Where do the Democrats go now?

A warning this episode contains bad language from the start, and it's not Emily Maitless or me to blame. This is a Global Player original podcast. Not only am I not interested in your fucking opinion, I'm not even gonna call you by your name. You're twenty three years old. I don't really give a shit what you think. And let me tell you, another huge error. Huge fucking error. Campaigns need to reflect progressive values. No, they don't. Campaigns are authoritarian by their nature.

And if our running, the Democratic Party strategist supreme who ran the Clinton campaigns. He's also known as the Raging Cajun. And boy. Is he raging about some of the young people who were around Kamala Harris during November's election campaign? It is kicking off a debate. about whether the Democrats focus too much on progressive issues at the cost of economic issues.

And it is becoming part of the postmortem movement, which is sucking all the air up in the Democratic Party right now. And we are going to be digging into that postmortem. Welcome to the NewsAgence USA. Newsagents USA. John Soport. It's John. It's Emily. And boy, is there some wound licking going on in the Democratic Party right now over What went wrong? And you get the impression that Democratic Party grandees are trying to focus it

on issues and not personalities, brackets. Let's not talk about whether Joe Biden stayed too long because let's face it, he did and what can we do about it now? But let's talk about the policies instead. And I think that what you're seeing is a traditional democratic party saying

We listened for too long to people who were saying that if we were only had the right policies on trans issues or gay rights or whatever, we would win the election. And you look at every demographic where we lost That did not work at all in November. Yeah, and part of the discussion you heard there was about whether Kamala Harris should have gone on Joe Rogan, which taps into a wider question, which is about, you know, the bro sphere. Donald Trump, JD Vance,

Absolutely nailed the young man's vote right now. Certainly the white young man's vote. But increasingly parts of, you know, Hispanic communities, black communities where young men were coming towards Donald Trump and JD Vannes. and very much not going towards Kamala Harris. And there were people on her side who said, you know, should they have done Joe Rogan? Should she not? We didn't really want her doing it because it felt really out of whack with what she stands for, values.

And that's Carville basically saying shut up about your values. You should have just been talking about the economy. He is obviously the man who made It's the Economy Stupid Famous. So there is nothing out of step with what he's saying this time round. But I think it does present a bit of a problem for the Dems because we know that this time round The two kind of growing constituents were older people, older white people, and people who made over a hundred thousand dollars.

And those are gonna be niche constituencies, right? By their very definition. You do not want to be just appealing to rich people or to rich old people. Older people. Look, the Democratic Party young macho men, although that is what Trump and J D Vance targeted, and that was certainly, you know, th him appearing on Joe Rogan was all about that.

But also according to the exit polls that were take place and remember their exit polls in America are very different from ours, their exit polls are much more attitudinal than they are about are you voting Democrat or Republican. And what they found was that even

First-time voters among women. Donald Trump was winning. There is kind of all sorts of data which should be, you know, causing the Democratic Party to really sit up and take notice. Because if you go back to Bill Clinton, And the strategy that he ran when he became president And when he beat George H. W. Bush, it was all about No.

just appealing to minority groups, not just thinking you can win with the rust belt. You had to broaden out your appeal. And here you had the Democratic Party losing blue collar voters in this election. in a way that just became ruinous that they couldn't hold on to even the rust belt, let alone anywhere else.

is the whole question of who is animated to, you know, fight for the Democratic Party, to campaign for the Democratic Party and Historically it's been the young activist, right? It's been the people who do care about progressive policies, it's people who do care about racial injustice, it's been the people who do care about more rights for, you know, gay rights or trans rights or or women's rights or whatever. And so this has been the bedrock.

of their noisy activism, of their fan base, quite frankly. So if you take that out, if you turn round to those younger people, you know, who are dynamic and motivated and want to start feeding letter boxes and knocking on doors and all the rest of it and saying

Yeah, we're not talking about any of that stuff anymore. Are they like, yeah, we hear you or are they well, you know, that that mattered to me and I suppose what happened was that the Democratic Party allowed itself to get into a position Where those messages were coming out louder than anything else.

