Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of Fox and News Corp. We'll see how long that lasts. Because we've seen the show, we've seen succession, we know how this goes. We have a fantastic show for you today. Michael Wolfe joins us to talk about his new book, The Fall, The End of Fox News
and the Murdoch Dynasty. Then we'll talk to polster Ben Tulchin about how Biden can adopt a populist message to do better with the voters he struggles with. But first we have Squawkbox contributor and host of on the tape, my friend and yours, Dan Nathan. Welcome back, my friend Dan Nathan to Fast Politics.
Molly. It's great to be back with you.
Let's talk about the economy, the Goldilocks economy. So is the economy good or bad?
Well, it depends in which line you're looking through, right, So, if you have a job and you benefited from basically wage growth that we've seen over the last few years, I think it's been pretty good, right. But the flip side of that is, like, you know, inflationary pressures have been around now for a couple of years, and you know that is the very thing that US Federal Reserve is trying to combat. It's also one of the reasons why the Biden administration named their fiscal spending policy last
year the Inflation Reduction Act. I think you and I have spent some time talking about that. I'm not really sure that that kind of battles high inflation. If anything, that could be inflationary, and it could be the very situation that we're in right now. You know, you'll hear
that term goldilocks a bunch. What does it mean. It means that, you know, we have, you know, seventy year low unemployment, we have wage growth that we haven't seen in a long time, but we also have a whole host of other costs for lots of consumers that maybe wages are not keeping up with. Right So, to answer the question, it's not a great economy for kind of lower end wage earners right now, despite the benefits that
they've had of late. Okay, but on the higher end, I mean, it seems like in every which way, you know, the higher end consumer is doing just fine. So some of the stuff that we track fairly closely is the savings rate that was really high, you know coming out of the pandemic is being drawn down. Consumer credit is really high at a time, and this brings us back to inflation, where the US Federal Reserve has raised interest rates basically from a zero interest rate bound during the
pandemic to about five and a half percent. We have not seen interest rates this high in a very very long time. So if you are a consumer and you are living paycheck to paycheck, okay, and you are buying a lot of stuff on credit and these are floating rates, they are astronomically high right now. And so you know, there's a whole host of things that I think as we settle into and the Federal Reserve set it to us this week, that rates are going to be higher
for longer. I think the lag effects of that tighter monetary policy are going to first hit lower end consumers and then it's going to work its way into the middle and higher you know, kind of bounds in the consumer landscape. And so to me, I think that is a story for twenty twenty four and through the lens
that you look at all this, Molly. It's not, in my opinion, a great setup if you are the incumbent president, in my opinion, because sooner or later, the economy is going to slow and we're going to be in a recession. And you know, I'm sure the Biden administration is hoping it comes after the election, but at some point, I think the market is a discounting mechanism. It will sniff it out if the economy is going to weaken.
So you think we're heading for a recession. It's just a question of when. But I don't understand because of the higher interest rates. Sooner or later, though the Fed did just not raise interest rates yesterday.
They did and so one of the big issues is that this lag effect of monetary policy, right, and so they acknowledged that. Economists acknowledge that, and so here we are. They started raising interest rates in March of twenty twenty two, so we're about eighteen months. And normally when you have that sort of tightening a monetary policy, you will see the economy start to weaken. That was the goal of
raising interest rates to cool off the economy. If the economy continue to go and gangbusters pace because of all the fiscal and monetary stimulus, we're ultimately going to have
a bubble inflate and then crash. And you don't have to go too far back to remember the global financial crisis where interest rates were kept too low for too long to combat what we had as a recession post of the dot com bubble, right, And so in each of those instances, they were followed by market crashes where the S and P five hundred, the major US equity market, was cut in half. Okay, and then we also had recessions.
And so I think the FED fear is that, and you hear all this talk about a soft landing or a no landing. A hard landing would be a very bad recession. I think the FED is trying to wrap kind of wrap their arms around how do we get to a soft landing where the tighter monetary policy kind of slows the economy, doesn't break the economy and push us into a hard recession.
I want to go further on this monetary policy idea because there are people who blame Biden, And if you blame Biden for this, you also have to blame Trump for this, because this is something Trump did too, that we have had years and years and years of like printing money, of pushing money into the economy, a very cheap money, of this modern monetary theory which says, just go for it, Nothing's going to happen. So how much of this is a blowback from that?
