Let's Find Common Ground - Trump's Historic Comeback

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

FOX 11 News Anchor Elex Michaelson leads a panel of political and media experts to examine why and how Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. They discuss Trump's and Kamala Harris' campaign strategies and messaging, and how the Democratic and Republican parties reached 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: Elex Michaelson (Moderator): FOX 11 News Anchor; Host of California’s Statewide Political Talk Show "The Issue Is" Chris Cadelago: POLITICO's California Bureau Chief; Former White House Correspondent Ed Goeas: Republican Pollster and Strategist Betsy Fischer Martin: Executive Director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University; Former "Meet the Press" Executive Producer Jessica Millan Patterson: Chairwoman of the California Republican Party

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.

Hi, everybody. Well, my most impressive and important credential here is I'm a proud alum of the University of Southern California. So fight on everybody. Fight on to the Trojans in the house. It is great to be here in Town & Gown, one of the most beautiful places on campus, the place where I decided to come to USC when the marching band was coming in and Pete Carroll was here and I said this is where I want to be and I'm so excited to be here today. And one more note and background on me, I anchor the local news here at 5, 6 and 10 on Fox 11, host a statewide show called The Issue Is.

And where we got the name The Issue Is, I don't know if I've told this story before, was because my hero in broadcasting was Tim Russert, who Betsy worked with and was the EP of, and he used to start his show every Sunday with our issues this Sunday. So I couldn't take the name, meet the press, because they already have that, but I said, let me do something in naming the show to honor Tim.

And so when I think of the issue is, I think of Tim and I think of Betsy and her great work, the greatest Sunday show in the history of our medium. So we have Betsy to thank for that. And thank you all for being here today. So just want to introduce our panel real quickly and then get into it. Chris Catalago is the Sacramento Bureau Chief for Politico, helping to lead the California coverage. They do this extraordinary playbook.

They do the national playbook, but there's also a California Politico playbook, which everybody should subscribe to for free. It gives you all the most important news in California politics. It's like my Bible that I read every day. Chris helps oversee that and a lot more. Chris Catalago is here, ladies and gentlemen. Round of applause. Jessica Milan-Patterson is the chair of the California Republican Party. When we were with the chair of the National GOP last year, she said that she was the best chair in the country. And she's had extraordinary success in helping to grow the party, especially in some of the down-ballot races that we've seen in the last year

Jessica Milan Patterson Betsy Fisher-Martin as I mentioned used to be the executive rooster of Meet the Press with Tim Russert. She now runs the Institute for Women in Politics and is a leading expert in that space uh... in terms of women in politics and also the media Betsy Fisher-Martin. Ladies and gentlemen. And Ed Goas, got it right, okay, is a longtime Republican pollster and strategist who has run some of the most successful Republican campaigns around the country. He's flown in for this. So, well, good to see you in LA. Welcome, Ed. Thank you all.

So, I thought let's get things started by getting straight to the point. The point of this particular discussion is why did Trump win and to talk about his historic political comeback. So in the interest of time in our attention driven economy, if you could in like a sentence or two, real bottom line, why did Trump win, Chris? So I came at it very much from the democratic perspective in terms of our coverage having been to DC covered Harris's first campaign and then Biden and then coming on when she, when

they switched the nomination. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about Trump and what he did, I'm sure we will on this panel, but from the Democratic perspective and to pick up from the last panel, a lot of it was people I don't think were hearing about how these policies, and they did roll out a lot of policies. I mean, I think a lot about this like,, you know, credit for first-time home buyers. But you do look across those and echoing, you know, what one of the students said. These things just didn't... people didn't feel like these applied to them.

And I think Trump was going big, Democrats were going very small. They were very involved in sort of small-ball process. And I think it just didn't really break through in the way that they hoped it would. All right, that was a long run on sentence with lots of commas. So, and, but smart. One, maybe one sentence or two sentences, why did Trump win?

I think it was because the American people lived through the four years of the Biden-Harris administration. Sounds like a Republican. As I'm a TV producer, I'm gonna to give you a quick soundbite from Trump. A vote for Trump will mean your groceries will be cheaper. Yeah. And the question now is, will that actually happen? Ed?

I am a Republican. I actually came here ready to promote the campaign that Donald Trump won. He won because he ran a better campaign. He won because she won a worse campaign. It's that simple. But I shouldn't have watched his press conference today on the crash. It was embarrassing.

And I will say to the group that for a guy that wants to talk all the time about common sense, he shows very little common sense sometimes. And if you want to see what a true president looks like, we just passed the 39th anniversary two days ago of the crash of the Challenger. And if you want to see a true president and you want to see a true presidential showing compassion, which is what a president

should do at a time like this, watch that speech. It's one of the best speeches showing compassion for the voters and for the tragedy that I've seen my entire time in politics. So what he's talking about, if you guys didn't see it this morning, President Trump went into the White House briefing room and he blamed the crash likely on DEI and then he was pressed on for evidence of what DEI had to do with it and he said he didn't have any evidence but he has common sense so that it probably has something to do with it but didn't explain exactly how. And he also blamed potentially the Biden administration,

the Obama administration, the Obama administration, Pete Buttigieg, at a time when they literally are pulling the bodies out of that water and not all the people have even been identified yet. So Ed, does that sort of go to the idea that Trump can't help himself, the idea? I think some of it is.

I'm a good friend of James. I've really liked him for a long time. Certainly like his wife a great deal and love their kind of back and forth. I think sometimes James comes across as very negative, but I think one of the problems we have in politics today is both sides are running negative campaigns. What both sides are doing is teaching voters what to be against, not what to be for.

