Can Democrats Lose the Downer Image? + Chris Murphy in Conversation (Crooked Con)

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Hi, everybody. Wow. I'm John Lennett. We're live at CricketCon. Yeah. He's got people. Everybody here has got people everywhere, even. We're in the Reagan building, baby, I've co-opted your ass. Can't lose control just yet. In his 1992 convention speech, Bill Clinton, who is perfect. A set of Republicans who were at the time angry about Murphy Brown being a single mom on television, if other politicians make you feel like you are not part of their family, come on and be part of ours. Republicans were the hall monitors. We were welcoming. Three decades later, Trump found an audience among pretty apolitical comedians and media personalities and their fans. You see Democrats as pious and scolding. The Democratic Party is widely reviled. A broad survey of working class voters described Democrats as, quote, woke weekend out of touch. Coming out of Tuesday, which was awesome. Semaphores... Woke Sharia. What? Yeah. Woke Sharia, baby. We're all living in Zohran Mamdani Stan now. Semaphores Dave Weigel put it best in summarizing the exit polls. What do you think of the Democrats? They stink. Who did you vote for as many Democrats as possible? So where do we go from here? Joining me, our streamer and political commentator, Hasan Piker. MS. Now, Simone Bernie Sanders. The Bull Works Tim Miller. And the co-host of the five. Foxy's Jessica Tarla. Tim, I want to start with you, and I want to just concede that this is like a big topic, and it can be hard to tease out style from substance, strategy, ideology. But I want to start with that 2024 dynamic. You have Trump and his allies on Rogan and a whole bunch of apolitical shows in media. In hindsight, Democrats say, oh, we need Democrats that can go everywhere. They have to go everywhere just like Trump did. But then we look around and we say, well, who are the Democrats that can do that? And as a former Republican, as a pilgrim in an unholy land, who's gone from viewing Democrats being annoying as an asset to a liability, where is your head at? Well, I was happy about the woke sharia in New York, but you do have to remember that the CIA has taken over in Virginia across the river. So the deep state establishment is also on the rise. Big tent, big tent. Big tent. You know what, love it. You guys are kind of annoying, and it is something that we're dealing with. And I think that it's important to just accept it and think about it. And the fundamental question that you got to, which was, Okay, well we need a Rogan Barone or we got to be able to go hang out with these you know folks We got to be appealing more to the comedian set and then it's like well, who would go on the podcast and then it's like well Are you available? Like the list is kind of short right and so you know we can't create people from scratch, but I think that it's important You know when I look back at the mistakes the Democrats made that got us to this place. It's like in

Like, Biden wins in 20 when everybody's inside, right? So you didn't have to be out there. And then in 22, it's like, well, we didn't have a red wave. So it's like, things are going pretty well, right? And so I just think that there was a lot of just inertia and status quo happening. And a lot of the problems that were undergirding that, a lot of things people were frustrated with about COVID or about... you know, the not as fun parts of woke sharia, right? Like, there wasn't a lot of reflection on that, and I think that it's good to reflect on it now, and I think that Tuesday was awesome, but just because we did really well on Tuesday, because Trump is fucking everything up, does not mean that we shouldn't also, like, think about how we can continue to kind of expand out and appeal to more people. Simone. It seems like Democrats are often in a trap, which is Trump or one of his acolytes does something genuinely offensive, whether it's attacking or undermining a democratic institution or going after a vulnerable group of people. And Democrats want to defend those people, right? But then at times, sometimes they seem like they're writing their own version of the Federalist papers. Or they are doing what is then described as identity politics. And so how do you fight back against Trump when he's attacking people, when he's making an issue of marginalized groups without then being seen by a broader group of being focused less on, say, the economy? How do you square that circle? Well, you know, I'm from North Omaha, Nebraska. Shout out to the Midwest people in the room. Yes, there are black people. There are black people in Nebraska all over this country. Maybe not North Dakota. And so I say that because earlier this summer, a black man, who is a Democrat, unseated, a three-term Republican mayor in Omaha, Nebraska. And we can clap for that. His name is John Ewing. And John Ewing, I grew up knowing John Ewing. I know him very well. But in that race, like in many other races across this country that have happened since 2024, one of the issues that the Republican candidate tried to... you know, pull to the forefront, where our bathrooms and trans issues. And you know what John Ewing's answer was? Well, first of all, he had an answer. He put up an ad to answer the attacks, which I think is really important. You cannot let attacks go. You cannot allow your opponent as a former strategist. You cannot have your opponent defining you and you not answering. So that's part of it. I think. Specifically coming out of 2024, a lot of candidates did not answer the attacks. And some people were just like, oh, no, no, that's not me. And it's like, well, who are you? But John Ewing put up ads and went out there and did speeches and was on the streets talking to folks doing interviews and whatnot and campaigning and saying, she's doing this because she don't want to talk about the potholes. She doesn't want to talk about the issues that are affecting you. She's going to make up this issue that... I'm not talking about. She doesn't want to talk about the potholes. And so I think the answer is not to run away from the confrontation. Like, you're not about to make me, as I used to always tell candidates, don't allow these folks anybody, any of your opponents, to make you believe that you're for an issue that you've never taken up.

I don't know what the hesitancy is from some of the campaigns and the strategists over the last, you know, couple of cycles to just not be clear about what folks are for and what they're not for. Because in 2024, that they, them, ad was seen everywhere. And black people in Philadelphia told me the organizers in Philadelphia said that everybody had saw that ad. And there was no counter, and they believed it. So I do think that... I don't think Democrats need to do a wholesale. Like, you need a full brand rebrand because I think, frankly, the Democratic Party brand, it might never be popular. But what may be, and that's okay, because what you need are candidates who people like and they want to vote for and who they believe in. And if the brand is popular or not, I'm not, I think the Democrats need to be less concerned about rehabilitating the brand of the Democratic Party apparatus and more concerned about running candidates that are close to the issues in the districts and places that they're trying to win.

Tim, Tim, don't agree. I know. I mean, the brand is... The brand is... The brand is... I agree with that. The brand is poop. The brand is boned. The brand is boned. So to me, that says people are willing to support candidates even if they think your brand is shitty. Well, I think that... I don't know. I think it's an important part of what I think the dynamic we see, right? Which is, you know, there's just a... report that came out that said, or here's a set of policies that are broadly popular that the Democrats should embrace going into the midterms, and they're pretty moderate and sort of... Oh, a bunch of these people that lost some races and hadn't one recently put this report out? It was shocking. I, for one, was shocked when I saw that report. I was like, wow, so do the exact same thing that the Democrats have been doing that caused them a sequence of failures? That's good. I like that. I knew there was no way. Moderate enough. That was what the issue was. There was no way I was going to get to the end of that sentence. I don't even know why I considered starting it. But taken. But when I hear what you're saying there, when I see a report like that, I see a group of people struggling against a brand that is in the toilet and a bunch of people trying to win despite that, which is another way of saying we're in a ravine. Let's find the highest spot we can here in this trench that we're stuck in. But there's... The reason I think this question is important, even if you're right, like people win despite disliking the Democratic Party. People hate Congress like their congressperson. I do think it's worth asking to what it is like to imagine a world in which Democrats are broadly popular. So. How many gummies you take before coming out here? So which brings me to Jessica. So I'll reveal something to all of you. which is John Tommy and I share in office perfectly. And we often, if not more often than not now, switch over to Fox News during the day. And we do because we want to see what's happening over there. But also, it's entertaining. It is. They're having fun over there. True story. And Jessica, I want you to talk about... like what it is like to be in that environment. Because part of what is so fun is there just collective appreciation and shared view of Democrats, which is that they're kind of feckless and funny and ridiculous. They definitely enjoy that part of it. And I'm so glad that this conference is this week and not last week because we'd all just be sitting around crying and looking at that memo and saying, well, you know, this is 57% popular. So I think we should go with that. But now we have some wins and we have this diverse set of wins. So I have had a way better couple of days. They've been almost circumspect. Oh, yeah. I mean, sometimes. They got a little rowdy too. But, you know, you can't. dispute results like that. You can't dispute a Zohran Mamdani win and a Abigail Spanberger win and whatever happened in the Mississippi State House. And I'm obsessed with whatever a public commissioner is in Georgia. I still don't know. When nobody shows up to vote, we win. Yeah. It's important. Remember. But the joy is important to the formula that makes