Um and that they were being seized on by the Republican Party. You know, when when you had some Which goes back much earlier. Yes, oh completely. It goes back to weirdly, I mean the the the George Floyd moment which we thought was kind of a real moment of of kind of racial reckoning and and sort of, you know, calling for justice against sort of police abuse.

actually could have been the most dangerous moment of all for the Democrats because of what happened to that movement in the hands of, you know, parts of the Antieth movement, parts of the Black Lives Matter movement who kind of lost the country. Well you started getting slogans like Defund the Police. Now Defund the Police

I'm told now doesn't mean take away money from the police, it means give more money to mental health services. Well fine. But don't come up with a bloody stupid slogan like defund the police. When you start talking about white privilege as well, which is one of the things that came out of it, or critical race theory, they had a massive alienating effect.

on a huge chunk of the electorate when the vast majority of Americans were focused on the economy and whether too many illegal immigrants were flooding over the southern border and that something needed to be done about that and wasn't being done by Joe Biden. So I think the confluence

Of those two things, the hangover from the Black Lives Matter of those slogans which were just massively alienating, let alone the transit sue, which you know, you could also talk Combined with the fact that it seemed that the Democratic Party wasn't talking about the core issues. of inflation and whether people could afford to, you know, fill the shopping trolley. I think that the Democratic Party looked like it was s s slightly decadent and out of touch.

So I think that is the fashionable narrative now. All I'm gonna do is say that now we've had all the votes counted, Donald Trump didn't even get fifty percent of the vote. I mean he he totally won. I'm not you know, I'm not going on a sort of denialism thing here. But he didn't win by th the massive margin that people thought he had done originally. Of the popular vote I think he won by, you know, uh just over a million.

In terms of the proximity of some of the states actually much closer than we realised. If the Democrats had won, we would not be doing this. We would not be looking back and saying, Oh my lost all seven swing states. Yeah, of course they did. I think that anyone who believes that there is just this pendulum in politics and you just wait for

Donald Trump to screw up and then the Republicans uh th will be out and Democrats coming in. No, I'm s okay, I'm gonna say something simpler than that, which is that right now all we're doing is kind of going

Oh my god, the Democrats were so stupid. They went on about, you know, trans issues, they went on about black issues, they went on about women issues, blah blah blah blah blah. We haven't done really the same post mortem on Trump, which is that he started telling a narrative About the stop the steal. in November of twenty twenty, he started sewing a narrative that people had had the last election stolen from them. Four years earlier.

And so I think that is just as significant that it wasn't that he talked about the economy the whole time. He didn't even want to talk about the economy. But he did have. You know, people like Bannon, people like the sort of House Republicans, the mega Republicans going round telling this story of how Trump had been a victim, how Trump had been st had the thing stolen from him, how Trump had had been ignored. And I think that was as important a part of the narrative that was told.

In the four years preceding, you know, which was helpful to the Republicans who became slightly detached from from democratic truth. as it was to say, oh well the Democrats, you know, they they shouldn't have talked about black people. I think it would be frivolous not to be holding a post mortem if you're the Democratic Party on what went wrong. And the fact of the matter is, all those issues are

and were important in themselves. But they seemed to come to dominate Among the activist base in the Democratic Party. by the progressives in the Democratic Party, and I don't think a lot of middle of America was ever so interested in those issues. And just on the Trump side of it, the victimhood, then this is nothing to do with the Democratic Party, I would say. This is the wheels of justice.

But those court cases, the charges that were brought against Donald Trump had a real effect of making him seem like a victim That's exactly my point. So so then my point is you can either say Oh we were so stupid to impose the rule of law on Donald Trump. You know, that is not the answer.

You have to bring a case against somebody who's tried to to start an insurrection. You know, you have to actually hold people accountable. But the case that he was prosecuted on was the New York case, which a lot of people thought was really frivolous. I agree with that. And that was weaponizing something Yeah, there were probably too many. But my point is that this comes down to something much more fundamental, which the Democrats d refuse to actually talk about, which is

They did not work out how to deal with Donald Trump. It was as simple as that. You know, they could have talked about whatever they wanted. But they didn't understand how to deal with him. They didn't understand how to deal with somebody who talks to Joe Rogan for three hours.

