Simon Rosenberg: I Think We're Going to Kick His Ass

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Speaker 10 Hey, JVL, it's been months since I've seen you without a screen intermediary. I'm just dying to lick your face and put my hands on you.
And so,

Speaker 10 are you going to come do some public events with us and be a human contact?

Speaker 12 Human contact? Yes. Yes, I'm going to do it.
I'm coming out of the house. I'm leaving the basement for two days.

Speaker 12 May 1st in Philadelphia and May 15th in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 10 This will be the first Bullwork event where we encourage jeering because it's Philly, people. So jeer us.
Yes.

Speaker 12 May 1st. If we have a bad show, I expect the Philly crowd to boo us.

Speaker 13 Please.

Speaker 10 Or anyway, even if it's a good show, boo us anyway. We deserve it.
May 1st in Philly, May 15th, 6th and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C. Come hang out.

Speaker 10 Go to thebulwark.com/slash events to get your tickets. Thebulwark.com/slash events and JVL.
I just can't wait to get all up on you.

Speaker 10 Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We're going to do it. It's a weekend show.
We are bringing you good tidings. The Denver Nuggets are up 3-0.
It's spring.

Speaker 10 There's Jazz Fest in the air in New Orleans. And I've got Simon Rosenberg, the author of the Hopium Chronicles on Substack.
He's a veteran Democratic strategist and consultant.

Speaker 10 2022, when Nate Silver was talking about the red wave and mocking Simon Rosenberg, he was out there saying, no, it's going to be a good year for Democrats.

Speaker 10 And that is when Nate Silver suggested he was smoking hopium. That inspired the new substack name.
Simon, I've brought you in to give the people a weekend injection of hopium.

Speaker 13 Tim, thanks so much for having me and big admirer from afar. Oh, thank you.

Speaker 10 We're going to do it. There have been requests.

Speaker 10 Sometimes, I don't know if you've heard, but sometimes there are some bulwark contributors, yours included, who can be a little dour, you know, a little fret. We can fret, we can be concerned.
And so

Speaker 10 we need to bring a little balance to things. So like you kind of inserted into my life, I don't know, two years ago on the internet.
And we'd never hung out. I didn't know you before.

Speaker 10 So tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your backstory? Are you like that guy? You remember the Mill House episode of The Simpsons where everything's turning up Mill House?

Speaker 10 Has that just been you your whole life or is this a new thing?

Speaker 10 Get us up to speed.

Speaker 13 Listen, I started my career as a TV producer and writer for ABC News and grew up in the media business and then went into politics.

Speaker 13 And I worked on two presidential campaigns, the Dukakis and Clinton campaigns. You know, I'm dating myself here a little bit.

Speaker 13 But I was part of the Clinton War Room 32 years ago, got yelled at by James every day.

Speaker 13 And after we won, I came to Washington as the comms director at the DNC. And in 96, I started the organization NDN that I ran for 27 years.
And NDN was

Speaker 13 part of the Clinton wave of trying to build the next Democratic Party after many years of losing presidential elections from 68 to 88.

Speaker 13 And that organization had sort of two incarnations. First, we funded candidates in swing races and swing districts to try to help

Speaker 13 grow the Democratic Party. We invested in leaders like Gavin Newsome and Corey Booker and lots of the people that you see today who are leaders of the party.

Speaker 13 And then the second thing we did is we became, in our second iteration, sort of like a private think tank for the Democratic Party and for the center left. And we produced policy work,

Speaker 13 you know, strategic thinking about our coalition how to use things like the internet more effectively to communicate some of the stuff we did was public some of it was private you know so i've been in the game here for more than 30 years and a lot of the work that i did i didn't need to be a public figure i didn't need to have a following because i was sort of an insidery place but that all changed in 2022 when my analysis about the election sort of went viral my more optimistic analysis of the election went viral and here we are two years later fighting it out together, Tim saving our democracy.

Speaker 10 I appreciate it.

Speaker 10 You do make a little appearance in the war room, right? A documentary? I do.

Speaker 13 I have. I'm in there twice.
And the other thing is, for Republicans, I mean, you may be familiar with me because I was a regular guest on Fox News for 17 years.

Speaker 13 I mean, I was on two to three days a week. Many of my Democratic friends didn't know that.
But for people who are watching and listening today on the Republican side,

Speaker 13 I was a regular guest on all the shows, but particularly Megan Kelly's show, you know, on Tuesday afternoons I was on for many, many years.

Speaker 10 Do Megan still talk? Has she had you on her podcast?

Speaker 13 I'm in touch with Megan. I'm actually in touch with Megan.
And, you know, I always admired Megan, actually,

Speaker 13 in those days because I felt she was true to herself. You know, that show was always the toughest show to do.
I mean, she was smart and she challenged people.

Speaker 13 And so I really enjoyed going on Fox News. I learned a lot.
First of all, it kept me sharp in my work and to have to go on what was a pretty hostile environment live two to three days a week.

Speaker 13 But also, it taught me a lot about the right and Republicans. And I felt like that experience has really helped me understand what's happened to the Republican Party.

Speaker 13 You know, I was on air when Trump came down on the escalator in 2015 on Fox, and they cut away to Trump. We waited, and they had us come back after.
And I said, I just want to go on record thinking.

Speaker 13 And I said, I think he can win the nomination. And at that time, that was an outlier position.

Speaker 10 Especially on Fox, by the way.

Speaker 13 Well, but you could also feel it on Fox. I mean, I could feel the admiration for him.
You know, they were, they were ready for him.

Speaker 13 So, look, I think that it's helped equip me and make me better at the work that I do because I feel like, and I've written a lot about the evolution of the Republican Party and the right in America over the last 20 years.

Speaker 13 And it's been heavily informed by my time actually engaging and talking to Republican voters and talking to prominent Republicans regularly for a very long time.

Speaker 10 Well, send Megan, my love. I would love to argue with her if she wants to re-engage with me.

Speaker 10 We used to DM. She doesn't DM with me anymore.
I've had some negative thoughts about her recent podcast turn, as you might imagine.

Speaker 10 I want to do a little news first before we get into kind of hopium analysis. Well, I guess maybe it's kind of related.

Speaker 10 The SCODIS hearing yesterday, we had a report from Mark Joseph Stern outside the Supreme Court on yesterday's podcast. It was pretty bleak about just kind of what he was hearing there.