And until we get our politicians to start talking about what they're for, which if you look at what James was saying, most of what he was saying was what you should be for as a Democrat, even though he mixes it with his banter, which everyone loves. You know, we have, and my feeling about Trump is I don't talk about him like he's the disease. He's a symptom of where our country is today. And the main thing that our politicians do wrong is that they don't understand basic problem solving. You talk about the problem, you talk about solutions,

you create solutions, and that creates new problems. And you always have to stop in that third phase and think about unintended consequences. And what we're suffering from today is the unintended consequences of campaign finance reform in the 90s. Things that came out of it at the same time, but not only super PACs but social media, cable news, all add to that environment. It's very interesting if you look at turnout in 1990, and I like to look at non-presidential years to see the base.

In 1990, 35 percent of Democrats voted in Democrat primaries and 35 percent of Republicans voted in Republican primaries. In 2022, it was 17 percent of Republicans voted in Republican primaries and 15 percent of Democrats vote in Democrat primaries. The only people voting in our primaries, it's not about the general election. The only people voting in our primaries are far right and far left and they are picking people that they want to fight over values, not find solutions. And until we start getting people that are going to turn out in the primaries, the centrist, which is 65% of this country, we are not going to correct the problem that we're in.

Good point. Betsy, you understand the political journalism and the media environment as well as anybody. Talk about the way that Trump used the media, thinks about the media compared to maybe the way that the Democrats use the media and how in this modern environment that helped change the game a bit? Yeah, that's a great question. Look, Trump is P.T. Barnum, right? He is a producer.

Greatest showman. Producer. He just, you know, the inauguration a week and a half ago, he's signing what I called his proclamations up at the desk with his pen, right? You know, he plays for the media. And I think that was true during the campaign, you know, the whole notion of like, what, Trumpy Trump? Unplugged?

You know, what we just saw is what we got. None of it's a surprise, right? And you know, the media is drawn to that. There's no doubt about it. I think that's how he became the nominee in 2016, was he got that initial first pass from the media by putting all of his rallies, back when we did have a primary,

right, putting all of that with zero commentating around it, just because it was getting eyeballs and clicks. And that was the original ascension of him back in 2016. And I think we just saw more of that happen. Yes, there were certainly attempts to kind of do the fact checking, but he breaks through all of that. And his media strategy this time was also just to kind of avoid that mainstream media and go to these alternatives, kind of outlets, the podcasting, you know, we sure can talk more about the bro vote and, you know, meeting kind of those

non likely voters where they were. No, they're not watching Meet the Press, but they're listening to these various podcasts and that was that was their strategy. Right, and so if you look at the last month and a half of the election, he almost did no mainstream media interviews and Kamala Harris took so much incoming for not talking to the press and she was doing a lot of those mainstream media interviews. Trump was almost exclusively going after those podcasts and he ended up, you know, not really hurting with his base because he had told them all that the media is the enemy so not talking to the media would be why would you talk to the enemy and

then when she did do the view as we talked about earlier you know she couldn't even answer why she was the most basic how she would be different those basic question and you think about this media issue every day to Chris yeah and I think I mean a lot was made about about the mediums and where Trump was going. Less was made about what the candidate would actually say when they go on. Right? I mean, you talk about Kamala Harris, there's so much debate about whether she was going to go on Rogan, whether she wasn't.

How was she going to fill those three hours? Like was it going to be compelling? And then the other piece of it is, I mean, you see it now with Trump, he's picked up where he left off. He's got a lot of outlets, a lot of more conservative outlets embedded with his, you know, with ICE folks right now on these raids. I mean, they're sort of producing, you know, the news and that sort of access is something that Democrats did when they were doing, you know, initiatives they wanted to do.

They had media in there. And so that's what people are seeing. You know, they're seeing Dr. Phil out there in Chicago on these raids and that stuff is breaking through it continues to break it gets social media stream right of everybody and half of his cabinet are all people that were on Fox News Channel so some people say that that's a negative but there's also a positive in that they all are good on TV and know how to communicate a message right you know yeah I want to get Jessica in here real quick.

Jessica, from maybe give us some of the numbers, because from a California perspective, for so long, Donald Trump was seen as the boogeyman that even associating with him would hurt you. Look at the way that Adam Schiff treated Steve Garvey in the primary, which we did altogether here at USC during the primary debate. But he wasn't so much a boogeyman for a lot of Republicans in this state in the primary, which we did all together here at USC during the primary debate. But he wasn't so much a boogeyman for a lot of Republicans in this state in the last election.

Now, we certainly saw from the beginning of my chairmanship when February of 2019 going into that 2020 cycle. And we really focused on California issues and individual district issues. We didn't talk about what was going on in the national scene. You would often hear me say, you know, the president is campaigning

in 11 states not named California. What we are focused on is making sure that we get the house, which is what we did in 2020 and 22. Picking up, even with Donald Trump at the top of the ballot in 2020, we picked up four congressional seats. Some of those seats, President Trump lost by double digits. Fast forward to 2024, and we lost a congressional district that Donald Trump won by five points.

So it changed significantly because of what people were experiencing in the four years of the Biden-Harris administration. We also saw a huge tick in the voter registration and the movement. And when I took over as chair in February of 2019, we were essentially the third largest party in the state. More people were choosing

decline to state than were choosing Republican in 2019. We rolled up our sleeves by May of 2020. We got that second place spot back. But what's most interesting is what's taken place since 2022.