I will say this that President Trump brought in the current FED Chair, Jerome Powell, Okay, to be his pick. And this was in back in twenty and seventeen. And FED Chair pal started out by raising interest rates in twenty and eighteen, and you know, he was trying to normalize interest rate policy after years and years of easy monetary policy that came with the financial crisis. Right. So here drum pale is under President Biden, and you know, interest rates have gone up faster than they have on
any administration in decades. Okay, So now all of a sudden you have this situation. Though I think the Biden administration is probably correct to identify the fact that if they were to kind of support a pullback in rates,
that inflation could be a worse enemy than high interest rates. Right, So they're in a really difficult situation here, and it does become political as we get into twenty twenty four, because every week we are going to have candidates on the right that are going to be kind of railing against whatever that FED share pals doing. They're going to
say it's perfectly political. They're going to say that the former FED chair Janet Yellen, who is now Biden's Treasury secretary, right is in bed with the FED, and the FED is supposed to be an independent organization. So this is going to get very politicized very soon. And going back to what I said before is that if you think that, you know, a stronger economy has been a good thing for this administration, I'd say yes, but he's not getting
any credit for it. That's present and Biden, if just look at the polling on the economy, it's really bad.
And so I don't know if it gets better from here, which is why I think that that whole campaign that they had a couple months ago with Bidenomics and getting them out there and his folks, you know, and I think the last time we talked, they need to do a better job on this because if the economy is okay right now and we are not in recession and it's been able to withstand the sort of interest rate hikes that have happened over the last eighteen months, then
there's a story to tell. With unemployment as low as it is right now. So to me, I think that's a whole host of great things that they could be talking about. And then the reshoring of a lot of jobs that are incentivized by a lot of stuff in this fiscal you know, plans that they kind of laid
out last year and the IRA and stuff. Those are all good for US workers, but they're also inflationary because one of the worst sort of I think takes about the last fifty years with globalization is that you know, we got as consumers, you know, we got addicted to cheap goods, and if that's going to be reversing out of China, it's going to be inflationary and better be prepared to pay more for your iPhone and some other things that are going to be made in other places closer to home.
Yes, for sure. And I mean that's the fundamental thing that people are so upset about, is paying more for things. Right, Like people in America do not like pay more for things.
Well, I mean, listen, it goes back in the Trump administration when they started this trade war with China. I mean it was really interesting in a way, is that a lot of folks are a lot of people that support him didn't realize that they were supporting something that worked against their best interests. Right when steel prices are more expensive and you are you know, an auto worker, you know, and less cars are being sold because the prices are higher, you know, this all happens to come back.
And so if plants have to close because there's less demand for things, I mean, these are all the fundamental you know, economic issues that we have to deal with. And when you map them to politics, and when you have people like the last administration who surely have no idea about much of this, you know, it gets really slow. You could make the case that the Biden administration has been as hard or harder on China. So like the
situation with China only gets worse from here. Also, and I'll just tell you a lot of folks that are involved in markets and this is the number one bugaboo, if you will, China and kind of decoupling from China. And I don't think whoever wins in twenty twenty four and whoever takes the Senate, I don't think anything changes in that regard. It seems to be fairly bipartisan. And
I'll tell you that. The other thing that you know, it might not be under the radar for too long, the fact that our neighbors to the north are in this big brew haha with India. India's most beneficiary of
kind of you know, moving away from China. And if the North America is in a bit of a row with two and a half trillion as far as populous, you know what I mean, between India and China, we might be headed to what looks like a more bipolar world as it relates to just kind of geopolitics and economics globalization.
With China, one of the things that Biden administration has been doing is they've been quietly trying to sort of shore up that relationship, but also shore up in Japan, South Korea, the other countries on that peninsula or near that you know, in that area who are useful if you need to kind of go against China. I mean, it feels like we're at an uneasy day tent with China.
Very uneasy. I mean, it doesn't get better from here, as I said before, because you know, at some point. All indications are that they're going to make some sort of move on Taiwan, and it could start out as some sort of economic sort of blockade, it could be something militarily. I mean some of the exercises that they're running right now, those are the sorts of things that obviously make the Japanese and the South Koreans very nervous.
And when you think about China and you think about North Korea, how they've been cozing up to Russia, who just invaded obviously last year, a sovereign neighbor of theirs, A lot of these things are really intertwined, right And so you know, when I think about China is like the multinationals US multinational companies and the precedent that they set when Russia rolled into Ukraine by pulling out of Russia,
you know, is that going to be the map? Is that going to be the playbook for US multinationals if the Chinese do anything with Taiwan. And when you think about China as being this engine for global growth over the last twenty years, the economic data in China right now is really bad. Export data is really bad. They're facing bouts of deflation right now. So if they in an effort to kind of restimulate, you know, whatever sort of activity, and they see Taiwan and a good way
to do it. You know, US multinationals, Japan and South Korea, you know, are very staunch allies. We're going to be in a bit of a pickle. And that is the sort of thing that could send the global economy into a really bad place, especially if you think that we will have a redo of the inflationary pressures on natural resources. You know, remember what happened with oil after Russia invaded Ukraine.
