The Future of the Democratic Party

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The Democratic Party is in a battle right now, with itself.

After devastating losses in 2016, the party was resurgent in 2018, but the lessons from both elections remain unclear.

Should the Democratic Party be one of progressive grassroots activism, or should it try to win back suburban and moderate voters?

Which is the winning strategy for the 47 Democrats currently running for president in 2020 and beyond?

Some in the party say that choice is a false one, and others say it's an existential one.

This is Radio Atlantic.

My guest for this scintillating and important conversation is the always scintillating and very important Dan Pfeiffer, former senior advisor to President Obama and co-host of a little-known broadcast known as Pod Save America.

Pod Save America.

Dan Pfeiffer, welcome to Radio Atlantic.

I am very excited to be here on this esteemed, very highbrow podcast.

Thank you.

We're going going to class up the joint, your joint.

So, Dan, let me just start as we talk about where the state of the Democratic Party and what the organizing principles should be.

When you think about 2016,

what did the loss in that election tell you about what Democrats needed to do?

That is such a challenging question because

they're

like the close losses are the hardest ones to sort of divine what both close losses and close wins actually divine actual lessons from because you could make a very compelling argument that were it not for a black swan series of circumstances like Russian hacking,

Jim Comey's desire to unburden himself at odd times,

Hillary Clinton's aversion to visiting Wisconsin in the fall, that absent all of those things, Hillary Clinton would have won and we'd be having different, very, very different conversations.

That didn't happen.

So I think there's two questions that we have to explore.

And too often within the context of a discussion about the Democratic Party, they are treated as a choice,

a false choice, which is something that Democrats are addicted to.

But we failed on two fronts.

One is to persuade some number of independent voters,

swing voters, if you will, to vote for a Democrat.

And that's not just Hillary Clinton's fault.

I mean, we also lost Senate races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and places places like that.

And to also

maximize what is our advantage, which is having a larger base by turning out people.

So we have to find a way to do both.

And the discussion, unfortunately, since 2016 has been which as opposed to how do you do both.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: I wonder if there's

a sort of thing that Democrats didn't do in 2016 that could have

endeared them, for lack of a better term, to both of those subsets, which is to say moderate suburban voters and also base voters.

Some of the post-mortems after 2016 said the Democratic Party was too elitist, too captive to elites.

Do you agree with that?

I don't, I've never really understood what that means.

Like when it says, like, who are the elites of which it's captive to?

And part of it, this discussion is it's never had, the discussion's never had on the level in a real way, right?

Well, like the subtext of that, when they say that is, you weren't good at, you like, you weren't, didn't find a way to appeal to to white working class voters.

And

well, but couldn't, couldn't that statement,

you, you, you were too elitist also means you, mean you took too much money from special interests.

You were having closed-door fundraisers with, you know, Citibank or whatever.

I mean, I, I think that there is a problem with

too much special interest on both parties.

Now, um,

the, it, to compare Democrats and Republicans when it comes to raising special interest money is

quite a thing, given who funds the Republican Party and basically the mascot of the Republican parties is a pair of brothers from Kansas who made billions in the oil and gas industry.

Who could you be talking about?

Just to pick a random hypothetical example from somewhere.

Look, I think that we, it was a the 2016 election was a failure across the board on every level at an incredibly important juncture for the future of the party, the future of the country.

And frankly, given latest reports on climate change, the future of the planet.

And we have to do better across the board.

We have to run better campaigns.

We have to have a better message.

We have to have better policies that speak to more people.

We have to tell our story better.

We have to not fall into every trap that Trump sets for us.

All across the board, we have to do better.

And like, it's very hard to pick one thing because fixing one thing is not going to solve the larger problem here.

The 2018 election suggests that, I should more than suggest, make it pretty clear that

this is a very fixable problem, that this is not a case of the country moving inexorably in one direction away from Democrats.

It's not at all.

It's that there are a set of things we have to do better at, and the stakes couldn't be higher as we head into 2020.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

Let me just stay on 2016 for a minute because

we should spend all of our time in the most miserable place possible.

That's how I do, Pfeiffer.

Yes.

I do wonder we compare 2016, and we began this discussion saying Democrats always X, Y, and Z.

But did 2016 not open up a new Pandora's box, specifically in the context of the wake of the Obama presidency?

So there's the first, America has its first black president, and it has a Republican Party that has an attendant reaction and strategy to undermine that presidency.

and exploit maybe a burgeoning fault line or create a fault line between the working class and the white working class.

