Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have a great show for you today. Solidarity Strategies founder Chuck Rosche talks to us about Biden's path to victory. But first we talked to Ramin Setuta about his new book, Apprentice in Wonderland, How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett took America through the Looking Glass.
Welcome to Fast Politics formIn.
Thank you, Mollie. Thank you so much for having me.
Perhaps you could start by talking to me about why you decided to write this book about The Apprentice and which is ultimately, weirdly the most important television program ever.
Probably I agree. I think it unlocks the mystery and secret of Donald Trump. And there's a lot of questions about who is he and how did he come to power, and why do people like him? And what is going on? And I think if you look back on The Apprentice, it answers all of those questions. And the reason I decided to write this book was that one I was a reporter in my twenties. I was working for Newsweek, and I needed a beat, and I needed something to
cover pretty consistently. And at the time, The Apprentice was the hot show on TV. And at the time the person who was the easiest to interview was Donald Trump. He would call office at Trump Tower. He had no publicist, he had no bedding. He was his publicist right he publisher, and as secretary would patch him through directly. I would call his office. I would be on the phone with him before I could even turned on my tape recorder. He would give me three minutes, he'd answer any question
I asked, and then he'd hang up. And so when he became President of the United States, I would often think back to that time of how easy it was to access him, and how easy it was to talk to him, and how surreal the whole thing was that we as a country were trapped in a reality show. And so when he left the White House against his own will, I decided to work on this book, and he reached out to me. Before I even had to
call his office, write a letter, send an email. He reached out to me and wanted to talk to me, And between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three, we actually spoke six times, four times in person. We watched clips of The Apprentice in his boardroom in Trump Tower. I went to mar A Lago, and I think this
book it's a dual narrative. It looks back on The Apprentice, but also looks forward on this shell of a man that Donald Trump became after he left the White House, fixating on feuds, fixating on celebrities, very resentful of what happened, and it was unlike any post presidency. I think we can imagine as the American public.
Talk to me about Deborah Messing.
Well, Donald Trump is obsessed with celebrities even when he left the White House, and so a lot of our time was that talking about his feuds and him feeling like he was slighted by Martha Stewart, by Bette Midler, by people that weren't on The Apprentice, because when he became famous on a reality show and became a famous reality star, he thought all these famous people that were momentarily nice to him were actually his friends. And one
that he's really obsessed with is Deborah Messing. He recalls very specifically being at the NBC Upfronts, which is a term of people using the industry when they're going to go and try to sell advertising for their show. And they were here in New York and they were walking in and Debora Messing said something nice to him because at the time Willin and Grace are on the same night as The Apprentice, and she said that his good ratings helped will embrace. That's his memory. That's a story, A.
Very polite thing to say to someone you don't know.
Very appropriate, totally like whatever. I'm sure famous people will have conversations like this all the time. They're not really meant to indicate anything. It's just being polite, absolutely right.
So he talked about how, in kind of creepy language, how attracted she found her with her red hair, spoke in this way that objectified her, and over the multiple times he brought up Debora Messing indicated that he found her attractive and had a crush on her, and so when she would tweet about him, he found it particularly hurtful that this person who sitcom star, who at one point said something vaguely nice to him, was no longer
on his side as President a States of America. And he was very aware and cognizant of what Devora Messing was posting on Twitter about him, more so than his own policies, more so than his own legislation, more so than his time in the White House. There was a lot of conversation about Debra Messing and our time together.
It's both very stupid but also makes a lot of sense. So more interested in the celebrities than his own policy.
