Raging Moderates: The 2028 Democratic Bench for President (ft. James Carville)

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Speaker 7 Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarloff.
Scott's off for the month of August, but don't worry, we've got an incredible lineup of guests filling in.

Speaker 7 And to kick off Scott Free August, we're starting strong with the one and only Raging Cajun himself. Welcome to the show, James Carville.
It's so great to have you here. Well, thank you.

Speaker 8 I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I'm so glad we could work this out. And we're just going to get into it.

Speaker 7 We are going to be talking about Kamala's return to the spotlight, Trump's Promises Made, Promises Broken, and the Sydney Sweeney saga, which I'm going to try to make you interested in it from a culture war angle.

Speaker 7 Just when Democrats thought we could turn the page on 2024, the past is back in the spotlight. Kamala Harris is promoting a book about her short-lived presidential run and prepping for the midterms.

Speaker 7 Joe Biden is back on the speech circuit, and Hunter Biden is stirring controversy on podcasts.

Speaker 7 As the party looks for fresh leadership, its most familiar faces keep stepping forward, complicating our reset.

Speaker 7 Meanwhile, in Texas, Republicans are escalating a redistricting battle with national implications.

Speaker 7 Governor Greg Abbott is threatening to remove Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to block Trump-backed maps that could give Republicans five more House seats.

Speaker 7 James, how do you think we should be handling the map wars?

Speaker 8 Well, it's really unfortunate. And I guess I'm I'm like anybody else.
Well, if you're going to do this, which is a highly unusual thing in the middle of a decade,

Speaker 8 we have to do it also. I mean, it's going to end in a pretty unfortunate place.

Speaker 8 But I don't know if there's any other answer to it, honestly, Jessica. I'm open to any other suggestion.
I think this is a really counterproductive use of the legislature's time. What else can you do?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree with you. And

Speaker 7 I mean, that's a new position, I guess, for me.

Speaker 7 A few weeks ago, I would have said, you know, you should wait for the census to come out and we all should have voted to, you know, ban partisan gerrymandering, which is what Democrats supported in 2021.

Speaker 7 I'm, I guess, a little bit worried that we can't win this one. Like, Governor Newsom can add five seats in California, and that's what the plan looks like as of now.

Speaker 7 But Kathy Hochul in New York is saying that she wants to get involved, but can't do anything until 2027.

Speaker 7 So, do you feel like this is going to be what shifts the midterms potentially back to the Republicans?

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 8 I think we're going to win by more than five seats. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 8 I mean, you're feeling good. Yeah.
It's

Speaker 8 really hard

Speaker 8 to imagine that the Democrats don't win the House back. I mean, even if they gerrymanded to five more seats, I don't think that's going to be determined.

Speaker 8 But look, I thought Harris would win in 2024, so you'd have every right to be skeptical, but I don't see Democrats losing anywhere. Not any election, not any poll, not any anything.
Wow. I mean,

Speaker 8 I don't know if you could argue about it's the strength of the Democratic Party and then probably be skeptical of that, but this is the, we gotta forget, this is the most unpopular administration at this point in history that there is.

Speaker 8 The big beautiful bill is the most unpopular piece of legislation that I can remember. I mean, this thing is severely underwater.

Speaker 8 And it's just such a golden thing for Democrats to run on. Every time they get away from it, I get a little miff of something like that.
That's what you got right in front of you.

Speaker 8 You can talk about the issues. And there's 10 things in there that are just utterly horrific.
Boy, you see these town halls? I mean, I looked at these things very closely.

Speaker 8 There might be some Democratic plants in there, but not very many. And the kind of questions they ask are not questions that a Democratic operative would put in somebody's head.

Speaker 8 You know, they asked about detaining people and, you know, ICE agents wearing masks. You know, I would have said, ask about rural hospitals or ask about this.
I mean,

Speaker 8 last night in Nebraska, you know, I'm sure Lincoln, there's a lot of Democrats in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska, but a lot of stuff is organic, man.

Speaker 8 They're just people are rebelling against this. And they're going to keep going as long as they keep holding these town halls.

Speaker 8 The leadership told them not to. This guy thought he was going to hold stuff off.

Speaker 7 Mike Flood.

Speaker 8 Yeah, who didn't work very well for him.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, I guess a little of a hat tip to him for actually showing up to do it because he knew what was going to happen, whether there were some plants who showed up or just his regular constituents.

Speaker 8 I don't, maybe he knew. Maybe he was just used to being in that Nebraska district and, you know, having everybody grew.
I don't know. I don't know who the state of mind was.

Speaker 7 So many have not not shown up, though. So I'm glad that they did.
And mostly because we got the footage of people talking about it.

Speaker 7 And there were such a range of issues, you know, from the Epstein stuff to healthcare to Alligator Alcatraz and what's going on with ICE.

Speaker 7 But I guess I have a little bit of PTSD from 2024 when Donald Trump was historically unpopular as an individual. And, you know, we felt good for 40 of the 107 days that Kamala ran.

Speaker 8 So I blame 2024 almost exclusively on Democrats. Now, why do I do that?

Speaker 8 Because it was evident two years, a year and a half before the election, people A, did not want President Biden to run free election, and B, they wanted a change in direction.