How problematic do you think that is for the Democrats going forward?

The division of those two, that subset of just the working class into a specifically racialized subset?

I think it's a huge, I mean, it's obviously a huge problem just for the general

moral and community fabric of the country, but it is a problem for Democrats.

And it is a solvable problem, we know, because Barack Obama twice was able to do well enough with both of those groups to win not just a close victories, but historic large electoral margins, particularly in the context of how polarized the country is.

And we lost the thread there somehow, right?

Do you think that thread can be gotten back post-Trump, given how toxic the conversation is?

I think it, certainly on the

yes, certainly on the margins.

There is a group.

Are we going to, is there a world in which all working class or even a majority of white working, let's I think it may be the better term is white non-college educated voters, which is the group that has moved

most

aggressively into the Republican camp since Barack Obama became president.

And I think one of the things that everyone missed is, you know, certainly myself and a lot of people in Obama world, we thought that Obama's performance with that group in 2012, given the fact he was an African-American man, he had a unique background, a middle name like Hussein, that Obama's performance with that group would be the nadir for the Democratic Party.

And now I think there's a very real concern that it could end up being the apex of the Democratic Party's performance with that group in the modern era.

And we're going to have to figure out how to get some of those Obama Trump voters back for sure.

Like there is not a math that works in the context of the Electoral College where you don't win some of them back, right?

That's the only way to get Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania back in your column.

And

so you have to do that.

And I do think that the best way to do that is a populist progressive message that works with both with working class voters of all backgrounds, all ethnicities, all genders.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Okay, well, we're going to get back to that progressive message because it seems fairly important in terms of the coming years.

You have done something that I think most people don't do, which is to suggest Democrats have to win both the base and the sort of moderates, both wings of the party, if you will.

There are a lot of people that say it's an either-or proposition and put their chits in with one side or the other.

I do wonder, because we are in what feels like a particularly progressive moment in terms of policymaking, at least on Capitol Hill, whether you think the Democrats are at risk or have been at least at risk of being too bullish or too reliant on the promise of America's changing demographics.

Because, you know, Republicans have a geographical advantage when you look at the country on whole.

You know, if they can keep running up the vote among whites and get, let's say, Harry Enton projects, let's say 90% of white voters in the upper Midwest as they do in the South, I mean, that could be a problem for a, in the words of Harry Enton from 538, a long-ass time.

So

I mean, that's not something that is discussed that much in the context of the US.

Yeah, I remember.

Yeah, I think that we,

in the wake of 2012, I remember discussions where a bunch of people in Obama land, myself included,

were screaming, perhaps not loudly enough, that demographics are not destiny, that it's not simply a fact that things were moving inexorably in one direction that would lead to democratic presidents as far as the eye could see.

And now, I don't know that we fully understood just how risky a proposition it was because

What I think shocked so much of us in 2016 was that we've always known that these states that have very, in the, in the industrial Midwest that have static, if not shrinking populations are, as young people are leaving and the population state is getting older and whiter, they're becoming more Republican.

And it's always been this race between North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Georgia.

and Texas to a lesser extent turning blue with

Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan turning red.

And those states got redder faster than the other states got bluer.

And that has created it.

We are now in it when Obama was on the ballot in 08 and 12.

You know, I remember my, I will put it this way.

I remember my first presidential campaign was Al Gore's ill-fated presidential campaign in 2000.

And there was in the early days of the internet that he invented, there was, you know, you can get, you could get on these

electoral college calculators, right, where you click the states to see, you know, like 270 to win or whatever it's called.

And I remember being a young pup on that campaign and trying to do the math to get to 270 and realizing very quickly that

Gore had to win all of the swing states to win, which at the time was Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida.

Right.

Because Ohio was not in play, Virginia was not in play, Colorado was not in play, Nevada was not in play, New Mexico was even a swing state at the time.

So you had to win all of them.

And then once, you know, as the country changed, Obama, you know, sort of brought a new coalition.

And then you had a thousand paths, right?

You could do it without Ohio.

You could do it without Florida.

And we're back to, unless Arizona.

North Carolina and Georgia really are in play this time, or a Democratic presidential candidate can bring Ohio and Iowa back onto the map, which they moved pretty aggressively off of it in 2016, then we're back to a very narrow path where you're going to have to win those three states in the middle and maybe one other one to get to 270.

