Presidential Election Takeaways

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Today, we’re stepping into the realm of national politics to unpack the recent election results, which didn’t unfold as many of our listeners might have hoped. We’ll explore key takeaways, share differing perspectives, and discuss what these results mean moving forward.

This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 64. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics. We know that we could have a state that truly represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful commonwealth.
And today we are actually going to be talking unusually about national politics. The election just happened. It did not go the way that I think many of the listeners to this podcast would have liked.
And we want to talk about what lessons we can take away from it. And before we even start, I want to say that the three of us are going to disagree, right. And we absolutely love and respect each other so much.
We're really excited. We're all grinning about this conversation where we are definitely going to have some very different opinions and continue to respect each other. And we hope that you guys will enjoy.
And with that being said, before we go on, I would love to introduce my co hosts. I will start with Jordan. 
Jordan Berg Powers. He him I've worked in politics and I am genuinely I was like we should put this on air. Let's disagree. So I'm glad to disagree.
Oh yes. And Jonathan. 
Jonathan Cohn. He him his been working on different like issue and electoral campaigns for a little over a decade. And since we'll be talking about presidential stuff today, have been doing stuff since the 2012 presidential race. 
Excellent. Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford. I was actually 100% disengaged in politics. Never voted in a primary, never voted in a city or local until the Bernie Sanders campaign. Just so people understand where I'm coming from. And since then basically quit everything else in my life but politics. So it was somewhat transformative for me and that is the three of us.
Do either of you want to say any more like Jonathan, you said a minute about like the 2012 campaign. Do we want to give a little bit of like our you know, backgrounds or anything before we dive in? Oh God, I'm just going to be so old. Go ahead Jonathan.
We see the Grace Jordan. We see the Grays. Oh I know Jonathan, do you want to say more? I can just be super quick that when it comes to this is where looking at the background of presidential like particularly as it relates to presidential politics.
My first time ever working on a campaign was the 2012 presidential campaign in Philadelphia after grad school back at my parents condo kind of near downtown in Philadelphia and if you know Philadelphia Fairmount that ended up being becoming a campaign fellow with the campaign there managing teams in Fairmount and Francisville found Philadelphia to be a very exciting place to be working on a presidential campaign because the goal is getting people out to vote more so than it. It's kind of ret mobilization more than it is what I call like the New Hampshire situation where you talk with a bunch of strange, swingy white people who can vote any which way in any given election, all of whom are former state legislators that like that. The Philadelphia round is very different.
It was a positive one. It's what also got me wanting to stay involved in campaigns and have obviously been in a number of them since we're thinking presidentially was active and the Sanders campaign in 2016 ended up being less active presidentially in the 2020 primary. As somebody who liked both Sanders and Warren and eventually voted for Sanders after I thought Warren had no path and did work in the general election.
Then during the COVID when everybody was at home running. Thanks. Background.
Oh God. So I My first campaign was in 1994 volunteering for Marjorie Molly Mazvinsky and Allison Schwartz in the Philadelphia suburbs. Yeah.
Yeah. And. And I worked on some congressional campaigns and some Senate campaigns.
And then I did a small stint in the 2003. For the 2004 presidential election. The 2003 Democratic primary for.
Well, God, I feel weird even talk about it. But just to say I worked on that campaign cycle and I swore off Democratic presidential politics after that and not wanting to work on it. And I actually left the country after that election in 2004 and I had no plans to come back until Katrina.
And so I did come back and worked in politics and mostly worked in state elections since then. And so that is like the short, very short version of my campaign work. But I've worked.
I sort of done every level of campaigns and started, you know, in the Bush sort of pre Bush and Bush years, so Clint Bush years of electoral federal races. 
Okay. I'm going to get us started in part because we started just, you know, chit chatting before we hit record. And it was so engaging that we just. Oh my God, stop, stop. We got to hit record and just get this on air.
We can start with Jordan if you want to talk about the thread that you had done recently. Let's start with that and some of the. Oh, yes.
Okay. So in 2016. So I was obviously at Mass alliance and following the 2016 election, I was personally very curious about what was going on with white voters.
And I was worried about what we were seeing not just in that poll, but in a bunch of polls we were doing around economic issues and other stuff that we were seeing very specifically White people moving into all sorts of weird directions. And I wanted to understand that better so that we could talk about progressive issues in a way that these voters could hear. So we did.
So we partnered with one of our best donors, a few of actually of our best donors, and a well known renowned pollster. And we polled voters who had formerly been Democrat who voted for Trump. And we did some polling.
So I'm asking questions that we asked so that you get answers that they sort of reflect your questions. And then we did focus groups in Worcester county with white, with white voters who are non college educated who had again sort of fit that. So we.
So you do a poll, you talk to people on the phone. And then we called back some of those people that we called and said, do you want to show up in person for some money to talk about those issues? And we divided people up by women and men and we did two different groups of them, sorry, four in total, but like two different types. And so those focus groups surfaced a lot of things that were very informative for me and I created a memo which basically mostly got ignored, but I did lead to some, to some electoral victories, the things that are positive that I learned.
So let's start with the positive and I'll talk about all the negative. The positive is we did not. We figured these are people voted for Trump, had moved conservative.
We were not going to ask them about abortion. So we asked women. So the 20 women, 20 women in total, 10 and 10 each about the state of women's like how is it to be a woman in America? I think something like that.
That was roughly the question. And in the focus group. So they're in a small room, they're talking to each other.
I can see them from video, but they don't know I black and not in the room. Right. So they don't know we're there, they just know the person's there.
And they immediately went to Planned Parenthood and abortion. And when we asked about abortion, there was not like general support, it wasn't higher or lower. But they immediately identified women's, women's rights as abortion.
And I was like, oh, we can't pull this. It's not catch. Polls are not catching how much women are linking their futures to abortion.
We need to double down on abortion. And we did. And that's how Becca Rauch and Trom Win won is from that poll, from that focus group, we learned that women and abortion and we were ahead of the curve on that.