Speaker 10 And George Conaway explains it all. People can go check that out with Sarah Longwell.
George had a more nuanced take. Where do you fall down on what we saw from the Supreme Court yesterday?

Speaker 13 Yeah, look, it was disappointing they even took up the case, right? I think that the idea that we

Speaker 13 had a lawyer for a former president making the case that it would be okay for the president to assassinate people while he's in office is kind of a low moment, I think, in this MAGA era.

Speaker 13 You know, that what SCOTUS was playing with yesterday was unraveling what is in some ways the core foundational design of our entire democracy, which is that a president can't be a king, you know, and that there needs to be accountability.

Speaker 13 I mean, there's a whole,

Speaker 13 it's the core of how our country was imagined and the sort of the right that they, or the wrong they were righting back in the 18th century, which was building a political system that was governed by people and not by a hereditary monarchy and by oligarchs.

Speaker 13 And that the founding fathers tried to imagine an alternative system.

Speaker 13 And the core of it, right, the White House was small, the Congress was big, right, was this idea of

Speaker 13 a highly contained chief executive is, in essence, the foundation stone of our entire democracy. And so I think the SCOTUS yesterday was playing

Speaker 13 with something so foundational to America that if they end up in the wrong place on this, it will change our democracy profoundly in obviously, I think, terrible ways.

Speaker 13 I will say one other thing, though, is that I think it's really important politically.

Speaker 13 I have this theory that, you know, we made a mistake by waiting for Mueller, meaning that we didn't engage publicly the issue of the Russian penetration of the Republican Party and Trump because we were waiting for Mueller to do it for us.

Speaker 13 And so we waited two years. Rather than engaging the public and educating the public, you know, we then waited for Mueller and it didn't happen the way we all expected.

Speaker 13 We shouldn't be waiting for the courts to do the work that we have to do to inform the public about who Donald Trump is in 2024.

Speaker 13 And I know that all this coverage and it's fascinating and it's incredibly riveting,

Speaker 10 but

Speaker 13 we have to take this discussion about who he is out of the courts and out of the legal domain and bring it into the political domain and prosecute it in politics, in campaigns, in ads, in the ways that we communicate.

Speaker 13 And I can get into that a little bit more if you want. But I think we have to stop waiting for Jack Smith or waiting for the prosecutors.
He's already done enough.

Speaker 13 We have enough material to, I think, you know, severely degrade him. And we have to not make it contingent upon him being found guilty because I don't know that that's going to happen.

Speaker 13 If it happens, great. But if it doesn't, we have to fight the election that's in front of us now.

Speaker 10 Here's an area where we agree 100%, just 100%.

Speaker 10 This thing cuts two ways and one way that's a scary and one that's an opportunity is that they're telling us what they want to do and it's it's not what the american people want charlie kirk yesterday talking to this guy uh curtis yarvin let's just listen to that in order to remedy this this sort of great imbalance or this this usurpation of the legislative

Speaker 14 and judicial branches over the executive branch, which has become the Democratic branch with a small D and thus has been rendered utterly toothless in the sense that the president himself has power over the government.

Speaker 14 The only remedy

Speaker 14 for this wrong is to put the president entirely in charge of the government.

Speaker 14 And that essentially means that the executive branch, far from being checked and balanced in a way that does not work and has left the executive branch not checked and balanced, but simply hogtied and held a hostage,

Speaker 14 is

Speaker 14 to render the executive branch completely unilateral.

Speaker 10 Curtis Charvin's, he's saying there on Truly Kirk's show that he wants the president to be able to be a king, to your point, to be able to do anything.

Speaker 10 And that we have the Supreme Court dithering over all this. And so that's really scary on the one hand.

Speaker 10 And I think that it's, it's worth, you know, the people that are raising alarm about this, I get it. But also, the American people don't want this, right?

Speaker 10 And it is up to us to show videos videos of these weirdo boys in their basement that are planning to turn Donald Trump into a king and make sure that enough voters see that so that they reject it.

Speaker 10 And that's basically what happened in 2022, right?

Speaker 13 Yep. Listen, let's go through the six things that voters are about to find out about Donald Trump that they didn't know about him in 2020 when he lost, right?

Speaker 13 Number one is that he raped Eugene Carroll in a department store dressing room.

Speaker 13 Number two, that he oversaw one of the largest financial frauds in all of American history, has been fined half a billion dollars for it, and he and his two sons have been banned from doing large amounts of business in New York State.

Speaker 13 Three is that he stole America's secrets. He lied to the FBI about it.
He shared those secrets with other people. It is without question the greatest betrayal of America by a former president.

Speaker 13 Four is that he tried to overturn an election. He led an armed attack on the Capitol on one of the only days that all 435 members are there.

Speaker 13 And he's promised to end American democracy for all time if he stumbles into the White House in January of 2025.

Speaker 13 Fifth, is that he and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any political family in the history of the country.

Speaker 13 And sixth, he's singularly responsible for ending Roe and stripping the rights and freedoms away of more than half the population.

Speaker 13 Any one of those six things are going to be difficult for him to overcome. I don't think he can overcome all six.
And none of those things are contingent upon him getting convicted in a court of law.

Speaker 13 These are all just facts in the ground. We know they happened.

Speaker 13 And it's important that we start prosecuting our case against him with force because the American people deserve to understand who they're voting for in this election, this Donald Trump.

Speaker 13 This Donald Trump, to me, is far weaker, far more degraded. His performance on the stump is far more atrocious and disturbing than it's ever been.

Speaker 13 And he's a far more dangerous and extreme figure than he was. We can't wait for Mueller.
We can't wait for Jack Smith. We can't wait for the Supreme Court.

Speaker 13 We've got to go get this done now, ourselves, together.

Speaker 10 100% agree agree with that. You've got me ready to put on my battle skeer.
I've got to go grab my battle axe right now. I'm ready for you.

Speaker 13 You guys do it every day every day, man. Bring it every day.

Speaker 10 We're doing our best.

Speaker 10 I want to explore in a little bit some data that undercuts some of those points. And I want to kind of hash out how we can bring the reality of Donald Trump to meet the data.

