Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: Election Debrief

Speaker 1 What does Zinn really give you? Not just smoke-free nicotine satisfaction, but also real freedom to do more of what you love, when and where you want to do it. Why bring Zin along for the ride?

Speaker 1 Because America's number one nicotine pouch opens up all the possibilities of right now.

Speaker 1 With Zen, you don't just find freedom, you keep finding it. Find your Zen.
Learn more at Zinn.com.

Speaker 1 Warning: this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Speaker 4 There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

Speaker 4 Anibay has designed the only fully machine-washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Speaker 4 Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Speaker 4 Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Annabe has you covered. Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your home.

Speaker 4 Sofas started just $699 and right now, get early access to Black Friday savings, up to 60% off store-wide, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Speaker 3 Add a little

Speaker 4 to your life. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Well, fuck.

Speaker 3 Usually, we do a next-level podcast on Wednesdays with my best friends, Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, and JVL, the editor of The Bulwark.

Speaker 3 It felt appropriate and right to just kind of make the next level the daily podcast today so we could all hang out with you, those of you that could stomach it at least and go over what happened last night and then we'll read we'll do another TNL later this week

Speaker 3 guys Sarah JVL

Speaker 3 hi

Speaker 3 hi

Speaker 3 hi

Speaker 3 hi this is what I want to do I want to talk at first about our analysis of what happened in the campaign so we can be a little bit

Speaker 3 so we can build up to our feelings and then I want to talk about going forward and then then we can kind of close by just talking about how

Speaker 3 everybody's going to cope with this.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the campaign itself,

Speaker 3 I guess, why don't you just give both of you give us the biggest picture after having a night to sleep on it? What do you think happened? What do you think explains his victory at the biggest level?

Speaker 3 Sarah, why don't you go first?

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 Look, I think what we're going to wrestle with here is the way in which this election was really out of the ordinary and then the ways in which it was pretty ordinary.

Speaker 5 And the ways in which it was pretty ordinary were that you had,

Speaker 5 and we've known this, right? We've known this, and this has been a little bit central to the conversation JVL and I have over on the secret pod.

Speaker 5 And then, you know, if you go back and look at the focus groups, it's all kind of there, which is people did not think the country was in a good place.

Speaker 5 They were unhappy with Biden. They were unhappy with the economy.

Speaker 5 The fundamental, they were unhappy with the state of immigration. Like Trump was always outperforming her on the issues that voters said they cared the most about.

Speaker 5 You know, we were, the, the, Joe Biden

Speaker 5 was very unpopular, like, right, his approval rating is lower than Trump's approval rating at its lowest. Um, and so, like, in a lot of ways, you're just talking about the fundamentals always being

Speaker 5 against her. And I think that, or, or that she had a steep hill to climb.

Speaker 5 And I think that sometimes people pushed back on the idea of the fundamentals because they were like, well, no, the fundamentals of the economy are good.

Speaker 5 And I was like, but nobody believes that the fundamentals of the economy are good.

Speaker 5 And so, like, if you just, regardless of what is or isn't, the people who vote are going to tell you how they feel about the economy. And I think that they did tell us.

Speaker 5 I also think, look, my theory of how she was going to eke out the blue wall states rested on independence breaking her way at the end, based on the fact that

Speaker 5 she was sort of able to

Speaker 5 not be the incumbent. That's the piece I feel the most wrong about.
Like, people thought she was the incumbent.

Speaker 5 Like, she was tethered to Joe Biden, and people wanted change, and she was the incumbent, not Trump. Like, and I was always kind of like, who's the incumbent?

Speaker 5 Like, we don't know because they're both sort of incumbents. But, like,

Speaker 5 they decided she was the incumbent and independence did not break her way at the end.

Speaker 5 The other numbers that have stuck out to me are things like

Speaker 5 of the people who thought Trump was too extreme, like, or who thought they were both too extreme, right? Trump won those voters massively.

Speaker 5 So, people who thought she was extreme and he was extreme still preferred his version of extremism.

Speaker 5 So, anyway, I just, I think that's what happened. I think like there's a lot of ordinary political analysis in here that doesn't mean

Speaker 5 humans are terrible and America is over. It's like these are the things that happened that we thought could be overcome

Speaker 5 because Trump was a uniquely flawed candidate, right? That she could overperform those fundamentals. She did not overperform them.

Speaker 5 And then, like, I just think one other data point that's clear that I think a lot of people are going to be talking about is just the Hispanic numbers.

Speaker 5 Like, the bottom fell out of the Hispanic numbers in ways that

Speaker 5 I don't, everybody thought there was going to be some

Speaker 5 of that. But, like, you know, a lot of people really dislike the analysis of guys like Rui Teixeira.

Speaker 5 And I understand why. Sometimes it feels like

Speaker 5 I get a little bit frustrated by it too, but like, it's true. It's true that culturally, Hispanics now operate much more just like not like white voters,

Speaker 5 like non-college Hispanics

Speaker 3 operate like non-college white voters.

Speaker 5 And they broke that way in a major way this time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we can talk about this a little bit more, I think. But

Speaker 3 there was a lack of willingness. I mean, look, we can do recriminations on a million things.
So that's really not the point of this. The point of this is just being eye-opened about what happened.

Speaker 3 And there's a lack of willingness by a lot of people in our coalition

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 just like accept. the numbers that were staring us in the face on Latino voters and black voters.
And sometimes even in a shaming way that's like, if you talk about it, it's like, oh, no, the real.

Speaker 3 and it's like, you know, it's true, like, the real, the white voters went for Trump the most, right, out of everybody, right?

Speaker 3 So if you're doing the identity politics thing, but it's like, I think that there was, you know, a,

Speaker 3 as, as we talk about, oh, what happened with the Nikki Haley voters? What happened with the, it was like

Speaker 3 the gains, to the extent there were any, like with that group was just swamped by the losses on the other side. And not kind of accepting that, that those losses were happening

Speaker 3 potentially impacted kind of the way the strategic approach of the people.

Speaker 5 I will say,

Speaker 5 I'm not sure that people thought that it wasn't happen.

Speaker 5 I didn't think it wasn't happening. I thought you could make up those

Speaker 5 losses

Speaker 5 with better performance from white voters because there are more of them.

Speaker 5 But like, I'm looking at Wisconsin right now, and guess what? Harris did do two points better than Joe Biden in the WoW counties, right? She did overperform him some.

Speaker 5 It still wasn't enough to offset that slide because Trump did better everywhere else.

Speaker 5 It's because it's that slide, but it's also like, it's the thing that I think the X factor is always like, does Trump have, is there more non-college, are there more non-college white voters in the tank?

Speaker 5 And it turns out there were.

Speaker 3 Every time, yes. There's a never-ending supply of non-college white voters, it turns out.
JVL,

Speaker 3 what's your top line thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I fundamentally disagree with Sarah, but

Speaker 3 only because of the result. Like there is a result,

Speaker 3 there is a version of this result in which I would absolutely buy her explanation, right? If

Speaker 3 this was

Speaker 3 Harris 49.1, Trump 48.7,

Speaker 3 and, you know, and the... the electoral college shook out the same way.
I would say, okay, yeah, I could see that.

Speaker 3 That's not what we just saw. Donald Trump just won the largest vote share of any Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

Speaker 3 He did this while his own campaign

Speaker 3 was basically running for the exits.

Speaker 3 I mean, we all read the Tim Alberta story in The Atlantic, in which Susie Wiles and Chris La Savita were talking about how terrible the campaign morale was, how everybody in the operation thought it was, you know, that the guy had just blown it all up while he's like dancing at the rally and talking about Arnold Palmer Schlong.

Speaker 3 And we also saw for the first time Trump overperforming down-ballot Republicans. This is not, he's run behind down-ballot Republicans in both of his previous runs.

Speaker 3 This time, all of a sudden, he's way out in front of them. And in 2012, people didn't think the economy was great.
Objectively, the economy was okay. It wasn't bad.

