Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: Election Debrief

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Well, fuck. Usually we do a next level podcast on Wednesdays with my best friends, Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark and JVL, the editor of the Bulwark.
It felt appropriate and right to just kind of make the next level the daily podcast today so we could all hang out with you.

Those the Bulwark. It felt appropriate and right to just kind of make the next level the daily podcast

today so we could all hang out with you, those of you that could stomach it at least, and go over what happened last night, and then we'll do another TNL later this week. Guys, Sarah, JBL, hi.
hi

hey

this is what I want to do

I want to talk at first about

our hi hi hey hi um 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 um so we can build up to our feelings uh and then i want to talk about going forward and then and then we can kind of close by uh just talking about how, how everybody's going to cope with this.

So the campaign itself,

I don't,

I guess,

why don't you just give both of you,

give us the biggest picture after having a night to sleep on it.

What,

what do you think happened?

What do you think explains his victory at the biggest level?

Sarah,

why don't you go first?

Okay.

Look,

I think what we're going to wrestle with here is the way in which this election was really out of the ordinary and then the ways in which it was pretty ordinary. And the ways in which it was pretty ordinary were that you had, and we've known this, right? We've known this, and this has been a little bit central to the conversation JBL and I have over on the secret pod.
And then, you know, if you go back and look at the focus groups, it's all kind of there, which is people did not think the country was in a good place. They were unhappy with Biden, they were unhappy with the economy.
The fundamental they were under unhappy with the state of immigration, like Trump was always outperforming her on the issues that voters said they cared the most about. You know, we were, the Joe Biden was very

unpopular, like, right, his approval rating is lower than Trump's approval rating at its lowest.

And so like, in a lot of ways, you're just talking about the fundamentals always being

against her. And I think that or that she had a steep hill to climb.
And I think that sometimes

people push back on the idea of the fundamentals, because they were like, well, no, the fundamentals Thank you. always being against her and i think that or that she had a steep hill hill to climb and i think

that sometimes people push back on the idea of the fundamentals because they were like well no the the fundamentals of the economy are good and i was like but nobody believes that the fundamentals of the economy are good and so like if you just regardless of what is or isn't the people who vote are going to tell you how they feel about the economy and i think that that they did tell us. I also think, look, my theory of how she was going to eke out the blue wall states rested on independence breaking her way at the end, based on the fact that she was sort of able to not be the incumbent.
That's the piece I feel the most wrong about. Like, people thought she was the was the incumbent.
Like she was tethered to Joe Biden and people wanted change. And she was the incumbent, not Trump.
Like, and I was always kind of like, who's the incumbent? Like, we don't know because they're both sort of incumbents. But like, they decided she was the incumbent and independence did not break her way at the end.
The other numbers that have stuck out to me are things like, of the people who thought Trump was too extreme, like, or who thought they were both too extreme, right? Trump won those voters massively. So people who thought she was extreme and he was extreme still preferred his

version of extremism. So anyway, I just, I think that's what happened.
I think like there's a lot of ordinary political analysis in here that doesn't mean humans are terrible and America is over. It's like, these are the things that happened that we thought could be overcome because Trump was a uniquely flawed candidate, right?

That she could overperform those fundamentals she did not overperform them um and then like i just think one other data point that's clear that i think a lot of people are going to be talking about is just the hispanic numbers like the bottom fell out of the hispanic numbers in ways that um i, I, everybody thought there was going to be some, uh, of that, but like, you know, a lot of people really dislike the analysis of, of guys like Rui Teixeira. Um, and I understand why sometimes it feels like, um, like 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 like white voters uh like non-college hispanics uh operate like non-college white voters and they broke that way in a major way this time yeah we can talk about this a little bit more i think but there was a lack of willingness i mean like we can do recriminations on a million things. So that's really not the point of this, but the point of this is just being eye opened about what happened.
And there was a lack of willingness by a lot of people in our coalition to just like accept the numbers that were staring us in the face on Latino voters and black and black voters. And sometimes even in a shaming way that's like if you talk about it's like no no the real and it's like you know it's true like the real the white voters went for trump the most right out of everybody right so if you're doing the identity politics thing but it's like i i think that there was you know a uh as as we talk about oh what happened with the Nikki Haley voters? What happened with, uh, it was like the, the, the gains to the extent there were any, like with that group was just, just swamped by the losses on the other side and not kind of accepting that, that those losses were happening, uh, potentially impact, potentially impacted, you know, kind of the way the strategic approach of so can i i will say i'm not sure that people thought that it wasn't happening or i i didn't think it wasn't happening i thought you could make up those losses yeah with better performance from white voters because there are more of them.
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.

It still wasn't enough to offset that slide.

Because Trump did better everywhere else.

It's because it's that slide, but it's also like,

it's the thing that I think the X factor is always like,

does Trump have, is there more non-college, are there more non-college white voters in the tank? And it turns out there were. Every time.
Yes. There's a never ending supply of non-college white voters.
It turns out, uh, JVL, um, what, what's your top line thoughts? Yeah. I mean, I, I fundamentally disagree with Sarah, but I only because of the result.
Like there is a result.

There's a version of this result in which I would absolutely buy her explanation.

Right.