Speaker 8 He didn't decide until July 21st.

Speaker 8 We now know that Harris was under orders from the president not to say that she would do anything different.

Speaker 8 We managed to pull this off. We gave Democrats no say-so, and who their nominee would be, or the direction their party would go in.

Speaker 8 And then we said on the biggest issue that the country was looking for changes, acknowledgement that we, you can't argue with people if they want something different.

Speaker 8 You just give them something different.

Speaker 8 And there were a thousand things that she could have done, and she did none of them.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 I don't have a problem writing a book. I think in my memory, most every defeated presidential candidate goes out and writes a book.

Speaker 8 I know Hillary wrote her book, I think, and, you know, Mitt Romney or whoever.

Speaker 8 But it's clear this party wants to move on now. 2024 is just something that Democrats don't want to think about, talk about, relive.

Speaker 8 They're ready to take the next step. And that's clear.
Clear as a bell.

Speaker 7 Yeah, no, I definitely feel that way.

Speaker 7 I live in New York City, and we just had our, I guess, over a month ago, but it feels recent, our mayoral primary where a lot of people wanted to move on with Zoran Mandani.

Speaker 7 And I was curious if you could talk about,

Speaker 7 I mean, this is really going backwards, but how any of the lessons of the 90s and the Clinton era relates to today?

Speaker 7 Because as someone whose politics are more moderate and Scott, who is on vacation, but we co-host together.

Speaker 8 I'm probably more liberal than you are.

Speaker 8 I'm not on the progressive side, but I don't, nomenclature is not what's important.

Speaker 8 Go back to 92. There were three things,

Speaker 8 three things, change versus more to say. That's our message.
It's never going out of fashion.

Speaker 8 Somebody a couple, three weeks ago, asked me, James, what's new in American politics? I said, nothing. And nothing will ever be new.

Speaker 8 You either like what you got or you want something different. Then the economy's stupid.
Of course, that drives, you know, how many economic reactions does a human being have in a day?

Speaker 8 If, you know, figured out, I couldn't count that high.

Speaker 8 And then don't forget health care.

Speaker 7 But why do we have to change?

Speaker 8 But just run on that.

Speaker 8 And it's all contained in the big bad bill.

Speaker 8 If somebody gives you something, well, take it. And they're giving us a simple, teed up message.
Let's just deliver it.

Speaker 8 We don't need a lot of hoo-hide and this and that and running around.

Speaker 8 Just talk about what's in there we need to change this it's putting you know fat cats over ordinary working people it's putting people that already have it made and hurting people who are trying to make it i mean you could just give a thousand alliterations of the same message we don't need anything new keep those three things okay well what do we do about all the stuff that keeps popping up then?

Speaker 7 I mean, we have this moment, right? We have Democrats on the proverbial lamb right there in Illinois and New York because of the redistricting. That's eating up the cycle.
You have Epstein.

Speaker 8 Well, the redistricting itself is unfortunate. We don't have any other choice.
And I mean, I think at some point people have a basic sense of fairness.

Speaker 8 I don't think this, I'd say they're polling or, but I don't think this Texas move is going to be very popular.

Speaker 7 Well, it's definitely not. Democrats are totally where you are.

Speaker 7 You know, they say just fight fire with fire. Mitch McConnell did this to us.

Speaker 8 Yeah. We would rather not do this.

Speaker 8 But as long as there's a three-point line, we're going to shoot three-pointers.

Speaker 8 I would much prefer to talk about how we can get wages up. I would much prefer to talk about how we can make rural health care better and improve rural hospitals.

Speaker 8 But unfortunately, I have to deal with this in the meantime.

Speaker 8 I mean, do it, but don't. Act like there are other things that you would rather be doing and that they're almost forcing you to do this.
And just in the element of basic fairness.

Speaker 8 I mean, the the Epstein stuff,

Speaker 8 it doesn't take a lot to keep it going. There's questions everywhere.
Can't we finally get some answers? All we get is stonewalling and prison transfers,

Speaker 8 the house going out of session, so they couldn't subpoena the records. There's so much we don't know.
Why don't we get some answers out of here? Let's ask them.

Speaker 8 And then, you know, this is a giant distraction and go back to your message.

Speaker 8 But it's kind of hard to tell people, don't talk about a guy who either hung himself or was hung in a jail cell and you had underage women all over the place and you had a British socialite in the middle of it and God knows everything.

Speaker 8 I mean, how do you not talk about that? You just can't.

Speaker 7 No, it's definitely made for TV kind of stuff.

Speaker 8 Yeah, that's easy to understand.

Speaker 8 And it fits on what a lot of people, a lot of people on the right say, there's this giant cabal of coastal elites that are harvesting these young females.

Speaker 8 You don't even got to give them credit, they were

Speaker 8 two-thirds right.

Speaker 8 They got the coastal elite wrong.

Speaker 8 There was a bunch of coastal elites, international coastal elites, I guess I'd call them, who were grooming and harvesting young women.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 8 That's true. It wasn't being done in Comet Pizza.

Speaker 7 With Hillary standing at the front of the store.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah. And so you got the wrong guy, your own person.