Speaker 3 It was a slow recovery under Obama, but uh, but people felt like it was very bad, and Obama did fine. You know, he beat Mitt Romney pretty handily.
He got over 50 percent, uh,

Speaker 3 his second consecutive majority. I

Speaker 3 do not find a way to see any of this result as anything other than an affirmative choice for Donald Trump and all his works.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I,

Speaker 3 I mean, this, this, nobody, nobody cares about bipartisan legislation. Nobody cares that Biden did the CHIPS Act or

Speaker 3 bipartisan gun reform. Nobody cares about the handling of Ukraine.
Nobody cares about any of that. What they care about is

Speaker 3 demagoguery and grievance. They care about like the Haitians eating the cats and dogs.
I mean, we saw the debate, right? We all saw the debate where she absolutely destroyed him.

Speaker 3 One of the most dominating debate performances of the modern era of television. And for not only that to not matter, but for him to then overperform even what

Speaker 3 his own people thought they were going to get. And this is with no turnout operation, right? Famously, this campaign outsourced all their turnout to like Elon Musk and a bunch of Tesla engineers.

Speaker 3 And they won.

Speaker 3 The proof of this is that Elon Musk's turnout operation didn't matter is that in

Speaker 3 Iowa, he's like plus 13 in Iowa. Like he doubled his margin of victory in Iowa from

Speaker 3 just, can we sit on the campaign operation thing for a second? Because this was one of my things I just wanted to talk about before we get into the more moral, big moral pictures.

Speaker 3 This is the third presidential campaign in a row, actually, where the winner did not have a meaningful ground operation. Joe Biden

Speaker 3 famously ran a basement campaign. The Democrats were concerned about COVID for good reason, so they weren't doing the organizing that they did in other elections in which he won.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump has had essentially no campaign both times. I guess in 2016, there was an RNC ground operation, but even still, it was very late to the game.

Speaker 3 I've been on this since 2015, and I just,

Speaker 3 like, at a presidential level, like all of the money, all of the campaign strategists are basically worth nothing. Like, like it just does, it doesn't matter.
Like, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 And people don't want to believe that. Some people don't want to believe it because it's part of their whatever

Speaker 3 remit and mandate. And it's like the campaigns themselves are one based on the

Speaker 3 candidates' performance or one based on external factors and one based on dominating the what you call the meat space of the news. So there's some things that can be done.

Speaker 3 You know, you probably have to give the Trump campaign credit, as gross as it was, for spending $100 million on the trans thing to make the trans thing an issue where it wasn't.

Speaker 3 You know, Bill Christo and I were complaining about this sometimes with the Kamala ads, how they were very like gauzy and she'll help the middle class. And it's like,

Speaker 3 you can insert something into the conversation with $100 million.

Speaker 3 Right. You can do niche things, right? Like you can do little things on the margins.

Speaker 3 Like I think that, you know, having outside groups target a particular group, like what Sarah's group did, like some of that makes sense, but that's a much smaller, like the budget for that compared to these billion-dollar campaigns.

Speaker 3 Like

Speaker 3 nobody just will accept it. Like, and it's been 12 years now.
And so just like from a political strategy standpoint, everybody needs to realize we're in a different world.

Speaker 3 And that does go to like the going into things. I mean, Trump, I, Trump won for a million reasons.

Speaker 3 So I don't want anybody to like take me like, oh, this one thing is why she lost or he won this one tactic.

Speaker 3 Like he won every, he won literally, he did better with literally every group except college-educated women. So like, it's not like, oh, if only the Hispanic outreach would have been better.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean? Like he, he, it was a cross-the-board victory.

Speaker 3 But, um, but, but, like, the Rogan thing, like, one of my regrets from the anal from analysis is I got wrapped up a little bit at times and like watching the Rogan thing, and there'd be like three things that he said.

Speaker 3 It's like, oh, this is crazy. And we'll do a thing.
It's like, oh, look at this crazy thing he said.

Speaker 3 But like, if you watch the Rogan thing for the whole two hours, the the people that were viewing it were looking at him and they're like, this guy isn't Hitler.

Speaker 3 Like this guy is just a guy that can just ship, you know, shoot the shit. And like that stuff matters now more

Speaker 3 than

Speaker 3 the like tailored campaign messaging. Like we're in a new world where everybody knows everything about each other.

Speaker 3 We're all in each other's phones and like the candidate needs to be able to carry their own message and go into places and talk and sound normal.

Speaker 3 And Kamala, we all kept saying she ran a great campaign. She did.
She ran a very solid buy-the-book 2004-2008 campaign.

Speaker 3 Technical campaign. She did.
And she was faced with a lot of challenges because of the situation that she was put in.

Speaker 3 But it's like,

Speaker 3 you know, to the extent that,

Speaker 3 you know, there's a 2028 campaign to talk about, like, to me, that is like the biggest, like, to just go through the motions again with inertia of like, we're going to run the Bush 04 operation.

Speaker 3 We're going to do a lot of ads and have a door knocking program. Like, it's all fake.

Speaker 3 It's all for basically nothing. So

Speaker 3 can can we talk about the woman thing? Well, hold on. I just want to check out.

Speaker 5 Let me just step on this point that Tim's making because I think it's a really important one. And I think that,

Speaker 5 you know, one of the things we talk a lot over on the focus group pod is about this thing voters say about the thing that they like about Trump is that he's not a regular politician.

Speaker 5 And one of the things I kept worrying about Kamala is like, she sounds good to us. But I kept saying, I worry that she's going to sound like a regular politician.

Speaker 5 And I remember DeSantis being cooked when I heard heard the voters start saying, yeah, I like him, okay, but he sounds like a regular politician.

Speaker 5 And that's always been Trump's superpower, the not a regular politician, because we are in a different era in terms of what people want.

Speaker 5 It's the reason, it's like the same things in our brain that make, I don't like TikTok, but like

Speaker 5 the same thing that makes TikTok and its informality, frankly, the thing that makes us.

Speaker 5 you know, sort of better than cable news is like the reason people aren't as interested in cable news and they're more interested, interested more interested in personalities.

Speaker 5 They're more interested in finding people they can trust.

Speaker 5 They're more interested in having like an honest like who's being authentic with me, who's telling me the truth, who's giving it to me straight. And like, they'd rather take

Speaker 5 a politician who they think is telling them the truth, and that truth contains some really ugly things than a politician that they think is lying to them just to earn their vote.

Speaker 3 Except that Biden beat him like a drum.

Speaker 5 Biden did not beat him like a drum. He beat him by extraordinarily narrow margins in across a handful of states, 11,000 votes in Georgia, 11,000 votes in Arizona, 30,000 votes in Wisconsin.

Speaker 5 And it was like slightly bigger in Pennsylvania and Michigan, but it was not big. We didn't beat him like a drum.

Speaker 3 And we're in the middle of a bigger. It's a majority in a generation.
I mean, what do you think explains then the difference? This is fine. This is a good thing to chew over.

Speaker 3 What was the difference between 2020 and 2024 for you, JBL?

Speaker 3 I mean, so we don't know the overall turnout, right? We know that Trump is already at his

Speaker 3 2020 number. He's at 71 million votes.

Speaker 3 As you said, like there are like two dozen explanations.

Speaker 3 One of them, I think, has to be. The Democrats can never run a woman at the top of the ticket again.

Speaker 3 I mean, never is a very long time, but I mean, like, not in anything that looks like this version of America. Because again, just the fact that he overperformed her

Speaker 3 and, you know, and overperformed down bout Republicans, like in places where Tammy Baldwin did okay,

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 people were okay with having a woman as senator. And they liked the Democratic woman as senator.
They did not want a woman as president. And I'm not saying this is all of it, but

Speaker 3 I think it would be crazy to dismiss this as being a significant part of it.

Speaker 5 Maybe I'll be. Yeah, it's not all of it, and it's not none of it.

Speaker 3 If it was Walt Harris, just hypothetically, I don't think the result is different if it was Walzar. I agree with that.
That's right. I think the results are exactly the same.

Speaker 3 Can I just say this as a baseline? I want to hear you guys react to this. My view is that

Speaker 3 there is no Democrat who could have beaten Trump this cycle because the voters wanted Trump this cycle.

Speaker 3 Do you guys agree with that or disagree? I only disagree with it in the context of because who knows how everything shakes out. But like

Speaker 3 hypothetically, there could have been a process that would have let somebody win that differentiated from Biden. I don't actually think that that would have happened, though.
Right.