More interested in celebrities than anything. He talked to me about how he has a secret vote in Beverly Hills. He's not interested in swing states or Middle America. He really wants famous people to like him. He's still incredibly resentful that he didn't win an Emmy for hosting The Apprentice in two thousand and four. In two thousand and five, when he was nominated and recalls going to get Emmy,
He's thinking he was going to win. Having The Amazing Race when calling it an establishment show even though it wasn't, that makes no sense. The Amazing Race was a scrappy, small reality show that didn't actually have that big of an audience back then, and it is very resentful. But I think the reason this is all very important because we're entering into another election, right and we're there's a lot of conversation about who Donald Trump is. Can the
Democrats it beat him? We know what's his take in his election, but what does that play? And Donald Trump is a product of Hollywood, He is a product reality TV. He is a product of celebrity culture. And there is a convergence in our society between political activity and celebrity culture. And we saw it perhaps with Sarah Bala, and we definitely saw it with Obama, who used it as a force of good not evil, and now we're seeing it
with Donald Trump. And I think it's really important to examine who Donald Trump is, where he came from, and how he sees the world, because that is the playbook he's going to use to try it to beat Joe Biden in the fall.
Mm yeah, I think that's right. So why is he interested in Beverly Hills just because it's filled with famous people or.
Because where celebrities lived? You know, he never lived in Los Angeles or Hollywood, but he always wanted to be accepted by Hollywood and his dream before he went into real estate because as an ebo baby, that was the easier path. But his dream is to be a producer, either of film or Broadway shows. He was always drawn and fascinated by show business.
It's such a crazy thing. Do you think that, for example, like having Robert de Niro at the debates would upset Trump? I mean, do you think that there is a way for Biden to play this.
Yes, I think that Biden needs to look at Trump as a reality star, and he needs to the only way to beat a reality star is by eclipsing or dimming that star's power. So yes, absolutely. Robert de Niro, who is a real actor and a real famous person and was often much more famous than Donald Trump until Donald Trump became president, I states being at the debates would certainly unnerve Trump. Absolutely.
Do you think that Trump had a moment since you interviewed him after he lost the presidency? Do you think that he ever felt that he was truly famous?
He felt like he was famous when he was the star of the Apprentice because he had two things right. He had fame. He was at the top of the reality TV pecking order when The Apprentice in season one, although the numbers kept dropping after season one, but whether it was the most watched show on TV for one week. He has those ratings rained both in his office and in mar A Lago and as the editor chy for Variety, he was always so excited to talk to me because
those ratings mean so much to him. Was wall. He looks at them, it's like comforting, soothing, and so I think that he was very fond of the period in which he was hosted The Apprentice because first he was famous, but second, just as important as being famous was that he was white. He wasn't a divisive figure. People thought he was an entertaining and you know, mostly loved saying his catchphrase you're fired back to him. So he was
a famous person who also wasn't dividing the country. And as much as he is stoking division now and creating drama and dividing the ISAs America and potentially just growing it, he liked the fact that everyone liked him and that's all that matters to him.
Yeah, I think that's right, And it is interesting that he did feel that he was popular then as president he had a lot of power, but he was liked by the people he wanted to be liked by. Do you think that was a real tension or now.
Yes, I think that was one of the central tensions of this presidency. But it was two things. He wasn't liked by famous people, which really bothered him and got under his skin so much so that he was a shell of a person after he left the White House over that, not over anything else, not over the insurrection, not over any of the other horrible things that he did. But he was very upset that famous people no longer
liked him. But part of this was that he was powerful as president, I states, but he didn't know how to do the job. And when he reality show he came in, he did whatever he did, he created, whatever problems he created. Sometimes his lines didn't make sense, but through the magic of editing, Mark Burnett and his team of producers always made Donald Trump a coherent, cohesive figure. And as PRESIDENTI states, yes, he was powerful, but I
don't think he knew how to use that power. And I think the reason why he was constantly flailing in the White House was that he wasn't in control of the situation. And I think it was very unsettling for him to not be in charge even though he was supposedly in charge.
Can you talk about his cognitive issues.
One of the things I noticed when I went to visit him was that he hadn't changed in many ways since I first started talking to him, but his memory was certainly much more foggy. The first time I sat down with him and talked to him, we had a very lengthy conversation. He told Jason Miller how much he loved talking to me. He extended our time to his
second meeting immediately. And then the second time I went to talk to him, we had had and again, this isn't someone who's been talking to a lot of press. At that time, Donald Trump was really laying low and I sat down and he had a blank expression on his face. He didn't remember talking to me. I asked him specifically, do you remember talking to me? And he said, no, that was a long time ago, even though it was
only a few months ago. And in terms of what I found is that his memory is incredibly foggy when it comes to things that are happening that are recent.