It'll be an election that may look more like Bush's win over Kerry than Obama's win over Romney.

So everybody who is listening to this podcast right now should listen to what Dan Pfeiffer said, which is we may, Democrats, have a very narrow path to victory in terms of the presidential map in 2020, which is not an insight that you hear, I think, that often because there is this kind of

florid

enthusiasm about just how much the country is changing, has changed, and how well set up the Democrats are for the quote-unquote future.

I want to touch briefly on 2018 before we take a quick break and get into 2020.

When you look at what happened in 2018 and the sort of semi-resurgent Democratic Party, the retaking of the House, do you see in the 2018 victories a lesson that is complementary or divergent from the lesson of 2016?

I see a couple of lessons.

And I think it is, and I say I throw a lot of grains of salt in this conversation, which is midterms, particularly the first midterm after an election,

are very unique animals, right?

2010 told you where Republicans swept the House and picked up senate seats, told you very little about what was going to happen in 2012.

And so we should be cautious to read too many, like they see it as predictive, right?

It should be instructive, not predictive, I think.

And the part that is instructive, I think, is that Democrats did learn one very important lesson from 2016, which was in 2016, we chased Trump all over the map on messaging-wise, right?

So every day we attacked Trump

on every topic all the time.

And what fell out of that was the two problems with that.

One is, if you tell a thousand stories, you tell no stories.

And so there was not, Trump had a very coherent message for himself, right?

Like, you know, in campaigns, you do this thing called a message grid, where you do your argument for yourself, your opponent's argument for themselves, and then your arguments against each other.

So for Trump in his message grid, his argument for himself is make America great again.

Everyone could recite that, you know, and people will have different interpretations of it, but everyone knew what his argument was.

And his argument against Hillary was crooked Hillary.

And that had a bunch of different meanings, email, Clinton scandals, et cetera, but that she was a corrupt establishment politician and just worse than him, right?

And like that was very clear.

Everyone knew that.

You look at the other side,

if I were to ask people like, what was Hillary's argument against Trump?

You would get 10,000 arguments.

Racist, unfit, corrupt, liar, profane, all of which are both true and disqualifying.

But you have to tell one story.

And what we did in 2018 was we did not allow Trump to drag us off our message.

With great credit to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and the DCCC and everyone else and all of our candidates is we knew what our message was and we stayed on it.

And even if Trump wanted to essentially make up a fake invasion of the United States in the weeks up to the election, we didn't let that pull us off an argument about

trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and raising people's premiums and cutting Medicare to pay for a tax cut for the wealthy.

And so having a discipline to not let Trump drag you off your message is an important lesson from 18 that I think we can that

we learned the lesson in 18 we learned lesson from 16 and hopefully we can apply it to 2020 acknowledging that it's much harder to not let Trump drag you off your message when you're running against Trump as opposed to some random congressman somewhere well but a lot of people will say hey look 2018 was a referendum on Donald Trump we are going to take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk a little bit more about the present and then the future Dan Pfeiffer is going to bring a crystal ball what a tease Stay with us.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Okay, we are back with the great Dan Pfeiffer, and we are going to look forward now to the year 2020.

Well, we're going to stick a little bit in 2019, and then we're going to head forward to 2020.

And what's going to define the Democratic Party going forward?

And what are the policies and who are the politicians that might unseat a man named Donald Trump?

Dan,

you are very adamant that the choice between base voters and moderate voters within the Democratic Party is a false choice.

But I have to ask you, as we stand here looking at policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for all,

even abolishing ICE, do you think those are the policies that unite both wings of the Democratic Party, base and moderate?

I think they can be if they are explained and messaged correctly.

I think there are real messaging challenges to abolish ICE, for sure.

There is no question about that.

I think Medicare for all is a very popular policy in a vacuum.

It is going to come under tremendous attack, and we're going to have to be able to message it in the right way.

Medicare is incredibly popular.

People are incredibly dissatisfied with the current system.

So there is an opportunity to do it there.

Climate change and a new new green economy can be a very powerful message.

Obviously, we already know Republicans have latched on to some critiques of it, and we're going to have to message it.

But it is almost, we wrap ourselves a little bit around the axle and worrying that our policies are

too liberal or too progressive or easily demagogue when we now live in a world of, this is actually not even completely unique to Trump because...

they operated this way a long time.

You know, Barack Obama is someone who

passed a market-based healthcare plan and was forced to help save Wall Street.

