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, and Gavin Newsom has called a special session to protect California's liberal policies. We have such a great show for you today. The levers Dave Siota looks back at the campaign and tries to parse the data and show us what he's learned. Then we'll talk to pollster John Delavolpi about the youth vote and how challenging it is to connect with young people.
But first the news, So Malli, while don't we go over some of the things we're seeing with how the election is checking out? What are you seeing here?
We're just going to sort of update because not everything is counted. California takes forever, but I just want to get you guys up to speed on the House. Right now, Republicans have won two hundred and five seats. Democrats have won one hundred and ninety one. There are thirty nine races under sided. A party needs to get to two eighteen seats to win the majority.
This is like my math nightmare.
So Republicans need only to win one third of the remaining thirteen races, Well, Democrats need to win two thirds.
That's twenty six.
Because a lot of these races are in California, there is a real chance that Democrats can win a lot of them.
Whatever it looks like.
Even if Democrats do win the House, which is possible but less and less likely by the day, it'll still be closed. And you'll remember that last session Republicans had the House but a very very slim, almost ungovernable majority, which ended up being quite good for Democrats and meant they were able to get very little done. So we'll keep following on that, and then I just want to do a few minutes on what we saw from the election and just so we can learn from it.
So there's some dalysis here about the Latito vote, since a lot of people are very confused about that.
What do you see here?
Six percent is the percentage of Latino's that Trump won. That's according to recent exit polls. It's the highest number for Republican presidential candidate in at least fifty years. Think about that. It's eclipsing George W. Bush's forty four percent in two thousand and four. So Trump also won a majority fifty five percent of Latino men. I think it's important to learn from. So Trump did, in fact win
Latino men by a large margin. He had a sixteen point margin of victory in Star County, Texas, the country's most heavily Latino county on the US Mexico border. He lost that same county in twenty sixteen by sixty points. Trump surged in a heavily Latino county near the border. These are people, some of them probably will end up in deportation camps if these deportation camps happened, but they
still voted for Trump. Another really interesting data point. These are all from the Washington Posts, and you should definitely check out this article from very smart data journalist Aaron Blake. But another really interesting statistic is that Vice President Harris had a forty seven percent favorability rating and exit polls versus Trump's forty six. She may have actually been more liked by voters, but these voters still decided to vote for Trump, So make it make sense.
It doesn't make sense to me.
And then Trump won the one in ten these sort of double haters, those are the voters who don't like either candidate. He won one in ten of those voters. It's the third time he's done that where he's won the double haters. He carried them by seventeen points in twenty sixteen, twenty seven points in twenty twenty, and it reinforces that they don't mind his character issues for what reason? It is not disqualifying to them. So now let's talk about undocumented immigrants.
S numbers are pretty alarming. What are you seeing here?
One of the things that is interesting is that in voc has, fifty two percent si undocumented immigrants should be offered a chance to apply for legal status, versus only forty seven percent who said they shouldn't be deported. But fully one in four of those who support legalization for immigrants voted for Trump anyway. So what this means is that a lot of people voted for Trump who may
end up getting deported. It seems as if in exit poles, fifty four percent of voters agreed that Trump was too extreme, but one in nine who viewed Trump as too extreme still voted for him. Again, they thought he was too extreme, but they voted to make him president. So obviously we have a problem here. The math is bad, This is not good. A lot of people voted for a guy who's going to do some crazy stuff, and maybe they
thought it wouldn't happen to them. I don't know, but I think that's a really important and also just insane and also, like you know, it cannot all fall to the mainstream media to explain Trump is, especially when Trump is such an effective messager on his own.
I want to take another minute.
To talk to everybody, because I feel like on the last episode, I talked to everyone about the things I got wrong and how I felt that I had really let people down and was way too rosy a picture, and perhaps that I was affected by my own media silas. I want to take a minute now to talk about the good stuff, because there's some actually good stuff.
You know.
It fucking sucks to have watched.