Fox so appealing as a set of programs to watch. And I think about it in context of the Joy campaign of 2024 that was not, right? We were being told all the time, like, you're having so much fun. Like, Brat Summer feels great. And I did feel great at the DNC because I thought that was the moment of like maybe we have a chance. But it was fleeting. And... It's always on our side, I think, since the 2016 election, it feels like it's forced upon us versus it's coming from within. There may be individual candidates that we're into. I've gotten super excited about people, you know, down ballot all over the place, or, you know, I love Ruben Gallego. Like, that's always fun for me to talk about. But because we have this... kind of uniform policy of stay in line, it's joyless because you can't feel free to criticize somebody that you disagree with or, you know, you're going to get scolded by this person and that person. And the Republicans, generally speaking, live free of that amongst themselves. I mean, criticizing Trump is a whole other thing. But they go about their business in a way that we don't and that I think that we're adapting to in, at least based on these election results. And Fox captures that, that there are people who have kind of like a shared core set of values maybe, but they're not taking themselves that seriously. They're not scolding each other. Like, It also matters and the quality of the programming. It looks great. Our graphics are beautiful. Our lighting is fantastic. Are you making a face? Look, I'm your Fedellian. I'm your biggest diehard fan, okay? But no, I don't think the Fox News graphics are beautiful. Look, I respect what you do, especially because, like, if I had to sit next to Jesse Waters and Greg Butfeld the entire time, I would kill myself. And the fact that you have been able to successfully sit in that room every day and just white knuckle through Jesse Waters' snide-ass remarks. is impressive. It is. Concur. Thank you. And it is nice to be amongst my people, which I'm usually not, like, cautiously weaving through here. But my point in bringing it up, and you don't have to love our graphics, even though they're copied in every movie and things like that. It's like the official look of it. But... But even when... The PR people love Jessica. She is a favorite of the Fox PR folks. But nothing has taken that seriously.

And that's not the case in liberal media. And that doesn't mean you're not talking about serious things, but there's this feeling like it is not the end of the world in every topic that you're discussing. And this idea that we can just go and show up in conservative spaces or, you know, come for an hour and you have to be open to those kinds of things, like doesn't capture how hard it is for people. who vote like me and some of the things that I think, to genuinely form bonds and interact on an ongoing basis with people who you disagree with. An hour, two hours, three hours is not getting to know the other side. living amongst them and spending time with them is. And I think that's why I'm able to do my job and have a reasonable therapy bill, like not insane, but we know each other like the family that it looks like, which is dysfunctional, but it's still a family. And people who watch the show, and we have 20% Democratic viewership, like, still get that. I'm sorry. It's not maybe not the answer you guys wanted. You're not getting a lot of claps because you're defending Fox News in this room. Let me speak. I want to talk to Hassan about what you just said. But before, I heard something from the crowd, and I think it reflects what they're feeling, which is, well, they're not taking it seriously because these are people that are not appreciating the consequences or arguing or telling themselves the story about the consequences. And I know you know that. But that's a challenge for the left. I think sometimes we are seen as upset or scolding because we're motivated by like a deep set of values. And when you watch Fox, there's a frivolousness to it. But maybe that's a kind of carelessness about what's happening to the country. I totally agree with you about certain issues. Absolutely. And I make that very clear and they can make fun of me or whatever. But elections have consequences. And we saw on Tuesday night that the American public sees through it. That's the point. People get all hot and bothered about how conservatives are reacting to certain things and that they're being dismissive. But they are the ones that think the American public is stupid. And we're the ones who know that they can see what's going on. So whether you get 90 seconds of talk time or you get to talk for hours a day on your podcasts or on your live street, all the things for us on. They're the ones that are doubting people's capacity to understand. And so I get what you're saying and I feel it. And sometimes I don't like being made fun of sometimes for being upset about American citizens taken into iced detention and not getting to call their loved ones. But Tuesday night, people showed up all over the country and said, fuck off. That is unacceptable. Pass on. I got a pause.

Hassan hasn't gone 17 minutes without talking since 2014. It's dying right now. The stage is vibrating, and I'm sorry it took this long to get to the fact that what we saw in New York on Tuesday in many ways feels like an antidote to some of this problem. You know, Zohran Mamdani is having fun out there. And... He's also representing an incredibly enthusiastic base of people who are finding community in being part of politics. And that does seem like something now that is... more easily formed on the left. I can think of all the candidates and campaigns that have been left driven that have built that energy and enthusiasm and sense of fun. Brad Summer was an exception. There was a moment where, look, we can all look back and be like, I knew, I was full, I went full breath. I mean, I was there. We were, yeah. No, and as someone who was there to DNC before I got kicked down, but on the last day, I actually found myself feeling a sense of anxiety. over the course of every single day that passed where I was like, why is everybody just like celebrating like we're at the end zone here when it is not a guarantee that Kamala Harris is going to win? And I kept warning over and over again that there were a lot of unaddressed issues that the Democrats just kind of. never wanted to acknowledge at all. Can we not just be excited? We had somebody who could talk, though? Could we just have had one week? We were excited for a week because she could talk. No, I, I, but that was great. So I just give us a break. No, but the, the excitement that came into the DNC was actually because for, for some reason, right? And the reason is because people finally realize Joe Biden was, you know, his brain was leaking out of his ear. I'm sorry. And, and. For that reason, I know there's probably a lot of Democratic Party stavvers in here, they're going to get really pissed off for me for saying this, but... It almost felt like we had a competent party for once, and they were responsive to the people's needs. And that's the reason why everyone was excited. I was excited. When I saw Kamala Harris choose Tim Walz, when she could have just as easily gone with Josh Shapiro, for example, I was like, oh my God, is this happening? Is there like an actual progressive momentum backing this candidacy, backing this campaign? And then they backpocketed him. And Kamala Harris went from saying that she was going to do Price controls, and she actually very decently messaged around that by saying, we're just going to go after price gougers, right, at the grocery store, which was her most popular policy at the time and directly addressed one of the main economic anxieties that people were experiencing. And then, lo and behold, her brother-in-law, who's head of legal at Uber, came on and was like, cut this economic populism shit out. And then you had...