Speaker 7 Do you feel like I understand that the tide would be going in our direction? And historically, that's just what's going to happen anyway with midterms.

Speaker 7 But we've spent a lot of time thinking about the way that we message and who the right messengers are.

Speaker 7 And if you're on social media and whether your videos look good and are you using the right font and filter? How are you feeling about the way that, I guess, the Democrats are presenting?

Speaker 7 Because our approval rating is absolutely abysmal. I happen to think it's because we're not fighting hard enough.

Speaker 7 It's not because people actually hate the party or think that we don't stand for the right things.

Speaker 8 So people belong to a political party because they want to win elections. That's what a political party is supposed to do.

Speaker 8 We lost. People are not happy.
I don't have a positive image of the Democratic Party. Okay.
The title of my documentary is Winning is Everything, Stupid. You didn't win, period.
Okay, in the case.

Speaker 8 I don't think people are prepared for what's getting ready to happen in Virginia. It's one thing to know that somebody's going to win an election and the other side knows they're going to lose.

Speaker 8 When the magnitude of this defeat is real,

Speaker 8 it's going to change a lot of things.

Speaker 8 And the image of the Democratic Party will go up suck because they'll watch Spanberger and they'll watch Cheryl on election night and they'll go, God, yeah, we win it. Great.
Go, team, go.

Speaker 8 Then,

Speaker 8 this is why I am a real kind of optimist going forward, if we get to forward.

Speaker 8 This is the most talented potential growth of presidential candidates in the history of American politics. Understand, not in this century, not compared to this.

Speaker 8 If I took the talent level of all of the potential candidates, and I think a lot of them are going to run.

Speaker 8 They sent them to ask me, I said, man, run, get out there. And when people see in Democrat seat, you mean, we got somebody that can string a sentence together? I didn't know that.

Speaker 8 We got somebody that can frame a thought. Gee, Liz, look at this.
Come see Martha. Look at this guy.
Look at her. And look at that.

Speaker 8 Then you're going to see something. But it takes a little trust and a little forward thinking to say, well, we're going to win in Virginia and New Jersey.
We are.

Speaker 8 We are going to win in 2026. We will.
I think the Senate is more in play than most people do, but it's a reasonable thing to assume we can't win the Senate back.

Speaker 8 And I think the talent level in our party at the potential presidential level is as high as it's been in American history.

Speaker 7 I love that.

Speaker 8 And it's one thing to say it. It's another thing to see it.
We all know who they are, who they potentially are.

Speaker 8 And the other thing that 2028 will do is it'll settle it. You know, people said Mendani, the 40 needs to be more progressive.

Speaker 8 You know, there are more people that live in New Jersey and Virginia that live in New York City. Now, you wouldn't never know that, but there are.

Speaker 8 And the primary voters are going to decide the direction of the party. And that's the way it should be.

Speaker 8 And they're going to have a healthy array of candidates to pick where they want to go in the direction of the person they want. And I think that they're going to do it very wisely.

Speaker 8 I'm very, very convinced of that.

Speaker 7 So you don't feel like we're in the midst of, and I know in your op-ed, you said this is a civilized civil war, but we have to delay it.

Speaker 7 So can you expound expound on that a bit more for me? Because it's hard.

Speaker 7 I mean, maybe just because I work in TV and everything feels immediate and you get asked questions like this constantly: like, what does Mom Dani mean for the future of the party?

Speaker 7 What is AOC getting more small dollar donations than any other candidate? And it's all over the state, right? There are people in Buffalo that like AOC and people in Queens that like AOC.

Speaker 7 And I think that does say something about where the party is.

Speaker 8 Well, and there's younger, more progressive people. It's their turn.
The old people need to get out of the way. The future is now.

Speaker 8 Good, run.

Speaker 8 And if you get the authority of winning the nomination behind you,

Speaker 8 then you've made your point. But I don't really count how many people you get in Idaho

Speaker 8 or how many overnight contributions you get. I mean, it's a sign of energy.
It's a sign that people are there. But,

Speaker 8 you know, Jessica, the Democratic Party has never nominated the most left candidate in a race.

Speaker 8 And I don't think it's going to happen. Now, most people

Speaker 8 don't know the process for selecting a Democratic presidential candidate. Let me explain it to you in two words.
Southern blacks. Okay.

Speaker 8 That's where that when

Speaker 8 You know, we had lost New Hampshire. Okay.
We didn't run it, Iowa. Other people had lost.
Biden,

Speaker 8 he wasn't even scratching. He didn't do Nevada,

Speaker 8 New Hampshire,

Speaker 8 whatever. And then one day, Jim Cliveman dropped a hammer, and the whole process was over.
He was it. Boom.
Okay.

Speaker 8 So you're going to see, and

Speaker 8 I happen, because of the situation, my birth and my politics and my region, I happened to know Southern blacks better than most Caucasian consultants. And I got a news fight.

Speaker 8 They're not all that liberal. Yeah.
Like I said, the most conservative person I ever knew in my life was my daddy.

Speaker 8 They're going to come down and bring in a lot of that stuff in rural South Carolina, Georgia, the Mississippi Delta. And Northeast go over that big.
I really don't.