So those are you know, China is a huge buyer of natural resources and crewed in the like in natural gas. So you know, all this stuff is kind of interrelated and it makes a lot of people, you know, away
from the human aspect of it. And I think that obviously is not something that we should kind of poo poo, But from an economic standpoint and from a geopolitical standpoint, I mean, this is this is the one thing I think that has the ability to really kind of break the economy right now at a time where interest rates again have only been going higher to deal with inflation, and all of what I just said is inflationary deglobalization and then geopolitical rowse between you know, China and Taiwan
or Russia and Ukraine.
That's very annoying. But can China kick the rest of the world into a recession? Is that what you're painting?
Yeah? I think that does have the potential to do that, right, So where is the incremental growth that could happen around the globe right now? Europe is in a you know, recessionary sort of.
Environment, right and England does forget it, Yeah, England is not particularly great here.
And so when you think about what is the kind of knock on effect of US consumers are basically seventy percent of our GDP our gross domestic product here, and if the US consumer to slow down because interest rates are too high because you know, they're not going to tap home equity loans with you know, mortgage rates you know, above seven percent, if floating rates on credit, which is hitting for consumers all time highs right now, is just
not sustainable to continue this level of growth. I mean it's going to be really hard, right like to keep our economy humming along. So the idea of a recession that's two consecutive negative quarters of GDP. That's not so hard,
and it's not even that bad of a thing. Those are their natural cycles in economies here, right, But the fact that we've become so interrelated with let's say Europe and with China, and if China is weakening and Europe is already weak, and there's a potential for you know, some major hiccups as it relates to our manufacturing in China. Like to me, I just don't know how we avoid recession in the next year or so. And if you had asked me a year ago at this time, I
would have said in twenty twenty three. But the longer we kick the can down the road, the more unstable our US consumer is. And if our US consumer is literally the engine behind our economic growth, with China weakening at a time when we're diversifying away from China, it's just not a great picture right now. So I wish I know you said it's annoying. I wish I had a rosier outlook. And if you want to talk about goldilocks,
that's great, that's backward looking. If you look at a lot of the leading indicators for the economy, they're softening right now.
So interesting so let me ask you, what could the Biden administration do?
Yeah, I mean, at this point, I don't think, you know, more fiscal stimulus is the right thing that.
Will cause more inflation.
And you know, like when you think about polls and you think about the sorts of things that like voters when they're going to vote, you know, I mean, what do they care about? They care about their economic stability, They care about their job and that sort of thing, and a lot of these other issues that will help, I think, define the twenty twenty four election. Guns and
abortion and immigration. I think they're a side show if you feel like you you know, have to make a choice between feeding your family and paying your heating bill or you think you're going to be you know, losing your job, and tuition has become too expensive, healthcare is to so they have to control the narrative better. I think they've done a very poor job. I'm at doing that.
They need more, you know, people out there telling the story how US consumers are doing better than they were four years ago in the like, and I just don't think they're good at that. Again, I don't think more fiscal stimulus would do the sort of thing. But some sort of good resolution with this United Auto Worker and where the government is helpful, I think would be really good because that is a voting you know, block that I think is should be important to the Biden being
re elected. So I think there's just being more upfront about these issues and how this is not going to be an easy situation to tame because inflation is not going down meaningfully anytime soon, and interest rates are to have to stay higher for longer. That's at least what the Fed's telling The only way interest rates go down a lot. They're not going to be good for good economic reasons. They've gone down in the post Dot com recession, and then they went down in the period during the
financial crisis. We don't want any of those sorts of situations happen. So if they can kind of thread the needle a little bit and kind of get to the other side of twenty twenty four without having to do anything dramatic, I think they just have to control the narrative better.
And that's why they didn't raise rates again.
I think what the FED is saying to us, and this has nothing to do with the administration. I mean, the administration can try to put pressure on them, but they are independent of the administration. Janet Yellen, who's the Treasury Secretary, the former the head of the FED, I mean, she can be as political as she wants, but she cannot try to do things to influence the US FED. So they didn't raise interest rates because they wanted to
take a pause. Now, the likelihood is that they raise interest rates at the next meeting in November another twenty five basis points, getting the FED funds rates of five point seventy five percent. That shouldn't have a too dramatic of impact on the economy, especially after they've just raised five and a half percent over the last eighteen nineteen
months or so. But the point here is that they are going to watch the data, and if the data continues to be inflationary, then they need to have tighter monetary policy. But if the data falls off a cliff and gets much worse, that's a whole host of other problems, and especially politically for the Biden administration. So I think if they could freeze things right here, right now and flash forward to the November twenty twenty four, I think
they would do that. But the likelihood that things stay static right now is not particularly great.