$50,000 in tax credits for small business owners. And that was not addressing the problems that people were experiencing. And I think that we have to do the honest autopsy of this campaign and realize that... Maybe people were excited for the progressive momentum that they perceived the campaign actually was going to have and the responsiveness that the party finally had to the people's desires, to the base of voters' desires. But then they kind of just threw that into the wind and just kept pumping Liz Cheney and refused to talk about. Sorry for wanting to help. For Liz Cheney. Can I just do one thing on the honest autopsy, though? Actually, we can find some common ground on the economic populist stuff. I think that commonwealth should have probably, in retrospect, obviously, had a more tangible message on economic populism. My problem with the Walls thing, though, is that that relates to the topic of this panel, is that I think if we're having an honest autopsy and looking back at the campaign, there were a lot of... liberals that live on the coast that were like, whoa, this dude can change a carburetor and I can put on a camo hat. Like, he's going to really, that guy is really going to connect with rural America because he seems like a guy that really connects with rural America. And people who like... grew up in rural America or who lived in red spaces are like, no, like that is the guy who was the P-flag teacher at the rural high school. And by the way, being the P-flag sponsor at a rural high school is awesome. That's a great thing to be. Everybody loves that. That's great. But like everybody who's from that world did not look at him and say, you code conservative. They're like, you have conservative values like me. They coded him and it's like, oh, you're the nice liberal at the school. Right. And so I think that if we're going to have an honest reflection on the last campaign, The economic populism stuff was a miss too, was a miss for sure. But being seen as being to the cultural left and being out of step with the country culturally on a wide variety of issues, whether it be social issues or COVID or free speech or just being able to chill on comedians podcasts, like that was a miss. And people misunderstood what Tim Walz was bringing to the table because he was not able to do any of that. Yeah, I think the cultural stuff is only relevant. if that is ostensibly the only thing that you're bringing the table. And unfortunately for the Democratic Party, I mean, these used to be wedge issues for a reason, right? These were concocted in think tanks with the deliberate design to make it seem as though there was some significant disagreements between the two parties. And they were created to make the Republicans more popular so that people would focus on whatever, you know... the family foundation decided was a more successful way to present anti-trans narratives after focus group, focus testing their message. And when people are focusing on that, they're always going to go, okay, well, the Democrats are silly. Why do they care about this? This is like a tiny sliver of the population. Instead,

They should, like every moment that they're talking about that is a moment where they're not talking about like affordability, where they're not talking about like a working class centered party. Where are the Democrats that ran on trans issues? Show them to me, people. Where are they? Exactly. No, I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree with you. It was a Republican. But you, you actually brought that up and I 100% agree with you. Okay, good. Sorry I jumped at my seat. No, I 100% agree with you because you said the potholes, right? Yeah. Like. If you're talking about the potholes and your opponent is constantly being like, well, what about trans people? Then they look insincere and they look silly. And there is no reason to betray marginalized groups and decide that we're going to actively write them out of the equation because they're working class as well. And this is something that I have never compromised on, and yet seemingly I've been able to find a very populist and robust movement in my own audience. that does not compromise on these issues, but also is always in the affirmative making the argument that we have to focus on kitchen table issues, if you want to use that kind of language around it, but like center the working class and try to seek out what their problems are, address them, and also make this earnest attempt and show that we are honest about actually fighting for them. And I think Zohran Mamdani's campaign in its success, was a fantastic example of this. I know people say it's in New York, but that's precisely what he did. Five key issues. He went out. He asked people, what's your problem? I'm going to solve it. And he centered his campaign around five key issues of affordability in New York. And lo and behold, in spite of 22 billionaires spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to take them out, in spite of a very hostile media environment, especially leading up to the primary or certainly after the primary. They janeflected a little bit by the end. But, and all of these attack ads, he still won. This episode is brought to you by Zbiotics pre-alcohol when you're raising a glass to your team winning. Catching up with your old buddies back in town. We're just trying to stay sane with a house full of relatives. How you feel the next morning still matters. That's why I drink pre-alcohol. Debiotics, pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's a build-up of this byproduct, not dehydration. That's to blame for rough days after drinking. Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre-alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. I got to say, it's almost holiday season, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Hanukkah, all the above. Now is a great time to load up on Zbiotics. I got to tell you, I don't have a drink without Zbiotics. If you guys don't believe us, just try it one time. By one pack, try it. It was a game changer for me. We've got to make sure it's actually at CrookedCon. I got to make sure there's like CrookedCon, Zibiotics. I'm getting knots. I think that's going to happen.

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I think the answer is people need to run for the race that they're in. Okay, well, what does that mean? Does that mean when, because let's be very clear, Donald Trump and the Republicans, they aren't looking for a big tent. They're like, mass deportation, F you, look at my one good black person, shithole countries in Africa, all the brown people need to be deported. Women got blood coming down their eyes, but like, yay, we're going back to a meritocracy, and that means only white men. Like, what are, hold on, what? But they're with. But they were winning. And so they didn't win because they opened up the aperture and let people do what they need to do. They won because they tripled down on what they believe. I'm sorry. That's just not right. That's just not. I'm sorry. That sounds good. And I like it. I want it to be right. It's just not right. They didn't win because they tripled down on what they believe. No, they did triple down what they believe. Yeah. It was dip. It was populism, but it was a, it was a. Populism is a thin ideology mixed with a thick ideology, according to Cass Mudd. His populism had a lot of things in. It was an economic populace, but populism had a little white supremacy in it, a little racism. Like Bernie Sanders is a populist in a different way than Donald Trump. Yeah, this here's the thing. So I don't understand. Here's the thing, though. Can I just say really quick, though? Here's the thing. Like, yeah, he doubled down on a bunch of terrible shit that they believe that's extreme. No doubt. No doubt. He also was seen as left of Kamala Harris on foreign policy. He was seen as an anti-war candidate. He was seen as anti the Republican establishment of war. He cut to the middle on that. He lied about that for sure. He's a liar. He lied. But then maybe our guys should lie about some things that are popular too. Okay, okay. Now you sound like me during the campaign where I was like, what the fuck are you guys doing when you're not like addressing this stuff where Donald Trump can present himself as the peace candidate? That was insane to me. me. But obviously, sending Bill Clinton to Dearborn to talk about Judea and Samaria, as most people were seeing... All right. We agree. Bill Clinton should have been on the sidelines. I want to bring us back. That's not pretend like they didn't moderate on things. It's all I'm saying. I'm having so much fun. No, no, I'm sorry. You cannot have a convention where you have some... that say mass deportation now. I'm not saying he was in a moderate. I'm saying he moderated on things. Ethnocentric nationalist version of this country and say that he moderated. What he did is say, people in Gaza, you should vote for me because Joe Biden ain't do away what you won't. That's not a moderation. He had good rhetoric, but his policy was consistent. And the vice president on that debate stage said all of the things that he... was saying that he would do, and he has outdone them. He said he was going to send the military into the streets. He was saying it on the campaign. That's not moderation. That's fascism. I agree. He said he was going to deport all of these people in this country. That is what he said that it's not just the criminals. He's coming for anybody that is in this country who was undocumented. So I just, I can't, I can't get with the, well, Donald Trump didn't moderate a bit. No, they tripled down on the bad stuff. and had nice graphics and good and smiled through it. So can I? I want to bring us back. Simone is. All right. Hassan quick and then I want to bring us back. Simone is absolutely right. 100%. And these were things that I was screaming about nonstop. You said you agreed with me that he ran to the left of Kamala Harris on foreign policy. On foreign policy. That's moderating. He moderated on. He didn't run on the unpopular Republican views on foreign policy.

He ran to the left on forum policy only because the Democrats came out and said, I'm going to have the most lethal military. Because unfortunately, and I mean this sincerely, I don't think the Democrats actually... saw the threat of Donald Trump as a significant enough threat because if they were, they would have locked in and had better messaging overall and tried to at least establish a base of support with counter narrative, with counter messaging leading up to the election, not in the aftermath or not during the election, but leading up to the election because Republicans, they... act as though there is an election every single day. They are constantly on message. They're constantly creating an alternative reality with lies, saying that undocumented migrants are actually responsible for a metric ton of the crimes that are taking place in American cities. When that is an abject lie, okay? And when I talk to congresspersons, whether it be at the DNC or even before or even after, and I tell them, why the fuck aren't you guys counter messaging against this? We are a nation of immigrants. America is the most diverse nation on the fucking planet. It is literally the reason. why we are such a domineering force beyond all these other, beyond all the other, you know, violent reasons. But, like, that is what, that is one of the most redeemable aspects of America that I personally love, that the Democrats completely dropped because they were scared. They saw that one poll from the Pew Center of Research. That said, that said. that 66% of Americans want mass deportations. That exact same poll also showed that if given two options, mass deportation and mass amnesty, that the majority always chose mass amnesty. So why is that never communicated? Because Americans, sure, the median voter trying to understand where the median voter is coming from is impossible, okay? You will kill yourself if you try to understand what these people are thinking. You just lost me, Hassan. I was with you halfway through that, but you lost me. But I'm with- No, but what I'm trying to say is this, okay? There are Trump, there are- There are- He's doing great. I want to hear this point that I'm going to say that I promise. that have been deluded into thinking that Donald Trump represented a change, and obviously we saw that buyer's remorse this past Tuesday, right? Especially in Hispanic communities where they were like, oh, I can't believe that he is actually doing mass deportation. And it's, you know, we're in D.C. is a fairly liberal crowd, and we laugh at those people. But, like, I talk to those people every day, and there were people. that genuinely thought, they genuinely believed that Donald Trump was actually excising the violent criminals. And the only reason why people are led to believe this lie, aside from the faucet of misinformation that comes from independent outlets on the right and also Fox News as well, is because there is no robust response from the Democratic Party that says, that's a fucking lie. That's a lie.

