Diagnosing the Democratic Condition
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Tuck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. As I promised you, there will be more Trump transition news coming from this show. It's moving very quickly, light years compared to 2016 when it was being led by Jared Kushner and Chris Christie. And frankly, they didn't expect

to win. So they didn't exactly have binders full of vetted people who were known loyalists to Trump. There were fights between Jared and Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus as they tried to build up their small army of allies within the administration to fill out their silos. They were concerned about their titles and they wanted to make sure that they had the most influence with Donald Trump.

Doesn't seem like that's happening this time. There are new power vectors around Donald Trump. There's Elon Musk. He is obviously the world's richest man, and he donated a ton of money to Donald Trump and crucially delivered a ground game to him. So Elon is a major gatekeeper when trying to get to Trump. Don Jr. also delivered him a running mate who helped close the deal. So Don Jr. has a lot of weight, especially when translating what the grassroots wants to his father. And of course, Susie Wiles,

his chief of staff, and they're making moves very quickly. It's been reported that Trump wants to confirm his cabinet during the lame duck congressional session. He knows he only has four years and really only two years before he becomes lame duck himself. So he's got to move very quickly on this aggressive agenda that he's promised during his campaign. So far, he picked his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, like I said, who is

I can already tell you, will not be a very strong gatekeeper if she wants to survive. The deputy chief of staff for policy, he named Stephen Miller, you know, the chief architect of his anti-immigration plan, the deputy chief of staff for policy. He also named Congresswoman Elise Stefanik the UN ambassador. She is a staunch ally of Israel. So you can guess where the country is going to lay down its position on the war in Gaza.

Then there's Lee Zeldin. He is a former congressman who ran against Kathy Hochul for governor. He is leading the EPA. That is the Environmental Protection Agency. And I'm guessing that he will be gutting it and dismantling it based on what Trump has promised. He's also named his border czar, Tom Haman, who is a former head of...

of ICE. They're making very sharp decisions. Trump is not bringing people in to have them eat crow like he did to Mitt Romney when he kind of dangled the idea of Secretary of State. They've already made it clear that they don't want his primary challengers involved in the administration like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley. And I probably don't have to tell you this, but it's all about loyalty, central casting. Can this person look the part while delivering the message? And basically, have they hung around the hoop with Trump post-January 6th when he was in his darkest hour, when he was in exile?

Here's what I'm hearing in terms of Secretary of State. There's a fierce battle going on between Rick Grinnell, the former ambassador to Germany, and the former director of national intelligence, and Senator Marco Rubio. NBC reported that Senator Hagerty is no longer in contention. He was seen as a top candidate for the role. Marco Rubio might be the only senator to take a cabinet position. He would be easily confirmable. And he has a very strong ally in Susie Wiles. He was her former client. But he's also seen as...

a neocon among the grassroots. Meanwhile, Rick Grinnell, he has a very strong ally in Melania Trump. He held fundraisers with her with the log cabin Republicans. He's still making the pitch and we'll see if Melania is able to bring this one over the finish line. She tried to make Doug Burgum Trump's running mate, his vice president, but that didn't work out so well. I'm hearing that Linda McMahon, who's running the transition, she's the former

head of the Small Business Administration during the first administration. She also sits on the Board of Truth Social. She is one of the leading contenders for Commerce Secretary. She's already been confirmed and she divested her portfolio the first time around. Like I said before, private investor Scott Bassett is in the lead for Secretary of the Treasury.

He's central casting. He's got that full head of gray hair. He raised at least $2 million for Trump's campaign. I was also told, don't expect a rerun of Gary Cohn, who was the former National Economic Counselor, despite his indications that he would like to return to the administration in a big role like Secretary of the Treasury. And told

see Gabbard, a major surrogate for Trump. She's a former Democrat turned Republican is pushing for secretary of the army. We'll see if she gets that one to get a sense of how this is all playing out. It's playing out in the Twitter verse where the grassroots is trying to apply some pressure on who Trump chooses. Dave Smith, who's a comedian who

goes on Joe Rogan's show. He tweeted, the Stop Pompeo movement is great, but it's not enough. Right now, we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration. They have had their time at the table and brought nothing but disaster to the world and this country. America first. Screw the war machine. And of course, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted saying, agreed, I'm on it. So these are the people that are having a real impact on who Donald Trump chooses to fill out his cabinet. Stay tuned.