And he was called a socialist from basically his first day in office.

So you don't have to be for Medicare for all.

So you're saying it doesn't matter what you do or how centrist you are or how much you try and embrace the private sector and Republicans.

You're going to get painted with the socialist brush no matter what.

Yes, I promise.

I think what policies you choose does matter and how you discuss them matters.

But we shouldn't allow potential Republican attacks to decide what our policies and message are.

And if like we're going to end up with this debate around Medicare for all in the primary that is going to be, you know, some people are going to be for the Bernie Sanders plan, which has a, I think, a four-year transition.

Some people are going to be for a Medicare Plus or a Medicare buy-in or a public option.

I guarantee you that whoever wins that debate and becomes a Democratic nominee, they are going to be.

attacked in tweets and ads as having supported something that is far to the left of what even Bernie Sanders has proposed in this.

So

I think the challenge for us is not going to be what Republicans say about our plans, it's what we're going to say about them to those voters.

And I think

I can get further into why I think this is a false choice, but these are the policies.

They're, I think, the right policies.

We're going to have a debate about which version of them is the right policies.

But

I believe a progressive populist economic message is the best way to do both things.

Turn out the base and persuade what we used to call in the Obama campaign is up for grabs voters.

Well, and I get that you, I mean, you're a communications person, so the selling of the message is important and the rebuttal and all the rest.

But I do think, I mean, I would ask you substantively, as someone who worked in the Obama White House, where it is almost unfathomable to imagine Barack Obama coming out and talking about Medicare for all and being asked a question on national television about the end of private insurance and suggesting that, yes, perhaps it would be the end of private insurance.

He never would have done that.

Would he have?

I mean, he has actually said this fall that he is for Medicare for all.

And he always viewed that the Affordable Care Act as the stepping stone to a more

to getting to something, whether it's Medicare, something that it is, you know, even his original plan had the public option in it, which

is not dissimilar to some of the Medicare for the sort of

the mid-stage Medicare plans that some Democrats are for.

And even people forget this, but there was one point in time where in the days when we were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act, where a Medicare buy-in became almost the plan that we were going to pass, but then

Democratic turncoat Joe Lieberman sunk it at the last minute.

So, I mean, I think

you ended where you ended, and the lessons you have are the lessons you have.

And I guess I just wonder knowing what you know now as opposed to what you thought going into the battle.

I think you're talking about, we're actually sort sort of, I think, having two separate conversations.

There is one about the plan you're going to sell to the country.

And then there's the one that President Obama was trying to get through the 2009 Senate where you needed the votes of Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Joe Lieberman, Joe Manchin, and Ben Nelson.

Blanche Lincoln shout out.

I haven't heard that in

a while.

That's right.

Right, exactly.

So, I mean, there was just, there was a,

there's, you know, this is the, the incredibly trite cliched Cuomoism of governing, campaigning in poetry and governing in prose.

Right.

But I think, I mean, there is a,

you know, the point you raise about Kamala Harris, you know, saying on the town hall that

in some way, shape, or form, the private insurance should go away and then sort of walking it back the next day is actually, I think, an example of why you have to make sure that you message these in ways that are empathetic to people's desires, but also their concerns and fears.

And healthcare policy in particular is a battle between the displeasure with the known and the fear of the unknown.

Right.

And like eventually, as every other Democrat has pointed out since then, that even in Medicare, there's a role for private insurance with Medigap plans and other things like that.

And so I think, and if we're going to go down the path with these policies, then we're going to have to be able to explain to people what the benefits are.

what the costs are and what the transition looks like.

And

I think if that's done well, it will be an asset.

If it is done poorly, it will be an anvil around our neck.

On a similar note, let me ask you about the Green New Deal, which has

been embraced warmly by Republicans because they've been using it as a cudgel to sort of beat Democrats over the head and say, look, these guys are going to end air travel and they're socialists and they're coming to destroy our democracy.

McConnell is going to schedule a floor vote on it to draw Democrats out and maybe maybe try and split the party in half.

Does that concern you at all?

I mean, I will stipulate for this in 2016.

Everything concerns me.

There is nothing I take for granted and nothing I feel good about.

And so, yes, I am like, there is.

You're in the worry hole.

Yes.

Like, as you know, in 2016,

back in our in our pre-Pots of America days,

John, John, and Tommy and I would tell everyone not to wet the bed.

And now what I tell people is worry about everything, panic about nothing.