They didn't understand how to deal with somebody who refuses to accept losers' consent. They didn't understand how to deal with somebody who didn't mind being a convicted felon and having three other cases. And I think none of this stuff about sh oh God, did we, you know, use pronouns. gets you any closer to understanding that, which is the Democrats just don't know they don't know how to deal with them. In a moment.

We will be speaking to a former Democratic congressman, Steve Israel, who has been very closely involved in the leadership of the Democratic Party. What should the Democrats do now? Well we're joined now by Steve Israel. eight term New York Congressman from two thousand one to twenty seventeen.

Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was a top ally of Nancy Pelosi and is author of books including Big Guns and a bookshop owner. And it's great to have you with us. Thank you very much indeed. There is a post mortem. Going on. Is it grappling with the seriousness of the problems that the Democrats face, or are people being too serious?

Well, my favorite quote, first of all, it's uh it's wonderful to be on with you. Thank you for having me. I will say that my favorite quote that has emerged in this. title wave of postmortems comes from a pundit named Matt Bye who wrote, Any democrat with access to a Wi-Fi has a theory about what we're talking and what needs to happen to get it right.

Several things are clear. We do need a reckoning uh in the Democratic Party in the United States. We need to understand why our message is not connecting with voters despite the fact that our policies are very much favored uh by voters. And so we've got to figure that out. And secondly, we need to understand that we are winning with policies that are to the center or right of center. We're losing independent swing voters with policies that are too far to the left of center.

And so the Democratic Party, which is a big tent, I understand that, needs to meet voters where they are. Not where our ideological purity may reside, and figure out ways to connect to those voters with policies that resonate with them. The policies that resonate Donald Trump just uh schooled us. uh are the economy, the economy, and finally the economy. Do you believe that there was another Democrat that could have beaten Trump this time round?

Well, that's a hypothetical, Emily. I don't I just don't know. We can Look, it's it's clear that the Democrats went through a perfect storm. President Biden, who I supported by the way, uh who I adore.

For his decency. He waited uh for a considerably long period of time and then left. And then Kamala Harris had to quickly consolidate her vote. And it looked pretty good early on. Uh we went from, according to the data A five percent chance of beating Donald Trump when President Biden was the candidate, to a fifty percent chance of beating Donald Trump when Vice President Harris took over.

But then gravity took hold and her numbers began to decline. Trump's numbers began to elevate. There's no way of knowing whether a different candidate could have won. I have my own theory. that we could have won with a different set of policy considerations. Can I just ask you, you've used that phrase, then gravity took hold, as if it was always going to be that way.

But what was that gravitational pull then? Was it just that people didn't believe that it was about the economy or they lost her when she couldn't divorce herself from the Biden administration? What was the bump down to Earth? So here's what happened, and it was thoroughly predictable. When President Biden announced on a Sunday morning that he was not going to uh stand for re-election, there was an instant bump. for Democrats and it immediately gravitated to the vice president why.

She did something that President Biden had been unable to do. She consolidated her vote. There were many Democrats. who didn't believe that Joe Biden was going to be the candidate. They weren't committing. So Kamala does something that eluded Joe Biden. She consolidates her votes. People say, Yes, this is a new thing, a new candidate. I like it. And then as time wore on. Republicans, the Trump movement.

just focused on the economy, the economy, the economy. I think one of the the weakest points of the Democratic campaign was when Vice President Harris said on national television she wouldn't have changed any one of Joe Biden's economic policies. It's hard to make that argument when people are still struggling. So the gravity of the economy as an issue and cultural issues took hold and brought us to the results that we saw on election day.

So that so interesting. I I want to just go back a tiny bit to something else you said, which was, you know, I was a great fan of Joe Biden. I loved him for his decency. Did he stay too long? Was that part of the problem? That whoever it was going to be didn't have a lot of time to define themselves and maybe after the midterms, maybe he should have announced after 2021 that he would only be a one-term president.

Well, of course, our politics in America is so screwed up right now that uh there is that question, did he stay too long? And now another question, could he have won? So we have stuck with him. Uh and so Democrats are scratching their heads to the point of leading with those questions. Maybe could Joe Biden have defeated Donald Trump? Who knows? Politics does not come with a rearview mirror.

So those are difficult questions to answer. I think the more important exploration But I no I sorry to interrupt you, but surely that that question is relatively easy to answer. Given the poll standing of Joe Biden when he pulled out of the race, he couldn't have beaten Donald Trump. The question is did he stay too long? That's an easier question to address.