So on the last podcast, we talked a lot about anecdotal evidence and reporting, and we offered our gut instinct about why voters chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. Well, on this episode, we're actually going to talk about data. That's right. Blueprint is a centrist

polling firm backed by Reid Hoffman. He is one of the founders of LinkedIn and it's released its first database report on why voters cast their votes the way that they did. So I've got Evan Roth Smith on the line from Blueprint to go through it all with us because there's one thing I don't love, it's numbers and charts. So let's make it human for everybody. But I really appreciate your work, Evan, because we absolutely always need data to make sense of it all. All right.

First, let's talk about the methodology. So for this for this poll and we got into the field first thing Wednesday morning, right? Elections called Pennsylvania's called in the early hours of Wednesday and we immediately decide we need to figure out what what what went wrong here for Democrats.

We pulled a whole bunch of things and we'll be releasing some additional datasets as we work through the analysis because we think it's important to get right, not just rush it out. But this first dataset that we wanted to get out was something called a MaxDiff test where we presented

voters all across the country. We looked in particular at voters in swing states. We looked also at swing voters, so people who are undecided down the stretch of the election or people who split their ticket or change their votes election to election. And we also looked specifically at swing voters who at one point were swinging and chose Donald Trump down the stretch.

And we presented them with all sorts of reasons that were on offer for a

a voter to reject Kamala Harris to, to, to say, I'm not going to vote for her and I'm going to vote for Donald Trump. Right. And, and this was a pretty long list, right? We tried to be as fair as we could to mirror anything that was said during the campaign or, or that, you know, we had seen in a think piece or on social media or in a Republican ad. Right. And, and we tried to be balanced, right. We asked, you know, is she too liberal? Is she too conservative? Right. All the sorts of things that,

that you could ask. And of course, we had to ask some of the language that Republicans and the Trump campaign had thrown at her directly, right? Like the now infamous and subject of much debate, they/them ad, right? Harris is for them, Trump is for you. So we tried to mirror some of that language just to see what stuck. And what we found was that at the top of the list, basically for everyone,

was that inflation was just too high, that too many immigrants illegally crossed the border. And we saw the stickiness of this they/them ad, right? That voters, particularly the voters who had broken, the swing voters who had broken for Donald Trump down the stretch, believed the premise of that ad

that Harris was prioritizing progressive cultural issues like the transgender issue, which was just a symbol, right, of broader discontent with democratic priorities over the economic

urgency that many swing voters felt around things like inflation. Right. And even when she distanced herself from that policy of allowing transgender criminal migrants to get sex change surgery in jail, that's the whole extent of it. It didn't feel...

very substantial. It felt like a very hollow way to distance herself from what was obviously a very effective ad for the Trump campaign, if not one of the ads that they invested in the most heavily, probably, right? It's interesting because I'm looking at the crosstab and inflation being too high and immigration being

They were pretty much spread across all voting groups, like all voters, all swing voters, black voters, swing voters who chose Trump and Latino voters. In fact, it was African-Americans that said by the highest margin that inflation was too high. Yeah, this was just a devastating environment for for Democrats. Right. And of course, there are people and I'm sympathetic to this point of view that, you know, was there inflation?

after, you know, was this election winnable for Democrats in a conventional sense? You know, was it just too far gone between the inflationary environment? But but not just that, you know, the inflationary environment and how Democrats felt or voters felt Democrats had responded to it, felt that Biden had responded or failed to respond to it. Right. Democrats have been frustrated for, you know,

a couple of years now, really since the midterms, about not feeling like we didn't get credit for the economy or that, you know, Bidenomics actually worked and voters weren't just buying it. But but honestly, voters just didn't feel like they knew what the Democrats were doing about inflation.