If if this was Harris, 49.1 Trump, 48.7 and, you know, and the the electrocologist shook out the same way, I would say, okay, yeah, I can see that. That's not what we just saw.
Donald Trump just won the largest vote chair of any Republican presidential candidates since 1988. He did this while his own campaign was basically running for the exits.
We, I mean, we all read the Tim Alberta story in The Atlantic in which Susie Wilds and Chris Lasavita were talking about how terrible the campaign morale was, how everybody in the operation thought it was, you know, that the guy had just blown it all up while he's like dancing at the rally and talking about Arnold Palmer's schlong. And we also saw for the first time Trump overperforming down ballot Republicans.
This is not, he's run behind down ballot Republicans in both of his previous runs. This time, all of a sudden, he's way out in front of them.
And in 2012, people didn't think the economy was great. Objectively,

the economy was okay. It wasn't bad.
It was a slow recovery under Obama. But people felt like it was very bad.
And Obama did fine. He beat Mitt Romney pretty handily.
He got over 50%, his second consecutive majority. I do not find a way to see any of this result as anything other than an affirmative choice for Donald Trump and all his works.
And I, I mean, this, this, nobody, nobody cares about bipartisan legislation. Nobody cares that Biden did the CHIPS Act or bipartisan gun reform.
Nobody cares about the handling of Ukraine. Nobody cares about any of that.
What they care about is demagoguery and grievance. They care about the Haitians eating the cats and dogs.
I mean, we saw the debate, right? We all saw the debate where she absolutely destroyed him. One of the most dominating debate performances of the modern era of television.
And for not only that to not matter, but for him to then overperform even what his own people thought they were going to get. And this is with no turnout operation, right? Famously, this campaign outsourced all their turnout to Elon Musk and a bunch of Tesla engineers.
And they won. The proof of this is that Elon Musk's turnout operation didn't matter is that in Iowa, he's like plus 13 in Iowa.
He doubled his margin of victory in Iowa from 2020. Can we just 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 big moral pictures.
This is the third presidential campaign in a row, actually,

where the winner did not have a meaningful ground operation.

Joe Biden famously ran a basement campaign.

The Democrats were concerned about COVID for good reason,

so they weren't doing the organizing that they did in other elections

in which he won.

Donald Trump has had essentially no campaign both times. I guess in 2016, there was an RNC ground operation, but even still, it was very late to the game.
I've been on this since 2015. At a presidential level, all of the money, all of the campaign strategists are basically worth nothing.
It doesn't matter just does. It doesn't matter.
Like it doesn't matter. And people don't want to believe that some people don't want to believe it because it's part of their whatever remit and mandate.
And it's like the campaigns themselves are one based on the, the, the candidates performance are one based on external factors and one based on the, um, the, the candidates performance, uh, or one based on external factors and one based on dominating the, what you call the meat space of the news. So, so there's some things that can be done.
You know, I, you probably have to give the Trump campaign credit as gross as it was for spending a hundred million dollars on the trans thing to make the trans thing an issue where it wasn't, you know, Bill Kristol and I was complaining about this sometimes with the Kamala ads, how they're very like gauzy and she'll help the middle class. And it's like, you can insert something into the conversation with $100 million, right? You can do niche things, right? Like you can do little things on the margins.
Like I think that, you know, having outside groups target a particular group, like what Sarah's group did, like some of that makes sense, but that's a much smaller, like the budget for that compared to these billion dollar campaigns. Like, 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.
And that does go to like the going into things. I mean, Trump, Trump won for a million reasons.
So I don't want anybody to like take me like oh this one thing is why she lost her he won this one tactic like 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 you know what i mean like he he was across the board victory but um but but like the rogan thing like one of my regrets from the analysis 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 it's like oh this is crazy and we'll do a thing it's like oh look at this crazy thing he said but like if you watch the rogan thing for the whole two hours the people that were viewing it were looking at him and they're like this guy isn't hitler like this guy is just a guy that can just ship you know shoot the shit and like that stuff matters now more than the like tailored campaign messaging like we're in a new world where everybody knows everything about each other we're all on each other's phones and like the candidate needs to be able to carry their own message and go into places and talk and sound normal and And Kamala, we all kept saying she ran a great campaign. She did.
She ran a very solid, by the book, 2004-2008 campaign. Technical campaign.
She did. And she was faced with a lot of challenges because of the situation that she was put in.
But it's like, you know, to the extent that there's a 2028 campaign to talk about, to me, that is the biggest. To just go through the motions again with inertia of we're going to run the Bush 04 operation.
We're going to do a lot of ads and have a door knocking program. It's all fake.
It's all for basically nothing. Can we talk about the woman thing? Well, hold on.
Let me just step on this point that Tim's making because I think it's a really important one and i think that um you know one of the things we we talk a lot over on the focus group pod is about this thing voters say about the thing that they like about trump is that he's not a regular politician and one of the things i kept worrying about kamala is like she sounds good to us but i kept saying i worried that she's to sound like a regular politician. And I remember DeSantis being cooked when I heard the voters start saying, yeah, I like him.
Okay, but he sounds like a regular politician. And that's always been Trump's superpower, the not a regular politician, because we are in a different era in terms of what people want.
It's the reason it's like the same things in our brain that make, I don't like TikTok, but like the same thing that makes TikTok and it's informality. Frankly, the thing that makes us, you know, sort of better than cable news is like the reason people aren't as interested in cable news and they're more interested in personalities, the more interested in finding people they can trust.
They're more interested in having like an honest, like being authentic with me who's telling me the truth who's given it to me straight and like they'd rather take a politician who they think is telling them the truth and that truth contains some really ugly things than a politician that they think is lying to them just to earn their vote except that biden beat him like a drum biden did not beat him like a drum he beat him by extraordinarily narrow margins in across a handful of states 11 000 votes in georgia 11 000 votes in arizona 30 000 votes uh in wisconsin and it was like slightly bigger in pennsylvania and michigan but it was not big he didn't beat him like a drum and we were in the In the middle of a pandemic. In the middle of a pandemic.
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In the middle of a majority in a generation. I mean, what do you think explains then the difference at this? Fine.
This is a good thing to chew over. What was the difference between 2020 and 2024 for you and JBL? I mean, so we, we don't know the overall turnout, right? We know that Trump is already at his 2020 number.
He's at 71 million votes. I mean, as you said, there are two dozen explanations.
Right. One of them, I think, has to be the Democrats can never run a woman at the top of the ticket again.
I mean, never is a very long time, but I mean, like not in anything that looks like this version of America, because again, just the fact that he overperformed her and, you know, and overperformed down ballot Republicans, like in places where Tammy Baldwin did okay because 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 I think it would be crazy to dismiss this as being a significant part of it maybe yeah it's not all of it and it's not none of it i if it was wall harris just hypothetically i don't think the result is different if it was i agree with that that's right i think the result is exactly no can i can i say this as a baseline i want to hear you guys react to this my view is that there is no democrat who could have beaten trump this cycle because the voters wanted trump this cycle well i mean you guys agree with that or disagree i only disagree with it in the context stuff because who knows how everything shakes out but like hypothetically there could have been a process that would have let somebody win the differentiated from Biden. I don't actually think that that would have happened, though.
So I think my real answer is no. My hypothetical answer is yes.
Because the Democratic constituency is basically JVL. They were not unhappy with Biden.
This was not really a time where both parties were unhappy with the status