Speaker 3 So I think my real answer is no. My hypothetical answer is yes, right? Because the Democratic constituency is basically JVL, right? Like they they were not unhappy with Biden, right?

Speaker 3 Like this was not really a time where like both parties were unhappy with the status quo and it was throw the bums out.

Speaker 3 There were some parts of the Democratic coalition that were throw the bums out, Muslim voters,

Speaker 3 you know, like working class black and Hispanic men, right?

Speaker 3 But like they're like the coalition that elected Biden, older black voters, suburban college educated people, they were happy with what they got, right?

Speaker 3 So even if Biden had dropped out earlier and then Kamala ran a campaign, she ran as good of a technical campaign as she did here.

Speaker 3 It's hard to see the Democrats then going for like, I don't know, some governor that was running on, oh, the Biden economy has been terrible and we need to go a new direction.

Speaker 3 That might have worked, actually. I think a Democratic governor that did that, but I just don't see how that would have ever happened in practice.

Speaker 3 I mean, I've spent one second thinking about that, but that's my initial reaction.

Speaker 5 Sarah, anything? You know, I certainly, I think that one thing that I won't do is be like, if she'd had Josh Shapiro as her vice president, she would have won. Cause I don't think that's right.

Speaker 5 I don't think like it could have made, like, I always thought that Josh Shapiro

Speaker 5 as the number two on the ticket mattered in like Pennsylvania. She loses it by 9,000 votes and that was the tipping point state.

Speaker 5 Then I'd get on my high horse about Shapiro. I'm not, I wouldn't in this scenario.
I do think if you'd had somebody,

Speaker 5 you know, like Shapiro, who could have broken with Biden,

Speaker 5 but who still read, like somebody who read is a moderate. And this is going to be a big debate.

Speaker 5 Like, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be like, don't tell me she needed to be more moderate. She ran, you know, with Liz Cheney next to her and like an incredibly moderate.

Speaker 5 That's true. But one of the ways you get the, hey, this person's just a regular politician is by people thinking you're inauthentic because your positions change between the times that they see you.

Speaker 5 And I just, I think that that did hurt her. And I think that Donald Trump in the swing states dropped a gajillion dollars saying that she was a San Francisco progressive.

Speaker 3 She was. Trump changed his mind on abortion, which was a very high salience issue, and it had almost no effect.
Right. And that, like, it's a very recent change.
That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 Like, all these rules we construct, they only hold for one side. You know?

Speaker 5 Yeah, but this is, JBL, this is where I do get like.

Speaker 5 It is the tension between you're in my positions, but I think that there is, there is frustration with the world that as it exists. And I can share that frustration with you.

Speaker 5 But I think sometimes you try to demand the world be different than it is, as opposed to like, it is what it is. Like

Speaker 5 you wanted to demand, right, that voters accept that the economy was good. And I kept telling you, they don't think it's good.

Speaker 5 Like that doesn't mean she can't potentially overcome it by separating him. They don't think that Joe Biden was a good president.

Speaker 5 I agree with Tim that like a key part of the coalition thought he did a good job. And so like running explicitly against him, it seems like, how would somebody have done that? I don't know.

Speaker 5 I can kind of think of ways somebody could have done that because, actually, people certainly, including a big part of the Democratic coalition, did not think he should run again. And I will say

Speaker 5 it is not super great to spend a lot of time picking apart everybody and pointing fingers at everybody.

Speaker 5 Because I do think we should, as part of analysis, like figure out where the flaws lie, but just like hurling invective at each other is not good.

Speaker 5 But I will say, Joe Biden deciding to run again was a catastrophic mistake. And if he had

Speaker 5 said early on he was going to be a bridge candidate, right, and that he was not going to run again and let the Democrats have their primary,

Speaker 5 that is a counterfactual we can't test. We have no idea how that would have turned out.
Maybe they nominate Bernie Sid. Like, I don't know.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 5 But like, I'm not saying Josh Shapiro comes out of that, but that is how this should have gone.

Speaker 5 Because by the time you got through this election, with

Speaker 5 the challenge for her, it was just so enormous.

Speaker 5 And it felt like she was meeting it. You know, it felt like she was meeting it.
But at the end of the day, it wasn't enough.

Speaker 3 Can I agree in part and disagree in part?

Speaker 3 I am now, you're going to love this, Sarah.

Speaker 3 I am retconning my Joe Biden greatest living president.

Speaker 3 And I'm actually going to write this week about

Speaker 3 how Bidenism turns out to be a catastrophic failure.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 on the subject of me demanding that people agree and how this is the wrong way to do it,

Speaker 3 isn't that actually how Trump's messaging always works?

Speaker 3 Right? And you say this all the time. Like, Trump would just go out and say, great economy, ever, greatest economy, and you just say the same thing over and over.

Speaker 3 Like, eventually people just say, oh, I guess it was, right?

Speaker 3 Why is it that he gets to do that? And

Speaker 3 like, Democrats are supposed to to like put twist their toe in the dirt and apologize for like no no we understand it's really bad like just know create your own reality sure but that that requires that requires somebody with i think genuinely trump's salesman's ability

Speaker 5 yeah so yeah and but like and a life but but that sociopathy has led him to a salesman role that both understands what people want and how to give them what they want.

Speaker 5 Like he understands in a lizard brain kind of way, how to get people.

Speaker 5 And like some of it is like the economy was good when Trump was doing it. It wasn't that the economy wasn't bad, right? It was that, but he is willing to

Speaker 3 final year. Sure.

Speaker 5 But he was willing to say all day, every day, he was relentlessly on message about how good the economy was when he was the president, which is why, and that stuck.

Speaker 5 And that's why when people looked back, like when I say it's the economy, you're right. People don't remember the pandemic.
They continue the pandemic to be an exogenous event outside of him.

Speaker 5 They remember the pre-pandemic time and the pre-pandemic economy. And he wrote a lot of that.

Speaker 6 We know no one's journey is the same. That's why Delta Sky Miles lets you do it your way.

Speaker 6 From earning miles on reloads for coffee runs, shopping, and things you do every day to connecting you to new places and experiences.

Speaker 6 A Sky Miles membership fits into your lifestyle, letting you do more of what makes you, you. It's more than travel.
It's the membership that flies, dines, streams, rides, and arrives with you.

Speaker 6 Every great journey deserves a great story. And when you have a membership that's as unique as you are, there's no telling how your story will unfold or where that journey will take you next.

Speaker 6 Sky Miles is the membership that will be here for all your big and small moments. The membership that's there for every solo adventure or family trip.

Speaker 6 The membership that comes with the power of partnership from brands you love. The membership that moves with you.
Learn more at delta.com slash skymiles.

Speaker 4 Life gets messy. Spills, stains, and kid chaos.
But with Anime, cleaning up is easy. Our sofas are fully machine washable, inside and out, so you never have to stress about messes again.

Speaker 4 Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Speaker 4 Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Speaker 4 Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes. Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.
That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Speaker 4 Get early access to Black Friday pricing right now. Sofas started just $699.

Speaker 4 Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 3 Trump's sociopathy and willing to just be totally shameless is a cheat code that we should just acknowledge. Like very few politicians would be able to be like,

Speaker 3 yeah, if you are mad at the Biden administration for being too nice to Bibi, you should be for me. And also, if you're mad at the Biden administration

Speaker 3 for being

Speaker 3 being too yeah like the opposite like he was on both sides and it worked yeah it worked it worked he was on both sides yeah i know he was on both sides of it and worked um i have a question i want to chew over something with you guys because i can't

Speaker 3 there's part of this that's like we're in hell we had bad luck Incumbents are being thrown out everywhere. People hated the fucking post-pandemic economy.
There's nothing anybody could do.

Speaker 3 And Donald Trump and like Mitch McConnell not fucking convicting Donald Trump

Speaker 3 and letting him run again is really was really the curse of this. And if not, it would have just been whoever came out of the Republican primary would have won.
Like anybody would have won.

Speaker 3 That's one way that I look at this. And the other way I look at it is, I don't know, maybe it wasn't that.
Like there is something fundamental. This goes back to JV Yale's point.

Speaker 3 There's something fundamental about the country wanting this. I look at, to me, the most jarring results are not any of the swing states.
Illinois, New Jersey,

Speaker 3 Texas, New York.

