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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Hi everyone, it’s Arjun, and I wanted to share a quick message before we get into the main show. Now that the presidential election is officially over, today we’re going to break down what happened, and why we saw a rightwing shift in nearly every part of the country this week.
My hope is that these episodes and conversations can help make sense of this moment we’re in, but I want to hear from you. What kinds of topics do you want to hear about? Are you enjoying this kind of coverage of the election?
Drop me a line at my e-mail asingh@levernews.com, tweet at me or send a message to my instagram account. I’ll drop that information in the show notes.
And if you just want to hear more, I encourage anyone who isn’t to become a premium subscriber. Premium subscribers get access to extra bonus content and conversations that we don’t have here on our free feed. For example, last week premium subscribers got to her an exclusive conversation David Sirota and I had with Oscar winning director Adam McKay, the man behind shows like Succession and movies like The Big Short and Vice.
To subscribe, head to our website levernews.com.
Ok, I’ve taken up enough of your time. So, let’s start the show.
After four years of uncertainty, we now know that Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States of America.
[Trump Victory tape]
Since November 8, 2016 it’s felt like the nation’s political system has been caught in a paralysis. Seesawing back and forth because of one question — how long will Trump be in power.
In his first term, Trump tried to ban people from majority Muslim nations from entering the country. He rolled back hundreds of regulatory rules. Rules that were in place to protect the water supply and air quality, and others that ensured workers would be able to work in safe conditions, even if their employers tried to cut corners.
By the end of his first term he had been impeached twice. Once for trying to pressure the president of Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, and then again for stoking a violent mob to attack Congress and prevent them from certifying his election loss.
Though he spent the last four years out of office, Trump was hardly out of sight. His specter loomed over our nation. Manifesting itself in politics, pop culture and our day to day conversations.
Joe Biden’s tenure in office saw the country come out of a pandemic and the economy roar back into action. Unemployment hit record lows, and he passed several major pieces of legislation. Two wars, in Ukraine and Gaza, also saw the administration pulled into global affairs amidst a changing geopolitical landscape. And his administration made a historic effort to rein in corporate excess, even earning the first antitrust win against Google.
Even so, Biden’s presidency was always viewed in contrast to what came before and what could come after.
Now, we know the answer. Voters had been telling pollsters for a long time that they were feeling frustrated economically. A bad bout of inflation and the raising of interest rates imprinted itself on people's perception of their own pocketbooks.
And consistent warnings from Biden, and then his vice president Kamala Harris, about Trump’s authoritarian instincts and similarities to dictators of the past didn’t seem to matter to a majority of the voters in the country.
In these early days, we’re not going to be able to fully know why so many voters chose Trump at the ballot box.
So, right now, all we can do is our best to try and make sense of it. And that’s what I’m going to try and do today here on Lever Time.
While I do have some strong thoughts about why we saw Tuesday play out the way it did, I wouldn’t be honest if I said it was anything more than an educated guess.
So, to help me make sense of it. I sat down with Krystal Ball, host of the show Breaking Points.
Krystal (00:48.371)
Yeah, I was definitely surprised. You know, I was someone who I think over learned the lessons of 2022 because I really thought we were in for a red wave in 2022. I was looking at the economic numbers, the wrong track numbers. I thought, this is all set up for a disaster for the Democratic side. And then it didn't materialize predominantly for two reasons. One, people are disgusted with stop the steal in January 6 and two, the overturning of Roe versus Wade. So this
Arjun (00:58.997)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (01:14.474)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (01:18.277)
Last time around, with Trump on the ballot and him being more unhinged than he's ever been before, and with continued deep concern about abortion rights being taken away and him continuing down the stop the steal direction, I thought he was awful enough that some of the inadequacies of the Democratic Party and the Kamala Harris campaign specifically could be overcome. Clearly, that's
Arjun (01:46.646)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (01:48.143)
that was wrong. And, you know, I think there's there's a micro picture here of what happened, what went wrong, which is embodied in the choice of campaigning with people like Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban versus, say, Bernie Sanders and U.A.W. Sean Fain. But I think there's also a bigger macro story, which is that
Arjun (01:49.364)
Yeah.
Arjun (02:03.211)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (02:14.541)
After the financial collapse, the nation was disgusted with the what we call the neoliberal era, which was sort of kicked off a little bit by Jimmy Carter, really embraced full-hearted by Ronald Reagan, and then cemented in place as a bipartisan affair with Bill Clinton. And
Arjun (02:21.61)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (02:33.681)
the rot and the failures and the fundamental immorality of that system of letting the markets dictate, you know, everything and putting capital over human rights and human beings. That all came to a head after the financial collapse. And you had these two movements that really sprung up as a result of that. On the right, you had the Tea Party, which leads to, you know, a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment, leads to the birther movement. Trump gloms onto that and that
facilitates his rise ultimately. And then on the left you had Occupy. That leads to Bernie Sanders. And these were two ideological competing visions for what could come after neoliberalism, which the public had broadly now rejected and was ready to move on for.
Arjun (03:10.666)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (03:17.44)
Yep.
Krystal (03:22.605)
And so the Democratic Party, in response, of course, to Bernie Sanders rise, has spent the past nearly decade doing everything they could to not only crush him, but crush anyone within the party who might be able to take up and push forward that vision. So that's left them in the place of continuing to try to run on a neoliberal ideology that has been thoroughly rejected. you know, I know it's it's trite to say like, Bernie would have won. I don't mean specifically Bernie
Arjun (03:40.277)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (03:48.256)
Yeah.
