And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, The Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

With the election behind us, I wanted to visit with an old friend, John Anzalone, one of the nation's best and most thoughtful pollsters and political strategist, to talk about what just happened and why and what it means for the Democratic Party and our politics moving forward. Those of you who regularly listen to The Axe Files may have heard my conversation with him several years ago, and you would know that Anzalone was the chief pollster for Joe Biden and for the Obama campaigns, but more importantly, is a son of two Teamsters from St. Joseph, Michigan and has special insights into the battleground states that turn this election and the folks who live there. Here's that conversation. John Anzalone, my pal. Here we are in the aftermath of of of this election. You and I have had many, many chats in public and private about this over the year. But because I have such a high regard for you and your insights, I thought I'd better. I don't know whether it's therapy or I don't know what it is, but I thought I'd better talk with you about what happened.

And, you know, pollsters have become therapists. They want us at the end of election since, you know, we don't provide any, apparently, value anymore. We have become, my last three weeks become basically therapists. And then when people, you know, don't get what they want to hear from me, then I'm just, you know, I'm a bedwetter. But that's just the way it goes now.

Well, yes, I think I would think pollsters would need therapists, actually.

Exactly.

At this point. I mean, the truth of the matter is, I don't think people understand polling. I mean, because it strikes me that the polls you know, I think people think this phrase margin of error is just kind of a throwaway line and it doesn't mean anything, but it does mean something. And the polls weren't that off, were they?

Yeah. I mean, you know, as you know, I mean, the media narrative wants to make political campaign pollsters into prognosticators. And as you know, we're message development strategist. Right. And we help with targeting and resource allocation, etc.. And so what we do is a lot different in terms of, you know, our day job as well as, you know, we spend a lot of money on trying to do it right.

Some do, I don't think all the news organizations.

'That's what I'm saying. The news organizations clearly don't. Some of them do like The Wall Street Journal. And they were, you know, committed. When Tony Fabrizio and I founded that poll to do, you know, a multimodal methodology and big samples and over samples of Hispanics and and African-Americans.

'Just slow down a second for for the uninitiated, multi multi-modal means you use different means of reaching people. So cell phones.

'Text or web, you know, etc.. And I think what we found in 2016 was that there was a universe of hard to reach voters that we just weren't getting or we weren't getting the right kind of non-college educated voter. For example, we were getting too many service oriented people rather than people who work with their hands or manufacturing blue, the true blue collar. And so, you know, like any industry, the polling industry has evolved as well. The problem, I think, with public polls and the media polls is that, you know, again, they're not spending the money and they're not necessarily attacking the questionnaire development and things like that the right way. And so we're getting a lot of polls that are using worn out panels with almost professional poll takers, et cetera, etc.. And naturally we get branded for that.

These panels are online panels.

They're online panels. You opt in and, you know, maybe you if you do enough interviews, you get a Starbucks card or something like that. And and on average, these people who are doing the polls are taking one or more polls a day. So imagine, you know, 80 polls a month. You're like a professional juror. And so so there's there's a real problem, I think, with the methodology, not to mention just we're seeing so many polls. I mean, if we go back to like 2000 Gore versus Bush, I mean, the campaign, not the Supreme Court case, you know, you probably had five major polls, right. And you trusted them all. That was a different age. I get it. And now you probably get released 8 to 10 polls a day. And I couldn't tell you who half of them are. And so it's not like there is a polling police out there who's going to, you know, say this is good methodology, bad methodology. What I wish the aggregators would do, RCP and 538 and Nate Silver is kind of have a subset, you know, of their their model of just the high quality polls that would be that.

I mean, isn't that what Nate Silver does?

Maybe he does. I'm not sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. But I mean, the point is they all predicted a close race and most of those models said it was a coin flip and could go either way. And all of those battleground states were relatively close.

They're really relatively close. So it would we would consider margin of the error. And I think we also learned that, you know, a valuable lesson in statistics and mathematics that five out of 100 polls that you do statistically will just be wrong. Right. Just be outside the margin.

So Anne Seltzer's poll in Iowa.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean like, you know, she had a really good run and then she had a bad poll. And that's not just not me being critical, but it was one of the, you know, five out of 100 that you're going to get that are really bad.

Yeah. And when you're doing a public poll like that and you have limited resources, you can't go back and say, let's just go in one more time.

Right. And I one time got torched. I think this was in 2020 or so. And Quinnipiac or someone clearly had a bad poll. And I said, well, what we would do in the private sector is we'd go back in. And we've done that over my career a bunch of times when you just can look at the crosstabs and know that something's not right, it's just wrong. And, you know, you go back in and you kind of see and you know, and some purists would say that you shouldn't do that, you know, But at the end of the day, you kind of know when something's wrong.