In retrospect, I think uh it would have been preferable for two things to have happened. One, he made the decision earlier. And two, maybe we should have had an open primary in the U.S. and not just designated Vice President Harris. But said we're going to have a mini primary, we're going to have a super super Tuesday where all Democrats get to vote, have two or three debates, and let the best candidate emerge. It might have been Vice President Harris. We don't know.

But I do hope that we can talk about nothing. The candidate, but what went wrong in the Democrats' prioritization of voter concerns? It doesn't matter whether it's Biden or Harris or Congressman Israel. What matters is what policies. are you promising the voters? And there the Democratic Party fell woefully short. So there's a lot of yeah, rear view mirroring now about

I guess you'd call them culture war issues, woke issues, did the Democrats get led down the wrong path on things like trans or on identity politics, all the rest of it? And I guess there's a very real sense for some people that this will become the natural scapegoat, actually, that the Dems will want to r distance themselves so far from anything to do with the previous values that you're gonna see you know, you saw AOC just this week.

dropping her pronouns. Now, I'm guessing like eighty percent of the population, maybe ninety percent of the population does not give a damn about pronouns. But if it speaks to your own values or if it speaks to what you believe in, are the Democrats risking pushing themselves backwards on that? Well, you don't have to distance yourself, you just have to prioritize.

Yeah. And this is you know my mantra in politics when I ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the organization as a member of Congress, the organization that was charged with message. mobilizing the congressional elections. My mantra was meet voters where they are and then pull them along.

And Democrats fail to meet voters where they are. I'll give you a quick data point. You know, there's a bunch of charts that are circulating. The one that is most meaningful to me is based on exit polls, public views on cultural issues. Democrats win on guns. And abortion. But on other issues. We just begin collapsing. And so we have a net unfavorable of 46% on immigration. We have a net unfavorable of 43% on transgender rights. I support transgender rights.

But when you are talking about those issues exclusively But she didn't. She didn't, Steve. I mean that was what was so interesting. She didn't even push back on on Donald Trump calling her newly black. The candidate at the centre really didn't hammer home culture issues at all, from what I remember. So I think that was the unique problem of this campaign is that it was so short.

That the Republicans were able to define her as overly focused. In fact, the most persuasive commercial in the entire campaign. It ran during US football games, basketball games, it ran during the World Series. Sounds insane. The power that's a good one. I used it in a way that was about pushing for the movement, right? I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message. And that's where things began to soften for Democrats.

But what do you do about it when you have got a democratic party where there are a lot of young, educated, college degrees, people who are the activists in the base and those are the sort of core values that they believe in? Whereas maybe an awful lot of blue collar workers just think this stinks and I don't want to have anything to do with it. How do you change the dynamic of the Democratic Party?

Well, John, I mean that that is the strategic imperative right now. The Democratic Party in the most recent election picked up ground with only two segments of the electorate. From the last presidential election. We picked up ground with people over 65 years old, and we picked up ground with white college women. We lost ground with everyone else.

Including activists. Now, some of the activists base, we may have lost ground because of the Middle East, because of what was happening in Gaza and Lebanon. And there's really fascinating data that shows that there are many young voters who just that was their litmus test.

And they just weren't going to vote for a Democrat under the present circumstance. That issue may may resolve itself. We don't know. We do have an opportunity. Here's the good news for Democrats. We have, you know, these things called midterm elections. And in two years, the entire United States Congress and one third of the US Senate will have to go back to the voters.

Midterm elections are historically unfavorable for the president's party. The president's party typically loses seats in those midterm elections. And so Democrats, to answer your question very specifically, John, if Democrats can reset, reposture, talk about issues that matter to people sitting at their kitchen tables in those swing states. Then we will do very well in the midterms.

The Democrats will take the majority in the House, or to take it in the Senate in 26, maybe 28, and reset ourselves. And may I say one other thing, forgive me from going on, but one other critical issue. How do I know this? 'Cause this is exactly what happened in twenty sixteen when Trump won.

