a trans event. Yeah. And, uh, she was pandering. Well, on top of it, on top of which, look, there, there's the one thing the Democrats said about that ad, which when, when I was in Michigan, I was amazed how many times I saw it. It was just constantly on. I watched, was watching a lot of sports and it was on every, it was just played. I felt like I watched it like every, like 20 minutes on, on every station. And it had Charlemagne, uh,

you know, very to your point, Mike, you know, taken out of context, you know, manipulatively edited, but, you know, made it seem like one of these kind of iconic figures in black America was, was outraged about the policy. Democrats answered that by saying, you know, this was the law on the books and the Trump administration. And that is true. But when she would get asked about it, she would point that out and then very quickly run away, move away from it. As opposed, as opposed to ever saying the words, Hey,

That was what the law said on the books. I said that in 2019. That was the law of the land under Donald Trump. He enforced that law. I said I was for it. But you know what? It's wrong. I'm against that policy.

She never would say that she would that for the reasons you said, which was that, you know, she, she didn't want to infuriate anyone in the trans community. And I, I, you know, I, I, I respect the trans community enormously, but this is this allowing an issue that affects so few people to become so resonant. So some, yeah,

And so, and so definitive about the cultural argument is that as campaign malpractice, you must try to knock that down when you saw how much traction it was getting and how much they were airing it and they were airing it because it was working. You had to do more to address it than they did. Yeah. And she came up through just very quickly, David came up through democratic interest politics in California, which is how you get a seat for life in California, one party state, but it's also a weakness. When you go to that college, uh,

Whitmer would have known how to handle that question because she's lived through Macomb County in a swing state. And that's part of the problem for candidate recruitment with the Dems. You know, Dukakis was another example. Yeah. I mean, you know, I saw a focus group. Well, I talked to a guy who conducted a focus group and this came up.

And, you know, he said, you know, people say, well, no one cares about that issue. He said, but the point is they worry that she cares so much about that issue that, you know. And then the other thing is the issue of someone said in the group, I don't care what people do, you know, on this. I just don't want to pay for it.

Uh, you know, and, uh, so that was a big element of it. I just, you know, I know this will infuriate some of our listeners, but we're hacks and we're, you know, Murphy and I have done a million campaigns and you just have to say from a, just from an, uh, an execution standpoint, their advertising campaign will go down as one of the great sort of

You know, it'll go down with the one that Roger Ailes ran against Mike Dukakis. It was very similar. Yeah. In 1988, Dukakis came out of the Democratic Convention 17 points up. And in the next six weeks, they just defined him. We ground him down. Alex Castellanos and I worked for Ailes on that campaign in the general. And I saw the playbook coming out here. And it's a good, simple playbook.

that people in every town USA get. And it's kind of scoffed at, you know, in the elite world, but out in the real world, it works a lot. Hey, speaking of Harris campaign mistakes, I've got to issue an apology. I want to apologize to the Slotkin campaign. So we did a poll two weeks out in Michigan, and I'll be quick because it's EV stuff, but it's important. 74% of Michigan voters said they thought EVs were, you know, something they'd heard a lot about in the campaign.

And Trump spent about $20 million, Trump and the Senate committee on the Republican side in the open Senate seat between Slotkin and Rogers, spent about $20 million saying EVs are going to wipe out Michigan.

We had a response set up, but we had no money. Slotkin put up a response set that I thought was a little too defensive, but it basically said, hey, I don't drive one. They're great if you want one. And those jobs are either going to be in China or in Detroit. You pick, which was our argument, too. Slotkin won. Harris never ran any advertising. Two weeks out of the election, we asked people, is the move toward EVs, the push toward EVs, which is code for the Biden stuff,

good or bad for Michigan, the auto capital two to one, they said is bad, bad for Michigan jobs in the economy. Trump totally won the argument. She never responded. Um,

you know, her group said, oh, it's not an important issue. Well, Slotkin responded and ran, I don't know what is going to land up being 35,000 points ahead of her, and his new name is U.S. Senator. Harris didn't. So that was just a tactical screw-up where the Slotkin people got it right. And though I thought that was too defensive, kudos, they ran it. They ran a good strategy there. They didn't let what was a huge issue in Michigan campaign kill them. Well,

Well, Harris didn't. And Harris got hurt a lot. People who depend on the auto industry for their livelihood, that's 20% of the state are

Excuse me, 24% auto industry manufacturing voted for Trump by double digits. Murphy, you are just a wellspring of self-reflection today. It's amazing. I've never seen anything like this. It was a character-building experience. Now I think I'm going to withdraw from politics and have a fun life for a few months because I'll still be on the side I'm on. But...

