Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and Congress and Matt Gates has leaked a draft of emotion for Majority Leader McCarthy to vacate his speaker chief. What he left it on a baby's changing table.
We have a.
Star studded show today. White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zeitz talks to us about the Biden Administration's move to negotiate drug prices for the American people. Then we'll talk to pollster John Delavalpi about the grains of salt we should be taking with many of these polls that are lighting up the op eds these days. But first we have the host of the Lawrence O'Donnell shows, and Miss Senbyc's own Lawrence O'Donnell. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Lawrence o'donnald.
Thank you. There's a little flaw in the booking system here.
Oh yeah, because when.
You asked me to do this, you never ask is there anything you'd like to talk about?
Yes?
Because the answer the answer would always be no. So I begin with nothing to say, okay, and so it's kind of a game to see if we can pull anything out of thin air for me.
To say, it's funny because when I was just about to record him, thinking like, poor Lawrence has to deal with our American political system right now, I mean, I just the kind of cirrus. I honestly just want your take.
Well, I just saw Jamel Bowie's latest piece about how unbelievably ridiculous is He charitably did not use the word childish for punditry to have ever talked about, oh, you know, Biden should not run for a second term, or Kamala how should be dumped from the ticket, and these things that were always ludicrous every single day they were said. And one of the things that that comes from is that when your job is writing about politics, and I
mean politics, not government, and there's a huge difference. Government is a huge and complex subject that requires career study, and politics is a game that you can get up to speed on in less than a baseball season. And your opinion is of exactly the same value as anyone who's been throwing around such opinions for thirty years. And that is not to in any way to mean the value of the new opinions. It's just to say that
they're all ridiculous. You don't get better at it if you are talking about and predicting in politics and just politics and campaigning and all of that sort of stuff. I've never seen anyone get better at it. I've never seen anyone be better at it in their twenty fifth year than in their first year, because it is a goofy, mostly uninformed, guessing game of idle minds that have to guess about something because they aren't authorities on anything.
I could go on and on.
I read that same piece and I had almost all of the same thoughts, and I did wonder why there wasn't more talk just about the power of incumbency, And because I had written about this, I also was thinking about In that Jonathan Jade piece, he talks about the four presidents who had been primaried and what happened to them.
I didn't see that piece, but primaries against incumbent presidents do have a relatively short history. It's a thing that kind of started, you know, in my lifetime, in nineteen sixty eight, and the Democratic Party, the professionals in the Democratic Party, the potential future presidential candidates in the Democratic Party would have to have taken the defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden lightly in order to decide, now,
let's mess with the formula that did that. Let's four years later have a big Democratic primary, which, as you know, is what political reporters want right desperately, West Berkley want to do that. They want this big primary with presumably everyone except Biden who ran last time, and more you know, Gavin news stars, you know, these kind of dream candidates who they dream about, and that that would be better
for the Democratic Party. While you have defendant Trump in four different courthouses around the country, it would be great to have this big, confused Democratic primary, in which, by the way, remember you would have to to some degree run against Joe Biden. You'd have to say here's what was in attic about the Biden presidency, that I will do better. And there actually isn't a candidate who's going to be able to run for president and the Democratic side and say this is what I will do better
than Joe Biden. There isn't one, because there isn't a thing within the jurisdiction of the presidency that Joe Biden hasn't actually done better than all you modern Democratic presidents. By modern I would say what I now mean by that is all presidents who included the environment and morphed into the subject of climate change as a serious subject. So that takes you back basically to Bill Clinton and forward.
It's really childish if you think that it's easy for the Democratic Party to just go through a nominating process and find a good candidate who is better than Biden, which is precisely what they set out to do last time. And pretty much everyone thought that there were candidates better than Biden, including me at the beginning. I looked at the polling and I looked at this situation, and I thought there were better candidates than Biden, and I was wrong.
The voters said, no, this is the candidate we want, This is the candidate we will support. This is the candidate who we will elect presidents. And there hasn't emerged somebody, either from the last field or now who could reasonably take that away from him. And Gavin Newsom knows that. Gavin Newsom knows. Among other things that Gavin Newsom knows is that if he did run a primary against Joe Biden,
he'd lose. And so you know, he might do very well he might get forty percent of the votes you know, in the primary.
But he'd lose.
He wouldn't get the nomination. And this is especially the time period, which is the year before the year of a presidential election, in which punditry is at its worst because it's it's desperately waiting for you know, voters to show up in Iowa, and waiting for them for New Hampshire and for South Carolina, and so in all the idle time that they have before the real votes start,
they come up with absolute nonsense. Imagine if the professional baseball season had a year of spring training before the first pitch is thrown out at Yankee Stadium for the actual season, I mean, baseball journalism would be a disaster.
Yeah, And that's what we're looking at right now. I think Trump has some legal problems. You talked about this yesterday. Give us the TLDR on that.