The thing that happened in 2016 and 2020 was that the Trump vote was underestimated in polling. And one of the questions about this race was, would that happen again? Would there be a late sort of infusion of vote that was a Trump vote and that would defy the polling and would tip the race. It feels like that there was some of that that, you know, you look at the late breaking vote, it was a Trump vote. And, you know, the younger men who were maybe infrequent participants in polling, I mean, in elections may have tipped the balance a little bit. But tell me, is that, am I wrong about that?

I think it's you know, I don't know if there's a right or wrong. I think that we're going to see a couple of things. One is the analysis, how I approach analysis in 2020, having been a big part of the Hillary Clinton campaign was that we realized she was she got what she polled.

2016.

2016, she got what she polled. And so my recommendations in 2020 to the Jen O'Malley Dillons and Donolins and the Anitas of the world was that, you know, Biden was probably going to get what he polled because there was a dynamic where Trump was basically getting all the late deciders and the undecideds. We got to remember undecideds do break and they usually break disproportionately, like really highly disproportionately for one candidate. And that seems to be Trump in all three election.

Why is that?

You know, I think that at the beginning he was the challenger. Right? And in 16, you can kind of argue it that maybe you can argue it in 2024, maybe it's just just a special dynamic with his with him and his voters. I can't really I can't explain it in 2020. But what we found was if you put the average of polls in each state battleground state, Hillary got what she polled within a point in the same thing was with Biden. And so clearly, those undecided voters are moving. Now, we won't know until the voter file. You have this huge voter file from every state and it'll get appended, and so we'll be able to look at voter history to get at what you're talking about, which is did they do a better job with infrequent voters? And I think that this is a really good time to bring up, you know, the field operation. There was a lot of criticism of Trump that he was leasing out his field operation to the independent expenditures and the like.

Elon Musk and.

The Elon Musk one were.

Turning Points.

Like, let's you know, let's talk about this because I think we all had a lot of herding at the end of the campaign about the, our field operation, which was big. It was historic. But we wanted to knock down what was happening on the other side. And I know Phil Cox very well. And you probably do, too, who was running the Elon Musk.

On the Republican side.

Yeah, on the Republican side. These are incredibly talented people who have a really long history of doing things right. Their focus was on these voters.

Infrequent voters.

Infrequent voters. Right.

Well, I think I think, Anzo, what what they did, what Musk did like, I'm eager to see what the autopsy on the Pennsylvania vote is, because that thing, you know, everybody was appalled and all this and maybe even ridiculed the idea that of this petition that he had Elon Musk for those who were listening and don't know or weren't following this, Elon Musk created a petition and he said, you can participate. You sign this petition if you're a registered voter. It was for free speech and the Second Amendment. So, you know, anybody who signs that is highly likely to be a Trump voter and that they could then take that they they have the names. He paid people $100 to sign the thing and 45 to refer people to it and then had $1 million lottery for anybody who participated every week and they could take those names and cross match them with people who and their vote history so they could identify the infrequent voters who sign this petition. And they created targets for themselves to. Am I getting this right?

And it worked. And let's just say again, we shouldn't again ever underestimate what the ability is of the Republicans to get their vote out as well. And the fact is, is that, you know, what I would hear a lot is, we're not bumping into them. Well, guess what? James Carville a long time ago said that Pennsylvania was, you know, Pittsburgh on the east, Philadelphia or Pittsburgh on the east, Philadelphia on the east, and Alabama in the middle. Allow me to suggest that that is where a bulk of that activity was happening. So, again, we will find out.

You say you speak as an Alabamian, so.

Right. That's the, Roll Tide.

People won't hear that in your voice. But no.

No, but I mean, you know clearly what their activity worked. I'm not saying that ours didn't. But, you know, we could at the end see a drop off when you compare the 2020 Biden vote to the 2024 Harris vote. And that and we may not see much of an uptick on the Trump vote, and so there may be a drop off, and that's clearly something that we have to deal with as a party as we move forward.

I want to ask you, I refer people back to a conversation we had on this podcast, I think, in 2021 when we talked about your life. And one of the reasons why, you know, I always have had such a high regard for you as a pollster and a person, is that you grew up not on the coasts. You grew up your parents were Teamsters. Your father was a trucker. Your mother worked at a mental health state mental health facility, answering phones. And you are the target. You grew up in the family that were sort of a target voter in Saint Joseph, Michigan, in one of the battleground states. The only group that Kamala Harris improved upon in terms of her performance vote share were college educated white voters in every other bracket she went down, and particularly among Hispanic men, you know, particularly among men and but and Hispanic men. But I want to sort this out because as we talk about the future, I mean, I have a particular point of view, which is the Democratic Party has become too much of a smarty pants, college educated party and still the party of working people, but too often approaching working people like missionaries and anthropologists instead of neighbors.

