Arjun Singh  0:03  
Music from the levers. Reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh, these are unprecedented times, at least. That's what we've been told for the last eight years, from the rise of Donald Trump to the covid 19 pandemic, and now the last minute switch from Biden to Harris, American politics has certainly been going through a weird period, but nothing was weirder than seeing Dick Cheney, one of the biggest villains in democratic politics, come out and endorse Kamala Harris. Well, that is until Harris bragged about that endorsement on the debate stage a couple weeks later, a coalition built around defeating Donald Trump isn't new, but the coalition Harris's building seems unstable. For example, what, aside from defeating Donald Trump, do Dick Cheney and AOC really agree on? What about Harris's donors that are asking her to pivot away from Biden's policies that have proven popular with the Democratic base that make up a majority of her support, and how much longer will Republican politics amount to one simple question, are you with or against Donald Trump for unprecedented times? It feels like these are old questions. Sure, the names are new, but the themes feel reminiscent of campaigns of the past, like the race between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976 so today, on lever time, I'm gonna sit down with journalist Ben Bradford. Ben recently hosted the podcast series landslide, an in depth look at how the 1976 campaign created the modern Republican Party. We'll discuss how Harris's campaign mirrors that of Jimmy Carter's and the risks that can pose and will try and unpack the most difficult question in American politics, what do people want out of their president?

Arjun Singh  1:56  
So Brad summer is officially over. Earlier this week marked the beginning of fall, and every four years here in the US, that usually means the peak of the presidential election. So far, we've already witnessed one debate between Harris and Trump, and it's probably going to be the last. She

Donald Trump  2:12  
was big on defund the police in Minnesota. She went out. Wait a minute, I'm talking now, if you don't mind, please, does that sound familiar?

Arjun Singh  2:21  
Then? For the past few weeks, when Donald Trump hasn't been talking about cryptocurrency, he and his vice presidential candidate JD Vance have been leaning hard into the culture war. And

Speaker 1  2:31  
look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk.

Arjun Singh  2:36  
In this case, they've been stoking an unverified rumor that Haitian immigrants living in Ohio are eating cats among other pets.

Speaker 1  2:43  
They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame this

Arjun Singh  2:57  
has been widely disputed. It's been disputed by Springfield's police force, the town city manager, and despite their best efforts, conservative sleuths like the provocateur Christopher Rufo, has so far failed to surface any legitimate evidence that pets are being eaten, much less stolen. Yet Trump and Vance continue to spread this claim.

JD Vance  3:18  
If every single thing that the media says about this story is false. The verifiable facts are that this community has had their lives destroyed by 20,000 migrants coming in and uprooting life again. Officials said no credible evidence.

Arjun Singh  3:33  
These claims are incendiary. Their baseless and on a whole, they're pretty ugly, and they seem to come right out of a playbook used by campaigns of the past. We're going to talk about that a little later in the show. But while this has been happening, what have the Democrats been doing and what have they been saying about it here on lever time, we've covered the fact that Harris was slow to offer any, actually, policies she wanted to pursue in office after becoming the presumptive nominee. Now, to her credit, this week, her team did release a policy portfolio which highlighted things like providing homeowners with $25,000 in aid for a down payment, providing startup businesses with up to $50,000 in tax breaks, and cutting taxes for middle income earners. Then, in a speech on Wednesday, Harris said the broad vision connecting these policies was an idea to strengthen the middle class.

Kamala Harris  4:22  
I intend to chart a new way forward and grow America's middle class. Donald Trump intends to take America backward.