He won in sixteen, Democrats won in eighteen, and then one again in twenty. We've got to replicate that. Steve, it strikes me that one thing that the Democrats haven't reconciled yet is how to talk to Trump fans, MAGA fans, let's just call them voters.

about democracy. Because there's been a lot of pushback over, you know, should they have used the term fascist, should they have talked about democracy, all the rest of it. If you talk to people outside America, the vast majority of voters cannot get over the fact that Trump still carried on talking about having won an election he lost. His election denialism seemed to be so fundamental to the entire race.

And there's something in the way that you're suggesting Dems just sort of pick themselves up, brush down their hands and crack on with it, which seems really confusing I think to people who say w if you do not have losers consent, how are you running the next race? Well, you're exactly right. Uh, I understand it. I direct the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University, and we study democracy. And one of the essential elements

of any democracy is the notion of forbearance. That is, the losers tolerate having lost. They acknowledge having lost. And Donald Trump did not do that. The problem we have is this. We know that history teaches us that people are willing to forego their own democratic rights, forego their liberties. If they think they're going to get economic security in in exchange. And when you look at the polls, people were were, yes, we know that democracy is at stake.

But so is our kitchen table, so is our food prices, so are our gas prices, and those are our priorities right now. So do you think then that you can school a Democratic Party that has grown up a lot on identity politics. I remember being on Roosevelt Island when Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for the presidency.

in twenty twenty sixteen run. It felt like the whole speech was an appeal to minority groups, whether it's gay rights, whether it's black, Latino, whatever. And it wasn't a consolidated message about the economy. And here we are again, even more so now. The Democratic Party seems to be separate little interest groups.

Well the fact is that the Democratic Party is a far less homogeneous group than the Republicans. Uh and so we have a lot more diversity, many more factions. The Democratic Party is a party of factions. The Republican Party is a party of MAGA. And twenty percent of the rest who are never Trumpers. And so when you have the diversity, the ideological and philosophical diversity that we have, you have to try and accommodate those concerns. I understand it.

I have a slightly different view of things, and that is that a party's obligation is to win elections so that it can. Project, protect, and defend its values. And we're not winning on identity politics right now. We're not winning elections on identity politics. And if we're not winning, we're in the minority. And if we're in the minority, we're useless.

So we've gotta retool our priorities. And if you heard from Camel Harris that she was thinking of running again, and I think she hasn't ruled that out. What would your thoughts be? Look, I I think uh I I'm open to it to anyone so long as they understand that this the next election will be won or lost. in battleground states with swing voters.

Who voted for Obama and then Trump and then Biden and then Trump. I want a presidential candidate who's going to focus on winning those voters. America's elections rest in seven battleground states. Uh with those swing voters who go back and forth. Whether it's Vice President Harris Or a Governor Shapiro from Pennsylvania, or a Governor Walsh, whoever it is. I want a candidate who's going to appeal to those voters and lead our entire party on a march.

And what if I said, Steve, provocatively, that none of the names you've mentioned will probably stand a chance of being the next Democrat president. You have to think far more laterally than that. You have to think right outside the box now. You have to think of the Fettermans or the people that are coming through or the gallegos people that are not part of of what we think of now as being the democratic establishment.

Well first of all, i it it's not so provocative. What what if I had said uh a year and a half ago that Joe Biden wouldn't be the nominee and Kamala Harris would and and and Donald Trump would win uh fairly handfully? Nobody would have that. But but you do raise a very good point and that is If we look at who did win, who were the Democrats who outperformed?

Vice President Harris. Um, who are the Democrats who understand those centrist purple districts? That's where the bench of Democrats is. We've got to draw from them. They know how to win in Trump areas. So just going back to the question that Emily posed, kind of at the top really, which is Was there anything?

That Kamala Harris could have done in the time between Joe Biden announcing he was going, you know, in July and the election in November, to have made that election winnable or do you think it was baked in because of I don't know, you know Direction of Travel. Direction of Travel and all the earlier stuff about Black Lives Matter, white privilege, trans rights, whatever it happens to be, that no one could have won it for the Democrats.

I think on all those issues, uh the identity politics issues, I think they reached their climax in uh in in this election. Uh when when you have an economy where 70% of voters are saying that the economy is is a problem for them, I don't know whether Vice President Harris could have reversed that. Tactically, yes.