Speaker 7 There is a push within the party to try to... change that level of influence, though.
And I mean, you still see everyone's showing up and wearing their Clyburn t-shirts.

Speaker 7 And Andy Bashir, you know, is out there. And I think really putting himself onto the main stage in a different way than when he was auditioning to be Kamala's VP back in the summer of 2024.

Speaker 7 But so you see nothing's going to change. It's been Southern blacks and it's going to continue to be Southern blacks.

Speaker 8 That's not going to change between now and 2028.

Speaker 8 And by the way, I don't want to change. They do a very good job.
Yeah. They give a very thoughtful job of voting.

Speaker 8 And I would think the appetite would be in a party to diminish the influence that Southern blacks have in Democratic primaries. I really don't.

Speaker 8 I'm satisfied with that.

Speaker 8 However, you draw it up, somebody's going to have

Speaker 8 some more influence. Now,

Speaker 8 Iowa, we don't do that anymore. Just see what happens in New Hampshire.
But all roads lead through the South.

Speaker 7 On that note, we're going to take a quick break. Stay with us.

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Speaker 7 Welcome back. Donald Trump loves to make big promises, but lately he's coming up short.
He pledged to expand access to IVF after a Supreme Court picks helped overturn Roe v.

Speaker 7 Wade, but the White House now saying there's no plan to require insurance coverage or federal funding for fertility treatments.

Speaker 7 On immigration, Trump advisor Stephen Miller publicly set a target of 3,000 arrests per day, but in court, the DOJ denies the quota ever existed.

Speaker 7 And we've already talked about this a little bit, but despite Trump's history with Jeffrey Epstein and public pressure for transparency, the long-promised Epstein files remain largely sealed.

Speaker 7 Galeen Maxwell is in a cushier prison as of now. And we're kind of asking what happens when the promises don't match the policy.
Do you think, I mean, I know you had your three-point plan.

Speaker 7 It hasn't changed. I love that.
It's consistent. It's easy.
We're always asking people, like, just give us our three-point plan.

Speaker 7 And now we can say we have the Carville plan that has got us wins for decades. But do you give any stock to the idea that broken promises actually affects Trump's base?

Speaker 8 I wouldn't call it broken promises. Oh, okay.

Speaker 8 Look, he told you that he was going to cut taxes on rich people. He cut taxes on rich people.
He told you that he wanted Project 2025 wanting to dismantle the VA, they're dismantling the VA.

Speaker 8 They told you they wanted to close rural hospitals, they're closing rural hospitals. Argue that he's powerful and he's successful.
Don't argue broken promises.

Speaker 8 And by and large, They're doing what Russell Boyd's most powerful person has been in the federal government for a long time.

Speaker 8 And now, the broken promise has said to be transparent in FCN case, anything about that.

Speaker 8 You know, you could always throw something in. But I wouldn't argue broken promises.
I'd argue bad results, really bad.

Speaker 7 Is that in that op-ed that I cited earlier? You know, you said we have to go out there and say we want to repeal absolutely every piece.

Speaker 8 Absolutely.

Speaker 7 That's the way forward.

Speaker 8 Yes. I mean, look at the horror of it.
Now

Speaker 8 it's 4.1 trillion in debt. They just recalculated it.

Speaker 8 And I'm sorry.

Speaker 8 You know, you never want to predict economic times, bad, good, but Trump's numbers on the economy are terrible, as are his numbers on cost of living. It's another thing I'm saying.

Speaker 8 Never use the word inflation. Always talk about cost of living.
Always.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Would have been nice if we talked about that in 2024, I guess.

Speaker 8 And she could have said that, you know, we're going to do the following things because we know that families, instead of saying it's not what you think it is, we've actually created X number of jobs, we could have just given people something to cling on that, hey, I see something going on out there.

Speaker 8 I'm going to change something to meet the moment. If we'd have had an open process,

Speaker 8 we'd have gotten 53% in 2024, which forced that result on ourselves.

Speaker 7 Do you have any insight into

Speaker 7 what actually happened within the Biden camp, which obviously seemed to be very, very insular? And then

Speaker 7 going back to what I brought up before, you know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are showing up again at a moment where we feel like we need to shed skin, right? That we need to become something new.

Speaker 7 And it's a reminder that people did feel betrayed by the Democratic Party and that they were looking to us to save them, essentially, from having to go back to Donald Trump.

Speaker 7 And to your point, that we can force them into his bucket again.

Speaker 8 So I think I know what happened.

Speaker 8 When presidents get elected, they have a culture around it. So the Clinton culture was one way.
The Obama people were different. The Biden and Biden's inner circle was,

Speaker 8 we won this, we beat Donald Trump, no one else could do this. We let this country out of the pandemic into a lot of areas, unprecedented prosperity, and we never get any respect.

Speaker 8 The Clinton people think they reinvented the goddamn wheel. The Obama people are arrogant and

Speaker 8 didn't return my phone calls when I was vice president. And, you know,

Speaker 8 because we Irish guys and grew up in Scranton, and I think Mike grew up in Providence, you know, to hell with all these people. You know, they always tell us what we can't do.