Another female presidential candidate be defeated by someone who at this point now is a felon. But there are a few bright spots, and I want to share them with you guys so that we all don't go crazy. One of the bright spots is that Democrats held a lot of Senate seats and it was this very very bad Senate map for Democrats and they had to defend a lot of seats and they were able to do it. So some of the seats they defended, which is just great, are Jackie Rosen is going back to the Senate and
that is incredible. She is from the state of Nevada. So you had Jackie Rosen and that is just great. And then you had Tammy Baldwin going back to the Senate, which is another really great seat that Democrats could have lost. So basically what it looks like is Laura Gillen, who has come on this podcast. She's a member of Congress. She has flipped a seat that belonged to d Esposito, so that's very good, and that's New York's fourth congressional district.
Then also Jackie Roe will keep her seat in the Senate. Then the other Senate seats are there's also Josh Riley is going to he's a member of Congress and he's winning New York's nineteenth so that's also a flip.
So there are some good things here.
And you know, it's a bummer that Bob Casey is not coming back. And also Michigan Elisa Slotkin is going to the Senate and she is a Michigan Democrat, and that is really great. So there's a lot to feel good about in this map, and just go from there. I think everyone should not despair and we should all just keep going. Dave Serota is the founder of lever News, the creator of the podcast The master Plan, and the author of the screenplay Don't Look Up.
Welcome back, Dave, Thank you, thanks for having me.
Yeah. I took like two days of like not sleep, being on television but also not sleeping and being in that weird fugue state. And then I was like, who are the people I need to talk to right away? And you were high on my list. I want you to just talk about where you are right now after this twenty twenty four cycle, and you know wherever you want that to go.
I feel like I've been here before. I feel like I was here twenty years ago after the John Kerry campaign. I actually went back and looked at the writing I did around the time. Back then, I had worked for a guy who was running in a red state, guy who was a farmer rancher, Brian Schweitzer, who became the Governor of Montana as a outsider candidate. On a night, an election night that was one of the worst election nights for the Democratic Party. That was the night that
George Bush got reelected. And I went back and I looked at the exit polls, by the way, and Bush won voters below one hundred thousand dollars and above fifty thousand dollars. So there was a maybe not as abrupt, a class alignment back to the Republicans, a working class alignment to the Republicans. It was similar. And I bring this all up to say that we have been here before.
We were here in two thousand and four, we were here in twenty sixteen, we were actually almost here in twenty twenty, and we are now here in twenty twenty four. And I think there's a theme through all of this that at this point I'm like annoyed and angry that I feel like I'm saying the same thing for twenty years, right, because I went back and I looked at what I wrote, and it was all about how the arithmetic of democratic politics does not work in a unfortunately a downwardly mobile
economy where the working class is getting bigger. The Democrats theory of the wine track of affluent suburbanites.
Well, it's just not enough people.
It's just not enough people. It's not enough, And so then you get to the question of, okay, well, why is the Democratic Party's formula upper middle class, affluent urban nights and people of color. Why does the Democratic Party want that to be its formula. Why does the Democratic Party see as the key swing demographic disaffected upper middle
class Republicans. Why do they keep clinging that the quote from Chuck Schumer from twenty sixteen is the one that rings true in this election, which was Chuck Schumer said back then, Hey, I'm not worried about Western I'm paraphrasing here, I'm not worried about Western Pennsylvania. For every Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania will win two disaffected Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and will replicate that across state
after state after state. That's been the Democratic Party's formula. So you have to ask the question, Okay, why did the Democrats see as their key swing vote disaffected upper middle class Republicans and not the Western Pennsylvania blue collar Democratic archetype. And I think the answer is because if the Democratic Party leaders are constantly trying to appeal to some sort of voting electorate and also appease their billionaire
and corporate elite donors. It's easier to make cultural appeals to country club Republicans on reproductive rights, LGBTQ, diversity, democracy norms. It's easier to make those appeals to those country club Republicans without having to fear that you're going to offend the donor class. If you don't want to offend the donor class, then you want to try to cobble together some coalition that means your electoral appeal isn't offensive to
the donor class. And so country club Republicans aren't offended by cultural appeals. But the problem is, as we've just discussed, there's not enough voters there. So if you're going to make an economic populist case to the working class, like a real case, you're going to offend your donors, right, and so that's why the Democrats have been averse to doing it.