And I told everybody in every state I could that we had, like, you need to replicate this. And they did. And they were seeing it in all of their states.
So like, we. So this was happening before D. For all of those things, we were seeing that happening.
Women were getting that cues. The bad news was that we really don't understand the depth of culture around anti immigrant racism and transphobia. And I always, I actually, this is the first.
So I wrote about it for the first time publicly. I never write about it publicly. The reason I don't write about it publicly is because the left, unfortunately does this thing.
And generally, as our society, we hear somebody holds a view so they're a bad person and we dismiss them. We want to throw them out, we want to get rid of them. And I don't want that.
Like, I. These are, like, these are my family members. These are people I am arguing with on text right now.
These are. This is where I went to high school in rural Pennsylvania. I cannot describe to you how few people of color and how red where I went to high school is.
These are the people I know. Like, these are not foreign people. And so I don't come at this to say, like, they're bad.
There's. There's bad people and good people and all of the simplicity that our society has. But we need to also understand the depth of.
I think I'll speak for myself that this was not hard to scratch the surface. They were in a room of 10 other people who they saw as like people and a white person asking them questions and everything. We filtered through them.
They filtered through the lens of what they were getting culturally, which was anti immigrant and anti black and anti trans very specifically. And I'll give you some specific examples of this. We asked them the opioid crisis was a big deal.
They said that. We asked them, should you like, about corporations? They were like, the people who are responsible for the opioid things are black people and immigrants who are giving them to our kids. Like, they, like, they did not.
They didn't say, like, they were just like, corporations. No, it's black people. It's brown people.
Like, they immediately went to that. We asked them about school funding. They said the reason schools don't have money is because Obama is giving free money to black people and trans people.
Like, that's obviously unhinged nonsense. But that's what they told us. Like, and so, you know, and so like, and when we ask them where they're getting their information, it was YouTube.
It was, it was social media. It was, they were like local news and Facebook, which Is like the, like local news station and Facebook. Right? So local news, we know has been.
Has a history of incredibly reactionary and racist and ideas. They also, they also. I think the other thing that we're missing, and I'll, and I'll stop talking after this, is that the other thing that local media does.
And I actually started watching local news and when I see local media, I mean like your local news station, the stories, the feel good stories that they tell are actually very regressive and conservative. They fall into old ideas on who a man is, who a woman is. Women are makeup baking, you know, like motherhood.
Like, there are very traditional ideas on what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. And so even the positive stories fit into a narrow idea of our society. And those are the places that are creating culture for them.
They are telling them how to understand the world, interpret the world. It was wild. We couldn't, like, we asked them, like, are corporations like, should we tax them or are they like, ripping you off? They were like, no, I mean, corporations give me my job.
We should give them tax cuts. So we could, we could identify for them that a person was a bad person. So, like, we could, we could, we could convince them that Elon Musk, for example, I mean, not back then, but we could convince them that certain rich person was bad.
But we, that the idea that like, they were all embarrassed billionaires, like showed up immediately, like, it was so. It was bad. So anyway, so I want to say that, like, we don't.
We are. We really need to grapple with the ways in which there is a billion dollars of industry, of bots, of Russia telling a segment of, of not just a segment. All of us, all the time.
We just usually get other sources. So we're not maybe getting as much about the ways in which we should think of the world. And it is racist, it is sexist, it is, it is absolutely homophobic.
Right. It is really entrenching some terrible values. And I just think we need to, we need to grasp the depth of that.
That was essentially my thread. Can I. Can.
I know, Anna, you look at, you're about to jump, so you can feel free to. And I have some, I have some stuff to chime in as well. Oh, okay.
I would have been, you know, to me, like the. And the reason I think this is such an interesting topic is if we tie this to the current, the election that just happened right then people learn a lot of lessons that I think are the wrong lessons to learn. And Number one, I think, look, I believe that every single person that grew up in America is racist and sexist.
Like, so don't get me wrong. Absolutely. That is like a fundamental belief of mine.
Look, it's just real. Me too. You, you, Both of you.
Yeah. Everyone listening to this. And it's part of what I really dislike, the sort of holier than thou, like, I'm an anti racist and therefore I'm perfect and good and don't have to do anything and everybody else is bad.
Right. And so all of this stuff, like, really turns me off the sort of judgmental way. And this is the second point.
It's not just in that, it's sort of we swim in it. But I do not believe that is the primary reason or simply the explanation that we can go to for the reality of why a specific candidate loses. Number two, it is a huge turn off.
Like, it really. People who hear that and the media, I think the media, frankly, is worse than anybody. Like the msnbc, you know, Joy Reeds and whatever, whatever.
Those people who are basically like, well, you know, Latin men, Latinx men are, you know, culturally sexist and that's why they wouldn't vote for…. It's just like, oh my God, you know, like they voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. So don't, you know, let's, let's be a little more, let's, let's not.
Like when you say those blanket statements about people, it's such a turn off to the left and to the Democratic Party generally. I think we don't, we think that it's okay to say those things because what Donald Trump is saying sounds so much more horrible. They're murderers, you know, but it really is like a condescending turn off for people to hear that kind of language.
But I also think that it misses a really two very important things. Number one is the candidate. And you know what? Barack Obama was a freaking amazing candidate.
The guy was just amazing. He was. And I do think that, I talked to a lot of people who are like, oh, let's just like make these, you know, regression analyses of all of the districts in Massachusetts and all of the races that won and lost and whatever.
And I'm like, you're missing the fact that the most important thing in any election is the actual person who is the candidate. That's number one. And the number two thing that people aren't, I believe, aren't talking about enough is, you know, we have been for many, many years in change elections.
We have been in elections where people are so Angry, they will just vote for either the other party or anybody who's going to promise change. And I think that that is the aspect that people are only just now beginning to wake up to. But I think it is part of why Obama won because he was “hope and change.”
You know, I think that message won then. I think that message wins now. But we're not, you know, we're not delivering the message.
We're also not governing with that. And if I, oh my gosh, I could go on forever and I should let you guys, for one other thing hopefully we can talk about is like, to me, everybody is focused on talking about the campaign and nobody's focused on talking about how the Democratic Party actually governed. And that is what I believe would truly have changed this election.