Undocumented migrants in this country are responsible for a lower rate of per capita crime than natural born U.S. citizens are. If you pair that up with documented migrants, it's negligible. It is marginal, and they're hyper-focusing on it, specifically because this is a vulnerable population that is easy to target and it's easy to ridicule, and there is not enough of a robust defense mechanism out there. And that's the reason why people end up believing this bullshit, and then they get shocked when it's actually implemented. So I think that's a good point. And I... And I think I sort of agree with Tim and with Simone about this. Impossible. It's a song. Fundamental rift. Because one of Trump's gifts, one of Trump's gifts is he is, I think he convinced a lot of people he was going to go after criminals, but he also said at the convention that they were going to do mass deportations. And I think how to bring it back is that is possible because of a big void. So Trump can do a lot. Trump has room to operate, to maneuver. Why? Because he has built an authentic connection with millions of people who believe him, who have his back, who think, yeah, he'll compromise. It is inconceivable that Kamala Harris would appoint Mike Pence to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Inconceivable, we wouldn't live in that world. But Trump can appoint a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the health department. Why? Because he has built such a credible, loyal following. that he, because of the authentic way in which you don't agree with that. Colts, no, it was just cults, cults. Cult, well, you can, look, you can, yes, it is certainly become a cult, right? And then you look at our side. And you find the politicians that have that kind of authentic connection to the voters. You look at the list of leadership of the Democratic Party. How far down do you go before you have somebody that can fill an arena? You have to get to Bernie Sanders. You go to Barack Obama. You go to Zohran Mamdani. You go to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It is largely on the left. That is the truth of this moment, but it wasn't always true. Barack Obama didn't run from the left. He ran against Washington. Bill Clinton had that kind of momentum. He actually ran from the right. But right now, that energy and connection is coming from the left. And so Hassan lays out a group of policies that are from the left. Like, I'm not for socialized housing. I'm for building a ton of housing. Boo. That's okay. But it is a void that the left is currently filling that the leadership of the Democratic Party is not. How does Trump get away with all this stuff? How do we get to find as being anti-trans? The other day, Bernie Sanders was asked about the border, and he said, oh, country's got to have a border. And that pissed off some people on. Me too. It pissed off some people on the left. Did it piss off us on?

I mean, yeah, I disagree with Bernie Sanders' message around that because obviously, yes, nation states have well-defined borders of boundaries. But my point about it is he can say that with confidence because everyone knows what Bernie Sanders stands for. Yes. And so when he has asked about trans issues, when he has asked about... issues in which Democrats are not at 5545, but at 3070. Whatever it may be, he can either say, you know what, I don't care about that. I'm not talking about that. Or he can answer in a way that maybe riles some of the base, but you trust him. And that to me is the connection between honestly the kind of like what seems a bit frivolous like are we having fun and the actual hard work of politics like Zohran Mamdani you said was moderating in the last few weeks of the campaign i was glad to see that tim and i are both people that pushed him i almost got i am i am to the left came out against him and i was like okay we're in business now zee i mean he was the reason why Zohran Mamdani was moderating on i don't know what he was moderating on i guess like maybe you guys were talking about like the policing stuff even though it was now that the election is over we We can be honest about it. Zohran Mamdani did this brilliant thing that got liberals to basically come to terms with a lot of things that liberal media had considered radical, right? Because he had a way with, he had a really good way of communicating these things. Can you generously call that? He did a good job of listening, seeming curious, and being persuasive to bring more people into his. Sure. Yeah. But one of the things that he did, but he was still on compromising. Defund the police always was about making sure that the headcount either remains stable, but then we actually turned around and restructured some. Defund is a very tough. Now who's doing, now you're the PR guy. That's the most politically you've sounded. No, no, no. But the thing is, the thing is, it has a bad rap. No matter what you say or do. Democrats immediately attacked it. They said this is a danger, and it's partially because Americans really love police. It's unfortunate. I don't know how, because they don't do their fucking jobs ever, but, and I wish they would, because I'm not like, I'm not saying we can, we can live in it. Cheering for police never do their jobs ever? I want to be able to call the police. I just don't want him to think I'm a suspect when they show up. Exactly. Exactly. We want to talk. I die on nine. We want a presence of law and order. And unfortunately, in many communities, police's presence is lawlessness and disorder. Now, having said that, having said that, he wanted to not reduce the head count necessarily, but at least like... bring in social workers to take away some of the bandwidth, some of the workload from the police. And that was a message that resonated with even Tim Miller, it seems. He liked it. It was. You want defund the police now. No. I want to.

Can I just just really quick? Because I think, like, like, Simone, I'm like, you're talking, you're talking to? I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you say something like, dude, bro. But here's, I think, what Zohran Mamdani did well, that kind of combines part of what you're talking about with what maybe I think, I'm happy he didn't take your advice on part of his campaign. But what he did well to the, are we having fun fun yet? Zohran Mamdani was happy. He was having a good fucking time. He was a fun hang here on my pod. We had a great time. He had a couple specific things. He cooked them on globalized it into fodder. That wasn't his best answer. That wasn't his best answer. But we were vibing, though, and people listened to the pod liked it. He had four issues, like you mentioned. It's kind of hard to know what Kamala Harris's issues were. I think if you quizzed all of us on here, everybody would say different things. Everybody knew what Zohran Mamdani's issues were. That was good. Who's good on that? He could go on a pod with me or somebody else. He could have gone on Rogan for three hours and hung out and had a good time. So he could communicate. He's happy. He had three issues. Three or four issues. But he also just did. Like, making the practical decision to say he was going to keep the police chief rather than doubling down on the tweets that he sent in 2019 with smart practical politics. Like, you can do both. You can have clear left-wing policy issues that people understand. You can be positive and optimistic. And he can also be practical. He did all of that, like, quite well, actually. I'll give you, I agree with that. I think his messaging was good on that. And that's precisely what I was talking about. Like, for example, okay, especially. Not in like the broader population's understanding of this issue, but like in mainstream media and in American politics, there's a major... division between how the population is receiving what Israel is doing and how our politicians are responding to it, right? And how the media even responds to it. Anti-Zionism is like a scary term or a scary word for a lot of media professionals in a way that like being anti-Israel is not necessarily scary at all for the average person. As a matter of fact, they are very anti-Israel now and there's polling to reflect on that reality. Now, what Zohran Mamdani did so perfectly was to communicate his position in a way that liberals understand it. He turned around and said, yeah, Israel has a right to exist as a nation-state that has equal rights and representation for all people. That is identifying that Israel has a Jewish ethno-state project, right? That is identifying that Israel has an exterminationist policy on the Palestinians. incredibly repressive policies on the Palestinians. Does Qatar have a right to exist only if everybody has equal rights for all religions? Is that true for Qatar? I don't... Or just Israel? No, I don't care. I mean, yeah. Okay, no nation state has a right to exist, including Qatar. Like, I don't know why you're bringing up Qatar, like, as though I'm going to be like, oh my God, Qatar. Like, they pay me so much money. I just say, I don't know why that's the only country that doesn't have a right to exist unless they get equal rights for everybody. Because it's an ethno state, all of those countries in that region are an ethnic state. No, if you can...