Arjun Singh  4:34  
In the same speech, she rolled out goals of investing in domestic industries like biotechnology and microchips, along with building more housing, we

Speaker 3  4:43  
will invest in biomanufacturing and aerospace remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies expand our lead in clean energy innovation. And manufacturing,

Arjun Singh  5:03  
but Harris's definition of strengthening the middle class also apparently includes mainstreaming cryptocurrency in private comments to donors this week, Harris promised to grow the crypto industry, one that's become rife with fraud and scams, and in classic Kamala Harris fashion, she said she'd only do it in a way that protected and benefited American consumers. But the remarks seem to be tailored for the wealthy donors at this event, donors who stand a lot to gain from crypto, and some who had recently said they may support Donald Trump because of it. And of course, Donald Trump has tried to go all in on crypto to win their votes. The other day, he was spotted at a Bitcoin confab, for example, holding out cryptocurrency themed burgers and promising he'd be the best president to get bitcoin everywhere.

Donald Trump  5:50  
This is a crypto burger.

Donald Trump  5:54  
Actually, you should name them. Name a Bitcoin and a crypto

Arjun Singh  5:58  
otherwise, he's continued to run on a classically Republican agenda of stripping away health insurance protections, rolling back regulations and cutting taxes, though there's a tinge of populism thrown in there too. For example, Trump wants to impose stronger tariffs on imported goods, a move that's seen as trying to bolster the domestic economy, but will also likely increase prices on a lot of things. When it comes to the economy, it seems to be that the country's voters and intellectual class are moving towards a more populous direction overall, or at least our leaders sound like they are. But really, a lot of this election is coming down to one thing, Donald Trump.

Speaker 3  6:35  
We know what a second Trump term would look like. It's all laid out in Project 2025 written by his closest advisers, and its sum total is to pull our country back to the past, but America, we are not going back. We are not going back.

Arjun Singh  6:58  
But if Harris wins, what kind of a mandate does that give her when it comes to fighting for different policies? Which of these constituents is Harris going to ultimately align with her crypto bro donors, the cheneys, or will she align with the broad base of the Democratic Party that supported Joe Biden's invigorated fight against concentrated economic power? To find out, we will need to wait until after the election. But in these unprecedented times, perhaps the answer can actually be found in the past.

Jimmy Carter  7:28  
Well, the fundamental question in this race is whether we're going to have major changes in the way the countries run. We're not going to get those changes simply by shifting around the same group of Washington insiders

Arjun Singh  7:38  
that was the 1976 election, and it's a prominent part of the podcast series. Landslide in that election, Jimmy Carter went up against incumbent Gerald Ford. Ford, unlike Trump, fashioned himself as a no nonsense pragmatist, but he caught the first whiff of the changing nature of Republican politics when he was nearly ousted in that year's primaries by a charismatic culture warrior named Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan  8:02  
No people who have ever lived on this earth that fought harder paid a higher price for freedom or done more to advance the dignity of man than the living Americans, the Americans living in this land today. There isn't any problem we can't solve if government will give us the facts, tell us what needs to be done, and then get out of the way and let us have at it.

Arjun Singh  8:24  
And that primary left him in a weaker position against Carter, an unknown conservative Democrat who'd ultimately defeat him in that election.

Jimmy Carter  8:31  
It's now time for healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again, it's time for the people to run the government, and not the other way around.

Arjun Singh  8:46  
So now I'm going to sit down with Ben Bradford to discuss what happened in 1976 and what lessons he sees from that election. Today. We're

Arjun Singh  9:00  
talking about a Democratic campaign today, but I think that there are always some lessons that candidates can take from the past. Interestingly, I think Harris could maybe take a step from the Gerald Ford campaign in 76 I'd be curious to hear your sense after doing a lot of this reporting. But one thing that I really appreciate about landslide was you talked about Ford being this kind of interesting figure in that he was still trying to create the idea of, like a big tent, broad based party, and he was positioning himself as that. I sometimes look at the Democratic Party now, when I saw like the Democratic Convention, it was very impressive at how broad that coalition had been. But at the same time, I did wonder, you know, is the tent gonna explode at some point you most recently saw like Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney are endorsing Kamala Harris, but at the same time, these two were, particularly Dick Cheney were the foils of Democrats for such a long time, over the Bush tax cuts, over the Iraq War, a lot of wounds. I would say a lot of Democrats from that time haven't felt healed from and it makes me wonder whether Big Tent politics has ever really been a successful way. And if you think there is a parallel to Ford in that, that idea of the big tent kind of not being able to succeed in modern politics, yeah,