So let me, let me chime in with a few different things. Um, one, to the point before, when you were talking about polling and voters, I thought this was an interesting thing. I don't know which article it came from, but it was tweeted by Jeff Stein from the Washington Post to the quoting Selinda Lake, a Democratic pollster talking about voter focus groups where she noted that everybody knows what Trump economics is.
China, tariffs, tax cuts. Then you go to ask them what are Democratic economics? And someone will make a joke about welfare and half the people can't name anything. Um, and I feel like that speaks to, I feel like it speaks to kind of both of even what you were saying, where a lot of the knee jerk thing of that is just flat out racism.
Right? That their, their initial response to what's a Democratic economic. It's just racist, right? They're just somebody making a racist joke and the other's not knowing anything. It also speaks to a messaging failure that I don't think Democrats are good at communicating the stuff and, and so that it's like one can't, like they're both, both things are true that, like it's true about that electorate writ large that you're dealing with.
But it's also true that Democrats are typically not very good at messaging. And this, this is one of my other points. Thinking of when you were talking about the way it was easy to get Jordan, when you're talking about the way it was easy to get people to understand a specific person as a villain, but in a way that was difficult for them to view corporations as bad.
Reminds me is one thing that I think is too often a problem in Democratic politics is an embrace of villainless politics. Because yes, when you have, when you have villainous like people understand that for them to gain, somebody else has to lose in most scenarios. And whether that's always true or if that's not, it's beside the point.
It's how people see how people see the world. And so that if you talk about and it's one thing where like if people actually voted on policies and there have been studies even showing if you ask people about Harris's policies, you ask people about Trump's policies, they liked Harris's policies more if as long as you didn't tell them who the policies came from. I do think that one of the problems is not the lack of policy content, which I think some of the criticisms of her is unfair.
But I would to go bolder on many things, yes, but anything that she's offered offering was decent and was popular. But to tell the narrative in such a way that like when talking about price gouging in a way where there isn't actually a price gouger in your story about price gouging is a problem that misses that fundamental way that people understand a villain like I'm pulling up had a joke before and I'm trying to find my screenshot of it where I remember back five years ago I joked that I was penning My Political Muse, my musical about political campaigns that was going to have a song, gotta have a villain. This was inspired.
For those of you who know too much about musical theater, if any of you seen the show Lex Bamalot, there's a whole song about how you can't have a show on Broadway if you don't have any Jews. It was inspired kind of by this about how you don't have a story if you don't have any villain. You need a villain per story of my like you can have 5,000 heroes, 10 Harry's, 12 Katnisses, one Dylan.
But you don't actually have a story if you don't put in a villain. And I think that that's something that Democrats don't often don't understand that if you're talking about solving the problems that they that they experience, you you increase the intensity and the felt belief that you're doing something. If you talk about well this company, this specific actor is the bad one and we're taking them on.
And I think if you leaving that out creates a problem macro comment on the election that I think speaks to kind of mix up things is that you do have, as some people have pointed out, have had in a number of pretty much in most Western countries. And I think Spain is Really the only exception. You've had all of the parties in power during the post pandemic inflation lose when put up her vote.
Because if you ask people are you better off than you were a few years ago and their main way of understanding that is the cost of things, they will say no, that doesn't like it ignores the fundamental fact that the person in charge is not necessarily like Biden isn't setting the prices of eggs. Was that right? They're not magic. Oh yeah, right.
It's like that's not how it works. And we suffer from a large degree of fundamental economic illiteracy in this country. But that's still right.
But that's. I disagree with you and I think we should talk about this. Okay.
No, but I'm saying but that is how that is how people experience it. And I think that there is a problem of it's difficult to tell people, well, the economy is actually good now if their experience of that is not that because then you then you're like talking across kind of across purposes and that you need to actually acknowledge that like. And I think that that's something needs to be done better.
My point was if you have that as a macro explaining a certain degree of fundamentals, I think that there's also to the what Jordan was noting earlier that people given racism and sexism that exists, are willing to give somebody like Trump the benefit of the doubt. They're. They're never going to afford Harris because they typically don't are willing to associate like the white male CEO as somebody who knows what he's doing in the way that they typically, they typically will not, will not have a black woman.
I also, and one thing I'm curious to see if there's research on I do feel like that there's probably a way in which the general sexism that can exist and that's not just male sexism, female sexism, the way in which it's kind of a universal thing. My guess is it gets exacerbated by female candidates who appear professional class. And that I think Harris definitely does and I feel Clinton definitely does.
And I don't think that for somebody like Tammy Baldwin, for instance, in Wisconsin does in the same way. I don't think that Amy Klobuchar does in the same way. And that's something that exists kind of across race that like the appearance of like woman who was successful in her field exacerbates that sexism, that it says nothing about who should, who should run, etc.
But saying that that's something that. Where we need to address the underlying. Like, we need to address that sentiment in the population at large in order to actually have the successful outcomes that we want in elections.
Right. So if I. Can, I.
Can I jump in? You go, and then I'll go, yeah, yeah, I was. Well, I was actually going to suggest that we talk about something. So if you have a reaction to him, you go first and then I'll suggest.
And then I have a reaction to you. But I was like, I was gonna dis. I was gonna disagree with you.
So, like, let's, let's. Let's clear ourselves up. So I guess I'll say I.
I genuinely think. I disagree. I think.
I think one is. I think a black woman has those sort of interlocking identities in a way that being black or being a woman isn't. So I actually do think it mattered to a lot of voters, even voters who we think of as people of color, that she was both.
That. I think that that's like. It's like too many things. Too many. I like to joke. It's like too many pieces of flair. Like, I'd only take a few at a time. I could take one at a time. But, like, there's a lot going on.
I do, I do think. I wonder. There's a lot there, Jonathan, that I think is worth following up about.
Like, is there. Is there, like, how do we think about women? And like, you know, like, are they, like, one of us or not? And like, the way in which. You know.