Since 2022 midterms, California Republicans have outregistered got that second place spot back. But what's most interesting is what's taken place since 2022. Since 2022 midterms, California Republicans have out-registered Democrats by five and a half times. We've out-registered declined to states by nine and a half times. In that almost six year period, we've registered almost a million new Republicans. That's despite more people leaving our state

than coming in here. We saw the movement in Trump's numbers here in California. He flipped or moved to the right, 57 out of the 58 counties compared to 2020. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, did worse in every single county. That's astounding. In every single legislative district, every single congressional district, it moved to the right. Why do you think that is? Well, I think that a lot of it had to do with California Democrats being in charge of everything here and failing many Californians, whether it was public safety where we saw all 58 counties. Alex, when in our lifetime have all 58 counties agreed on a proposition? Yeah, and this is she's talking about Proposition 36, which was a pushback to Prop 47. Prop 36

was something that was opposed by all of the top statewide Democrats, opposed by the governor, opposed by the speaker, by the Senate President Pro Tem, a few Democratic mayors who I think were smart politically realized that this would be bad and they agreed with it but most Democrats opposed it and yet it won by what 70 plus percent with the whole entire state saying we disagree with you governor on this. And not only did Democrats give them a lot of reasons but Republicans started to show up. These were things that I wanted to focus on in my chairmanship. We had ceded entire communities to the Democrat Party. And my community was not thriving because of any of the policies. In fact, by any milestone that you would look at safer streets, better jobs, better education for our Children, we were getting none of that. And we had to

show up in these communities and make people feel like they were welcome in our party. And you're the polling guy. Can you talk about just nationwide also in terms of the shifts that we're seeing in demographics that you noticed, whether you like them or not, in terms of Trump? The shifts are a false read. And that is very important for everyone to understand. In this election, he ran a good campaign. He took the get out the vote that's normally with the party and he put it into a private operation that he understood. And he registered and identified just like he did in California, registered and identified more Republicans and turned them out.

In this election, he won by 2 million votes. He increased his vote by 3 million votes. But Harris declined in the vote that Biden had got by 6 million. I guarantee you that 3 million didn't come from the 6 million. It came from new Republicans voting, and the 6 million were disenchanted Republicans, disenchanted independents for him, but also with Biden, and more specifically with Harris. And so all the, what percent of the vote you got is distorted because it's based on election turnout polls. And so they are identifying if all the Democratic vote dropped off, and it was very heavily

in black votes, very heavily in Hispanic vote, very heavily in youth vote. That meant that his percentage he was getting with those groups went up in comparison to what turned out on the other side, not what he got in 2020. And Betsy, you focus on the women issue and this was supposed to be the saving grace of the Democratic Party, abortion. That was going to be the big thing that drove turnout. We saw that it had driven turnout in the midterms after Roe v. Wade was overturned. What did we end up seeing on that front? I mean I thought we would be seeing kind of the largest gender gap ever. That did not turn out, right? And

what happened was we actually the gender gap was smaller in this election cycle, which was really surprising to me than it was, you know, in previous elections with even with Biden and Hillary. And so, you know, I think Trump look, when you look at the difference between men and women, the biggest gender gap that you saw were those young voters. And we'll probably talk a little bit more about young voters and other panels too, but you saw that big disparity between young women and young men when it came to the election. And I think on the abortion issue, look, Trump basically went out there and said he was not going to be for a national abortion ban

and he was leaving it up to the states and that helped him sort of quell what we saw post-Dobbs in 2022 and he didn't suffer at all with sort of the more conservative evangelical voters. That support didn't waver at all and so you saw that gender gap that did not, you know, if the gender gap would have been a couple of more points, the election would have been different. But again, you have to go back to who voted.

And it's gonna take us a while to figure out of the six million that they vote before and didn't vote this time, and of the three million more he got, did they not vote last time and vote this time, which is gonna distort all those figures. And I saw no indication in the polling that the women that were incensed over the abortion issue were not still voting Democrat.

They didn't go and vote for him all of a sudden. They maybe stayed at home, or he increased the vote of the ones that wasn't in the picture. And he increased his margins among men. Right. Significantly, especially non-college educated men. And then you get to this question, Chris, that when you think about when Barack Obama was running, that's when I was here at USC,

the Democrats were the cool kids. That was the party you wanted to hang out with. John McCain was not the cool kid, God bless him, right? Mitt Romney was not seen as the cool kid. It was, you know, even the Obama bros, that was a thing. And what the hell happened? How did the Republicans, how did Trump become the cool kid? Harris had a chance here.

I mean, there were, there was a month-long period, maybe even longer, she was up in some of these polls. I know the campaign has gone and done their media tour and talked about how she was always kind of trying to come back up. I mean, she had leads there. She had leads in some of these states. The decision she made not to give these younger voters,

these voters who were looking for something, any kind of daylight between her and Biden, I think was just crushing for her. The fact that she was not able to break away on any of these key issues, even if it wasn't a significant break, even if it was a rhetorical break, she just was unwilling to do that. And I think a lot of these voters saw that and were just dispirited by it. I mean, you saw the drop off and the activity online from, you know, the height of the Bratz summer to to where the campaign ended up. And so, you know, they gave her a chance. They really gave her a look.

But people voted for Biden four years ago, because they thought he was a centrist, not because they thought he was a centrist, not that they thought he was a progressive. And his policies all through his presidency had moved far to the left in terms of what they were doing. And the reason why she couldn't distance herself from it, because there was a question, was it her policies versus his policy? They also thought he was going to be a bridge. That didn't turn out to be the case either. Right, because it puts her in a weird box. Because if she says she disagrees with the policy, then it's like, why didn't he listen

to you? Exactly. Right? And then you already probably have some challenges as being a woman and a woman of color of are you being respected in this administration? Are you being listened to? Are you you being respected in this in this administration? Are you being listened to? Are you just being put in there for different reasons? And so does that make you look weak if on every issue you made your point and nobody

cared and they didn't listen to you? But again, was it her policies? Right. And when she was asked that question, there were two very simple things she could have done that would have changed things. One is she could have said, I did what any vice president is supposed to do, what Mike Pence did. I supported the president and his policies.