Yeah. Listen, I think that at the end of day, when I go back to my upbringing again, my parents were pretty blue collar. There wasn't much there. Sometimes we, you know, we were free lunch kids, sometimes we were not. But we were always like, you know, we kind of knew where we are going. And I think that I think that, again, this isn't so much just about.

What do you mean or, what do you, you knew where you were going?

'I think that the Democratic Party, my autopsy would be less about looking back, but looking forward, which is I think we got to figure out what the American Dream means for people. I actually knew that when I was a kid. Right. Working 2 or 3 jobs. My grandfather was a shoe repairman. He was a cobbler in downtown St. Joe, Michigan. I used to go in there, worked for him, worked for my great uncle who had another shoe repair shop down the street. I don't know how they sustained two shoe repair shops. But this is going to sound weird. But I remember, it's like when I think about the future, I remember this strange thing, which was I wanted to have a job where you kind of wore a certain type of shoes, you know what I'm saying? And I guess my my grandfather was a shoe repairman. And it was like, you know, the banker, whoever would bring them in. And my point being is that I think we need to talk about the American Dream and what it means or what what the future holds for people. And we're seeing this in focus groups that people now, young people as well as their parents, like they young people worried about whether they'll ever be able to buy a house, the parents in the separate focus group will talk about, my kids will never be able to buy a house. You know, college is too expensive. Health care is too expensive. You know, it's like that all goes into the pot about whether people, you know, think they'll ever be married, etc., etc.. And so I just think that, you know, everything feels out of reach to a lot of people. Right. And that is a problem. And we've got to, I think, speak to that. And I learned a lot from two people. You and James Carville. And James was the economy stupid, Right. And you understood kind of economic populism and how you need to talk to people so they felt confident that Democrats were going to be the party of opportunity and the party of their future. And. I think that's where we have to get to. And that is not me being completely critical of, you know, the last year or so. As much as we are coming off of Covid, supply chain inflation, etc., etc.. And there were just diagnostics out there that were just so tough for the Biden-Harris administration and for Kamala Harris to put something together in three months. But as a party, we better be talking to not just young people, but quite frankly, of all age tranches about what the American Dream means so people feel that the Democratic Party is going to be on their side of attaining that American dream.

Yeah. Well, listen, I couldn't agree with you more. There's a few things in your answer I want to explore, but I kept saying during the course of this campaign that I feel as vehemently and as strongly. I'm the son of a refugee. I feel strongly about the about American democracy as anybody. But if you're talking about democracy over the dinner table, you're not, you're, it's because you don't have to worry about the cost of the food on your dinner table. Yeah. And, you know, I think that the cultural divide or the economic divide, if your party's base is a is an upscale economic, economically upscale base, the conversations are different. And, you know, so I do think that is it's not just a matter of say the right things, because I think Kamala Harris did say a lot of the right things. She was talking about economic opportunity. She was talking about the issues you were talking about. But it it it it was it was more sheet music than soulful music. It was. And it's and to people who are have lived in this economy not just for the last two years, but for the last four decades when things have changed and, you know, productivity grew, but wages didn't grow with it. And there was you know, the economy has just changed. Automation, globalization and so on. There's a there's a skepticism about whether that American Dream is real.

Right? And I think that also, again, we have a lot to learn. And both Democrats and Republicans go through this. You know, Republicans went through it in 2012 after Mitt Romney lost. Right. And they had to rethink how they're going to move things. One of the thing that aggravates me about our party is that we have losses. And I'm not talking about Kamala Harris. Of people who do this really will well and outperform for a Democrat. But we don't take any lessons from them. I mean, if you look at Tim Ryan's campaign against J.D. Vance.

Former congressman who ran for the Senate in 2022.

22, and most people don't realize, did it on his own, didn't get any money from the outside parties, you know, etc., because he wasn't a targeted one. Got that race to dead even. And then he was a little bit ahead of, guess who, J.D. Vance, because Tim Ryan talked a great working class populist economic message. He was so real. Everyone should go watch his ads. And then the Republicans came in, I think, with 50 to $60 billion and.

They saved JD Vance.

And so I think that.

Who ran, by the way, the governor, the Republican governor was running I think I think he won by 23, 25 points. J.D. Vance won by seven.