Because I think. And I think the other thing that you're. I think you're right about Anna, is that, you know, I always tell people that, like, Obama and Trump ran the same campaign, only with.
Well, that's racism. Like, Obama ran as an outsider. People are pissed off with the, With where their lives are going and where the country's going. And it's becoming more and more. It's coming harder and harder.
And if the ins. And the thing that Harris, the problem of her campaign is, like, she's in a time where she's trying to defend institutions at the same time as these institutions are failing. And it's sort of hard to do that.
It's hard to like what. You know, and that's a really tough place when people are generally not happy with the things. With the places you're going.
I don't, you know, and I want to also lift up. I think what Jonathan, what you said, which is like, the reason we were all excited about walls, is it's so Funny the way people are like walls is this progressive Walls was the most conservative congressperson. But you know what he said? He said he listened to people and changed his mind.
How about that? And then he also said that like part of the thing he said is like, well, when people give you power, you have to deliver back to them. So he understood who gave him power as a conservative Democrat and delivered for those people. And like that's actually the thing that's been missing for generations for Democrats is they get power and they don't deliver for people.
See Massachusetts. And we all agree with that. And that is a huge problem that puts you in this scenario where people, you know, where people would say, I don't believe Harris will do the the funny thing is they say, I don't believe Trump will do the things he says and I don't believe Harris will do the things he says.
And the problem is that Harris would have tried and maybe not gotten to it. And Trump is actually going to do all the things he said. Well, thousand things, one thing.
Dr. Nicholas, this is a super quick thing. And then if you had a comment to jump in before, note they think is also a problem.
And I feel like this again speaks to Jordan. The focus group stuff around corporations is I think that we have a bipartisan problem in this country where we both coming out of the parties and coming out from the media that associates CEO with smart, good on the economy, successful, et cetera. So that you have a situation where there are greedy and zero empathy.
Exactly. Like where so you have so many people and be like, oh, Trump's going to create jobs because he's a successful businessman or he's going to be good on the economy. And no real amount of actual facts can like infiltrate that belief that people have that's cultivated both from his media image as well as from years of popular culture and really both parties telling people that the CEOs are successful and whom you should be listen, listening to on the economy.
And so when an economy is not like people aren't experiencing economy as good, they think that that person can fix it and are like, again, it's another way in which people will give him a benefit of the doubt that they will not attribute her. And the other thing I would note that I think this, this goes to Jordan. Your point about like Harris and the relations to institutions is one thing that I think was always a very difficult needle to thread if you were the vice president running, running, running to continue is you can't really be like it was fascinating because I was at the Philadelphia rally.
I've watched video rally clips for But I was at the Philadelphia one on Monday. And Harris's team tried to lean into generational change, knowing that people wanted to change of being kind of a younger candidate, some kind of fresh start. It's hard to be a change candidate if you're the party currently in control because and it's also if Biden has been unpopular for a number of years, like for about probably about two years now.
Right. In terms of favorability polling, if you are the vice president of a currently unpopular president, it is a very difficult needle needle to thread because you don't really then there are good accomplishments. There are things I like from the Biden administration.
There are things I don't but there are real things in the record to run from or to run on. But if he's not popular, you can't, you're not going to lean into those because he's not popular. And so it's not a useful thing to start talking about all of the things that you and Joe Biden did together.
You have to suddenly lose all of that. But then so you're saddled with all of the negatives of being an incumbent, but you have none of the benefits of being an incumbent. Absolutely.
And it was also always the, I think the difficulty with everything like she should say how she's different from Joe Biden. That's a fundamentally difficult thing to do when you're the sitting vice president who is a part of that administration. There are some ways I would love for her to have broken from him and there are ways I wouldn't have liked her to break from him.
But that's it to me was always described as an easier task of doing than I think it fundamentally was. Although also last comment. Despite all of that, I do think that the fact that Democrats didn't have a total route in the Senate and like will at least leave the House and if it's if the Republicans keep the House narrowly is because of the switch that happened over the summer on the ticket that I do think that if Biden had stayed on the ticket it probably would have been a route.
Sure. You're just going to drop that a leaf. Yeah, whatever.
Go ahead, Anna. Here's what I want us to cover because I think we do have differing opinions on this and I think this will be fun. So, Jonathan, you said something about how oh, people associate it associate the economy with prices and they don't understand that the, you know, the president can't just perform magic and make prices go down.
And Jordan, I'm pretty sure that on this podcast, at least before and after that, you have a number of times talked about the Biden presidency as being like, really one of the best, you know, in recent memory. And I will admit that maybe even if I haven't pushed back, I don't see it. And, and I'll also say, like, I am probably among the top 1 or 2% of Americans in terms of my political awareness.
And if I don't see it and like, often, you know, you're a bunch of wonky policies and I'm like, if I don't see it as an incredibly engaged person, the average person probably doesn't see it. And so I want to talk about that. I want to talk about delivering for the working class and whether the Democrats have been, whether they've done enough, whether people are simply hoping for magical price, whatever from the president and they're being unrealistic, or whether the Democratic Party has not done enough.
So I think it's, I just want to say I'm going to quote actually Jonathan's thread he had on Blue sky, which is that it's hard to imagine what the alternative is. Right. But we actually do have what happens in the alternative.
And I actually think Barack Obama. So I often say that Joe Biden is the president that people imagine Barack Obama to have been. I believe the reason we can't have a black woman president is because Barack Obama was a pretty mediocre to terrible president.
And I genuinely think that the reason that we can't have good, that Democrats have trouble is because he used high fluent progressive language to push Eisenhower Republican ideas. And so they never were going to live up to the transformation that he said and in fact made people's lives substantially worse. So what do I mean by that? The way that he approached a financial decline is to do a little bit of stimulus with a lot of austerity.
So people's lives got worse. The federal government paid, put less money into local governments. People got squeezed at the bottom and, and so that allowed for a middle class to be okay and for regular and for, and for low and for middle and lower income folks to be worse off because of Obama economics.