And what I was not confronted with that Mike Pence was, is being asked by the president to do something that was illegal. That would have taken the press off on a tangent and not focused on what she just said. Or she could have said, I was a United States senator from California and I viewed issues from a California view. But after four years of being vice president, I see it now as a national view.

And yes, there are some things I would probably do different. Yeah. Both of those would have been so much better answers than no. Or I learned, right? I was vice president. I went across the country. I got to talk to people. I had this incredible opportunity.

And so my perspective has changed. But the Biden White House didn't give her an opportunity to shine at all when she was president. And that's the question. Did Joe Biden quietly, privately give her space to go after him? I don't know. Maybe you know. If there was any like, I know you're

going to have to hit me on this and go for it and we won't say it, you know. Was there any of that going on? She already had one strike against him on going against him. By running in the first place and what they manufactured. Not only that, but early on she decided, and this was mentioned earlier,

but when you decide to basically inherit his entire campaign structure and those folks who are running the campaign and then you supplement it with a few other people, you've set yourself up, you set yourself on that path. She made that decision fairly early and that crew was not a crew that was going to break from Biden or necessarily or do anything approaching kind of throwing him under the bus in a way that would, that might have needed to be done to break away from it. I i mean his his numbers were very bad at that point they loved and respected biden he was their guy right so in terms of california because this is the area of your expertise

what does kamala harris's loss potentially mean for the prospect of another democratic candidate from California or her? Is the party now at a place where they think, okay, California is the land of soups and nuts or whatever it's called, or fruits and nuts is what I've heard them call it in Texas, and we don't want to go there, let's stay away from that, or do you think that there's a prospect for her, for Newsome, or for others from California going forward? I think it depends a lot on the individual. I don't know that you look at the last candidate being from a particular state, but just to go to some of Jessica's points, I think in California what I've seen is there's a lot of folks out there,

we've seen it with the fires, they're sort of starved for competence in government. They want government to do these basic things. And I think that's the idea that's taken hold certainly nationally is that that's not happening in California. And that's the sort of thing that can harm a candidate who's coming out of here is are they doing the basics? Right. And how do you think about that, Jessica, going forward as, as you know because we have not had a statewide Republican win since 2006 despite all of the problems that you articulate about a one-party rule is it leaning into Trump is it leaning into a

more moderate thing do you get behind somebody like Caruso who now says he's a Democrat but you know you know and and maybe take back off in terms of the rate. How do you think about that? Yeah, so I do think of it in exciting terms. I would love to see Gavin Newsom run for president. I would talk about it every single day. And I'd love to continue to shine lights on the absolute incompetence here in California.

But I think for Republicans, I think what we do need, you know, certainly we're moving in the right direction, however slow it may be. Do I think we're at a turning point? I don't know yet. I feel like so many catastrophic and large scale failures have happened here in California and I don't think Californians have gotten to that point yet. And I think what it's really going to take is a Big leader that can come in on the Republican ticket and do that Right and the last you had was Arnold Schwarzenegger who obviously was larger than life in every way possible

And he broke through so many different molds, but you have thoughts, yeah. Yeah, I just, again, I wanna go back to our country is in deep trouble. And it's not one party or the other, it's our country is in deep trouble. And one of the things that's happened through three decades of doing nothing but focusing on negative campaigns

is trust in every one of our institutions in this country as an all time low except for our military. Used to be the military and police six years ago, now it's only the military. It has very high. So whether you look at big business, big government, the small business, unions, healthcare, media, religion. Always at the bottom. I mean, no, but they're all at an all-time low. And the problem with that is it's made our voters very cynical. And the problem with cynical voters is cynical voters are very susceptible to demagoguery,

whether it's demagoguery on social media, demagoguery on cable news, demagoguery from our candidates. And if we don't start doing something to build trust in our country's institutions, we'll never build trust on either side for the candidate. But Ed, the reason why there's been so many negative campaigns is because it works. It's the same reason why there's so much negative news on the news at night, because when we do positive news, nobody watches it. No offense, but I always upset my friends who are in the media. My response to that is, so does positive, you ought to try it once in a while.

And I have built an entire career on running positive campaigns. And I watch people who is ultimately the type, one of the best candidates I ever had James Langford who actually because he was so positive to be able to put together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to get an issue for the border right and then you had Donald Trump It was such a serious issue Why say kill it now so I can campaign on it eight months later? Call bullshit on that kind of thing when candidates say that kind of thing. That's how you get over it. But positive works, especially when it comes to, you know, one of the biggest

problems we've had from the 90s, one of the other problems, and it was brought by Newt Gingrich when he took the voting down from five days a week to three days a week and members of Congress stopped bringing their families to Washington. I used to, when my kids were growing up, I coached basketball, I coached baseball, and there was always a congressman from the Democrat side and the Republican side sitting in the bleachers cheering for their kids. They don't do that anymore. They leave their families at home. They don't do anything to actually get to know each other. So what's the positive message? If you were running one right now,

what is that message and how does that pull? The positive message is be for the things you're for and begin to rebuild trust in our institutions. And look, populism was always based on being against big. Big government, big religion, big media, big business. And back in the early days, we used to always want to be against more of the bigs than the other side was against the bigs. That was the beginning of negative campaigns. But we used to be able to run negative campaigns, run campaigns against negative campaigns,

and make the issue they're running a negative campaign the issue. And we can't anymore. Chris? I think it's still very TBD in terms of where it goes post-Trump. I mean, you can see sort of two competing, not only for the different states, Democrats are gonna look to win, but just kind of even sort of overall themes of these campaigns. Are Democrats gonna look for someone more Trump-like,

basically this, like a fighter type who's gonna campaign in that way, or is it gonna be closer to 2020, something Biden I think capitalized, which is sort of a healer, someone who's gonna come into the country and basically say, we're gonna bring you guys together. closer to 2020, you know, something Biden I think capitalized, which is sort of a healer, someone who's going to come into the country and basically say, we're going to like bring you guys together. And I think, you know, it could go either way. Yeah. It seemed to me that in 2022,