Jurisprudence is actually more predictable than politics. Okay, So I have dropped out of the political predicting field, so this is not political predicting. So one thing to know about the country you live in is that depending on the jurisdiction you're in the guilty verdict at trial rate hovers somewhere in the ninety percent. Okay, there's plenty of places
where it's ninety nine ninety eight. You know, the best places for defendants have like ninety two percent guilty verdict rates in trials that go to jury's Okay, that go all the way to jury's. So he's facing four different criminal juries, okay, with four different judges, one of whom, let's just presume in Florida, is going to try to tilt everything she can in Donald Trump's favor. That is
still a fairly limited way to influence the trial. The judge has influence, but other than outright dismissal of the case, which the judge is empowered to do, it's very difficult for the judge to steer the case and a criminal trial to a not guilty verdict. So you have to assume that minimum of three out of four of these
cases are going to end up in guilty verdicts. And the guilty verdict, as I've said before, is just the first day of the appeals process, and the appeals process in each case is going to take at least two years. But this is the most real thing that's happening both in our politics and in Donald Trump's life, and in this history of the Trump era, which is defendant Trump, which is why I concentrate on that on my show without ever mentioning a presidential poll. I couldn't care less
what the presidential polls say. I couldn't care less that someone in New Hampshire is mad because South Carolina is going to go first. I don't care. There's not a single voter in New Hampshire who's not going to vote for Joe Biden in the general election because the South Carolina went before New Hampshire for the nom press. It's all just child's play. That stuff, and this thing is real with real evidence that is ultimately going to to stop the madness of the Trump era. It won't stop
Donald Trump. He will be if he gets a sentence. The most he's going to get his home confinement because they're never going to figure out how to send the Secret Service to prison with him and all that. He will rant for the rest of his life, that's for sure. But those verdicts are going to be very, very very powerful definers and punctuation points on the era.
You know, I think that's a really good point and like maybe a little bit cinematically disappointing, but probably it's very unlikely that Trump will actually have bars in front of him.
I actually am a liberal, and a kind of light sentencing liberal. I've been in courtroom when I was ten years old watching someone be sentenced to the death penalty to be electrocuted. And in Massachusetts when that used to happen, the way they would read that verdict is the word death would come at the very end of the verdict and it would be this very specific thing where electrical current will pass through the body until death was very
very specific. I've seen people, you know, sentenced to life. I've seen them sentenced to twenty years. I've seen them sentenced to one year. I'm not a hard sentence guy. I'm not the guy to ask to put someone away for.
A long time.
So I got to say, you know, the sentences never matter to me as much as the verdicts do. And so if someone gets twenty years, I'm never going to complain and say they should have gotten life. And so but anyway, that's the long winded way of saying I'm very defendant sympathetic basically, but home confinement is going to be its own wonderful comedy. There's going to be Trump Home Confinement Broadway plays one hundred and fifty years now.
You know.
It took one hundred and fifty years for the British to finally write, you know, the Madness of King George, and it was a phenomenally wonderful play, but no playwright could see him that way. It took over one hundred years to see George that way, you know. And the thing about Trump is, you get every playwright's going to see him that way, like right now today.
But the ripening of it will go on forever.
I believe the Trump Home Confinement play of one hundred and fifty years from now will be better than the one ten years from now. It will just get better and better. It will give forever. There will be sitcoms, there will be It'll just be its own giant entertainment genre.
George Conway always says to me that he thinks that the Republican Party will have to die in order for it to get Trump out of his system. I don't want to ask you to predict the future, but it does seem like they are really addicted to Trump.
Well, you know, the corporate structure of the parties I think makes it functionally impossible for them to die, especially in a two two party system that the media supports energetically. The media needs it to be a two party system because they don't know how to cover a four party system or a seven party system as they have in other countries. It's just too many cameras, you know, too
many camera crews. They can't handle it. The structure of the two party system is probably unbreakable and probably has such enormous barriers to entry to a third party that I suspect there's going to be this thing we call the Republican Party going forward, and the question becomes who's
running it, who gets control of it. If you look at your examples of parties changing utterly, the Democratic Party is the example you have, and the Republican Party, the Republican Party was the most subt It just changed on a dime with the madness of Donald Trump and the madness by the way of millions upon millions upon millions of Republican voters who said, oh, this would be great, he should be present. Those people are nuts, and so no one knew they were nuts because they were offered
Mitt Romney or they were offered John McCain. So the same people who voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney then said, oh, no, I want to vote for the clown. I want to vote for the abject buffoon clown right, And so those voters have been exposed. And the question is the question is all about them. It's entirely about them, And what are they going to do when Trump is out of the picture and there are these Trump pretenders who are running.
And are the vives?