Speaker 10 But first, to your point, just about how bad he is on the stump and how many opportunities he's providing day in, day out.

Speaker 10 I want to listen to him yesterday outside the courtroom talking about Charlottesville.

Speaker 13 He was was talking about Charlottesville. Charlottesville was a little peanut

Speaker 13 and it was nothing compared to, and the hate wasn't the kind of hate that you have here.

Speaker 10 I mean, this guy, again, still years later, trying to downplay the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville that led to the death of Heather Heyer. You know, this is not what the American people are.

Speaker 13 Listen, my niece spent years working in a dementia ward, in a in a memory loss ward, in a nursing home.

Speaker 13 And one of the first things that happens when you start declining is your impulsivity gets out of control. You have impulse control problems.

Speaker 13 He is demonstrating unbelievable impulse control and impulsivity issues. He can't help himself.
I mean, every time he speaks, he's making horrendous mistakes.

Speaker 13 I mean, coming out against the ACA, I think just in the last few weeks, this idiotic decision that he made to the state's rights on abortion, which I think he thought was some kind of genius move, right?

Speaker 13 He sort of

Speaker 13 threaded the needle, and yet what he was doing in his idiocy was actually endorsing the most extreme abortion bans in the country.

Speaker 13 And if he's okay with Idaho anywhere, he's okay with Idaho everywhere. And what he did was that he cemented himself as the most dangerous abortion extremist in the country.

Speaker 13 And he thought he was doing something else, right?

Speaker 13 And I think that his campaign is now being driven by these impulsive outbreaks where he says things that, as you know, as somebody who's been in the business, he's making the kind of mistakes that candidates who lose make, right?

Speaker 13 Coming out against the ACA was idiotic. The decision he made on the abortion issue was idiotic, right?

Speaker 13 You know, and he's making idiotic, impulsive statements, which is why they're trying to keep him away from the camera, right? I mean, he's barely doing campaign events.

Speaker 13 And because I think they realize that every time he spoke, he was digging his, you know, his hole deeper. Look, he's got a very serious problem.

Speaker 13 and something i think you understand is that he has no capacity to to make positive news right i mean he's not in the white house his business is a total you know s show right i don't know if i can say that

Speaker 13 show right i mean his his new company has dropped from 79 to the low 30s right he's campaigning from the courthouse and not the white house as i call it right he's he doesn't have the capacity the way that biden does to generate positive news stories and i'm sorry, you know, him being in court and being funny and having guards around him is not helping him in this election, right?

Speaker 13 It's reminding people about, you know, that he's a serial criminal and one of the most awful people to have ever walked the face of America.

Speaker 13 And so I think that over time, Biden's ability to be president and continue to generate positive news stories and talk about all the things he's doing to make things better versus this historically awful, the line I use is that Trump is the ugliest political thing any of us have ever seen, that over time, that contrast is going to be very difficult for the Republicans, you know, as it as it manifests in the coming months.

Speaker 10 I've been resisting the, you know, kind of, oh, Trump's declining, he's deteriorating thing. And I just, I happen to spend some time this week re-watching some of the 2015 video.

Speaker 10 And he's still the same person, right? Like he hasn't changed as a person, but he is angry and lashing out, to your point, and the impulse control.

Speaker 10 And he's lost a a little bit of, it never appealed to me, his kind of devil may care, you know, joie de vive kind of thing. Like, I get that never landed with me at all.

Speaker 10 But I can objectively see and look at and say, okay, that's kind of, I can see how somebody could laugh at that joke or that's kind of funny. And he's lost that completely.

Speaker 13 Some of the charm, some of the charm. Yeah, some of the charm.
I mean, I think having watched, I was on Midas Touch a few weeks ago and they played a series of clips for me that I had not seen.

Speaker 13 And it was shocking. He's much more erratic and more impulsive than he used to be.

Speaker 13 And, you know, people that have worked for him, I've watched people who've worked for him say on air on MSNBC and other places that they feel that he's, you know, he was very disciplined in 2016.

Speaker 13 That's all gone now. And he's just sort of saying, you know, whatever he wants.
He's not scripted by the campaign. He's not paying any attention to that.
And again, over time, that's a problem.

Speaker 13 You know, look, we're in a very close election right now, right? If you look at the 538 averages today, the election is tied.

Speaker 13 You know, we've made gains in recent weeks, and I feel better about where we are. And I think we have a little bit of momentum now.
But we've got to continue to make gains.

Speaker 13 And this is, we've got six and a half months or six months now. I think a lot of the structural things favor us and are problematic for him as you play these things forward over time.

Speaker 13 And I think it's why there's been this quiet confidence in Biden world and among many of us that once the general election turned on and people got to see this Trump and Biden got to make his case for what he's done to make things better because I think he's been a good president, the country is better off, that over time that that would matter and that we would pick up and make up some ground.

Speaker 13 I think that's begun. I think we've seen that happen over the last few weeks, but we still have a long way to go in this race and we are not where we need to be and we've got a lot of work to do.

Speaker 10 Yeah, all right. I want to start digging in on that then.
I just want to mention, you mentioned the Idaho law. We've talked about Arizona a bunch on this.

Speaker 10 Idaho is also in front of the Supreme Court right now.

Speaker 10 It's a ban, for folks that haven't followed it closely, that allows abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman, but not to prevent her health from deteriorating.

Speaker 10 And it comes with a jail sentence for doctors that do. It's just an absolutely insanely extreme bill.

Speaker 13 And it has an anti-trafficking statute.

Speaker 13 So it's got and pioneered, and Idaho is particularly awful in that it pioneered this idea that if you traffic someone under 18 out of the state to get an abortion, you're also criminally liable.

Speaker 13 And so they actually have efforts to try to contain and prevent people from leaving the state, right? Which is, there's no question that that stuff will all get knocked out in the courts.

Speaker 13 But Idaho is the most extreme bill that has passed.

Speaker 13 And it's why, you know, even yesterday, I mean, you saw in the court hearings, right, one of the lawyers for Idaho, defending Idaho, said that loss of an organ by a woman would not be sufficient reason to trigger the Idaho law, you know, that it would be okay for women who are

Speaker 13 who needs a spleen, who needs whatever, right, right?

Speaker 13 And that we're really at a point where, you know, it's unbelievable where we are in this issue and how crazy, you know, look, I mean, Dobbs was one thing, right?