Gavin Newsom thought that Joe Biden wasn't going to run. And if you watched his activities then, which you and I both did closely, he was kept on talking about fighting. Where the hell is the Democratic Party? When the Roe v. Wade went down, where's the party fighting back? All his language online was all about fighting because he thought, to your point, Ed, that you've got to get to the Democratic base, which wants to see a fighter. And that is how he was going to differentiate himself from the old nice guy who got run over essentially.

And then Democrats did just well enough for Biden to stay in the race and then Newsom's boxed out so he now has to hug Biden and say that he's his best friend so that way Harris doesn't get in there and that way which could box him out. But it seemed like that was the calculus of at least one aspect of of a lane. And maybe he's trying to do that again right now. Yeah. And the problem for the Democrats now is the fighting posture is is you know where a lot of them are being told to be. They're the opposition party. They're the party out of power. So that's what they should do. Now what they pick to fight on is a very important topic, a separate subset, which is do they

focus on these things that voters just don't care a whole lot about? I mean, firing attorneys in D.C., is that something that someone sitting at their table thinking about, like, this really affects me? It might be very important for the future of democracy, but it might not be something that really resonates. And then where do they go from there? So I think now, and then at the same time, you have some of these folks who frankly, and this has not gotten as much coverage at the moment, have been kind of neutralized

in how much they can fight because of their elected officials who have a lot of problems in their own states, in their own cities. And so how far are they going to go out there hitting Trump when they're supposed to be doing their job at home? People are looking for them to do the current job rather than focus on the next thing. And you had a big fire and you have tens of billions that you need from the federal government. They also need to be a little bit more sophisticated in understanding Trump's strategy.

Trump's strategy right now is to do all these executive orders, knowing that a good deal of them are going to go down in the courts. And he benefits from both, because first of all, he states what he's for, he passes a good deal of things, so it goes through, and the ones that get thrown out by the court, he then uses it with his base to say, see, that's one of the things we're against. Yeah. Betsy, what do you think is the smart media strategy that Democrats can learn from what Trump has done well?

Well, I mean, you see Trump right now, I mean, he's flooding the zone, right? strategy that Democrats can learn from what Trump has done well. Well, I mean, you see Trump right now, I mean, he's flooding the zone. Right. I mean, where does the media start? I mean, at any given day, I'm sure you're in your newsroom, like, what do I even talk about this, right? Yeah. There's so much. I mean, on day one, we're covering at the inauguration, 200 executive orders.

Yeah, like where do you start with that? How do you do that in a minute, 30? Yeah. And I think that is that is the Trump strategy right now, like flooding that zone. And so there is not one thing that gets picked up on and the spotlight is not shown. I mean, do you start with like the crypto, you know, tokens or what do you even start with here? And that's and that's That's I think is very difficult for the media and we're just going to continue to see that in terms of Democrats using the media Or or social media or getting their message out. Maybe independent of the media. What are the lessons that can be? I mean, I think it's like What did not work last time? Let's not wash, and repeat on it, right? And so you had Democrats who their message during the campaign was all about the fight, all about anti-Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and that's not what people, to Chris's point, not necessarily what people really cared about. They cared

about those groceries at the end of the day, not the trials, not the felony counts, none of that. And so what did, I mean, they care about what affects them. And so Democrats want to have a message, it needs to be about what they're doing to help people. And it's that competence factor that we talked about. It goes back to, they need to campaign. I mean, take everything James said earlier.

It's about campaigning on what you're for, not campaigning on what you're against. And that's how you begin building and rebuilding because 65% of this country is centrist. 65%. The problem is the 35% is who's voting in the two primaries. Stop letting that define who you are as a party and start looking at the centrist. And Jessica, they, you know, one of the other smart thing James talked about was the idea of picking which things to focus on. So for you now as a party chairman, when you got 200 executive orders and you got to pick and choose which ones to focus on, what are you focused on right now as the message for

this state and for the people running in this state? Well in California, we'll continue to focus on California things. And that's because that is where we are finding our success. When we're talking to people about their gas prices, when we're talking about now we're going through this whole it's going to be a recovery and a rebuilding situation here for the last several years, we've been able to talk about crime. Los Angeles County decided to vote out their very liberal district attorney because of the policies

that California Democrats have championed. So we will continue to focus on California things and utilize President Trump in the excitement enthusiasm that he brings to certain parts of our state. Chris? In terms of... I know you were just trying to weigh in on the last issue in terms of the messaging and what are the big issues going forward? Yeah, I think, I mean, look at, I look really closely at how Democrats have been messaging

around these cabinet appointees and these hearings. And a heavy focus is still on these character deficiencies that they think these nominees have. Less so on the quality, you know, less of an emphasis on the qualifications, less of an emphasis on basically, you know, whether they could do the job and more on who these people are, foibles in their background. That stuff has just not worked. It didn't work with Trump and it's now not working with these nominees.