And I do have one idea for the Democrats we can talk about later. But following Trump minute to minute, like, you know, a toddler if it changed, it's just too goddamn exhausting. I don't think it'll be quite as much of a disaster as people worry about on fundamental institutions and rights, but it could be. Okay, then let's take a break right here, and we'll be right back.

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Yeah, this is the question. Go back to the top, to the first thing that we played the sound of Trump saying promises made, promises kept. I think this is maybe not a good hacks on topic, but maybe because it's the thing that everybody in your life... Give it a whirl. Everybody in your life is worried about this, right? We all said with varying degrees of urgency and alarm that...

This is an existential, the existential stakes of this election were between democracy and authoritarianism. And Trump gave a lot of evidence, you know, a lot of things he said to the promises made, promises kept joke.

about things that he was threatening to do using the military against his political opponents uh calling up liz cheney to put her in front of a military tribunal um fantasies about having journalists shot uh i want to be a dictator from day one uh it's throwing out the constitution he said you're bumming me out here man he said a lot of shit he said a lot of shit right so

I ask you to Mike, I think he's just made his point, his position clear. I don't know what I think about this, right? Because I, my general view is Trump tried to do some of this stuff in his first term. He was held back by, by, by people who he will know will not let anybody like them near him in the second term. How worried are you actually about the beginning of seeing a slide toward, uh,

authoritarianism, like the actual dismantling. Steve Bannon was on TV the other night saying, we are going to tear the Justice Department down to the studs. We know how to do it now. We are coming for you, Joe Biden. We are coming for you, MSNBC. We are coming for you, et cetera, et cetera. And we are going to administer rough Roman justice.

And that guy, you know, and so it's bravado. Yes. I'm with you. I can laugh it off. But I just, you know, I mean, David, you're looking a little gray. Like, how much should we, like, you know. It's just, I mean, it's the lighting. No, no, I mean,

I meant the core of your skin, not the light from the hotel window. I mean, how much do you sit there and go, holy shit, this could be coming? Listen, I think that the big question is how much, because we know that

He had these impulses when he was president last time, and there were people around him who said, no, you can't. We can't just go indicting everybody you don't like. We can't indict your former, you know, now he's like all whipped up because he thinks that's what was done to him. And.

And the question is, you know, who is his attorney general going to be and what are they going to tell him? Are they going to tell him the same thing? Are they going to say when he says, you know, jump or indict? You know, are they going to say how high, you know, how high?

How are the regulators going to behave? I, you know, we talked about this last time or in the last week when Bezos kind of bridled the Washington Post for making an endorsement for Harris.

You know, he did it not just as the owner of the Washington Post, but as a businessman who has big dealings with the federal government. And so are the what are the regulators going to do? What are the budgeteers going to do?

who make these decisions as to who gets what contract, he has tremendous leverage if he just breaks down the kind of norms that have governed these decisions in the past. And are there people there who are going to say, you know what, why don't we just concentrate on delivering on the stuff that we promised people and not get on this binge of retribution? Yeah.

And I don't know, Murphy. I don't know. You know, I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish, and I despise Trump with the power of a thousand suns. I have since I first had to deal with him when I was working for the governor of New Jersey in 1993. But I think one reason Trump was somebody people thought, get him out, put Trump in, things were better four years ago, is they all think he's a bullshit or two.

He's a condo salesman. So they discount some of this. That may be a mistake, his crazy stuff. But I think Trump will be torn because on one hand, he's a populist. What's that really mean? He wants to be popular. Oh, I'm not going to do any tough fiscal stuff. I'm going to spend popular money, popular, popular. So the stickier fights...