Dan, thank you so much.
Thank you, Molly. I appreciate being on the pod. I love the pod, and I'm amazed at which you do nine a plus interviews a week on Fast Politics. It's just beyond me, so keep it up.
Michael Wolfe is the author of The Fall, The End of Fox News, and The Murdoch Dynasty. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Michael Lollie, Thank you for having me.
Thank you for coming on this as a hot hot book.
Have you gotten a copy of it?
I have a copy, but I just got it, so I haven't finished yet. Let's talk about first. You've written a lot of books. You have written about a lot of politicians and people, and why did you pick this.
I haven't written about a lot of politicians. I really don't like to write about politicians. I have written about Donald Trump, who I would say is distinguished by not being a politician.
I think that's a good point.
But I have written a lot about Rupert Murdoch. So I have been writing about Rupert Murdoch since when was my Murdoch biography published in two thousand and nine, And before that I was New York Magazines media reporter and vanity fairs media reporter. So I often wrote about Murdoch, and then Murdoch let me in for some reason that I'm sure he can't explain, nor can I let me into his world, very quite intimately, and I spent a year basically interviewing him, his family, his executives, anybody I
wanted to, including his mother. So I have been writing about him on a fairly steady basis since then. And this is kind of, you know, a book end. I mean, it is ending. I mean, Murdoch is ninety two, and the end comes even to him sooner rather than later. The curious point of this story is that that end will take Fox, arguably the most powerful political influence in this country. His end will take Fox with it. You
can't take Fox with you. You can't take Fox. So you really do think that the death of Ruper Murdock will be the end of Fox News?
Absolutely?
I mean, I don't think that there's any piece of logic that could find an alternative to that. It ends. Because this is a company that is really exists because of one man, and he has children who will take over control of the company. Four children. You have six children, but there are four who will take over they do not agree with each other on and their disagreements kind
of approach the mortal level. It's a blood score between them, and there's a virtually no scenario in which they can go forward in agreement.
So tell me what you think Ruper Murdoch will think of this book if he has not gotten it yet.
That's an interesting thing because when the Murdoch organization doesn't like something, it responds with, or, at least in my experience, responds with a unique.
Kind of venom.
After my biography of Murdoch was published, which he did not like at all, which I always found somewhat curious because it's really not a negative biography. When he got a copy of it, he called me up and a fear tried to get him to tell me what he objected to, and he finally sputtered out, but it's just so personal, and I said, but.
Rupert, it's a biography at any rate.
He didn't like it, and part of his response ended up being quite painful for me because my marriage was then breaking up at that point, and I was involved with someone else, which nobody else knew except the New York Post found out. They went out of their way shall we say, to find out and raked me through for weeks or certainly what felt like weeks on and I was hardly a celebrity, was treated as a celebrity with outrageous marital difficulties and anyway it was, it was terrible.
So I would like to say I am poised now, but I am not poised. And I firstly, I really can't imagine what is going to come my way, but I would not.
Be surprised if it was some serious stuff.
So what do you think is the thing that's going to make him the most enraged?
I mean, it's personal. This is about his family. I mean this is about Fox too. It's not just about his family. I mean it's about the personalities at Fox, which has its own problems. I mean, there's the Foxes has problems with the Murdoch families, but it has problems with Donald Trump, who the Murdochs hate, but Fox's audience love. It has problems with its various personalities. The whole Tucker
Carlson story is laid out here. I would safely say that there's not one single thing that Rupert Murdoch is going to like about this book.
Talk to me about Laura Ingram. There's some very interesting stuff in here.
I think I kind of feel sorry for Laura. You know, Fox is a very difficult place, to say the least for a woman to work. I mean, it was particularly difficult in the age of Roger Ayles, but it hasn't gotten much better. I don't think that they necessarily jump on you there anymore, but they certainly don't treat women like they treat men. And I think Laura Ingraham has
been put in the very difficult, difficult position. And there's a lot of reasons that she would want this job and does want this job, but is.
Her heart in it?
And you know, that's one of the interesting things about about Fox and why it has done so well, is that its stars have their heart in it. They are fully invested in being Fox people, in talking to the Fox audience. And I think she's been a little resistant to this, reticent about it, although she has tried curiously. You know, she's one of Murdoch's favorites, and she's one of his favorites because she's actually not a Trump Maga
right winger. She's kind of an old fashioned, a nineties right winger, which Murdoch is.