So what does that tell you about. So all of those people who were, who were Obama people who left the party because he promised them one thing and then, and then delivered the opposite, their lives got worse. And then you add to that the fact that no one is talking about transforming people's lives so no one's talking about a re.
A reimagination of like how people could. Their relationship to working. So like no one's talking about the fact that you shouldn't have to work four jobs, right? We're talking about making it so that you only have to work three jobs.
And so we're not talking about those transformational changes. So if you. So the problem is that you've made it worse and all these things.
So when I say that Biden is that like we could have done it the way Obama did it. We could have slowly, we could have used austerity and slowly tried to get out of this thing and you wouldn't have had inflation. Also people's lives would have been far worse off.
And so what the problem is, it's hard to imagine the opposite. But we actually do know what that looks like. It looks like the slow growth and the, and the growing, the Tea Party, the hatred, the.
All the things that happened, the sort of feeding the thing that fed this moment. That's what it looks like. And that's honestly what happened in Europe.
That's what happened in Europe. Yeah. It was mostly austerity with a little bit of growth.
And you feed right wing, you feed sort of resentment and right wingness because people are like, well, I'm getting something but I'm not getting enough. That's not really changing and I need to blame somebody for that. So that's the problem is that like, yes, Biden created.
So Biden used classic Keynesian, he taxed some rich people and he spent a shit ton of money on regular people to make the economy soar out of the problem. That isn't a transformation, that isn't a change in the giant in the dynamics of people's lives, but the fact that people aren't. There aren't long bread lines, there isn't huge unemployment, the fact that mostly people can find work, that's a benefit to Keynesian economics.
And that's what I mean when I say he did those things on top of the fact that. So I heard this person talk about yesterday, I had a class on the environment and this person had really well reasoned criticism for the ways in which we approach climate and the ways in which Americans expect our standard of living to survive. And that's basically coming at the cost of the planet and other people who aren't afforded the same rights.
So currently we have it put in place the fact that even though we make up 4% of the population, we make up 50% of the emissions and we are enshrining that into the future, not to mention that how unfair that is for other people who might need to grow more than 4% to get out of their economic situations. And she says all this, and somebody in the class, you know, rightly says, that's a really good point. But I feel like Biden tried to do a little bit.
He tried to push in the right directions, but, like, also made to, like, get it passed because I had to pass a bill. He made some. He pushed in the wrong direction.
He did really transformative things on methane and also opened up more gas. Like, he did let try to both, like, how do we go where you want to go? Which is like, we're no longer admitting, and we're, like, trying to make up for our things when we can't even get people to do the bare minimum. And she was like, well, we just need to tell people what's happening.
And I laughed. I literally laughed on the phone. And so I just think, like, part of it is like.
Like, there is a reality that, like, he had 50 votes and two of them are people who suck at life. Like, there is only so much he could do. And, like, I actually think that we got a lot with that.
And it's not what I wanted. It's not like I loved Bernie Sanders first plan, like, sign me up for that. Of, like, it's not that I think that it was like, the best thing, but it's the best in my lifetime.
And that's really what I'm trying to say. And yes, people don't get that because you don't understand the op. You can't fundamentally understand could have been like, what isn't quite there.
And also to your point, we didn't change. We didn't change the dynamics of, like, housing is too expensive, healthcare is not affordable. Like, nobody was proposing transformative change in that way.
Yeah, I think my basic take on it and what I hear and I, you know, been listening to a lot of podcasts and stuff on the election, of course, I'm sure we all have. And I hear a lot of people, like, mentioning a lot of very specific things that Biden did with the NLRB and the, you know, the build back better that, you know, the pieces of Billback better that actually ended up passing or whatever. Whatever.
And I just, I really think we have to have a simpler metric because it's too easy to get lost in these details. Right. And to me, like, look, I went to urban planning graduate school.
Inequality was my favorite topic. Wage inequality, wealth inequality. I did a Lot of research in it, wrote some papers in it.
So. And there's a lot of things that people who, researchers who study inequality do understand, which is when inequality gets too high, you get political unrest. And this is what we are seeing, right? So there are, I'm going to suggest maybe two different ways that people can think about it that are very simple.
One, inequality that's a little too cerebral for a lot of people. Like, there's the genuine coefficient, the dissimilarity index, blah, blah, blah. Like, these are all mathematical terms.
And people often argue, which I understand. Oh, nobody really who would ever think about that. And that doesn't actually affect people.
It does. But what I want to mention as an alternative is what percentage of people don't have 500 bucks in the bank in case of emergency? Like, what percentage of people? And the percentage of people at this point is like, definitely over 50%. I don't know if it's gotten to 60% yet, but, like, $500 is a root canal.
Like, that's your kid breaks a bone like this. These things because of our healthcare system happen to people all the time. Your car that you need to get to work, something goes wrong with it.
Like, that's $500. So the number of people who live precarious lives, lives where they literally do not know if tomorrow they're not going to be able to pay their rent like you cannot. And this is what I want us to look at in terms of presidencies.
Like, there has not been a presidency in what, 30 years that has lowered inequality, that has reduced the number of people whose lives are precarious. And when you get to this level, I am sorry, nobody is going to be satisfied with the status quo. And they're going to vote for anybody who will promise change.
It doesn't matter how outrageous they are. It doesn't matter what they say. This is the, to me, this is the Trump phenomenon.
And this is the number one reason, I think, why Trump won, why he won in 2016, why he won now. And I'm not saying that the country isn't racist. You know, people like, like I said at the beginning, I think we all.
Sexism, like, built in, but there is something else that we could change, but I think the Democratic Party is unwilling. 
I guess I just want to say really quickly, and this is the part where we disagree very kindly. So I just want to say this, and this is the part I disagree.
I think people, you could make people's lives better. And fundamentally, they will always choose racism and Sexism, because I fundamentally think people just don't want to be black because they know what it means to be black in America. And so I do think that there's.
And I think part of the promise of Obama was that he was going to absolve them of that. And the fact that he didn't is why they're even angrier. So I don't.
I don't want to. And I want to say that this is unknowable. So, like, when I say that, when we said in the beginning, we disagree because.