Tactically, maybe she shouldn't have said, I wouldn't change a thing about the Biden economy. And so there were tactical moments where she might have done things differently. Maybe it would have made the difference in a state like Wisconsin, which was so such a razor-thin majority, maybe Pennsylvania.

But tactics, uh we we've got to go beyond tactics and now evaluate our long-term visions for the voters. It's not just messaging, it's our policies. It's what James Carville, who was President Clinton's campaign manager, said best.

It's the economy stupid. That's what he said. Yeah, he he also said, Steve, if he could come back reincarnate as anything, it would be the bond market. Which seems to which seems to suggest that, you know Sometimes he thinks the whole thing is a mug's game. Yeah, yeah. Well, God bless him. Yeah, he's also said recently, uh I mean he was pretty scaty. Well, we should play you this clip. Let's just play you this clip. The most proud of what's thinking about going on Joe Rogan show.

And a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit. Uh supposedly the campaign said that that wasn't determined to fact it, but they did. When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, uh them let me tell you exactly what you tell these people, what I would tell them. Not only am I not interested in your fucking opinion, I'm not even gonna call you by your name. You're twenty three years old. I don't really give a shit what you think.

And let me tell you another huge error, huge fucking error this way, is when people said campaigns need to reflect progressive values. No, they don't. No, they don't. Campaigns are authoritarian by their nature. And if I were running a twenty twenty eight campaign and I had some little snot nosed twenty three year old Saying I'm gonna resign if you don't do this, not only would I fire that motherfucker on the spot, I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot.

I'm really not interested in that. And you're uninformed, stupid jackass. Um Steve, I think that broadly is your view expressed with maybe fewer um Anglo Saxon words in it. I I look, I'm a New Yorker. The only quibble I have with James is he didn't say the word fuck enough times. But I mean, like he's somebody who gets it right, right? I mean, I remember when he called Georgia for Biden last time round.

Delivered for Clinton. He he he's a stretchist who who kind of knows how people vote, right? Does and that's look, y again, the data shows us that we it used to be that the Republicans were the party of the elite and the Democrats were the party of the working class. In this election, it completely flip-flopped. Now Republicans are viewed as the party of the working class, and Democrats are viewed as the party of the coastal, progressive, woke elite.

You can win elections based on that in San Francisco and the Upper West Side of New York. You can't win those elections in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin. James Carville is as usual correct. Steve Israel, great to speak to you. Thank you so much for joining us. Come on again. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. In a moment, we'll hear from Kamala Harris, the first time she's spoken since her election defeat.

USA. And John Sopar. We've talked a lot about the campaign, but we haven't heard from the woman herself recently until last night. And this was her message to her fans. I just have to remind you Don't you ever let anybody take your power from you. You have the same power that you did before November 5th, and you have the same purpose that you did. And you have the same ability to engage and inspire. So don't ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you.

Oh it's weird, that could be a message to herself. I mean, you hated that. I well I I I I she was leaning forward uh and it sounded I'm I'm n I know Sorry to say this. It sounded l slightly s as though she was drunk. And I've since seen on social media and there is a meme of her with a bottle of whiskey in her hand delivering that particular. It reminded me of like You know, girlfriend to girlfriend. When when when your boyfriend's just patched you, yeah, it's bunch of you and you're like

You are worth ten times what he is. He's a monster mobst he's a odd monst monster that he's a mob You are worth ten times him. Which is what we've all done to our girlfriends, right? But I don't know how it helps Kamala Harris, particularly as there is a lot of talk that she's gonna be back in the fight, that she wants to run for president again. That she is going to run for governor of California in the U.S. twenty six I honestly think if you'd seen that video the night before she lost.

You would have watched it in a totally different way. I think as soon as somebody has become a loser politically, we see them totally differently. All the gloss is gone. I think it's badly lit, it's badly framed, she's leaning forward in the chair. I just think as a piece of production it's pretty bloody. Don't do it. And it's classic Kamala Harris word salad stuff.

So when we fall from grace, what you're saying is we'll never be back saying it you're just You've got the same power you had yesterday, Maitless. You're still as powerful as you once were as long as I've got my blank will be. Exactly. Go, we'll be back next week. We'll be back. We'll see you then.