But there's a lot about her drinking, which I think is pretty interesting.
Yeah.
Well, and she's not the only drinker at Fox. It's a big drinking place. The Murdoch family is a big drinking family. But yeah, I mean, and there's a particular scene in.
The scene with the plane. Will you talk about that.
I tell the story of a trip on Sean Hannity's plane to Roger Ayles's funeral in the spring of twenty seventeen, and Laura was, who was not working at Fox at the time but wanted to work at Fox at the time, was at the funeral and she got very, very drunk. I mean, one of those kind of drunken scenes that is a kind of television worthy drunken scene, the full monty of drunkenness, and so much so that she tried to get a ride with Hannity on his plane back
to New York. She wanted to be dropped off of Washington, but Hannity wouldn't let her on the plane because he said those planes are too small for someone who would clearly end up in the bathroom vomiting the whole time.
That is not the only time she gets rejected. The Murdoch suns found her retro not aspiring talk to me about that.
When she was highed, that was a kind of tussle between between father and sons about who would get to make this higher and it was actually Rupert who finally.
Decided to make this attire.
And the sons were annoyed about this and regarded her as kind of an old fashioned conservative who was in an old fashioned you know, a person who sell by date as a media personality had passed.
Right, but she has really hung on. I mean, what do you think about that?
She was the only woman in the lineup, and she was kind of convenient in the lineup between the two big enchiladas of the primetime schedule who didn't want someone else who might compete with them. So she was a sort of convenient buffer for Tucker and for Hannity. But now she has just been relegated out of official prime time.
There's so many personalities in this book, and there's so much for Rubert Murdos.
Is just like when liberals such as I suppose ourselves write about Fox, it's always written as the overriding point is politics, And I've tried to make this the overwriting point here. Television that it's really not you know, Fox is not. Yes there's politics at Fox, and yes that's the subtext, But the overt text is how do I stay on the air? I am, you know, like all television people. I mean, what do all television news people have in common is desperate desire and need to stay
on the air. And it's I will do anything to stay on the air. That's this motivation that I tried to I try to convey that unique experience.
And it's really about the family, which is really interesting. Before we talk about Tucker hals and we need to talk about Arena Braganti. Please tell our listeners who she is and sort of she is really one of the most important figures in anything about Fox.
She's the pr person.
But what that means, you know, she comes out of the Ales era, is that she is the enforcer. If I get it by the Murdocks in any way, it will come from her. She is the one who is out there selling the Fox message to other media, but she is punishing anyone who crosses who Fox feels has crossed them. She's I mean, super good at her job.
One interesting aspect is that she often uses the New York Times to do this, which seems counterintuitive since The New York Times hates Fox so much, But since she has often dissing people who are on Fox, then The Times becomes a willing and convenient outlet. So I was, for again reasons that are not necessarily clear or intuitive, I was very friendly with Roger Ayles for many, many years.
I was friendly with him because he was a great source, because he was a great gossip, because he had really unique insights into the media business, which I was covering for much of much of that time. On one occasion, I can't remember what I was writing about, but I didn't call him. I called the Fox PR people, and he got wind of this, and he called me up and he said, why wouldn't she call me? If you want to know what happened, don't quote I reading. Her job is not to tell you the truth. It's the
opposite her job. You want to know something, you call me.
It's amazing, So talk to me about the dominion case. Because that was like a very sort of will there won't they settle situation?
It always seemed that way. There was no possibility that they were not going to settle this. You know, the first rule of any media company in a libel or defamation case is never go before a jury. You go before a jury, you're going to loose. But they got awfully close to going before a jury. I mean I was actually sitting there. I was face to face with that with that jury shortly after.
You know, and I believe it would have been right.
After the lunch break the jury was seated. There was a lunch break, and then the lunch break was prolonged, and then they settled because of that immutable rule that was this, This was the line in the saying you could not face the jury. And so the real story is, how in hell did it get that close? Yeah, they should have settled months and months and months and months
and months before. There was a moment. Would think it would be about a year and a half before when Murdoch was complaining that this could cost him fifty million dollars in the end, and it cost him seven hundred and eighty five eighty seven million dollars. That's the story. Why did it take so long? And that's the indication of the kind of disarray that was going on within the organization.
So you think they just couldn't get it together in time.
Yes, I mean they couldn't get it together, and I would say it was There was and continues to be only one real decision maker, and that's Murdoch and he is ninety two, So getting him to make decisions, I think is very difficult. I think getting him to focus
becomes more and more difficult. I think that he processed this whole as being not Fox's fault, but Donald Trump's fault, and in some way this became about Donald Trump paying for this, and somehow it became about his grievance against Donald Trump instead of focusing on the fact that this lawsuit was directed at him.