And we respect each other and I say I genuinely love every person on this thing. And I probably. Other people think we don't know this.
There's no way to know this. This is an unknowable thing because it's a mixture of all of these things together. But my inclination towards this is like, there's just something deeper that we have to figure out how to tackle as well as all the other things.
Like, I think we. The one thing I could say is we all agree that, like, actually delivering for people and changing some of these really big dynamics would. Would change the ground.
And I still, for me, I think part of this is we can't, like, we have to also tackle the culture. Part to this of, like, how do we like the fact that. I like.
What I also see is a retrenching of gender roles. You know, like, we lived in a time where, like, girls could wear yellow and like. And like, you know, lots of ways in which we think of the way men and women go about their day.
What are they. What. What.
What products do they buy? How do they. Things like, those are moving in directions that they went one direction and now they're going back another direction. And I think all of those things, to me, are signals to where we're going.
And I do think, like, when you say, like, one of the things I wanted to also point out is, like, some of the things people say is like, oh, well, Latino men voted for. For Clinton, and now they voted. But that's like, a lot of people different.
Like, there's a lot of people who have come for things. And I think actually there's some fundamental sexism that's embedded in the same way it's embedded in our end in other cultures. Right? Like, it's not, like, particular to one group of people, but I think what.
What black people experience so much racism in America that even though a lot of black people hold all of the same conservative values as, like, we're just as likely to be as conservative as any white person. But America's so racist that we see ourselves together. Despite that, despite the fact that many of us hold many very conservative viewpoints because we're so racist, we still.
That holds together. And the Amer. And then unless you.
And then if you don't experience that marginalization in that same way, it's hard to hold. It's hard to hold that together, that other things start to matter in that mixture in a way. So that's.
I think I want to. And I just want to leave again to say, like, I don't disagree with Anna in the sense that, like, we might disagree with the, like, what percentage? How do we think about things? I think I disagree, but in a way that's saying, like, I don't know that I'm right. And I want to say that as respectful as possible because I think too often we have these.
They're happening online, they're happening with each other where we're saying it with a certainty that just this week that's unwarranted. We're all guessing. We're all trying to do our best.
And it's all of these. Right? It's all of these things are true. Yeah.
A few quick things. One, and this I was thinking when you were talking about, like, whether they're even the same people in a situation. I do feel like.
And like we won't have the. We won't be able to speak to this until we get full data from the election. That I think one, one problem I always have and how people talk about demographics in the election is that there is a comp like that there's a composition issue with any election.
Like, the people who voted in 2020 are not the same people who voted in 2024. They're not the same people who voted for 2016. Some people age into the electorate, Some people die.
Some people choose not to vote. Some people who didn't vote before choose to. And so all of that creates an interesting scenario where, like, how all of those factored into movements in different demographics is something that we don't, like, we don't know yet of whether or not some, some like rightward shifts are as much.
People flip it. People who voted before changing how they voted and how much of it is new. People who didn't vote before voting and how much of it is people who didn't.
Who voted before not voting. Because that, that happens in all directions. The one thing I would say as well, when looking at like the, the kind of, the general milieu of Racism and sexism and kind of, that kind of exist is it's one thing that I that describe as the difference between affirmatively going and casting a vote for Trump and staying home, because I can understand the disillusionment, the Pakistan, both houses disillusionment that leads you to say, I'm not even bothering to vote.
But to me, if you're making the active choice of saying, I'm going to vote and that vote is for Donald Trump, that's definitely something that's shaped by that, that culture of racism and sexism where you see him as that guy who we already had in office who was terrible and is constantly saying is running the most misogynistic campaign that we have probably seen in the countries. Like, given that there haven't been that many female candidates, you can like, narrows the exact number of them. Right.
And I, I don't know all how misogynistic any. Like, past campaigns talking about women's ability to vote way back when are like, I don't know how much that was in the presidential campaign. So I'm just making all of those, those caveats of how just flagrantly misogynistic his campaign system was.
You're going into the ballot and you're choosing, you're like making that affirmative choice as opposed to staying home, which if, if one is upset with the way things are, you can say like, it's a, it's a rational decision to say, none of you are doing anything and I'm staying home. And it's a different decision to say, I don't trust you, but I'm voting. I'm, I'm voting for the schmuck.
Yeah, I will say that. I think there, I think that paints too broad a picture for me. That paints too broad for me.
That paints, paints every single person who voted for Trump as a, as somebody who, like, you know, in the judgmental sense is like a racist and a sexist. And I genuinely don't see it that way. I think that there are a lot of people who, I mean, I was hearing, I was listening to Democracy now, and she had a Palestinian organizer, and that person was like, you know, Donald Trump says horrible things, but the Biden administration slaughtered like, 80 of my family members.
So if you think that I'm going to vote for the slaughterer, for the slaughterer instead of the person who says ugly things, I don't mind that he says ugly things. So, like, you know, that person could have voted for Jill Stein. Yeah, I'm sorry.
That's bonkers. Tout and so, like, if that person chooses, like there literally was a candidate on the ballot who, if that's like your animating issue, is the one who, like, yeah, is the one to vote for. And that you see that as well.
Even in like the results of Dearborn, you did see Jill Stein do. Do fairly well. More votes than Harris.
To me. To me, like, that's the kind of. If you're then choosing affirmatively Trump as rather than.
Rather than Jill Stein on that issue, it's because you're voting on other issues where you probably actually just agree with Trump. Yeah, I guess that's a level of nihilism that I don't think animates that many people in the thing. And like, also just like, I don't want to tell a single.
I don't want to tell a person who lost individual people how they're grieving in a way and how they're. And that. And how that grieving is reflecting in what they do in politics.
Like, that's, you know, I have, I have as. I don't think we discuss on here, but I discussed like, I have, I have. There were.
I had loved ones in Gaza on that day. So like, I don't want to judge. I would never judge.
Like, I think, I think like there is. That's a, That's a, like, it's a. It's an impossible thing for me to, to want to get it dive into.