Are those kinds of candidates going to become like they used to be in the Republican primary, this temporary bubble of oh isn't that interesting and fun Herman Kain? You know that kind of character, And they will bubble for a month and a half on the polls, and then they'll go down and you'll end up back in the Romney, McCain Bush territory. I don't know who the Romney, mccains
and Bushes are. I know who all the clown characters, but I don't know who those Romney and McCain and type people can be in the future, because that's not who you're putting in the Senate. That's not who you're putting in the House representatives in the Republican Party. That's not really who their governors are. And it's not how you get on Fox. It's not how you get the
following in the past. Nineteen sixty eight was a big kind of an attempted revolution within the Democratic Party that people think didn't work.
They're wrong.
They just didn't understand the length of the time it takes for a revolution to work. It was a four year revolution.
You know.
It began in nineteen sixty eight and was victorious in nineteen seventy two with the most liberal nominee for the Democratic Party in history and George mcgovernment. And you can tell how much of a revolution it was because McGovern went on to lose forty nine states. That's how far the Democratic Party went from kind of a kind of establishment centrism to what was the current real leftism of
the Democratic Party. And you know, then it kind of pulled back a little bit in the direction of Jimmy Carter and was finding its way along and getting in fits and starts, sometimes with two steps forward and one step back, increasingly liberal to the point where Joe Biden is in fact the most liberal president in history, and no one would have told you. No one would have guessed, you know, in the nineteen seventies, you know that Joe Biden was going to grow up to be the most
liberal president in history. And so that's a slower evolution of a party, but it's all based on thinking and considering issues. And the first time that anyone in the United States Senate in the nineteen eighties or nineties, whatever, was the first time any one of those people heard the phrase gay marriage. Every one of them thought, well,
that's crazy, that's crazy, right, that's a joke. And eventually it becomes a taken for granted element, you know of the Democratic Party's range of sympathies and interests, and what that is is a party and politicians listening and thinking and having their gay relatives and having their gay friends and having you know, this story evolves publicly for them in ways in which they actually open their minds and learn. I can't think of an example of anything like that
in the Republican Party. I can't think of one, Like, not one thing did the Republican Party think their way through collectively, by the way, with the majority of the country who was also thinking their way through it to get to a new position. That's not anything the Republican Party's ever done. And so Stuart Stevens is my favorite
because he was Romney's campaign manager. He was the last campaign manager of a Republican presidential nominee who was saying and Stuart, you know, he was the most thoughtful person I know in that field. He's a novelist, he's a writer, he's a thinker. When he sat down to do his book about what happened that gave us Donald Trump, he just kept staring at it, the situation, and kept staring at the situation, kept staring at the situation. And it's all in the title of his book. It was all
a lie. And I never would have said that. I never would have said to you, Mitch McConnell was lying to us in the Senate in nineteen ninety four, nineteen ninety six, nineteen ninety seven, when he appeared to be a completely reasonable Republican senator, he was just lying to us. He was just getting through the day, believing in nothing. And it was all a lie. If that's true, and I think it is, it leaves the thing we call the Republican Party with absolutely no fulcrum on which to turn.
Lawrence is so interesting, important and also quite depressing. Thank you for joining us.
Depressing is my specialty. They're supposed to be a warning about that on my phone number. When you call it, they're supposed to be it pops up. But you call her, ID is supposed to say to you, depressing, depressed, be careful.
Jeff Science is the Biden White House chief of staff. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Can I call you, Jeff, of course, and thank you for having me. It's an honor to be with you.
You're not like the right honorable chief of staff, right, there's.
No, absolutely not. And he talked to my children, you do your much worse things. So let's just stick with Jeff.
You are the chief of staff for the President of the United States. These are enormous shoes to fill. Left by Ron. Ron has been on this podcast twice. He's friend of the pod, but you know, he was pretty burnt out. I mean, it's a really rough job. Can we talk about that.
It's a hard job.
I mean I think all these jobs are hard and probably getting harder, just in terms of how fast things are moving, how difficult the political environment is, how complex the world is you know, obviously the hardest job is the president's job, but those of us who are lucky enough to serve around but we do have our jobs. And you know, I think Ron did a spectacular job.
I mean, the results speak for themselves, the historic accomplishments across the first couple of years that President Biden achieved, and you know Ron was his right hand person chief of staff, So huge credit to Ron, and you know, massively big shoes to fill. I think the way I approach I've approacheached to my challenges is getting the right thing together, and to me, that means diverse backgrounds, different experiences, low ego about it for the right set of reasons,
and have each other's back. And if you get that team around a table literally figuratively, you can do everything, meaning you can deal with any crisis, you can capture any opportunity. And having that team together means all so that they function as a team well. And I think we have that going here. Ron had that team together.
Many of the same players are still here. We've added some new folks, and I think that the way you get through these very difficult periods of different issues both domestically and internationally and get a lot of great things done. As this president has is to have that team around the table and work together and have each other's back. That's a lot of how I view my job is to serve the president by ensuring that he gets the
right team at the table. And that's true both here in the White House and it prop the cabin right.