Speaker 8 You know, we don't get the elite media to give us the credit that we deserve. And we're going to run, goddamn it, and just get out of the way.
I think that was a big part

Speaker 8 of

Speaker 8 the mentality of the President Biden and the people around here.

Speaker 8 And then, of course, we know for a fact that there were all these elaborate mechanisms you had to go through to even get something in front of President Biden.

Speaker 8 You're not allowed to talk to him about it. I'm pretty sure that's a large part of what happened.
And then, when

Speaker 8 it was just inevitable that they couldn't go out, they told Harris, we know this for a fact, well, you can't do anything different. We did.

Speaker 8 You keep the same campaign manager, the same headquarters, the same artwork on the wall, the same phone number,

Speaker 8 and don't say you can do anything different. It's like, well, it was designed.
We had to do five really stupid things to lose, and we probably did all five of them.

Speaker 7 For 2016, there was a moment that you could isolate on the chart, the Comey letter, right, where Hillary was going to lose 11 days out, and the interview on The View, where Kamala came on and they asked her.

Speaker 13 What do you think would be the biggest specific difference between your presidency and

Speaker 13 a Biden presidency?

Speaker 14 Well, we're obviously two different people and we have a lot of shared life experiences. For example, the way we feel about our family and our parents and so on.

Speaker 14 But we're also different people and I will bring those sensibilities to how I lead.

Speaker 7 And she was there to roll out a policy that was distinct from the Biden administration for people who received Medicaid, that you could get care in-home for your parents.

Speaker 7 Do you want to talk about the sandwich generation? It was a good policy, right? And now that we're talking about health care, it would have been even better.

Speaker 7 And she just, I guess, wasn't allowed to do it. And then I thought that she did a great job with the hand that she was dealt, more or less.

Speaker 8 She wasn't dealt a hand, she was dealt a straitjacket. You can run, but this is what you got to say.

Speaker 8 That moment, I think the people on the VO, I know I read this, they're like aghast that she gave that answer.

Speaker 13 Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?

Speaker 14 There is Donna thing that comes to mind in terms of.

Speaker 8 You didn't have to be an experienced political operative to know, oh, God, she didn't just say that, did she? Yeah, she did. She did.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and I work in conservative media, so they're always playing, you know, tape of the word salads and her being embarrassing or whatever.

Speaker 7 But, you know, it was about Donald Trump, the election, just with everything. He's larger than life.
He eats up all the air in the room. And

Speaker 7 we didn't do good enough, I guess, in differentiating from the past.

Speaker 8 We didn't, forget, this was a change election. And we decided that we weren't not going to give them that, which, and we almost won.
Yeah. Think of she just said, what policy of difference?

Speaker 8 Well, you know, every President Bob was different than President Clinton, who was different than President Carter.

Speaker 8 And these are three things that I want to do going forward. Anything like that.
And then you get,

Speaker 8 well, did you and the president ever disagree? And you can say, look, my counsel to him is my counselor to him, not people, but I want to talk about what I'm going to do differently.

Speaker 8 You could do anything like that. Just throw any little seed to somebody and they'd have climbed onto it.
But then even give them that.

Speaker 7 Do you think that the Biden team really would have been vengeful about that?

Speaker 7 Because now they're floating this notion that they're going to reveal embarrassing stories about her if she comes out against him.

Speaker 7 But in your experience, like, do you think they really would have come after her? Because that his legacy is, I don't want to say ruined, but certainly tarnished by what happened.

Speaker 7 And she was the one who could have saved it.

Speaker 8 If Biden gets out in September of 2023,

Speaker 8 the Democrats win, plain and circle.

Speaker 8 President Biden would justifiably be going around the country cutting ribbons at airports and overpasses and highways, and he would be going to Europe like Grant did and whoever the modern Bismarck is.

Speaker 8 He would be visiting there.

Speaker 8 The University of Pennsylvania Biden Center

Speaker 8 would be swimming in contributions. Understand that.
And he would have earned every bit of it. He's one of the most accomplished politicians of my lifetime.
But one decision.

Speaker 8 And now nobody really wants to hear from him. And the last thing that the Democrats want to do today is revisit 2024.
It was a nightmare. It's over.
Turn the page. It's that simple.

Speaker 8 This is not

Speaker 8 an argument that Democrats want to have right now.

Speaker 7 Do you think that means that the old guard in general needs to get out of the way as well? Or this is a particular Biden-Harris problem?

Speaker 8 I don't. I mean, I think the voters, first of all, being a part of the old guard myself, will get out of the way pretty fast.
They have to worry about it.

Speaker 8 If you're talking about New York City, by the way, not even really talked about the economy. That was his whole kind of thing.
He's a pretty good interviewer.

Speaker 8 I got to tell you, he doesn't get out of his kind of cost of living argument of how hard, how difficult life is in the city.

Speaker 8 So why do you automatically assume that mandani is the future of something but spanberger and cheryl are not part of the future i understand that's a very coastal it's a very new york centric view but i'm not i'm not sure that that's the correct view but they will be

Speaker 8 a person from that wing of the coalition that's going to run in 2028. And

Speaker 8 I think it's necessary that they do so these Democratic primary voters can weigh in on the direction they want their party to go in.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I agree with you. I also think that it'll probably be a governor who ends up being the candidate.