Speaker 13 But the extremist bans that have taken place, and look, we're about to have, I think, a big moment in the election is that there's a very high likelihood.

Speaker 13 that over the next few weeks, both the women of Florida and the women of Arizona are going to lose their rights in reproductive freedoms in the middle of the election,

Speaker 13 and they're going to be replaced by some of the most extreme abortion bans in the country. Right now, live fire, you know, in the election itself.

Speaker 13 And I think it's going to have a really significant impact in making the danger of MAGA

Speaker 13 very proximate for people, not distant, not far away, but proximate. that this is a movement that's growing more dangerous and it's expanding.
It's not retreating.

Speaker 13 And I think that that if both of those are implemented, I mean, Florida is going to be implemented right in the next few weeks.

Speaker 13 If Arizona is also implemented shortly afterwards, those two things could start to change the election in ways that, you know, that will be advantageous, I think, to us. Because

Speaker 13 if fear and opposition to MAGA has been the most powerful force in our politics since 2018, when these moments come where MAGA becomes manifestly terrifying and dangerous, it shifts the election.

Speaker 13 It's part of what happened in 2022. And so we could be entering a very critical phase in the general election over the next few weeks.

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Speaker 10 They always called me rain cloud on campaigns. All right.
Now, I lost most of the campaigns that I worked on. So I always pushed back and said I was reality cloud, not rain cloud.

Speaker 10 I was warning people. I was a Cassandra.
So, you know, maybe our nature might be a little different here. Basically, I agree with everything you said so far.

Speaker 10 I think things are getting better for Biden. Things are moving in the right direction.
I think there are a lot of fundamentals that are going to work in his favor.

Speaker 10 And yet, like, there are some things that concern me. Biden's approval rating is still at 35.
73% say Biden's too old to be president.

Speaker 10 Here's the one that's the most concerning for me: Do you generally remember the years that this candidate was president as good, bad, or not really good or bad? This is a recent Times fault.

Speaker 10 Biden's 25, good, 27, not really good or bad, 46, bad. Trump was 42, good, 23, not really good or bad, 33, bad.

Speaker 10 So So that part is the one that I'm like, man, people have the data and they have deluded themselves into remembering the Trump era is differently than it is. Like, that's the part that concerns me.

Speaker 10 Does that not worry you?

Speaker 13 I think that we, I think, have a reflex to kind of flush the disruption of COVID out of our mental understanding of the world, right? COVID was... a massive disruption to the country.

Speaker 13 It was a terrifying period in our history.

Speaker 13 You know, Biden Biden is going to have to argue that he was elected in 2020 to get us to the other side of COVID, and he did so successfully, and that on the fundamental promise he made to us that he obligated and met it.

Speaker 13 And I think that's going to have to become, I think, more central to their, because of the things you're talking about, right?

Speaker 13 And he's going to have to remind people about how terrible everything was when he came into office. The economy was crashing.
The vaccines hadn't been distributed.

Speaker 13 There had just been the first not peaceful transfer of power in American history. The city, our city, Washington, was essentially under military occupation for 50 days.

Speaker 13 And he's going to have to talk about how things have gotten better. I mean, I think this is going to be really, really important to us.

Speaker 13 But I think that part of what he's dealing with is that there is this hangover from COVID that like things got crazy.

Speaker 13 And that's why these campus protests and these other things, this sense of unsettlement, the Republicans are so desperate for a 1968, like either urban riots or student disruptions, right?

Speaker 13 Because in the history of the Republican Party, their great run of success came after 67 and 68,

Speaker 13 which had urban unrest, right, and sort of student disruption.

Speaker 10 Well, here Worry Wart Tim here. Aren't you worried a little bit about that? I mean, that is kind of happening.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so, but it's happening on a very minor scale. This isn't 1968, right? I mean, the Vietnam War had been going on for years.

Speaker 13 It was not publicly popular.

Speaker 13 You know, the truth is, if you look at the Harvard IOP poll for young young people last week, the gold standard poll, you know, they asked the most important issue, Israel-Gaza was at the bottom, right?

Speaker 13 I mean, there's a handful of people that this really matters for, but for the overwhelming majority of young people, overwhelming majority of Democrats, this is not a central issue, and it is unlikely to be a central issue in the election because things like loss of bodily autonomy and loss of democracy and health care and the economy will matter much more to people than Israel-Gaza, which is a distant and faraway thing.

Speaker 13 However, let me just come back to what you were saying.

Speaker 13 Part of the reason I'm optimistic that during the campaign we can address and fix the concerns that you have is that in the Wall Street Journal poll, which was not a great poll for us a few weeks ago, in the States, they asked, how do you think the economy is doing nationally and how do you think it's doing in your state?

Speaker 13 And in every one of the battleground states, a majority of people said things are good in my state and things are good here.

Speaker 13 And it isn't a big leap to be able to then say, well, they're good here because of Joe Biden.

Speaker 13 And particularly when you have a Democratic governor making that case and the entire Democratic establishment in the state, we have Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Arizona, right, in North Carolina, and we don't in the other two battlegrounds, right?

Speaker 13 But we do have a big, important Democratic establishment in Las Vegas and Nevada. And so I think that the underlying ability for us to say, hey, you know how you think things are good here?

Speaker 13 Well, it's happened because of our economic strategy. And I don't think that's like the hardest thing to do in a campaign.
So yeah, look, we have work to do. I'm not being pollyannish here.

Speaker 13 I mean, the election's tied. I don't think anybody should be happy with that right now.
Some of our coalition is wandering. We've got to go get them back.

Speaker 10 You agree with that. Like, you're not doing poll trutherism here.
You agree that the election's basically tied.

Speaker 10 So just really quick, though, you talked about how the biden team seems very calm i forget word to use or sanguine about things quietly confident quietly quietly confident yeah that worries me a little bit because i've heard from high-level biden people personally and in the new yorkar article we have interviewed evan osnos about this where there are high-level biden people that think the polls are broken that do think that they're misrepresenting the reality and i don't really share that view i i think this has been a little bit kind of not and I've been accused of poll trutherism, right?

Speaker 13 By

Speaker 13 yeah, I know, I know, I know. So I'm aware.
Let me try to explain the reality of this versus sort of the caricature of this, right?