You come from National Economic Council. You were involved in the COVID roll out, the coordination there. I think of you as like a numbers guy and very much about sort of setting into motion the work of government. How does that track to what you do now?
Yeah, and I call myself a numbers guy. I am the analytic, and I think that it's always important to be rigorous in thinking through the situation and what are the considerations for a decision and what are the options or recommendations for the president to make decisions on hard issues. So I think I'm rigorous on making sure that there's strong analytics research, every view is considered, every perspective, and
to me, again that comes back to ID. My job is making sure that we have the right team and they're functioning as a team. And that's how I approach the challenges when I was at the National Economic Council, it's certainly how I approach the challenges as COVID coordinator, and it's all about teamworking, coordination and prioritization and holding each other accountable. And I think that's how you get results.
And you know, I think one of the things that particularly in this period of time, a lot of people coming into the federal government, into the White House or into cabinet agencies with policy priorities. You know, they have an idea for a piece of legislation or an executive action, and that's where they focus, and that is a lot of the focus at the beginning of most administrations, you know, so the infamous hundred day Policy Agenda, and it's a big deal to get a piece of legislation signed into
law you'll call the Affordable Care Act. That was certainly a lost piece of legislation, and thank goodness, it passed congresson was signed into the law by the Obama Biden administration. And I remember the signing ceremony. The most signing ceremonies are in the Oval Office, but when it's a really big deal, you move across the street to the old
Executive Office. Building and the Southport Auditorium you can sit more people, And there were a lot of people at that signing ceremony, and you know everyone's crowding to get into the picture. If you're really lucky, you get a pen. The President youth to find a piece of legislation. Remember that's when the ben and Vice President Biden was caught on the hot mic describing how big a deal it
was to sign that piece of legislation. Do you remember that, Yes, I will repeat it here, but it was a big, big something deal, and it was that piece of legislation which has had such an impact on tens and millions of people's lives. It's state lives, right. It almost stell with art because of allows e website. And the point I'm making is that execution getting stuck done. Look, it's hard.
It's hard in any setting, private sector or NGO. I think it's particularly hard in the federal government just given the scale, the scrutiny, the oversight, the politics. But getting stuck done executing is really important in the federal government.
And I think this team is this president has this team very focused on execution and implementation of the historic legislation and actually making these trillions of dollars in investments in America lower prescription drug prices real to the American people. American people are benefiting from thirty five dollars insulin. American people are benefiting from the new jobs that are created
through new bridges and roads and new factories. And how do we get more and more done, and also how do we tell our story to the people of how this is making a difference in their lives.
You know, when I was writing about you guys, and I asked a straight reporter who's a friend of mine, I said, this drug program where they're negotiating these drug prices like this is something that every president has tried to do.
Every president has tried to do right.
And nobody has ever done it. And I said, and now here's Fiden doing it. His complaint was this administration is aggressively boring. He said they are so boring that he said, it's like a cudgel.
If boring is head down doing work, then I'll take boring. But I think, you know, I'll actually push it back a little bit to the press. And maybe it's what people are interested in in terms of online and all the rest, But the press likes controversy. I mean what you're talking about on prescription drugs or gossip, that's just plain old with me. It's the first time in history that Medicare can negotiate drug prices.
It makes total sense.
That Medicare is the largest purchaser of drugs, should be able to negotiate drug prices. But as you said, no one's being able to get that done. And President Biden got that done. We now have thirty five dollars insilent, and that matters. And I think the challenge here is I maybe good stuff is somehow considered boring.
I think good stuff is good stuff.
And it's our job to implement and get more and more stuff done, but also to tell the story and break through to the American people about how this is changing their lives.
So, the drug price negotiation, what does that look like? He's doing it now, When will this happen? What will look like? Pharma is pushing back? Will you sort of debunk the ads and explain what this will look like if it works?
Well, this is ten drugs that are high cost to the federal government, the highest cost, and it's negotiating for better prices in the amount of drug that the government is purchasing for Medicare recipients. It makes sense that the government should get a good deal, and the prices are
too high and they can be lower. And so now we're negotiating those ten and that impact will be seen across the coming years, and we'll negotiate more drug prices across time each year, and that will result in lower prices for Medicare recipients, and hopefully that'll trickle over to the rest of the American people through lower prices, because oftentimes the pricing of Medicare is what insurers and other
healthcare providers will gravitate toward. And you know, I think that it's look, big pharmas fighting it because this cuts their profit right and it cuts their ability to buy back stock. There's still plenty of money for big pharma and biotech and other companies to invest in future drugs. So look, this is maybe something that people will cover because there is a.
Lot of controversy around this. I think, plain old good stuff.