Right. And so, you know, I mean, I think that there's a lot to learn by Pete Buttigieg, like right. Again, a completely different guy who doesn't feel like a working class guy but understands economic messaging as as well as anyone. I think that there's no doubt that if you take a look at Gretchen Whitmer and what she has done, I always love Jen Palmieri. I think in her Vanity Fair article on Gretchen Whitmer said she doesn't have a political ideology. Her ideology is, quote, get it done. End quote. Right. Roy Cooper, same thing. I mean, there's people who do this really well.

The governor of Michigan and the governor.

Of governor of North Carolina, who do these things.

Clients of yours, we should point out.

Well, not all of them, but you know, but again, I think they're just really they're really good at connecting with voters. And again, I'm not bringing them up in comparison to Kamala Harris, I'm thinking about the future and what we should do to what make them what makes them successful, but also for people who didn't win a presidential like Pete Buttigieg or did or didn't win a Senate race like Tim Ryan. They have something to offer in the narrative of what they were doing right that made them successful at that point in time, even if the outcome wasn't great.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. And looking back, you know, it's always interesting to look back because everything seems clearer. You know, hindsight being 2020, that's certainly true in politics. But it was nagging me throughout that when you have a 28% right track number in the country, meaning 28% of the people thought the country was on the right track, when the president's approval rating is flirting with 40, which is quite low, when people two thirds of the people have a negative view of the economy, you would just look at that clinically. You would say, I'm looking at the sheet of paper. The incumbent party can't win. No incumbent party has ever won. And so, you know, the question is, we can pick apart what the Harris campaign did and didn't do. I think she overperformed expectations of her own performance in many ways. But she had those letters attached to her, vice president. She was the number two person in the administration that people wanted to fire as people all over the world who were firing incumbent administrations. In retrospect, was she sort of D.O.A. from the start?

Let me add to your diagnostics, which I think that isn't often talked about. Trump ended this campaign with a 51% positive retrospective job rating. So there was that. He, he is a guy who can fix the economy again because of how people knew him as The Apprentice. And he's a billionaire. And this has been and they had this kind of amnesia about what the economy was like when he was there because they were viewing it vis a vis the inflation that they experienced in 22 and 23. And so his job rating retrospective on the economy was in the high 50s. So, listen, I think that, you know, I really believe that we just, quite frankly, expected too much from having someone basically become the nominee. Right. And only have three months to put a campaign together. We know no one knows anything about a VP. We knew that when Biden won, we had to kind of, right. And so she had to, she had to tell the American people about herself. She had to actually run a real campaign, and she had to make a contrast with the opponent. And that is a lot to ask a person to do in three months. And, you know, I think she had a really good two months, right, of August and September. And I think that what normally happens in October is when the Republicans have their best month because they make a contrast and they had all the easy contrast because they had all the easy issues on their side, meaning the economic ones, the inflation, cost of living and the border. And they were using her own words against her. And so it was, I just think, asking a lot for anyone to put a three month campaign together.

Let me ask you a question apropos to that. And I should point out you you were the poster for Joe Biden in 2020. You started off, I think, as his driver when he ran for president in.

Iowa in 1987.

Yes. And so you drove his car in 87. You helped drive the polling. And in 2020, that got him to where he wanted to go. But would the story could the story could anyone have withstood these headwinds and would the story have been different if there had been a primary, if Biden had not run? There had been a primary. And one of the governors you mentioned or Buttigieg or someone else. Buttigieg was part of the administration, so he's not really a part of this question. But if someone else had been nominated who was not attached to the administration and had a little bit more of a latitude to say, I'm not part of the Washington thing and this is what we need to do. And someone who had close ties to, you know, working people and so on. Would that have given Democrats a better chance?

Well, I'm.

Without criticizing the VP.

I just let me let me answer it in this way, because I hate recriminations and all.

This not really recriminations.

I know. But it'll be a political question. Here's here's what I think is that I think that if you look at our bench, which is what you're talking about, that we have an amazing bench that I think will serve as well for the future. I mean, you know, you know all of them, right? I mean, you know, whether it's Wes Moore or Raphael Warnock or Gretchen Whitmer or J.B. Pritzker or Shapiro or Gavin Newsom, I'm missing some. Phil Murphy, Mitch Landrieu. I can you know, you can go on and on our bench for the future to get it right in. The right political environment, I think is what we should be hopeful for. Right. And I think that, you know. We should do an autopsy. That's what every party should do, regardless of if 90% of the problem were, again, bad political and economic diagnostics that put you just in an absolute hole. But I think that we have a great bench who can get this right.

Yeah, that's really not what I'm.

I know.

That. That. I know you're being artful.

Well, I know. And I don't.

I mean, I'm not. I'm not asking. I'm not going to draw you into the discussion that I and Carville got into early on about whether Biden should run or not run. And so the question is, could someone who was not from Washington have won this race or was it just hopeless because they had wins against the incumbent party? Like you would be tagged with the with the with the with the anger at the status quo regardless. I mean, that's just, that's.