quo and it was throw the bums out. There were some parts of the Democratic coalition that were throw the bums out.
Muslim voters, working class, black and Hispanic men. The coalition that elected Biden, older black voters, suburban college educated people, they were happy with what they got, right? So even if Biden had dropped out earlier, and then Kamala ran a campaign, she ran as good of a technical campaign as she did here, it's hard to see the Democrats then going for like, I don't know, some governor that was running on, oh, the Biden economy has been terrible, and we need to go a new direction.
That might have worked, actually, like I think a Democratic governor that did that, but I just don't see how that would have ever happened in practice. I mean, I've spent one second thinking about that, but that's my initial reaction.
Sarah, what do you think? Yeah. You know, I certainly, I think that one thing that I won't do is be like, if she'd had Josh Shapiro as her vice president, she would have won.
Because I don't think that's right. Uh, I don't think like it could have made, like, I always thought the Josh Shapiro as the number two on the ticket mattered in like, uh, Pennsylvania, she loses it by 9,000 votes.
And that was the tipping point state. Um, then I, I get on my high horse about Shapiro.
I'm not, I wouldn't in this scenario. I do think if you'd had somebody, um, you know, like Shapiro who could have broken with Biden, um, but who still read like somebody who read as a moderate, and this is going to be a big debate.
Like there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be like, don't tell me she needed to be more moderate. She ran, you know, with Liz Cheney next to her and like an incredibly moderate.
That's true. But one of the ways you get the, Hey, this person is just a regular politician is by people thinking you're inauthentic because your positions change, uh, between the times that they see you.
And I, I just, I think that that did hurt her. Um, and I think that Donald Trump in the swing States dropped a gajillion dollars saying that she was a San Francisco progressive.
Um, she was, trump changed his mind on abortion in which is a very high salience issue and it had almost no effect right and that like it's a very recent change so i'm saying like all these rules we construct they only hold for one side you know yeah but this is jbl this is where i do get like on it is the tension between you're in my positions but i think that there is there is frustration that with the world that it that as it exists and i can i can share that frustration with you but i think sometimes you try to demand the world be different than it is as opposed to like it is what it is like you wanted you wanted to demand right that voters accept that the economy was good and i kept telling don't think it's good. Like, that doesn't mean she can't potentially overcome it by separating him.
They don't think that Joe Biden was a good president. I agree with Tim that like, a key part of the coalition thought he did a good job.
And so like, running explicitly against him, it seems like, how would somebody have done that? I don't know, I can kind of think of ways somebody could have done could have done that because actually people certainly including in a big part of the democratic coalition did not think he should run again and i i will say it is not super great to spend a lot of time picking apart um everybody and pointing fingers at everybody because i i do think we should as part of analysis like figure out where the flaws lie but just like hurling invective at each other is not good. But I will say Joe Biden deciding to run again was a catastrophic mistake.
And if he had said early on he was going to be a bridge candidate, right, and that he was not going to run again and let the Democrats have their primary, that is a counterfactual we can't test. We have idea how that would have turned out maybe they nominate bernie say i like i don't know right but like i'm not saying josh shapiro comes out of that but that is how this should have gone um because by the time you got through this election with the the challenge for her was just so enormous and it felt like she was meeting it, you know, it felt like she was meeting it.
But at the end of the day, it wasn't enough. Can I agree in part and disagree in part? I am now you're gonna love this era.
I am retconning my Joe Biden greatest living president. And I'm actually going to write this week about how Bidenism turns out to be a catastrophic failure.
But on the subject of like me demanding that people agree and how this is the wrong way to do it, isn't that actually how Trump's messaging always works? Right? And you say this all the time. Like Trump would just go out and say, greatest economy ever, greatest economy ever, and you just say the same thing over and over.
Like, eventually people just say, oh, I guess it was. Right? Why is it that he gets to do that and, like, Democrats are supposed to, like, put, twist their toe in the dirt and apologize for, like, no, no, we understand it's really bad.
Like, just know. Create your own reality.
Sure. Isn't that the name of the game? That requires somebody with, I think, genuinely Trump's salesman's ability.
Yeah. But that sociopathy has led him to a salesman role that both understands what people want and how to give them what they want.
Like he understands in a lizard brain kind of way how to get people. 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, he was willing to. Except for the final year.
Sure. But he was willing to say all day, day every day he was relentlessly on message about how good the economy was when he was the president which is why and that's stuck and 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 uh they continue the the pandemic to be an exogenous event outside of him they remember the pre-pandemic time and the pre-pandemic economy.
And he wrote a lot of that. 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, yeah, if you are mad at the Biden administration for being too nice to BB, you should be for me. and also if you're mad at the Biden administration for being too nice to BB, you should be for me.
And also, if you're mad at the Biden administration for being too... Look at the splits, right? And it worked.
Yeah, it worked. Yeah, I know.
He's on both sides of it and it worked. I have a question.
I want to chew over something with you guys. Because I can't...
There's part of this that's like, we're in hell had bad luck incumbents are being thrown out everywhere people hated the fucking post-pandemic economy there's nothing anybody could do and donald trump and like mitch mcconnell not fucking convicting donald trump like and letting him run again is really was really the curse of this and if not it would have just been whoever came out the republican primary would have won like anybody would have That's one way that I curse of this. And if not, it would have just been whoever came out.
The Republican primary would have won. Like anybody would have won.
That's one way that I look at this. And the other way I look at it is, I don't know, maybe it wasn't that.
Like there is something fundamental. This goes to JVL's point.
There's something fundamental about the country wanting this. I look at, to me, the most jarring results are not any of the swing states illinois new jersey new jersey texas new york illin she lost by four in illinois things will things will roll in it might end up being eight or whatever but last night at 6 a.m when i was on fucking msnbc and steve kornacki pressed the illinois button and she was up by four and a half points in Illinois.
Like it was in similar in New Jersey. Texas went from six back to 1415.
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.
And he won across the board victories in them in places where the campaign wasn't really waged right so it's like it's not about the ads i mean they got the national trans ads during sports and stuff so the campaign was aged a little bit but like that i just like that i mean the hardest part of me to process is going to be segment two coming up here where we talk about what comes next.