Which is a dementia thing. Because my mother has dementia and recent stuff. She can remember stuff from twenty years ago, but stuff that happened, yes, she can't remember.
I found that to be the exact same case to Donald Trump. He could remember with very specific detail the night that The Apprentice aired, Supposedly Alli called him to congratulate him. He could remember going to Themes, he could
remember getting an Emmy nomination. But when it came to actually asking him specifically about things that happened during his time in the White House and specifically things that happened were happening in real time, it was all kind of abstract and theoretical, and it was utterly it was alarming.
And he wasn't drawing from recent memories. He was drawing from other people's reminder to memories.
And it doesn't seem like he's retaining recent events, which is very important as we had into this election, that needs to be a central focus of the debate. There does need to be a discussion about that. As a seventy eight year old man, what is it exactly that's going on with Donald Trump?
Yeah? Do you think one of the things that I just wrote about that I think a lot about is his obsession with projunction. So I'm wondering if we talk about his memory issues and then we talk about his you know, he has very successfully projected the idea that Joe Biden has dementia. And even though I took to someone who was in the White House for three hours the other day. People meet with him all the time find him to be quite sharp. It has become a
narrative that has really taken off. Do you think that there is some intentionality there with Trump's own issues?
I think, either consciously or subconsciously, in the same way he called Hillary Clinton cricket Hillary, but the one that never really followed the rules or of the law. I think that there's something similar going on here. Yes. Absolutely. And when he said over the weekend that Joe Biden needs to take a common test, I really you know, I flashed back to that day where he had this completely blank expression on his face and didn't seem to
know what was happening. And there were moments where we were talking and he wouldn't seem to know what was happening, and then he would become more clear and less clear, and he went in and out of it.
It's so interesting. One of the things that I'm struck by is he's obsessed with Hunter Biden, and Hunter Biden has a substance abuse problem or had a substance abuse problem. I've written a lot about it. As someone who's sober myself, I wonder how much you think that Trump, who's never had a drink, and Biden, who's never had a drink, how much sort of substances play here with Trump.
I think that is part of it, because he brought up Hunter Biden in our conversation unprompted when he was talking about the election fraud and how the media wasn't
covering what was happening. But he also brought up substance on drinking when he was talking about firing Chloe Kardashian af of The Celebrity Apprentice, And there was this whole narrative on the show where he learned that she had a dui, and because of that, even though she had the dui before she was even castle on the show, he decided to randomly fire her one week helping them both later uncovered that he also majorrogatory sexist remarks about
her appearance, which I think is the real reason he fired her, but using the duy as excuse. So I do think that Donald Trump doesn't have a sophisticated understanding of substance abuse issues and doesn't have a real handle
on it, even though his brother suffered from it. But I also think that he has a real jealousy when it comes to the children of other famous people, because he always is kind of comparing and stacking up his own kids with other kids, and one of the ways in which he asserts dominants is by thinking he has
the best kids. Whenever we talked about other children of famous people, like Wilsa Rivers, Jon Rivers daughter, I could see there was a calculation in his head where he was trying to figure out how his kids measured up. Or Martha Stewart's daughter Alexis, who was a judger on The Celebrity Apprentice Martha Stewart. He was very resentful of
how bad she was and how good Avanca was. So I think part of the way in which he compares himself to other people and makes himself feel better is through the fame of his kids, particularly at Boonka.
Right, he loves Vonka. Did you feel like he didn't like Eric? I love this topic. Please just I know I'm patty, but let's hear it.