Ben Bradford  10:20  
you know, I think that one thing of having everyone from Dick Cheney to AOC endorsing a candidate speaks to sort of the ahistorical moment that we find ourselves in. Yeah, you know. I mean, the thing that has sort of strung together every president, essentially throughout American history is the peaceful transfer of power. And so the fact that that that is one of the issues of this election, I think, helps to speak to the reason that that's happening now. With that said, you know, you're absolutely right that in the primary race between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Ford very much was pitching the big tent. He was courting what at the time existed, which was liberal Republicans, and particularly people who were liberal on social issues, who were more conservative economically.

Gerald Ford  11:14  
I will not forget my initial pledge to be president of all of the people I believe I can best represent my party, but this will be futile unless I unite the majority of Americans who acknowledge no absolute party loyalty. Therefore I will seek the support of all who believe in the fundamental values of duty, decency and constructive debate on the great issues we face together as free people. Ford didn't want

Ben Bradford  11:50  
to spend a lot of money. He didn't believe in a big welfare state. But also, he was married to the feminist icon Betty Ford. He was a huge proponent for the Equal Rights Amendment, and, you know, just the injection of culture war into what had traditionally been looked at as more economic issues. Of course, those things are related. Of course there are, there are interplays between those things. But sort of the explicit connection was not something that Ford was interested in, and was really being promulgated by his opponent, which was Ronald Reagan. So I think that one of the things that's really interesting about modern politics that we see develop in landslide is the destruction of big tents. And I think there is a good question of whether a big tent can exist successfully for any period of time under our current structure. So what I mean by that is that when Gerald Ford is running against Ronald Reagan, and we don't get into this, this is actually a little bit of context for the series. We don't get into it in the series explicitly. It is the first time that President a nominee is being selected under the current system, which is to say where primaries are the main way that you get a candidate.

Ronald Reagan  13:02  
I'm going to campaign as hard as I can, going to try as hard as I can to to win, but you have proportional delegates here. I want all the delegates that I can get, but I don't believe that the state is is as crucial. In other words, a defeat for me, would not have the same impact that if he would for him. So

Ben Bradford  13:24  
before that, it had always been the smokey back rooms, right? Why do we have delegates who go to the convention rather than just votes doing it? It was because those delegates were the people that were actually picking they were going to the convention. They were getting together in smokey back rooms, and they were saying, well, who's the guy we want? We want that guy. And of course, it was always a guy. So you know, this was the end of that, and that had ended during the Vietnam War. And the I think that the challenge that Ford faced, despite all the advantages that he had as being the president, controlling the party apparatus in so many different ways, the the idea of an ideological candidate who can drive grassroots turnout, who can seek wedge issues and split people apart to get a vote in a primary. This was a relatively new strategy that we were seeing be adopted, and I think it speaks to a lot of why we don't see big tents as much anymore.

Arjun Singh  14:16  
That's that's so interesting, you know? And like, I guess this is a chicken and or the egg question. But when you're looking at the push for a culture war, or the the use of a culture war in that 1976 primary is that something that's being directed from Reagan and the people supporting Reagan, or is that something that they detect in the public and Reagan happens to be almost the right guy at the right time. He's the perfect image to fit what people are really pushing for, at least on the Republican side of the aisle. Yeah, I

Ben Bradford  14:48  
mean, I think it's both. I think that, you know, I've talked to some political historians about this, and political scientists about this, and this is always the question, right to what extent are politicians successful? They're picking up on something in the zeitgeist. And the answer to that has to be that, you know, you're probably not going to be successful unless you're doing so. But also, to what extent are political figures sort of determining what people believe or what issues they care about? And I think that, you know, the thing that I always think about is in 2016 which is when I was first sort of getting the idea to start doing these historical look backs and sort of examining how our parties and how our political division sort of formed as we know it today. The thing that I think about is build the wall. And Trump coming into a primary of 17 different Republicans, and he says, you know, we should build a big cement wall between US and Mexico. And everybody said, that's crazy. Build