Speaker 3 She lost by four in Illinois.

Speaker 3 Things will roll in. It might end up being eight or whatever.
But last night at 6 a.m.

Speaker 3 when I was on fucking MSNBC and Steve Cornacki pressed the Illinois button and she was up by four and a half points in Illinois.

Speaker 3 It was similar in New Jersey. Texas went from six back to 1415.

Speaker 3 Like these are this country's, this is not about finding more white working class voters because he did that. But these are the country's biggest, most dynamic, most diverse states.

Speaker 3 And he won across-the-board victories in them in places where the campaign wasn't really waged, right? So it's like it's not about the ads.

Speaker 3 I mean, they got the national trans ads during sports and stuff. So the campaign was aged a little bit.
But like

Speaker 3 that,

Speaker 3 I just like that.

Speaker 3 I mean, the hardest part of me to process is going to be segment two coming up here where we talk about what comes next.

Speaker 3 But the hardest part for me to process of the looking back part is that. It's just like

Speaker 3 regular people across the country

Speaker 3 that were not targeted by the campaigns in any meaningful ways, like across demographic groups, every group except college-educated women were like, yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, which is why, which is why, actually, I think that the recriminations around like

Speaker 5 what ads did they run or like who was targeted or whatever. Like we can do it and like it's actually an important part of the analysis for understanding how we do things better in the future.

Speaker 5 But like, you can sort of see it happen everywhere.

Speaker 5 Like everywhere it moved to the right, which meant that the factors were less about the individual messaging and everything else and much more about broad factors

Speaker 5 that made people who didn't usually vote for Republicans. Like a lot of people move Hispanic and Black voters.
Like there is a shift to the right that cannot be offset.

Speaker 5 There's not enough college-educated women to offset them. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So let me, I'm sorry, I started rambling and I didn't get to the nuts of the question, which is, was this a contingent random thing? Bad luck because of the economy and the timing?

Speaker 3 Wrong time, wrong place?

Speaker 3 Or like, do the Democrats have a fundamental brand problem that must be fixed and that and that like, or

Speaker 3 Do does Donald Trump have some special appeal? You know what I mean? Like, what of those things? Because I come to this, and I'm going to come to this over the next year, like, totally open. Like,

Speaker 3 obviously, my natural prior is like, the Democrats should have run a center-left, whatever that I like. But, like, I don't fucking know.
Like, I don't know. Maybe they should have run a socialist.

Speaker 3 I don't know. Like, I'm literally open to any possible thing.
It's a, maybe they just need a culture warring. Maybe they needed like a tough guy of their own who like codes as a culture war.

Speaker 3 Like, so I guess my question is: is it, was it something that could have been fixed about the brand or was it a contingent element of the post-COVID economy?

Speaker 3 Can can I take this for a Sarah go ahead um I mean I think it is very clear that one of the things that happened that was a large driver was that Trump has been totally normalized and he just added to his vote total each time and that suggests that people just got the sense that like yeah no it's fine and it didn't matter that new facts and new things were happening about him.

Speaker 3 Like for instance, he attempted a coup or that he was convicted of a bunch of felonies.

Speaker 3 Because just the fact of him having been on the ballot for the third time just made it normal and built permission structures. And so instead of like getting, instead of

Speaker 3 it was like the opposite. He, he dismantled the anti-Trump coalition simply by being there.
Right. And the fact of him made him seem normal and allowed him to.

Speaker 3 The Democrats self-implode their coalition. I guess.
I don't think so because of, again, the down ballot stuff, right? And so down ballot Dems did okay,

Speaker 3 right? I mean, not

Speaker 3 actually, by the way. Like, they could still win the House of Representatives, which is a key thing.
There's a chance they could win the House of Representatives. It's going to be a very narrow.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's going to be very narrow. Right.
Tammy Baldwin held on. I mean, there are.

Speaker 3 Tammy Baldwin held on.

Speaker 5 But listen, but Casey lost.

Speaker 5 You know, Sherrod lost.

Speaker 5 Like all the places that are getting sort of redder, more red.

Speaker 3 I think Trump pulled those this time. Like this time, Trump had coattails.

Speaker 3 I don't know, man.

Speaker 5 There was a lot of anti-incumbency bias.

Speaker 5 This is, if you listen to the Pennsylvania episode, one of the things that we were talking about is like how in the group that the swing voters that went for Kamala, there were two people who were voting against Casey, though.

Speaker 5 They were like Kamala McCormick voters. And it was just like, it was just like, this guy's been here for forever.
And we got the same thing about Sherrod Brown.

Speaker 5 Like there was this, and you could even get it somebody from Tammy Baldwin. There was like a lot lot of people who were like, I like Tammy Baldwin, but like she's been there a long time.

Speaker 5 And so I think there's, and look, incumbents, so listen, just to answer Tim's question in my own way, I think that number one, incumbents across the globe are getting tossed, right?

Speaker 5 And that has to do with the global post-pandemic economic environment. That is like the big, and

Speaker 5 big immigration patterns that people are unhappy about. Those are happening globally.
They are having repercussions for political parties globally. And it is, and we're living now

Speaker 5 in a time when incumbency maybe helps you on a hyper local level. But the higher up you go, like the more people are like, what is this person doing for me directly?

Speaker 5 And you like end up actually getting more of the blame even when you're less close to the person's actual life.

Speaker 5 But here's the thing. So to Tim's point about the Democratic brand and our

Speaker 5 Democrats imploding,

Speaker 5 I think imploding is too strong a term for what just happened, but I do think that Democrats have a big problem, which is that they are culturally out of step with the vast majority, with the majority of Americans on a bunch of cultural issues, and that this is where Republicans have been cleaning up, and that Trump does it in a crass way, in a horrible way, but people are annoyed enough about a lot of it that they'll take his crassness.

Speaker 5 And here's the thing.

Speaker 5 I almost don't want to give Trump too much credit because I think Nikki Haley would have also won this election handily.

Speaker 5 Like, I think that if she had been the Republican nominee, I also think she would have crushed.

Speaker 3 And that's why I'm also a little bit on like the woman, the brand.

Speaker 5 Like, I think that this has more to do with Democrats and their brand and people rejecting where they are, like their ideas on the economy, which, you know, Kamala Harris said middle class a lot and that broke through to a lot of voters like that repetition they didn't have like a clear economic pitch uh and they didn't and they certainly didn't have a pitch on immigration and immigration's been a vulnerability for a long time so i the i just

Speaker 5 those things do matter and i do think that's why people but like democrats are going to have to reckon with the fact that the republicans had i think what was not actually in many ways a good nominee, did everything he could to self-sabotage and that people still took him in large part because people were rejecting the Democratic Party.

Speaker 5 But the

Speaker 3 fascism,

Speaker 3 the Democratic brand did fine in 2018 and 2020 and 2022.

Speaker 5 So, but here's the difference. And this is important, actually.
And I think we knew this. 2018 was a corrective on Trump, right?

Speaker 5 From a bunch of people who were like, didn't know what they were getting. And frankly, I think something like that could happen in

Speaker 5 26, right? Because I think we still have elections and like the world moves forward politically.

Speaker 5 In 2020, I think that Joe Biden, I think it's always been unclear which way the pandemic cut, but it is possible that the pandemic hurt Trump enough to let Joe Biden win and that Joe Biden not having to really campaign and Donald Trump being in everybody's face and people having this anti-incumbency bias was enough to get rid of Trump.

Speaker 5 And again, the margins were very narrow.

Speaker 5 And then we entered a high inflationary period, which dams candidates all the time. It's like a surefire way to like kill a presidency is to have high inflation during it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I guess we're

Speaker 3 the rest of our lives to talk about this. But I think my final point about the Democrats, and I want to move forward and how to think about this, is I want to say this

Speaker 3 because it is an omission against interest. Like the way in which I am a moderate is foreign affairs and economic affairs, not really social issues, right? Like I'm not a cultural moderate.

Speaker 3 Like I'm, I'm, I pretty much agree with Kamala Harris on every single one of her cultural issues.

Speaker 3 I'm sure I could think of one that we disagree on, but do you believe in gender reassignment surgery for prisoners?

Speaker 5 Because that seems to be a very big issue.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't think I would have paid two.