Krystal (03:52.478)
standards at this age at this point in time.
Arjun (03:54.368)
Sure.
Krystal (03:55.696)
But the demographic groups that are now fleeing the Democratic Party at the most rapid pace, those are the very demographic groups with which Bernie Sanders, especially in 2016, was the strongest. We're talking Latinos. We're talking the broad working class. I remember most of his contributors worked at places like Amazon and Walmart and Starbucks. We're talking about bros, specifically even literally Joe Rogan.
Arjun (04:07.851)
Right?
Arjun (04:12.33)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (04:16.948)
Yeah.
Hahaha
Arjun (04:23.55)
Right? Yeah.
Krystal (04:23.83)
And so, you know, it turns out that all the people who were talking about the Bernie to Trump pipeline, well, they were correct. Actually, there was a Bernie to Trump pipeline because many of these same voters, when offered the choice between Trump's right wing authoritarianism and the Bernie Sanders social democratic left populist version, class first left populist version, they chose Bernie Sanders. But when offered the choice between hollowed out neoliberalism and Trump,
Arjun (04:33.16)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (04:39.35)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (04:53.884)
They picked Trump. And so that's where we are in a lot of ways. feel like this result, which is deeply painful to me, and I think deeply troubling and going to be deeply painful for the country, I think it is in a lot of ways Democrats reaping what they've sowed over the past decade of their approach to this movement.
Arjun (05:00.459)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (05:12.116)
Yeah, absolutely. I agree with.
everything that you just said. And when I was looking at a lot of these exit returns, the most incredible thing to me was seeing that in every single county in the United States, Harris underperformed from Biden in 2020. There was this whole election, I had kind of a cognitive dissonance in my head because on one hand, you know, we would do all this reporting on the lever you guys have talked about on breaking points. There was a lot of very good seeming things coming out of the Biden administration on regulatory moves on certain labor things, but it was
very wonky and when you would talk to people who are supportive of the administration they would point to a lot of data points and say well look at the unemployment look at the fact that inflation is outpacing wages but
I would go out and I would talk to just people and I think one of the most interesting things was anytime I would take a ride share, I would talk to the the ride share drivers. I love talking to them because a lot of them are they love politics because they're listening to radio in the car all the time. Yeah, almost every single time I spoke with a ride share driver here in DC, a lot of times they were immigrants. They were more favorable to Trump and part of it came down to what they felt was a cultural aspect of this where they felt that the Democrats
Krystal (06:05.798)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (06:10.18)
Right, all day, right.
Arjun (06:26.32)
did not represent people like them. They didn't feel that they fit in with this sort of highly educated, fairly wealthy party. But also they felt like they weren't talking about things that mattered to them. know, the Democrats to them were focusing a lot on Trump is a threat to democracy. What happened on January 6th? I want to be clear that I'm not trying to dismiss those that side of Trump. And I think that's a very important and frightening aspect of Trump. But in a campaign, you were trying to win over voters. And it seemed that that wasn't breaking through.
Krystal (06:37.019)
Mmm.
Arjun (06:56.136)
to them. But what was breaking through was things about the economy and they were falling into sometimes the stereotypes of Trump. He's he's going to cut taxes. That must be better for me. He's good. He's a businessman. he must know what he's talking about. But clearly these economic issues were what mattered to them. They would say that they moved to the United States to find more prosperity. And so they weren't really thinking about this as this cultural, what is the direction of America in the 250 year scope of its history. They were thinking about what is the path to
prosperity that I have. And I wonder, where do you feel about this, this kind of cultural idea that the Democrats have culturally become very out of touch with just a lot of people in the country and that in some ways this might not have been a pro-Trump vote, but just a rejection of the Democratic Party. I don't know if I would call it a protest vote as much as a lot of people just signaling that they did not feel that these were the people that represented them and that they were more willing to take a gamble on the opposition to
that this time. Change.
Krystal (07:57.936)
I don't think we can underestimate how much Trump himself is a uniquely compelling figure. I mean, he outperformed every single Republican Senate candidate, save for one in the entire country. And that one was Rick Scott in Florida, which Florida's vast shift to the right, I think also can be directly attributed to Trump. So I don't think it's just a rejection of Democrats. actually, that would be an easier, more comfortable answer for me. I think it is an affirmative embrace of Trump and Trumpism.
Arjun (08:23.307)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (08:26.911)
Yeah.
Krystal (08:28.034)
you know
I don't think the liberals are wrong about their assessment of the threat of him. I do think he's a fascist and you know, not to be hyperbolic, but if you just look up the definition, you go down check by check, like right wing, ultra nationalist, militaristic, tied in with capital, let's see Elon, anti-immigrant, autarky, right? We're talking about tariffs across the board. Like he checks the boxes. That is his ideology. And he is also, you know, deeply authoritarian instincts. He's the CEO who wants to
Arjun (08:35.156)
Right.
Arjun (08:40.008)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Anti-immigrant. Yeah.
Arjun (08:48.447)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (08:53.716)
Yeah.
Krystal (08:59.668)
run the country the same way he runs his business, which means that every has to do exactly what he says when he says it. And I don't think for for many, and this this is, not to like besmirch all the people devoted for him. But I think that that sort of sense of I just need a strong man to come in and make it better is a feature, not a bug. Like when he came out and said, I will be a dictator on day one, I think there is a certain we have to be honest that there are a certain segment of Americans
Arjun (09:02.12)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (09:25.27)
Yeah.