Clearly they don't have the votes. If you don't have the votes, you can still use that opportunity to try to sort of make some gains on that side. And so far on that, it hasn't happened now on this OMB directive and a whole bunch of spending in there. Democrats, I think, have sort of corrected a little bit and they're talking more about these specific programs. And that might have been something that has like jumpstarted the party in some way to

start to focus on things people are thinking about, but it hadn't happened up to then. Ed, I'm curious because you obviously were a huge part of the party before Trump and sort of understand the old school grand old party. And there are a lot of people that you worked closely with that probably weren't huge Trump fans privately, but have now supported him publicly. Have you noticed that they've changed at all in the last few years that this time around they maybe see him Differently, what's the private conversation? It goes back to a

Variety of things but it goes back to those primary voters Yeah That no matter where they may be in terms of where they want to be in terms of issues, they know that they have to pass the test with those primary voters. And we asked a very interesting survey question over the years. In fact, we asked it independently at first. We asked, do you want your member of Congress to fight over values even if it means they get no solutions?

71% said yes. We asked that same group of a thousand people, do you want your member of Congress to compromise their values in order to get, find common ground and find solutions to your problems. 75% of that same group that said 71% said yes. One thing I've always said to my clients is voters sometimes hold contradictory opinions and they hate the hell out of it if you point it out to them. But when we asked it as a forced choice, 27% voted I want to fight over values, not over solutions. And 67% said compromise on values to find common ground to find solutions to our problems.

It's interesting that that 27% makes up who's voting in our primaries. We need to stop letting primary voters dictate to us what type of candidates we have and if we don't do that, and the way to answer that is to start voting in primaries. Don't emphasize voting in general elections. Emphasize voting in primaries. So the nominee that you have to vote for in the general election represents where you really are and what you really want. Yeah. Forgive my ignorance on this because I don't know the answer to this. Is Senator Lankford facing a primary challenge?

Probably. Yeah. So, okay. So let's go into this example because I think answer to this. Is Senator Langford facing a primary challenge? Probably. Yeah. So, okay. So let's go into this example, because I think it's interesting. So Senator Langford, as he talked about, was the guy behind this bipartisan immigration bill. Senator Langford, a very conservative Republican in a very conservative state of Oklahoma. A lot of Trump people were very mad at him for trying to do a deal with the Democrats. He now faces potentially a primary challenge.

What is his message? What's your advice to him in that situation? Because you literally have a real world example of that. The biggest mistake that has been made is talking about the border problem, which is a real problem, as an immigration problem. It's not. Our immigration problem, our immigration policies in this country have been broken for 40 years and The reason why we have the border problem is we don't have enough people coming in legally

We only allow 1.2 million a year It is not matching what we need for our economy and we need to have a system to bring in people That really want to be a part of this country Not just want to take advantage of the jobs that are here. And the worst thing that happened in the last two years is we were beginning to move towards a real discussion on fixing immigration, and all of a sudden the border became the issue

and combined as the same issue. They are two separate issues. And if the Democrats want to know something to do here is when we do fix the border problem, then's the time to start going after, let's fix immigration in this country. What's the message for Lankford? He gets a Republican primary challenge. What's the bumper sticker that you advise him?

It's going to be exactly that. And luckily he has another senator in the state who is willing to kind of step forward and give him some cover. And that's going to help. Okay. I want to go around the horn with a couple quick rapid-fire questions, and then in a moment we're going to do Q&A as well, so start thinking about what you might want to ask. If I like one-word answers, so let's try to have some fun with this.

So one word to describe Donald Trump as president so far. Fast. I'll go last. You go last. president so far? Fast. I'll go last. You go last, okay, Jessica. Fast. Loud. Yeah. A salesman.

I'll say predictable. Predictable, interesting. So you're saying nothing that he's done, he's told you everything he's done. Promises made, promises kept. The tweet he had last night after the plane crash was something that he's been doing for more than a decade. Basically, he's been sitting there spouting off on whatever's on the news, whatever's on TV, doing it as president, doing it out of office. Same thing. You could have you

could have written that tweet or truth post before you even saw it. Alright, now we'll do another one word. One word to describe the Democratic Party right now. Perfect. Confused. In the wilderness. That was more than one word. I agree with the confused and the under... Rudderless. Who is most likely to be the

Democratic Party nominee in 2028? Chris, you go first. You don't always get to be last. I'm sitting that one out. Pleading the fifth. Shapiro. I would agree with that. Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania.

I actually think the one that I see out there with the potential to grab the medal is the governor of Kentucky. Governor of Kentucky and of Sheer. Really, really, really good. Who is very popular in a very Republican state. That would be on paper somebody that would be appealing certainly to the— No Wes Morris.

Yeah. So, well, did you just— Governor of Maryland. No, no, that's not mine, but— There was no— —mine to come up. Who—let me tell you this. Who is the leader of the Democratic Party right now?

Who is the face of the Democratic Party? Mr. Nobody. Nobody. No. Nobody has an—is it Hakeem Jeffries of the Democratic Party? Mr. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody hasn't. Is it Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat leader? No. Nobody thinks that there is a leader of the Democrats. That's a problem, right?

But I guess we've seen this in the past. I mean, you think of examples. Betsy, think about, right, 2005 when George W. Bush had won. Republicans had control of everything. And then two years later, Nancy Pelosi takes over as speaker. Two years after that, Barack Obama. Comes in and huge Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House.

So sometimes it can change pretty quickly. 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.

Thoughts? Any questions here? Yes, sir. He can talk loud. What's your name, sir? Hi, Steve Cohen. How are you? This is Steve Cohen asking a question about education.

Go ahead. So I want to talk about the, we just found out that students have not recovered from the pandemic three or four years ago. This is, can they read? Can they add and subtract? Yes. We aren't educating our kids to figure out how to deal with social media. And to me, the elephant in the room right now,

despite everything you guys said, is that social media won this election. We have the biggest, the two biggest trolls are Trump and Musk. And they're dominating social media, and we as Democrats can't fight back. And the question I have for everybody the whole day is how do we fight back?