And that if they had put their mind to it, they would have put a stop to it or at least made it less worse. And there's now been some, of course, retroactive criticism because it's easy to wake up the Wednesday after an election and say, here's what we could have done differently. But there's been some criticism of things like letting the child tax credit lapse and not fighting harder for that and other things like that. Right. That we could have done more to really show voters that.

that we took immigration seriously. And by the way, that's what provided the opening for Donald Trump to come in and provide an explanation to voters and say, I'll tell you why they haven't done anything for you on inflation. It's because they're obsessed with these extremist social, you know, issues that, you know, are from their far, far left flank, but they're indulging them and they're indulging them at the expense of the things that you care about, you know,

Mr. And Mrs. Median voter, Mr. And Mrs. Swing voter, you know, the price of groceries, right? Right. Plus they could roll the tape from everything that Kamala Harris had said in 2019, right? Yes. And, and one thing that, that we see in this data and see in some additional data that, that we'll be releasing, uh, and we're seeing reflected in some of the debate out there around, uh, the media ecosystem or the information environment or whatever, uh,

A term of art people are using to say, hey, it sounds like it seems like a lot of people are watching media that isn't too friendly to Democrats. Right. And the truth is only about 10 percent of the country really consumes dedicated political media, which means information is very sticky. Impressions are very sticky. So when Democrats make themselves all about something for two years, right, during the 2019, 2020 primary cycle, voters remember there isn't a lot of new information coming into most voters minds.

to displace that impression of the Democrats, especially when it's being aggressively reinforced by the Republicans. And we're doing very little to disprove it. Yeah, I mean, this was a time when, you know, Harris was caught on tape saying she was a radical and it wasn't even like she was caught on tape. She said it herself. You know what I mean? Or said that, you know, she was for Medicare for all. She believed that border crossings should be decriminalized.

So, you know, these are obviously really big issues that were kind of hangovers. And she ran basically to the left of Bernie in 2019 during a primary that was very progressive. Joe Biden was essentially selected to be the running mate by the party poobahs like James Clyburn in South Carolina because he was seen as more of a centrist who could really take on Donald Trump when the rest of the candidates were seen as just way too out of touch with the rest of the country.

But I do want to talk a little bit about the second reason people chose not to vote for Kamala Harris. Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border. It's interesting because, you know, there's this conventional wisdom, which is wrong, that Latino voters support migration, that they are pro amnesty, that they believe that the border should be open. In fact, in your polling, it shows that

that an overwhelming number of Latino voters chose not to vote for Harris because of the number of border crossings. Can you kind of explain that? Yeah, it was it was absolutely the second most important issue to Latino voters in terms of reasons not to vote for Harris. And, you know, I think it's just the Democrats had a proposition on their immigration policy, right, which is that

attitudes around legal immigration, right, and our legal immigration system and what we used to talk about as immigration reform haven't really all changed all that much when you poll it. Right. People still think that we should allow legal immigration, that, you know, we can we should have some easier and more straightforward pathways to citizenship. Where Democrats fell down is we had given the American voter this value proposition that a porous border or the border crisis that Republicans

said was happening and that people were able to observe to some extent in statistics and on the news, that it wasn't really that big a deal, right? That it wasn't too big a problem. That illegal border crossings or people who are in this country without proper documentation, without going through the proper pathways, that it wasn't that big a deal. And Donald Trump and the Republican Party very successfully convinced

many voters, including Latino voters, that scarcity they were experiencing in their own lives, including scarcity driven by inflation, but also things like housing scarcity, was a result of this democratic insistence not to do anything about people in this country illegally. Yeah, so they were able to convince them that even if you don't live in a border city or state, you are directly being impacted by the crossing on the border of

You are being directly impacted by migrants. And frankly, I think Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott in Texas, the two governors, when they started shipping migrants up to sanctuary cities, up to blue cities like in New York and in Chicago, it had a real impact, especially in the suburbs.

Yeah, it had an enormous impact, not just because it did transfer the reality of that many border communities have experienced around illegal crossings into places very far removed from the border, but also because it drove media coverage. Right. Reporters don't really live.

on the border. And Adams, Mayor Adams made a huge thing about it. He was like, we're being overwhelmed. Our city is being overrun. He said that. Yeah, he said it. And he wasn't the only mayor, right, who was forced to contend with this as a result of public outcry. It created

racial divisions as well. People were starting to get angry about how migrants were being treated. They felt like they were getting more than citizens that were living in the, in the country. They felt that they were getting more benefits. Yeah. As you know, as a, as a purely political endeavor, it was enormously successful, right? But what, what DeSantis did, what, what Greg Abbott did now, whether it's, um, humane to, to ship, you know, put people on a bus and send them halfway around across the country when they don't know, really know what's going on. Uh,

is an entirely different story, but it was incredibly effective politically because it did apply pressure to the Democratic coalition right at the heart of their base and major American metros. And it drove major national media coverage for years. Could have actually helped Republicans win the House in 2022 as well, because, you know, a lot of the seats that were picked up were in the suburbs of New York or in New York state where they were getting a lot of this media coverage. I'm also looking at Latino voters and the third

issue for them as a reason to not vote for Kamala Harris was that the debt rose too much under the Biden-Harris administration. What do you make of that? This is a fun finding because it's so strange, right, on its face that the debt would pop in any way, right? It's particularly high for Latino voters, but it's high in every voter group. And we've actually seen the debt and the deficit pop

in our polling for months now. And really what it is, is it's a stand-in for inflation, right? And the reason why it is doing so well with Latino voters, or at least my proposed reason for why we see doing so well, is Latino voters found themselves unusually pressurized or especially pressurized around the economy in this election. And that a lot of the stuff you saw was a total dissatisfaction. So anything that

anything that seemed to explain the economic pressure and the level of price rise in this country was, it has been over-performing with Latino voters and also over-performing with all voters. And it's not necessarily that...

every American turned into a deficit hawk overnight. But for decades, Democrats included have been telling voters that when the debt is low and the deficit is low or non-existent, financial outcomes in your personal life improve. Putin ran on that. Barack Obama, during the stimulus,

was signaled enormous amounts of deficit hawkishness in order to reduce the political blowback from the stimulus spending, right? He didn't want people to think he was being irresponsible with federal money above

above and beyond what was necessary to save the economy. And you do now see some economists retrospectively, but also there were economists at the time like Larry Summers during the response to COVID who said, hey, we're going to overcook the economy and there's going to be inflation blowback. And now we're seeing in these poll results the results of that, right? That message broke through even for people who don't really pay that close attention because they were feeling it so intensely, the inflation, that they wanted to figure out why.

It's also, by the way, not necessarily causally wrong, right? You know, government spending levels are connected to inflation. So it's not causally incorrect. To see it this prominent in a poll is a little surprising, but it's because voters draw a direct line from A to B when they see the debt or the deficit, they draw that to inflation. Yeah, it's interesting. I always go back to the conversation I had with my mom about why she was unsure of who she wanted to vote for and she brought up the debt. And it was interesting because like,

Republicans are hardly fiscal hawks anymore. Let's be serious. Donald Trump pumped the economy up with cash, too, before Biden took over during COVID and during his time in office. I mean, he caused a lot of the deficit and the debt to increase with his tax cuts. So it's just interesting that still the Republican Party has maintained a brand that they're better with money, that they're better at handling the debt and the deficit, even after years of kind of wild fiscal behavior under Donald Trump.

Voter assumptions are, you know, parameterized how the parties have to campaign. Voters assume Donald Trump is good with money because he's very rich. That gives him more freedom to do things like pump the deficit a little bit. Right. Without costing himself politically. Voters assume Democrats, you know, are our spenders because we go out and talk about all these ways we want to spend taxpayer money. So we have ways.

less leeway when it comes to what voters will tolerate from us on the debt and the deficit when it becomes a campaign issue. Yeah, perhaps saying that they had the largest social spending program since FDR with the Build Back Better plan and the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill probably was not the best way to set up Kamala Harris for the second term. Probably.

And of course, the implementation side and the governance outcomes matter, right? It's one thing to go out and say we're spending a whole bunch of money and everyone looks around and sees it in their life, right?

I think a lot of Americans felt like, okay, you did all these big programs, eggs kept getting more expensive. What exactly did you spend all this money on? And that's because it's a lot of that money, a lot of the, you know, the IRA or any of these other bills, a lot of that's still cut, you know, caught up in, in bureaucratic process. And so it hasn't hit lives, um,

in time for the election. Exactly. Another hit on Democrats that they get too tied up in bureaucracy with big government programs and why you hear a lot of Republicans say that they're for smaller government, right? Because they don't trust the government to do

be effective with their money, right? And that's all tied to the debt as well and government spending. I do want to ask you, though, how do you think the Democratic Party can win back Latino voters? Do you think they're gone for good? No, they're not gone for good. In fact, they're swinging, they're rapid swings within the electorate election to election, right? They're, you know, Latino voters, but

but also many voters are just in play right now. That's why our elections continue to be so close. But I think for Democrats, in order to gain some ground back with Latino voters, but also with all the voters we lost, we lost a lot of voters in this election.

to the Republicans or to the couch, right? As they say, a lot of Democrats stay at home. Not too many, right? It's overblown what the overall turnout level decrease was, but we did lose, particularly in major metros, significant Democratic vote share to the couch. But it starts, you know, if voters have all these misconceptions, or it's unfair to call them misconceptions, if voters have all of these preconceptions about the Democratic Party, right, because of things that they remember us talking about, or

or things they still believe about the Democratic Party that we haven't done enough to disprove, and Republicans keep saying they're still those people, right? Then all we can really do is start today by focusing like a laser on the things that voters actually care about, particularly, you know, the voter groups where we now are extremely worried, like Latinos, like young men. You know, one of the most frustrating voter groups for Democrats in this election are non-college educated white women who have not moved an inch

in three cycles, same exact vote share for Donald Trump in three cycles. Clinton, Biden, Kamala Harris, doesn't matter if Roe v. Wade existed, didn't exist, we have made no inroads whatsoever with non-college educated white women, while college educated white women have moved. So there are so many voters that we just have to show starting today, we care about the things you care about. All of those things that you might remember some Democrats talking about,

that's not us anymore. That's banished from the party. Right. And by the way, you know, it sounds a little, uh, blase to say, okay, we just have to, you know, become something else. But,

The Republicans kind of did this, right? Donald Trump, you know, sent the Heritage Foundation to the netherworld when Project 2025 started to become a campaign albatross for him. Right. He basically threw them under the bus and said, I don't even know those guys. He did the same thing to a lot of the pro-life movement by refusing to back a national abortion ban or even back state level abortion referenda. Right.

or to pull the party off of IVF legislation, right? You know, the Republicans made some really, really tough choices in managing their right wing this election in order to be able to go to voters and credibly say, we're not the people the Democrats say you are. Let's talk about immigration, right?

price levels and all these other things that Donald Trump really wanted to talk about because he felt they were good issues for him. We're going to have to do some of the same things, right? We're going to have to show voters incredible, meaningful ways that, you know, the things they believe about us, the extreme positions they believe Democrats hold simply aren't true. Or if they once were, they aren't anymore.

And that takes time. Yeah, it's so funny. Like the first group of people that the Democrats want to blame, at least from my sources in and around Kamala Harris's camp is white women. They didn't show up the way we thought they would. What do you make of that? You know, I think the campaign struggled to raise the salience of the entire premise of white women were going to show up for us was, I think, largely premised on reproductive issues and abortion. Right.

Now, college educated white women had a double digit move towards the Democratic Party this cycle. Non-college educated white women did not move at all. They are Trump's strongest soldiers. They're the only demographic among white people who have not moved towards the Democrats at least a little since 2016. But, you know, I think I think the Harris campaign is.

in part because they were stymied, in large part because they were stymied by the Republicans, wasn't able to raise the salience of reproductive access and abortion to the point where they were winning voters who weren't already, you know, women voters, white women voters, who weren't already voting for Democrats, right? You have lots of women out there who do vote on abortion and who do, you know, determine who they'll vote for at the ballot box on the basis of reproductive issues. But they're probably already voting for Democrats. And

Because Trump did

you know, sort of was able to make the attack that he was, you know, was going to implement a national abortion ban less credible. Voters beyond that block, you know, women voters, white women voters who Democrats are trying to say, you know, it's your rights or it's Donald Trump, you know, just didn't buy that by that attack. Because again, you know, anything we tried to use as a proof point for that, he successfully distanced himself from or, you know, very casually, you

thrown to the bus, like the Heritage Foundation. But then it would suggest that people were really closely paying attention to the race, more so than we assume. Yeah, that's probably right. I mean, you do have to discount a 24-hour news cycle and things like that. But I will say in the data, at least, there was a point in this race where the Project 2025 attack was really, really successful.

And it was one of the best things Democrats had. And then, you know, it was receiving quite a bit of coverage. And it also broke through. Right. That's really the difference maker. So many fringe ideas. It was crazy. Monitoring women's period. It broke through to voters. Voters did express real concerns about it.

And we saw it resonating in the polls. In fact, the only real period where where we see swing voters breaking for Harris over Trump were the swing voters who are making their decision around that time about three months ago. But because it received a lot of coverage and because

And because voters were going, wait a second, this is genuinely pretty concerning. Once Donald Trump said and said again and again and again and again in increasingly visible and and direct ways that he had nothing to do with Project 2025. In fact, he kind of went on offense against them. He's like, these guys are trading on my name. Right. He successfully discredited that because people were talking about it. So when he said something, it made its way into that discourse. And eventually that attack happened.

Also, I think the Harris campaign backed off of it a little bit. It did seem like they had so many different messages, the Harris campaign, that they couldn't just settle on one and really drive it home. It was very disjointed. It was like an octopus. You know what I mean? There was no central driving force or message. I felt that especially towards the end, especially as they shifted to fascism in the final weeks in democracy. This episode is brought to you by Vitamin Water. Food,

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Do you think that this vote was more about Kamala herself or a reflection of how the voters feel about the Democratic Party? Because I think she ran as a generic Democrat who had Biden's baggage, and that was not a very strong position. Yeah, I think I think that is true.

basically correct. It was impossible. I shouldn't say impossible, but they did not do enough to outrun the hangover that that Joe Biden left her, but also that the Democratic brand had. Right. If the Democratic Party had a really strong brand that was better than that of the president, she could have run into that brand and away from Joe Biden. But the

she was caught between a rock and a hard place. And the rock was Joe Biden. The hard place was being a generic Democrat. Both of those turned out to be pretty bad options. And

The only way out is to forge a really, really firm sense of who you are outside of those two things. And in 100 days, that didn't happen. She would have had to do something very drastic or acknowledge that her, I guess, predecessor or the person that she's so attached to had done everything wrong or admitted the things that he did wrong or say, I want to take a break from his policy or I think he handled it the wrong way. And...

that probably would have caused a lot of drama or she wasn't willing to do it. But I think if you've got to win, then you've got to make those hard calls, right? I agree. We released several data sets

showing that she desperately needed to draw additional distance between herself and Joe Biden. In fact, one of the things we did after she went on The View, which I think, you know, with hindsight was maybe the worst day of her campaign. As I wrote about at Puck, I wrote a pretty big story about that, how the Trump team thought that they had just gotten gold from her when she said, not a thing comes to mind when she was asked what she would do different from Biden. And they were like,

what we will be blasting this everywhere. Yeah. And they were right to because we did a test where we tested all sorts of hypothetical responses that she could have said in place of that. And everything did better than what she actually said. What could she have said according to your testing? I'm just curious. I know we're playing Monday morning quarterback, but still, I just want to hear. Well, we did this like the day after. So I can say, you know, in the moment, we were like, oh God, please do something differently.

But the best thing that she could have done was to pick a single high salience issue like inflation or immigration and say, I'm a team player. I'm the vice president. But, you know, I think we got I think we got it wrong on inflation. I don't think we did nearly enough. You know, it's because of how I grew up. It's because of the kind of background I have. But.

I just think we have to do better and I don't think we've done enough and I'll be a different president on that stuff. It would have been a really painful and tough day. But I think if you're a Democrat right now, looking back, I don't think it would have been more painful than Tuesday. There was not a lot of love for Joe Biden anyway within the party. It would have just been awkward for Kamala Harris and her team, which was made of a hodgepodge of Joe Biden layovers and some new people from Obama world. And I think she's a genuinely loyal person.

loyal person. But you know, you, you go out and you say, I that's, listen, this is uncomfortable for me. I I'm his running mate. He picked me. I'm a loyal person. I don't like having to do this, but you know what, when it comes to really important things like securing the border,

I just think there's more we got to do. Let me tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to search resources. I'm going to try and get this deal passed. Right. And think of what that would have looked like in the headlines and on the nightly news for weeks after. Right. Right. Every question, every every press availability she did, it would have taken all sorts of pressure off the campaign. It would have given her credibility with voters to talk about all sorts of other things.

if voters didn't constantly assume or weren't constantly thinking about the ways in which Joe Biden had failed them and how Kamala Harris had told them to their faces she would be no different. OK, so when you look at the numbers ranked of reasons not to choose Kamala Harris, it's

I believe Kamala Harris is too similar to Joe Biden was the sixth reason, top sixth reason why people chose not to vote for her. Yeah. And by the way, the worst reason that the lowest performer on this, which we tested again in the interest of fairness, not because we thought it was real, was that she's not similar enough to Joe Biden. Wow. That was the worst thing. You know, there was and you know, this wasn't a widespread view, but there were people who

you know, then and now who are like, you know, Joe Biden had these working class credentials in places like Pennsylvania, you know, that would have gotten it done in a way Harris couldn't. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. As much distance, the single worst thing she could have done is tried to...

you closer to Joe Biden or be more like Joe Biden. Were there any like conventional wisdom criticisms of Kamala Harris, like particularly in the media that just missed the mark entirely that like voters just didn't care about at all? I think there were a lot of wasted cycles on her bio. You know, the only the times where we saw her bio being or her or her, you know, where she came from or anything like that mattering was when she was able to when we threw it in something around, you

one of the two big issues in this election. If like, if she had said, you know, I come from an immigrant background, that's why I understand there's a right way to come to this country in a way that breaks the law. That's, that was a place where we saw bio be successful. Anytime it was like, I grew up like you, therefore I get it.

Um, that was a wasted cycle. Um, or anytime like, you know, I, the McDonald's stuff was sort of silly. I don't think that wound up moving a single voter, gave Trump a nice photo op. Um, but, but I don't think it put anyone off, um, Kamala Harris, whether or not she had actually worked at a McDonald's and yeah, I think I, you know, cycle any, any sort of

discussion of her family or anything like that. That was, of course, one of the early, you know, the Trump folks tried to force that and then backed off of it. What I thought was interesting in your data is that at the bottom were concerns about how pro-Israel she was or how pro-Palestine, like that's pretty much at the bottom of the

voters concerns. And it goes back to the idea that Americans don't really vote on foreign affairs. They vote on domestic issues. And so we did talk for a very long time, though, about this rift in the Democratic Party. And I think it certainly didn't help Josh Shapiro when he was being considered to be a running mate for Kamala Harris. I mean, they didn't get along, whatever, but he was seen as a very strong governor. Well, he won Pennsylvania by more than 50 points. He's a Democrat.

And there was just concern that it would activate the pro-Palestinian movement within the Democratic Party and that the Democrats would face a lot of recriminations for this. But it doesn't seem like it really factored that much in why people didn't vote for Harris. No, it really didn't. I mean, Israel and Palestine issues just had no impact with swing voters. Exactly.

in any meaningful way. They were the worst. They were like the least important things that anyone voted on. There was she could have moved in either direction and it wouldn't have made a difference to to to most of these voters who cast ballots that made a difference. Yes, Pennsylvania was must win or, you know, now seems like it might be must win, although she'd want it. She'd still lose. But, you know, the only difference that it seems like choosing Josh Shapiro would have made for the ticket is if he had made like different internal support

strategy recommendations than Tim Walz had. You know, if he had gotten in there on day one and been like, we have to say Joe Biden isn't the best president, right? That's the only different, right? And maybe Tim Walz did say those things in internal meetings, but that's the only real difference that the VP pick would have made would have been if it had steered the campaign writ large in a totally different direction.

not on Middle East issues or anything like that. Okay. Evan, if you could give the Democratic Party one piece of advice moving forward, what would it be?

This is based on your polling and what you've been doing over the past year. We have to completely discard all of the things that allow voters to assume the worst about the Democratic Party. The broad positions of the Democratic Party are not unpopular. They know that we favor government spending and welfare programs to help people. They know that we our coalition is made up of, you know,

various groups like black voters and LGBTQ voters. They know all these things, right? But when it becomes credible that the generic center-left views that the Democratic Party holds, that we hold the most extreme version of those views, that we're not just...

pro-immigration, that we believe in decriminalizing illegal border crossings, that we're not just, you know, pro-LGBTQ or supportive of trans people, that we would let that get in the way of an economic agenda, the way Donald Trump suggested somehow it could get in the way of an economic agenda. When we do not do hard but necessary things the way Republicans did hard but necessary things to make it clear to voters that we are not the most extreme version of ourselves,

We become winnable and voters take us seriously on the things they care about. So so step one is to just stop giving airtime within the party or within organs connected to the party or elected official forums within the party. You know, stop giving that stuff airtime. You mean mute AOC and Bernie? No, no, they're fine when they talk about economic stuff. They're great. OK.

And AOC, by the way, you know, her DNC convention speech was like basically a barn burner populist economic speech that I think was quite good. Just stay away from cultural issues, Democrats, to stay as far away as you can from them. Yeah. And on everything, just just we have to shut down this and wokeness, the wokeness. But the entire idea that we cannot allow Republicans the room to credibly paint us as an extremist party.

Because we have done that to them. And that's when we beat them, you know, into dust. We did that in 2012, where it was like Mitt Romney only cares about the rich people. He's like kind of a crazy guy. He has, you know, fanatical religious beliefs. We beat them into, you know, we beat them into dust in 2012, right? Because we did it to them and they just did it to us.

Right. They were able to convince everyone that we have fanatical views on certain social issues, that we have, you know, fanatical views on immigration policy, that we have no idea what we're doing on the economy because we're so busy thinking about these other things. And if we're focused on these things, then how can we possibly claim to care about ordinary people in America? Right. About normal people who have told us time and time again that their concern was price levels. Right. For years now. So that's that's my advice for the party is we just have to.

We have to improve our credibility and we have to remove the ability for Republicans to credibly suggest that we are an extremist party. I always thought that the biggest challenge for Kamala Harris would be to prove that she is not the most liberal person to ever run for president. That's that's a lot shorter than what I said, which was a hard feat because there was just so much tape from her in 2019. And she was people believe she was a very liberal person. People believe she was running in a very liberal party.

And people believed that, you know, Joe Biden had failed as president. You know, with swing voters in the final week of the election, Joe Biden was for swing voters and swing states. Joe Biden was 45 points underwater in favorability. If you can't create daylight, you're done. And she was done. Well said. There will be a lot of reckoning. And the instinct, the instinct to like blame the American people drives me up the wall.

As it should drive everyone in the party, like, you know, all these people, this isn't an indictment of Democrats, it's an indictment of the American people. Last I checked, we're an American political party. We try to win the votes of Americans in order to govern the United States of America. Like either we take that obligation seriously or we don't. And either the purpose of the Democratic Party is to win and wield power in competitive elections or it isn't.

So you we can litmus test our way to irrelevancy and like repeat the 1980s and, you know, live on little blue islands in a sea of red and warm our hands. But at the bonfire, the vanities or we can get back in the game and try and win an election or two over the next few years. Well, Trump might help you win another election. Yeah. Twenty twenty six is awfully bright. I will say that intervening years. Not so confident.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this show, please rate it, subscribe, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri and sign up for my newsletter, the best and the brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20 for 20% off a subscription at Puck. I will be back again on Thursday.