Speaker 13 The reality is that I think there's a quiet confidence that once we push the chess pieces forward, that Joe Biden's a good president, the country's better off, we have a strong case to make, we're raising tons more money than they are, our party's very unified, right?

Speaker 13 You know, we've been winning elections all across the country. When voters have had to go vote, we keep overperforming expectations, they keep underperforming.

Speaker 13 And then there's their dumpster-fire shit show on the other side, right? Where the RNC is completely broken, broken.

Speaker 13 There's an unprecedented rebellion against the Republican nominee and likes of which we've never seen in our lifetime.

Speaker 10 You're talking about the primary vote.

Speaker 13 Yeah, well, no. I mean, all of you, right? I mean, Romney, two former vice Republican vice presidents, Republican nominee of the party, right?

Speaker 13 Many other Republican Party leaders, or Chris Christie this week just said, there's no way I'm voting for Donald Trump. We've never seen that kind of open rebellion against the nominee of one party.

Speaker 13 And I think, as you know, the whole premise of your work is that in creating this permission structure for Republicans to not vote Republican, we have more powerful tools to do that than we've ever had.

Speaker 13 And it's why I'm, you know, I think that this never Trump or Never MAGA wing of the party is going to be, you know, this is an existential threat to Trump in 2024, because I think something broke inside the Republican Party with Dobbs.

Speaker 13 And that for many Republicans, it was just like, okay, this is a bridge too far. We've gone too far.
The party's become too dangerous.

Speaker 13 And what you've seen happen in virtually every election since the spring of 2022 is that Democrats have overperformed expectations and Republicans have underperformed and struggled.

Speaker 13 That has happened in 2022. It happened throughout elections in 2023.
It's been happening in 2024 by Trump's.

Speaker 13 Because I think as people go through the process of having to vote, right, where they go from being a registered voter to a likely voter to a voter, right, that process,

Speaker 13 when they start looking at MAGA, the ugliness of MAGA is causing Republicans to both lose votes and to lose money.

Speaker 13 There is a hard dollar fundraising crisis in the right now that I think is a much bigger issue than is being reported on.

Speaker 13 Because I think that a lot of the Republicans that have become loosened, I'm not saying they're going to vote for us, right?

Speaker 13 But who become loosened from the Republican Party are the people that wrote the $500,000 checks. The establishment Republican Party was the hard dollar fundraising base for the Republican Party.

Speaker 13 And you're seeing discrepancies now and hard dollars being raised that we've never seen before in these elections.

Speaker 13 And I want to remind your listeners and your viewers that you can't make up hard dollars with super PAC dollars because of what's called the lowest unit rate, right? In Las Vegas in 2022,

Speaker 13 to match a super PAC had to spend $7 for every dollar we were spending in hard dollars.

Speaker 13 So for Trump to match what Biden's about to do in hard dollars, they're going to have to raise three, four, five times more than Biden does with super PAC dollars.

Speaker 13 And that's not going to happen, right? And so I think this financial advantage we have is very significant. So long story short, on your question, I think there's a...

Speaker 13 a quiet confidence that when you play all this forward, the fact that Biden's been successful, Trump's the ugliest political thing we've ever seen, over time should allow us to win this election.

Speaker 13 And what they're saying about the current polling is they don't believe the current polling is reflecting the reality of an informed electorate that's going to be hearing from the campaign, right?

Speaker 13 And what's the evidence of this?

Speaker 13 The evidence of this is, to your point, is Trump's repeated underperformance of public polling in these early primary states, which is an example of that process where people are going from a voter to a likely voter to a actual voter, and they have to go through the process of thinking on what they're going to do.

Speaker 13 And when they go vote, Trump falls and loses ground.

Speaker 13 That is still, to me, the likely scenario of what's going to happen in the fall, that people just, he's too ugly, it's too much, it's too far, and Biden will win.

Speaker 13 But, you know, we got a long way to go, and a lot's going to happen between now and then, and we have a lot of work to do.

Speaker 10 I think there's smart folks out there that look at that same data, look at the recent election since 2022.

Speaker 10 The Democrats, there's no doubt Democrats have been on an unprecedented streak of overperforming in these midterms, these special elections across the board.

Speaker 10 Some people say, though, that might be more about the nature of the coalition, that the Democrats have kind of coalesced the most hyper-engaged voters, you know, and this new my people, the people that have left the Republican Party that used to be independents, have gone to the Democrats.

Speaker 10 They hate Trump so much. They'll turn out to a pointless primary to vote for Nikki Haley just to give him a middle finger.

Speaker 10 And that a general electorate is a different group of people that maybe Trump might have more appeal to, folks that are less engaged, less, whatever.

Speaker 10 What do you say to that kind of case?

Speaker 13 I know the argument, and I don't really agree with it. And I don't agree with it for a couple of reasons, right?

Speaker 13 One is that since 1992, there have been eight presidential elections, and we've won more votes than seven of them.

Speaker 10 We can't say we on this podcast if we're going back eight presidential elections because we are on the opposite side on some of those.

Speaker 13 Okay, okay, on some of those. So the Democrats, the Democrats.
Sorry. That's okay.
Point to you. The Democrats.

Speaker 13 And by the way, it is fun to be with you now and to be in this pro-democracy coalition that we're in now. It's exciting, actually, right, to be, to hang out with all of you guys.

Speaker 13 So one is, just to go through this, is that one is that The Democratic Party's success at the presidential level since 1992, we've been on an unprecedented run.

Speaker 13 No American political party has won more votes in seven out of eight elections before. And in the last four elections, we've averaged 51% of the vote.

Speaker 13 The last time we did that was in the 1930s and 1940s.

Speaker 13 So in actual voting, not in extrapolation of recent polling, and when people have gone to go vote, we're on the best presidential run that we've been in since the 1930s and 40s.

Speaker 13 And as you pointed out, we're also in an unnaturally successful run as a party in power, right? So we've been kicking ass in both now in recent years.

Speaker 13 And so Trump, I think, has a lot to overcome because those people have voted, right? Those are not poll data, 51.4% voted for Joe Biden last time, right?

Speaker 13 So the second point about that is that what I think is missing from this whole school of thought is the impact of all this money we're raising.