Speaker 7 I think people will be looking for executive experience and the kind of deliverables that you just can't get in the same way if you're in the Senate or you're in Congress.

Speaker 7 And I'm excited about it. You know, your line, unsurprisingly, is better than mine, but our bench is very, very deep.

Speaker 8 Don't underestimate the Senate talent, Democratic talent. Okay.

Speaker 8 I don't get into thought picking and choosing here, but does anybody really think that Ruin Gallagher is not going to be on the ticket by 2032? No. Okay.

Speaker 8 I mean, Chris Murphy is a really talented guy. Warnock is one of the better communicators I've ever seen.

Speaker 8 Of course, there's Democratic talent in governors, and there's also, but there's a lot of Democratic talent in the Senate.

Speaker 8 And the point I'm trying to get across here is the Calvary is coming. Okay, it's coming.
It can't get here.

Speaker 8 And as I said in the piece, right now, we're just all about being against the Big Beautiful Bill. There's no person in a Democratic coalition that doesn't detest the Big Beautiful Bill.

Speaker 8 It unites every Democrat. And now come the 2028 cycle.
Did we flush it out? But not until then.

Speaker 7 Okay. Hold our powder until then.
One thing, it's an extension of the bill because there was tons of funding in it, obviously, for ICE, which now has a bigger budget than the IDF,

Speaker 7 which feels extreme to me.

Speaker 7 I think immigration will still be a major flashpoint in the conversation.

Speaker 7 It's the economy stupid, but there are a lot of people who certainly have not forgiven Democrats for how terribly immigration was mismanaged under the Biden administration until the last year, let's say, and haven't seen a thoughtful plan for how we would be managing the border and our asylum system.

Speaker 7 How do you think that we can do a better job of that? Are there any folks who you feel like are doing a decent job in speaking to this?

Speaker 7 And I'm not saying, to me, it's not enough to just say, you know, we made a mistake. We have to be for strong border security and a humane process.

Speaker 7 Like there has to be something more for people that really care about immigration. Like there was in the 90s, like Obama, like Hillary ran on as well.
So

Speaker 8 you're right. The first part of the Biden administration was asked, and the reason is he listened to those lefties.

Speaker 8 Remember, Bernie Sanders in 2016 was calling for open borders.

Speaker 8 That's what they were basically advocating. It turned into a policy disaster.
By the end of the Biden term, border was perfectly fine. Now, that's not the greatest thing to argue.

Speaker 8 The question then becomes, when you talk about immigration policy, right, we'll talk about the southern border. What about the 14 million people that are here?

Speaker 8 You could just come over to something and say, you know what, we're going to have a point system.

Speaker 8 So, somebody's been in this country for 35 years, held the same jobs, raised three kids, they've all gone to college. That person gets 10 points.

Speaker 8 Somebody's here for three months and they've committed three crimes, they get no points. And what we need to have is acknowledge that people are here.

Speaker 8 We don't need to be raiding Home Depot and raiding this.

Speaker 8 Not every person that is in this country

Speaker 8 that is

Speaker 8 not documented is the same.

Speaker 8 We absolutely need

Speaker 8 a healthy immigration policy, and we need to deal with the people that are already here. Period indicates.
There's people going to, oh, it's not flushed out. And what are you going to do about this?

Speaker 8 And say, look,

Speaker 8 my policy is this. We like immigration.
We like immigrants.

Speaker 8 We're going to have an orderly process to get in the table and we're going to have an orderly process with the people that are already here people like immigrants they don't like disarm you got to understand that if you put you have a favorable unfavorable opinion on immigrants it'd be two to one favorable yeah i want to have immigration i want to deal with it that's here they want to get rid of it all and we can't do that we don't want to it's not in our interest

Speaker 8 and

Speaker 8 You can see his numbers on immigration are now not that good, actually.

Speaker 7 No, they're going south because what he's given is actually some level more disorder yeah well there's a frenziedness to how this is happening but just tell people we want immigration and we want order and there's no reason that we cannot have both i feel like we would have gotten a lot of goodwill if the blue city mayors had played ball and handed over criminals basically to begin and then stephen miller and trump would have looked even worse even even more quickly, frankly.

Speaker 8 People, a lot of them are not going to school to scare even people that are here legally.

Speaker 8 My housekeeper, I make her tape a passport to her rage,

Speaker 8 because if she got to go back to Guatemala, I'm going with her.

Speaker 8 The clown in Nebraska was saying, a 28-year-old who doesn't work, we're just going to give him health care. Okay, the cost audience didn't even like that.

Speaker 8 If a 28-year-old is here illegally, the last place sick, were you ever 28?

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 8 You never thought about getting sick. The last place you're going to be is in the emergency room.
All right.

Speaker 8 And particularly if you're not here legally, shit, you die of a heart attack before you go to the

Speaker 7 point, but they have to smoke screen it and they have to talk about the five able-bodied people that are on Medicaid that should be at work.

Speaker 8 You tried it in Arkansas. It was exasperating.
The problem with Medicaid and healthcare costs is not 28 Euros.

Speaker 8 I mean, some of their arguments, if you think about them, just beyond the argument they're making, it's really stupid.