But the hardest part for me to process of the looking back part is that. It's just like regular people across the country that were not targeted by the campaigns in any meaningful ways.
Like across demographic groups, every group except college educated women were like, yeah. Yeah, Which is why, which is why actually, I think that the recriminations around like, 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. But like, you can sort of see it happened everywhere, 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 that made people who didn't usually vote for Republicans, like a lot of people move Hispanic and black voters, like, there is a shift to the right that cannot be offset.
There's not enough college educated women to offset them. Yeah.
So let me, I'm sorry, I started rambling and I didn't get to the nuts of the question, which is, was this a contingent random thing, bad luck because of the economy and the timing, wrong time, wrong place? Or like, do the Democrats have a fundamental brand problem that must be fixed and that and that like or do does does donald trump have some special appeal you know what i mean like what like what are those things because i like i come to this and i'm going to come to this over the next year like totally open like i. Like 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.

I don't know.

Like I'm like literally open to any possible thing.

It's maybe they just need a culture warring.

Maybe they needed like a tough guy of their own

who like codes as a culture war.

Like, so I guess my question is,

was it something that could have been fixed

about the brand or was it a contingent element of the post-COVID economy? Can I take this first, Sarah? Go ahead. I 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. Like, for instance, he attempted a coup or that he was convicted of a bunch of felonies.
Because just the fact of him having been on the ballot for the third time just made it normal and built permission structures and so instead of like getting instead of it was like the opposite he he dismantled the anti-trump coalition simply by being there right and the fact of him made him seem normal and allowed the democrats self-implode their coalition so i don't think so because of again the down ballot stuff right and so down ballot dems did okay right i mean not great but there's still a chance 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 gonna be very narrow right tammy baldwin held on I mean, there are... Tammy Baldwin held on.
But listen, but Casey lost. You know, Sherrod lost.
Like, all the places that are getting sort of redder. More red.
I think Trump pulled those this time. This time, Trump had coattails and pulled those people around with him.
There was a lot of anti-incumbency bias. This is if you listen to the Pennsylvania episode, one of the things that we were talking about is like how in the group that the swing voters that went for Kamala, there were two people who were voting against Casey, though.
They were like Kamala McCormick voters. And it was just like there was just like this guy's been here for forever.
And we got the same thing about Sherrod Brown. Like there was this and you could even get it from Tammy Baldwin.
There was like a lot of people who were like, I like Tammy Baldwin, but like she's been there a long time.

um and so i think there's then look incumbents so listen just to answer tim's question in my own way i think that number one incumbents across the globe are getting tossed right and that has to do

with the global post-pandemic economic environment. And big immigration patterns that people are unhappy about.
Those are happening globally. They are having repercussions for political parties globally.
And we in a, 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? Um, and you like end up actually getting more of the blame, even when

you're less close to the person's actual life. Um, but here's the thing.
So to Tim's point about

the democratic brand and our Democrats imploding, I think imploding is too strong a term for what just happened. But I do think that Democrats have a big problem, which is that they are culturally out of step with the vast majority, with the majority of Americans on a bunch of cultural issues.
And that this is where Republicans have been cleaning up and that Trump does it in a crass way, in a horrible way. But people are annoyed enough about a lot of it that they'll take his crassness.
And here's the thing. I almost don't want to give Trump too much credit because I think Nikki Haley would have also won this election handily.
Like, I think that if she had been the Republican nominee, I also think she would have crushed. And that's why I'm also a little bit on like the woman, the brown, 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, Kam class a lot and that broke through to a lot of voters, like that repetition.
They didn't have like a clear economic pitch and they certainly didn't have a pitch on immigration. And immigration has been a vulnerability for a long time.
So I just, those things do matter and i do think that's why

people but like democrats are gonna 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 but Not because they love fascism.

The Democratic brand did fine in 2018 and 2020 and 2022 so but here's the difference and this is this is important actually and i think we we knew this 2018 was a corrective on trump right from a bunch of people who were like didn't know what they were getting and frankly i think something like that could happen in in uh 26. Right? Because I think we still have elections and like the world moves forward politically.
In 2020, I think that Joe Biden, I think it's always been unclear which way the pandemic cut. But it is possible that the pandemic hurt Trump enough to let Joe Biden win and that Joe Biden not having to really campaign and Donald Trump being in everybody's face and people having this anti-incumbency bias was enough to get rid of Trump.
And again, the margins were very narrow. And then we entered a high inflationary period, which damns candidates all the time.
It's like a surefire way to like kill a presidency is to have high inflation during it. Yeah, I guess my, we're, we live the rest of our lives to talk about this, but I think my final part of the point about the Democrats that I want to move forward and what, how to think about this is I want to say this because it is an admission against interest.
Like the way in which I am a moderate is foreign affairs, economic affairs, not really social issues, right? Like I'm not a cultural moderate. Like I'm, I'm, I pretty much agree with Kamala Harris on every single one of her cultural issues.
I'm sure I could think of one that we disagree on, but do you believe in gender reassignment surgery for prisoners? Because that seems to be a very big issue.