Speaker 13 from this higher educated, hyper-engaged set of voters that are building the biggest campaigns that we've ever had, which are allowing us to control the information environment and also reach lower propensity voters in our coalition that we could never reach before because we just didn't have the resources.

Speaker 13 And so, one of the reasons we're doing so well in these elections is because we have the biggest campaigns that we've ever had.

Speaker 13 And those campaigns and the grassroots that the Democratic Party has are pushing our performance in all these elections to the upper end of what's possible.

Speaker 13 And the most recent example of that was in New York III. In the special election in New York, public polling had us up two to three points, right?

Speaker 13 We won by eight in a district we had lost by seven and a half points just a few, you know, 16 months earlier.

Speaker 13 And we made two million phone calls in New York three, which is the number of phone calls you make in like Michigan in the general election. Every Democratic household got five handwritten postcards.

Speaker 13 You know, in 175,000 households got five handwritten postcards. We've never been able to touch voters like this and reach voters like this because of the money that we're raising.

Speaker 13 And so I think the calculation, this whole school of thought about how the electorate gets bigger, you know, it gets better for Trump.

Speaker 13 I have a different take on it is that I think as the electorate gets more informed and gets closer to voting, Trump fades.

Speaker 13 I have a different take on the same data that we're seeing, and it leaves me more optimistic.

Speaker 13 Just this week, right, Joe Biden had the single best poll that he's had in the entire election, which was the Maris poll, a very highly ranked pollster, right, that had Biden winning by three nationally and winning by six among likely voters.

Speaker 13 And what that is to me is that as voters move from that path of being registered to likely to voting, what you're seeing is this consistent pattern that things get worse for Trump as people go through that process.

Speaker 13 And I think that that's why this school of thought you're describing, I think, is not really accurately capturing what's actually happening with real voters. But we'll see.

Speaker 13 I mean, I could be wrong, obviously. I don't think I am, but we'll see you know we're we're about to find out right

Speaker 10 you're warming my heart a little bit because you're the arguments here all resonating with me right it's there's a version of your argument that i find a lot weaker um about like oh you know that polling companies aren't reaching certain people and that you know people lie and young voters like i just i don't like that because the 2022 the thing i mean it was you and bill crystal uh were both right about 2022 and it was because you were mostly following the polls right it was the pundits it was the rest of us that were wrong because we were projecting midterms.

Speaker 10 Oh, there's always a late-breaking wave in midterms or blah, blah, blah. There are other factors.
And the polls are actually pretty good in 2022.

Speaker 13 Okay. Wait, can I just say one last thing on this argument? Because I think that it gets to people that have worked in campaigns versus people that write about campaigns or do data.

Speaker 13 The idea that one party just keeps winning all over the place is not important can only be articulated by people that have actually never worked on campaigns.

Speaker 13 Because the idea that winning is somehow like simple and easy and people just show up versus like you having to have a really good candidate and you have to have a strong argument and you have to raise lots of money and you have to then go execute and produce good ads, right?

Speaker 13 This idea that there's some kind of like, well, you know, higher income voters move to them and they just keep winning elections.

Speaker 13 I mean, I listened to people say this and I'm like, you've obviously never actually worked in a campaign where 80 million things could go wrong, right?

Speaker 10 You're a clockmaker god of your campaign, right? Like there's some outside force and there's a data and everyone's ones and zeros and it just happens.

Speaker 13 And it's like, have you ever been around a really crappy candidate who's like really made big mistakes? Like Donald Trump, for example, right?

Speaker 13 Like Donald Trump's awfulness is actually, I mean, going back to what we were talking about earlier, if I can just make this point for your audience, is that.

Speaker 13 Part of what Tom Bonyer and I did in 2022, we didn't dismiss polling, right? We just looked at lots of other things.

Speaker 13 I mean, I just had a meeting with Julie Murrs, who's the head of the DCC, to go through all the house races.

Speaker 13 We didn't talk about polling in the entire meeting because basically all the polls were really close. So we talked about all these other things, right? How's the candidate doing on the stump?

Speaker 13 Are they performing well? Is the party holding? How good is the campaign team? How are the ads? How's the narrative? What's their bio, right?

Speaker 13 In the real world of politics, there are all this other things you look at to assess the health of a candidate or a political party.

Speaker 13 And in my analysis, I'm looking at all of those things because I've been doing this a long time, right?

Speaker 13 And when I look at all of that, I think, I think we're going to kick his ass is what I think, right? And is it based, does the polling there today? No.

Speaker 13 But will it be as we inform the electorate? I think that's the likely scenario.

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Speaker 10 I want to talk about one other group on this front before I let you go. You've done a lot of work at the Hispanic vote.

Speaker 10 When I think about my, the little worry, you know, the little worry wart side of me in my brain, you know, the non-college Hispanic and black voters are one group.

Speaker 10 And that is going to matter in Georgia, particularly with black voters, Nevada, particularly with Hispanic voters, and in Arizona, more Nevada. You've done a lot of work there.

Speaker 10 I'm curious your take on that demo.

Speaker 13 We're in a period of transition here, and we have to be humble about what we're seeing for a few reasons, right?

Speaker 13 One is that I think some of this is being driven by the shutdown Democrat argument that Republicans made in 2020, which I think for younger men of color who were less well-off, this stuff really stuck.

Speaker 13 And I think that Biden's team,

Speaker 13 you know, when you look at the exit polls in 2020, you know, we won COVID voters by three to one. Economic voters, which was the second category, we lost those voters by four to one, right?

Speaker 13 You know, Biden went into the White House in a structural deficit on the economy. He did not make a powerful connection to voters on economic issues.

Speaker 13 But that's okay because we won the election, right?

Speaker 13 But it meant that he went in, I think, with a weakened position with many working-class folks who felt that Democrats were trying to deny them the ability to make a living, and particularly for Hispanics, because COVID was worse with the Hispanic community than any other community, right?

Speaker 13 More Hispanics had to work in-person jobs, fewer have health insurance, right? All this stuff.

Speaker 13 The way I describe this is that we need to reestablish ourselves as the party of economic opportunity, you know, to these voters who are wandering right now.

Speaker 13 I think it's unlikely that black and Hispanic voters wander into Trump's camp and the Republican camp because he is the most profound racist that has appeared

Speaker 13 in the country. He's the most profound anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, xenophobic candidate.
And the...