In fact, the.
Tucker Cross and Fox fight continues.
I thought it's probably an indication of an even broader fight that's happening, and that's going to happen in conservative media. For a long time, Fox has been at a monopoly position in conservative media. There was only one outlet, and it was dominant to a dramatic extreme. And I think now we see more and more that there are other possibilities here and that conservative media will fragment and this shouldn't be a surprise in the same way that liberal media has spregnant.
So interesting. Thank you so much, Michael.
And thank you.
Ben Tulchen is a pollster and the founder of Toulchien Research. Welcome to you fast politics.
Ben, thank you for having me.
I'm going to let you introduce yourself to us. Tell me about what you do.
Sure, I'm a political poster for Democrats, helping get them elected. Also do bout measures, work for isshie clients, nonprofit organizations, labor unions and those kinds of clients. Best known for poland for Bernie Sanders presidential kpaign in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty also elected the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, which I was named Polster of the Year recently. So I work for lots of clients around the country as well, but those are kind of my claim to fame.
So you're a Democratic pollster, but you have candidates that are sometimes not in the Democratic mainstream.
As a consultant, we I work for cancer. I like shout out what I work for. I tend to be kind of a broad ideological mix.
Yes, let's talk about what the nuts and bolts of pulstering looks like for you.
Yeah, sure, I mean one, we have to get hired by a cant right and we have to get paid.
But in all seriousness, doesn't how always happen.
But the industry self polling has gone under a lot of changes and transformations the last several years. I mean a lot's been discussed about. There are fewer people willing to respond to surveys. We used to call landlines. Those don't really exist anymore. So now we have to find other ways to reach people through cell phones, texting, calling, cell phones, email, you name it. So the industry has changed a lot. It's gotten harder to do what I do. But my value adds a pulster and a strategist, and
I really pride myself for being a strategist. I don't just deliver poll numbers. I provide strategy and that's kind of my value ad. And you know, I've been instrumental and you know, taking Berry Sanders from zero to percent to the brink of the nomination. I was instrumental electing Aericam's mayor. And you're sitting a very difficult, diverse, multi candet field with ring choice voting scenarios.
So my job is.
To not just tell you what the numbers are, but like figure out a strategy how to win.
But you also do focus groups.
We do, Yes, we do, and.
Lately you've been doing focus groups. Tell us what you've been sort of working on and the stuff that you have been talking to my friend Ron Brownstein about.
Look, I mean, as we kind of heading into a presidential election year and having worked for Bernie, and I've seen kind of a clear pattern of merge where Democright Party has struggled with working class voters right, and they've struggled in delivering an economic message, and that was clear. What the driver of success for Bernie's campaign in both twenty sixteen and twenty twenty was he had a very clear, powerful, progressive, economic populist message. And I feel that Direct Party is
kind of hasn't learned the lessons from that. Whi he was successful, Many people in the party view him as his kind of left wing crazy guy, and the fact is that he actually had a very clear coping here an economic message that resonated very powerfully with young people
and Latinos in particular, and that drove a success. And those are two groups quite frankly, that Biden struggled with in twenty twenty that Bernie did much better than Biden within those two groups, and it didn't start off that way. With Latinos in particular, we were tied with Biden the begining of the campaign, and over the course of the campaign, through a very discipline focused economic message, we gained separation
for Biden and ultimately ran circles around him. And that's We're able to win Nevado at California and do quite well with Latinos. So I'm seeing that. And then I did a really fascinating project of left leaning gun owners.
I want to get to that, but first I want to talk to you about Latino voters, because that is the two really the weak spots for Democratic reelection are the young voters and the Latino voters, right, especially Latino men, male voters. Right. That is a number that Biden is losing and that the Republicans are picking up for whatever reason.
For the people who are staunchly anti Bernie who are listening to this podcast, and I know there are some of you, Bernie has already endorsed Biden, so that is done, right. He's not going to primary him, period paragraph But Bernie had a bunch of really exciting progressive ideas, like the climate Core and that now Biden has just implemented, right,
He's implemented two of Bernie's key kind of things. I mean, do you think that there is a way for do you think that more successful messaging of that will help? And do you think that Biden did these things because he knows he needs those voters?
Yeah?