Yeah, I don't think I would have paid the two. That is how we – do we have a number on how many prisoners have undergone gender reassignment surgery? Two.
I don't think I would have given those two prisoners the gender reassignment surgery taxpayer funded probably, but I actually don't know the situation, so maybe I would have. I don't want to say that.
Here's the thing. You can't just tell the biggest demographic group in the country, non-college white people, that you don't really care what they think about cultural issues.
It's just not a winner, especially with the electorate. It didn't end up being an electoral college factor.
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 uh experience and you know it's just like i'm not saying that you throw trans people under the bus to to come back and win elections but there has to be an ability to speak the language culturally and to try. And like, they just haven't really tried.
Like they'll say that they tried, they'll check this box and they'll, there'll be, you know, a couple of lines in a speech, but like there still is a dominant feeling among that group that the Democrats look down on them, don't care about them. And is that unfair? Shouldn't they be looked on, though, Tim? Maybe.
I'm sorry. I know this is unpopular, but 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? Because that ad isn't...
Well, yeah. democracy.
Well, yeah. Well, number one, we live in a democracy.
But also, JBL, because that ad is a stand-in, right? The stand-in, the gender reassignment surgery, taxpayer-funded, is a stand-in for all of the ways that people believe Democrats are culturally out of touch. Well, sure.
But this is like all the ways that people believe that crime is through the through the roof right i mean again i i understand that i'm demanding that the world be different than it is and i get that yeah but i don't feel rational i'm just saying look you look at the map just look at i'm not like the oh red like land doesn't vote but like if if if 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 a vote like we're gonna live in a mega 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 maybe they have that are wrong. Maybe they're swimming in disinformation.
But that's just the facts of life. And not trying to offer something to them is a mistake, as long as we're in this democratic environment that I guess we're in.
Yeah, I just think it's going to be hard to outbid a dem Like, I mean, what these people care most about is demagoguery. That's what they want.
They don't care. You can, I guess this is where I'm trying, you can 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.
We're going to the affordable care act which makes it easier i'm saying actually no i'm saying no actually don't try to sell them i think that's what they've tried right i'm saying like you gotta go and like hang out and like and and be like oh yeah i am i share your concern about whatever the thing is that you know what i mean that's what i'm talking about bill clinton yeah no and i think this is what i'm not what. I'm not going to say Latinx, and I'm not going to say birthing person.

It's like that.

It's that stuff.

But Kamala Harris didn't say those things.

But this is my point about it being a stand-in, right?

It's about Democrats broadly.

I guess.

It's like unfalsified.

Those people, the people who run around saying Latinx didn't vote for her.

They voted for Jill Stein.

Nah. We're going to have time to to chew over that i want to do quick forward looking um and then feelings um we're taping this 11 30 uh kamalai is going to concede a little later than my taste but whatever she's going to do it there'll a peaceful transfer of power.
There are no Democrats that are right now. I was on MSNBC for hours.
I didn't hear anybody say anything irresponsible about it. I was with the people at the Bannon event last week, and the MAGA folks truly believed that the Democrats were going to try to keep him from power and that they were going to do what they did.
That was a deep, true belief. Like after the event was over in private, two of them came up to me and was like, would they really let him win? Like, like they, they truly believed that the Democrats were going to do what Trump did to them.
Um, obviously they're not going to yay for the Democrats for that. Um, so I guess my question is on the forward looking,

what are,

what is,

I guess,

what is your top line thing that you're worried about or that you're

thinking about as far as the next year of Donald Trump,

assuming the presidency again?

Can I tell you mine?

If you want to think about it,

I'll start with mine mine I'll ask the first

question to myself then uh it's a host prerogative and then you guys can riff from there I said this a little bit at the end of the podcast at the end of the live stream last night I continue to think about it to me like I I think that the aperture is extremely wide on what Donald Trump does and tries to do.

You know,

I think he's a fickle human. And I think it can range from bad, kind of a little bit bad to extremely bad.
But 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, like the mindset of, I of, I'm not even going to say the resistance, the mindset of the people that are in coalition against this, to me, it feels more like the mindset of what the opposition feels like in Hungary or Eastern Europe. that the job going forward is not really about stopping him or thinking about like how the next 20 years more rights can be gained.
It's more about thinking about what, what can be protected, what can be protected in the meantime, because he is a wrecking ball that if if left to his own devices i could conceivably try to wreck all of the structures that govern our domestic society as well as our international norms and alliances and the rule-based order of the world like i all of that could collapse in the next four years is the worst case scenario. Some of it could collapse is the median case scenario.
Just a little bit of it could kind of get rolled back is the best case scenario, right? And that sucks as a mindset to think about. I understand why people might be like, I'm checking out of that because

my whole life has been thinking about how are we going to progress? How are we going to gain more rights? How are things going to become like, that's just not the world we're in, right? Like anymore, at least for a while. And so to me, like that is just what I keep noodling over in my brain when I'm able to process that.

So anyway, you can riff off that or if you have other thoughts on kind of what is up next, I'd be happy to hear them. Sarah, do you want to go first or do you want me to? I mean, I'll start and then JV, I'll jump in because I do think this idea, which is a very bulwarkian perspective, right, is that our job now is to focus on, I think, and I think we're doing some of that, right? I think you have to understand the nature of the problem clearly.
I think we have to do the work to understand the nature of the problem clearly and not just fall back on.