Speaker 3 That is how we do we have a number on how many prisoners have undergone gender reassignment surgery?

Speaker 3 I don't think I would have given those two prisoners the gender reassignment surgery taxpayer funded, probably, but I actually don't know the situation. So maybe I would have.

Speaker 3 I don't want to say that.

Speaker 3 Here's the thing. Like, you can't just tell

Speaker 3 the biggest demographic group in the country, non-college white people, that like you don't really care what they think about cultural issues.

Speaker 3 Like, it's just not a winner, especially with the electoral. And it didn't end up being an electoral college factor.

Speaker 3 And by the way, that non-college white group now kind of includes non-college Hispanics, too. Like that's sort of like they're being assimilated into the into the American experience.
And,

Speaker 3 you know, it's just like, I'm not saying that you throw trans people under the bus to come back and win elections, but there has to be an ability to speak the language culturally and to try.

Speaker 3 And like, they just haven't really tried. Like, they'll say that they tried.
They'll check this box and there'll be, you know, a couple lines in a speech.

Speaker 3 But like, there still is a dominant feeling among that group that the Democrats look down on them, don't care about them. And is that unfair? Shouldn't they be looked down on though, Tim?

Speaker 3 Maybe.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 I might look down on

Speaker 3 the bottom of the corner.

Speaker 3 But like, if it is true that there were two gender reassignment surgeries for prisoners, and yet these ads were wildly effective with those groups, then why shouldn't they be looked down on?

Speaker 5 Because that ad.

Speaker 3 We live in a democracy.

Speaker 5 Well, yeah. Well, number one, we live in a democracy, but also, but JBL, because that ad is a stand-in, right?

Speaker 5 The stand-in, the gender reassignment surgery taxpayer-funded, is a stand-in for all of the ways that people believe Democrats are culturally out of touch.

Speaker 3 Well, sure, but this is like all the ways that people believe that crime is through the through the roof, right?

Speaker 3 I mean, again, I understand that I'm demanding that the world be different than it is, and I get that. Yeah, but I don't have to be irrational.

Speaker 3 I'm just saying, look, you look at the map, just look at the map. I'm not like the oh, red, like, land doesn't vote.
But, like,

Speaker 3 if

Speaker 3 they, you know, we've said this before on this, if, like, working-class white people in rural America start voting like black people do, like by share of vote, like

Speaker 3 we're going to live in a MAGA autocracy for the rest of our lives. So, just as a practical matter, like maybe they deserve to be looked down on.
Maybe they have views that are gross.

Speaker 3 Maybe they have views that are wrong. Maybe they're swimming in disinformation.
But, like, that's just the facts of life. And

Speaker 3 not trying to

Speaker 3 offer something to them

Speaker 3 is a mistake, as long as we're in this democratic environment that I guess we're in. Yeah, I just think it's going to be hard to outbid a demagogue.

Speaker 3 Like, when, I mean, what these people care most about is demagoguery. That's what they want.
They don't care. You can, I guess this is where I'm trying to.

Speaker 3 You could reach those people if you're operating in a world in which you believe that they are motivated by reality and outcomes, where you could say, we're going to do things that are better for you.

Speaker 3 We're going to pass the Affordable Care Act, which makes it easier for you to get a career. I'm saying actually, no.

Speaker 3 I'm saying, no, actually, don't try to sell them up. I think that's what they've tried.
I'm saying, like, you got to go and like hang out and like, and be like, oh, yeah, I am.

Speaker 3 I share your concern about whatever the thing is. You know what I mean? That's what I'm talking about.
Bill Clinton. Yeah, I know.
And I think this is what.

Speaker 5 I'm not going to say Latinx and I'm not going to say birthing person. It's like that.
It's that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 But Kamal Harris didn't say those things.

Speaker 5 But this is my point about it being a stand-in, right? It's about Democrats broadly.

Speaker 3 And could you guys unfalse hoodie? Those people, the people who run around saying Latinx didn't vote for her. They voted for Jill Stein.

Speaker 3 We're going to have unlimited time to chew over that.

Speaker 6 We know no one's journey is the same. That's why Delta Sky Miles lets you do it your way.

Speaker 6 From earning miles on reloads for coffee runs, shopping, and things you do every day, to connecting you to new places and experiences, a Sky Miles membership fits into your lifestyle, letting you do more of what makes you, you.

Speaker 6 It's more than travel. It's the membership that flies, dines, streams, rides, and arrives with you.
Every great journey deserves a great story.

Speaker 6 And when you have a membership that's as unique as you are, There's no telling how your story will unfold or where that journey will take you next.

Speaker 6 Skymiles is the membership that will be here for all your big and small moments. The membership that's there for every solo adventure or family trip.

Speaker 6 The membership that comes with the power of partnership from brands you love. The membership that moves with you.
Learn more at delta.com slash skymiles.

Speaker 4 Time for a sofa upgrade. Introducing Anibay sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.
Every Anibay sofa is modular, allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Speaker 4 Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Speaker 4 Liquid simply slide right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Speaker 4 Plus, our pet-friendly, stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price.
Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your living space today.

Speaker 4 Sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get early access to Black Friday now.
The biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off.

Speaker 4 Plus, free shipping and free returns. Shop now at washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 3 I want to do quick

Speaker 3 forward-looking and then feelings.

Speaker 3 We're taping this 11.30.

Speaker 3 Kamalares is going to concede a little later than my taste, but whatever. She's going to do it.
There'll be a peaceful transfer of power. There are no Democrats that are right now.

Speaker 3 I was on MSNBC for hours. I didn't hear anybody say anything irresponsible about it.

Speaker 3 I was with the people at the Mitt Bannon event last week, and the MAGA folks truly believed that the Democrats were going to try to keep him from power and that they were going to do what they did.

Speaker 3 That was a deep, true belief. Like after the event was over, in private, two of them came up to me and was like, would they really let him win?

Speaker 3 Like, like they truly believed that the Democrats were going to do what Trump did to them.

Speaker 3 Obviously, they're not going to. Yay, for the Democrats for that.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I guess my question is on the forward-looking,

Speaker 3 what are, what is, I guess what is your top line thing that you're worried about or that you're thinking about as far as

Speaker 3 the next year of Donald Trump assuming the presidency again.

Speaker 3 Can I tell you mine if you want to think about it? Okay, I'll start with mine. I'll ask the first question to myself, then.
It's a host prerogative, and then you guys can ref from there.

Speaker 3 I said this a little bit at the end of the podcast or the end of the live stream last night. I continue to think about it.
To me,

Speaker 3 I think that the aperture is extremely wide on what Donald Trump does and tries to do.

Speaker 3 You know, I think he's a fickle human. And

Speaker 3 I think it could range from bad, kind of a little bit bad, to extremely bad.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I think that the nature of what happened with the Senate, what happened with the Supreme Court, and what happened with Donald Trump as president,

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 the mindset of,

Speaker 3 I fucking, I'm not even going to say the resistance, the mindset of the people that are... in coalition against this, like to me, feels more like the mindset of what the opposition feels like in like

Speaker 3 Hungary or Eastern Europe. Like that the job, that the job going forward is not really about stopping him or

Speaker 3 thinking about like how the next 20 years more rights can be gained. It's more about thinking about what can be protected.
What can be protected in the meantime?

Speaker 3 Because he is a wrecking ball that if left to his own devices,

Speaker 3 I could conceivably try to wreck all of the structures that govern our domestic society as well as our international norms and alliances and the rule-based order of the world. Like

Speaker 3 all of that could collapse in the next four years is the worst case scenario. Some of it could collapse is the median case scenario.

Speaker 3 Just a little bit of it could kind of get rolled back is the best case scenario. Right.
And and that sucks as a mindset to think about.

Speaker 3 I understand why people might be like, I'm checking out of that because my whole life has been thinking about how are we going to progress? Are we going to gain more rights?

Speaker 3 How are things going to become like that's just not the world we're in, right? Like anymore,

Speaker 3 at least for a while. And so to me, like that is just what I keep noodling over in my brain

Speaker 3 when I'm able to

Speaker 3 process that. So anyway, you can riff off that or if you have other thoughts on kind of

Speaker 3 what is up next, I'd be happy to hear them.