I think he'll avoid. He wants to be loved. This is all about a father. I think it wasn't so nice to him. So I'm not sure. I think some of the stuff that he sees as transactional with the wingnuts in the party, now that he's czar, he can ignore. You know, that's why he keeps trying to bar...

very 2025. So I'm not sure his instincts are going to be quite as bananas. The, the thing you worry about, this is where Heilman was, is personnel because personnel is policy and we're not going to have some of the grownups. On the other hand, operation grownup is underway. You know, the Senate majority caucus, there's a race to staff now. And I,

I think Trump will have some dregs in positions of power. The good thing is that dregs tend to be incompetent, too. So we'll see. And I think Trump will be distracted by shiny objects to some extent. So I think on paper, the threat is there. In practice, I think you're going to have a cranky old egomaniac playing with the toys and wanting to be loved, which may...

get him to back off a little if susie wiles is chief of staff she is a risk avoider may i may i want to ask one additional question here just to just to say he he he tried to order he tried to invoke the insurrection act in when he was in office and and esper stopped him from deploying the military against protesters he tried to have joe biden arrested in the final days of the campaign in 2020 and his attorney general and his and his council stopped him he

He has tried to do this stuff, not just thought about it. He tried. So here's my real question to your point, Mike, about populism. I have now read multiple polls in the last couple of months that the mass deportation program is now a majority-supported issue, at least in theory. Obviously, I don't think these questions have been posed to people in a way that will make them actually contemplate what it would look like if you tried to deport 12 million people from America. But do you guys think, as a matter of politics, to go back to Hackville here, that

Trump starts to actually build to put together a deportation force and starts throwing people in trucks. Is that, Oh, I think it's like the wall he'll try and he'll start and it'll be a horror show. And some seven year old kid's going to get killed and the country's going to back up a little.

David? Yeah, I mean, I don't I think that that is one that he's going to they're going to deliver on something there. Can they deport 10 million people or are they going to I mean, someone's going to explain to him, you know, if we deport 10 million people, the economy is going to ground to a halt.

Inflation is going to shoot up again. And crime is going to skyrocket because you're going to have every person in law enforcement across the country engaged in that pursuit. Which is back to the incompetency. He'll do a photo op with 200 people in new SWAT uniforms. And they'll start deporting people. And there'll be 20,000 in. And it'll be wall-to-wall trouble and everything. So he'll try.

But I don't think the masks will get into deportations. But still, it's going to be a nightmare for some people, and it's going to be just horrible. Okay, then let's take a break right here, and we'll be right back.

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Well, I've got one and it's really cool. And you breathe into this thing, it reads your metabolism, and then you have an app that's connected to it. And that tests and lets you know whether you are in fact burning fat at that moment or burning carbs or what combination of those two things you're burning. And it gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even your stress management, because that's the whole ballgame right there when it comes to dieting, I hate to tell you. It's not just about how many calories you take in. The question is, are you burning fat or are you burning carbs? And how does that

actually affect your body, your body fat composition. A lot of people want to lose weight. I don't know about you, Mike, but you know, this campaign has been hard on me. I needed to drop a few LBs here. I think Lumen's going to help.

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dot me slash hacks for 15% off of your purchase. Lumen, we are so grateful to you for sponsoring this episode of Hacks on Town. I think the other thing that's going to happen is, you know, I think there'll be

He'll be monetizing the office as he has before, and we'll see a lot of that because he has four more years to do that. You know, let me ask you guys a question. What what do you think the public reaction is going to be when he pardons the J6 people?

And shuts down the investigation, all the criminal cases against him. Well, this is a big problem for the Democrats. Because I think they're going to want to litigate this all the time. Everything like that, the backward stuff. And if I were them, just from a point of political strategy, I would not get into base feeding on that. Because I don't think the country... The country looks at Trump with kind of fond nostalgia.

pre-COVID economy and everything. So I... Do they look at the insurrectionists with fond nostalgia? Do they want to see them free? Maybe not, but, you know, it's the price of beans. I mean, I think the Democrats should have a very simple strategy. One, the hard thing to do, which is fix their woke crazy. I don't know if they can. Axelrod, you should go lead that fight. But more importantly, the whole thing is the midterm congressional elections. In

In two years, we're going to pick who has the house. Right now, it looks like the Repubs may hang on. It'll be very slim, waiting on late California mail-in ballots. You know, we're C. We don't know yet. But two, three, four seats. So that'll be...

But generally in the first term, midterm, incumbent president gets beat. And my guess is all the controversy around Trump will make him very vulnerable. And so the Democrats have to be the best they have ever been at candidate recruitment and really swing for the fences in the midterms to get the House, which is the checkbook back and the investigatory thing.