I do want to say that I don't think. I think the problem. I guess you're right, that we, we broad with this broad brush and then.
Or we do this other thing which is we sort of say like, we sort of say like, well, everyone's racist and sexist. So like, that's sort of. And I guess I want to say is you have to.
People who voted for Trump knew that they're voting for explicit authoritarianism, racism and sexism. And I do think that that says something about that electorate. And it doesn't mean that every person is the same.
Like there's a wall and you're in a black and white on either side or that we don't share many of those values. The left is very much replicating this. Some of the authoritarian that we're growing up in, like it is around us we are in fascism.
But I also don't think that we should. I do think that there is, that there is something in the cultural milieu that we need to tackle about. There is just, it is a heightened sense of anti immigrant, anti lgbtq.
Like there is a lot. And the anecdotes to that are not to say again, not to dispose people, but like education, having people talked to, loved by black, by people of color when they can be by their, you know, those, their trans family members talking to them if they can. Like I wouldn't force those conversations on anyone.
But the more that we can be thoughtful about like we need to, we need to have these conversations and not dismiss people, but also not accept it. I think that's really important. There's a, somewhere in there is that is the work I think we have to do because I do think there is something that's animating right.
Because Jonathan's right. They could just do other things. And I like, I wish that the answer was that I want to live in a world where if America had done less to support the violence in Gaza, that that would have been an election victory for Harris.
But I am not convinced that that is the case. I would love for that to be true. That would really align with my peace, my peaceful values and a worldview of a life without violence.
But I'm not there. But I do think it mattered. I do want to bring something up which is a lot of people have said like, oh, the other side, they're voting for authoritarianism against democracy.
And I have to bring this up because you know, a lot of times I think that people who don't vote are in fact actually smarter than the people who always vote because they understand something fundamental about the American system that the people who are always voting don't understand. And for example, like I really, I am shocked, I'm always shocked at the people, the always voters who just believe campaign promises when obviously they're obviously false. It's like somebody who's, who fought against something and then they, for their six term person, then they run on something and then they get in office and of course they then don't do it.
Like, like they just believe this stuff in a way that the people who don't vote are in fact a little bit smarter than they are, they're wiser. And the thing that I think that people who voted for Trump, that they have understood that I think is real is we do not live in a democracy, we live in an oligarchy. And you know, they're not voting for like an autocracy or fascism over democracy, which look, I'm not going to vote for fascism no matter what, but, and I think fascism is worse, but they're voting for it over an oligarchy, which is what we have because they have come to understand that they cannot trust either party to vote for their interest.
And nobody, everybody's like, oh, it's fascism over democracy or it's a, you know, autocratic whatever over democracy. And I do not think that that is the decision that they're making. So one thing that I think is an important, like I just want to quickly chime in is one thing I think is always important when you're talking about.
And this again gets to like speaking with too broad of a brush. There are people, if we're talking about Trump voters, it doesn't make sense as a defined category in prop because some of them are people who always vote Republican every single election. Some of them are people who swing.
People who vote Republican every election will be somewhat different in their priorities than people who swing. I often think about when I think of like I grew up, the suburb where I grew up outside of Philadelphia is historically Republican and voted for Trump this time and voted for Trump before. Voted for Trump again.
I think it's. Cause a lot of the people there probably like has a lot of people who are racist and it has. And they hate taxes.
That is not interesting. What's also I would say even interesting is you have a dynamic between that town and the neighboring one that have the same property value, it's the same income levels and the difference is education where the neighboring one has a higher rate of college degrees than that one and the neighboring towns kind of foreign born population is largely Asian American and that our towns was largely Russian. And I think those factors speak to like that mix of culture, education speaks to a difference.
But like between those two. But again people who are well off in a well off suburb who typically vote Republican will vote and vote and vote Republican. So like I don't think that if we're talking it needs to be clear that if we're talking about certain people, you're talking about the marginal voter because the marginal voter is motivated differently than the reliable voter.
There is a person who voted for Trump every time Trump has been on the ballot and who also voted for Mitt Romney before and who voted for Bush twice and for like. Right. That that voter is a distinctive voter from a voter who was who voted for Trump only once or twice of his three times or who the Obama to Trump voter that they're motivated by that they're not inherently the same category.
So that's why I think like there are Republican voters who just think like we live in an oligarchy. I love it. Let's keep it that way.
Right and like, I guess I, I do, I do think. I do. I do think that there is. I guess I disagree. I think that there are. Look, I mean, America has never been. I mean, it's not, it's, it's never been a, like a democracy in like, you get what you put in. Like, it's just like a, like, I vote for this thing and I get what I want. I agree.
And I definitely think that we have, especially our federal government has been, you know, like, as inequality it gets bigger. We are more and more beholden to billionaires and their whims and their desires. And that is a thousand percent true.
And also, like, in my lifetime, my mom went from not being able to vote to being able to vote. Like, that is like a real thing that happened. Like, there is a lot of, like, I don't want to, like sugar.
I don't want to sound like I don't agree with all of those things. I do think that. But I also don't think of democracy as like, it's a, like there's a lot of ind.
There's a lot of little things that we take for granted that I think are going to go away because I think that's actually how authoritarianism rises. And so I guess I. But to get to your point, I think, yes, I agree.
I think people are fed up and they're willing to have a person be like, fix this. Fuck those people. Let's just get rid of those.
Like, let's, let's have at those people in a way that, like. And in a way that, like, yes, I think that that's a lot. I think there's a lot of what's going on.
It's just, there's a really fed up ness. And I agree. I think there's.
People should be fed up. Like, it's really, it's not getting better. People's lives are getting worse.
And they, and in largely our political class and especially our media class, which I think is. We haven't talked about. But actually, to me, if you're like, what's the thing we could fix? It's like, I actually don't care about fixing Democrats.
I actually care about our media system, which is why I keep talking about culture making. I actually think they're the problem and not in the way that Trump is going to start arresting journalists he disagrees with. I mean, the ways in which are, the ways in which they reinforce really bad values and are totally aligned with keeping their jobs.
So that means making their billionaires happy and not enough like, you know, this weddedness to both sides is rather than facts, their design, their, their does, their ideas that like you need to filter everything through a moderation, which means that like you should moderate whether or not I'm a person or not, right? Like this, this impulse towards just like not asking tough questions, not things. I think those are all part of the problem and part of culture making. So like I do, I do want to say, like, it's not that I don't, I think we all agree, we're on this podcast because we agree that there's just fundamental sh to our society that are, that are absolutely needed.
But I do think that there is like, like I actually do think that people are like a lot of Republican voters. They are towards like more authoritative. Like there is a desire for easier, easier answers with easier solutions.
I mean that's certain what Putin believes, right? Like, Putin believes that the way the order should be and like that's sort of his governing philosophy is this idea that like people tend towards wanting, they will give up their individual liberty for the, for the certainty of, for certainty. That's actually it. So that's his understanding of the world.
And to some extent that's a truth. I don't think it's a universal truth. I think that's true for some people and to degrees again, because I don't think of it as like either or I think of it as degrees.
But the one thing I want to chime in that the media comment reminded me of and some other things I wanted to build off of a prior point as well is what's annoyed me is how much that I've felt that like immigrant, that xenophobia gets exacerbated by the media because most people, like, if you're in like North Dakota complaining about immigrants, like what is it? Somebody coming over from Canada. It is an entire like so much of that exists through media, right? It's through the things that you take in. It's not through your day to day leverage experience.
Health care costing too much is something that you experience every day. Immigrants coming over the border too much is simply, it's simply not. And I think that one of the, one of the problems that you end up seeing and this gets touched in different ways is as Jordan noted, if in focus groups and pollings you do see a lot of voters hold very strongly anti immigrant views.
The problem that exists both, I think because of a media environment, I think a political class environment on the Democratic side is the Democratic. Democrats see that majority opinion from voters and they respond to it by adopting the position. They follow that.
They don't try to. They don't, they don't try to change that position. They don't try to take another contradictory position held by the same voters.
The whole family separation thing was gigantic across the board. Yeah, it was. And it was anti Trump and it was okay to be anti Trump.
But then, you know, when the Republican Party then like gets a little bit of power and starts being anti immigrant, then they're like, oh, well, I guess that's popular. We'll just do it. I mean.
Yeah, yeah, that's the worst. It's the. They don't do this, they don't do that to us.
That in polling, voters overwhelmingly support mass deportations. But then if you tell them what that actually means, they're like, no, I'm just talking about. They talking about deporting the people.
I know voters support a lot of things that a really amazing leader tells them to support. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanna, I think we should.
I think we should wrap up. Cause we could endlessly talk about this. But I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna end with my.
I wanna end with just two things and then we should. Everyone should go. The first thing I wanna say is, like, I hope that this is a model for people to disagree with each other, but do so in a way that is like loving and supportive and like, boy, do we need each other right now.
And not think that the other person is wrong or bad for disagreeing with us. Like, I just cannot say enough how much. Not only do I disagree, you heard us disagree.
And I will take in that disagreement into how I think about it because I respect everyone here and that will reflect. So I just want to say that's really important. And the other thing is the thing I learned from 2016, which was like, one of the things I used to do a lot was Gatekeep.
I was a part. I was the executive director of Mass alliance. And a lot of people made a lot of asks of me and I would be like, I don't know.
Yes. I'd try to gauge whether I want to do it. And after 2016, I made a rule to say yes to everybody.
It didn't mean that every single person got all of my time, but it did mean that while they were in front of me, I treated it like they could be the solution to the problem. And I would give them my best advice. I would tell them who they should talk to.
I would not keep that relationship. And ultimately, people who had far out ideas often came back with a newer version of that idea that actually, that was pretty good, pretty workable. But they had to come to it to themselves.
But I really cannot stress, like, we don't. There's not going to be one thing that solves this because there isn't one problem. And so try to say yes to each other.
Try to support one another. Try. Don't.
Don't think that they, that you have the right idea and they have the. And they don't. They have the right idea and you have the right idea.
How can we support each other? How can we say yes to each other? How can we show up for each other? Like, that's the thing I want to take away is like, if we are genuinely all moving in the right direction, then help people move in that direction any way you can. Wow. I can't even follow that.
I love that so much. I remember in 2016, after the 2016 election, being in a room where somebody said, because there was this, like, oh, you know, new ideas, stop. No more new ideas.
You know, and. And somebody said, hey, if, if someone has broken into your house and is like sitting in your house and not letting you in, aren't you going to try the windows and the doors and the basement hatch and the, you know, like, get on the rope, like, try everything, right? So I'm 100% with you that we should really be trying and support people's ideas, even if you don't really see how it's going to work. So I love that.
And then my other last comment is just, I want people to, like, look, number one, try to be less judgmental of others. Even Trump voters, right? Try to be less judgmental and understand, have empathy for people. And then the other thing I want people to think about is inequality or how many people live precarious lives like that.
We really are. I think a lot of folks who are progressive tend to be a little bit on the wealthier side and aren't living that kind of life. And so if you are one of those folks, you know, have some empathy, understand that a lot of the people who are making those votes are in fact people that, that we want to support.
They are marginalized people. They are poor people. And that, you know, having empathy and trying to be kind and understanding and really understand what they're going through and why they're making the kinds of decisions is going to get us to the place that we want to get.
My final comment is going to build off of Jordan's, and it's one of my favorite song lyrics I will shout out, although it's not where this originated, that we recently hit the whatever number anniversary of the Brandi Cinderella and the song. And I always love the line from the song Impossible Shut sung by Whitney Houston in that movie. But like, but the world is full of zanies and fools who don't believe in sensible rules and won't believe what sensible people say.
And because these daft and Dewey thy dopes keep building up, impossible hopes and possible things are happening every day. And I think that's always a wonderful line to think of. Totally amazing.
Well, thank you both so, so much, as always, for everything that you do, and also for today. Thanks to all of our listeners, to all of our supporters. Please donate.
It's the link below and we will see you all next week.