Speaker 3 Sarah, do you want to go first or do you want me to?

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 I'll start and then JV, I'll jump in because I do think this idea, which is a very bulwarkian perspective, right, is that our job now

Speaker 5 is to focus on,

Speaker 5 I think, and I think we're doing some of that, right? I think you have to understand the nature of the problem clearly.

Speaker 5 I think we have to do the work to understand the nature of the problem clearly and not just fall back on it was race, it was sex, it was

Speaker 5 people love fascism. Like, I think we've got to dig as deep as we can to understand what's happening in the country so that we can figure out how to how to push back against it.

Speaker 5 Trump was running to stay out of jail. Like, I believe that Donald Trump ran so that he wouldn't go to prison.
And now that he's president, what?

Speaker 3 Congrats, Donald.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's right. And he's instead of prison, he'll be president.
I think the question is, is like, what does he do with that?

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I think that there will be a lot of things that he and his team are going to do. Maybe they won't do much, actually.

Speaker 5 Like, maybe Donald Trump's appetite for the things that he said is like, actually, he's an old man who just didn't want to go to jail. And now he's kind of like, meh,

Speaker 5 like, now I can play lots of golf and like, you know, piss into a microphone. And

Speaker 5 I don't actually have the stomach for real work. And neither do any of these clowns that I'm surrounded by.

Speaker 3 And like, the worst.

Speaker 3 I don't think that's going to happen, but that would be the best way for him to be popular as a prince if he did nothing.

Speaker 3 Like doing nothing, literally doing nothing would be the best way for him to be popular. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I do think, though, when I think about what's about to happen,

Speaker 5 like that, that, right? That's like the best case scenario. It's like maybe he just doesn't try that hard to destroy things because he's lazy and he just didn't want to go to jail.

Speaker 5 And that the people around him are like Elon and they're a bunch of people who are just trying to do things that enrich themselves. And so like, ultimately, they're not massively damaging.

Speaker 5 They're just self-enriching and corrupt.

Speaker 5 And that's bad. And we are, we should, you know, fight against that.
But I think the bigger issues, the things I worry about most are like the international policy side of things.

Speaker 5 That Trump, you know, buddies up with all the strongmen, that he abandons Ukraine, that he abandons Taiwan,

Speaker 5 that maybe he pulls us out of NATO just because that's a hobby horse of his,

Speaker 5 and America's role in the world. And this is not me being some kind of unrepentant neocon.

Speaker 5 This is about just like abandoning allies, like dropping everything that we do that is, you know, around diplomacy and everything else. We just completely retreat from the world.

Speaker 5 That scares me a great deal. The idea of, but like these things, right? Like these things will engender backlash when they happen, right?

Speaker 5 If he does the things, like our job is to be there to fight them because just because he was elected with this mandate does not mean that the things he does, if he does the worst things we imagine, will be popular, right?

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 the way, and this is the world that we have lived in,

Speaker 5 and I think this is what I've been saying to myself over and over again today, is like,

Speaker 5 history is long, and you can look back and see lots of times when one party

Speaker 5 shocked the country, right? And you thought, well, man, it's over, but it's never over. There's always another election.
There's always new voters coming in and out of the electorate.

Speaker 5 There's always, he will be the incumbent now. He will do a bunch of things that are unpopular.
It is our job to help voters understand why they are bad, right?

Speaker 5 To be better about our messaging, because I do think that the reason that

Speaker 5 one of the reasons Joe Biden was so unpopular, and I complained about this like literally all the years, was about how little they did to promote the agenda that they had, to talk about it, to make it stick.

Speaker 5 Anyway, our job is to be the bulwark as these things happen and to make sure that voters understand when they're bad and to try to stop as many bad things from happening

Speaker 5 and then get a corrective in the House in 2026.

Speaker 3 Jonathan.

Speaker 3 Three things.

Speaker 3 The first thing is that Ukraine is fucked, and

Speaker 3 that is regrettable, and it will have very bad outcomes for Europe and the world, but it is no longer America's problem.

Speaker 3 We do not have the luxury as a teetering democracy to expend any political capital to help them anymore. And I'm sorry, but that's just the reality of it.

Speaker 3 When Trump tries to fuck Ukraine,

Speaker 3 like, you know, Democrats should make whatever political hay they can out of it and try to make Trump pay a price for it in terms of popularity, but in terms of stopping it, don't spend any chits on that.

Speaker 3 Like that, we just don't have the luxury of that anymore.

Speaker 3 Number two is tariffs. Tariffs are a thing that he can do quasi-unilaterally.

Speaker 3 And what tariffs really are, is a mechanism for bringing the entire business community of the United States to heel.

Speaker 3 Tariffs are the way in which he establishes an Orban-like control over the actual economic base, the private sector economic base of America. And that is going to work.

Speaker 3 I think it's very clearly going to work. Jeff Bezos tweeted this morning.

Speaker 3 Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th president on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities.

Speaker 3 Wishing at real Donald Trump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.

Speaker 3 That is now going to be the official posture for anybody at any level of business everywhere in America. And

Speaker 3 once you own the business community,

Speaker 3 your hooks are really in deep

Speaker 3 to the political sphere as well. Number three,

Speaker 3 his promise to deploy the military against protesters.

Speaker 3 There will be an anti-Trump protest shortly after his inauguration. I don't know what it'll look like.
I don't know where it will will be. It'll probably be something like the Women's March.

Speaker 3 And when that happens,

Speaker 3 Trump.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah, I agree with Tim here.
I'm not sure there will be.

Speaker 3 There might be.

Speaker 3 That's not a snarky. Are you sure? This is a genuine.
Are you sure? Because I'm not sure. Yeah.

Speaker 3 At some point, right? Maybe, maybe it won't be shortly after the inauguration. Maybe it'll be after he fires Jack Smith or something.
I don't know. But at some point, there will be a protest.

Speaker 3 And Trump will see that as a dare to carry, to make good on his threat to deploy the military.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I would be surprised if he didn't do it, because not doing it will look like backing down, and he always feels like he can't back down.

Speaker 3 And once that's been done once,

Speaker 3 I think the

Speaker 3 ability and willingness of people to protest publicly at scale in America is going to decline precipitously. And I think that's just like all between now and March.

Speaker 3 Those three things are all between now and March.

Speaker 3 So I'm just going to sit on that because I don't know if I agree with that, but I don't know if I disagree either. So

Speaker 3 we'll sit on that and

Speaker 3 we'll have what we're going to do another next level here later in the week.

Speaker 3 Is there anything else of substance you want to talk about before we talk about feelings?

Speaker 5 No, I'll just say on this idea of sitting on it, I do think,

Speaker 5 you know, I've tried to,

Speaker 5 you know, I spent the night and then this morning trying to figure out what's happened, right? I'm trying to like make sense of it, just like we all are.

Speaker 5 And I'm going to just say that like, I have said the things that I said here, and they're my takes generally because they've been my takes all along.

Speaker 5 I'm just now looking at them with the knowledge of how the election went.

Speaker 5 But I'm going to reserve the right to be like, we probably have a lot to learn here.

Speaker 5 I think this is like sort of not a time for the hottest of hot takes.

Speaker 5 We got exit polling, but we don't have like good catalyst deep data yet. And so I'm still trying to figure out exactly, you know, with the different demographics and stuff.

Speaker 5 Like, there's a lot we don't know that might sort of shift our thinking a little bit. But like the big broad picture tells us sort of what we need to know in terms of like,

Speaker 5 there was a repudiation of Democrats here across the the board. And we're going to have to figure out what to do about that.
And I think

Speaker 5 people who want to spend too much time,

Speaker 5 as part of the analysis, we can sort of say, like, this was a bad move or this was a bad move.

Speaker 5 But I think like living in the recriminations is going to be unproductive and that people are going to need to like take good hard looks, think about it for a second. Don't just react.

Speaker 5 We're going to have to think about this for a little bit. And then then we're going to have to figure out how to reorient a movement going forward to forestall the worst of what Trump might try to do

Speaker 5 and to build a different, more durable coalition.

Speaker 3 I agree with that.

Speaker 3 The thing I agree with the most is that, like,

Speaker 3 really,

Speaker 3 you will see on social media and on cable, I already saw it last night, people that go out there and they're like, it was Gaza, or it was, it was race.