I look, I mean I know that Biden if you look at the polling, right or he's lot Biden's locked into a very close rate with Trump, who's the likely Republican nominee. What I've been observing is having gone through the twenty twenty campaign to do a lot of polling and watching you know, Burry do very well with young
people and Latinos and Biden struggle with them. They eventually rallied to Biden in the general election, but then three months into Biden's presidency they kind of left it right and just and a lot of move to kind of unsure undecided. But they weren't sold on Biden at the beginning. They warmed up to him and when it was a comparative a choice between Trump and Biden, but then they didn't show a lot of loyalty, and then having stuck with them now in looking at recent polling versus Biden
versus Trump, example, Latinos and exit polling. In twenty twenty, Biden won Latinos by thirty three points sixty five to thirty two, and recent polling against Trump, Biden is only winning among Latinos by seven points forty five thirty eight with a lot.
Of others, so there's a net twenty six point drop off.
Young voters show a very similar pattern where Biden won them by twenty four points sixty to thirty six and twenty twenty Corten exit polling and now he's only up three, so it's a dramatic chip. Now my view is this should be low hanging fruit for the Biden campaign. So to your point is he's focusing on them, embracing policies, advocating policies that young people support, that Latin they should
be appealing to Latinos. But he's always struggled with these two groups, so it's going to take a lot of work for him.
To win them over.
In my view, talk to me about gun owners, who exactly is in this group?
So these are you know, left leaning gun owners, right, So if you think about where Trump has made inros with working class voters and Biden and Democrats expense. It's been you know, versus Hillary and versus Biden. African American men and Latino men. Right, So there's the two subsets that Trump has made some inroads with. And they're disproportionately working class, and they're disproportionally gun owners. So I've been working with a coalition trying to organize and connect with
left leaning gun owners. After every mass shooting, right, there's obviously rush for advocating for tougher gun safety laws, and the challenge of left leaning gun owners is then they feel.
Kind of, oh, do I belong in this party?
Right?
So this effort is to kind of make them feel welcome voting.
For progressive candidates and causes.
Right.
You know we found is that they own God, these folks own guns. They like owning guns. They're proud to be gun owners, right, So, which is not a typical profile of today's in today's Democratic Party, which has become
more white collar professional, right. So, you know, they're just purtily working class and many of them are struggling financially and they're really worried about the economy, and we're more inclined to vote for Biden over Trump, but you don't have concerns, especially on economic issues.
So this is the group that is being affected by inflation the most.
Yeah, our experience if you look at kind of acroeconomics microaps and our research, I mean young people in Latinos. These are the two groups that you know Biden is struggling with the most now compared to where how he did in twenty twenty. They have been deeply impacted by inflation. Right, You're a young person, and people tend to make less
money they're earlier in their careers. And so if you're a young person and the groceries st have gone up, and costs and price of gas has gone up, in rent has gone up, you feel that a lot and young people don't have any sort of historical perspective, right, they have been through inflation.
This is new to them.
Inflation is the first time they're really experiencing inflation. And they just know that A things cost more and b that Joe Biden is present. Right, And so while they are left leaning politically and voted for Biden in big numbers in twenty twenty, you know a lot of them moved to the on side of column. Right, now in a matchup between Biden and Trump, and they'll say, well, five years ago we didn't have inflation.
Today we have inflation.
So the Bien folks and del grag Parry has to vote to young people and compel them to vote for Biden and tell them a convincing economic message and b why Donald Trump is really really bad or not that they don't know that, but you just have to an election. It's a binary choice between two people. You got to remind them why they hate Donald Trump, so they vote for Joe.
Biden, right exactly? With student debt, are they mad about the student debt situation? And if so, who do they blame?
They're frustrated for sure, because it has real impact. I mean, if you want student debt payments.
And interest rates just went ah, yes, So.
It's it's real.
It's a real pocketbook issue, and it's impact in a real way.
I mean, I think from pulling.
We've done and others done. They largely blame the Supreme Court and MAGA and call tunes. But Biden's present, right, so and he got it done, but they didn't get done. So that's the story that Biden's going to have to tell is explain point direct their anger at Donald Trump's Supreme Courts right, and say, look, this is the reason why you're student loans paying forgiveness got thrown out, and
I'm the one who stood up for you. So the challenge Biden has is he has to make the argument right, He has to make the case to them about why Donald Trump's bad for them, and Joe Biden stands up for their interests.
So I think one of the most interesting and useful things that I have been hearing about is that this polling is really sort of directional. Right, this is what Biden needs to do over the next four hundred plus days in order to win. Right, talk to us about the sort of like how Biden should take these polls.