So lots of howling on MSNBC about outrage about January 6th is good base child, but it doesn't move that needle. It's the Italian campaign of World War II. It's not D-Day or the Russian front. And so the D-trip is now the most important thing, I think, in short-term organized democratic politics. And they're going to have to be great, not go to the sociology department at the community college, but find candidates there.

who have wide appeal and run a 40-state massive midterm press. Because one thing that'll do is it'll chill the repubs who care about majority more than anything. And they know the House majority is really in danger. And that'll have a freezing effect on some of this stuff. So I think...

Being careful about relitigating stuff that makes 36% of the country really, really mad and get into the stuff that'll win 20 seats in a midterm and grab an institution to slow them down. And then you can go impeach them 20 times and do all your base stuff. But they got 20 months here.

to get the best midterm congressional House campaign put together in the history of the Democratic Party. And it is critical. David, I've seen you on television a lot at odd hours the last couple of days, poring over exit polls. So here are my questions for you. The one thing that no one disputes is that Trump...

that the Democrats have a problem with Hispanics. It's not news. We've actually been saying this for years. Particularly Hispanic men. Particularly Hispanic men. But, you know, I mean, yes. So that's a problem. When you look at the exit polls, what are the insights that you glean with respect to coalition politics in two areas? One is Democrats in the black vote.

Now that the, I mean, exit polls are imperfect, but we have some data on that. What's the standing of the party with African-Americans, number one? And number two, the gender dynamic. Republican strength with men, Democrat strength with women. What do we take away from this election as things, as Democrats think about fixing their problems? How big a problem is they have on either one of those fronts? Well, first of all, we sat here at the beginning of the weekend. We said, one way you're going to know how this election goes is if...

uh you know is looking at the gender numbers and if she is beating uh trump by uh and uh by a margin that's equal or greater than the margin by which uh he beats her among men uh she will win the election well you know what he uh beat her among men by 13 points and she beat him among women by eight

So that there wasn't even close to parity in that. And they, I mean, they had, again, talking about strategy. I mean, their campaign was very much aimed at men and particularly young men. You look at the, you know, the things that he said, the podcast that he went on.

uh you know the the rogan thing and many others i mean they they had a very very um uh they had a very calculated strategy to run up the score among uh among these young men i will also say um let's give a

Shout out to the America's new oligarch, uh, uh, Elon Musk who dialed up the algorithms, uh, on, uh, X Trump's actual Trump's actual running mate. Um,

Yeah. And, and, but also I think that's going to end badly, I predict, but go ahead. And did, and did some things relative to turn out that in Pennsylvania may have been helpful. We've talked about his, you know, his giving away money in there to help identify because, you know, first time voters, uh,

or irregular voters, low propensity voters who would vote for Trump and they flush them out. One thing that we, Van Jones said last night on CNN, and he's right, that we thought,

that Democrats would do much better on election day because they had a massive organization. And he held up his phone and he said, but they had this and they were, they were, uh, digital and social media, uh, really, really hard to flush out these young men. Uh, and, uh, is that your, is that your verdict? I mean, is your verdict on this, that, uh,

You know that again, I'm, I was one of those people for sure who said on the base of what I had seen on the ground in the blue wall States that I was being polite. Well, no, but I mean, I'm serious. I mean like the, do we now think on the basis of, of the results that, uh, the Trump, uh,

untraditional stealth ground game plus with Twitter added in that that was every bit the equal to and maybe better than the operation that Jenna Malley Dillon spent for each building. Is that the conclusion? I don't know. One thing that is clear is there was a big, big wave

that, you know, and you look at the, I mean, they actually did better in the battleground states in terms of fall off from 2020 than they did in states where they weren't running a campaign. They being Trump? No, I'm talking about the Harris campaign. They felt they did less well everywhere. I have it written down here somewhere. Let me give a contrarian opinion. Two things that the media obsesses on that are bullshit.