Donald Trump  15:45  
that wall. Build that wall. Build that wall. Build that wall. Build that wall, build that

Ben Bradford  15:53  
wall. And of course, by the time that Donald Trump gets the nomination, that's in the platform, and it becomes this sort of key piece of rhetoric that that carries through to today, where he's still talking about it, and it's broadly accepted in the Republican Party that that's what they want to do. So I think that there is a way that politicians can harness the wins in the air and then channel them into what people believe. And nobody was more masterful at that than Ronald Reagan.

Arjun Singh  16:23  
There is a lot of discussion, I don't know how I say a lot. It's hard when you work in the media to determine what's a lot and what's like, you know, happening in the media. But there has been a lot of writing in the media about how Kamala Harris has been slow to roll out policies, you know, and it should be said that she has started to roll them out, and she's also been the nominee for an incredibly short amount of time. But there was this, this persistent criticism that was coming in the last couple of weeks that, you know, we couldn't nail down what her policy positions were. Was she going to continue with Biden? Was she not? And I wonder, you know, when you look back at that election, on the other side of the aisle was Jimmy Carter, and he's kind of, you know, he takes that primary system, he comes out of nowhere. I think he's the reason Iowa becomes like. Iowa is the place you really gotta, you know, make your bones. And, you know, what do you make of kind of, this idea that, you know, things have to be so policy laden. I shouldn't say, what do you what do you personally think about it? But does that have, like, a hysterical historical allegory, like in this time period where the primaries are now open, the public is really participating? Was this something people are saying like, Oh, what's Carter's, you know, tax policy? What's Carter's energy policy? What's Carter going to do about, you know, gas and you know, and I'm sure a lot of people were concerned about that, but did it have this sort of specificity that we see today? Yeah,

Ben Bradford  17:48  
I think actually, there are a lot of parallels between that 76 campaign with Carter and the campaign that we're starting to see Harris run right now. There were questions. And you hear this sort of develop, as you hear us kind of carry Jimmy Carter from unknown governor who he'd been out of office after being a one term governor, and all of a sudden he's running for the Democratic nomination against senators and congressmen and real, really, much more known people. And the way that he emerges is absolutely fascinating, and it is partially this criticism that emerges around him is that he's fuzzy on the issues. Not only do people not know what he thinks on the issues, but this criticism emerges that he's telling different people different things based on what they want to hear. So when he wins in Iowa, and again, this is like not a particular moment that we get into in the series, just as we sort of sort of cover it. But there is this sort of interesting little side note of Iowa. He wins the Iowa caucus. And the idea of this unknown person winning the Iowa caucus, as you mentioned, really makes it the Iowa caucus that we know today he, and I should say he wins it in the sense that he beats any other candidate, is actually uncommitted that beats him. So again, these are the delegates uncommitted.

Arjun Singh  19:05  
It's another call back to today, although it's quite different, right now.

Ben Bradford  19:10  
Yeah, right, exactly so, but it's anti abortion groups get angry after the Iowa caucus because they feel betrayed, because they thought that they had heard Carter commit to a constitutional amendment against abortion, while at the same time, he had abortion rights advocates also supporting him. And so there's this sort of picture that emerges of a Carter who, if he's not directly contradicting himself in front of other groups, certainly the way that he talks leaves people under the impression that he agrees with them,

Jimmy Carter  19:43  
and I don't think that the voters are in doubt about what I say. They just feel that I'm the kind of person that they can trust. And if they are liberal, I think I'm compatible with their views. If they are moderate, the same and if they voted as conservative, I think they still feel that I'm a. Good president. So I think this is a kind of image that's a good one. It's based on compatibility with voters, not because they've put me in little boxes as a certain sort of an ideologically committed person. What

Ben Bradford  20:13  
Carter is doing is running on one specific thing, which is that he is the outsider who is going to clean up government,