Speaker 13 The amount of ammunition we're going to have to remind voters of his just historic racism is significant. So I think we have tools, right?

Speaker 13 Both in terms of the economy is for black and Hispanic workers better during Biden than any period in American history. And we're going to be able to make that case.

Speaker 13 The uninsured rate is lower for Hispanics than it's ever been.

Speaker 13 I mean, we have arguments to make, but I want to just say one really important thing, because I think this has been lost in the Hispanic understanding.

Speaker 13 In 2004, because Bush, you know, I started getting into all this Hispanic stuff during the Bush era because Bush was really good on this stuff.

Speaker 10 Spoke a little Spanglish.

Speaker 13 Yeah, he spoke Spanglish, but there was also a desire and an intent to make a connection with the Hispanic community.

Speaker 13 There were high-ranking Hispanic staffers, both in the Bush governorship and in the Bush White House. This was real for him.
This was not BS.

Speaker 13 And so Bush represented a serious threat to us in that period. And you could make the argument that he became president in both 2000 and was re-elected because of the Hispanic vote.

Speaker 13 Now, if you look at the Electoral College map and which states flipped, right? So my work in the Hispanic community began in 2002 as a response to Bush's strength and performance in 2000.

Speaker 13 And in 2004, Bush got 44% of the national Hispanic vote. He won Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Speaker 13 And Republicans controlled five out of the eight Senate seats in those four southwestern states and 14 out of the 21 House seats.

Speaker 13 And our net margin with Hispanic voters in that election as Democrats was 700,000. We won 700,000 more votes.

Speaker 13 In 2020, Joe Biden won Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, the first Democrat to do so since 1940, right?

Speaker 13 The Republicans don't control any of those Senate seats any longer, and we control 14 out of the 23 House seats. Since 2004, six states have shifted from Republican to Democrat, only six, by the way.

Speaker 13 Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia, and Georgia. The shift in the Southwest is because of the Hispanic vote.

Speaker 13 Even though we're getting a slightly smaller share, it's a bigger electorate, right?

Speaker 13 Net total, right?

Speaker 10 So a smaller percentage, but at more raw votes.

Speaker 13 So a smaller piece of a bigger pie is still more pie, right? And let me give you the number here. So in 2004, our net margin, right, was 700,000 votes.
In 2020, it was 5 million. Wow.

Speaker 13 The party that's eroding with Hispanics is the Republican Party. It's not the Democratic Party.

Speaker 13 And because what's not being calculated, you cannot look at a very fast-growing part of the electorate purely through share. You've got to look at net vote margins.

Speaker 13 And the truth is, our success with Hispanic voters has fundamentally altered the electoral college map and the political map in the United States.

Speaker 13 And I would argue that our success with Hispanic voters has been the most successful party-wide project of the Democratic Party over the last 25 years.

Speaker 13 And what we could happen in this election, I mean, Arizona, there's a possibility. The state is more Democratic today than it's been since the 1940s, by the way.

Speaker 13 But we could flip both chambers in Arizona. And Arizona could now be looking more like Colorado, right? And, you know, what happened in California, right?

Speaker 13 Colorado and New Mexico are not even competitive battleground states any longer. Bush won those states in 2004.

Speaker 13 You know that the Kerry campaign in 2004, Colorado was not a targeted state for the Democratic Party in the general election. That's how far gone it was.

Speaker 13 And now there is no Republican Party left in Colorado, right? So I think that people have to take a deep breath here about what's happened with Hispanics. It's actually been a very successful project.

Speaker 13 Is it being threatened by what's happening now?

Speaker 13 I view it more as a challenge than a threat, meaning that we have tools, we've got to engage, and I still think that they've got a fundamental problem, which is their guy is an unbelievable racist and an unbelievable xenophobe, and that we have enormous ammunition to help inform an electorate that may not understand that about Trump in the coming months.

Speaker 10 All right, Simon Rosenberg, any one last injection of hopium? Anything else? Anything else we didn't get to?

Speaker 13 Yeah, listen, my basic take on the election for all of your viewers and listeners is that Joe Biden's been a good president. The country's better off.

Speaker 13 The Democratic Party is strong, winning elections, unified, and raising tons of money. And what do Republicans have?

Speaker 13 They have Trump, who's the ugliest political figure that we've ever seen in our lifetime, and a political party that looks far more like a dumpster fire than a well-oiled political machine.

Speaker 13 We may not be where we want to be, but in every way imaginable today, I would much rather be us than them.

Speaker 10 Amen, brother. How's that for some uplift, listeners? Simon Rosenberg, come back.
Whenever I get too dark, please come back in a couple months.

Speaker 10 And unless you get dark too, then don't come back because that'd really take people into a hole.

Speaker 10 And hope to talk to you soon. Thank you for all your check out the Hopium Chronicles on Substack.
I'm going to be back on the other side with a quick mailbag and we'll send you into the weekend.

Speaker 13 Peace. Take care, everybody.

Speaker 10 All right. How good was that? Simon Rosenberg, I want to have a cigarette after that conversation.
Boy, we are feeling good. A quick, a little bit of house business for everybody.

Speaker 10 I do have a Spotify playlist. We have a couple thousand people that have signed up for it.
We're putting it in the show notes every Friday for those asking about the outro songs.

Speaker 10 I mentioned on the pod, George Conway explains it all to Sarah Longwell. George's view on SCODIS yesterday is a little bit different.
I think worth your time.

Speaker 10 I also told George that I would pimp his hat that he's selling

Speaker 10 at store.GeorgeConwayExplains.com. It says vote for Joe, not the psycho.
Gonna get that hat. It looks good.
That's gonna look good. It's a nice beach hat for you here in the summer.

Speaker 10 Block out the sun and let people know what you think about Donald Trump. Also, Bulwark Plus, you can go to thebulwark.com/slash free trial to get Bulwark Plus and support us if you are up for that.

Speaker 10 One of the things you get is a live stream periodically. There was one last night with Mona Charon and Kim Whaley and some other legal experts that give, I think, an even deeper dive into SCODIS.

Speaker 10 So if you want lots of SCODUS, you've got that. Thursday Night Bulwark with Monacharin and George Conway explains it all.
Go check both of those out. Okay, quick mailbag taking one question.