Speaker 3 It was this with us. I don't want to pick on the gospel.
It was Israel. It could be anything, right? And it's like, it was neoliberalism, right? Like, I've seen all of that already, right?

Speaker 3 And it's like, I don't know.

Speaker 3 He won a broad, again, I repeat, he won, he improved with every demographic group except college-educated women.

Speaker 5 And he was going to win a record number of whether it was advertising, any of those things. He improved.

Speaker 3 He improved across the board. And so it's like,

Speaker 3 what do the Democrats need to do to

Speaker 3 create a majority coalition? It might need to be very different. It might need to be the same.

Speaker 3 Maybe it should have just been the Tim Miller dream of Josh Shapiro, but maybe it really shouldn't have been at all. And it should be something totally different than that.

Speaker 3 And I just, I think that it's going to take time to think through it. All right.

Speaker 3 Feelings.

Speaker 3 I guess I'll just start. So

Speaker 3 you know what I'm looking for here.

Speaker 3 I just want to say, like, I know that some people listening are probably like, can I listen? Can I do this? Like, can I do it? I want to become a monk.

Speaker 3 My friend Dan Savage tweeted, like, what is the liberal version of the Benedict option?

Speaker 3 For people who don't know what the Benedict option is, that was like a far-right thing about getting away from society and creating a

Speaker 3 little religious sect in the woods.

Speaker 3 And I understand that sympathy or I understand that impulse. And I like woke up this morning and just, you start to think about

Speaker 3 just the day-to-day

Speaker 3 of like Trump picking cabinet people and Trump doing Trump having an outrage and I just

Speaker 3 it's going to be very just in candor I'm not a coal miner like you know I'm not looking for sympathy but it's like going to be very challenging to have to care about that right like it's going to be very challenging for me to have to care about that I really dislike these people a lot I think that they're you know we can do the sober-minded analysis but there are a lot of like good thing a really good thing happened to really bad people and that's tough and I spent a lot of time not on a podcast between 2016 and 2018 in yoga and therapy like dealing with that before I started doing commentary and it's like the notion of having to spend this transition talking about it all out loud

Speaker 3 is tough

Speaker 3 but I'm gonna do it It's important to do.

Speaker 3 This mission has felt good, even though it was not successful. And

Speaker 3 there are things about it that are going to suck. And if people don't want to tune in for a little while, I get that.

Speaker 3 But there are going to be other people that do want to tune in and want to kind of talk it through and want to think about it and want to, you know, process.

Speaker 3 And I think it's important to be a part of that processing and then important to be a part of what Sarah just talked about, which was how we can make a difference on the margins as far as protecting

Speaker 3 being a bulwark against the real threats that are coming. So,

Speaker 3 as I laid in the fetal position this morning, that was what was going through my head.

Speaker 3 So, I just wanted to see if you guys have any additional feelings on that or anything related that you would like to share.

Speaker 5 JVL?

Speaker 3 I mean, I will echo Sarah's that we have a lot to learn. But for me, that primarily

Speaker 3 That primarily takes the form of

Speaker 3 we allowed ourselves, or maybe I'll just speak for myself. I allowed myself for the first time since 2016 to suffer from a failure of imagination.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 2016 was me suddenly discovering things about America that I never knew. And maybe other people did know, but I didn't.
And

Speaker 3 I made a real concerted effort over the next eight years to not let that happen to me again. And this is why I,

Speaker 3 you know, like we joke about how like yeah i just you know pick the worst possible outcome and it always turns out to be right

Speaker 3 and with this race i didn't allow myself to to envision the worst possible outcome right i was happy to to envision trump winning i kept saying yeah no look is it better than even chance that uh he's going to win um i said this all the time that uh you know like you know harris isn't doing enough doesn't look good and then you know for the last three weeks it it looked a little better and we got the the sells are in the time sienna polling that looks good.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I thought he could win. I never imagined that he could wind up getting the second largest,

Speaker 3 no, I'm sorry, the largest Republican majority of the vote since 1988. That is not an eventuality which I ever considered to be possible.
That is a failure of imagination.

Speaker 3 And I am determined not to allow that to happen again.

Speaker 3 But I will say this, and this is where Sarah and I will disagree.

Speaker 3 Sarah's gift is to never suffer failures of the imagination

Speaker 3 about how things could be better.

Speaker 3 I don't have that ability.

Speaker 3 My gift is to never suffer, hopefully,

Speaker 3 for another eight years I can learn this. not suffer from failures of the imagination of how things can be worse.
And so I am going to try to

Speaker 3 be very vigilant about myself on that.

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 3 I mean, I think

Speaker 3 everything is on the table,

Speaker 3 right? Maybe like, and I wrote this like six months ago before Biden dropped out. I was like, you know, look, here's the best case scenario for a second Trump term.

Speaker 3 And I basically did what you did, Sarah. Like, you know, maybe he just gets in there.
He's tired. He just wants to stay out of jail.
And like, it's all basically fine.

Speaker 3 And that's that's one possible outcome. But another possible outcome is Hungary, right? That is not worse than Hungary, that is not a thing which is off the table.

Speaker 3 Worse than Hungary is possible, actually. Yeah, worse than Hungary is but Russia is possible.
Maybe Russia isn't likely. Maybe Russia is much more unlikely than Hungary, but you know, like it's

Speaker 3 there.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I think, you know, for people, I don't know, I got dunked on for saying, like, if he wins in 2028, 100% or 2024, 100% chance he runs again in 2028.

Speaker 3 And people like, you know, like at Dash Regulatory, like, oh, his brain is broken. It's not possible.

Speaker 3 Last night was again another, like, don't tell me that it's not possible. Don't tell me that some little piece of paper that says 22 at the top of it is going to stop this from happening.

Speaker 3 You know, like we've got a pliant Supreme Court. He will have appointed

Speaker 3 at least five members of it that point.

Speaker 3 And the 14th Amendment said it wasn't possible for an insurrectionist to run either, right? Don't suffer from failures of imagination and all this.

Speaker 3 And don't blind yourself to how bad it could actually get.

Speaker 3 Those are my feelings.

Speaker 3 It's not great feelings. Sarah?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I guess JBL's right a little bit about me in the sense that

Speaker 5 it's not that I'm blind to how bad things are going to get. I just don't see any other alternative but for us to figure out what to do about it and then to do it

Speaker 5 and to try to. That's your gift.

Speaker 3 I didn't mean to say that you were blind to these things. No, no, no, I know you aren't.
Very sincere. I know you aren't.

Speaker 5 I will say, though, it's interesting, was just thinking about blind spots.

Speaker 5 One of the things I've been wrestling with just for myself is that,

Speaker 5 you know,

Speaker 5 if you go listen to the focus groups, like it's all in there.

Speaker 5 And like my analysis, I was trying to think about like, and I was a little, I'm a little sheepish about even talking about like pundit accountability and like, was my analysis right? How is it wrong?

Speaker 5 Because it's like, that's about me. And so it's a little bit stupid.
But I am trying to, I am trying to figure out, right?

Speaker 5 I started doing the focus groups because I wanted an answer to how Trump happened in 2016. And so like, I can't help but look back and be like, okay.

Speaker 5 I saw all of it in the groups. I did Hispanic groups and played them for people.
They were, and people here will tell you how, you know, oh, no, like they were, they were ripshit about immigration.

Speaker 5 And, and I said in the thing, I remember Rui was on. People hated that episode.
It was Rui to share it. They hated that episode.

Speaker 5 But I think if you go back and listen to it, all the stuff about Hispanic men is in there, right? It's just, it is. And if you

Speaker 5 look at the swing voters, which we really focused on, the thing that I said is like, yeah, in every group, you're losing one or two people. They're backsliding to Trump.

Speaker 5 You aggregate that, you know, in a way, like, and you can't, they're not, they're not numbers, right? You can't treat it like that. But like, you could see it there.
The flags were there.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 you asked people how things are going in the country, which is the opening question every single time, and they say bad.

Speaker 5 And they talked about immigration, they talked about crime, and they talked about the economy. And our intellectual impulse to say, well, that's wrong.