It was race. It was sex, it was people love fascism.
Like, I think we've got to dig as deep as we can to understand what's happening in the country so that we can figure out how to push back against it. Trump was running to stay out of jail.
Like, I believe that Donald Trump ran so that he wouldn't go to prison. And now that he's president, what? Congrats, Donald.
Yeah, that's right. And he's, instead of prison, he'll be president.
I think the question is, is like, what does he do with that? And I think that there will be a lot of things that he and his team are going to do.

Maybe they won't do much actually.

Like maybe Donald Trump's appetite for the things that he said is like, actually, he's

an old man who just didn't want to go to jail.

And now he's kind of like, like now I can play lots of golf and like, you know, piss

into a microphone.

And, uh, I don't actually have the stomach for real work and neither to any of these clowns that I'm surrounded by. I don't think that's going to happen, but that would be the best way for him to be popular as if he did nothing, like doing literally doing nothing would be the best way for him to be popular.
Yeah. Um, I do think though, when I think about what's about to happen, like that that right, that's like the best case scenarios.
Like maybe he just doesn't try that hard to destroy things because he's lazy and he just didn't want to go to jail and that the people around him are like Elon. And there are a bunch of people who are just trying to do things that enrich themselves.
And so, like, ultimately, they're not massively damaging. They're just self enriching and corrupt.
And that's bad. And we're we should, you know, fight against that.
But I think the bigger issues, the things I worry about most are like the international policy side of things that Trump, you know, buddies up with all the strong men that he abandons Ukraine that he abandons Taiwan,wan uh that maybe he pulls us out of nato just because that's a hobby horse of his uh and america's rule in the world and this is not me being some kind of unrepentant neocon this is about just like abandoning allies like dropping everything that we do that is you know around diplomacy and everything else we just completely retreat from the world uh that scares me a great deal the idea of but like these things right like these things will engender backlash when they happen right if he does the things like our job is to be there to fight them because just because he was elected with this mandate does not mean that the things he does, if he does the worst things we imagine, will be popular, right? And so the way, and this is the world that we have lived in, and I think this is what I've been saying to myself over and over again today, is like, the history is long, and you can look back and see lots of times when one party shocked the country, right? And you thought, well, man, it's over. But it's never over.
So it's another election. So there's new voters coming in and out of the electorate.
There's always, he will be the incumbent now. He will do a bunch of things that are unpopular.
It is our job to help voters understand why they are bad, right? To be better about our messaging, because I do think that the reason that one of the reasons Joe Biden was so unpopular, and I complained about this, 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. 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 um and then get a corrective in the house in 2026 jonathan uh three things i mean the first thing is that ukraine is fucked and uh that is regrettable and it will have very bad outcomes for europe and the world but it is no longer america's problem we do not have the luxury as a teetering democracy to expend any political capital to help them anymore.
And I'm sorry, but that's just the reality of it. When Trump tries to fuck Ukraine, like, you know, Democrats should make whatever political hay they can out of it and try to make Trump pay a price for it in terms of popularity.
But in terms of stopping it, don't spend any chits on that. We just don't have the luxury of that anymore.
Number two is tariffs. Tariffs are a thing that he can do quasi-unilaterally.
And what tariffs really are is a mechanism for bringing the entire business community of the United States to heal. Tariffs are the way in which he establishes an Orban-like control over the actual economic base, the private sector economic base of America.
and that is going to work. I think it's very clearly going to work.

Jeff Bezos tweeted this morning, big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th president on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities, wishing at Donald Trump, all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
That is now going to be the official posture for anybody at any level of business everywhere in America. And once you own the business community, your hooks are really in deep to the political sphere as well.
Number three, his promise to deploy the military against protesters. There will be an anti-Trump protest shortly after his inauguration.
I don't know what it'll look like. I don't know where it will be.
It'll probably be something like the women's March. Um, and when that happens, Trump.
Yeah. Yeah.
I agree with Tim here. I'm not sure there will be.
There might be. That's a, that's a, that's not a snarky.
Are you sure this is a genuine, are you sure? Cause I'm not sure. At some point, right? Maybe it won't be shortly after the inauguration.
Maybe it'll be after he fires Jack Smith or something. I don't know.
But at some point, there will be a protest. And Trump will see that as a dare to carry, to make good on his threat to deploy the military.
And I would be surprised if he didn't do it, because not doing it will look like backing down, and he always feels like he can't back down. And once that's been done once, I think the ability and willingness of people to protest publicly at scale in America is going to decline precipitously.
And I think that's just like all between now and March. Those three things are all between now and March.
So I'm just going to sit on that because I don't know if I agree with that, but I don't know if I disagree either. So we'll sit on that and we're going to do another next level here later in the week.

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

No, I'll just say on this idea of sitting on it.

I do think, you know, I've tried to, 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. And I'm going to just say that like, I have said the things that I said here, and they're my takes generally because they've been my takes all along.
I'm just now looking at them with the knowledge of how the election went. But I'm going to reserve the right to be like, we probably have a lot to learn here.
I think this is like sort of not a time for the hottest of hot takes. We got exit polling, but we don't have like good catalyst deep data yet.
And so I'm still trying to figure out exactly, you know, with the different demographics and stuff like there's a lot we don't know, that might sort of shift our thinking a little bit. But like the big broad picture tells us sort of what we need to know in terms of like, there was a repudiation of Democrats here across the board.
And we're gonna have to figure out what to do about that. And I think people who want to spend too much time as part of the analysis