Speaker 10 Met to do this last week from Max. He's a 17-year-old college student.
Thanks for listening, Max. Oh, and if you have a question for the mailbag, remember, it's Bulwark Podcast at thebulwark.com.

Speaker 10 Max asks, My campus is a highly politically active school, but also extremely left radical.

Speaker 10 I'm a leftist who identifies closest to Bernie Sanders, but I want to be highly active in organizing for Biden this year.

Speaker 10 So my question is: this: How should I motivate my leftist peers not only to vote for Joe Biden, but also to campaign for him too? Man, that's a good question.

Speaker 10 In a lot of ways, you might have thoughts on that last part more than me, but I can give some perspective on how to help motivate leftist peers to get to Joe Biden.

Speaker 10 And sadly, it's the same way that a lot of people are being motivated these days. It's through negative partisanship.

Speaker 10 I think that, you know, a lot of those folks, like you're 17, you know, there's no memory of pre-Trump for 17 year olds.

Speaker 10 And so I think really highlighting all the dangers and all the threats of Trump and kind of reminding people about that, since it's not as fresh in their mind.

Speaker 10 Shoot, if you're 18, even when Charlottesville happened, you're in middle school, right, elementary school. You know, so some of this stuff is is was not at the top of your concerns.

Speaker 10 And so I went on Dan Savage's podcast. We'll put that in the show notes too.
Sex and politics.

Speaker 10 Dan is a longtime progressive activist, gay rights activist, also does sex advice if you're in need of any of that. And I went on his podcast, and he had a listener call in and ask this very question.

Speaker 10 And him and I went off for about 15 minutes, if you want the long version of what the case is.

Speaker 10 I think it's especially compelling to send to friends because Dan pushed back on this argument that's the lesser of two evil arguments, you know, saying that, you know, he's a little older than me.

Speaker 10 And, you know, so he lived through the AIDS crisis.

Speaker 10 He's like, I voted for Democrats who did not want me to have a right to marry, who did not want to address the AIDS crisis as quickly as possible, who supported Don't Ask, Don't Tell Bill Clinton, who enacted DOMA, Defensive Marriage Act, Bill Clinton.

Speaker 10 And he did it because progress takes time. And, you know, sometimes you do have to choose lesser of two evils.

Speaker 10 So I don't think Joe Biden is evil, but if you're talking to people who do, I think that's a compelling argument.

Speaker 10 You know, because if you look at the other side of this, we just talked on this podcast about the Idaho law, the risk to women in a Trump administration, you know, in some of these states having zero-week abortion bans, where if you have an ectopic pregnancy and you have a risk of your life, some doctors are going to be scared to do it because they don't want to get prosecuted.

Speaker 13 And that's crazy.

Speaker 10 Even if you're pro-life, that's crazy. You know, the risk to these vulnerable women is in a Trump administration is insane.

Speaker 10 The risk to trans folks in a Trump administration and the new rules that would go into place targeting trans folks are extreme. The risk to immigrants, he's promised deportation camps.

Speaker 10 The risk to migrants. So if you're a progressive voter that cares about vulnerable communities, think about poor women that live in Alabama, Idaho, Arizona.
Think about migrants on our border.

Speaker 10 Think about probably not gays so much, but trans and non-binary people that are dealing with gender dysphoria. Think about the potential threats to them.

Speaker 10 Think about the potential threats to our whole democratic system.

Speaker 10 That's a little bit more esoteric. But I think that the tangible threats to real people that your friends on these campuses are going to know are as great as they have ever been in any election.

Speaker 10 You know, you can say what you want about Mitt Romney or Bob Dole, but the threats to the well-being of marginalized people was not nearly as great in those elections than it is in 2024 with Donald Trump coming to the White House and with these little guys, like I showed earlier, Charlie Kirk and Curtis Yarvin and Stephen Miller, you know, wanting to essentially turn America into a Orbanist, quasi-fascist state where they can target their foes.

Speaker 10 The threat is too great. We need young people turning up for Joe Biden.
They can turn out for Joe Biden and also express displeasure with Joe Biden over.

Speaker 10 Gaza or over anything else they disagree with Joe Biden on. That's fine.

Speaker 10 That's part of the American system. So go check out that Dan Savage podcast.
You want a longer version of that. Hopefully, that's helpful.

Speaker 10 You can send people to me if they live in a swing state. I'll take them one at a time.
If they live in, you know, Oregon, whatever. They can vote their conscience.

Speaker 10 Max, I hope that's helpful. Everybody else, thanks so much for being with us in the Boulder Podcast.
Another great week. We'll see you back here on Monday.
Enjoy your weekend. Enjoy your hopium.

Speaker 10 Get some sunshine. See y'all soon.
Peace.

Speaker 10 Wrapped in a blanket, all tired and warm.

Speaker 10 Mama's doing the best that she can.

Speaker 10 Takes hope in a hopeless world.

Speaker 13 The eldest son stayed in school,

Speaker 13 listening to his mama, never drag old use.

Speaker 13 Get every job he wants,

Speaker 13 gets refused. Takes hope in a hopeless world.

Speaker 13 Looking for hope in a hopeless world.

Speaker 13 Try to find love, it's a change of times.

Speaker 13 Trying to stay strong, but my mind is weak.

Speaker 13 Looking for hope in a hopeless world.

Speaker 13 Now, the churches are full,

Speaker 13 plans are not heard.

Speaker 13 Saturday's child don't wanna go to Sunday school.

Speaker 13 Now what have happened to the golden rule?

Speaker 13 You gotta call up all the homeless man

Speaker 13 Spanish change for the soldiers who fought the war

Speaker 13 put a little money in those hats and those pins. Give

Speaker 13 hope in a hopeless world.

Speaker 13 Hope in a hopeless world

Speaker 13 Try to find love in such a

Speaker 13 time.

Speaker 13 Try to stay strong, but my mind is weak.

Speaker 13 Looking for hope in a hopeless world.

Speaker 13 Looking for

Speaker 13 this world,

Speaker 13 trying to find love

Speaker 13 in such hateful times.

Speaker 13 Trying to stay strong, but my mind is weak.

Speaker 13 Looking for

Speaker 13 hope,

Speaker 13 we can't be standing still.

Speaker 10 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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