Speaker 5 You know, I think there's

Speaker 5 this question of like, how do you, how do you make people see reality for what it is? Or do you, how do you meet them where they are is like a thing we have to grapple with. But I just,

Speaker 5 what I hope for people who listen to this, like who are bulwark people, I want you to come to us for two things.

Speaker 5 One, like, we are going to do our best. to be honest with you all the time.
Like we don't have any,

Speaker 5 I don't, I don't know. There's nothing like we're trying to protect for ourselves.

Speaker 3 Predetermined outcome.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Like we just, I think we want to figure out what happened so we can be part of the solution.

Speaker 5 And I think if you want, you know, I was watching the live stream last night and like JBL was characteristically bleak, like pretty much from the outset.

Speaker 5 And I was trying to kind of be like, hey, let's wait, let's wait. But like, it was true, like it was going south.
And people were so mad. They're like, I'm signing off.
You guys are too negative.

Speaker 5 And I think like it's important for people to know who are part of this community, which is an amazing community. And last night was open to everybody.
So it's like kind of hard to know who's

Speaker 5 like a subscriber versus people who just like casually or whatever. But like, know what you're getting with us,

Speaker 5 which is like, we're going to go through this moment by like.

Speaker 5 really grappling with what is going on. And we're going to put everything on the table and we're going to try to turn it over so that we can figure out what really is going on.

Speaker 5 That's why I do the focus groups.

Speaker 5 And I want to make sure that we're looking at it hard without a lot of priors so that we can then figure out how we can best stop Trump from doing the worst damage that he can.

Speaker 5 Us sitting, like we can speculate how bad or not bad it might be, but the fact is our role is to do the analysis, but also, and this is why it's different from everybody else, our role is also to do everything we can

Speaker 5 to protect this country and the democracy and the institutions that undergird it from somebody who wants to burn them to the ground.

Speaker 5 And like, we can't do that without being really clear-eyed about what's happening right now.

Speaker 5 And so, like, if you want to be part of figuring that out and then doing the work to stop Trump, this is a good place for you. You should come, you should come with us.

Speaker 5 But, like, if you're somebody who's going to be like, well, you guys are too negative, or, you know, I don't, I will breach, it's, it's, it's

Speaker 5 racism and sexism.

Speaker 5 Anybody who says anything else, you know, I don't want to listen to, like, then we're not good for that because like maybe you can get some of that on MSNBC or, you know, some other, but like we are going to try to figure this out together and do something about it because that's who we are.

Speaker 3 God, I love you, Sarah.

Speaker 3 My only nitpick with that is the word stop.

Speaker 3 He's not getting stopped anymore, but slow, control, contain. I don't know.
We can think about words, but.

Speaker 5 Well, that's what bulwarks do.

Speaker 3 Yeah, sadly. yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 All right. I've got one final thing, and if you have a final thing to a final thing, that's fine.
We've got no shortage of time. Got all the time in the world with Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 I do feel cursed about that. Sam last night was talking about how there was a part of him that felt invigorated by this.
And like, I don't, just like in candor, like, I don't at all.

Speaker 3 But.

Speaker 3 Part of the reason why I don't feel invigorated by this is like

Speaker 3 it is just insane to me that I'm going to spend the prime years of my life having to spend time thinking about the stupidest, most disgusting fucking person in the entire world.

Speaker 3 Like, I just, it boggles the mind. It's like, I do feel like I'm cursed, kind of.
It's like, like, that this is a curse and there was a witch.

Speaker 3 And, like, I just, I could, it could be, there could be, it could be anybody.

Speaker 3 Um,

Speaker 3 but it's him, and that is awful. And I'm very uninvigorated by that.
That said,

Speaker 3 um,

Speaker 3 Ben Rhodes, um, who I have some plenty of policy disagreements on, but wrote a book after 2016 where he was really going through his own processing.

Speaker 3 And he went and interviewed the people that were doing, that were fighting for freedom in Hong Kong and Kyiv and Hungary. I forget who the other characters were.

Speaker 3 And some of those people are fucked, which really sucks for them.

Speaker 3 But like, that is the little node of invigoration that I have, right? Like there was like those people have real purpose and it's a different purpose than the purpose that we wanted for this life

Speaker 3 probably.

Speaker 3 But they did have a real purpose and they were, it was inspiring to read about them. And

Speaker 3 I think that we're kind of in their shoes in America right now. We're kind of in our own Hong Kong or

Speaker 3 Kyiv or. Well, all three of those groups are going to wind up on the losing end of those historical struggles.
So let's hope not.

Speaker 3 Right. I mean, well, no.

Speaker 5 No, well, you know what, though? I got to say, like, I think it's okay for us to take a beat and feel like,

Speaker 5 you know, to take in the pain of this, right? And what it means. Because I always said this election, it wouldn't be what it said about Donald Trump.
It was going to be what it said about us.

Speaker 5 And like, we're going to grapple with that. It's going to be hard to do.
And it makes me sad. It does.
Like, it makes me sad.

Speaker 5 But like,

Speaker 5 this is why we do this is because, and I presume the people who listen to this and they say that they were in it to preserve democracy, that means they care deeply about the country.

Speaker 5 And if we care deeply about the country, like we just have work to do. Like, that's just the truth.
Like, it's our job and we care about it. And we are in a position.

Speaker 5 to be people who are rallying people to fight. So it's okay to be in our feelings for a little bit, like, and to figure out what happened.

Speaker 5 But also, like, it is our job to figure out how to get people motivated to get back in the game. Because if everybody checks out, then we are fucked.

Speaker 3 Excuse me, J-Valt, you looked like you had a final thought.

Speaker 3 No, no, that's a perfect to end on. We're going to keep your final thought in your head for this time.
All right, guys.

Speaker 3 Well, for those of you that made it an hour plus through this podcast,

Speaker 3 kind of good. Okay, show.
Sad show, long show. How about that? Sad show, long show.

Speaker 3 I'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the Borg podcast.

Speaker 3 I don't know when me and Sarah and JV all are going to get back together for the next level we owe you, but we will do that at some point as the week goes on. And thanks for sticking with us.

Speaker 3 We'll see you on the other side. Peace.

Speaker 3 Sorrow.

Speaker 3 You're acting fun, you're spending all my money.

Speaker 3 You're out there playing in our high-class games.

Speaker 3 Sorrow.

Speaker 3 Sorrow.

Speaker 3 You never do what you know you ought to.

Speaker 3 Something tells me you'll be devil's gonna

Speaker 3 sorrow

Speaker 3 sorrow

Speaker 3 I try to fight it, but I couldn't resist it.

Speaker 3 I never knew just how much I missed it.

Speaker 3 Sorrow,

Speaker 3 sorrow.

Speaker 3 With a long one hair and eyes of blue.

Speaker 3 The only thing I ever got for you

Speaker 3 was sorrow.

Speaker 3 The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 3 Delta Airlines just turned 100 and is already shaping the next century of flight with the Delta Sustainable Skies Lab. Here, they're building the future of flight.

Speaker 3 Think electric air taxis and next-gen aircraft aiming to cut fuel burn significantly. And this isn't just future talk.

Speaker 3 Today, their fleet of Boeing 737s have marine-like finlets designed to reshape airflow that reduces drag. The future of travel is more sustainable, and Delta's leading the way.

Speaker 3 Learn more at delta.com slash sustainability.

Speaker 2 Master distiller Jimmy Russell knew Wild Turkey Bourbon got it right the first time. Kentucky born with 100 years of know-how.

Speaker 2 Our pre-prohibition style bourbons are aged longer and never watered down. So you know it's right too, for whatever you do with it.

Speaker 2 Wild Turkey 101 Bourbon makes an old-fashioned or bold fashion for bold nights out or at home. Wild Turkey Bourbon, aged longer, never watered down to create one bold flavor.

Speaker 2 Copyright 2025 Capari America, New York, New York, never compromised, drink responsively.

Speaker 1 What does Zinn give you? Not just smoke-free nicotine satisfaction, but real freedom. Freedom to do what you love and choose choose your rewards.

Speaker 1 With Zin Rewards, you can redeem points for premium tech, outdoor gear, and gift cards to your favorite retailers.

Speaker 1 Find your Zinn and keep finding rewards that fit your lifestyle at zinn.com/slash rewards.

Speaker 1 Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.