we can sort of say like, this was a bad move, or this was a bad move. But I think like living in the recriminations is going to be unproductive, and that people are going to need to like, take good hard looks, think about it for a second, don't just react, we're gonna have to think about this for a little bit and then we're gonna have to figure out how to reorient uh of movement going forward to forestall the worst of what trump might try to do um and to build a different more durable coalition i agree with that i don't the thing i agree most is that like, really, you will see on social media and on cable, I already saw it last night, people that go out there and are like, it was Gaza, or it was, it was race.
It was this, I don't want to pick up the Gaza, 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 and it's like i don't know i he won a broad again i repeat he won he improved with every demographic group except college educated women i and and he was going to win a record number of whether it was advertising any of those things he improved he improved across the board and so it it's like, what do the Democrats need to do to create a majority coalition? It might need to be very different. It might need to be the same.
Maybe it should have just been the Tim Miller dream of Josh Shapiro, but maybe it really shouldn't have been at all. And it should be something totally different than that.
And I think that it's going to take time to think through it um all right uh feelings um i guess i'll just start so um you know what i'm looking for here um i just want to say like i know that some people listening are probably like can i list can i do this like can i do i want to become a monk my friend dan, like, what is the liberal version of the Benedict option?

For people who don't know what the Benedict option is,

that was like a far right thing about like getting away from society

and creating a, you know, a little religious sect in the woods.

And I understand that sympathy or I understand that impulse.

And I like woke up this morning and just,

you start to think about just the day-to-day of like Trump picking cabinet people and Trump doing, Trump having an outrage. And I just, it's going to be very, just in candor.
I'm not a coal miner. Like, you know, I'm not looking for sympathy, but it was 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 we can do the sober-minded analysis, but there are a lot of good things. A really good thing happened to really bad people, and that's tough.
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 is tough.
But I'm going to do it. It's important to do it.
This mission has felt good, even though it was not successful. And, um, and there are things about it that are going to suck.
And if people don't want to tune in for a little while, I'm, I get that. Um, 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.
And I think it's important to be a part of that processing and then important to be a part of what Sarah just talked about, which was how we can make a difference on the margins as far as protecting the being a bulwark against the real threats that are coming. So as I laid in the fetal position this morning, that was what was going through my head.
So I just wanted to see if you guys have any additional feelings on that or anything related that you'd like to share. JBL? I mean, I will echo Sarah's that we have a lot to learn.
But for me, that primarily that primarily takes the form of, we allowed ourselves, I'll just speak for myself. I allowed myself for the first time since 2016 to suffer from a failure of imagination.
And, uh, you know, 2016 was me suddenly discovering things about America that I never knew. And maybe other people did know, but I didn't.
And I made a real concerted effort over the next eight years to not let that happen to me again. And this is why I, you know, like we joke about how like, yeah, I just, you know, pick the worst possible outcome and it always turns out to be right and with this race i didn't allow myself to

to envision the worst possible outcome right i was happy to to envision trump winning i kept saying

yeah i don't know look is it better than even chance that uh he's gonna win um i said this all

the time that uh you know like harris isn't doing enough doesn't look good and then you know for the

last three weeks it looked a little better and we got the the selzer and time sienna polling that

But I, you know, for the last three weeks, it looked a little better. And we got the, the Seltzer and the Times-Siena polling.

That was good.

But I, you know, I, I thought he could win.

I never imagined that he could wind up getting the second largest.

No, I'm sorry.

The largest Republican majority of the vote since 1988.

That is not an eventuality, which I ever considered to be possible. That is a failure of imagination.
And I am determined not to allow that to happen again. But I will say this, and this is where Sarah and I will disagree.
Um, Sarah's gift is to never suffer failures of the imagination about how things could be better. I don't have that ability.
My gift is to never suffer. Hopefully for another eight years, I can learn this, not suffer from failures of the imagination of how things can be worse.
And so I am going to try to be very vigilant about myself on that. Because, I mean, I think everything is on the table.
Right? Maybe, like, I wrote this, like, six months ago, before Biden dropped out. I was like, you I was like, here's the best case scenario for a second Trump term.
I basically did what you did, Sarah. Maybe he just gets in there, he's tired, he just wants to stay out of jail.
It's all basically fine. That's one possible outcome.
But another possible outcome than Hungary. That is not a thing which is off the table.

Right.

And Hungary is possible, actually.

Yeah.

Worse than Hungary is what Russia is possible.

Maybe Russia isn't likely.

Maybe Russia is much more unlikely than Hungary.

But, you know, like it's it's there.

And I think, you know, for people, I don't know, I got dunked on for saying like, if he wins in 2028, 100 or 2024, 100% chance he runs again in 2028. People like, you know, like a dash review like, oh, his brain is broken.
It's not possible. 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. You know, like we've got a pliant Supreme Court.
He will have appointed a at least five members of it by that point. And the 14th Amendment said it wasn't possible for an insurrectionist to run either.
Right. Don't don't failures of imagination and all this and don't blind yourself to how bad it could actually get those are my feelings it's not great feelings sarah yeah i mean i guess jbl's right a little bit about me in the sense that um it's not that i'm blind to how bad things are going to get.
I just don't see any other alternative, but for us to figure out what to do about it and then to do it. Um, and to try, that's your gift.
I didn't mean to say that you were blind to these things. I know you weren't very sincere.
I know you weren't. Um, I will say though, it's interesting was just as thinking about about blind spots.
I, I, one of the things I've been wrestling with just for myself is that, you know, uh, if you go listen to the focus groups, like it's all in there. And like my analysis, I was trying to think about like, and I was a little, I'm a little sheepish about even talking about like pundit accountability and like, was my analysis right? How is it wrong? Because it's like, that's about me.
And so it's a little bit stupid. But I am trying to, I am trying to figure out, right, I started doing the focus groups because I wanted an answer to how Trump happened in 2016.
And so like, I can't help but look back and be like, okay, I saw all of it in the groups. I did Hispanic groups and played them for people.
They were,

and people here will tell you how, you know, oh no, like they were, they were, uh, rip shit about

immigration. And, and I said in the thing, I remember Rui was on, people hated that episode.