It seemed to me like clearly he likes Levonca the best for the sons. He didn't really engage that much in his sons. So Eric talked to me for this book and he actually invited me to Trump Tower and I sat in Eric's office and he went through sort of the play by play and how important the Apprentice is for the family, but he didn't give me any
real sense of how we felt about his sons. But also he's very good at not even though he's great at reliving feuds and talking about all the issues that he's happened with various people, he is really good about keeping his kids out of his conversations. Although when I did, I asked him about there was a storyline on The Apprentice where apparently Don Junior was having an affair with Aubrey O. Day. He said he'd heard that and that was reported at the time, and Aubrio Day ended up
saying that it happened. And again, this is I mean, you can say this is Patty and the Sicilian, this is ridiculous, but this is a family that's running a reality show. Don Junior judge on the show. He's married at the time, and he's having an affair with a can tested who he's giving a secret help to you because Audreode was like calling Don Junior and getting help on this season of The Apprentice, And it just is a playbook for how the Trumps do business.
That's so crazy? Can you talk to us about what you say? The lesson Joe Biden could take from this.
I think that Joe Biden needs to be aware of the fact that even though in the media it does seem like, Okay, well, how can we go through this again? Right, We're really going to do this again? There's no When Donald Trump left the White House in disgrace, I think a lot of us thought that Trump arrow was over. But Donald Trump does still have broad pockets of support throughout the United States, and I think Joe Biden needs to realize that he's not going up against a traditional
political candidate. He is going up against this Frankenstein created by reality TV. And even though the polling is close and Biden now has a slight edge, I don't think we can discount the fact that Donald Trump can win. I think it's extremely possible that somehow Donald Trump can eke out of victory because he will use every trick in his playbook as a reality TV star to deflect confused suggests things on of Biden that actually are true
to himself. He did the same thing to Hillary Clinton and in twenty twenty we were all suffering from COVID, we were trying to heal as a nation. There were a lot of forces that were at play. And I think that the country has gotten complacent and we have to remind ourselves that Donald Trump is a creation of reality television and this is a very dangerous thing because
the general American public will fall for these tricks. He's a mirage by Mark Burnett, and I think one of the things I cover in this book is exactly how he became popular and became who we became. You know. One of the contestants told me, he's playing a character, and I believe that this is a character that Joe Biden's going up against, not an actual political figure.
Yeah, he's playing a character. Donald Trump is not an actual political figure, right. He's a sort of Manchurian candidate. I mean, he doesn't believe in anything, does he.
He believes in whatever we'll get him the most amount of phrase and approval at that time, and that's why he became so much more conservative because the bar Ray wing of the party started supporting him. But he he whatever he needs to say to feel approval and to feel like people support him. That's what drives Donald Trump.
Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you'll come back.
Thank you so much, Molly, I really like talking to you.
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Chuck Roscha is a Democratic strategist and the founder of Solidarity Strategies.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Chuck, Yes, tell us what's going on. Is Joe Biden going to lose Hispanic voters?
No, the question is is he going to win them by enough to win the presidency? Because the Latino vote, Hispanic voters will probably be the lynchpin in this election in lots and lots of states.
Yeah, Latino voters are not a monolist. It's a bunch of different groups all much together in one word that does not describe. And so maybe you could walk me through the different states, the different groups or however you want to talk and sort of give us the landscape of what the Latino voter, who is who and which group is which and how Biden can appeal to them.
Or of the problem with Latino voters is that there are small groups made up within a group, and I will walk you through who we are. But just like me, if you're listening to this podcast, you're like, why would Molly have an old white man on here to talk about the Latino vote. It's because I saund like an old white man when I speak. But I'm very much a Mexican redneck from East Texas. I love it man well, because I was raised by my white grand da Eddie
in Rouley's, Texas on a working farm. If you're not seeing my beautiful brown complexion with that funny cowboy hat, I sound like every other white redneck I grew up with. But I am, in fact a Latino voter. My last
name is Rocha. Rocha from the Great Wanna Wato state of Mexico, and Mexicans make up about sixty eight percent of all Latino voters in America and the biggest difference between and we'll get to this, Molly, the biggest difference of what the Latino vote is now and Latino voters are the fastest group of growing, the fastest growing group of voters within that diaspora are second and third generation
Latinos like myself. Twenty years ago, they were more of a foreign born group of folks who are newer immigrants. Well now the children of those folks and the children of their children, like my thirty five year old son, who's also named Charles Rocha, who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with my two beautiful grand boys, also is a Latino voter. That's what's really happened in this group that we're coming
of age. The average age of a Latino in America is twenty seven and the second largest group behind the Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricans are the majority of Latinos in a state like Pennsylvania. That really matters to the president. So if you have a lot of well meaning, woke white consultant strategist around you trying to figure out the diaspora of how we reach Latinos, if you don't have one of us in the room explaining the nuances of the cultures and the differences, you'll mess up.
But half of this battle is literally just showing up, Molly.
Half of this battle is showing up sounds to me, like field offices, what does showing up mean?
Showing up means buying a lot of digital ads, because, as I just said, the average age of a Latino is twenty seven. Most twenty seven year olds in America don't own a TV or pay for cable. That means if you run that same Spanish language TV commercial, which Univision and Telemundo will for both of them. Don't sue
me here. It's very important for Latino voters. But that twenty seven year old Latino kid, my kid in Pittsburgh is not watching Univision or Telemundo in Spanish, so you have to go show up where they're consuming information normally on some streaming service, some gaming app, or something that's
tied to their cell phones. And lots of times in the democratic groups, we don't spend enough time dissecting those subgroups because it's not efficient, and it's not efficient because younger voters don't vote at the propensity of older Spanish speaking voters, so we spend a lot of time talking
to them instead of the young folks. Then you have generations of people who just don't get any information, so they start getting Republican curious or third party curious and that's where you start seeing just kind of getting some losses on the margins.
I'm hoping you could talk about with the case that needs to be made to Latino voters. I feel like different groups have different concerns. What are the big concerns? And again not a monoliths, so different groups are going to have different concerns. But what do you see? I mean, is inflation number one? Is religion number one? I mean, are they different concerns than regular voters? Younger voters discuss.
One of the things that me and Mike Madrid are Republican Operative do a podcast every week called The Latino Vote Podcast. That's my pitch for our podcast, and we talk a lot about this on the podcast because the fastest growing group within the quote unquote non college educated voter middle class working their way from the lower classes that do the working middle class are these Latino workers.
So they're the second generation, the third generation. They're starting to go to college at a high rate, but they're still disproportionately non college educated, just workers. So they really fall in line. And when I was running Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and we got over seventy percent of the life Latino vote in every place that we competed for that was there was a Latino running the whole organization, which was me, So we were filtered into everything. But
we ran on this economic populist message. Latinos really get for giving your college loans. They really get a rig system that's really tilted towards the rich and not towards folks who are just trying to work every day and make it. And Molly, if you said, how do I dumb that down to what's your thing on your hat? I would say, what are you going to do? And I see this in focus groups every week. The Latino voter wants.
To know what are you going to do immediately to help me and my family have more money, make more money, and help me get my kids into school so they don't have to have this shitty job that I've got.
Yeah, it strikes me that there is a certain sense in which the Latino voter is very similar.
Right.
It's this idea that the system is really rigged against them, So it's populism. But one of the things that I'm struck by is Joe Biden. One of the reasons why rich people are so mad at him right now, and we're seeing that a lot. It's funny because a lot of the anchors who do finance are like telling me in horror that all these people they know are so furious at Biden because they don't like raising taxes on the wealthy, they don't like the antitrust stuff. They don't like,
you know, a student loan forgiveness. I mean, it seems to me, though Biden maybe not as good at transmitting it, He's really done a lot of stuff that's economic populism.
Yeah, and that goes back to the point about the average age of this newer electored Molly get this forty percent of the Latino voters and this election will be new since twenty sixteen, forty percent. So they're just younger. They don't know what Joe Biden has done because they just aren't tuned in to the part of how we communicate to normal voters. And what I mean by quote unquote normal voters is we in both parties spend a lot of money buying TV advertising. That's how you communicate
to the masses. But I would give that an asterisk and say to the masses of old people, because old people like me like to watch the evening news because I want to know what the weather's going to be tomorrow.
Or what the traffic's going to be. And young people could give a shit less. And so if that's the way you're communicating, you're missing a lot of folks. And what Donald Trump.
Has done is just kind of showed up in the space halfheartedly with a do and just kind of like walked in and said, I'm Donald Trump. You know me from TV. You should vote for me because that guy over there don't give a shit about you. And it's just not true. But just him showing up in the space and buying some advertising helps him get two percent, three percent, eight percent more. And so that's where you start seeing the difference is there's not this big migration
to the Republican Party. You just have a bunch of Latinos that are Republican curious that.
You could lose, and you have to remind them of what you're doing for them.
Right every time we're in a focus group, when you tell them what Joe Biden has done for them and what he's done with bills to create jobs in America, what he's done to help their kids be able to get into college and I have affordable colleges. They're like, yes, why didn't we know this? And I'm like, cause we're not sending you that at on TikTok, which we should be.
Yeah. So what should Biden be doing.
He's doing exactly what I would be doing right now. Oh good, And that is this is that he realizes he has a problem. For twenty years, Democrats were like, oh, Latinos are good, They're just as reliable as black voters, almost, and we'll just go flush them out when it comes election time.
Well, those days are long gone. When Donald Trump won these exponentially high numbers in Miami and in the Texas Valley in twenty sixteen, it was a wake up call to Democrats. And so what Joe Biden started doing is advertising to Latinos in digital and TV earlier than any time in the history of American elections that I've noticed.
And in the last off year elections, Molly we outspent Democrats Republicans almost six to one in Spanish language, everizing in Senate States. Because again, there's one way to fix a problem Democrats like to do, and that's throw money at that problem. And I will take their money at least they acknowledge that there's a problem, and you know, they hired Julie Chavez Rodriguez to be their manager for
Joe Biden. That's a hat tip to Latinos. And then you start advertising because no pay so, no sayso in my world, and so you've got to show up and spend money. And they're doing that now earlier than they ever have.
That's so good. I'm very happy to use this because there's a lot I don't know if you know this, but there's a lot of hand ringing going on a lot.
What bothers me the most, Molly, is there's no doubt that there will be no stone unturned with the Biden campaign because they'll have more money than they know what to do with to fix lots of problems. And so they have Julie Chavez there. She's going to make sure things are done. They're going to be coachly competent. They've already hired a trailer full of Latino consultants who are
making adds in digital. What I worry about, Molly, is underneath that at the Senate level and at the House level, not in the party committees or they're supporting super packs. I know I'm getting down in the weeds. But in the campaigns themselves, you have it. Seeing the infrastructure of democratic campaigns keep up with this exponential growth of Latino voters with Latino managers or operatives, So you lose some of that cultural competency at that local level.
And I want to talk about that because one of the great injustices in American life right now is that we've only had three black female senators this class of senators. There are a bunch of black female senators. You have a really a good group, but you're not seeing Latino senators, especially in the Sunbelt.
The Ruben Diego Yes, and I'm working for Ruben and he is killing it right, He's doing great.
But what a lot of these people are missing, especially not especially. I shouldn't say that because everybody does it, So I don't fault these black women who are running for the Senate, who are going to be amazing if they get elected. Also Brooks in Maryland, the amazing woman in Delaware. But they all have one thing in common, Molly, is they have white media consultants. Oh interesting, and they control the diaspora within the party apparatus. Now there is
emerging amazing black and Latino on firms. But it's so hard to break into these top races because you have to show, as you should, that you could handle a race like that, So you need to have work history doing that. And it also becomes this place where, well, if you don't hire me for the first one, I never can have the experience. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where there's not a lot of folks doing this at the highest level who could be making sure
that we're doing it right with black or Latino. And I take it a step further with AAPI. This is a problem within the party that we need to fix now at the party committee levels. Let's say the DNC,
the d TRIPLC, and the Senate Campaign Committee. They know they have a Latino problem, and they're doing the right things by hiring a lot of Latino consultants, hiring lots of Latino staffers because they're going to make sure even if the campaigns are doing a shitty job at talking to brown and black people, the party committee can make up with that with a lot of money and a lot of TV, radio and digital targeted to those subgroups
of voters. And that's how I think we actually went back the House and have a shot at the Senate.
Yeah, no, I agree. So debunk something for me because there's a lot of anxiety on the Democratic side, not just me but all my friends, and there's a lot of like this thinking that Trump has this masculinity that's very appealing to young men. Debunk that for me or don't.
Well, I can tell you this that Donald Trump and Joe Biden have a problem with voters. I've been doing this for thirty four years, and I've never seen two nominees underperform their House or Senate parties, nominees or incumbents in states like these two people do. So I am a Democrat and a yellow dog Democrat, going back Molly to when I work for Anne Richards in Texas. I seen a few elections, right, And I say that to show how long in the tooth I am, and I
have never seen like folks double haters. As you can say, they're double haters and they don't like either one of them.
But that's not really true, right. They're bored with Biden, but they hate Trump. That crow.
What the point I want to make there is that this third party thing is a real problem in certain states and the more states that RFK Junior gets on could be something. Now the people flock their no, but the margins are going to be so small. And to actually answer your question about the masculinity piece, is that you have groups of people that have come of age since twenty sixteen who just want something different. And it's not as much in focused groups, this masculinity piece. It's
the piece of and people they deem it that. But take it from a non college educated Mexican redneck here on this microphone who says that it's more about warning and being able to break things or say things that people are scared to say. Folks miscategorize that as toxic masculinity or masculinity, when in fact it's just people that are tired of the same old, buttoned up politician saying the same old catchphrases and they like somebody who's just different,
who don't give a shit about what they're saying. It could be fascist in off the cuff and talking about sharks and all the crazy shit that Donald Trump talks about. But there's a small piece of the electric especially young men of color and other folks like that, who are just looking for they're so desperate for something different that even him breaking shit is something that they're at least curious about.
Right. No, I mean I think that's right. And you're basically talking about the charisma factor, right.
And then when you have a group of professionals who are some of my best friends and they do amazing work. When I talk about well meaning white consultants, they're literally the top of the heap of doing great work. But there's little pieces that we miss when we run campaigns. I never graduated from college. I went to work in a factory when I was nineteen. I had a baby when I was nineteen who I had full cust he for now for thirty five years, I have a different
vision of life. Does it make it better or worse? No, But it makes me when I talk to people, I'm closer to the paint. I remember going to a payday lender to get money to make it to payday so
I could buy dippers for that boy. So when I'm writing an ad, Molly, it just looks a little different than the same group of very highly educated professional some of the best in the business TV makers, because I'm just looking through a different lens and I think sometimes that's where we miss around the edges of having the same message to the same group of people because the same posters writing the same poll for every candidate, right.
Right, right, right, that's a really good point. What do you think this sort of solve is with Biden when you're going against Trump?
I say, contrast, contrast, contrast, and make sure that there's no such thing as a gootv universe.
And for all of you at home, you follow Molly, you know that means get out the vote.
There's groups of voters suit you don't worry about talking to till the very end because you just know they're going to be good Democrats. Now, those of us who work in data know that if somebody votes in a Democratic primary and their regular primary voters, we probably don't have to talk to them in the general because they're
just going to show up. But we need to take more of those filters off and talk to a bigger group of people because we're just not operating in your mama or Daddy's Democratic Party anymore, and we're losing so many folks because we've over let me make up a word, we've overdatified our elections. Where we've come up with models of people who should be acting like their friends and neighbors to make sure that we run campaigns more efficiently, which is important, but we leave out swaths of people
that we've not talked to in a while. And if you just go talk to them, and what I mean by talk to them is send them a mail piece, send them a text message, and call them on the phone and say there's a difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and here's just a few things that are very different in drawing a contrast, and that's how you get them and you win this election. Is drawing that contrast to a li larger group of people, not just
your modeled scientific universe. Of this small little group of folks that your data scientists team have told you are the most likely persuadable voters, but I'm talking about that twenty four year old kid who may have only voted in one election in their lifetime, who probably is thinking about setting this out or skipping that, like, have that conversation.
We can do that now through the text messaging and other things that are out there where we've just stopped not doing that enough, And I think that's how we come back.
Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you. Very interesting and important. Thank you.
No my pleasure. I just need to know where to send the invoysh for this thing.
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