Speaker 7 I'm always astounded by it. And I think, am I hearing the same thing other people are hearing? But we need to take one more quick break.
Stay with us.

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Speaker 7 Welcome back. Before we go, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the culture wars.

Speaker 7 I don't know if you've been paying attention to this viral American Eagle campaign starring actress Sidney Sweeney. It sparked days of online debate with some critics saying it hints at eugenics.

Speaker 7 Trump called it the hottest ad out there once he found out that Sidney Sweeney was a registered Republican in Florida, and then he's going after what he sees as woke brands like Jaguar and taking another jab at Taylor Swift.

Speaker 7 I know in the wake of the 2024 election that you weighed in a lot on the woke issues, right?

Speaker 7 How the Democratic Party stopped talking like normal human beings and was spending too much time paying attention to a very tiny percentage of the population.

Speaker 7 Do you think that we're doing any better on that front? Do you think what's going on with the Sydney Sweeney ad matters at all?

Speaker 8 So the actual date was April 27th, 2021, when publicly said in Fox, this is killing us.

Speaker 8 There's so many things about it. And I've said defund the police are the three stupidest words in the history of the English language.

Speaker 8 I mean, I don't like to call it the W-word because it was actually kind of started by Led Betty.

Speaker 8 Led Better, who who was a jazz musician from Louisiana and Texas, who brought that in a song, I think, in the 1930s that black people should be woke aware of their interactions with the police.

Speaker 8 It sounded like a pretty good idea to me. Okay, since pretty smart Lynn Betty was.

Speaker 8 The whole identity language was bad for the party.

Speaker 8 Basically, what the identity left said, you have to look at me as a blank

Speaker 8 first.

Speaker 8 And I can't do it. I got to look at you as a human being first.
I'll know if you're black or you're

Speaker 8 female or whatever it is that you are, but humanity is our most important identity.

Speaker 8 And the public never liked it. And think of words they say.

Speaker 8 And this is where I think that the people that use the term communities of color actually think it's racist. And I'll tell you why.

Speaker 8 It is the assumption of educated white people that everybody that is not white is the same, which is idiotic. Yeah.

Speaker 8 It's idiotic to say that all white people are the same. But it's a kind of, you know, like NPR people love this kind of language.

Speaker 8 And they don't even know, they don't know what they're saying. Remember when they were starting and the whole thing was going to be BIPOC?

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And they were just going to hoard all non-white people in the same vet,

Speaker 8 which is historically ignorant and politically stupid thing to do

Speaker 8 and you know we didn't now there's been a big bounce back i mean the non-whites if you look at the latest data are moving away from trump pretty quickly but we did not do that well with non-whites because i think a lot of that was the hangover of the identity area now you don't hear political people use this kind of language anymore it hurt us in 2024 it it did and you did all kinds of data on late breaking

Speaker 8 voters, the stuff was very sticky. And, you know, Alyssa Slotkin was pretty articulate about it, who won a very, very close race in a state that Trump carried.

Speaker 8 They just need to talk like other people. And we just, the longer we get away from that, the less the effects are going to be.

Speaker 8 But it was one of the all-time stupid political ideas in this century was we were going to change dictionaries in the way people spoke to each other.

Speaker 8 We were going to do no such thing.

Speaker 7 Do you think we are doing better in this way?

Speaker 8 I do. I don't see you.
Do you see anybody using that kind of language anymore?

Speaker 7 No, I certainly think that it's better.

Speaker 7 I, you know, the Sidney Sweeney stuff, I think, is one of those more right-wing stories where they're taking, you know, some people online who probably vote the same way that we do that are outraged about it and, you know, saying it's Hitlerian, etc

Speaker 8 but in general i think we've been pretty good at being normal which is a nice break don't talk about not being part of identity politics just don't be part of identity politics you don't have to say we'll have to go through it and relive it it was just a giant stupid mistake that some well-meaning people thought it was the future of communications.

Speaker 8 And it was just really, really stupid.

Speaker 7 Couldn't have said it better myself.

Speaker 8 But I don't want to drag it back up. Just let it go and just talk like normal people.

Speaker 7 I'm going to tell my colleagues that I just don't want to talk about it anymore. And hopefully they'll let me off the hook.

Speaker 8 Well, that's what you do. You know, it's the whole thing.
If you have the law, I'll get a law. If you have the facts, I'll get the facts.
If you don't either pound the tape,

Speaker 8 you don't want to talk about the failure of this administration to deal with the cost of living.

Speaker 8 You don't want to talk about all of the things that they pass from gutting veterans benefits to rural hospitals to you name it. And just do it like that.

Speaker 8 But they're going to keep trying to bring it up because it's their advantage to talk about it. It's not our advantage to talk about it.

Speaker 8 It was a phase, just like teenagers go through phases.

Speaker 8 But that was all it is.

Speaker 8 And, you know, they're always going to come back to the trends and sports.

Speaker 8 It's, you know, I'm not, haven't thought about the 400 meters and the girls' track meet, but the Athletic Association, I'm sure, has ways to determine that we have equal competition.

Speaker 8 I know that Senator Gallego, Governor Newsom, Congressman Rolten have all said that they all have daughters and they want them to compete, to compete together girls.