One was Haley voters. He got 94% of Republicans. The whole never Trump thing was Washington window dressing. A lot of people worked hard. They're all my friends. Didn't make a hill worth of beans in the big macro fight. Second, the most overrated thing that is 90% bullshit in a general election, which I've always believed, but I don't say a lot because a million people scream I'm an idiot and I'm a media guy and what do I know? Ground game.

a lot of wasted horseshit money that makes a very marginal thing. Now, in a lower turnout election, different story. But in a big general with huge macro... I know. Most people do, though. One of your peers called me up and said, can we finally say the ground game is such bullshit? I said, no. No, but I mean, I think the ground game has an impact. It doesn't have the ability to offset a wave. It is decisive in a very close

And it actually, I mean, I saw it, Mike. I saw it in 2008. And if we didn't have this Army. That was a message thing. I would much rather have message because ground game can amplify it. You get a better ground game when you're winning on message. Well, okay, that's fine. When you're macro losing, the ground game is just a bunch of pins on a wall. Let me just. At great cost. Let me just. Yeah, I feel like I'm part of this.

argument that you had for years and years and years when you were trying to get more money for spots. But no, no, no, no. Come on. That's that's a that is a cheap shot. It is not true. It's from I just hate the ROI of paying people to talk to other people who are already voting for you. I also like that, Mike, the one of the leaders of Republican voters against Trump started out by saying this whole never Trump thing is bullshit.

It was this year. It was. Look at the data. That's my point. All the stories about the Haley voters and all that. This was a big force election. And all the little stuff that we like to obsess on, particularly in the process press, was overrated cable TV chat chum.

Uh, it's just, this thing was fire the guys that were in and enough with the work. Well, of course, shit, that's what the election was. They both did very well among their parties there. You know, there's no evidence in the numbers that there was a, uh, the flaking of Republican voters to, uh, from, you know, these Haley voters, they, they, if they were Republicans, most of them voted Republican, but this is what I want to say. The, the bigger shift from 20, uh,

occurred in non-battleground states. So in non-battleground states, Democratic performance dropped 3.5 points. In battleground states, 1.6 points. And part of what made that difference was

People on the ground, but it certainly wasn't enough to make up for all the other things that were going on. And yes, I do think in terms of getting to a constituency, they thought they could organize. I think the Trump people used, uh,

You know, the podcasts, the digital, you know, social media effectively to reach because they actually won among voters who were first time voters. No, no, but I see that as communications and message. He's very at home on Rogan. She ducked it. You know, the demo, I'd say, tells the whole story. In addition to that reverse gender gap thing, which is huge and shows most of the, again, elite voters.

you know, pre-assumptions were out the window. Trump did better with voters under 30 than any Republican since Bush in 2004.

I mean, it is impressive. And she did worse than anybody since 2000. Yeah, and some of it has to do with how they communicated methodologically. Some of it had to do with the fact that in a social media age, Trump himself...

is a more effective communicator. Oh, totally. Yeah, he gives conflict and entertainment, which is what social media is built on.

I have one other large question to ask you two geniuses, okay? In the 2020 election, Lou, these are the things I puzzle over at this moment. In the 2020 election, granted, it's a COVID election. It was a totally unique circumstance. But Joe Biden, 81 million votes. Donald Trump, 72 million votes. Okay, that's, I think, 153 or so million people voted. Right now, we don't have the full numbers in yet because California, as you said, Mike, is still coming in.

Harris at 68 million votes, Trump at basically the same number at 72. Okay. Given the stakes raising and other things that were gone on, went on in this election and Trump trying to come back, I'm a little surprised that, that not only did that's 140 million votes so far versus 154 million votes that turnout is down and

nationally before you go far too far down this road nate cone just tweeted from the times our last estimate for the final turnout in the presidential election is 157.5 million so he thinks it's going to be over so they're that that many votes are still almost matching 2020 in raw votes though falling a tick lower as a share of eligible voters given population growth so as a percentage of the whole it's lower

Yeah, so I don't think that's going to turn out. Not dramatic. And you can account for that by COVID and the pent-up energy around. Like, COVID can account for the fact that it was a little bit higher. Right. It's a percentage. Yeah, but this outcome was not about some turnout surge. It was normal. It was about massive shift in attitudes, choice people made.

and the issues they cared about, which were not the ones on the white wine and cheese agenda. They were on the meat and potatoes, unhealthy food agenda, so to speak. Let's be fair to Harris about one thing. I mean, she didn't campaign on a woke agenda. I mean, she was stuck with some of the stuff she said in 2019. What the biggest point, Mike, is that on the issues that really fundamentally mattered,

the, the, the die was cast. You'd have fired them three and a half years, three and a half years of, of inflation and discontent on the economy, which Joe Biden did very little to talk about in a way that would have ameliorated the problem. Plus Harris, then inheriting all that basically cast the die. That's really the, the, the takeaway is that not. Yeah, that's,

Yeah, that is the big mainspring. And we kept trying to find sophisticated reasons. At least I did. And I think I wasn't the only one to say, oh, this time it's different. It's generational. It's first African-American Indian. You know, it's this, it's that. We're finally going to break the glass ceiling. All the things that are important to people who generally don't have to worry about the grocery bill.