Yeah, I mean he's got to make a concerted effort at targeting these groups in a way that's meaningful, authentic, and constantly right. I mean, the you know, younger rooters and Latinos and they lean left, they voted for him in twenty twenty, and he's got to woo them and win the back. And I think, look, I think it's a multi step process. I mean, he's got to lay out a pot positive messages story to tell which look
at people have their own personal economic experience. You know, the positive messaging about what he's done the economy is going to have a limited impact, but he still has to tell that story, especially on student loan debt forgiveness. Right, But then he's got to go destroy Donald Trump and just just savage Donald Trump. And he's starting to do that more. But that's one big critique I've had of the of the Biden administration is he wouldn't even mention
Donald Trump's name for the first two years. And look, I mean, every good narrative, every good story has a feeling, right, I mean, Star Wars is nothing without Darth Vader, right, And their refusal to kind of engage Trump and Maga Republicans consistently. I mean they've started doing it now, but for two years, they wouldn't even mention the other side,
including Trump. And I just feel like the reason Biden got elected was if you look at exit polling, most people said it was a vote against Donald Trump, not a vote for Joe Biden.
And maybe the Biden folks.
Thought that, well, he can become president, be this inspirational figure, and he didn't.
He's done amazing job and policy.
Accomplished a lot on a policy front, but I feel like he's always stronger when he's put it against somebody else, Right, Well, that's Vanders or Donald Trump or whomever. Biden does better when he is up against somebody else other than himself. And I just think that making the next year about why Donald Trump's a horrible person president and why he's bad for these voters in particular, and how Biden has made an effort to do good by them.
Right, I'm thinking about sort of this idea of populism, really like successful economic populism. One of the reasons why, and again I don't want to relitigate because Bernie endorsed Biden and AOC endorsed Biden. But I want to say something about Biden which is really about Bernie, which is a Bernie had this incredibly good economic populist message that was very compelling. It was Democrats speaking to working class
voters in a way that Hillary could not. Because clearly, if you look at Biden's legislation, he has been an economic populist. Right, He's done tariffs, he's pro union, he's doing the kind of economic populism that you know Americans desperately need How could he sort of steal that playbook from Bernie a little bit?
Well, I mean the ironies he has, right, I mean that's the thing is.
Right, the legislation, but the advertising.
It, I mean, that's the iron is why Bernie endorsed him early, right, because he's Bernie feels like Biden's done a great job on the policy front, and you know, so Bernie's behind him. It's tough because Biden is who he is, and he got elected president for being who he is, right, which is kind of a steady hand in stormy weather, right, and so you know, it can't
really embrace his inner Bernie and be Bernie. So I look, I do think though, that advertising matters, right, telling story over paid communication, whether digital TV ads matters, And it takes time. I mean, if you look at you know, the presidential primary toy toy, I mean, we Bernie has a very compelling economic message, but look at our TV ads. I mean we really focused on economic messages in the primary and that's where we will to win the first
three states so resoundingly. And if you look at Biden campaign, they had limited resources and they were very biocentric about you know, Biden's story, and they were kind of light on economics, and I think that's one of the reason we were so successful at the being in that. But look, I think they're starting to talk about the economy that can't Biden and this team are. And again, it's going to have a as the incumbent if people aren't feeling
great about the economy. If you're saying how great the economy is, is going to meet some resistance. But he's going to highlight his accomplishments, highlight all the jobs he's creating with manufacturing, Infrastructure Bill and the Chips Bill, and tell us compelling story and contrast that with Trump's you know, economic RECERD, which is basically a big tach cut for
big corporations. So that's how he's going to be come populous. Look, I mean Barack Obama wasn't a populist, sounded like a populist when he ran for re election at twenty twelve because we're against Mitt Romney was a plutocrat and it was the effective strategy. So I think the Biden folks and Biden will are coming around to that. But but
also Biden, look, he can't he's Scranton Joe. I mean, he does have these working class roots, so he does have the ability to connect with working class people, and he just has to channel that as best.
He can't in his own voice.
That's the other thing.
He can't get up there and sound like Bernie because then everyone's know it's not that's not who Joe Biden is, but in his own way as Scranton Joe, and through policy accomplishments and highlighting Trump's true economic record, which is massive task us for big corporations of the wealthy, and while Joe Biden's trying to bring jobs back from China, manufacturing jobs and high tech jobs. Heldough a compelling story to tell, but it's just going to take a while to tell it.
Thank you so much, Ben, Really interesting sure.
Thing and a moment.
Jesse Cannon, Molly job fast. Those Republicans are in disarray, and I think it's always funny because we often make a joke about that.
But what else do you call this?
They can't get the rules vote passed, and the rules vote is like a very standard you know, like what kind of paper shall we write this on? Since nineteen ninety five, the House has failed to pass rules eight times, all under GOP control. McCarthy has failed three times in the last eight months, including twice this week. Con Gradations, Kevin McCarthy, you are our moment of Ourckeray. 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.