So I want to pause for a second here because I think there's a lot of good stuff in what you're saying. Because everybody's a little fragile right now, or at least I'm a little fragile, I want to just say two things which I think are true, which is one Harris did an incredible job considering where she came in. She raised a billion dollars, she got voters excited, She did everything she could in a very tough situation. Certainly, in my mind, she really did. But I see what
you're saying, and I think that it's really important. And the other thing I want you to want you to talk about, which is really I think the crux of all of this is that it's easier to motivate your base. And this is what Donald Trump discovered in twenty sixteen and then replicated in twenty twenty four is it's easier to motivate your base than it is to try to convince other people to go after Republicans.
So can you explain to us a little bit about that.
Well, I certainly agree that it's easier to motivate your base than it is to convert.
People with chain. Yeah.
Yeah, Look, I think Kamala Harris ran I don't even know how to characterize. I don't think she ran an awful campaign. I also think that she ran as a generic Democrat, So I think that was the strategy, just any generic Democrat that doesn't have a kind of unique problem like Biden.
Right, But she came in so late and she inherited.
Yeah, and so I see the threat. I would say this though, and look twenty twenty hindsight always, but I said this right when she was nominated, which is, you can try to run a risk averse campaign and just be the generic Democrat, but there is no risk of her. That's a risk on to itself.
Right now. That is a very good point. You know, if you look at.
The structural obstacles in this race for the incumbent party, inflation, people are unhappy.
Low approval rating for Biden.
Right like, whether that's her fault or not, those are just structural impediments that we know are impediments to every candidate running in this situation. So there's an argument that you have to risk aversion is just accepting those impediments and thinking somehow history is going to be different. I would argue again twenty twenty hindsight, but I argued it, then you have to make big risks in a situation like that, And what are those risks? I mean, what
were the risks that you could have taken. I mean I had suggested as an example. I don't think this would have won the race for her, but you know, put out there a specific proposal, don't You don't have to put out twenty eight thousand proposals campaign on two or three things that are so crystal clear in how they will benefit the working class and then run around
and just only talk about that. And I had suggested at the time paid family leave, right like Tim Waltz said that should be the top priority of the Democratic Party right before he was nominated. You could just like, hey, vote for me, you get paid family of That's it, right, Like that, Like it's very I don't think anybody can answer. Could have answered, Hey, if Kamala Harris wins the app time, at the average voter, what does it mean for me?
I get like it's not Donald Trump, and like there's this thing called democracy, but like what do I actually get directly? And I don't think that question was answered. I don't even think the campaign really made an effort to really seriously answer that. I know they had TV ads on about price gouging. I know they had TV ads about some basic economic stuff. You know, there's two media worlds that the voter is immersed in. There's the paid television ads, then there's the what is the campaign
doing the candidate doing on the campaign trail. So you had these anti price gouging ads on TV and reproductive rights ads, and then you had like the candidate running around with Liz Cheney, and you had the face of the Democratic Party on cable TV being a billionaire Mark Cuban, and you had a Democratic convention in which you had a billionaire governor bragging about being a billionaire. The average voter probably walks away from this being like, I don't
even know what the hell that is? What is this picture? Right? At least with Trump, he's telling a story. He's telling a clear, crystal clear. I mean, he's incoherent, but like his story is basically, you know, a story of grievance, a story of the government getting in the way the economy, government run by elites who don't care about you, right, Like, it's at least a story. And so you know, I'm not try to say this was an easily winnable race. It was not. But I think this Democrats having a
problem connecting with the working class. I go back to, like, this is what I've been talking about and a lot of us have been talking about for twenty years, and I'm burying the lead here because I think the thing that we have to wrestle with is if you look at the exit polling, who do the Democrats do worsd
with overall working class voters? Obviously men and Latinos. The Democrats had within its midst a movement that almost won its nomination, a movement that was strongest among those demographics Bernie Sanders when he ran in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty. And I'm not saying, like, you know, he should have run in twenty twenty, I'm not saying any of that. What I'm saying is is that the Democratic Party, it has ostracized Bernie Sanders. It is ostracized the people who
ran Bernie Sanders campaigns. It has ostracized the Bernie bros. I'm putting that in quotes. I mean literally, they genderized the establishment of the Democratic Party, genderized Bernie supporters by calling them Bernie brose. And then they wake up in twenty twenty four wondering, hey, why do we not do so well among working class male voters.