Jimmy Carter  20:21  
I think there's a there's a lack of purpose in our country's government now, which is much more vulnerable than the people deserve. It's hard to detect what are our goals, what common purpose we work toward, what sort of sacrifices might be expected from the American people, and if I can exemplify the correction of some of the defects that have been brought in our government by politicians and not by the people, and help to restore the greatness of this country, then I'd like to do it. Other candidates

Ben Bradford  20:51  
are rolling out their plans. They are saying, I am in this particular lane. And Carter very much, isn't I mean, he actually is conservative in the field. He's a southern governor who is it from a right to work state. It creates problems for him later, where he's really outside, sort of the labor mainstream of the Democratic Party. But as he's running, he is maybe viewed as a more conservative option, but mostly he is the change candidate. He is the outsider who is running against Washington and his inexperience actually becomes a advantage. And I think that that is sort of fascinating, when you consider how that template applies to Harris today, not necessarily as an outsider, but as a change candidate, right? I mean her slogan being, we're not going back. And then you look at, okay, how she has not been, yes, super eager to put forth a whole bunch of plans. Sure, it's been fast, but I think that probably, again, I'm not a political strategist, but as I look at sort of like how this compares throughout history, I would guess that that's pretty intentional, and I think that what we saw during the debate was, you know, you heard her saying, I'm eager to talk about my plans. I want to talk about my plans. And then she would mention certain things that, for the most part, were sort of, you know, generally popular things, you know, a modest tax break here, or a modest grant there, things that are, you know, not going to be controversial, because she does not want to introduce more specific things that can be attacked or might divide this very, very large tent that she has. So it makes sense for her to say, Well, I have a plan. I want to talk about my plans, while not actually necessarily, really want to talk about her plans. And the final thing I'll just say about that is that was something that was something that we saw Jimmy Carter do. One of my favorite things that Jimmy Carter does in 1976 favorite from the you know, perspective of looking back and thinking it's funny, is that he gets accused of being fuzzy on the issues right? People don't know where he stands, and so his response to that is to start using the word issue more in his speeches. Interesting to say the real issue of this campaign and the issue that I want to talk about, the issue that you need to think about, the issues that I care about are the issue of the insider versus the outsider. And it's like, is that an issue, you know? And I think that that's sort of what you saw during the debate from Harris, where she's saying, I have a plan. I have a plan. And then, without necessarily wanting to delve very deeply into what those are.

Arjun Singh  23:23  
One narrative that I've sometimes heard coming out of like the Carter Presidency, is that it was, it was rudderless and it was directionless at the same time, though, it's like the Department of Energy is created under his administration. He has, you know, I'm not a presidential historian, but he does have some legislative feats that do happen. So where does this narrative kind of come from? I mean, is that an actual assessment that Carter was rudderless? And the reason that I'm asking this is because I was talking to David srota, the levers founder, and, you know, he was saying to me that one thing that he thinks is that, because Carter had this sort of he's the quote issues candidate, but he's not really being clear on these issues, it ends up creating a directionless administration. I'd be curious what you what you make of that?