ethno state, Jim Jordan's at that state, Saudis in ethos state. So I'm okay with all of these other countries being ethno states then, and you're not just using that as a deflective mechanism to move the attention away from Israel, a country that literally receives more aid and more political support than from the United States of America than anyone else. As a matter of fact, a lot of people actually get mad about Qatar because now the golf leaders have realized, oh, if we give this guy fucking jets, he's going to defend us too. We're oil barons. And that's the reason why it almost feels like people who defend Israel are jealous that like now other Gulf nations are trying to do like Israel style things over there. I love it. Please bring us back. Sorry. Anyway. I would say that. I would say this. I would say this. I don't moderate the message without compromise. I have disagreements with you on this, as you know. I will say that Zohran Mamdani had a challenge, right? And part of his challenge was reassuring a lot of Jewish New Yorkers that are deeply worried about some of his past comments and which he has, and he spent a lot of time trying to reassure those people, I think, because he recognized that there was a liability in some of the ways in which his previous statements and some of his positions were seen by a lot of New Yorkers, which is where more Jews on earth live than in any other place than in Israel. True. And he sought to address it. Now, without getting into the details of where we... I think he had to do that because he's Muslim. I'm going to be honest. I think it was racism. Straight up. He had never said a single thing that was even remotely anti-Semitic, and yet the media constantly kept needling him on that. Let... I don't agree with that. And I don't agree with that because it's honestly impossible to know because it's overdetermined, right? Do I think there's anti, that there is Islamophobia and the reaction to Zohran Mamdani? Of course there is. So I think there's genuine concerns about some of the things he said, of course there is. Can you tell me what? Hold on, you can't tease it out. What was concerned? Well, he got a Lex. So does that argument really matter? He is now the Merlex of York City. So whatever he did work. So the reason I don't want to stay on it is because I think there's a lot we can say about it. But what I'm trying to say is. He had people that were really glad to see someone who had taken his views run for mayor and succeed. He also had people he needed to reassure who had disagreement, but he recognized that he was in coalition with a lot of people who had different views, including he was asked about Abigail Spanberger, and he was asked about Mikie Sherrill, and he said that this is a party that has room for everybody, not just people who look like me. And I think that to me is what I... I hate Republicans. If you can unseated Republican, it's good. It's good in my book. That was my anger and resentment with like the way that the Democrats were representing themselves during the campaign where it kind of felt like they didn't hate Republicans too much. Whenever I hear Nancy Pelosi say, oh, we need a strong Republican Party. I'm like, no, we don't need a Republican Party. We want to run in this country in every seat and be so successful that you have a weak and feckless and ineffective Republican Party that cannot undermine the agenda that centers the working class.

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Talking about the overlap of the ways in which Zohran Mamdani built a big enthusiastic base of support, talking about the ways in which Democrats have a void of people not really knowing what they stand for, which lets them be buffeted by issues where they're kind of, whether it's trans issues or other kind of issues where they feel like they're on their heels and there's this debate about throwing people under the bus. What are the lessons that you think Democrats should be taking from the success on Tuesday? You know, Chuck Schumer was afraid to... So I... Yeah. So this is now going to be the third time Chuck Schumer has been booed at a Democratic event I've been at in 48 hours. And... All right. Are you ready? The former Republicans going to praise Chuck Schumer right now. The shutdown strategies worked pretty good. We're doing great on the shutdown. You're giving them a little clap. Shutdown strategy turned out to work pretty good. Everybody's like, oh, Chuck. Yeah, we had to drag him to finally do that. He had an opportunity to do it earlier. At least he's there. What is Jessica? Simone, you were going to leave the Democratic Party in March. Well, you know, about every six months, I got to do a gut check. Every member of the 92% that's how we sustain ourselves. It's like renewing your vows. Yeah, very much so. Very happy to be with my husband. So, Chuck Schumer is being afraid of Democrats being tied to Zohran Mamdani. He is less afraid, it seems to me, about the young people and people that support Zohran Mamdani not seeing Chuck Schumer on their side. And so, Jessica, how do Democrats... confidently assert that we are a big tent that includes everyone from Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger and Tim Miller and Hassan and Zohran Mamdani without dealing, without ignoring the genuine and real politics of moderates not wanting to be tagged as New York or San Francisco socialist, which is real and we can't ignore. Yeah, well, I think so. I just want to say since I've been looking and reading, are we having fun yet? The last 10 minutes were the opposite of fun. I think that, no, but it's important for our electoral strategy because that fight is the opposite of fun. It doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen, but when you are the party that is being represented by that kind of screaming back and forth versus saying the stuff that we agree upon, that we're like all of the candidates that won were affordability candidates. It sounded different out of Abigail Spanberger's mouth and what she was talking about than out of Zohran Mamdani's mouth. We all got to the place where they thought the Democrats want us to have more housing and more money in our pockets, and the Republicans have been dicking us over with their policies. And so that's where we have to be.

I was so excited by Zohran Mamdani's campaign in that it finally felt to me like there was some Obama energy back. And as an elder millennial who spends a lot of time with Gen Z's, I'm sad for them that they don't know what hope and change felt like. They don't know, you know, what it meant to watch him from the DNC convention through, you know, when he left. Tim's like, it was terrible. It was fun. He was good. I got some goosebumps every now and then. No, I hated a DNC for sure. Like, I'll stand on that. Yeah, but. People finding community, people combating loneliness, people having shared purpose, you know, getting outside, touching grass, all of that. That's what politics means to me. And you want a great policy agenda, of course, but you really want to feel common cause with people. And you can have disagreements about, you know, various issues. But that is the path forward for me. And that's not going to come from Chuck Schumer. I think Chuck Schumer is, you know, pass his sell-by date in terms of leading the party this way. But, you know, Chuck Schumer, I think that he was right to recruit Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown to be running for those Senate seats. And I hope that they're going to win. And I feel good about that. And I think that, you know, his Zohran Mamdani stuff is about... himself, and he's, you know, he voted in the election. He's a Jewish New Yorker in Brooklyn there. And Zohran Mamdani got 30% of the Jewish vote, which is very low. He has work to do with the community. I hope that he will do that work. But I don't think focusing on Chuck Schumer is the answer to it. It's the energy, and that there was energy across New Jersey, and there's energy in Virginia, and there's energy in New York. And that's the kind of organizing. It's not, you know, big. Democratic energy, it's individual candidates that have this affordability message and are communicating as a naval pilot, as a CIA officer, or a community organizer. And this can be for everybody. So Trump is also now giving us a pretty big opportunity. On the one hand, he's been going after comedians, and he's, you know, trying to get Kimmel canceled. He's angry about Seth Myers every other day. He's tearing down parts of the White House, which was a strange choice, which I tried to walk to see it, and they've built giant walls so that we don't see the construction site. And, you know, Trump is not doing as many rallies as he used to do. He's really kind of ensconced now in this, in Mar-a-Lago in the White House at his Great Gatsby parties. He's tweeting out photos of marble bathrooms.