Again, I think that the 51% retro perspective job rating should have told us a lot that we went into this cycle. I mean, I think all Democratic operatives and a lot of talking heads thinking that he had a ceiling and the job rating, the job rating is your ceiling. Right. And it's going to be interesting because he's probably going to get a little over 50%, which is pretty damn close to his job rating. Right. And so that would go closer to your theory that it was probably hopeless. I think that the other side of the operative thinking is, is that if you get this close, you know, you could probably also win it. And that that always hurts. Right? But let's also realize that of the three elections that Trump has won, he never won the popular vote. And the margin that you would have of the three states that you would have to take is actually substantially bigger than it was in 16 and 20. So you would have had to do a lot right, even if you were a different candidate.

You know, I think there will be people who listen to this podcast who will say, with everything that happened, with everything that happened with Trump, between the elections, with all the freight that he apparently was carrying, how could this be? I mean, I have my own thoughts on it.

'Here's my fear of the post narrative, and I'm already hearing it, and I'm really surprised by who I'm hearing it from, which is women. I hope that the narrative doesn't bite, which is we can't elect a woman or we can't elected African-American. Like the misogyny and the racism is real. I think it was part of what what we were dealing with in this campaign. But I also think that, you know, quite frankly, losing out on the economic narrative was real. Right. And I think that the fact is, is that, you know, Trump having the easy job of just using Harris's own words on important issues, right, was real. I mean, in terms of of the negative branding. But I worry that, you know, we're going to get into this narrative as a party that an African-American can't win and more importantly, that a woman can't win. And I think that there is a false narrative out there that this campaign was run on abortion. I think that was one important issue. I think that when you take a look at the proportionality of the ads run on that issue, it's going to be smaller than people think. Reproductive rights are still important to people. It's still a certain universe of single voter issue. I don't think an entire campaign should be run on it. I don't think it was this time. But again, I worry that I worry about those about those narratives.

Talk about the Trump campaign, because you're right, they had an easier job. He was totally defined in people's minds. They didn't have to spend any time or money. You know, for better and worse, people knew who Donald Trump was. They didn't know who Kamala Harris was. And they could spend three months defining her. And it was really a race to define her in a way that that people would absorb. I think the campaign did a pretty good job early on in sort of making that connection with working class, middle class voters and trying to do that. The second act was a little fuzzier. But Trump's Trump's advertising campaign was really about this. I mean, you know, what we look for is a consistent message driven through a series of communications and ads. That goes to the fundamental contrast. And their message was simple. She's part of the status quo. She's part, if you like what you have, vote for her. If you want change on the economy and the border to the biggest issues, vote for Trump. It was better when he was president. I mean, it was pretty simple. And as you point out, they did it a lot by using her own words.

Yeah. I mean, if you if you check off all of the important issues, the cost of living, they did a brilliant ad where they had her at a rally talking about hey bread is this much, egss is this much. Sometimes it's tough just to get through and then a separate, you know, person holding an iPad saying, Biden, that mix is working or, you know, all that type of stuff.

That's her her saying Bidenomics is working.

That's her saying it, you know and and, you know, a separate one on the border, which is the number of people coming in. And then, quite frankly, the parochial issues, you know her in her own words, saying that she wanted to ban fracking on the Fallon Fallon show was run in Pennsylvania. You know, Trump brilliantly used her support for the EV mandate in Michigan, saying that she wanted to ban gas cars, it was going to ruin the auto industry. And so they were using macroeconomic issues as well, which are also woke issues. Right. And again, that's not critical of her. That was just what she was saying when she ran for for president in 2019 and they were using it against her.

Elissa Slotkin. Was your firm polling for her?

Yes. Yeah, Molly was polling and I should have put her in that list of of candidates who did a really good job of defining the economic narrative.

She got elected senator from Michigan, a congresswoman from a swing district of Michigan. She got elected. She won by, I think, 3/10 of a percentage point or something like that while Trump was carrying the state. She responded to the EV. They had the attack against her. And she did a they did a brilliant ad in which, she she lives on a farm. She said there's no charging stations near me. I don't drive an electric vehicle and I'm not going to. No one's going to force you to. But if they're going to be made, I want them to be made.

Made heere.

In Michigan and not China. And there was no ad like that from the Harris campaign and there was no response to fracking either.