Ben Bradford  24:13  
Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting point. I don't think that it's my specific takeaway, but I think it is a valid way to look at what happened. I mean, you know, Carter did win as sort of a hope and change candidate, an outsider candidate, and he came in, and he essentially could not put his priorities forth. In a lot of ways, he didn't have an agenda. A lot of people said that he came in, you know, nuclear engineer with the nuclear engineers mindset of, we're going to do these lists of things, but without sort of an overarching message to the American people. I think that that's all true. I think that on whether a candidate can sort of run that way and then enter and avoid that, I don't know. I think you could argue that Barack Obama, President Obama, had. A sort of a similar issue in his first couple of years, where he'd run as a hope and change candidate, and then he came in and, you know, again, the setting matters, the individual politics matter. This was during the recession, and they did pass big bills. They passed stimulus, you know, they passed the Affordable Care Act. There was, you know, the House passed a cap and trade bill, what would have been the biggest climate change bill ever in the country's history. But, you know, couldn't put that one through. So, you know, again, is that a list of things, or is that sort of speaking to an overarching agenda? Yeah, for Carter, you know. So I get that interpretation. I think it's a worthwhile one to think about, I also think that to your point, he certainly had some successes. You know, the Middle East peace accords that struck peace between Israel and Egypt, and there has not been a war since, a tremendous accomplishment of personal diplomacy. And I think that that's essentially inarguable. He maybe it's not an arguable, but, you know, it's sort of like generally looked upon, I would say that way. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Jonathan alter, the historian, has a great biography of Carter called his very best that, I think, yeah, is a reappraisal of the Carter record. With that said, I think that a thing that you see from Carter, both when he was governor of Georgia and then when he was president, is that he built a reputation as a micromanager that, you know, he wanted to be involved in everything he was not going to delegate. There's that sort of famous, but apparently apocryphal story about him, you know, signing the schedules on who could use the White House tennis courts. But again, speaking to how a narrative develops, that spoke to a, you know, his secretary probably forged his signature on it, which is a thing that happens pretty frequently in a congressional office. And that was like, you know, it's pretty standard. You sign a Dear Colleague letter and you have somebody else do it because the person doesn't have time. But it spoke to a thing about Carter, because he was so nitty gritty in the details, in a way that you may want for someone to understand the policy, but also in a way that can can avoid getting things done. But the other issue that Carter had, and I would say that this is probably different from Harris, is that because he ran as an outsider, because he was outside of his party's mainstream on issues like labor, because he was more economically conservative, he got into into the White House, and suddenly he's faced with Democratic control of Congress, a much more powerful Congress than we have seen In decades, and they have different priorities. And Carter, you know, the knock on him again, both in Georgia and in the White House, was that he was pretty aloof and he wasn't necessarily willing to do the compromises and the deal making that sort of have to be done in order to get legislation through. And I think that those sort of things contributed to the image that ultimately emerged, combined with the things that he couldn't control, which is that it was an absolutely terrible time to be president with a terrible world economy, you know, things like the Iran hostage crisis, all these other things that helped sink him, yeah.

Arjun Singh  28:16  
And with Carter, too, it's interesting to hear about his relationship with the Congress. And in many ways, it feels like today you have like the parties are much more top down. It feels like where, like the president is really the center and the leader. And you take someone like a Kamala Harris, who has been in politics for a very long time and clearly has made a lot of allies, but at the same time in DC, is a relative unknown, but when she becomes the nominee, it is sort of seen amongst this political class of, okay, this is our person. Let's go to bat for her. Let's do all of that. Let's get behind the president. Is that kind of the culture that you had, and you know, we can take like Ford and Carter? Were the parties as much centered around the personalities at that time, or was it more of like these guys were the president, but there were, you know, you had strong senators, you had governors. You said, Hang on one second. You know, you need us as a little bit too.

Ben Bradford  29:09  
Yeah. I mean, I think that it's, you know, how strong is your political coalition, and where is the power center of that political coalition? And I think that that basic dynamic exists today, but it probably varies based on the president. The Congress was definitely much more powerful because Democrats had a much larger majority and it now they also had a had a pretty fractured Coalition, in the sense that you had a lot of conservative Southern Democrats that are now sort of the heart of the Republican Party, right? This is the when you have Republicans running Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon running the Southern strategy right, trying to peel off conservative Southern Democrats. So at the time, you had certain things that sort of the Democrats could push through on their own. But you also had more bipartisanship, where. Where you could find deal making compromises with the other party. So I think some of those dynamics don't exist anymore, and that creates actually kind of two like contradictory impulses. One is that I think you're right, and it makes it more top down. You know, the bills and the priorities are not coming out of the committees. They're not being, you know, worked on over time and kind of ground up legislation that then goes to the President's desk. On the other hand, it gives individual members who are on the wings much more ability to determine policy. You know, you notice on the Republican side, the degree of power that, like the House Freedom Caucus, has, you know, or you notice somebody how, somebody like Joe Manchin, the amount of control that they could have wield in the Democratic Party, because those very small margins of votes matter, and these people who know that they can hold out know that they can really control, have a lot of influence over bills and policy, because their vote is needed. So I think that it's sort of like both things. Does that make sense? Yeah,

Arjun Singh  31:01  
no, absolutely. And I'd be curious to hear from you. You know, you've done all this reporting, you've now published this amazing podcast series. How did it change the way, if it did that you think about politics, and what are the lessons for you in what we take away in our current political system?