It's long overdue, and President Biden got it done, but making no mistake that drug companies don't want this to happen, and Republicans on the hill, no one voted for this legislation.
No Republicans voted for it.
In fact, they're trying to take back the legislation and cancel the legislation so we don't have cheaper prescription drugs. And I think all Americans are most Americans agreed to drug prices are too high.
Right. It's such an interesting thing because it's like one of these things where the polling really supports it and people really want it, and Republicans, of course are against it. Speaking of which, many newsrooms believe that we are going to have a shutdown. What is happening?
Good question.
I'd start by saying, we absolutely absolutely should not have her shut down and we should not rab a government shut down, right, but particularly now because back in June, remember in June, we had a bipartisan agreement that averted America defaulting.
On its debt for the first time. So we didn't do that, that's a good thing.
As part of that, we agreed to budget levels and those are the budget levels that we're now debating again. And look the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans, most of the House, certainly Democrats and many Republicans want to honor that agreement that was made back in June. It was a bipartisan agreement.
You know.
I think through President Biden's uncanny ability to lead bipartisan solutions, we got to a bipartisan solution on the budget. And now because it's some extreme Republicans in the House, they want to reopen that agreement by proposing to cut by a significant amount the services that the American people rely on in need, food safety inspectors, education, law enforcement, head Start, childcare, meals on wheels. These are programs that really matter to
Americans across the country, across all communities. It's totally wrong to threaten to shut down the government over these extreme far right demands. The bottom line is the how else should do its job? Honor the agreement that was made a couple of months ago and fund the government, and we should not be discussing government shutdowns at this point. Unfortunately,
that's not what's happening right now. There's still a couple of weeks left, and I'm vopeful that the agreement will be honored and we won't shut down the government.
I don't want to be Pollyanna here, but a government shutdown is still much less cataclysmic than American defaulting on its.
Dat Yes, we'll stop by that terribly.
They're sure, even we're talking about, you know, people's lives and food safety and law enforcement and housing like. Yes, you are correct that technically this is not as devastating as a default would have been.
But I think we're not in a good space. We're talking about degrees of devastating.
Right, No, it's true, and I want to get to now the strike. The WGA is striking, the Screen Actor's Guild is striking, and then the people who will looking on the manufacturing lines and some of these car companies are striking. Donald Trump is toying with the idea of going there bafflingly. Talk to me about how this administration is connected to this union.
Yeah, I won't attempt to debaffle on that front. I've known the president now since two thousand and nine, so almost fifteen years. He is a union guy, and that's been clear in all the interactions I've had with him across time.
He's certainly the most pro union president in our history.
I'll speak to the UAW because the President spoke to it on Friday. He believes in collective bargaining. He wants the parties to stay at the table. And he believes, and I'm quoting the President here, that record corporate profits deserve record contracts for the UAW workers, and we want an automobile future in this company that's made in America. He supports twenty four to seven world at the table to get to an agreement that keeps.
Workers at the heart of our auto future.
President is a union guy and believes in collect and bargaining, and that's what he's pushing for right here.
I wrote about this this week in my column. I write about it all the time. Donald Trump numerous indictments, impeachments guy is an armed insurrection Joe Biden a lot of accomplishments. His thing that the media is using to make a false equivalency is his age. Just like with Hillary Clinton, they used her emails. I think it's the structure of the way mainstream media a lot of the time operates. I say this as a member of the mainstream media. I mean, what do you say to.
That look at the results of what's happened under this president's leadership. I mean a decade or more than a decade worth of historic legislation done in two years, more jobs created in two years than in any other war year term of any president. We talked about the progress prescription drugs. We haven't talked about, but think about all of the progress that the President is making on the climate.
With the biggest investment ever in clinnement. All the electricity in the US is going to be generated by clean energy by twenty thirty five. That's pretty remarkable.
So look at the results of this period of time. It's off the charts.
And as I said, we have a huge opportunity to continue to implement every day things that really matter to people's lives. Better roads, better bridges, more prescription drug costs, reductions, getting rid of junk fees, like barging parents with kids extra in order to sit with their kids on an airplane. We're at it every day, building on this tremendous first two and a half years. One of the privileges I
have is working very closely with the President. And you know, I'm a firm believer and put your head down, work hard, and good things happen. Watching this president work is a case study and hard work, being relentless, all of his six coming to bear. He's relentless and hard to keep up with. I mean you know, just last week he left here the White House. Yeah, but you know that was after a full day work. He gets on a plane,
he travels twenty odd hours to India. He gets off the plane, he has a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Mody. You know, across a couple of days, he meets with thirty world leaders at the same time. I'm talking in all hours of the day and night, because you know, we're twelve hours apart on time, and he's staying on top of you know, what's happening with the weather situation, what's happening with workers here at UAW and elsewhere, what's
happening in Congress. Then he's off the Vietnam late night press conference. You know, he goes and meets with embassy staff and military people even to somehow down in time and all of that to go to manass So he eats his priorities even when he's that hectic.
So my answer is, look at the results.
And then you know, given this lucky seat that I get to sit in, I can tell you, hey, study and hard work coupled with experience just get gets things done.
And that's what we need now, and that's what we need.
For the next many years, the next several years here in America under his leadership.
And this is like something I talk about all the time to everyone. I know, why is the polling not better?
Look, it's not where we spend time here. Our focus is you've bird over and over again. It's getting things done. And that's what the President holds this team accountable for as results. And you know, there's so much more to do when you look at how Americans steel job satisfaction.
Is at a thirty six year high.
Over seventy percent of Americans have a positive view of their own financial situation. Look, there's you know, we have had high inflation, inflation is moderating, We are seeing real wages growing, and the invest in America agenda which we talked about starting to bear real fruit here. You know, we think Americans will continue to have an improve view of the overall economy. You know, as the polling this is a very similar place to where President Obama was
in twenty eleven. I was at OMB at the time, across the way in the old Executive Office building. So I remember those days and as you know, the story ended with him beating Mitt Romney handily.
So President. The main thing is, you know, keep your head down into your work.
But I think it's also you know, as you've heard the President say before, don't compare him to the almighty or the unknown compared to the alternative. And I think that's what the American people will do.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I really appreciate getting you on. John de la Volpi is a poster and author of Fight How gen Z is channeling their fear and passion Do You Save America? As well as the sub stack j dv on gen Z. Welcome back, Too Fast Politics.
John.
Great to be back with you. Thanks so much for having me.
Mollie.
I'm delighted to have you. And actually I've been trying to get you for like three weeks because the moment I started seeing polls, I was like, I knew, John here to explain to us what's happening, and I want to start with what does the landscape look like right now?
So listen. The reason that you know it took us a while to book this is because I've been on the road, you know, end of the summer, I've been on the road. I've been talking to voters. Came back from a week in Florida. I've been talking to voters across the country. Here's the thing. I think there's just a massive disconnect between kind of what the media polls are telling us the country cares about, and what everyday
Americans are caring about, whether they're Democrats or Republicans. I think broader picture, all the polls, you know, are showing this race to be a toss up. That's I think just the cycle of national politics today. But I think when you get beyond this, I think the issues that I'm most concerned about that could affect the election of a year plus from now, they're not being covered by
the polls. And I think that's a disconnect. And I think that's my concern, you know, as someone who cares about, you know, kind of empowering voters of an understanding public opinion.
I want to do like a quick lightning round with you about polling national polls four hundred plus days out from the election accurate or not well.
Recent iSER say they're not accurate or not only are they not accurate, they're not relevant. I mean, it's okay as one data point to see where we are right, It's okay to see what you know one data point. But if that's the case, plenty of people have talked about this. You know, we'd be seeing, you know, a president Giuliani, President McCain, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So Bob Dahl exactly, we could go on, you go on for decades. Right, helpful but not insightful.
Okay, So that's interesting. Also, I want you to just talk about like the nuts and bolts of polling for a second. Are they still happening on landlines? I mean, talk to me about the methodology. Has it changed?
So there are some polls, some high quality polls are conducted using land lights, not a lot, but they're still used, you know, as as a relatively small percentage of the overall interviews. But here's the thing. There's two basic kinds of polls. Okay. You can think of a probability based survey, okay, which means that every voter or every American has an
equal chance of being included in the survey. And then you have a non probability or convenience sample where people sign up from lists and or recruited and are compensated for them. Okay. The idea of the probability the high quality research, you don't need to conduct that over the telephone anymore. We recruit people to take these surveys based upon not what kind of telephone you have, but based
upon where you live, an address based approach. So the highest quality survey research today is based upon that probability based polling, which uses it's basically agnostic in terms of technology telephone, mobile phone, internet device, et cetera. So that's basically how we how we think about that. And what's tricky is that there are some questions in some polls between a convenience and a probability sample where there are no differences, and there are other questions where there could
be a ten or fifteen point difference. So it's just a very perilous time both as someone who collects data but also someone who interprets data.
So I want to just talk a little more about this. And again, I think that this is all super interesting, and I know what this is like sort of boring nuts and baltsa stuff for you, but I know for me, like I want more information on all of this because it's just so it feels so relevant right now. One of the things that I wanted to know though, is like with the midterms, and the midterms, we saw junkie polls, we saw a lot of resmutant kind of polling that
would shape the averages. And remember, I mean, I think the best story about this is Patty Murray, right was you know, that's a deep less ten thousand seat and for a minute it looked like she might really have a challenger. So would you talk to us about that phenomenon of these junkie red poles and whether or not you see that this cycle.
It's an increase in concern for memal it's polling as propaganda. The barrier to entry polling today is relatively low. You know, when we talk about again the high quality address based sampling probability, that costs upholster tens of thousands of dollars just to collect that data. That's very expensive and it takes a long time. Okay, On the other hand, for one thousand dollars or a couple thousand dollars, anyone in this audience can conduct a pole and you can get
it on one of these averaging sites pretty quickly. Right, And what therefore happens is there's an incentive, in my opinion, right to change a narrative, whether it's to ask irrelevant questions to get them into the media environments. It's the oftentimes hard right media environment based upon what some proportion of Americans say. And as we could see less cycle, there was a group of polls that people questioned who was paying for them, that were showing a very different
election outcome. They were predicting this red wave. A lot of the traditional pundits looked at those polls, and they also looked at the history of you know, incumbent first term presidents, et cetera, et cetera, and they change our narrative. That's one thing, but it's also driving millions of dollars of spending, right, it's driving cable news coverage. It's it's really I think, having an effect that again further erodes trust in media, trust in news, in trust in institutions,
including academic research and survey research. So it's now a political tool. Sadly.
So, one of the questions I have about all of these Biden news to old polls is a lot of these polling the questions that people are asking, will you talk to us about this sort of kind of innate bias in some of these questions and what that means and what that looks like.
And this is something I'm most concerned about, right, so we could have a thoughtful conversation about the way in which data is collected, probability and non probability. But my biggest concern about the polls that your audience and other people see is just like the lack of curiosity right in the rehashing the same questions day after day, month after month, year after year, cycle after cycle. That is where I think many of us fall prey to misinterpreting
public opinion. Let me give you an example of this. At my company's social sphere, I published a very detailed survey Midsummer I as Democrats Republicans, I asked all Americans on a scale from zero to ten, just as an example, how they felt about the economy. Okay, we found massive differences. We found that forty three percent of Republicans said it was bad on a scale from zero to ten, zero one or two, okay, twice as many as Democrats. Huge differences.
Same thing on the other end, okay, But when I ask how their financial situation is, there's no difference. There's literally no difference. Thirty four percent Democrats say it was excellent. Thirty percent of Republicans said theirs was excellent, and only
fourteen percent of Republicans say it was the worst. Okay, to me, that's incredibly insightful that we as pollsters need to throw out the old playbook if it's not giving us data that informs us, if it's not reflective of what our neighbors and our family members, you know, and our community members are feeling right and think about how and how to do this the right way. And that's the concern about whether it's the age question or some
of these directional questions. You know, people are now just predisposed to put on their political hat whenever we start asking them questions, and we need to take a few steps back and really understand as much about like their humanity in their lives compared to kind of what partisan camp they are, because that doesn't provide us real insight.
It's pretty interesting what you're talking about, this idea that you can have these partisan questions and the thing you're talking about right now, the difference between how is the economy and how is your financial situation? That's a pretty interesting disconnect, right, And I mean that is that partisanship issue. I mean, did that not exist ten years.
Ago, not to this degree, Molly.
No.
And by the way, Democrats Republicans, there is no significant difference on whether or not they have enough night to take a vacation, whether they're saving money, whether they could afford a home. I'm not saying that the economy isn't an issue. I'm not saying the commy doesn't put pressure on people and it needs to be addressed. Of course it does. But when you ask people like in English right, how their day is going. They just did ten focus groups the last week or so. In the first hour,
that's the conversation I'm having. What's a good day, what's a bad day? What stresses you well, what makes you happy? Okay? And it was nearly impossible to know whether I was in a Republican focus group or a Democrat focus group, you know, until we turn to the news. It was nearly impossible because Americans care about the same things based upon where you live. Traffic is a big deal, road rage is a big deal in states with traffic and
a lot of guns. Right, that transcends party. And I just don't think we get that level of insight about the issues, Nor do we get the level of insight as you know, something I care a lot about in terms of like some of these really important subgroups who are likely to decide the outcome of the election, right, whether it's people of color, younger people, women, et cetera. We don't nearly have as much insight in terms of those important groups as well.
That's really interesting. So when you get to news and you see the disconnect, what does it look like?
People put their blinders on, and it's nearly impossible to have a conversation or for Republicans to give Biden credit on anything in similar Democrats on Republicans. But I think it's harder, you know, for Republicans. The mental gymnastics I see in some of these focus groups is just difficult for me to understand and process. You know, how someone can feels one hundred and eight degrees different when we're talking about like an individual's family based upon whether they're
Republican or Democrats. So I definitely see kind of more of a blinder situation in Republicans programmed to basically kind of hate anything associated with the Democrat Party. However, as I said ten minutes early, in those focus groups, I'll find Republicans will say one of the biggest challenges in America and then their lives is not enough access to healthcare or reproductive healthcare, you know, or issues that Democrats have been fighting for for generations.
But they're not open to the possibility that that's what's going on.
So this is why when I walked out of the scrip, I said, I don't want to give up on some of these kind of independent minded people who have just not had a relationship with civic life, with politics, with government. You know, who watch their news generally from Fox News, but their values and the things that they care about, in my opinion, are much more aligned with Democrats than Republicans.
So it's the question of, I think, how do Democrats begin to have conversations with these voters at a much earlier age. We now have a generation that's been raised or two generations have been raised exclusively based upon where you live on Fox TV, and they're seeing this quote, as I said, this polling propaganda.
I mean, when you talk to these Republicans, do they just say, like, is Fox sort of the answer to all of this? Like when you ask them about their media diet, is it always Fox, so well, I don't watch cable news.
I tuned out from that, right, So, or they say, you know, I'm a fan of Trunk, but there's a lack of pride associated with that. I listened to how I watch it, and you can certainly kind of hear, you know, see the through lines there in their rhetoric.
It's so interesting. So when you're polling, I mean, is there a sense like when you said, when they say, well, Biden's too old, is there any sense like, well Trump is two and a half years younger than he is, or does it?
Is it? Just like that's it, that's it, based upon what group I'm in, whether it's with a Democrat group or Republican group. I played Devil's advocate out argue some points, Well, you know, is he young enough for create thirteen point five million jobs? Is young enough to gun you know, violence, etc.
Et cetera.
They just are listening because in that political context, and they'll say, you know, he's too old and I like him, he's a nice guy, but he's just too old, right, So it makes them feel a little bit better, But just it's going to be really challenging to kind of break through, right, Like right now. That's a longer term plan as far as I'm concerned. Right is to kind of re establish civic IQ, you know, and ability to discern propaganda from from facts. That's a longer term play.
My concern for short term is the role that this is having in increasing levels of cynicism that would just incentivize people from voting or or voting for one of the two party candidates.
One of the things that I think is pretty interesting right now is we find ourselves in a kind of disconnect between some of the survey stuff I've seen, so like, for example, I'm seeing survey stuff that shows that, like most Americans want some amount of gun control. You know, they don't really care about trans people being denied healthcare. That's not something they care about. They just want people
to live their lives. That kind of stuff is not particularly popular with the voters, but I guess is very popular with the Republican base. So they're going to have to pivot when they get to the main election. I mean, talk to me about that.
There's going to have to be a significant pivot away from some of these culture war issues. I think that the discussion a year from now, in a general election is going to be about basic rights and which party is defending and expanding basic rights. And we're not just
talking about reproductive rights, obviously incredibly important. There are a number of younger women and younger men I've met in the last couple of weeks who are the process of recently married, planning for a wedding, etc. Who are thinking about where they're going to live, whether or not they want to have children. Based up upon the Supreme Court decision a year ago. This is directly impacting thousands, if
not millions of lives. That's an example. The basic right to access clean air, clean water, basic right to feel safe in a movie theater or in a school classroom. These are the basic rights, the basic right to work hard and to be able to afford college or home if that's your choice. And I think that's going to be the frame that this campaign will be run on.
And I think, you know, that's going to be a more positive frame at this point for the Democrats than Republicans, based upon I think, you know, their their legacy of fighting and expanding for these rights. Now, whether they can communicate to you know, to the right people in the right places, that's an incredible challenge. That's how I see, you know, the themes of the next fifteen month or so playing out.
Are you worried?
I'm extremely worried. My book which has been focused on gen z and I say, I'm not worried about the future if we allow our kids to get there and our democracy is intact. But I am extremely worried, especially coming off of the road for the last week or so, just about again, which I think is this kind of propaganda machine which has made everything related to politics and public service negative, which turn people away where they're not able to see some of the good things that are happening.
And this has been something that hasn't happened over the course of this administration or the last couple of administrations, but this is something that has been in our system now for decades, and that's what concerns me. I think we need to kind of invest in systems that allow younger people to feel comfortable having conversations about civic life and politics Part one. But I also think that we need to as soon as possible, begin to tell those
stories about how government can do big things. This administration has done big things, and no one can set this thing out next year. Thank you, John, Thank you Molly. It's great to be with you. As always.
Jesse Cannon, Molly, Jong fastt Joe Manchin. He always thinks he's right and he knows what's up when I think the rest of us disagree.
Joe Manchin, who's toying with the third party run to make Trump president again, is very concerned about the Senate dress code, which was changed for John Fetterman, because honestly, why should the Senate have a dress code. Mansion told a reporter that he spoke to Fetterman today about the Senate dress code. I hope Fetterman talk to him about the child tax credit, I said, John, I think it's
wrong and there's no way I can comply with that. Well, you know what there's no way I can comply with is you abolishing the child tax credit and protecting big oil and gas. And for that, Joe Manchin, you are yet again, and your houseboat and your lack of charm, you are our moment of fuck. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense
of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, Please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.