So

that's also my approach.

Wear diapers, basically.

Right, right.

Which is my approach to the Green New Deal.

Where, yes,

the Republican attack concerns me.

I would like to see more research to know,

like you, what matters is not the overall poll number, but like how specific groups react to it.

Right.

So do the voters that we need, who are available to a Democratic nominee, right?

Are they worried that we actually want to eliminate air travel and farting cows, right?

Or

let's just say I'm ready to eliminate farting cows generally.

But I get the concern.

I think the concern is that you can't eliminate the farting without eliminating the cows.

So you either have to have farting cows and hamburgers or no hamburgers.

They go together, like peanut butter and jelly.

Okay.

Exactly.

And so, you know, I think we need to test, like, there are things that excite the Republican base, which we cannot control and should not worry about because there's nothing we can do to unexcite them, right?

What worries me are the things that move voters out of our camp into theirs or out of our camp into becoming third-party voters or non-voters.

And I think it is still a question as to whether those arguments work on the

sort of the axes that I care about or they just simply get Republican voters who are eventually going to be super fired up in 2020, and that should be our assumption, more fired up.

Okay, so you want the sort of more granular breakdown of who's getting swayed by this argument or these labels.

Yeah, right now it's happening in a vacuum.

And that is alarming to me as a Democrat generally, and is that Trump is out there just making his argument and every in the most talented messengers in our party are all rightfully focused on persuading

guaranteed Democratic voters in four states.

Only most of them may not even be swing states in 2020.

So yes, that part is concerning.

We talk about the Green New Deal.

We talk about Medicare for all.

The socialist label, which is bandied about

by both Republicans and Democrats.

I mean, there was a time when you would never identify yourself as a socialist.

You know that time.

It was not long ago.

Elizabeth Warren has gone out there and said, I am a capitalist to my bones.

Kamala Harris says, you know, I am not a Democratic socialist.

Beto O'Rourke says, I'm a capitalist.

Corey Booker has basically dodged the question.

Is it a label that should be excised completely from democratic vocabulary?

Should it be embraced and

dealt with

in a sort of more upfront fashion?

What do you think of it as a potential liability heading into 2020?

I think the polling, at least in the NBC poll that came out recently,

shows that there's very real concern about a president who identifies as a socialist.

And so it is certainly a political concern heading into 2020 and every other election.

I don't think we as Democrats are in the part where we excise people from the party, right?

Or we excise labels from the party.

It wouldn't be in our nature to do so.

And even if we tried, we would fail because we don't, this is not a Democratic Party is not a hierarchical

top-down structure.

It is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.

So it's sort of like there are people who, like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who identify as such and are actually pretty important members of our party.

And I think it's going to be incumbent upon each candidate to argue as to

who they are and what they stand for.

And frankly, why that's different.

I think people have been a little hesitant to, both Democratic socialists and non-democratic socialist Democrats have been hesitant to have an argument around this to say sort of what different, what, you know, how they are different and why they are different, right?

Like, what what is the difference between,

and I actually honestly do not know the answer to this, and I assume this will play itself out in the course of the 2020 campaign.

But what is so different between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, where she is

to her bones,

yeah, to her bones, and Bernie Sanders is a Democratic socialist.

Their policies are very similar.

Well, I mean, I guess I would say, isn't that problematic?

I mean, it feels like if you're embracing many of the same ideas and you have this very strong reaction to being called the same thing as the other person who is embracing the same ideas.

Does that not suggest a problem within the party?

Yes, it suggests a problem in the sense that people are going to have to make the argument for who they are and what they stand for.

I think it's very important as Democrats and as general Democratic observers

for us, myself and others, to point out that the positions that are being advocated for by

Democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are actually not socialist policies as they're commonly thought of.

They are progressive policies that are actually more in the mainstream of American public opinion and history than a lot of what the Republican Party advocates from the right.

The idea that you would offer government health care to people is not a socialist idea.

Bernie Sanders is not advocating for nationalizing industries or things like that.

The idea that college could be paid for is not that you would extend the idea of public education from 12th grade to two to four years later in college is not a radical idea.

But and it is our job as Democrats to defend those ideas as within the mainstream of American thinking before they can be caricatured to be something that looks more like the Soviet Union than a common sense idea.