You did this, yes, but our listeners are not necessarily those people.
They are for sure, No, No, I'm right, for sure.
Wanting to catch up on What's happening. But I do think those are really good points. And the democratic establishment one of the things when you look at Harris, she lost that vote. Right, These young men, the Joe Rogan crowd, were very winnable for Bernie, And in fact, Bernie went on the Joe Rogan podcast and Joe Rogan sort of semi endorsed him.
Right, Yep, that's exactly right. And by the way, there was controversy about Bernie going on Joe Rogan. There was controversy about Bernie going on Fox News, the Fox Newstown. Oh he can't. One of the lessons here is you go where the voters are.
Yeah.
Absolutely, that's the candidate's responsibility. This idea that you know, we're expressing our values by going on Joe Rogan and saying therefore Joe Rogan is No, that's not how this works.
Right.
The people who listen to Joe Rogan are not going to listen to CNN. Right, that's a choice. If you want to get in front of those voters, you go on Joe Rogan.
That's exactly right. And I would say there's a bigger issue here we're talking about media, which is I think that the Democratic Party, Democratic elected officials, the sort of the infrastructure of the Democratic Party is obsessed with getting onto and building out its communications strategy through traditional communications platforms,
cable TV, news, newspapers. They're obsessed with talking on platforms and through conduits that are only talking to the voters that, by the way, the Democrats are winning sort of upper middle class, affluent, educated, highly informed voters, and they're not all that interested. They haven't been all that interested in engaging with independent media, alternate platforms, and that's a huge
disadvantage right clearly. And the Republicans, they've spent years cultivating and building out that infrastructure exactly.
And if you look at this campaign.
He went on Theovon, he went on Joe Rogan, he went on all of these podcasters who speak to this group, which Harris lost. I want to go back to this idea we talked about before, because there's so much of the Democratic idea and I think it may have worked to some in twenty twenty, was to reach across the aisle to these disaffected Republicans. But now the disaffected Republicans are by de facto either don't vote or vote for Democrats, and the Republican party itself is now maga.
Yeah, this question of who the real swing voters are is the central question here moving forward. This, I hope, is the end of a Democratic party that sees the primary target swing voters as country club Republicans. The primary swing voter in America are working class people generally, that is, the.
Who were already Democrats, who are not showing up.
Yes, who are either not showing up or voted for Trump but have voted before for the Democrats. We did learn this lesson in twenty sixteen, right all the counties that voted twice for Obama and then voted for Donald Trump. These were a lot of them were working class locales in the country that had been hit really hard in the financial crisis and in the recession that followed. Those are the target swing voters, and the Democrats need to
reorient their party to be talking to those voters. And I think it's also worth saying this is worth asking some difficult questions about what those swing voters see when they see Democrats. And my view is is what they see, let's talk a little bit about you can tell what the Republicans are trying to make them see. In Donald Trump's ads, for instance, during NFL games. Right, Donald Trump is trying to talk to working class voters when he's
advertising in NFL games. My belief is this all of the anti trans ads, the weirder the ad got right, Like she wants to give sex change operations to people who are in prisoners. What is that really saying?
I mean, people are getting your free stuff.