Yeah, that's right. And you and I have you know, we have a rule, right? If you get attacked, you respond. And we did in 2020. And Elissa Slotkin did. And again, my other partner, Brian Stryker, who you know really well, has done a ton of research on this, and we saw Trump changed the narrative over the last year on EVs and battery plans and attacking China and etc.. And Brian was part of that Slotkin team and that response. And you have to you have to respond. And the other thing that she did was make it very clear in another thing that she always said, which was, you know, there's 45 new manufacturing plants come to Michigan. Again, a lot of Brian's work where we found that people just want to make things. It wasn't necessarily about the jobs. But if you grew up in Michigan, you know, we made things. Gretchen Whitmer always talks about this as well. This is a state that makes things. And so I think that they did a really good job of kind of defining the economic narrative for Elissa Slotkin. I think we have a lot to learn from that and I think we have a lot to learn from the type of candidate. Remind me if I'm wrong. I think she was a CIA agent or analyst.

Yeah. And she spent 2 or 3 tours in Iraq.

'Iraq. So there was a price of admission there for people, you know, to not think of her as just a national Democrat. And I think that that was that was really important as well. But it's a great example of of owning your own economic message, because at the end of the day, all we heard in focus groups was, you know, how tough it was, you know, with price, the price of everything going up. And when I really kind of knew we were going to have a serious challenge was when I was watching focus groups in Michigan. Again, we did one with white men and one with white or with African-American men. It was kind of McComb County and Oakland. And there was no differentiation between what the white men and the Black men were talking about. And that's that was kind of unusual. And it was all about the cost of living. It was all about how it was just harder and harder to get by. And quite frankly, the trust factor in institutions and the Democrat Party was basically nil. And we've got to get that trust back.

Well, getting back to my smarty pants, college educated white party, there's been this presumption that remember all this talk about the coalition of the ascendant, which when you think back in 2008 and to, you know, when Obama won, when you think back to it, that phrase itself carries with it sort of part of the problem, this notion that someone you know, when you talk about the coalition of the ascendant, it it implies that there's a coalition that's descending. Yeah. And but there was this there's assumption that Hispanic voters and the Hispanic community is very diverse. I mean, it's really the Hispanic communities. But also a lot of those voters are buddy Larry Grisalano who was for four years, my brilliant collaborator. And your great friend said, you know, these voters, they're not looking for a racial advocate. They're looking for a economic advocate.

'Yeah. And it goes back to the American Dream, Axe. I mean, like if you're Latino American, one is they're not you know, it's not a homogeneous group. And I keep saying the more and more, I think movement by the Latino community to be real persuadable voters, it's just a normal evolution of first and second generation Americans. It was no different than our parents. Our grandparents. Like, you know, my grandparents all spoke broken English and my parents just wanted to be American man in the 50s. Right. And then you go on from there. And I think that that's the same thing with Latino voters. And I think that whether it's Latino, whether it's whites, whether it's African-Americans, we again, have to dissect what the American dream means to people and get that back, because right now, if you're a young person, you're like, college is too expensive. Or if I go to college, I'm going to be in debt. You know, I don't know if I can afford health care. I don't know if I could ever buy a house. Hell, I'm not sure I can afford rent, which means I can't even imagine myself getting married, etc., etc.. And so, like, these are real things. And we hear them in focus groups all the time. And, you know, you saw what happened with the youth vote. Matter of fact, we did better in in terms over if you take a look from 16 to 20 to 24, it was the senior vote that moved to Democrats because we had so much to say to them. Right. Negotiate. Medicare's $35 insulin, $2,000 Medicare cap, etc.. But we got to figure out how we talk to younger people. And I don't want to define younger people, 18 to 29. I think we have to expand that to define younger people in terms of, again, what are their hopes and how do we connect with them to say we are going to help you with your future and meet the American Dream? Because we're not doing that right now.

What I hear in focus groups is people are sort of dismissive of the concept of the American Dream, that they think that it is, that it is a cliché and that, you know, and and that politicians come to them in election years and talk about it. But the fundamentals remain the same.

And I'm not suggesting we use the term. I'm suggesting we figure the proof points underneath it to get people to pay attention.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. There's another aspect to this, you know, about the Trump media campaign. I mean, you used to were it's interesting because I look at issues like climate change. Others have become an even as they relate to economic issues. You use the word woke and a lot of the voters you're talking about take the Latino voters who have, you know, the majority of Latino men who shifted over, for example, they are socially conservative. Right. They certainly react when they think I mean, climate is an absolute. I thought it was interesting. Lee Zeldin, the former congressman from New York, gets appointed by Trump yesterday or today, head of the EPA. And the first thing he said, we're going to begin right away deregulating. At the very same time he's talking about it, his home state, New York, is is ablaze in wildfires that they've never experienced before. So there is a crisis that has to be dealt with. But if you're someone who makes your living extracting energy from the ground and have for generations and that's your good middle class ticket, the loss of that job is also an existential crisis. And we haven't figured out how to balance those things. And here then, you know.