Ben Bradford  31:19  
Yeah, okay, so the thing, more than anything else, and I, I started out the first series that I did was for Audible. It's called of the people. And that one actually focused on George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee who lost in a famous landslide to Richard Nixon, and what you see over the course of that story is the primary system developed McGovern is the guy that essentially wrote the rules for the current primary system. Uses them to launch a presidential campaign in order to win against the establishment. He builds this new coalition that includes anti war supporters and women's rights groups, and it's the liberal wing of the party, as we know today, and that is part of what splits the Democratic Party in 72 not necessarily forever. And it's interesting, because it's, you know, it's a power struggle between sort of the old white labor movement, you know, the cigar smoking backroom bosses who also control the labor movement, and these new insurgents, which is, you know, people of color, women, younger people who all, all of a sudden, are getting a voice at the convention. And as I was looking at that, you know, that was sort of what got me into it, and it sort of led me to doing landslide, which is the 1976 race. It's sort of the the natural extension is to go to move forward and say, Okay, well, what happens next? So, sorry, that's just context to say that. Then I was surprised, because I knew that Ronald Reagan running that, of course, he ran the Southern strategy, that, of course he was more conservative. But the thing that I think that you hear over the course of the series in the archival footage is how extreme he was viewed in his own time. Yeah, how, how just outside of the mainstream, the degree which he was dismissed both as a candidate for governor and then as a candidate for president when he was running against Gerald Ford, because his viewpoint was considered so far outside what we would now call the Overton Window, that there was just no way that voters across the nation were going to consider this person. And then you watch how he is able to build a new coalition and how he's able to win. Part of it is luck. Part of it is circumstance. Part of it is being just an incredible retail politician to a degree that we probably have not seen otherwise. The other part of it is just understanding the degree to which is based on backlash, the degree to which it's based on getting the voters who were angry about, you know, a decade before, the Civil Rights Act which Reagan opposed, and the Voting Rights Act which Reagan opposed, and fair housing, and the degree to which he was propelled, not so much by his anti tax stances, because, remember, that didn't that didn't differ from Gerald Ford all that much. So it was his ability to talk in a language of anti tax, anti regulation, anti government, but for the people who were voting for him rather than Ford, to understand the social issues that were underneath it, the backlash to civil rights, social movements, et cetera. And I think that probably intellectually, we know that, but the degree to which that is sort of a modern a predecessor to the modern Republican Party, and what we're seeing today in the Republican Party. That really struck me, and was not necessarily the hypothesis that I had going in, yeah,

Arjun Singh  34:51  
is a coalition built around anger and fear? Is that a resilient coalition like I do wonder for. Or Reagan, for example. How far can you you extend that? And at some point do fissures start to form where people say, I am angry, but I'm, you know, I'm not so angry that I will endorse that. And I think about a little bit with Trump, really, he's taken some issues, and he's really tried to turn them away from the traditional kind of Republican mold. And you're seeing that kind of tension and difficulty, but in your reporting, and I know Nixon kind of used that same tactic, gave the silent majority how powerful of a coalition builder is fear and anger?