I think it's deeper. Actually, I think it's obviously at one level, it's a dog whistle to sort of bigots, right, people who just you know, sort of the maga bass, the real base. But I think it's also this, it's also saying to people who are not bigots or who don't think much about any of that stuff. Hey, the Democrats are so obsessed with specific demographic groups. They don't care about you. They don't see you as anything other than you know, whatever demographic group you can check on
a piece of paper. We the Republicans look at you as you know, there are people, everyone's everybody. And what they're saying is the Democrats is a party of small, niche groups, and they don't see you, the regular average American, the so called is Nixon called it the silent majority. And I think that all speaks to Democrats can say, oh, well, that's just racism, that's just bigotry, and that you know, we'll never see.
But that's not really what it is.
No.
I think it means the democratic messaging, the Democratic brand has to return back to a brand that says universal ideas, universal programs are good on their own merits and don't have to be cast as for this group or for that group. Molly, I want to tell you a story about twenty twenty. It was twenty nineteen, because I think this is really important. I was working for Bernie Sanders and he was out and talking about Medicare for all. He was in an event. It was an event about
black women, issues of interest to black women. I can't remember the name of the group, and he was asked, what are you going to do? And I'm paraphrasing here, you know, what would you do for What are your plans for the black community? Et cetera, et cetera. And he said a couple things and then he really focused
in on Medicare for all. Now, I don't care where anybody who's listening what they think about Medicare for all, but he made a very universal argument about how you know, the healthcare crisis, and he was essentially booed because the idea was that he wasn't specifically talking about a specific policy program that would only help one specific set of people. In other words, the universalism of what he was pushing was seen as sort of insensitive to the specific needs
of a specific demographic group. Now, obviously specific demographic groups do have specific needs and do have specific grievances that are different. But I think my point is is that if the Democratic Party becomes hostile to the idea of universal class based peals, that is a fundamental problem. It gives the Republicans a way to say the Democrats don't care about all people, They only care about specific so
called interest groups or demographic groups. And I think Donald Trump exploited that, and the working class of this country reacted to that. And by the way, the asterisk is, even with the Democrats being perceived as that they did worse among those specific demographic groups in the voting, even those specific demographic groups don't like to feel pandered to.
No, I agree, a man, very very very very interesting.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, thanks so much for having me.
John Delivolpi is a polster and author of Fight How gen Z is channeling their fear and passion to save America as well as the substackt jdv on gen Z.
Welcome back to Fast Politics, John dela Volpi.
I love, it's great to be back with you, Mollie. Thanks.
So I'm going to.
Start by explaining to our listeners the last time we were together, because I think it's important.
I came to.
A panel you had at the Harvard Institute of Politics and I am seated and it was you and me and John anzelone who's another very smart pollster, and two young students who are college students at Harvard and who are involved in the institute, and then the head of Emily's list.
Correct.
We talked about the coming election, and at the end of our talk, we all weighed in on what we thought was going to happen, and I think you were really right. These kids, by the way, also thought Trump was going to win. So it did show that young people were not having it even then. So explain to us a little bit about what you saw through this process, and maybe you want to start with Biden.
Sure, Well, you ended that forum with us asking us for predictions, and my prediction was to the students, specifically in the audience, that we need to be prepared for any outcome. And the reason I said that was I didn't feel comfortable predicting a Trump victory at that moment. Though that's clearly kind of what you and I were talking about, I think before and afterwards, right. But the reason I operated it in that way is because I didn't feel like our students were prepared for this outcome.
I didn't feel that my own kids, you know, in the members of our community, were prepared for this outcome because the media that they consumed, the media that their friends and their neighbors and their peers consume, indicated that there's nothing to worry about, that democracy was on the ballot, that reproductive health was virtually the only issue that mattered to younger people, and therefore, how could there be an each choice other than rejecting Trump and voting for our Harris.
And what I tried to do is just to say, hold up, let's reconsider who we're really talking about here. So that was the point of that, right, And when we talk about Biden, this is someone who produced Obama like support among younger people four years ago long and what I mean by that is he received sixty percent of all the votes cast among Americans under the age of thirty one. But what he also did was something that Obama never dated. He helped produce record level turnout
and participation. The first time in recorded history, we have over a majority fifty three plus percent of all eligible young people voted in the twenty twenty election. And for those on college campuses and younger people to collectorre grady was it was over sixty percent. So that is where we collectively started. When we really think about the first significant kind of gen Z kind of experience in presidential campaigns.