Well, we should have learned something from NAFTA, right? Quite frankly, when, you know, we lost the textile mills and the furniture mills and in St. Joe, Michigan, when we lose, you know, the Whirlpool plant, etc., etc..

And we told people that we told people that this would this is part of progress, but it wasn't progress for them.

No, no. And and again, you know, I do think that one of Joe Biden's crowning achievement is the Chips and Science Act, etc., bringing innovative manufacturing back to America. But, you know, it's not like it's hitting enough communities, quite frankly, to necessarily move elections and things like that. But we we have to keep talking about it.

And the payoff, it's not immediate. The pain is.

No. It's not immediate.

Yeah. Yeah. But getting back to the issue of of Wokeism, the other ad that will be remembered forever from this campaign, the Trump campaign was the ad about the funding of prisoners of surgery, transition surgery for trans prisoners in the California penitentiary system, and the footage that was used from five years ago or whatever was I think I was told it was actually from her AG race of Harris talking about her support for public funding of that. And the killer line in the ad was she's for they them his for you.

Yeah and I think that the real I mean, while it was a great tagline and it kind of summarizes everything in terms of of what they were trying to do, at the end of the day really was about taxpayer dollars going for prisons transition. I always think about the 1991 ad for Harris Wofford, Democrat who won that.

James Carville race.

Yeah, won that race and.

Senate race, this was a special in Pennsylvania, the canary in the coal mine.

And if you remember how he did it, he stood in front of a prison and said, these guys get better health care than you and then many of you. And so I think that the killer was that this was, again, prisoners, taxpayer dollars going for transition service. And I probably there was no ad I heard more about from people, meaning from Democrats. Right. Not political operatives, etc., etc.. You know, in terms of it bothering people and it it defined her. I mean, it really did define her.

'Well, she was working very hard to to sort of position herself in the middle class, in Middle America. And I think, you know, the point of that ad was, first of all, she's not from here. She's that she's a coastal liberal elite. And secondly, her priorities are not your priorities. Right? She's got different priorities. And it was very effective and very memorable. And then they used out of context Charlamagne tha God, who is a very charismatic radio guy out of New York but national in scope, who speaks to particularly younger African-Americans.

And again, it goes to show how difficult it is. And again, you know, how much we ask of her in three months. You got to sell yourself. Do you sell yourself to the American people? I mean, you got to you know, they're going to learn who you are. You got to you got to tell them what your agenda is as president. And you have to contrast the against the other against your opponent. And again, your fourth thing would be respond and protect yourself. That's a lot to do. And I thought again at the beginning when she was talking about her being a prosecutor, I think that really help people, kind of want to take a real look at her. You know, she talked about that a lot, being a prosecutor and AG, the fights that she took on. And we saw at the beginning that people really grabbed on to that.

I mentioned Charlemagne. I want to talk not just about messaging, but the conveyance, the by which messages were transmitted. And a lot has been made of this since the election. You know how it you know, he did he basically tied her among men under 29. You know, Biden did much better in 2020. And this you know, he did historically well for recent elections with younger voters. I think he lost some by 13 because young women stuck with Harris. But young men did not. And a lot was made of how they used YouTube and and gaming, you know, video game streaming and the kind of programing that Trump went on. How important is that and how did what it Democrats do about that? Or is it just about getting the message right?

Well, you know, that's outside my lane. You know, I think that there's going to be a couple of things that you're going to hear a lot about, and that is it's not about how much money you raise is about how you spend it. Right. And I think that always goes kind of to an autopsy, TV versus digital, and then kind of within that bucket how you spend the digital money. Not something that I do. I think it goes to a bigger point, though, which is, you know, we've got a younger male problem. And if you you know, John Della Volpe, who is an expert in youth and youth polling, he's been doing it for 25 years at.

The Harvard IOP.

At Harvard.

Where you're sitting now. You're a fellow.

Yeah. And he just had an op ed in The New York Times yesterday. And we should listen to him. I don't agree with everything in his op ed, but I think that, you know, he is someone who, again, talks to young people all the time. He, you know, kind of threw up the flare about young men. And without a doubt, there's a epidemic out there, kind of a disenfranchisement epidemic among young men. You know, we tend to use overly moralizing language to them. You know, they kind of turn to kind of, if you will, Internet role models who have this kind of distorted, you know, view of masculinity. And, you know, that is what Trump is best at and his people like Joe Rogan, etc., etc.. And so I think we got to go in there and understand, you know, again, how we talk to young men and how we give them, you know, some sense that we're on their side because right now they're, you know, they're feeling invisible. And even if it's for all the wrong reasons, we've got to get some of them back.