Ben Bradford  35:32  
Well, I think political strategists will tell you that they are the thing that is most likely to drive somebody to vote. So it makes sense then that that appealing to that can be really effective. I think that if you're looking at who the coalitions are that are sort of driving the parties and driving the candidates, that a coalition based on cultural backlash has been really resilient, right, because it is what starts to drive the Southern Democrats who had been unified with Northern Democrats in cities. The New Deal coalition, right is based on labor and the degree to which cultural issues and social issues can divide that coalition in both parties, by the way. I mean, this is, you know, this plays out across not just one party. And of course, there's, you know, there's back and forth. But it also doesn't mean that it's sort of an equal response, that you know these are, it's easy to say, Oh, well, you know, it's both sides and it's equal. I mean, you know, these start in different ways and are promoted in different ways, but I think that we have seen that through line be pretty resilient in the Republican Party. And I think that you know, if you were surprised when Donald Trump emerged as a political force within the Republican Party, and I was very surprised at the time as I watched that sort of field emerge, it helps explain where that came from, how it was effective, and how a lot of those communications have continued to be effective.

Arjun Singh  37:11  
Yeah, it on the flip side, the role, I think about, the role of kind of like, like, you know, hope and change and that being a motivator as well. And this is a really, this is a big kind of question. I'm almost apologetic for trying to throw this at you, what did people seem to want out of out of a leader? Because, you know, we talked about the difference between policy and vision. And in a way, it seems that one thing that Reagan and successful politicians do is they tell a story. They kind of have a narrative that they're telling people this is what your country is like. And I wonder with Reagan it was, it was fear and anger, but then it transforms into its Morning in America, yeah, because he happens to be the president at that time. And, no, that's

Unknown Speaker  38:00  
a great point.

Arjun Singh  38:01  
People loved him, you know. And I do wonder what, what is it sometimes, and I've covered politics for years, and it's just, it's something I always think about, what do people seem to want out of their leaders?

Ben Bradford  38:12  
That is a great point. And about Reagan, I think it's a great question. And I should mention that, right? That one of the things that really differentiated Reagan from sort of the the the far right movement in the US before him, was his ability to be optimistic, and I think that that helped attract more people. You know, his message was that you don't need all of these things that are that are being presented by government, whether it's the Civil Rights Act or whether it's the welfare state or what have you, because people will do it on their own. And so it was a way of encapsulating that backlash, but also in a way that that looked forward and seemed optimistic. And again, this is where he was such a great communicator. I mean, you know, people call him the great communicator, yeah, because he could do that. He could encapsulate that message. And I think that is a really important part of his success, and shouldn't be overlooked. I think that one of the things that you notice as you sort of go from someone like Ford to Carter to Reagan and and then going forward in US politics, is that, yeah, people do want someone who can tell them a story. It's also, you know, what do people care about? And I think that we are so divided on policy, we are so interested in individual issues, and what we care about in terms of our individual issues, stances on a whole different array of things that can determine whether we vote for a candidate or not. And those things can be really, really important, of course, and particularly in a day. Particularly in a day when we're so divided and the differences tend to be so stark on certain issues, right? I mean, you know, you vote for one party on abortion or, you know, and you know, it's, it's, it's a stark difference between what the parties sort of pitch on an issue like abortion. It also, you. Is like, not most of a president's job, right? It used to be sort of viewed that the President's job was more foreign policy, you know, like, I don't think that there's a lot of debate over, who do you want to have the nuclear codes? And in the event of a nuclear crisis where the our early warning systems say that nuclear weapons are imminent, and it might be an accident. It might be a flock of birds that have triggered it, because that has happened in the past, a long time ago, that you know, are you saying this is the person that I want to have in charge of being, of making that decision? And that's not really what we I think these days, sort of decide our leaders off of and so I think that that is absolutely fascinating. So I think that part of his personal charisma, part of it is how these people project, part of it is how they speak to our current moment, and part of it is how they can sort of sell a larger story. And that all boils down to, how do they appeal to our emotions? Well, Ben, thanks

Arjun Singh  40:56  
so much for taking the time to chat with me. I love the podcast, and it was really cool to get to talk to you about all this. Oh, I

Ben Bradford  41:03  
really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Arjun Singh  41:08  
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me, Arjun Singh, with help from Chris Walker and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockman. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with another episode of lever. Time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai