Let's Find Common Ground - How Democrats Lost the Plot

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Democratic Strategist Tad Devine joins political and polling experts, Dale Butland, John Della Volpe, Mike Madrid, Carissa Smith, and Stephanie Young, for a conversation exploring how Kamala Harris and Democrats performed during the 2024 general election. They discuss the Democratic Party's messaging, how candidates connected—or didn't—with key voting demographics, and what polling revealed about voters. This discussion is part of the Warschaw Conference on Practical Politics “The Trumping of America: Why and What's Next?” in partnership with POLITICO,  PBS’ "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover," and C-SPAN. Featuring: Tad Devine (Moderator): Chief Strategist, Bernie Sanders' 2016 Presidential Campaign Dale Butland: Democratic Strategist; Former Press Secretary and Ohio Chief of Staff for US Senator John Glenn John Della Volpe: Author; Director of Polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics Mike Madrid: Latino Pollster and Voting Expert; Author of “The Latino Century” Carissa Smith: Former Senior Public Engagement Advisor in the White House Office of Public Engagement Stephanie Young: Former Deputy Assistant to President Biden; Senior Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris

Welcome to Let's Find Common Ground from the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. I'm Bob Shrum, Director of the Center. And I'm Republican Mike Murphy, Co-Director of the Center. Our podcast brings together America's leading politicians, strategists, journalists, and academics from across the political spectrum for in-depth discussions where we respect each other and we respect the truth. We hope you enjoy these conversations.

Well, welcome. Welcome to How the Democrats Lost the Plot. Okay, that's the name of our and you know when I first read that I really wasn't sure what it meant to tell you the truth. I mean, what are we talking about? So when I arrived here I asked my old friend and former business colleague, partner, Bob Shrum, I said, what does that mean? How did the Democrats lose the plot? And he explained it to me. So I looked it up and according to the Collins English Dictionary, it is an idiomatic way of saying that someone has become confused, disorganized, or mentally unstable. Okay, so now we know what we're talking about today. I'm talking about the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, you don't have to

hear from me so much as from this great panel that we have assembled, who I'd like to introduce to you. First, Dale Butlin is a Democratic strategist, former press secretary to Ohio Senator John Glenn, and was his Ohio chief of staff. Dale has a tremendous understanding of Midwestern politics, not just in Ohio, but across the region which in recent years has become the central battleground of presidential campaigns. John De La Volpe is someone I've known since I met him when he was a junior in college in Boston.

He was looking to volunteer for a campaign, the Dukakis campaign. I was in charge of the delegates at that campaign, and this young, really smart guy came in, wanted to volunteer, so I put him to work. And he's been working in politics ever since. As a pollster, as the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, he's also the author of a book, Fight, How Generation Z is Channeling,

Their Passion to Save, Their Fear and Passion to Save America. He's become in recent years, I think it's fair to say, one of the leading experts on youth voting in America. Mike Madrid is also a pollster and a principal at Grassroots Lab, a campaign management and lobbying firm here in California. He's a nationally recognized expert on Latino voting trends and served as press secretary to the California Assembly Republican Leader and political director for the California

Republican Party. He's also one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project. Carissa Smith is an award-winning strategist, politics, government, and public engagement. She was also a fellow at the Center for the Political Future and currently Vice President of Government Relations for Fox Corporation. She previously served as a public engagement advisor in the White House Office of Public Engagement under President Biden and in 2020 she was the National Women's Vote Director for the Biden campaign.

And finally, Stephanie Young has served in the White House in both the Biden and Obama administrations. president of the United States has served in the White House in both the Biden and Obama administrations. She's the former deputy assistant to president Biden and senior advisor to vice president Harris.

She was also a spring fellow spring 2023 Barbara Boxer fellow here at the USC center for the political future. So thank you all for being here and let's just begin. I'm gonna start with Dale. Dale, as I mentioned, the Midwest has become one of the key battlegrounds. You worked for John Glenn years ago.

And I'd like you to explain, not just in respect to Ohio, but in respect to the Midwest, how did counties that John Glenn used to win by 20 and 30 points become counties that Kamala Harris lost, and the Senate race as well lost by 20 or 30 points. What's happening in that central battleground of American politics? With your permission, Mr. Moderator, before I get to that, I'd like to make a comment more broadly on sort of the theme of this panel, which is how Democrats lost the plot.

I'm not sure it's quite that clear. Earlier today, we had a question from one of the students who is here who asked something similar, because when Donald Trump wins the kind of overwhelming victory that he did in the Electoral College, when he sweeps all seven swing states, when the Republicans now control both House of Congress, it's easy to think that this was an unmitigated disaster for Democrats in November and that it's maybe even easy to buy in to Trump's claim that he and his MAGA allies have won a major mandate. But I think that's a misreading of what happened in November.

Let's remember. Yes, Trump, for the first time in three tries for the presidency, managed to win a plurality of the popular vote. He did not win a majority. And to me, it's hard to claim that you have a mandate when most of the people cast in ballots voted for somebody else.

In the House, as I think James Carville mentioned earlier, we actually picked up a seat in the House. And the Republicans now have the second smallest majority in the House in American history. In the Senate, yes, it's true. The Republicans flipped four seats and they now have a majority of 53. But let's remember that three of those four were in blood red states that Trump won by huge margins, West Virginia, Montana, and I regret to say my home state of Ohio. But in the swing states, it was a different story.

There are seven swing states, right? Five of them had U.S. Senate races on the ballot, too. Democrats won four of those five. And we lost the fifth by two-tenths of one percent. So, as I say, I think it's real easy to overinterpret what happened. Now, none of this is to say that I disagree with the theme that Democrats have been losing the plot for some time. And hopefully, we'll be able to talk about that as to why that's been happening and how we might be able to reverse it in the years ahead.

But let me let somebody else talk and then I'll come back to the question you asked. Okay, let's do that. Carissa, maybe I'll bounce around if you don't mind. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And that's not withstanding the fact that Hillary and Biden ran before the Dobbs decision, which obviously changed the landscape in America in terms of politics.

What happened with women in America in 2024? Why did these changes come about? And just explain to it in the context of losing the plot. Short thing, and I probably will add in my, it's Stephanie here to also follow up from her insight from actually on the campaign trail. But overall, I can speak to 2020 and some of the trends that we were seeing

is that we overall make sure that we built a really diverse coalition in 2020 that was essentially had really good narrative and messaging that essentially focused on all economic, all multiracial classes of women, right? And overall, I think that that messaging was able to propel us to win in 2020, especially with black women showing up and doing what we have always done at the voting polls at 92 to 96% is that we

saw that we that was our base, we saw that we were loyalists, and we saw that we were going to vote based off the issues and based off of what was going to essentially secure our kitchen tables in our neighborhoods. Now, looking at where we are in twenty twenty-four, we did see a shift in some of that and I'm sure Stephanie has talked on this too. Some of that we also saw was based off of the economic messaging. We saw that there was clear there was a clear narrative that essentially that Harris, but between Biden and Harris, that it was not good for people's kitchen tables. They were looking at grocery store prices. They were looking at the cost of living going up.

And I will say that the messaging from Republicans was really, I would say successful in building the case that it was because of the Biden-Harris administration that costs had gone up. Now we know based on economist studies, based on us kind of going on the up end from a pandemic that that was truly not the case, based off the numbers and the figures, if you look at GDP, and other

facets, and, you know, fact sheets that came out of commerce at that time in Treasury, but overall, they were successful in sticking that hey, you have a new administration, and the cost of living has gone up, it was able to resonate down to kitchen tables in which that that messaging was now then being essentially spread, or I should say, evangelized within women voters of, hey, maybe I do need to vote differently because I cannot afford the cost of living.

And despite there being robust economic plans, despite there being, you know, even with the shift of the candidate, Vice President Harris coming in and making it clear that she had a clear economic plan to lift up families, whether it was through home ownership, whether it was through opportunities, through educational grants, whether it was through also student loan repayment, it still at that point was not really resonating, I think,

based off of kind of the wall of the economic distrust that Republicans have built, particularly for women. And I do think we're gonna be talking about this to come of how did we go from the 15% to the 8% of women this year. And I'll be honest, I don't think I fully have the answer up here based off of the data. I think that we're still gonna see the vote that just took place and how people respond to it

and what they're seeing take place currently in this new administration. And look, I think that we can't ignore all the cultural pieces that came at play. just took place and how people respond to it and what they're seeing take place currently in this new administration. And look, I think that we can't ignore all the cultural pieces that came at play. So when it came, they were running a fear based campaign. They had that the ad at the end about transgender people and bathrooms and all of these different pieces. And the vice president talking about transgender Americans. I think that played a huge role. I also think, you know, racism played a huge role as well. They did not know vice president Kamala Harris.

She is a black woman. She has South Indian heritage as well with her mother being an Indian. And I think that all of those pieces coming together, you know, did not work in our favor. And I think it's looking at it just from an economic perspective, it's not that that's not it. We have some very, very strong holds to our past that come out to haunt us in big moments. And I think that you can't, just because she's a woman,

all white women don't identify with her either. So I think that that was a big issue, considering you had obviously black women and other women of color, but I'll also say this. I mean, when you had the thing that we did not talk about on the campaign trail in a real robust way, what was happening in the Middle East and in Gaza. One thing that we know, or I at least knew from some

of the research that was done, was that a lot of millennial women and women of color were very impacted by that and very upset with the administration. And that wasn't addressed in any way, shape or form. So it was this big thing that nobody talked about this boogie monster right here that we're not even gonna address on top of, on top of all of the messaging that they did directed towards these women and also fear mongering.

And on the flip side, I think that we went so hard in on the abortion piece, which is extremely important. That doesn't resonate with everyone though in the same way that it does. And I know that we saw wins on the ballot every time that it was in these other states, but it didn't have the same type of pull that I think that we anticipated it having. And I know especially for mostly I think for African American women I'll speak, I don't think it has that same type of resonance. We're not marching in the street every day for this, but it's still an important aspect.

So it's not a simple answer. I think it's a complex answer, and I don't think you can leave out the cultural pieces. I don't think you can leave out the racial pieces. All of them came together in a moment that from my perspective is not good for this country. Yeah. Let me just follow up quickly

and ask you about something you raised, which is the trans ad that was run by the campaign. And I say this as someone who worked for Michael Dukakis and we had a Willie Horton ad that we really didn't deal with, who worked for John Kerry and the Swift Boat ads come at us and we could talk about that all day too and give you my version of why we didn't do it. But the Trump campaign spent $125 million on that ad or versions of that ad.

$125 million in battleground states. You know, when I worked for Kerry in 2004, we were given a check for $76 million from the federal government to run the entire campaign. So I know inflation has been a lot, but you know, that's a lot of money to spend on something. Did you feel pressure to deal with that in the paid media environment and the exchange in the campaign in some way to engage and try to reassure voters who might be concerned

about that attack? Absolutely. I think one of the reasons why we lost the plot is that I do feel that leadership does not reflect what this country looks like. This country has changed dramatically. And when you think about the folks who are voting and all the different walks of life they come from, all the different perspectives, you got to have people who are leading campaigns who reflect that diversity.

I don't know how to talk to certain people, but I do know how to talk to others, right? We all have our strengths. And I think that that was, from my perspective and the little time that I did, I was on maternity leave and then I went to help on the campaign, but the little time that I was there, I saw that that was a major challenge.

The fact that who was making the final decisions did not reflect the people that we were going after. We were using a very old playbook. I worked for President Obama. I also led Michelle Obama's voting initiative when we all vote for about five years. So I worked in this space of how are you gonna reach people and talk to them?

There were so many barriers, I think, to doing things differently when they had been doing things differently. I can't even remember the amount you said that they spent, but not only did they spend all that money on that ad, they went to every nook and cranny on what we would call the dark web, but it's the web now. It's out there. They went to every place, every platform and preached their message in places that we deemed did not pass purity tests, right? Was not presidential, was not appropriate.

And look, yeah, some of those places are not presidential or feel appropriate, but that's what American people are consuming, that's where they are. So if we're not gonna take on issues head on, if we're not gonna answer things head on, and we're gonna just continue to just push past it, people are beyond that. I often say that Donald Trump is a reality TV show

host president. We are a reality TV show culture right now. We want whatever feels authentic. And I think that because we've placed from such an old playbook of, well, let's not address this, let's forget them over there, let's just scrounge and focus on those filters right over there, it won't matter, it does matter. And I think that now we see that,

I think that the challenge is, how do we start changing the way in which we do this work? How do we start looking around and saying, hey, if everybody at this table looks like me, this is not the right table, okay? How do we bring the right people to the table? How do we do things out of the box? How do we make ourselves uncomfortable

and stop saying that certain people have to pass purity tests to be at the table to help us push our messaging out there? And then also addressing these issues head on. I think there's a little fear that sits amongst us at times and too many silos. Great. Thank you. Thank you. John, after the election, and I remember reading this, and I'm one of the few people probably alive who still reads hard copies of the New York Times every day, okay? But I remember reading this. You wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled, Democrats have won.

Our excuses mask a devastating reality. OK. Tell us about the message of that op-ed. Thanks. If I could just for one minute. Yeah, go ahead. I wanted to say. Or how we lost the plot.

But you mentioned our relationship going back 30-something years. I just also want to shout out to Bob Schruong for being a friend and mentor for so many years. It's really so special that I'm here. Thank you, Bob. And I've learned so much. You're not gonna tell them about driving to Boston

to pick them up when he was coming to the meetings of Rhode Island when we did the governor's race there. All times probably. That's the point. But listen, I think that I was angry. I started just putting some thoughts down the day after. And I think the point of that is it was early and there was a lot of finger pointing and the polling deficit in the summertime was too much, the campaign was too short, inflation

was too high. And from my vantage point, as you said, focusing, you know, not entirely, but a lot on younger voters, this is a winnable race. As an example, as James Carville said earlier from this stage, that if one out of 100 people change their minds in the three Midwest and the Blue Wall states, we don't have a president blaming DEI for a tragedy in the Potomac, as an example. One out of a hundred. Now, who, and there's obviously a diverse electorate, but when you look at younger people,

there's been an unmistakable pattern this century. When Democrats win, 60% of the youth vote, they win elections. John Kerry won 55%. Hillary Clinton won 55%. You start with 55%. You know, your job is to go from 55% to 60%, and the math takes care of itself. You know, in this campaign, Harris' campaign started, you know, 54%, 55%.

And rather than expanding it, actually, we'll see once the final, final numbers are there, you know, got somewhere in the low 50s. And I think that to connect with what Stephanie said earlier is, in my view, kind of a lack of listening and understanding what the real anxieties and fears were of this particular cohort of of of of voters. There are a lot of I think lessons from the twenty-two campaign, you know, midterms that were very successful that were not changed, right? It was it was and to me, a lot of the

messaging that young people are were consistent with what happened in twenty-two rather than talking about economics. One other point I want to make is that half of 18 to 29 year olds, more days than not over the last two weeks, suffer from depression, hopelessness, or anxiety. 25% say that they've considered self-harm. Several days in the last two weeks, a couple percent every single day. Okay, a lot of that is driven by the extent to which they can see themselves successful and have an stable future. And by not listening and addressing those specific issues, I think doesn't allow younger people to connect with someone and motivate them to turn out. And I think doesn't allow younger people to connect with someone and motivate them to turn out. And I think that's what I was trying to convey in that op-ed.

Yeah, and that's, and I want to ask you one more thing about that op-ed. But first let me say, I completely agree with you that young people can win elections for Democrats all across America. And I'm reminded that in 2008 when Barack Obama won Indiana and North Carolina, two states the Democrats had not won for generations, he won it by winning only one age cohort, 18 to 29-year-olds. Okay? He lost every other one. And he won those two states that were never in play until that election.

That's the power of youth vote. One other thing you said there, and this may be a little insider and technical, but as a great consumer of polling and working as a media strategist for many years, you also wrote about your concern that the Democratic Party, you wrote, has increasingly replaced the art of listening to and polling voters with an almost religious devotion to data analytics. Explain that. What does that mean? So, um, so when I talk about like and Mike will certainly kind of weigh in on terms of classical polling, you know

Surveys benchmark service tracking surveys qualitative research and focus groups being replaced in my view by Analytics which don't go in-depth and listen to people, instead model people, right, and say what they predict will happen based upon modeling, right? Okay, it's like a radiologist. Radiologist plays an important role in the hospital lab work. You read the test, you see the data, but that radiologist isn't necessarily talking to the patients, right, understanding where the pain's coming from, understand their perspective and how to get better. They're just looking at one piece of it. And what campaigns, I think, in this particular campaign,

over relied on analytics. It brought them away from rather than closer to voters. It's obvious. If they were listening to voters, Todd, they would have made different choices, in my view, in terms of where they visited, what they said, they would have gone to the Dearborn coffee shop and listened to voters, right?

20 point difference in University of Michigan sounds. 20 point difference between the cycle and the cycle before. And this is a cohort where two out of three people have values that are aligned with the Democratic Party, by the way. Right. So it's not a it's not a disconnect in terms of the values or the top other issues. I think it's in the execution. Yeah. I just want to point to that, though. I also think that there is a like you're not going to pull and listen to everybody either.

It's right. Who do we deem most important in this moment to win? Right. As opposed to saying like, okay, these people are our base, let's just check in, make sure they're good. We don't do that. We didn't do that this time. And I know that when we did pull folks who were in our base, it was really towards the end at a time where you really couldn't turn anything around. So I think that there is an obsession with like, it's like a game we're playing. How are we going to get the ungettable as opposed to like, how are we going to make sure all of our people are good and then bring in some of those other folks on the end?

Dale, did you have something? I just wanted to get back to the original question. Go ahead. Then I should go into Mike. Mike, why don't you go ahead? No, no. All right. I want to just jump in and I want to talk to Mike about Latino vote.

Young people obviously are important, but I will tell you from the Midwestern perspective, we can't ignore the other elephant in the room, which is we have been hemorrhaging working class voters. When Bob Shrum was working for Ted Kennedy and I was working for John Glenn back in the 1980s, it wasn't just Ohio that was a quintessential swing state, but West Virginia was bright blue. Everybody was a Democrat in West Virginia. Now it's one of the reddest states in the union.

By the way, Mike Dukakis won West Virginia just for the record. I think it started 30 years ago, roughly, when we embraced globalization and we promised everybody, yeah, there's going to be some short-term dislocations, but in the long run, everybody's going to be better off. In fact, the benefits from globalization came, but they weren't evenly distributed. People who were college-educated and were elite, were highly trained did very, very well, but everybody, very well. But everybody else didn't. Let me say that, I'll tell you, in a country where only 36% of the population has a college degree,

becoming a party of the college-educated elites is not a recipe for winning a lot of elections. Let me tell you how bad it's gotten. This last November, in the 20 states that had the highest median annual income, we won 18 of the 20. Of the 20 states with the lowest median family income, we won 3. In Pennsylvania, 15 years ago, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in registrations by a million. It's now down to 200,000. Day before yesterday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that for the first time in 20 years, there are more registered Republicans in Nevada than there are Democrats. In Ohio you asked about that in 1992 that was John Glenn's last campaign for reelection which I ran. The best county we had in

the whole state was a county called Belmont which is a working-class blue-collar county in East Central Ohio along the river. We won Belmont County by 36 points, better than we did in any of the other 88 counties in the state. This last November, Sherrod Brown lost Belmont County by 34 and a half points. That's a 70 point swing in 30 years. And I think the problem has been is that we promised all these benefits were going to

come from globalization, but the problem is the people who live in the Belmont counties of this country are living in hollowed out towns and working dead end jobs that don't pay enough to make ends meet. And I think unless we go back to our Rooseveltian roots with a kind of a, for want of a better term, a liberal populism or a center-left populism that focuses on how we can bring back good standards of living to regular people.

Things like not just raising the minimum wage, raising all wages across the board. Capping maybe, capping credit card interest rates, making child care more affordable, making elder care more affordable. You can go down the list. There's lots of things that we can propose. We're not going to be able to enact those over the next couple of years because the Republicans control all the levers of power in Washington, but we can propose them and we can amplify them and we can make the Republicans vote against them over and over and over again. Yes, we should oppose the Republicans and all the, you know, if Trump was elected to

bring down the cost of eggs, to bring down grocery prices, to close the wealth gap, which has become a yawning chasm in this country. He isn't gonna do that. We all know that. You could see it with the, you know, his inauguration with all the tech bro billionaires that had all the best seats, right? He is not, he is gonna fail. It is no accident that for the last three consecutive presidential elections,

for the first time in 120 years, voters have thrown out the incumbent party. It's no accident that control of both houses of Congress has changed four times over the last 20 years, because neither party is fixing the problem, which most people think is an economic system that is rigged and working against them, and a political system that doesn't work for them either, and too often seems more concerned

about cronyism and taking care of the politicians than it does the people that they were elected to serve. So, I think with this kind of renewed emphasis on populism, I think we can get, maybe we can start making our way back, and history tells us that in the first midterm after a presidential election is always a very good year for the party out of power, and that of course will be us in two years. Yeah, right. I'll just, and before I talk to Mike, I will just say that, you know, in 2016 when I worked

with Bernie Sanders, you know, we were trying to figure out a frame. Bernie basically wanted to talk for an hour and 15 minutes to everybody in the country. And I was like, well, we only get 30 seconds. So I asked Ben Tulsion, who's from California, who's a pollster. We were talking through, and Bernie was talking about a rigged economy, you know, and he was talking about, you know, a campaign finance system, you know, that was corrupt. And so I suggested to Ben, because in these campaigns, a lot of times what you do, if you're going to make a TV ad, we try to write something that's 30 seconds long, put it in

front of people, because then we can replicate it by making that out of it. So I suggested, I think we should test a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance and see how it does. It was the number one testing message in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that's what we began to focus our campaign on and our messaging on. And I bet today, or if anybody's going to work on the next presidential campaign, that if you go out with the same

audience, that audience is still waiting for someone who can not only deliver that message, but deliver on it if they were president. So, Mike, I'm sorry, I want to get to you and ask you a question. You're one of the leading experts on this in America. Biden won the Latino men by 23 points in 2020. In 2024, Trump won Latino men by 10 points. Hillary won Latino women by 44 points in 2016. Harris by 19 points. What happened and why?

Well get comfortable because it's a long story. We've got 24 minutes. That's not saying to be a Republican up here on stage kind of helping the prognosis but my career trajectory I think probably leads to the book that I wrote in June, which was called The Latino Century, written as a warning, more than a prediction, although everything that I was predicting in June before both conventions ended up coming to pass. The story actually starts a little bit before that. I think that there's a cultural problem in the Democratic Party that is preventing itself from recognizing the single largest ethnic demographic transformation this country has ever undergone.

15 short years, America will become a non-white majority country. And yet, the party, the Democratic Party, I say this is somebody who's run campaigns for governor, for Democrats, Antonio Virgo is still my good friend, worked for George W. Bush, did the Lincoln Projects, you know, I can't keep a job anywhere, in any party.

But I have seen both parties address, in the state of the Democratic Party, I would say not address the single largest challenge from my perspective, facing it demographically. Because the common thread through all of this the working class youth vote Non-white voters female voters the fastest growing segment of every one of those is the Latino vote And the way it is approached in the Democratic Party is extremely parochial extremely stereotyped Extraordinarily limited and is focusing on the fastest shrinking segment of that's demographic. Okay? What we're witnessing right now again this huge growth trajectory of

Latino voters is largely driven 80% of it is driven by US born Latinos. We are witnessing some of the most rapid expansion with third generation and increasingly now a measurable fourth generation which we couldn't even do when I started studying Latino voters because the segments weren't that big. All of this rightward shift or I shouldn't say all of it the vast majority of it is happening with these later generation Latinos as they become more Americanized but the stereotype would you very often hear from the Democratic Party is oh it's racism oh it's misogyny. Oh, you're

conservative Catholics. These are all the old lazy stereotypes I heard in the Republican Party in the 80s and the 90s. It's now progressives literally casting the same aspersions because none of those are true. In fact, as you mentioned, the highest level of support that any Democrat ever received was Barack Obama amongst Latinos. Hillary Clinton then started to lose, but she was still the second highest, a woman, black man and a woman, the highest vote getters. Incidentally, Kamala Harris's entire career has been predicated on her rise in California with dramatic overperformance with Latino voters. They know her, they voted for her, they've supported her for 20 years, they didn't just suddenly become misogynists and racists. There's clearly something much more profound going on and I would

suggest, and my warning to Democrats in June was, you need to get off of this lazy idea that has no empirical basis that Latinos are driven and motivated by the immigration issue. But you can't do it. They literally cannot do it. And in fact, you're going to watch your own party continue to double, triple, and quadruple down

into this same wrongness in the next 30, 40, 50 days. Doesn't mean that we're anti-immigrant at all, at all. In fact, the polling would suggest that we are there, that we are sensitive to these issues. The 2018 midterms were the one anomaly for Democrats. When Donald Trump was cracking down on the undocumented and sending ICE into workplaces and splitting up families, you saw the highest turnout amongst Latinos

in the history of midterm elections in this country and the most decisively anti-Trump. But if you want to build a long-term party and get back into relevance, you should focus on the fastest growing demographic, which has essentially shown dropping support in the five surrounding elections with that one anomaly. I do believe the midterms will be a very good year for the Democrats because history tells us that it will and it should be. in the five surrounding elections with that one anomaly.

I do believe the midterms will be a very good year for the Democrats because history tells us that it will and it should be. And I think a lot of what Donald Trump is already doing is unpopular. And I think after he didn't put his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in, was probably the highest level of support he's probably gonna have

during his entire presidency, okay? But that without a lack of an affirmative aspirationalational, middle class agenda, working class agenda, you are just being a party of opposition that is picking up campaign wins based off of what you are against. You can't build a sustainable movement or a party on that. And that is exactly why all of the key indicators amongst Latinos are moving away from the

Democratic Party. It's not just that they're moving to the right, although they are. What's happening, as Ed Goaz pointed out in the earlier panel, is the dramatic decline in voter turnout. That's a really big problem for Democrats, guys. That is a political act in and of itself that is telling you something you need to be paying attention to. Moreover, the group that is the fastest growing group of no party preference, unaffiliated, independent voters are Latinos. OK, so this populism, correct, correct word, I believe, or anti institutionalism, It is one of the really fascinating characteristics of the Latino vote. One because it is a very significant and growing segment of the youth vote.

It is the fastest growing segment of the blue collar working class, non-college educated vote. We keep talking about working class voters. It's increasingly non-white, overwhelmingly Latino. That rightward shift you're seeing with the working class is correlate to the rightward shift amongst Latinos. It's all happening at the same time for the exact same reasons why, it's the same voter.

That's why. And we've aggregated everything out of it except for talking about the fastest, largest growing ethnic group in the country. And the only time that Democrats do is when they wanna talk about immigration. When there is not a single poll, not a single credible poll in the past 30 years that has been taken that would suggest that anything other than the economy is the number one issue,

ever. And I say this to my Latino Democratic caucus members here in other states and the congressional delegation. Show me where your aspirational Latino working class agenda is, ever. Where's your policies for this? And if you want to tell me it's minimum wage and strengthening labor unions, I would say you need to call last century because that's where those ideas belong. I'm not saying I don't support them, but I'm saying that the average voter, the average

blue collar working class Latino voter with two kids trying to make it in a state like California or Nevada or Arizona doesn't believe that those are real solutions because for their lives it's not. It's not. You don't believe me? Ask Ruben Gallego. Ask Catherine Cortez Masto. There's just such a heavy emphasis, no disrespect to the blue collar working class voters in

West Virginia and Ohio and these areas. That's not the future of the Democratic Party. The future of the party because it's the future of the country is in the Southwest. Remember when we all used to talk about turning Texas blue because Latinos were going to change it? You haven't heard that talk very much lately, right? But the issue set remains the same. The states that are likely to turn more blue

if you do get back to a more populist economic agenda are going to be Texas, more so I would argue than Ohio, for those reasons, for those same reasons. That's where the growth is happening. One final point. There has been a lot discussed about polling in the Latino community over the past couple of years. In every single one of the races, Tad pointed out the Democratic polling was wildly wrong with Latino voters. And they were promulgated

and pushed out as though it was God-spoken truth. Biden's pollsters who became Harris's pollsters, who worked for Hillary Clinton's pollsters, their Latino pollsters, excuse me, their Latino pollsters were all the same. They were putting out data that was showing that Donald Trump was gonna get 31% of the Latino votes. 15 points lower, 15 points lower than it were actually manifested.

There's a reason why, and it's not just because they're bad pollsters, they were consciously could not conceive that non-white people would be voting for the Republican party so they would weigh and skew the methodology to adjust for that. Proven, look at every bench line poll from that firm from Hillary Clinton's race in 2016 until 2024. Dramatic

over waiting with first generation Spanish speaking Latinos which is why there's been such an emphasis on the immigration issue despite that being the fastest shrinking demographic in the country. And if you can't get past that culturally, internally as a party, you have no hope of

getting back into the game with the fastest growing segment of the electorate. Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my recollection from reading the exit poll is that this was the first election, 2024, and the history of exit polls, that Latinos were the second largest group. I would argue 2020 was, but regardless, the trend line is now going to start moving really, really big. Did you have something to add? Just a little number here, put this in perspective.

Relative to 2020, younger Hispanic, Latino men and women, there was a 50 point underperformance. 50 point underperformance. In 2020, Biden won younger Hispanic men by 41, and he won younger Hispanic women by 63 points. In this cycle, Vice President Harris lost Hispanic men by four and won Hispanic, Latino women, Latino women by single digits. Maybe it was a 50 point shift.

And the data was there. All the warning signs I think were there when we look at even the party ID affiliation. Stephanie, I wanna ask you a question. This is my last nerdy poll question. I'm sorry, I love this stuff. In recent years, education's become one of the most important predictors of vote in presidential elections. White voters without college degrees have always been really the core of Trump's support and that continued in

2024. He beat Hillary by three points in 2016 with white voters with college degrees. Vice President Harris beat Trump by eight points in 2024 with that group. But Harris lost support among voters of color at all levels of education. Why did this happen?

Why were they going in one direction there and another direction elsewhere? I mean, I think it's a convergence of a lot of different things. I will say I would like to caution that especially when it comes to men, Latino men and black men, that was a really big thing towards the end. Everybody started paying attention and saying, oh my God, we're going to lose

black men, we're going to lose Latino men. It was a thing. But nationally, eight in ten black voters actually supported Harris overall, so still pretty high. Yes, Biden, I think, had nine out of 10. And then about three in 10 black men under the age of 45, excuse me, went for Trump. So we're talking about 3%. We're not talking about like a huge, huge number here. And I just want to put that into context because I think sometimes we blow some of these things out of proportion,

not saying they shouldn't be addressed and looked at. But I think there's a number of different reasons. Again, I mentioned this earlier about the purity test that I think that we do have. The populist agenda, I think it lives. I think all the things, the care agenda, all the things that we want to do to provide mothers, I'm a new mom with support when it comes, we don't do anything for women. I mean, now that we've become a mother, I'm like, Jesus Christ. But seriously, like all the support that we need to give working class people in this country, Democrats have the ingredients to do that. Have the bills, have all these things.

We don't communicate it. We don't even know how to communicate and we get wrapped up and all these other big pieces moving, and then obviously Trump is you know taking over The media in a way that did not just distracts us But it keeps us jumping from one thing to the other it's like the cat watching the little you know light And we are not able to figure out how to message To people in a way that actually resonates reaches them and feels authentic We don't know how to do that well.

And that's partially because we don't lie and we think before we speak. However, I'm not saying that we should take on those bad traits, but I do think we have to figure out how do we communicate with people where they are in ways that they understand. Talking to you is different from talking to, you know, another audience that might not have an understanding

of even how government works, okay? People don't understand how government works. So when we are talking to them and we're using not even just, not trying to be patronizing, big words, all those different pieces, if we're not talking about issues in the way that people just get it, the bread and butter issues doesn't work. So that's one space that we're feeling, and I think a reason why we lost a lot of those folks. I think another reason is that we don't go to where they are. They're not on MSNBC.

They're not on CNN, who's trying to be like Fox News. They actually are watching Fox, unfortunately. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to and they tell me, watch Fox, and we, please stop watching Fox. That's not real news, but it doesn't matter. They're watching it and we're not there. Not only are we not there,

the Joe Rogan interview became the thing at the end and even Charlemagne from the Breakfast Club, who's has been and can be provocative, but has shown himself and that platform to be a huge platform reaching working class, especially people of color, Latinos and African Americans and young people at large. I think that we go to these places with caution and we have these conversations that are supposed to be candid and real in such rigid and confusing ways that just doesn't resonate.

So we have a messaging problem. And we will continue to have a messaging problem if we are playing by the old playbook. When I went to, when I worked in the Obama White House, that was the first, we had the first office of digital strategy, right? We're focusing on Twitter and Facebook at the time. And I don't even think, I don't even remember when Instagram came to be maybe it was around but at any rate that was new media that we were dipping into. We haven't gone beyond that. I just got out of the White House. We still just have an office of digital strategy. We don't

have an office of cultural strategy where we're going to the cultural platforms that the majority of people are consuming because they're not consuming news. So we don't even we don't even play in those places by going there to talk directly to people and playing talk and ways that people can understand. And then on flip side, when it does, when we do have these big races and campaigns, we don't advertise there in the ways in which we should.

He did. I mean, YouTube has become the new source. I know it's the number one new source for Latinos, but it's become a huge new source for young people. He was outspending us on YouTube like crazy. And all these different spaces and places, we weren't there. Because we don't value that as news.

So we, beyond our messaging problem, it is understanding that the world has changed and we're using the old playbook that doesn't work anymore. And we're going to have to figure out how to change our messaging, how to change the messengers too at times, and how to just be, how to be real with people because that's what people are wanting to connect with. And we can do that. It's just, it's going to take acknowledgement. It's going to take work. And it's going to take having, I think, different people at the table. Can I just say one thing? And recognizing that just because Hispanics or African Americans or young people voted

for you last cycle, last month or last year, does not guarantee it's going to happen again if you don't constantly check in. Donald Trump had a very clear pathway. He needed to basically expand his franchise relative to 2020. He probably saw a ceiling when it came to women, right? So what did he do? He focused on younger men who had not been participating before, 18 to 24-year-old men. And who were not talked to. Who were not talked to. He spent ten times as much money as Kamala Harris did. And what

happened? He changed it, he flipped it, and he won. He narrowed those margins. Let me speak to how that happened in real time when it was happening. I guarantee you. Because the RNC, I don't know if you remember this, in spring was criticized right after Laura Trump took over. She was criticized heavily by saying, they shut down all of their offices in black and brown neighborhoods.

They're not serious about this. Anybody who's done campaigns at the level that we're talking about knows that that's not turning out real vote, by the way. The amount of money you get for showing up in those areas is that there's mountains of data and electoral results showing that's not how you win this vote. One, two, the Biden campaign announced three times,

three times historically early and historically significant in terms of the size of the buy, Latino advertising. And every time they did it, their numbers went down with Latinos, okay? So at a certain point, there is a policy problem. It's not a tactical problem, although that is also true. There is a policy problem. And here's the real kicker.

This didn't start with Donald Trump. These numbers, especially if you look at voter registration and registration turnout, they've been a pernicious problem for the Democratic Party for decades. This predates Donald Trump, predates social media spend, and the data has been very clear for decades on this. If you don't talk to voters about what they were screaming at the top of their lungs telling you they want some redress about, don't expect to win their votes. It's really that simple.

We hear about violence all the time in the news, yet we rarely hear stories about peace. There are so many people who are working hard to promote solutions to violence, toxic polarization and authoritarianism, often at great personal risk. We never hear about these stories, but at what cost? On Making Peace Visible, we speak with journalists, storytellers and peace builders who are on the front lines of both peace and conflict. You can find Making Peace Visible wherever you listen to podcasts. I just have to push back on one piece. People do want to see you in their neighborhoods

and their communities. They do, they do. And the door-to-door stuff doesn't work like it used to, but it's hand-in-hand with all the digital pieces. You can't leave that out. Like, you still gotta to be in the neighborhood. And I will say, the campaign wasn't where they needed to be either. They weren't in the neighborhoods.

They weren't built up. I worked on Obama 2012. We were, I mean, that was a machine that was built really early. And the people knew us. And when I say the people, really what it is, those at the grass tops, those people who are running organizations, who are leading in the community, who have tips everywhere. Those are the people that you are attracting when you are actually physically there, right? And they help to bring other people in.

It's a hand in hand piece, right? The door knocking is different. I know that that doesn't work as well as it used to. So we got to move away from that. But it is still critical and important for you to have a presence. We didn't have a presence. We didn't feel like there was a general election happening. Trump had zero presence and he dramatically increased performance in all of those districts.

All of them with no presence. Well, he was all digital. But I'm talking more about our folks and what they expected and what they needed to help us galvanize. It's not just a one and done. Yes, I know that he's been able to be this magician from, I don't know, the Wizard of Oz from this place and being able to manipulate and do things digitally only. I don't think we have the luxury of just doing that.

I think we have to do all the above. I'd like to suggest that we have not just a messaging problem, we have a do all the above. I'd like to suggest that we have not just a messaging problem, we have a medium problem too. For those of a certain age in this room, and maybe old enough to remember Marshall McLuhan, we have a medium problem too. Because even if we as a party, the Democrats,

are able to construct a populist center left agenda, we also have to figure out a way to amplify those proposals enough so that our message is heard. And that means we have to figure out a way to break through the conservative media ecosystem that sets the news agenda for this country. Some of you may read the New Republic. There's a great article a couple of months ago by Mike Tomosky who pointed out that the ecosystem starts with Fox News but goes way, way beyond that. That it includes Newsmax, One America News, the Sinclair Network of TV stations, iHeart Media, the Christian Bot Radio Network, Elon Musk X, and of course,

most recently, podcasts have become the latest thing, right? And podcasters who deal with politics, like Joe Rogan, mostly have a conservative bent. They are sympathetic to Trumpism, and Trump himself used those platforms to great effect in this last election. Mark Melman, the pollster, just wrote a piece for The Hill here, and he says that Trump's podcast appearances in the election last fall reached an audience of 23 and a half million Americans, whereas Kamala's podcast appearances reached an audience of six million people. But the solution isn't as easy as finding and funding some progressive podcasters and

the influencers because research shows that whether the format is talk radio, cable news, or podcasts, outrage is a much easier sell than is moderation or a careful analysis of the issues. Bob Shrum identified this problem, I think, 30 years ago. I think you, Bob, as I remember, you called the talk radio thing the grievance network. Those of us of a certain age will remember the previous democratic attempts to build a more liberal talk infrastructure like Air America, if you all remember that, never gained much traction, went down in flames shortly after they were launched.

Now, I'm not smart enough to know how we can square the circle, but I know that if we want to stop conservative voices from setting the nation's news agenda, if you go into, not here in California maybe, but if you go into Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania, you go into a small town, into a barbershop or a bar, you've got Fox News on TV everywhere. It is constant. And we've got to figure out a way to stop this right right-wing media ecosystem from dominating the national conversation Yeah, I want to touch on a few things. I've just been listening one

I think on the media there has to be I think a direct deposit into investing into media infrastructure in which the voices and policies of the Democratic Party are getting out there and new digital media ways and non-traditional media ways. Most people do get their new sources from independent media. They get it from YouTube. They get it from different apps that essentially, I will say, Republicans or right-wing messaging, to your point, has essentially been able to expand and get what they are saying in the narrative to far and wide-reaching voters. I think for us, to your point, we've had a very old playbook as far as Democrats go, and it's time for us to move away and to really use this time to reset. And even the framing of this of like, you know, have we kind of lost the plot?

I want to be clear, we did not lose the plot with the candidate that was the most qualified. We did not lose the plot when that shift happened, when she was taking over the, taking over as a Democratic presidential nominee. So I want that to be clear too. She was the most qualified. She had the best policies. She had the best agendas. When it came to culturally competent messaging

and narrative building, that was not the case. And Mike, you hit on this. Thank you for reminding us that she was a candidate here first at the local level where Latino voters was her base for every part of her career. Me, I am Afro-Latina. I'm Puerto Rican.

So yes, immigration messaging does not register with me or my folks. And I have plenty of family members at the kitchen table who did ultimately go vote for Trump based off of feeling as though that his messaging reached them. So I'm glad you brought up that point too because with everything that we do, we can't see our voters as a monolith.

We can't see any voters or take any of them for granted. And even as Stephanie highlighted towards the end, there was there was the oh we need to focus on black men we need to focus on Latino men or we need to you know do some messaging even towards black women that even came up as well like we're not feeling as though that there's a connection there. I think overall in order for us to really go forward and to also grasp grasp the new constituency that is emerging especially amongst the key demographic of Latino voters, especially the expanding demographic with new youth voters who are entering and turning 18,

is that we're gonna have to completely revamp the way that we do politics, policy, and people. And that to me is something that the Democratic Party has not to me come to the realization yet, is that to me, the Republican Party has made the shift to acknowledge where their party has moved from. We can do a litmus test of that

of where they were just in the last decade to where they are now and even I think the signaling of the candidates that they're running, the candidates that their party is investing in goes to show that they have seen the data, they have seen the polling, but they've also listened to voters and seen that, hey, we want to win, so we're going to put candidates up there

that are going to win. And I think it's not saying that she can't, it's not saying that Vice President Harris couldn't have won because I wholeheartedly do believe that. But I think that because there was messaging in there and a narrative that was put forward, that was quite frankly for a candidate that doesn't look like her, you have a groundbreaking candidate. We've never seen a woman of color take the helm. She was previously the vice president.

There were so many aspects, I think, honestly, of her and the essence of her that, quite frankly, was put, in my opinion, in such an outdated rule book for a white male candidate. And that, to me, is one of the things that I think we did lose the plot, in a sense, of our messaging and our narrative building of how could we take this candidate to me

that hit all the boxes and when she did, like I said, take over the nomination, we saw the excitement in the polls. We saw that people were like, wow, okay, the Democratic Party is paying attention. They're putting forward new leadership. They are going forward with something that has never been done before.

And I think for us to sit back and I'll be honest, even say, oh, we shouldn't put that type of candidate up because we know the undertones of when people say that. I also just think that that's very regressive to where our party is actually going. And also, like I said, she has the record to show that she performed well across every constituency, but especially among Latino voters, even in her trajectory and rise. Great, great. John? Yeah, just an observation from those times.

I think that, I don't know, I think the next, to me, the criteria for the next Democratic presidential candidate ought to be who can perform on Fox News. Who can go to Fox News and perform on Fox News. I think one of the vice president's best moments was actually the Brad Barrow interview, actually on Fox. Yeah, it was. And the previous, to me, some of the highlights

were when she did that college tour, right? Yes, I was there. And she integrated, you know, and she, and fed back to younger people that without them, okay, we don't have the first Bipars and Gun Violence Prevention Act in two generations. Without younger people, we don't have historic

climate change. Without younger people, we don't have $150 billion in student debt. It's almost a quarter of the Pentagon budget was relieved in student debt because of younger people participated and very few people knew that. But somehow between the college tour and the last six weeks of that campaign,

younger people didn't hear that message. And if there's the most significant predictor of whether or not someone's gonna vote is, is there a tangible difference? If they understood the difference that they made by their vote in 2020, I believe more would have shown up. And you look at again Elections that are won by a fraction of percent stuff can make a difference Yeah, and on the college tour, I just want to highlight this, you know

We usually do those things during election year, right or and it kind of was but well, no it took place before the it's a place In 23 believe and bled into 2024 But students were not used to you know The vice president or the president or anybody coming to their campus just to talk to them and not ask them to do anything. And I think that was a good example and you probably were not fully aware,

some of you may have been, but like we went to HBCUs, we went to schools in Nevada, we went to school, literally all over this country, we went to college campuses, excuse me, and we packed it out every time the vice president spoke. It was a standing room only moment. And those kids were hungry. They were hungry to hear from her.

They were hungry to hear about what she wanted to do for this country and what this administration has done. And that gave me a sense of hope, but also re-understanding that you cannot ask people to participate in this democracy by not going to them and talking to them. And we expect people to do that and wearing my old one-way-own-vote hat, we know that the majority of people don't vote because nobody asks them to. That sounds crazy, but seriously, no one asks them to. And it takes about seven touches for someone to get registered to vote. It is a process that we don't engage in at all. So we do need to go and take our messaging literally to where people are, more college tours, more conversations, more tangible moments where people feel like I know you,

you know me, and you understand my needs and can meet them. Yeah, and really, I mean, those of us who have been doing this a long time recognize Kamala Harris, I thought, ran a very good campaign in the very short amount of time she had. But the fundamentals were arrayed against us. She never had a chance. She unfortunately was the sitting vice president at a time when the sitting president had an approval rating on election day of 39 percent. When 70 percent of the electorate told pollsters, fairly

or unfairly, that they thought the economy was lousy, no incumbent party in American history has ever won reelection with numbers like that. And remember, Kamala lost because she got roughly 7 million fewer votes than Joe Biden got four years earlier, right? But those seven million missing Democratic voters didn't go to Trump. He only increased his total vote total by about what a million and a half to two million. Most of those missing Democratic voters just didn't vote. They just didn't show up. And that's the challenge I think going forward is that we got to give these people a reason to show up. We have to give them a reason to want to go out and vote. And the way to do that, I think,

is to start pushing policies that will improve the lives of them and their families. I agree. Well, they're going to be done soon, and I promise to end on time in three minutes. But I'll just make one last point, if anybody wants to comment on it, you're free to. One thing I love about coming here to the Center for the American Future is that Democrats and Republicans seem to somehow get on the same stage and not be killing each other, okay? It's really something that we could use so much in America

and I'm glad this space is being provided for it to happen here today and at other times too. And I've loved the fact that today, whether it was Mike Murphy or Ed Goess, or Mike, I'm talking about Latino voters here on this stage, that I found myself in agreement with all of the things, not all of the things, most of the things that my Republican friends and colleagues have said.

Ed said something that struck me, and maybe because I'm a Democrat, I got a different perspective. He talked about the unintended consequences of campaign finance reform in the 90s and that leading to many of the problems we have today. I guess my perspective on that issue, and I feel very strongly about it, and I'm proud to have worked for Bernie in 2016 because we tried to make that a centerpiece of the campaign, I don't think it was the unintended consequence

of what the legislature in the United States Congress did with campaign finance reform in the 90s that is destroying our politics today. It is the intended consequences of what the United States Supreme Court did, not only in the Citizen United decision, but in a number of other decisions, to create a corrupt system of campaign finance,

which is legal, I understand, I'm a lawyer, I used to campaign finance, which is legal. I understand. I'm a lawyer. I used to practice law. It's legal in this country. But boy, I've worked in 29 campaigns outside the United States. And let me tell you something, if they did what we do here, they would go to jail. Okay?

Okay? If they came in and spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to elect somebody president, which just happened in this thing, they would go to jail. And we will continue in this country to have a rigged economy, which is held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance until we muster the will to change it. And I hope we do. Okay. Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks everybody in the panel. Thank you for joining us on Let's Find Common Ground. If you enjoyed what you heard, subscribe and rate the show five stars on iTunes or wherever

you get your podcasts. Follow us on social media at USCPOLFuture. And if you'd like to support the work of the center, please make a tax deductible contribution so that we can keep bringing important voices together across differences in respectful conversations that seek common ground. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.