Krystal (09:30.269)
That is appealing. Just fix it, right? And that's common. America is no different from any other place. In times of chaos, tumble, change, et cetera, you are going to see a rise in acceptance of authoritarian tendencies and a rejection of democracy, especially when democracy seems like it is not delivering on its promise for individuals. I mean, this is something FDR recognized, right? And FDR, if we look back in our history, of course,
Arjun (09:31.712)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (09:46.591)
Yeah.
Arjun (09:52.053)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (09:55.595)
Right.
Krystal (09:59.508)
effectively like sort of a Bernie Sanders social Democrat and recognized that that was what was needed to check a rise of a similar, you know, fascist movement in America and also to serve, you know, the way he got the business community to not be happy about it, but go along with it for a number of decades was the threat of communism also existed. So we can look to our own history for what has been successful in combating fascist movements and you know, the Democratic Party and the way that they've approached it
Arjun (10:15.058)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (10:29.438)
is not that. So there's a lot there. I do want to go back to your question about the cultural point, because I do think there's something there. And you see all these people running around on Morning Joe and whatever now go.
Arjun (10:30.719)
Yeah.
Krystal (10:41.234)
It's the part of fall to the far left. They you know all this woke ism, etc, etc Well, let's remember where the woke Identitarian politics came from within the party. It was weaponized by Hillary Clinton To claim that Bernie Sanders and his class-first movement was racist and sexist That's where that came from. You know, she said Breaking up the big banks isn't gonna end racism She used this try to position herself because she could see there was
Arjun (10:44.214)
Right
Arjun (10:56.298)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (11:02.346)
Yeah.
Krystal (11:11.218)
energy there at the left end of the party. She used this to try to position herself as though I'm the real leftist because I'm talking about these identity focused issues. That's where that comes from. And I agree that that has been very off putting. And but the reality is Kamala Harris didn't run that campaign. Kamala Harris didn't talk about her race or gender at all. She made a point of saying, I don't take anyone's vote for granted. You know, she really tried to
Arjun (11:18.614)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (11:41.93)
that rhetoric. So I don't even think at this point that that's a fair critique of certainly the way she ran her campaign.
Arjun (11:46.485)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (11:50.89)
Yeah, you know the last thing I want to ask you about is that a couple weeks on the show I did an episode looking at the idea of the working-class kind of shift and one thing you hear about within this election was the right-wing populism that There was a shift with Trump and Vance where they were not just populist but willing to become anti-corporate and you know fight back against corporate power so, know on the episode I I pointed out that with JD Vance in particular that seemed to do only happen when it fit comfortably within kind of the right-wing
dogma where it landed with, okay, this is fighting against electric vehicles, so we will support the striking auto workers. It never seemed to challenge their actual base, but what did you make of this idea of right-wing populism? I read a great piece that you published earlier this week where you touched on that a little bit. Could you expand on what you were saying about the idea of anti-corporate populism within the Republican Party and whether you think that's a true thing that's happening right now or if that is maybe more of a messaging point?
Krystal (12:26.556)
Right.
Krystal (12:50.896)
I do not think that that is a true thing that is happening.
Arjun (12:53.396)
Yeah.
Krystal (12:54.894)
I mean, listen, they can prove me wrong, but we can just look at the record of the first Trump administration, which was extremely friendly to corporate America. His biggest accomplishment is giving the wealthiest people in the country a giant tax cut that will be certainly extending those tax cuts is going to be a major part of this next administration. His largest funder is the richest man on the planet who is running around trying to rebirth Paul Ryan era austerity politics, promising he's going to cut two trillion dollars from the
Arjun (13:03.062)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (13:16.16)
Right.
Krystal (13:24.625)
federal budget, which you know he's not going to be able to do that, but if he did that is more than all federal government discretionary spending. That is the level that we're talking about here. no, I don't buy it. think you know it's hard. Fascism really is kind of the most accurate framing of what the Trump vision is, but what has been
Arjun (13:27.594)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (13:31.851)
Yeah.
Arjun (13:43.253)
You
Krystal (13:46.334)
What has been a failure of the Democratic Party is people understand the vision and the story that Trump is telling about America and that Trump is telling about the problems in America. He has his set of heroes and villains. His villains are immigrants. His villains are quote unquote cultural elites. Hollywood, you know, any rich person who can be deemed quote unquote woke. That's not a rejection of corporations.
Arjun (14:05.398)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (14:11.199)
Yeah.
Krystal (14:16.411)
or corporate CEOs or unfettered capitalism, that's a rejection of cultural leftism. so, you know, that's his story of what's going wrong for people, right? These cultural elites are flooding your towns with immigrants. They're trying to change your way of life. They're assaulting your values that you hold dear. And that is in...
Arjun (14:23.722)
Right.
Krystal (14:43.703)
factually incorrect story about America. It's an ugly story that demonizes some of the most vulnerable populations in the entire country, but he has a story. The Democratic Party, in rejecting the Bernie Sanders movement, has failed to be able to tell a compelling
Arjun (14:45.174)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (14:52.384)
Yeah.
Krystal (15:03.681)
rival story about what is going on and why things feel so unsettled for you, why you are struggling right now. know, Bernie Sanders had a story about that and it's a story that has the narrative actually being accurate, that it is about the millionaires and billionaires are in the language of Occupy, the 1%. It is about unfettered capitalism and that he had a series of compelling solutions to that as well. So by rejecting that narrative and the movement that was pushing
Arjun (15:14.431)
Mm-hmm.