It was Rui to share it. They hated that episode.
But I think if you go back and listen to it,

all the stuff about Hispanic men is in there, right? It's just, it is. And if you look at the swing voters, which we really focused on, the thing that I said is like, yeah, in every group, you're losing one or two people.
They're backsliding to Trump. You aggregate that, 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. And, and you ask people how things are going in the country, which is the opening question every single time, and they say bad.
And they talked about immigration, they talked about crime, and they talked about the economy. And our intellectual impulse to say, well, that's wrong.
You know, I think there's this question of like, how do you make people see reality for what it is? Or how do you meet them where they are? It's like a thing we have to grapple with. But I just, what I hope for people who listen to this, like who are people.
I want you to come to us for two things.

One, what I hope for people who listen to this, like who are bored people, I want you to come to us for two things. Um, one, like we are going to do our best to be honest with you all the time.
Like we don't have any, um, I don't, I don't know. There's nothing like we're trying to protect for ourselves.
Predetermined outcome. Yeah.
Like we we just i think we want to figure out what happens so we can be part of the solution and i think if you want you know i was watching the live stream last night and like jbl was characteristically bleak like pretty much from the outset and i was trying to kind of be like hey let's wait let's wait but like it was true like it was going south and people were so mad they're like i'm signing off you guys are too negative 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 uh like a subscriber versus people who just like casually or whatever like know what you're getting with us, which is like, we're going to go through this moment by like, really grappling with what is going on. We're going to put everything on the table.
And we're going to try to turn it over so that we can figure out what really is going on. That's why I do the focus groups.
And I want to make sure that we're looking at it hard without a lot of priors so that we can then figure out how we can best stop Trump from doing the worst damage that he can. Us sitting, like we can speculate how bad or not bad it might be.
But the fact is, our role is to do the analysis, but also, and this is why it's different from everybody else. Our role is also to do everything we can to protect this country and the democracy and the institutions that undergird it from somebody who wants to burn them to the ground.
And we can't do that without being really clear eyed about what's happening right now. And so if you want to be part of figuring that out and then doing the work to stop Trump, this is a good place for you.
You should come, you should come with us. But like, if you're somebody who's going to be like, well, you guys are too negative or, you know, I don't, I will breach it's, it's, it's racism and sexism.
Anybody who says anything else, you know, I don't want to listen to like, then we're not good for that because like, maybe you can get some of that on MSNBC or some other, but we're going to try to figure this out together and do something about it,

because that's who we are. God, I love you, Sarah.
You're the best.

My only nitpick with that is the word stop. He's not getting stopped anymore, but slow,

control, contain. I don't know.
We can think about words, but.

Well, that's what bulwarks do.

Yeah, sadly.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

I've got one final thing.

Or if you have a final thing to a final thing, that's fine.

We've got no shortage of time.

All the time in the world with Donald Trump.

I do feel cursed about that.

Sam last night was talking about how there was a part of him that felt invigorated by this. And like, I don't just like in candor.
Like I don't, um, at all. Um, but part of the reason why I don't feel invigorated by this is like, it is just insane to me that I'm going to spend the prime years of my life having to spend time thinking about the stupidest, most disgusting fucking person in the entire world.
Like I just, it boggles the mind. mind it's like i do feel like i'm cursed kind of it's like like this is a curse and there was a witch and like i just i could it could be there could be it could be anybody um but it's him and that is awful and i'm very uninvigorated by that that said um ben rhod Rhodes, who I have plenty of policy disagreements on, but wrote a book after 2016 where he was really going through his own processing.
And he went and interviewed the people that were fighting for freedom in Hong Kong and Kiev and Hungary. I forget who the other characters were.
And some of those people are fucked, which really sucks for them. But that is the little node of invigoration that I have.
Those people have real purpose. And it's a different purpose than the purpose that we wanted for this life, probably.

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

And I think that we're kind of in their shoes in America right now.

We're kind of in our own Hong Kong or Kiev.

Well, all three of those groups are going to wind up on the losing end of those historical struggles so let's hope not right i mean well no no well you know what though i gotta say like i think it's okay for us to take a beat and feel like you know to to take in the pain of this right and what it means because i always said this, it wouldn't be what it said about Donald Trump. It was going to be what it said about us.
And like, we're going to grapple with that. And it's going to be hard to do.
And it makes me sad. It does.
Like it makes me sad. Um, but like, this is why we do this is cause, and I presume the people who listen to this and they say that they were in it to preserve democracy.
That means they care deeply about the country. And if we care deeply about the country, like we just have work to do.
Like, that's just the truth. Like it's our job and we care about it.
And we are in a position to be people who are rallying people to fight. So it's okay to be in our feelings for a little bit, like, and,

and to figure out what happened, but also like it is our job to figure out how

to get people motivated to get back in the game.

Because if everybody checks out, then we are fucked.

Excuse me.

JV, you looked like you had a final thought.

No, no, that's perfect. We're going to keep your final thought in your head for this time.
All right, guys. Well, for those of you that made it an hour plus through this podcast, kind of good, okay show, sad show, long show.
How about that? Sad show, long show. I'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the borg podcast

i don't know when me and sarah and jv are going to get back together for for the next level we

owe you but we will do that at some point as the week goes on and um thanks for sticking with us

we'll see you on the other side peace and guys are blue The only thing that I get from you is sorrow Sorrow You're acting funny Spending all my money You're out there playing You're on high-class games Sorrow Sorrow You never do what you know you wanna Something tells me the devil's daughter Sorrow Sorrow, sorrow

Oh, oh, oh I try to fight it but I can't resist it I never knew just how much I missed it Sorrow Sorrow With your long-blown hair and eyes of blue The only thing I ever got from you Was sorrow Sorrow Oh Oh Oh The Board Podcast. Oh, oh, oh

The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.