Even some of his top staff now are living on military bases. They've isolated themselves in a lot of ways. Like, do we now have the opportunity to say, hey, they're the hall monitors and out of touch scolds? We're the ones that actually understand what's going on. Yeah. And is there a way, to me, like, is there a way to have a unifying agenda that does what Hassan is talking about? but is one that is appealing to maybe not every single most centrist Democrat, but a broad enough and big enough agenda that would unite that you would like and Tim would like and Jessica would like that we can get behind. I just think, I just come at this from, as a former strategy, I was a commonsperson for most of my career and I did campaigns from, say, legislative racist to judges' races to presidentials. Yes, I worked in the White House. I don't know if you'd agree with me here, Tim, but I think that the wrong, the answer is not. Okay, just these five things and then da-da-da-da. I think the answer is about the strategy. And the what things you put under your strategy depends on what candidate you are and where you are running. Because coming up in 2026, there are gubernatorial races. There are state legislative races. Like 2026 and frankly 2027 are really about 2028. and then 2030. And you have to win state legislative seats. You have to win the governor's races, but you also, you know, you should want to take back the House and the Senate. Okay, and how do you do that? It is not by saying, we only do these five things right here. No, it is about what is the strategy. And the strategy does have to be, touch grass, talk to people. What are the, under, you need to understand your constituents in your community. So whether it's Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, or Zohran Mamdani, the thing to Jessica's point that they all did. well as they understood what the people wanted. Affordability in Jersey and Virginia also meant energy. Energy prices are way up. One of the things that Mikie Sherrill said that people got behind is that she wanted to declare a state of emergency on energy on day one. And that is what she plans to do. I talked to a lot of, I talked to the folks whose job it was to go out there and organize African-American voters in New Jersey. And they said for the black voters in New Jersey that they talked to, that... For them, it was bigger than Mikie Sherrill. They were dealing with all of these issues that they listed that had to do with affordability and whatnot. And they felt like what was happening in the other states and places in this country, voting for Mikie Sherrill was going to keep that from happening because Jack Tritorelli was very much so aligned with Donald Trump. So I think that you have to just stay close to the issues and the races. But the answer is not the party apparatus says this is, the answer is not those posse papers that these people keep putting out. That's not the answer from my perspective because that's not how you win races by campaigning and you go out there and you talk to people and you earn their votes. You do not win a race by a policy paper. And I just think that there's all this focus on how can we align on these five issues and not a focus on what is our strategy? Is our strategy staying close to the people? It's why Democrats, the shutdown fight, they're...

It is terrible for people in this country who work in the federal government. That is absolutely terrible. What the Democrats are doing is... Well, it is at the end, at the end of the day, it's going to benefit all of those people because they are fighting, but they settled on a strategy. Isn't this a good example, though, this shutdown exactly what we're talking about, which is Democrats chose an issue. I was skeptical. I was skeptical. I was skeptical of every choice. To be honest, it was no, I didn't think there was a good option for Democrats, for not playing with the best hand. But we chose health care. We chose it. And we said, we're going to take this to its logical conclusion. And it's worked better than anyone, I think, really predicted. But can I just know? They didn't just choose health care. They chose a very specific thing that was happening in Congress that was tangible, that connected to people's everyday lives that they could see. And so when I say, we don't need to choose all the, like. That was a strategy. Exactly. No, I'm agreeing with you. I'm agreeing with you. Yeah, I just, we're getting, I think I was having fun, by the way. We could do a whole other hour. Yeah, and I think the disagreement is necessary. I also would say, I'm also like, you know, I'm pretty easy to please. I mean, like, Zon had me. Like, I don't know what more of you people want for me, you know? I voted for three straight Democratic presidents, and I was going to vote for Zohran Mamdani for mayor. So I'm pretty easy to please. So you can get me on board. Here's what you have to do. We go at this. Some specific things. Have some fucking balls. Like run a fucking campaign. Tell us what your campaign is about. don't be a fascist and be able to talk and be able to talk and be able to communicate to people and lift them up. And like it's, that seems like that isn't that hard, but it's kind of been for us for the last 10 years. But like that's how I would summarize. I do think so, you know, we're coming from behind in part because I think we've paid for having, like if you were someone coming up in politics and you see who the standard bears of our party have been for the last 10 years, you might not know exactly the Democrats used to be fun and cool. So we have one minute left. Hassan, final thought. Um, yeah, we got to get rid of the gerontocracy within the party. Down with the seniority structure that we have, we need, we need real whips in the party. This is something that I talk to you about. This is something that I talk to the podjohns about every single time. If you have people who don't want to play ball. I'm sorry, what kind of whips? Like, you know, I don't. I don't. Like whipping votes. I don't mean in the, unless, unless it's Joe Manchin, in which case, you know, maybe.

I'm kidding. Of course, I can't use spicy language here. But we need to make sure that we earn the trust of the working class back. And I think that they have been hyper-focused on culture-war narratives. And the only reason why they've been hyper-focused on culture-war narratives is because we have not done enough on the left flank to say, no, we are with you. We will fight for you. We're going to make sure that we solve your economic hardships. And Jessica, you're just going to go back in there and you're going to fight all these people and you're going to defeat them for us. Yeah, no. You got this girl. But agree with all of what was just sad as the kind of final wrap-up stuff. But, you know, this idea, you need to be able to talk. You need to be able to talk where I talk. You don't need to be able to talk for three hours with people who agree with you. You know, it's easy. I launched a podcast last year like everybody else. I can get anyone who's going to be running for president to come on my pod. They're dying to do it. The tougher conversations are the ones that we need to be having because that's how you can get in people's faces and say, that isn't what my party stands for. We're not a communist party. We're not a socialist party. We're a big tent part. Sorry. We're a big tent that includes some socialists. Yeah, a Democratic socialist. is not a socialist. I mean, they use these words interchangeably. Asan was pro-USSR this week. We're wrapping it up. We're ending on a high note. Are we having fun? Are we having fun? All right. And I do think, by the way, like, I hear, look, what's great about being part of a big coalition as being comfortable with the moments of tension and discomfort and disagreement because Republicans can't, you're right, they're, they're, They've been a little less scoldy. But they also are running to squash dissent because they're not comfortable with discomfort. They're trying to tell people that politics is easy and there's never any time where you need to feel conflicted or bad or that anything is hard. That's a kind of part of the appeal of fascism. Democratic politics can be tough. Democracy can be tough. But we are part of a big coalition and I just think we can all have fun together. All right. Thanks everybody. Thanks for coming to this. Thank you to Jessica Tarlow, Tim Miller, Hasan Piker, and Simone Bernie Sanders. Yeah. Joining us live here at CrookedCon, he's one of the Democratic Party's loudest voices calling out the dangers of the Trump administration. Welcome, Senator Chris Murphy. Hey, thanks, Dan. Hey, everybody. Before we get started, I would note the senator has a vote, so we're going to probably have to wrap this up a little about five minutes earlier because we can't let them miss the vote. But we're going to be here for as long as we possibly can. All right, let's start with the good stuff. Yeah. So the mood, as you can tell in this room, is much better because of what happened on Tuesday. How are you interpreting those results? Well, democracy is, for the time being, still alive and well. And...