I think that you're right, John. She didn't campaign on the so-called woke issues, but the videotape from 2019, obviously, was damaging. And then the Democratic Party has a branding issue in this regard. Careful, you might trigger them. And I'd say one last thing about this just to be really, I mean, this is a woke thing or not a woke thing. I'm feeling triggered. The immigration thing is still a huge problem.

Right. I mean, you look at those, those, we talked about very briefly. I raised the Latino thing. I think she's, I think the problem with the democratic party's problem with African-American voters turned out to be overstated. It's problem with Latino voters did not turn out to be overstated. And we're back in a place where Donald Trump, you know, they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. Donald Trump wants to have a mass deportation is now a guy who's close to getting half of the Hispanic vote in the country. And Democrats, I,

And Democrats must deal with that. To assume the Latino vote is about identity. By the way, I would officially say it's no longer the Latino vote. It's an American vote. Right. And stop trying to think. This was a mistake they made last time. They kept sending on the Biden campaign, Kamala into Dade County, thinking they had some identity argument of color with Latino voters. They're assimilated. It is not the handle. Economic issues were.

I hope, by the way, that when they clean out the Harris headquarters, somebody leaves a Post-it note for the next one, the next Democratic campaign that runs, saying suggestions. One, don't screw up the border and avoid inflation. Turns out the Hispanic voters want to secure borders as much as non-Hispanic voters. Or a good wage. Look at those Rio Grande districts in the energy patch that were overwhelmingly Democrat and have all swung.

It's the hourly pay. It's not, let me talk to you about your heritage, and we're bringing in some speakers from La Raza for you here to talk about identity. It's about wages, and it's about safety, and it's about all the things that are animating a lot of voters. As we wrap this thing up, I want to play a play.

a bite from Kamala Harris's concession speech. And let me just also parenthetically give her credit for making one. We as a country, we as a country for perverse reasons, we as a country benefited from Trump winning and winning decisively because we were spared the ordeal of the, of the chaos that he would have reigned on the country had he not won. And she, and she did what,

past Democrats and Republicans have done, which is she yielded to the will of the people and acknowledged it. But she did say this, and I want to ask you guys about this. Please know it's going to be okay. On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win. But here's the thing, here's the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn't mean we won't win. That doesn't mean we won't win.

That was widely interpreted as her saying she might be back, that she might run again. I'm not sure that's what she was saying. But looking ahead, do you see that in the cards? I think she did overperform, and I am not going to dog Kamala Harris. I think she had some big moments in this campaign, that debate, the convention speech, and so on. But...

It seems to me there's going to be no dearth of candidates in 2028. Generally, people in politics never give up when they've had the big ride. If I were her, I wouldn't.

I would say it's in her interest. I thought her speech was moving. And by the way, Trump brought up a cage fight promoter. There was no thank you to the opponent. There was no grace. You know, it was as usual. It was Trump. But she was cheated by Joe Biden's greed from the fair shot to prove excellence in a primary. Maybe she would have. Maybe she wouldn't have. But she didn't get that. So she got put in the rocket chair and did her best. I'd like to see her...

go be excellent and maybe a democratic primary would be it i guess but she needs a story part of what's going to happen is there's going to be candidates are going to come forward with their theories of the case about what the democratic party needs to do and what the democratic party needs to be as clinton did uh you know and in some ways as obama did when when

But let me ask you quickly, and Johnny, just quickly, and then I know we're running out of time. Can the Democratic Party change? Because it strikes me the political incentives inside the Democratic Party are very different from the incentives that you would want to build a party that can win elections.

a bunch of these swing states which are tighter than the national mean. I mean, it's very hard. Yeah, I mean, I think that we always make this mistake of assuming that the Democratic Party is some far-left party.