I'm getting a sense here, and this is kind of like where I want to land this conversation, that like you I know that you're saying that

you've become a kind of worry wart, Dan, but I sense this unyielding optimism about how Democrats can keep a broad coalition together and can embrace, you know, complicated proposals that have potential steep downsides and will be exploited by the other side of the aisle as long as they make the case eloquently, forcefully, honestly, whatever adverb you like.

Which leads me to the question,

is really, is our presidential politics even about ideology at this point?

Or, you know, is this even about settling some intra-party Democratic squabble about where the heart of the party truly lies?

Or is it really all about personality?

And I go back and I look at the sort of the lean years in Democratic Party politics, you know, the 80s, Dukakis and Mondale weren't great candidates.

Bill Clinton was.

Now, he was selling something very sort of different.

But, you know, Obama was a great candidate.

John Kerry wasn't.

I mean, does the sheer force of personality, can that sort of, I'm not going to say paper over, but can that solve the riddle that we've been bouncing around for the last half an hour?

Yes, it can.

It is, I think it is a fool's errand.

To decide that as a party, we're just going to wait around for generational candidates to come because that means they don't come every cycle.

But I think that there's a disconnect between how voters see the process of electing a president and how political pundits and professional commentators and reporters see it.

And podcast hosts.

And podcast hosts.

Yeah, I put myself in all the three of those categories.

Well, you are.

Yeah, exactly.

And so the,

you know, our last two presidents are Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

These are people who did not fit into easy ideological boxes, right?

Trump stands for nothing, and therefore he was able to stand for everything.

It was like sort of a demented Rorschach test.

And I just think that it is

like the primaries is where we have a debate about the policies that we stand for,

the direction we want the party to go.

And then that is decided by whoever happens to get the most delegates through our strange arcane system.

And then

hopefully, and I believe will happen this time, we unite behind that person.

And then that person leads us.

But to voters, people are making a decision about the character of the candidate themselves, the general direction they want to take the company.

Is it a restorative, you know, particularly in

a reelection year for a president,

it really comes down to a choice between the change and the status quo.

Do they feel that

they want to keep doing what they're doing or they're willing to take a risk on someone who will do things differently?

And the personality and persona that person is incredibly important.

And that does not mean that the kind of policies they stand for is not also important because if you win, the policies you campaigned on are the policies you're going to have to try to gun.

Sure, of course.

And when you don't win.

But you've already won at that point.

So what does it matter?

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I just do not believe that either voters generally in the country, general electorate voters, or Democratic primary voters are as obsessed with ideology as

the rest of the political conversation, particularly on Twitter, would suggest.

And that people want a, I mean, there's a couple dimensions.

One is the polls are pretty clear that Democratic voters mostly want someone who can beat Trump.

And that the

quote-unquote electability question is so much more relevant when you know who that person is going against, right?

Like you can, this was, this is how John Kerry ended up beating Howard Dean and John Edwards in 2004, is that voters voters made a decision in the end that even though they were more passionate about Dean, they liked Edwards better.

They thought John Kerry had the resume and the gravitas to best take on Bush.

And even though he lost, it was a pretty close race, and that was probably the right decision given what we all know now about,

at least John Edwards.

And

so people are going to, Democratic voters are going to size up these candidates as who they think can best take on Trump.

Now,

it's a really complicated thing because no one, particularly post-Trump, has any idea what actually makes someone an electable candidate, but that is a lot of the gut sense of what will

go into people's decision-making process, particularly in these states like Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, where the voters are basically professional political pundits.

Luckily, they have about 392 Democrats to choose from.

Yes, they do.

So there will be something for everyone.

Dan Pfeiffer, it is a pleasure and an honor to to have you on our homespun little podcast, Radio Atlantic, descending from the great heights of Pod Save America to chat with us about critical issues this week.

Because this is an Atlantic podcast, do you record directly from an ivory tower, or how does that work?

We are a small city on the hill that looks down upon a

populated fiefdom.

Yes, I tried to use as many polysyllabic words as possible to have it be an appropriate for your august audience.

As opposed to how you slum it on your other podcast.

Exactly.

Dan, thank you for your time and thank you for your thoughts.

I am sure that we will be listening and re-listening to this episode of Radio Atlantic as we proceed forward, marching inevitably and inexorably through the night of American politics.

We hope to have you again sometime soon.

Thank you so much.

That was a very Atlantic close.

I'm impressed.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, to our podcast fellow, Patricia Jacob, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the battle hymn of the Republic as interpreted by John Batiste.

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Thanks for listening.