Speaker 8 That seems totally reasonable to me.

Speaker 8 It's just state. the problem, state where you are.
And this is before the pandemic, I went to Amsterdam. You know what they don't have in the Amsterdam airport? Gender-specific bathrooms.

Speaker 8 You go in the bathroom, you close the stall, you come out, you wash your hands,

Speaker 8 and you go out.

Speaker 8 And I was just kind of stunned because I'd like never seen that before.

Speaker 8 And it was like zero issue. Yeah.

Speaker 8 It's

Speaker 8 a cultural shock. And I guess culturally, we just can't do it or people would go crazy.
But there's some gender, I'll be in our five, it's probably not the most elegant topic, but it's true.

Speaker 7 It's a reality for all of us.

Speaker 8 The point is, you know, whenever you want to, we'll get back to the foreign meet at the Girl State Track meeting. But I agree with Santa Gallego, Governor Newsom, Congressman Motin.

Speaker 8 I think that's a reasonable position.

Speaker 7 Totally. And where 80% of the country is.

Speaker 8 Yes. Is that governor of Utah? They passed an anti-trans sports thing.
The guy is conservative. He's a nice guy.
He's a big Mormon, Latter-day Saints.

Speaker 8 He said, there are 100,000 household athletes in Utah, for trans. This is not my issue.
Go veto and they're sent back to the Utah State Athletic Association.

Speaker 8 Let them deal with that. You know how many athletic governing bodies they are in the United States? You couldn't count them all.

Speaker 8 I'm going to be concerned about how do we get young people motivated Democrats to raise taxes where they were pre-Trump on incomes over a half million dollars a year and use half that money, which is trillions of dollars, to establish a first-time homebuyer's mortgage relief fund.

Speaker 8 Because if you're, when you're 27 or 28, and you hear people, and particularly Democrats, talking about, now it's the Republicans, they telling you how good the economy is.

Speaker 8 And they will say, what the shit is she or he talking about? I have no hope to buy a house. I have no hope to get an education.
I'm living in my parents' basement

Speaker 8 and they got every tax break in the world and they're telling me how good I got it. And we act like we don't see them.
So when I was in law school, understand this, every month I got a check for $300.

Speaker 8 in 1971 dollars. I could do whatever I wanted with it.
I could buy books. I can go to the French Quarter.

Speaker 8 Anything. Okay.

Speaker 8 That was what they call a GI Bill.

Speaker 8 I buy my first house. I am guaranteed the lowest mortgage rate there is.

Speaker 8 When I graduated from law school in 1973, there was one black and three females in a graduating class. We don't live in that world anymore.

Speaker 8 So we got to give these young people tools that my generation of young people had.

Speaker 8 And we got to quit telling them how lucky they are to be living in this economy at this time.

Speaker 8 It's a statement that actually irritates them. It's an old rich guy's idea of like,

Speaker 8 this guy started at McDonald's and he became the regional manager.

Speaker 8 Yeah, one out of 100,000, most people that are sitting there for $9 an hour and not thinking they're going to be the regional manager one day. The most important thing, if I ever,

Speaker 8 lesson, is people want to be seen.

Speaker 8 Okay, that guy sees me, or she sees me. And if you start talking about that, a young voter will say, well, at least they understand what I'm going through.

Speaker 8 And that was part of Trump's appeal with these rural whites. They didn't feel like Democrats saw them.

Speaker 8 And then Trump goes and promises a bunch of stuff, stabs in the back, of course, but he did do the first necessary thing. He said, you exist, you're out there.
I see you.

Speaker 8 And we don't do that with young people very much at all.

Speaker 8 And just,

Speaker 8 you know, understand that just acknowledging the problem with an imperfect solution is 100 times better than denying the problem.

Speaker 7 I love that.

Speaker 7 I can't thank you enough for your time. I don't know if you have anything that you want to wrap up with, but you've.

Speaker 8 I'll just say this. I go on any network.
I go on any show.

Speaker 8 And I think the idea that we boycott any news outlet,

Speaker 8 I can go on somebody's show, and I don't have to agree with them.

Speaker 8 But I just wish Democrats would just say, look, god damn it, we got swagger here. We've got some strong candidates coming.
We got a hell in this in this big, beautiful bill.

Speaker 8 We're going to romp and kick ass in Virginia and New Jersey.

Speaker 8 Let's go get them.

Speaker 8 Oh, well, James, the approval rating

Speaker 8 is 31%.

Speaker 8 Well, yeah, because we lost. I don't like them either.
Once you start winning, it's going to go up because what approval rating really lags is among Democrats because they don't like to lose. Yeah.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 7 No one likes to lose.

Speaker 8 Winning is everything, stupid.

Speaker 7 Winning is everything, stupid. Thank you for your time and that's it for this episode.
Our producers are David Toledo and Eric Junikis. Our technical director is Drew Burroughs.

Speaker 7 Going forward, you'll find Raging Moderates every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to its own feed to hear exclusive interviews with sharp political minds.

Speaker 7 This week, I'm talking to Mallory McMorrow, who's running through the next senator of Michigan. And make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode.

Speaker 7 Thank you again, James. All right.

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