Listen, obviously, the election on Tuesday was first and foremost a referendum on Trump's corruption, his chaos. It was an important statement in every corner of the country that the American public are not ready to turn our government over to a would-be dictator. But there's another message I think that comes from Tuesday as well, and it's one that I hope Democrats are... able to learn which is that people want an opposition party that is willing to stand up and fight in this country It is not coincidental that we got that big victory at the first moment when the Democratic Party is showing real resolve, is showing a willingness to stand up to this guy. And so, as I've said over the last few days, it's important for us to hear the voters and continue the fight that we're engaged in right now. So it was, I think, a really important moment. I think the result of Tuesday... will be that a lot of folks who maybe had been thinking of sitting on the sidelines, some of the corporate elites, the higher education elites, the legal elites who were maybe thinking that Trump had already won this fight will now realize that, right, the fight is still on. And I think it ends up giving confidence to a lot of people and a lot of institutional players all around the country to maybe reenter the fight to save democratic norms and the foundation of our democracy. Obviously, huge wins, but these wins are mostly in blueish states, right? New Jersey, Virginia, two states, Kamala Harris won, California. I mean, Georgia is obviously the exception. Do you worry that there's maybe a danger of overreeding this, right, to think maybe it kind of as Democrats did after 2022, that the voters are with us? I mean, like you can ignore some of the hard questions that still exist after 2024? I think that's exactly right. I think it's interesting that the party has not been able, I think, thus far to find the oxygen to do a real autopsy as to how we got to this point. And that's understandable at some level because we've had to be engaged in, you know, this, I mean, just epic scale fight to save the country. But the reality is if you look at the United States Senate, You know, the best right now that Senate Democrats can do if we run the table is 52 seats. Because right now, for the time being, we're not competitive in a lot of states that just a decade ago we were competitive in. And so we do have to wrestle with why we have lost a lot of low-income voters, why rural areas of abandoned Democrats. And Trump will. make us more electable in some of those places, but it probably doesn't get us over the hump in a place like Missouri or Florida where just two seconds ago we were running candidates that won. So I am certainly worried about the fact that the party.

has only 12 months to go before the midterm election, and maybe hasn't done enough of that reckoning with what wrong that will allow us to once again be a national party able to win everywhere. Not that I expect you to have all the answers here, but one of the reasons we're all gathered here together is to try to figure out questions like this. Do you have some thoughts on how Democrats get back to a world where we can win the Ohio's, the Iowa, the Montana, some states in the south, some things we should do differently, different kind of candidates we should be open to? Yeah, I do. And I'll give you sort of three simple ideas. First, I just do believe that it's not a mistake that the only person in our party that draws crowds of 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 is Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I just think you have to tell a story. And you obviously are better at this than anybody, but you have to tell a story, a narrative. And that narrative has to not only tell you how we're going to make your lives better, but it has to tell people who's screwing them. And there's a true story out there about the corporate class, the billionaire class, consolidated economic power, making people's lives miserable in this country. And the Democratic Party has become this technocratic party that only talks about solutions, solutions that are largely about just rearranging the pieces on the existing marketplace playing field. We've got to be a party that talks about who has too much power and exactly how we are going to radically and immediately shift power from people who have too much of it to people who have not enough of it. The second thing we have to do, has become a big tent party again. And I know this is a tough conversation for our party. But if it were up to me, we would be a party with two big tent poles, a tent pole that talks about unrigging our economy and a temple that talks about unrigging our democracy, right? Getting big money, anonymous money, billionaire money, out of politics. And by the way, admitting that you have to do big things to do that, like if it takes a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics, we should be a for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics. But, Dan, that means that means that you are letting people into the tent, perhaps nominating candidates or being present in areas where, you know, folks might not be with us on all of the social and cultural issues, might not even not be with us on, you know, issue that I care deeply about like guns. But I just think we have a better chance of convincing them. if they step inside because they align with us on a higher minimum wage or on campaign finance reform. So I just think we have to become that big ten party again. And then the last suggestion I'd have is just how we spend our money. We've been corrupted by a consultant class in the Democratic Party that tells us to spend money.

only on 30-second TV ads and digital ads. The Republican Party goes out and builds a permanent messaging and mobilization infrastructure. We talk about that all the time, but we end up spending almost all of our money on ads that disappear as soon as the last election is over. And so if you want to win in this country as a Democratic Party, be a big tent, be a pugilistically populist party, and spend money on permanent messaging and mobilization infrastructure. Speaking of populism, what do you make of Zohran Mamdani's win in New York City and some of the discomfort that some Democrats, including some of the Democratic leadership, have had with that sort of candidate? You know, it was, it almost got to the point of being hilarious. You look at Zohran Mamdani's interviews in the final days of the campaign, and you couldn't ask him a question that he didn't answer by talking about the cost of living in New York, right? I mean, he was so laser-like focused. on cost. There was a survey done of democratic social media posts, maybe two or three years ago, and it showed the percentage of our social media communications that talk about the economy. You know what the percentage was? 10%, one out of 10 messages from the Democratic Party is about economics. Now, we were talking about a lot of other stuff that's really important, but when you only spend 10% any time talking about economics, people start to take the hint that maybe you are not going to fight as hard as you say you're going to fight when you get into office. So that relentless focus on the economy, second, just being authentic and not being worried about making mistakes in your communication, not vetting every single thing you say through communication. professionals, and then like a realization that if you don't, listen, I don't agree with Zohran Mamdani on everything, but like you are actually perceived as illegitimate to voters if all of your views are inside the 40 yard lines. Like if you don't have one or two things that a voter vehemently disagrees with you on, they get suspicious of you. And so just being true to what you, and also they have a bullshit. sensitivity that voters probably didn't have as acutely decades ago. And so if you aren't authentic, if you don't have a couple views that are a little outside of the mainstream, you are actually not perceived as real and thus not electable as a Democrat in this country today. Let's talk about the shutdown, right? We are, I don't even know what day we're on now, but it's the longest shutdown in history. Some of the people who are here today are people who would be at work in the federal government somewhere were it not for the shutdown. You know, there's been all this talk since the, you know, right before the election, even after election about some group of Senate Democrats who are negotiating with or open and negotiating with Republicans around some sort of deal to open the government exchange for a vote on.

the Obamacare subsidies. Sort of what is the status of those negotiations you can tell us and What do you think Democrats should need an exchange to end the shutdown? Well, I mean, first, let me say this. In this audience, I know our people that, A, right now, have been furloughed, have been without a paycheck for over a month, people in this audience who have been illegally fired from their jobs. First and foremost, let me just say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for what you have done for this country. Thank you for the sacrifice that you have made. So I went down to South Florida on Monday with Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith. And we went down there because in South Florida is the highest concentration of people who have ACA plans in some parts of South Florida. 25% of residents have an ACA plan. And if these premium increases go into effect, and you're talking about premiums doubling or tripling for folks across the country, but particularly in this area, Whereas where we have a high concentration, we're talking about a meltdown of the health care system. And so, yes, there is deep pain in a shutdown. People are not getting paid. Food stamp benefits are at risk. Obviously, travel gets interrupted. But if we don't... stop these premium increases from going into effect. There is life and death pain as well. And so it is important for my colleagues to realize that there is no good choice here that Republicans have put us in an impossible position. Listen, for me, coming off of Tuesday, when the people of this country told Democrats to fight, it would be heartbreaking for Democrats to make an immediate decision to stop fighting.

So I guess the question is, how does it end, right? Like there is, you know, a Senate vote without a guarantee of a House vote is that's a, you're, that's fake, right? Like, you're not actually solving, you're getting something, but it's really, but the people who are, premiums are going up, are getting nothing. And I just. Like, I really feel like you guys are an impossible position of you're negotiating with people or you're standing off against people who do not seem to care about hurting their own voters, right? Like you're in, you're in Florida, which is the highest percentage of people on plans, people using, get the subsidies. The subsidies largely benefit people in states that did not expand Medicaid, which are red states. Right. Right. So how do you sort of think about? how to bring this thing to a close when there's no good faith partner to negotiate with here. Yeah, I think it's charitable to suggest that they don't care about hurting their voters. They actually do seem to care about hurting their voters in that they are deliberately trying to make the shutdown as painful as possible. These are nihilists, right, that we're dealing with, which makes it hard. I mean, listen, I think you have to listen to Donald Trump. What did he say on Tuesday morning? He said that the shutdown is hurting Republicans. We should realize that most Americans have not actually gone on to the website to see what their new premium increase is. Many of the rates were just posted a few days ago. We should understand that Donald Trump's pollsters are telling. their party's leaders that they are going to lose the midterms. They're going to lose both the House and the Senate if they don't stop these premium increases from going into effect. And so I just think we have to have faith that there are a lot of reasons why the Republicans, as this nightmare of premium increases, starts to become more real, are going to be willing to sit down and... cut a deal. We made an offer just an hour ago to Republicans in which we said, listen, we will vote to end the shutdown today for a simple one-year extension of these premiums. Previously, we've been talking about two or three years. We made a really, really simple offer here. I think as the days go on, it is going to be much harder for them to say, no, we can be reasonable. We were reasonable in the offer we made today, but to fold at this point. I think ultimately, A, doesn't help the people we're trying to help in our health care system, but also empowers Trump to act more brazenly and more illegally, knowing that the Democratic Party really in the end doesn't have the stuff necessary to stand up to him. So I think if we don't... get something for the people we say we have been fighting for, not only is there an immediate impact on them, but there is potential more pain coming from an emboldened President Trump. You know, this is the point in a typical election cycle where the...

House Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader become laser focus on nothing more than keeping their jobs in the majority. Like what just maybe, maybe there may be some answers, but help me understand why when Trump says it's hurting the shutdown, it's hurting them, the shutdown's hurting them, Trump's pollster said it would be a 12 point shift in the generic ballot if they let these things expire. And he said that before the shutdown. Like, what is, like, what are they doing? I don't really understand like the thinking here. Like, there's just no logic to it. You're asking me to try to explain what Republicans are thinking. You go to the gym with these people. I mean, you see them in the hallway. You talk to more Republicans than these guys do, I think. Certainly than I do. Yeah, I mean, they don't have any independent thought process. They are employees, right? They are. They just take direction from Donald Trump. Now, He did give him a direction on Tuesday morning in the Senate. He said go and change the rules of the Senate. But Senate Republicans sort of scratched their head because. They just got wiped out on Tuesday. They are now increasingly likely to lose the Senate next November. And they thought to themselves, do I really want to change the rules? So that when Democrats take control, we can very easily pass into law Roe versus Wade and universal background checks and an extension of the voting rights law with 50 votes. So maybe there are very limited moments when they choose not to follow his instructions. But no, by and large, even if he is telling them to take a barrel over Niagara Falls, right, which is what they're kind of doing right now politically, they are going to follow instructions like good cult members do. It was very funny. I watched the video, the very strange video that Trump put out arguing for eliminating the filibuster. And it sounded to me almost exactly like a bizarre version of a 2021 Potta of America episode. We were selling abolished a filibuster shirts back in those days when you guys trying to get the voting rights bill passed. Let's talk about a little general strategy here, right? Like one of the things that you have become very known for since Trump took office is. like just being a very vocal spokesperson who's sort of like calling it as it is, not mincing words around the dangers to democracy, to our freedoms, to Trump become an authoritarian. Now at the same time, you know, you have Zohran Mamdani winning this race on affordability. There's this report, the tidying to win that came out last week that's like Democrats have to talk about economic issues. Like that is, that's what everyone cares about. How do you sort of think about the balance of? Like these obviously critical assault on democracy that we know are very of great interest of the people in this room, but maybe not to swing through us. How do you sort of think about your messaging? Yeah, so I don't think of it as two different stories. I think of it as the same story. Okay. It's not a story about his assault on costs and making people's economic lives more miserable and his assault on democracy. It's the same story in this sense.

What is his goal as president? His goal as president is to turn the federal government into a vehicle to enrich himself and his billionaire friends and to steal from people, to raise your costs in order to reserve enough money so that he can give it all to his pals. That's deeply unpopular. Nobody wants that, right? The big, beautiful bill is the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich. In the history of the country, it's wildly unpopular. So how do you get away with just stealing from regular people? Well, you destroy the rule of law. You destroy the ability of people to dissent, to protest, and to stand up and object in elections. And so, yes, he is trying to turn our government into a kleptocratic oligarchy in which he hurts us to help he and his Mar-a-Lago cronies. The only way he gets away with that is to destroy the democracy. So now I just explain that in... you know, 60 seconds, but you can actually explain that in 20 seconds. And so I think as long as we tell those two twin stories together, people will get it. And I also do think that we maybe have overlearned our lesson a little bit from 2024. Okay, it is true. Like our democracy message did not land in 2024. And large part because people are like, why do I want to save this version of democracy, right? Like this version of democracy sucks. It just works for the elites and the billionaire class. But that doesn't mean that people aren't plugged in right now to the actual threat. And the polling tells you that 80% of the American public thinks that we are in a political crisis right now, that more than half of Americans believe that their right to free speech is at risk. So I think you tell it together, and I think that you have confidence that the democracy part of the story actually does resonate and turn people out in a way that maybe it didn't a year ago. That's how I think about it. It's interesting. I think that you hit. earlier when you're talking about how we reach these voters in these red states what i think is the key solution to this challenge which is we need a reform agenda because we have to be the what happened in the biden era as we became the party that was defending democracy as is we were the status quo people but if we can be the party that's trying to reform democracy to get the corporate power out get the money out like that's a different message And it gives people a sense that we're fighting for something better than we currently have. So when I entered politics 20, 30 years ago, so campaign finance reform, right? Getting, you know, big corrupt money out of politics was like a top three or four issue for Democrats. And something happened over the last 20 years in which... It barely cracked the top 10. Some of it is that our democracy reform agenda migrated from big money to voting rights. And that's for good reason, because they were and still are trying to stop people from voting. But it is also- You were going to ban dark money in the John Lewis bill last year. Or four years, right, but it wasn't necessarily what we led with. It is just true, though. that Trump did get elected on his promise to drain the swamp. People do want to vote for a party that I think is going to clean up Washington. Right now, they don't really believe that we're much less corrupt than they are, in part because they don't hear us talking every single day about that reform agenda. And so that's why I get back to my prescription, my amateur prescription for the party, which is make the tent pole, make 75% of what you talk about, unrigging...

the economy, big ideas to put money in people's pockets, simple ideas like Zohran Mamdani had, and talk all the time about what you're going to do to unrig the democracy and make the influential have less power and regular people have more power. One last quick question here, because we know we've got to get you this vote. One of the great concerns of people in this audience is that the Republicans are going to do something to try to steal the 2026 elections. How are you thinking about that problem, anything you guys are doing to get ahead of it? Yeah, I think, you know, continuing to invest in good local and state leaders, which is why these elections were so critical. We made a smart play, which was to put a lot of focus in investment on governors and mayors, who are the actual people who... administer elections. And so I think we can have some confidence that right now we, in the states that are going to matter, we have people who are going to protect against these efforts to try to corrupt elections. I think we have to be in a real active public and private conversation with social media companies that right now are being corrupted by Donald Trump to essentially allow for election distortion and interference to exist on their platforms that if they do that, and Donald Trump doesn't win, that they should keep their records and that, you know, there's going to be a price to be paid for essentially helping Donald Trump try to engage in election intimidation. And then... Lastly, just keep on turning out, right? There's this political science that says if 3% of a population is engaged in regular protest, it just becomes this secret sauce which puts enough sand in the gears to protect your democracy from destruction. The institutional players who would have to fold to essentially steal an election. are just a little bit less likely to do that. And that includes the Supreme Court, right, who are full of politicians who want to do Trump's bidding, but don't want to get too far outside of the political mainstream. They are all watching you. They are all watching whether No Kings is just a once a year phenomenon or if it becomes a once a month phenomenon. And so the amount of buying you need to steal an election is pretty large. And public protest at scale is probably the key ingredient to keep the folks we need to stay straight from being corrupted when Donald Trump asks. So I wish it were more simple than that. But there's nothing more important than your ability to be present and to organize your friends and neighbors in being present during this moment. That is a great place to end it. Please give it up for Senator Chris Murphy, Senator. Thanks for being here. Thanks guys.

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