Yeah, and you think about, you know, Joe Biden in his final speech talked about an oligarchy led by tech bros, and a lot of Republicans were all scoffing at that. And then you see at the inauguration, the richest people in the worldarchy led by tech bros and a lot of Republicans were all scoffing at that and then you see At the inauguration the richest people in the world who are all tech bros who are right there in front which maybe gives you The sense that they but you think about it And anybody jump in here, but you think about that used to be advantage Democrats, right? Barack Obama was thought of as the Facebook election and that he used that so effectively, and now it seems to have flipped. Anybody want to weigh in on the biggest issue

of our time? Well, I know. He likes to call himself a great communicator. I work for the great communicator, Ronald Reagan. And I watched him when Trump wants to talk about how big he won this election by. He's the biggest victory in 50 years. He needs to remember Reagan, who won 49 states and 515 electoral votes. And he, I used to brief him once a month when I was congressional committee national campaign director. And I grew up with a speech impediment.

And I walked in every month, I did it for two years, and I had 30 minutes. And I was scared to death. My speech impediment, and I was only 30 something, and he would take five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and talk to me, tell jokes, and he had a sense of telling when I had calmed down, and then he said, okay, what do you have to tell me?

And he never once said, this is a waste of my time, cut it to 15 minutes or 10 minutes. But I saw that as the sign of the man who truly had compassion, who truly understood people. Many of you may have disagreed with the policies that he had, but he understood people and he played to that. But would he even have a home in the current Republican Party? I mean, that was a different area and a different media universe. He does because I'm still in the Republican. It's the result of everything that has happened since the 90s.

Right. Starting with Gingrich and... The party is driven by the extremes. Both parties. But to his point, question, which is a good question, anybody want to jump in on this in terms of winning over social media, which is the main way that everybody is experiencing information these days? There is no everybody is experiencing information these days. There is no media literacy of students these days.

I mean, they don't understand the difference between what's getting shown up in their feed and, you know, an opinion column in the newspaper, right? Like, it's just all there, and they don't understand how to check sources. I mean, on social media, there is no editor, right? Everything is getting through and there's no time to check and see where that come from. You know? And they see it and I mean, I'm the mother

of a 23 year old and look, I see it with her. She'll send me stuff, where did you hear about this? Oh, I just saw it on social media. That's the answer, right? That's about this? I just thought on social media. That's the answer Right, right. That's the answer. I saw it on social media. Well, where is it from on social media? Oh Let me look here. Oh, it's a the MAGA something site Well, let's figure out where that's coming from right and so we are just not doing a good enough job in teaching our young people how to look at sources, how to figure out, cut through all of the garbage that they're getting.

It's an addictive problem too, just sitting there scrolling. That's a problem on the parents, not on our society. I have a 15-year-old. It can be both, right? It can be both. And my 15-year-old's response to me the day after the election is, that's all right, it's only four more years. But that's a pretty informed statement.

I don't know. It seems to me that we might want to have some media literacy classes. Yes. It might be just as important as physics or chemistry or all the rest of it. I literally think. I need to know calculus all the time, but media literacy is something everybody needs. But that's my take. All right.

Other questions? And we could spend an hour just doing that question. But yes, yes, ma'am. My name is Sandy. Hi, Sandy. Lifelong Democrat. Regarding the extremes, controlling the parties, and the primary being the problem. Last time I was here, I think you were here at that event,

there was someone speaking about reforming primaries. Do you remember him? Nick something? Yeah. So what about reforming the primaries and the thing I know the most about is ranked choice voting? What about that? I think there's some experiments going on that. Again, the real issue is there's other things aggravating it. Super PACs are aggravating it because they think their only job is to run negative campaigns directed at those primary voters. The party having less money today than more because they took it away from them under the auspices

of cleaning up dark money and in fact they created a worse avenue for dark money. And so you know I remember back in you know the late 80s early 90s our strategy was always to look from the very beginning of the campaign not the primary separately than general election but where do we need to be to get 50 percent plus one of the vote. Not in the primary but in the general election. Now that question doesn't even come up until after the primaries over.

We've got open primaries here in California, which is not true in every state. I'm curious, Jessica, your thoughts on this. Yeah. How it works. So basically, the only primary that's closed is the presidential primary. That is only open to Republicans. Democrats open up their primary to everybody, but every other primary is open to what's called a top two system where anybody, whether you're Republican or Democrat, can vote for

anybody in the top two advance. Could be Democrat, Republican, could be Republican, Republican, Democrat, Republican. How do you think it's working? Not great. I mean, the thought behind it when Prop 14 was passed was to get to your point or to your point more centrist candidates. And you're not changing the electorate though. It's the same people voting in the primaries.

So you're still getting the extremes usually of both party, which you end up sometimes is in an incredibly deep blue district or an incredibly deep red district, you will get two candidates of the same party. So sometimes you'll get a moderate Democrat and then they go through TSA and go up to Sacramento and they vote with the party line on everything and really nothing gets solved anyway. But if you ask about the rank order voting, which Alaska went to, the interesting thing about that process

is that when you had a bunch of candidates running and knowing the top two are gonna run against each other, what it did take away from is negative campaigning as much, because they didn't wanna be negative campaigning. You have to be liked in order to get... You have to be liked to get... Liked and you wanted to make sure that you weren't running a negative campaign against someone you may need their votes if they get knocked out, not being the top two.

And ranked choice for people that might not know is that you rank your choice. So instead of just voting for Chris, you say, I like Chris the best, but I like Jessica second best and I like Betsy third best, you know, and then people are eliminated. And instead of having as many rats, it all gets figured out somehow. There's a great documentary that's out. I saw a couple of months ago called Majority Rules about ranked choice voting in Alaska. If anybody wants to check it out. It's well done.