Whenever we have conversation, I always remind people that it's because of younger people in twenty twenty that Biden was elected.
Of course, there are a lot of, you know, ways in which you can cut this data, but it is true that President Trump won everybody over the age of forty five, and it was that combination of record turnout in twenty point margin that elected Biden in the sixth the in the five battleground states that flipped from red to blue, Democrats generally start in the mid fifties with younger people, the job is can you push it to sixty.
When you push it to sixty percent, mollet you win the loy Else when you fall below sixty percent, you join the legs of Al Gore, Hylary Clinton, John Kerrey find public servants not presidents.
Yeah, that's a really important point. So he had that support and he really lost it.
Right, He had the support in What is incredibly frustrating to me, Molly, is that he did what younger people ask him to do. Okay, And this is the thing that makes me so frustrated, is that the couple of years he despite Republicans not supported in the Supreme Court, right, he relieved over one hundred and seventy billion dollars of student debt. He passed the first five you know, he led.
That's the first byparison, Gun Violence Prevention Act, and two generations right, historic investment and climate But as you know, I spent you know, in ordinary number of hours every single week working and talking to younger people, and very few people know or appreciate that. So that was I think the one of the most significant factors of young people essentially losing faith in the Biden Harrison mistraction and the Democratic Party is they didn't see the receipts, you know,
the checks for cash. They didn't see the receipts. They didn't see the impact that their vote made. I think that's a major part of it. And of course you have on the other side, you know, the stress around economics. But the failure to communicate and I know it's hard, but the failure to communicate that he led and successfully accomplished more for younger people than any president problem in my lifetime is a key part, I think to understanding where we are today.
Yes, so let's let's do more on that.
Is that inability to message with to that group the accomplishments, is that a media failure, a communications failure? I mean that group young men who went for Biden, Like he managed to get to those young.
Men, right, Trump was able to, yeah.
And take them away from Biden. Talk about that shift.
I'm not saying, you know, one of the most challenging things to do in media today, in communications today, right and survey research today, is to connect and talk to younger people. You know, is the fractioned media landscape, social media level of authenticity you know, certainly Biden's not is not native to any of these platforms. But we're talking
about the president of the United States of America. Okay, it is required that the White House and the party that supports him, Molly, finds a way to communicate more effectively to more Americans. When you don't, this is what happens. Okay, you lose people who you have no business losing to an anti Democratic, you know, a Republican contanger. That's what happens. It's not easy, but you need to find a way. You have all the resources in the world at your disposal.
We got into this interesting exchange actually on our panel, Molly, right, Republicans had x number of dollars more money spent. Well, not this cycle. You know, the Democrats had far more resources from Republicans, and of course they controlled half of Congress and the White House as well. So there's that can be a hard but you know, I'm not making you can't make any any any excuses. But listen, let's take a lesson of how Trump did it. And by away,
Kamala Harris did a pretty good job of this. Well, you know, certainly over the first you know, undred, you know, sixty days and over the entire campaigns. She did a damn good job of this.
And I mean, I want to stop us for a minute here and say, Harris did absolutely the best anyone could do with the situation. She inherited, Like, if we see anything, it's that she she got in there.
She was a really good orator. She raised a.
Billion dollars, She had huge I mean, like, it was not like she was in the greatest starting place, right, I mean the incumbent had and Biden had a forty one percent approval rating. I mean, for her to win would have been a humongous left.
And I give her so much credit for becoming a far better politician than she wasn't when I first got to know her, you know now shleep back in twenty nineteen, Far far better. I don't think there's no question that she couldn't have managed that rollout any any better. But the political and the communication side, right, I thought the convention was brilliant, you know. Her prosecution of the case
during the debate again a plus. I wish I think she wishes as well that she had a better prepared answer on the view regarding you know where ever, voters might find some distance between her Biden. I do think that hurt her, if we're being honest. But the capacity that she had, like Trump, was to use social media to connect with people outside of these kind of political algorithms that you and I spent so much of our
time in. Right. You know what Trump was able to do is he was able to extend his his relationship with the younger voters through connections right to Dana White and UFC, or to Dave port Novoliam Bar School or the melt Points, etcetera, etcetera. Well, Kama was able to do that.
With call her Daddy, but not quite enough.
Yeah, but also through the joy of that somber of her dancing. I've been enjoying, you know, cooking and mused and those sorts of things. That's important to kind of make that connection is that's how you build confidence and trust to have a more meaningful conversation later on about Okay, which policy is going to be more effective? Right for my economic future? You need to make that connections first.
Yeah, top line, this election for us, like ultimately and again state by state wasn't completely uniform.
We did see a lot of split ticket voting, right, Yeah.
We had been in an era I think Maule the last two presidential cycles, you can check me, but I think it's accurate to say there is only one instance of ticket splitting, I believe, and the last two cycles, which was difference than the previous three cycles, where we
saw somewhere between seven and ten states tickets splitting. So one of the reasons, one of the reasons that I was not confident, you know, in terms of a Harris victory, it is because of that ticket splitting, and to me, that showed an election to it that basically kind of normalized Donald Trump, that people were making the choice of I can vote democrat, I can vote for him because I think it's going to improve the economy. But then I'll try to balance that with the point of my
democratics center. They saw some value in voting for him. It wasn't they didn't necessarily see, you know, the pure fascist tendencies that so many other Democrats saw. They saw the value in the economy. And I think he has normalized, you know, a big part of what he's doing. I think that explains a lot of tickets splitting and a lot of a reason that I was just not confident in a Harris pictory.
Yeah, so here are the things that I think are interesting. Tickets flitting then the house. It still seems like the house is going to be very tight. But that's pretty interesting. And also we saw she did grow vote chair with college educated women and rich people, right, So so I think.
One of the most are lemm statistics and atheists, well in the non religious perhaps atheists as well as a group. Right.
So basically, you know, I don't know a lot are the people that you know who are my friends at neighbors and Massachusetts's about right, and probably for you too in Manhattan, I don't know, right, But but these but this is the echo chamber that we're talking about, and in the children and there for the parents of the children, you know, on college campuses, who would try to prepare
for this. You know, I think it was you know, you can cut this so many different ways, right, you know, I saw someone alsis showing a one point one percent shift across at ballet ground in the States. She wins the blue wall a one point one percent shift. This is winnable that I don't believe that. Yes, were there headwinds with inflation and his favorability, Yeah, headwinds you know inflation.
You know, though it was getting better headwinds on his approval rating, of course, headwinds in fact, you know you're doing a one hundred billion dollars started up, right in one hundred and seven or eight days or something.
Absolutely, I still think this is winnable. And the biggest, biggest criticism I have is the Democratic Party's instituial the lack of institutional investments in listening, okay, and investing in listening to the people who Trump is clearly communicating with. Okay, I'm talking about younger people, clearly Hispanic specifically Hispanic men. Right, we saw like a thirty point shift there as well
as as well as rural voters and others. Democrats seem to have a good grasp with the African American community. It could always be stronger, but it feels like she did really well there.
Right, she didn't lose black men.
I mean the reason she lost and tell me if this is correct, is Hispanic men, white non college educated.
Men and women.
Yeah, and listen, if you take the US both from one from fifty five percent, which is where I think what she got to sixty percent, well that adds a point and a half.
You win.
And you know, again, Democrats in particular continue to make progress with seniors, you know.
Which is amazing, Which is amazing, and.
It's important, which makes all this, in my view, all the more frustrated.
Yeah.
No, it is very shitty, I mean, but it is also very interesting. So how much do you think that Gaza and Israel affected this?
Let's look at from a couple different perspectives. I think that in all of the polling that I've conducted, and I've asked a question dozens of times and dozens of venues of different word choices, Gaza and Israel is generally near the bottom of all list of priorities. However, it doesn't mean it's not a priority, right, And that is I think where we said somehow we sometimes misinterpret things.