There's a midterm election in two years. There is a presidential election in four. What the Democrats have to do. And what is let's let's let's sort of reverse engineer this. If you were if you were Trump's strategists and, you know, you mentioned you do polling with Tony Fabrizio, very, very fine pollster who polled for the Trump campaign. What advice would you give them? How do they lock in their gains and how do Democrats, you know, recapture the initiative?

Well, again, I think that everyone is kind of in the, you know, we're beaten, you know, beat, the Democratic community right, we're is kind of beaten down and, you know, licking their wounds. And they're going to do that for for a long time. But they better understand that we also just lost the popular vote. Right. So if you're Trump, I think that your you know, Susie Wiles and all those guys are hoping that he becomes more presidential. Right. I mean, listen, they have some real challenges themselves. You know, they may completely overestimate the whole thing about trying to deport deportation and what that means for America. Right. So they they can overplay their hand as well.

It's also true that Trump tends to run as a populist and govern as a royalist.

Yeah. Yeah, Well, I mean, I think that the thing is, is that he's going to have people around him now who are truly for for him, right? I mean, you know, you.

See that in his appointments. Yeah.

His appointed. Right. I mean. I mean, the fact is, is that he's going to have a Senate that is much more his people is going to have cabinets. That's much more his people. But they're going to have a bunch of challenges. And I'm not saying we shouldn't fight. We should fight like hell. But the fact is, is that if we want to win the Senate back, we've got to be a hell of a lot more like elissa Slotkin, right, in, in our economic messaging and kind of reaching people. So you're not again, using this overly moralizing language that that is more important than their economic future. It goes back to what you said about Larry Grisalano. You know, identity, their economic identity is what's important.

I think that they are counting on sort of cultural populism, social and social issues to Trump, no pun intended. Some of the economic concerns, you know, Trump, obviously, how people feel about how they're doing is going to be really important and they have to pay attention to that. But the agenda that Elon Musk is talking about, vast cuts in government and government programs, big tax cuts, continued tax cuts for corporations, for the wealthy, they'll disproportionately benefit from those. Some of the deregulation stuff, I think some will be welcome, tariffs and so on. I don't know that Elon's talking tariffs. Trump is. Some of this agenda is really threatening to the economic interests of these voters we're talking about. And, you know, I think Democrats have to pick their fights and some of those fights are not ones they should pick. I think he's going to do things that will alarm people and you should, you know, things that undercut democracy and so on. Those should be resisted. But I think these fundamental economic issues are where people should keep their focus. And whose side is he actually on.

Yeah listen. And I and how I would approach it is, is that we won in 2018 as a reaction to Trump. Right? Without a doubt. His behavior, it never became presidential. You know, women in particular acted. So in 18 we won because of him. In 20, we won again. We had a moderate candidate. Joe Biden ran a really good campaign. He took him on on the economic issues, etc.. We narrowly won, but it was really about Trump. And in 2022, we won those Senate seats because of extreme Republican candidates. Right. It was the head cases versus they head winds and we won because of the head cases. And so we got to quit winning because of them, and we got to start winning because of us. And we've got to get a true economic message that people start believing that we are on their side and we're going to provide them with the right type of economic future that they can't.

They meaning the Republicans.

The Republicans. Like, you know, we got to stop winning because, you know, they're losers, right. That didn't happen this time. And and so I think that that is what, 2026 and 2028 is about, is finding our voice as a party. So the word cloud is when you think about, you know, when you asked that simple question, what's was the first word or phrase that comes in the Democratic Party? It's there for the people. They're for the middle class. They're for me. Right. And we haven't had that in a long time. And we were running against a guy whose word cloud was he'll fix the economy and he'll fix the economy means that I'll do better under him. And that's the headwinds that you were talking about it at the beginning of this podcast that was really hard to overcome. But if we're not competing on an economic narrative or as Chris Lawrence says, the economic identity is way more important than the personal identity politics.

I think it's a good place to end. And so I always love talking to you because you speak with clarity and wisdom, and I hope folks hear your words today. And I just want to say to the listeners, we'll have a prominent Republican voice next week to talk about this election from their perspective. And I think you'll be interested to hear that discussion. I know it's a little off from our normal format. We'll get back to storytelling about people's stories in a couple of weeks, but this was a sizable event in the history of our country and merited getting a wise man on here. Even if you've heard from him before to help clarify things so. John, thanks so much.

Thanks for having me, brother. Appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to The Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Berry, Jeff Fox and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Lickteig and Haley Thomas. For more programing from IOP, visit politics dot u chicago dot edu.