Arjun (15:21.877)
Mm-hmm.
Krystal (15:33.597)
that narrative forward, Democrats have left themselves still trying to hold on to an ideology that has at this point here and around the globe been thoroughly rejected because populations have seen the way that outsourcing your morals and your values to the markets has been a failure for many and caused a lot of pain and destruction in people's lives.
Arjun (15:56.83)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Crystal, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Awesome. That was great. I'll just take...
Krystal (16:01.142)
Yes, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
After the break, David Sirota sits down with Jeff Weaver, one of the architects of Bernie Sanders’ two runs for president to hear why he thinks the coalition that had supported Sanders in 2016 and 2020 seemed to shift away from Harris on Tuesday.
We’ll be right back.
David Sirota (00:04.738)
so let's start with just the current election. The top three to five exit poll stats that blew your mind, that tell what you think is the story of the election.
Jeff Weaver (00:25.3)
The story of the election is, there's really two stories of the election. One of which is, although we now talk about it in terms of education, really what the breakdown was in this election was about class. Used to be pollsters asked people in their polls about their income, which they don't do anymore. They use education as a proxy for that. And if you look at, I'm scrolling here through some exit polls from CNN, incredible erosion of support.
among working-class people, particularly voters of color. Voters of color, no college degree, which again, we say no college degree, mean this is working-class people. Clinton margin plus 56, Biden plus 46, Harris plus 30. That's among voters of color. The margin among white college-educated women goes up. I mean, actually all the messaging they did during the campaign, her margin went up.
Almost double the margin among college educated white women as Hillary Clinton had so tremendous upsurge of support there women with white women No college degree sort of So what we're seeing is this incredible flight of basically people of color Working-class people of color from the Democratic Party Latino men Clinton plus 31 Biden plus 23 Trump plus 12 among latinas
Hillary has 44 % plus 44 % Biden plus 39, Harris plus 22. Her margin among Hispanic women is cut in half. I don't know if you saw the statistic, it was in Newsweek. The most Latino county in America had a swing. Trump won it by 16, Hillary won it by 79 points. Biden won it by 52 points. So there's this tremendous swing among the working class in this country. And of course, nobody wants to talk about that.
David Sirota (02:21.073)
Well, I want to talk about it and I want to ask the question I think I have my own thoughts on, but I want to hear your thoughts, is a sort of typical liberal might ask. I don't understand why people lower down on the economic scale would vote for real estate mogul Donald Trump.
whose campaign centered Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, whose campaign, what was it, three quarters of the billionaire money spent in the election went to Donald Trump. Why would the working class, why would there be a class shift of the working class to a candidate like that?
Jeff Weaver (03:06.496)
Well, there's a few things. Let me just address the Elon Musk thing. Of course, we put Mark Cuban front and center. I like Shark Tank as much as the next person. But Mark Cuban should not be the face of the Democratic Party, who was there just to push crypto deregulation, let's be clear. So we had our own billionaires out there as well. But the reason is that the Democratic Party has not offered a counterbalancing narrative, in large part, to what the Republicans have offered.
Times are tough for a lot of people. They have a narrative. It's completely false, of course, about immigrants and people of color and what have you. We don't have one. What's our narrative? Joe Biden's corporations are good. People are good. Congress is good. I'm good. You're good. We're all good. Bad things happen to good people sometimes. Their response to inflation was horrendous. We got hit, as you know, by experts with their macroeconomic numbers.
real wages are going down, do you really care how much the GDP has gone up? That just means that Mark Cuban is getting more money and you're getting less. That's even worse, right? In some ways it's even worse. everybody's doing great except you. Right, so you should really feel really bad. You're really a bad person because, yeah, right, exactly. You're going down and it's probably your fault because everybody else is doing well. Why aren't you doing that better?
David Sirota (04:24.402)
It's like a status message. it's like your comparative status is actually worse.
David Sirota (04:33.67)
Right, right.
Jeff Weaver (04:34.924)
Everybody else can afford the eight dollar eggs. Stop complaining. know, you see this, Bill Maher the other night on his show had a statistic where the average income in Alabama and Mississippi was $85,000, know, higher than in England or Canada. But of course, you you and I know that there's old people in Mississippi and Alabama who die every year in the summer because they don't have air conditioning or can't afford air conditioning. So, you know, I mean, that's one of the parts of the country with the greatest wealth and income disparities.
are in those places and there's no recognition of that. And so they would rather put this, frame this as an issue of education. So on one side we have the educated, smart people, and then the other side we have like the troglodytes, neanderthals, racists, misogynists, they're over there. If they'd only gone to college, they'd be voting with us because they'd know better. And they don't want to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Pardon the pun.
But it's class. Class is the issue. And it's why they're losing voters of color in this country, are, you know, many of are put off by the, you know, the sort of virtue signaling, it comes out of the Democratic Party, the, you know, the pronoun checking, and those types of issues. You know, we need to move toward a party that is more economically populist and socially libertarian.
David Sirota (05:55.126)
So the question then becomes, why hasn't the Democratic Party done that? I will offer a theory. The Democratic Party knows these lessons. The data has been accumulated from 2016 to 2020, now to 2024. The idea being that the Democrats are losing working class voters while they are not making a strong class-based appeal.
on economic issues. They are not naming the villains. As I said to a friend recently about Bernie Sanders speeches at his rallies, why do people come to see Bernie Sanders speeches at his rallies knowing that he's going to say much of what he's already said in the past? And I say that as somebody who wrote speeches for him. And the answer is that I think people like to just hear somebody in politics
Naming the villain. I think that I honestly think that's what it is. There's something Therapeutic and cathartic about it. So the Democrats I think they're not the people who run the party aren't stupid. They know this but they have issued class-based politics I think because They are always looking for a way to appeal to voters, but also placate the donor class
And so that leaves you with a very narrow set of issues that you can talk about. What are the set of issues that you can talk about that voters want that don't offend the donor class? It's like reproductive rights. It's like LGBTQ rights, not unimportant issues, but you're going to be less interested in talking about the economic issues that maybe threaten the financial interests of your donors. That's my theory.
Do you agree? And if you agree that that's the problem, then how do you break that problem? How can the Democratic Party break away from that fundamental, essentially conflict of interest?
Jeff Weaver (08:08.448)
Yeah, well, you know, I think in some ways it's, you know, I think you've framed it, you know, writ large well, but I do think there's sort of a way in which a sort of insular group of people reproduce themselves. You know, the Democratic Party leadership is elected out of a small group of people. In many cases, those elections at the state levels involve very, very few people. The president appoints a huge number of members of the DNC.
who all reflect that it's a self-perpetuating virtue cycle where if you don't agree with the whole list, you're out. We've seen this on the left too, by the way, so it's not just among mainstream Democrats. But as you know, David, because you worked in the Congress with me, you worked for Dave Obey, by the way, who was not a great pro-choice champion in the world, when I came to Congress with Bernie Sanders, there were a lot of Democrats who were pro-life. There were lot of Republicans who were for gun control.
who were in the suburbs who now have been replaced by Democrats, Democrats who were pro-life are now being replaced by Republicans. There is a judgment, a litmus test around these social and cultural issues. Instead of having an attitude of saying, you know what, my rights stop where yours begin and you live your life, I'll live mine. You don't need to convince me of the validity of your life and I don't need to convince you of the validity of mine. We'll just...
agree to coexist and not interfere with one another or hamper one another. That used to be more the attitude. That is not the attitude now. And you see it reflected among party leaders that people feel preached to. They don't want to feel preached to. People feel looked down upon. People feel denigrated as ignorant or racist. And you know, look, there are racists in this country. There are racist structures in this country which have to be dismantled. But the country writ large is not
Most people don't perceive themselves as racist. Even if you want to break down those structures, telling people they're racist is not the way to do it.
David Sirota (10:09.083)
Yeah, well, that's a good segue to what do you make of the, I mean, I think it's very predictable, but what's your response to the Kamala lost, just like Hillary lost because of misogyny and with Kamala misogyny and racism. You're already seeing that boil up that there's gonna be an effort to create a narrative around that. What do you make of that? True, not true?
Jeff Weaver (10:33.792)
Well, I don't think black men are not racist. And yet we've seen their support of Democratic candidate go down from Hillary to Biden, who had less of a margin with black men. So was clearly not about her being a woman, because fewer of them supported Biden, and now fewer of them are supporting Kamala Harris. Latinas are giving half of the margin to Kamala Harris that they gave to Hillary Clinton. Biden was sort of in the middle. So clearly that trend line...
has nothing to do with race and or gender. That is a way of not having the real conversation.
David Sirota (11:15.167)
Arjun, go ahead.
Arjun (11:19.345)
Is there also an information ecosystem gap that needs to be overcome? Like, I mean, in the closing days, you saw Trump go on Joe Rogan. He made a pitch for Harris to come on his podcast, but then it's like Trump is going on things like the Lex Friedman podcast, the Undertaker podcast. And I guess Harris for her part went on Call Our Daddy, but it feels like there's two different information ecosystems. And I guess I'm curious from you, Jeff, how do you bridge the gap in terms of information ecosystem? And was that a strategic error that you saw on the Harris campaign?
part.
Jeff Weaver (11:50.506)
Yeah, mean, know, David, again, from the Bernie campaign, we know Bernie went almost anywhere they would have him because he wanted to talk to people. didn't care about the host or the host's views. He wanted to talk to the audience. You know, he was criticized loudly by many in the Democratic Party for being one of the first people to really go on a Fox. He did it at Town Hall in Pennsylvania. That was the infamous town hall when they asked the Fox-picked audience.
whether they supported Bernie Sanders' socialist health care plan and everybody in the audience raised their hands to the shock of the moderators. yes there is. I think the other problem is that the mainstream media is now viewed as a partisan. So you have Fox, which is clearly on Republican side. have MSNBC, they call it MSDNC, not unfairly, they call it that. mean, CNN has had a Dr. Frankenstein problem since 2016 when they helped elect Trump. They've been trying to kill him since. You if you watch Jim Acosta's show on
Arjun (12:32.713)
Yeah.
Jeff Weaver (12:47.328)
CNN in the morning, the guy should be on Kamala Harris's FEC report. I mean, it's incredible. I support or support Kamala Harris and oppose Trump, but you just watch it as a political observer and you're like, holy smokes, this guy is a commercial for Kamala Harris. you know, other forms of media, you know, just are not big enough in many ways to break through. But I do think it was it is a mistake to not talk to as broad a swath of voters as you can with some kind of virtue signaling about Joe Rogan.
David Sirota:
So on this media question, it seems like Democratic politicians, the Democratic Party in general is most interested in engaging with the MSNBCs of the world that talk to the same very narrow subset of voters that the Democratic Party is actually doing fine among, which is upper middle class affluent liberals.
but that the Democratic Party is not interested in building the kind of or engaging with the kind of independent so-called non-traditional media that the Republicans have spent a long time cultivating and building. And so you get to an election where Donald Trump is running out to talk to all sorts of different platforms to find disaffected voters and the Democrats are all just competing mostly to get onto MSNBC. There's like a, it almost is in microcosm
representation of who the Democratic Party thinks are its most important voters. Do you agree with that?
Jeff Weaver (01:11.915)
I do, but I would say this. think there's a lot of people who would take the Trump example at the Democratic Party establishment who would say that that's a dangerous thing, right? These platforms give someone like Trump a voice. If you open it up on the Democratic side, you might be giving a left populist voice who would then displace them, right? mean, Trump has displaced a lot of the traditional Republican power structure. That to them is not a, that's not a lesson learned for them. They don't, that's not a positive. You think the members of the
DNC are really interested in having a left populist voice go out on a liberal or a democratic blue media of some kind and like blowing them away. I don't think so. Trump is Trump. Trump's success may reinforce the worst in those folks.
David Sirota (01:59.462)
Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting point. mean, it's sort of like, what are the incentives of the Democratic Party? And I think, talk to us a little bit about that, this idea that
that the Democratic Party externally presents a brand of we're trying to win elections. But the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party are such that there is a lot of self-preservation. I mean, that's like any organization, like individuals are interested in preserving their own power, their own wealth, their own ability to make a living, et cetera, et cetera. But it seems like what you're alluding to is that
Jeff Weaver (02:28.895)
Of course.
David Sirota (02:41.16)
There's kind of a conflict of interest at the heart of the Democratic Party that staying in power in the Democratic Party as it exists now, no matter how many elections it's winning or losing, seems to be the top priority and the top cult, the sort of pervasive culture of the Democratic Party, not necessarily winning elections. I guess what I'm getting at is the idea of winning elections being more electorally powerful.
but reshaping the party so that the people who are in the party right now have less power, that's a battle because you're dealing, you're battling with self-interest. You're battling with people who are trying to hold their territory. Is that basically right?
Jeff Weaver (03:22.229)
Well, it's true as an outsider. mean, those individuals are convinced that their presentation of the issues and their framing is correct. Like, they believe it themselves that, you know, they're being, that they're right and that the rest of the country is wrong. I mean, that's a difficult position to hold in a democracy and be successful. You know, other countries, when you have bad elections, they replace leaders in both parties in this country. That doesn't happen. I mean,
you lose an election in England, the party leader who's in the prime minister does not become the minority leader. That person is out. That person's gone.
David Sirota (03:59.893)
Right, I was going to ask about that. mean, I Zephyr Teachout wrote a piece in the in the nation saying that Chuck Schumer needs to resign. And in most I think it's fair to say in most other countries, when you get shellacked in an election, it's like goodbye. Right. It's like and that doesn't seem to be happening. I mean, maybe it'll happen now. I guess it gets to my question of if the Democratic Party can't change leadership.
now after this kind of election? What does it say about the party itself? What does it say about American politics? Like how could it not have to change after what just happened?
Jeff Weaver (04:42.327)
Right. Well, look, you know, I think what a lot of people are going to rely on is Trump self-destructing. They're going to say, look, he got in there. People now are going to remember why they got rid of him last time. And so, you know, if we just hold on, we'll win in the midterms and then we'll retake the presidency. You know, the insanity will be over in 2028. Of course, the insanity was supposed to be over in 2020, but the insanity will be over in 2028. We'll move on. And, you know, these people have convinced themselves that Trump is some kind of anomalous.
I don't know, unicorn. know, leaders don't make history, history makes leaders. And, you he's taking steps now to institutionalize his brain in politics and public party. You his vice presidential running mate would be probably worse for the country than Trump, I have to say. Because he'll be more effective and more focused in an ideological way on changing the nature of government and its relationship to people.
David Sirota (05:32.074)
Yeah. Yeah.
David Sirota (05:38.337)
Yeah, I absolutely agree. The idea of a smarter authoritarian whose personal behavior doesn't get in the way of implementing the authoritarian agenda, that is JD Vance. And his code switch in the debate to sort of normal guy, I think that, I mean, my take on Vance is it took him a very long time on the campaign trail to realize that he would be more effective.
Jeff Weaver (05:52.8)
Yeah.
David Sirota (06:03.138)
by code switching to normal guy rather than like MAGA base guy. It was really weird actually because he was already the VP nominee, meaning he wasn't in a primary and yet he was sort of running in the general as a primary presidential candidate appealing mostly to the base. Something in his brain switched or he got a good piece of advice, hey, wait a minute, I'm already in the general election. I'm gonna use this debate to code switch to like,
Jeff Weaver (06:28.907)
Right, right.
David Sirota (06:31.382)
General election normal guy and it was really effective and I agree with you that that vance is just as if not more dangerous than trump because He he comes off as a relatively normal person. I want to go back to the to the election just for yeah. Go ahead Yeah
Jeff Weaver (06:50.071)
And I think he has an ideological foundation. know, Trump doesn't really have an ideological foundation. mean, he's authoritarian. He jumps all over the place. It's not a coherent ideology that underpins his policies. But the advance there is.
David Sirota (07:02.221)
Yeah, Vance has a way he sees the world. He's got a narrative that he tells. I mean, just saw him, I saw a clip of him on Rogan, by the way, talking about how the railroad companies hate him because he's the one who's called them out for socializing the costs of their misbehavior and that this is the problem in the railroad industry and in the market generally of corporations.
Mistreating people because they feel like they can socialize the cost of let's say in that case the east palestine train disaster and I would I listened to it I was like, this guy has a real analysis of the world And I think that that raises another question this realignment If there is a realignment there certainly was a realignment in the election if this realignment is happening Are there opportunities for?
Jeff Weaver (07:34.7)
Right, right.
David Sirota (07:56.938)
actual good populist policy to happen under a Trump-Vance administration? And are you even allowed to say that there are possibilities for good things to happen without fear of being called like a Trump appeaser or a Trump supporter? Like, are we allowed to even talk about this?
Jeff Weaver (08:15.957)
Right, right, right, of course.
Right, right. Well, look, I do think people want more honest talk, or what they perceive as honest talk, and less sort of partisan talking points. So, I mean, let's be completely honest about it. When COVID happened and places were being shut down, it was Trump that signed the PPP. It was Trump that signed off on the initial round of checks to people to keep them afloat during the, no, no, continued it wisely.
But that certainly didn't happen in the 2009 time period. Those checks weren't going out to people. there were good things that happened. there are people among Democrats. Democrats worked on the PPP as well. And Ben Carden and other people worked on that as well. Bernie was certainly out there pounding the table for a more direct payment relief to people.
Are there ways where you can do that? mean, the problem is that much of Trump's populism is a faux populism. So when you get to tax policy and you get to deregulatory policy in some areas, it's going to be a complete corporate giveaway. It's going to be the reinforcing of the corporate benefits.
David Sirota (09:25.113)
Right, right.
David Sirota (09:38.934)
Can we go back to the election for one more moment on that? The Latino vote. I mean, the Latino vote was in a particularly big shift. And I think there are a lot of people who may be listening to this saying, I don't understand how the Latino vote shifted to Donald Trump when he ran all of these immigration ads that were, in a lot of ways, code for
Jeff Weaver (09:41.077)
Yeah, sure.
David Sirota (10:08.433)
We don't like Latinos. I mean, I think there's like a border argument on the policy of immigration. And then I think there's also, you know, at a deeper level, Donald Trump coding a kind of anti-Latino or pro-white message to white people by talking about border policy, right? It's sort of dog whistle.
So I think a lot of people will look at the election results. I don't understand. Donald Trump is like dog whistling anti-latino messages to white people and he's rewarded by having an upsurge in Latino voters voting for him. What do you make of that?
Jeff Weaver (10:52.983)
Well look, we had tremendous success in Bernie's two campaigns really with Latino voters. mean, far beyond what anybody thought was possible. I California in a fractured field, you remember there was three million candidates on the ballot in California. Bernie got 50 % of Latino vote in California. the Latino community itself is wildly fractured. Central Americans and Mexicans on one hand versus Venezuelans and Cubans, they're very, very different communities. So let's talk a little bit about
Latino community in sort of the southwest part of the United States, largely Central American and Mexican descent. You know, there were some, I did notice during the campaign, were some subtle changes in Trump's rhetoric at times. Where he started, there was, I remember one in particular where he said, well, it's not just Latinos coming over, it's people from other places coming over. People coming over from the Middle East, people coming over from Africa, and you know,
trying to, I think in some small way, split some hairs. Look, Latinos, like every generation of immigrant communities, it's highly aspirational. And if you speak to those aspirations, you will get their support. And that's what he did. He spoke to their aspirations. Now, is it going to fall through on it? Probably not. Bernie spoke to their aspirations. And it was also rewarded electorally. The Democrats didn't have anything to say other than high prices.
I think that's why they failed. know, housing, housing's a mess. You know, the cost of housing's, know, apartments are expensive, houses are expensive, the interest rates are crazy. You know, at some point we should also talk, you know, not on this show, we don't have time, but you know, the impact of high interest rates as an element of inflation and the cost burden that people are feeling. You you remember during COVID when the credit card balances of America overall went down substantially. People, I think there was...
periods where we had the lowest credit card debt we had in a long time. Now those balances are higher than they've ever been. So people went from an environment where they were paying down their debt to one in which because of high costs, they were at high interest rates, you more and more of their income is being eaten up by credit card bills. And people paying 25, 28, even these are people with decent credit getting paying 28 % on credit cards. And what does that do to people's buying power?
David Sirota (13:21.483)
So I want to ask you one last question here about what Bernie started in 2016, 2020, how it relates to where we are now. There's this column in the New York Times by David Brooks, not exactly a friend of Bernie Sanders. he's, know, David Brooks is like the human personification of kind of the media elite in America.
Not exactly a friendly crowd to Bernie Sanders, to you, to me, to anybody who's, you know, in this, has been in this political space. And Brooks writes, maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders style disruption, something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable. Now, I mean, I tweeted that quote and I said,
Jeff Weaver (14:09.598)
You
David Sirota (14:13.758)
I have gray hair and now look like an early onset senior citizen because I and a handful of others have spent 30 years being vilified and ostracized by the David Brooks's of the world and then 30 years later David Brooks comes out and just admits that what we've been saying has been 100 % correct. So this is not like an I told you so but I I had always hoped that if Bernie Sanders didn't win the presidency he'd be a kind of
in history a kind of what Barry Goldwater was to the Republican Party, which was Barry Goldwater didn't win the presidency. He got actually the biggest loss in the history of the presidency. then but his acolytes, his followers ultimately took over the Republican Party and won the 1980 election. And the rest is history. So I guess my. Sure.
Jeff Weaver (15:08.689)
That was 16 years later. That was 16 years later, So, what's the next cycle?
David Sirota (15:11.967)
Sure. And so that gets to my question. Yeah. So it gets to my question, which is, are we at a point where you think and it's not just about Bernie the person, but where the lessons of what Bernie Bernie's candidacy galvanized and now on the opposite side, what the 2024 election has shown in the Democratic Party not learning or caring about or really being hostile to
the lessons of what Bernie put together. Do you think there's a pivot point where those lessons are actually internalized and somebody like Bernie Sanders becomes that goldwater figure in the metaphor of the Republican Party? In other words, that those lessons are actually learned. Is this the pivot point?
Jeff Weaver (16:02.999)
Well, we don't know that Bernie Sanders, again, I said it was 16 years later, so it was a long time. You had Gerald Ford and you had Richard Nixon who were, Richard Nixon at that time was by today's not the most conservative person in the Democratic Party, right? mean, they're like conservative Democrats who are more conservative than Richard Nixon in Congress today. So we don't know that he is not the Barry Goldwater of the Democratic Party.
You know, it's interesting, I'm not a great expert on the Republican Party and how it functions internally, but it seems that the Democratic Party seems as an institution to have been more resilient against change, despite the more resistant to change, yeah, more resilient in the face of change, I should say, than the Republican Party has been. I don't know if that's a function of the way the parties are organized and the way leadership's picked and what have you. You know, clearly...
David Sirota (16:45.26)
more resistant to it. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Weaver (16:58.091)
if Bernie had won the presidency, the Democratic Party would look very different than it does today in terms of its focus on working class people of all colors. the Democratic Party really is an electoral creature of the presidency. It is there to funnel money into presidential campaigns and to elect the president. And then once the president is elected, to act that it's the president's behest.
It is not really a party in the way that you think about, or traditionally think about a political party. It's an electoral machine, but really largely geared toward the White House. I the DSCC and the DCCC, which are the electoral arms of the Senate and the House respectively, they're not controlled by the DNC. They don't control the DNC, the DNC doesn't control them. You know, if the DNC has a different view, they tell them to pound sand. Like, they don't do it. There's no party. There's no, party chairman doesn't run...
a traditional party. When the president's in power, a democratic president, the president is the chair of the party, effectively. You we saw that when they upended the primary schedule to benefit Joe Biden earlier this year. mean, that dictate came out of the White House and people I talked to in the DNC, even those who were not sympathetic to it, were like, well, the president told us to it, we have to do it. So they're not really a party. They're, you know, they act at the behest of the president. Well, we don't have a president. They're sort of in waiting.
until the next nominee gets picked. that's so, you know, largely change the Democratic Party comes through presidential primaries and you got to win them. And we came close in 16 and 20, but we didn't win. If we had won, it'd be very different. I mean, some state parties were very different afterwards.
David Sirota (18:41.778)
Sure, and I think that speaks to the idea that the 2028 presidential campaign will start, if it hasn't already started, it's gonna start right now, and the jostling for different lanes in the party, and who ultimately wins the primary, I think will set the direction of that. I just hope that there's a recognition that, I mean, frankly, that the electoral results of 2024
Jeff Weaver (18:49.175)
sorry, it's up,
David Sirota (19:12.334)
One takeaway is that Bernie Sanders created a coalition inside the Democratic Party. That was he didn't win. He was essentially, if not ostracized, he was shoved to the side as were, you know, the people who were participated in that campaign as was was really the forget about the people. The theory of the campaign was sort of brushed away.
Jeff Weaver (19:38.913)
Right. Yes.
David Sirota (19:40.585)
And the election in 2024 shows the danger of that. Like literally, Bernie Sanders had a strong working class following, a strong following among Latino voters. And those are the voters who went to Trump. And young people, yes. Yes.
Jeff Weaver (19:56.919)
Well, and young people. And if you look at what's happened, I want to make sure that I get the statistic right on young people. Kamala Harris underperformed with young people. I hold on, I'm trying to pull it up here. But I'm going to get it in time. let's look at first time voters. Trump won first time voters, so he turned people out.
Clinton got plus 19 with young people under 30. Biden was plus 24. Harris was plus 11. 30 to 34 year olds? This is the Bernie generation, 30 to 34 year olds. Clinton plus 10. Biden plus six. Harris plus one. So these are the people who supported Bernie Sanders overwhelmingly to the tune of 80 % or more. And these people, their view of the world has never been
you know, acknowledged or incorporated into the Democratic Party and you can see those people left. They left the party. They left. They said, you later. I mean to go from plus 10 to plus 1.
David Sirota (21:02.697)
That's right. That's right.
David Sirota (21:09.044)
Yeah, that's I mean, that's it. That's that that that that's everything Jeff Weaver Exactly, exactly they got the message is what you're saying Right. I mean, it's you know, it's not forever. It doesn't mean they can't come back But I but I agree with you. I think I think there was sort of a message sent Jeff Weaver. Thanks so much for taking time today
Jeff Weaver (21:12.907)
When you tell them their views don't matter, they're going to leave.
Jeff Weaver (21:29.287)
My pleasure, David. Anytime