I think overwhelmingly younger people voted some combination of economic concerns, trying to get a sense of economic independence and financial stability, and of course reproductive health, abortion rights, you know, freedoms more generally. But I kind of think about Gaza and Israel like climate change, and that climate change is very rarely at the top of a list of priorities. But if a younger person doesn't see their values on climate
reflected by the person they're learning for. It's really hard to motivate them, Okay. And I think that's probably the case with Israel and Gaza that I do think, yes, it wasn't the driving issue, but I think that when we look at turnout, it was higher in ballot ground than a non background. The body was depressed, and I'm pretty confident that, you know, Israel and Gaza played a role. I believe we'll see once the final exit polls are
into that she she might have lost. So you vote in Michigan, you know, and we know clearly there's a significant.
Partment and she lost. You're born yeah, yeah, right, but.
But the thing is probably right, like you don't need to like when you're a younger person in Michigan. It's certainly in the greater you know, dear born Detroit, Oakland, you know county, et cetera. Like you're connected to that community.
You may not be from that community, right, but you know someone or you know someone who's been affected by this, right, So you know, it's something that's been brought up in all the focus groups that I do out there, and I'm sure that's certainly in fact when it's one percent virtue of everything that matters, right.
Yeah, no, exactly, Just give me two more minutes.
On Anecdotally, since you are at a university, you saw young people not as engaged with this campaign.
These are the things I saw this year that struck me. Okay. The first one is the first series of focus groups I did in February and March of this year. And I recruit focus groups, you know, I generally do bigger groups of town hall's. We've got Democrats and Republicans and independence often in the same group. Often we will do other groups as well. But in those early groups, you know, and we were in Michigan, then we're you know, we're
across all the battleground states, Western Pia, et cetera. I found that younger people were much more confident voicing their vote for Trump than Biden. Right, Independence, Democrats were flipping. So I just found that that was people were more confident saying publicly were Trump than even Democrats who are
wing for Biden. That struck me, okay. One. The second thing that struck me Molly's in these earliest conversations, Okay, women would tell me they cared deeply, of course about reproductiveile. But you know what, they might care more about keeping that apartment and not being homeless. We talked about this is barely a focus group that can that I conduct where I don't have a member or more who is
or had not been homeless. So that is something again when we're trying to understand how could someone possibly be for Trump who was younger. Well, when you're on the verge of not having a home, you know, and someone tells you I can fix this, I will put money into your pockets. I'm sorry. That's a really strong argument and we need to respect that.
And my criticism is you're not.
Going to pick that up, Molly, okay, through deeper analytics and modeling, You're not. You're only going to pick that up by listening and engage it. And by the way, Kamala Harris has done that. She spent a good part of the last year traveling to college campus get into she knows that.
Yeah, now, none of this is about Paris, right, she got in too late for it to be about her. I mean, the fact that she was able to just do what she was able to do was such a testament to her strength as a candidate and her ability but just is this is a really really important point.
John.
I hope you will come back and talk to us more about this.
I hope so too. I really so much appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today.
Thanks. No, no moment, Jesse Cannon my junk fest.
You know, it's hard for me to ever be a fan of Eddie these type of guys.
But Jerome Powell not so much.
No, this is actually really good and it's my moment of fuckery because I think this is how you're supposed to behave when faced with trump Ism. A journalist asked Jerome Powell if he would resign if Trump asked him to.
Jerome Pal's the chairman of the FED.
It's a very important job, and Trump wants to make the FED an arm of his campaign that will fuck up the United States economy beyond repair. It'll make the United States economy like Trump's steaks. So I'm really glad that Jerome Palell said this, said, do you believe the president has the power to fire or demote you? And Jerome pal just responded, not permitted under the law. That's what all of us need to do. No more. You know, don't be the Jeff Bezos, who says, thank you so much, sir.
You know, don't comply in advance. The only way to stop Trumpism is to resist. And that was very good about Jerome pal So. I hope we'll see more federal employees do stuff like that. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.