Any of the students have a question? I want to give you guys first. Yes, please tell us your name. My name is Lawrence. I'm currently a senior studying international relations. I just want to first push back on the notion that sort of like Generation Z and the users are uninformed. Now, certainly there are, I've seen some of my peers that are less informed. I think there's certainly some truth in the idea that there probably could be a little more media literacy for my generation, but at least from my personal experience, I think

it's less of Generation Z and the young people being less informed and more the idea that we've lost trust in our legacy media and our main institutions, right? Whether it be, right, the mainstream media, ABC, NBC, CBS. It feels like some of my peers and honestly me too, I feel like we we have lost the trust. We have lost trust in our in in the we've sort of lost we've lost the belief that our institutions can will actually speak up for us and do what is do what is right and so we're starting to gravitate towards social media and alternative outlets, bloggers, podcasts,

podcasters, etcetera which Trump used. Right. used to great extent to win the votes of young straight males who have lost, who have sort of felt disillusioned and left out of the Democratic Party and the liberal gen Z, quote unquote, mainstream. So with that being said, how will legacy institutions and for those of you on stage, how will your respective stakeholders and organizations that you represent, I guess, try and reach out to Generation Z? Because right on the know, many young people, especially here at USC, we've had big pro-Palestinian protests, a lot of anger against the Democratic Party for not being more pro-Palestinian.

Meanwhile, I've had many young males, young male friends who are disillusioned by the Democratic Party. They were cheering when Trump won. They're like, right, masculinity is back. And yeah. So I want to answer your question, but I'm going to ask you a question before. Where do you get your news?

I get my news from, I still watch a lot of legacy media. I'm a big fan of Politico just because. Shout out to their graphics team. They do a good job. And what would, for you, what would make you trust legacy media more? I think if legacy media really started not just focusing on the main headline, the main issues in America, but also delve like investigate investigative piece of reporting on you know perhaps different scandals and different different different

really just poking at the deeper problems that oftentimes people just want to dance or dance around or use like vague political term. Would you be willing to pay for that? Yeah. Oh yeah. That's it. I pay for the LA Times. I pay for Wall Street Journal. Way to go. Okay. Because that's part of the issue. Okay, thank you. Well, Chris, as the Politico guy. Yeah, I was going to say, I do think that there's, obviously you have to, you know, if you believe in these things, obviously you have to sort of tell people why these various institutions are important and what they actually mean. So

it gets back to your literacy piece. But I also think from the perspective of media, I've seen this just huge backlash. This might be COVID, this might be everything since. But there's a real distrust not just of these institutions, but the quote unquote experts. I think young people in particular, they're like, what does this person really know? Are they really the expert? They're saying this thing now and there's so much stock being put in what these experts are saying at any given time.

They're seeing some of that, not all of it, some of it clearly proven wrong in a barely short period of time. And that I think is undermining a lot of the trust they have in its backfiring on the press that is laying so much on these folks who are seen as the authority. So how do you think about it from a business strategy, you're helping to run Politico's business strategy in attracting him and the other people back here and getting them to buy your product? I mean, I think we, not to sound too much like a a homer here but I think

we do do a lot of that type of reporting we have the you know day-to-day political reporting we have very deep policy reporting that relies on really what's going on really tries to incorporate who's on all sides of these things how they're taking it on. And so I mean there is a lot of, you have to sort through, of course you always have. There is a lot of good stuff out there and I think, I guess the messages for outside of our own outlet, if you do see things that you think are effective, outlets that you think are doing it well, you have to pay for it. I mean, that's the bottom line.

Investigative reporting is expensive and hard. And to my point, I'll speak on behalf of what I'm trying to do, is be aware that people may not come to you where you want them to come to you. You have to go where they are. So I spend a lot of time putting together Instagram reels and TikToks and other things and realizing that that can't just be a clip of the news, it's got to be its own thing. And you know, some people say I went on TMZ yesterday, like there's different places where you can communicate with different people. And I think the legacy media needs to get

out of the headspace of let's do everything like it's 1985 and start communicating to people like it's 2025 and go to people and also be more conversational to that point about experts. I don't think people want to be lectured at. They want to have a conversation with people. They want to learn. They want to be included. And so that old school model, I think just doesn't work anymore.

Ed, I know you had your hand up. I think that might be the last. I think just doesn't work anymore. Ed, I know you had your hand up. That might be the last word. The lack of trust is something I made a point of earlier. They all have it. And I wrote a book with Linda Lake, a Democrat pollster, called A Question of Respect. And we had been asking a survey question about our youth on do you believe that our youth may be the future on a more civil future. And the numbers were over 50%. And not only were youth very strong on that, seniors were very strong on that. Millennials were upside down negative.

And so you have a generation right above you that is fueling some of that negativism that is there. The disappointing thing we had in the book is when we finally got to the last chapter on hope and we did interviews with young people, whether they were college-educated, not college-educated by gender, by race, they all said the same thing. I will respect others if they respect me first. And we're living in a society today that no one respects anyone else Yeah, and so they are not being fed that the finally conclusion we came to is we needed people like for me a Ronald Reagan

Or a John McCain who showed me real respect for others We don't have that today our politicians aren't showing that for each other. So who's going to lead our young people to be in the right position of civility, of respect, and dealing with issues in a respectful way where we do find common ground so we can actually get some solutions for our problems in this country? And we'll end on that because what the USC Center for the Political Future is all about is what you're talking about is this idea of being here and the fact that you all are here supporting

a civil discussion learning from people of different parties. We need more of this. So thank you all for being here. Thank you for listening to us. We look forward to talking to you more at lunch. 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. out.