I mean, that's the image that... That's the brand, unfortunately. Well, yeah, but it's not the fact. And the fact is that Democrats never nominate candidates that are on the far left flank of the party. Democrats always... And one of the things that... One of the mistakes that people make, sometimes people on the left and sometimes liberals, is to assume that...

uh you know people of color hispanics and blacks and so on are a left-wing vote yeah totally wrong right no it's about the people are strongest against the defund the police is the african-american voters who actually rely on police for public safety here to answer your first question i know you want to probably go last here but i want to ask my answer mike's question and your question mike

I think the Democratic Party has in the past, notably in the Clinton period, which really is a worthwhile analogy. If we're going to get to the end of 12 years of the Trump era, the party is going to be, even though they won the White House for four of those years, they're going to be desperate to get back in. And I think the

that there's already in the mainstream of the party a pretty decent appreciation for the fact that defund the police and some of the wokest stuff from the 2019 and pandemic era is political death. I think a lot of those people who we talked about as potential successors to Joe Biden, Gretchen Whitmer, Bashir, Wes Moore,

uh josh shapiro those are not woke candidates those are not lefty candidates and those are the candidates who we're looking at uh who i think are all those people are at least plausibly going to run uh looking at it thinking about it and i think you're i think the party can move itself back i don't know if it will because the left will still be loud and there will be a fight for it but you're asking can it can will yeah no i think it it can i'm not sure it will we'll throw this to axelrod for the big finish but i'll throw a mini question so go ahead and then i'll do it

I just, as I finished that last thing, just to say David's question, I think she will run again. I think Harris will run again for the reasons. And I think she's going to hear all of us saying it was Joe Biden's fault, not her fault. And that's just going to encourage her to run again. I don't know. I mean, I, I would be shocked if she didn't put herself in that race. It'll be tough. I think it'll be tough, but let me ask, ask a question to set him up for the big, but I wouldn't bet against you on that Johnny. Once they run, they taste the, they've been to Paris.

Will, can the Democratic Party ever nominate a Southern white Protestant male again, like Clinton, like Carter, who tend to win national elections for him? Yeah, well, I mean, I think that the thing that made Clinton and Carter viable was they were as comfortable in a black church as they were in a union hall, particularly Clinton.

And, you know, I think I certainly wouldn't rule that out. I mean, I thought, for example, in 2020, you know, I thought Mitch Landrieu would be a good candidate for that very reason. But so here's what I want to say, you guys. I watched that concession speech by Kamala Harris and.

To me, the most moving thing was to see the faces of young people, particularly young women, in the crowd, tears in their eyes, and dejected and filled with despair. And my message to all of us, but particularly to young people, is that...

We have gone through periods before in our history where, you know, we thought,

that the changes were dramatic and irreversible and this is the way things are going to be. But the wheel of democracy can be awesome and brutal, but it turns and it turns. And, and the only thing to, in my view, the only thing that threatens American democracy is if good people, uh, and particularly young people, uh, become so cynical about it that they walk away, uh,

And I just, you know, I feel like there are going to be battles ahead and there'll be a change of direction as there has been, you know, before. But I just want to...

I want to hug every one of those young people who are in that crowd and say, there'll be another day. Stick to it. Stick at this because we need you. 24 months, we're going to have a big, big one. David, we'll send out some people into the crowd to get consent before you give that hug. Yes, I walk around with those forms on me. You don't want to trigger anybody where the patriarchy goes in and tries to force hugs that are unwanted.

David's like, I want to hug that crowd whether they want it or not. All right. Well, I can hug you guys, though. So we'll do that. Yeah, we're going to wind up in a Trump ad. No mailbag this time, but send questions. Hacks on tap at gmail.com. Post-election questions. Hacks on tap at gmail.com for next week. You can do a voice memo on your phone and send it. And we should end with a promo for a rare...

uncompensated, live, hacks on tap, in-person appearance next week. Uncompensated? Yeah, we're not getting paid for this. Can you believe it? Oh, well, I'm out. Guys, I'm out. Exactly. No money, no fun. Murphy, we weren't supposed to tell them until we got there. I know, I know. My error. I'm loopy from 24 hours of trying to recover from a nightmare. So next week, my pals are going to join me at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago where I hang out.

And we're going to do this podcast in front of a group of young people. I'm really looking forward to that. And I appreciate you guys doing it. I'm going to take you both to Manny's, my favorite deli, to compensate you for your time. Fair deal. Lunch or dinner? I've got to figure out my plane tickets. Well...

We can negotiate that off the podcast. This is a Chicago negotiation. First we sign the contract, then we negotiate. All right, everybody. America endures. See you in the midterms. Courage. Courage.

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