Scribble

Audie Cornish

00:00:02

'If there was any doubt that Donald Trump has reordered the political landscape, well, it's gone. The election results tell it all. Trump made inroads among groups that have long been cornerstones of Democratic coalitions and also groups that have been Trump-curious, like Latino voters. The numbers for Latino men were especially eye popping. Trump won 54% of them, compared to Harris's 44%. So why did Latino voters go for Trump this time around? And what signs did Democrats miss? What will they do to bring them back into the fold? I'm Audie Cornish. And this is The Assignment. I saw some data like everyone else that made me think there's only one person I should talk to this week. There is one guy.

Chuck Rocha

00:00:54

It was that bad let's call Chuck.

Audie Cornish

00:00:56

'This is Chuck Rocha. He's a Democratic strategist and former union organizer from Texas. He's Mexican-American, has been working on Latino issues and with campaigns across the country, including, notably, Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Remember Bernie Bros?

Audie Cornish

00:01:13

Okay. So introduce yourself. Who you are and what you do.

Chuck Rocha

00:01:17

My name is Chuck Rocha and I'm the president and CEO of Solidarity Strategies. We're a full service political consulting firm and the largest Latino owned and operated political consulting firm in the Democratic Party.

Audie Cornish

00:01:30

I mean, you often talk about not having a college degree.

Chuck Rocha

00:01:34

I do.

Audie Cornish

00:01:34

You often talk about your Mexican heritage.

Chuck Rocha

00:01:38

Very much so.

Audie Cornish

00:01:38

You also talk about being a guy in the Democratic Party who tries to talk to men in ways that Democrats are not perhaps so great at.

Chuck Rocha

00:01:49

All of those are true and guilty as charged.

Audie Cornish

00:01:52

So what happened?

Chuck Rocha

00:01:54

I think that it's it's lazy for me or anybody else to say that this thing is broken. It's been being broken for a long time, especially with Latino voters. And I think it's important to level set as we've watched these things come in and all of you listening at home to think about blaming a Latino male or blaming a Latino bloc of voters or even Black males or any of these other little things that are sexy for folks to pull out of some kind of exit poll. The bottom line is Donald Trump was reelected last night because of white women and white men.

Audie Cornish

00:02:29

Okay. But I'm going to stop you there. I was reading let's see, it was David Rothkopf. He's who is a writer, left wing writer. And he said, "this is not a moment for instant analysis. The stakes are too high. He says those doing the analysis have records that are too dubious and need to do some introspection. At least I know I do. I was so wrong, so far off. My decades of experience were so useless to me that I need to spend some real alone time talking to people smarter than me to realize where I went wrong." So this is our version of that discussion.

Chuck Rocha

00:03:05

Yeah, and I agree.

Audie Cornish

00:03:06

If we were resetting. Right. If you thinking of like all of the experience you had the last couple of years helping the Bernie Sanders campaign, working on the 2020 election for the Biden team, how much of what, you know, feels useless in this moment?

Chuck Rocha

00:03:26

I just get aggravated and sometimes mad at myself, to be honest, is that I joined this party in 1990 when I was 20 years old as a factory worker. As you said, I'd never been to college because I wanted to fight NAFTA and bring jobs back. My factory was getting shipped to China. I wanted to quote unquote, drain the swamp of rich people that had all the power when I felt powerless.

Audie Cornish

00:03:48

And where were you living at the time?

Chuck Rocha

00:03:50

Just rural East Texas on a working for an hour and a half east of Dallas. I was tired of watching us spend money overseas when when I got my paycheck. This may sound relevant to folks who work for a living. If I got a little overtime, the government would take almost 40 or 45% of my money when I had a one year old baby to feed. So it was very aggravating for me. So I joined the Democratic Party because the union said we could fight back and put in people that look and act like us. Everything I just described to you last night was why working class Latinos voted for Donald Trump. We've allowed them to steal our message. And because I don't feel like they really believe in it, but they know that that works with working class people.

Audie Cornish

00:04:28

Let me challenge it. Sure. You're talking about you being this guy in the 1990s, and then I think about being a young person growing up in the Clinton era.

Chuck Rocha

00:04:37

Sure.

Audie Cornish

00:04:37

Right? It was Democrats who ushered in NAFTA. It was Democrats who ushered in sort of an orientation towards globalism. There are all of these kind of long running regimes that Democrats leaned into, especially during that period. And I wonder if you look back now and think there were the seeds of something there that would come back to haunt the party.

Chuck Rocha

00:05:03

I think so. I think we want to change. NAFTA was to check you a little bit. Was negotiated under George Bush. So they sent me to Washington to say, look, the Democrats are with us. You've got to go lobby Bill Clinton and these other Democrats before he talks. People like my governor, Ann Richards, who was for NAFTA, to say this is bad for workers. That was my first entree into politics. I'll tell that story.

Audie Cornish

00:05:26

Yeah. The complexities of that.

Chuck Rocha

00:05:28

'Sure. I tell that story to say that as a young 20 year old man with tight Wrangler jeans and a mullet halfway down my back, I wanted to fight somebody for the betterment. A lot of these working class Latino now, and even non-college educated white men who are in the broader sphere of podcast as I talk on a podcast, are living this same rebellion we're going to do with this crazy guy, Donald Trump, who wants to break the system. So last night. That's what I meant by sometimes feeling like maybe I didn't speak up enough. Maybe I didn't tell my own story loud enough because I wanted to fall in line with the party I've been with since 1990.

Audie Cornish

00:06:05

One of the perennial stories as a political reporter is about the Latino vote. And I'm going to try and get through this whole interview without you or I using the words not a monolith.

Chuck Rocha

00:06:16

Sleeping giant maybe.

Audie Cornish

00:06:17

Sleeping giant. Yeah, there's a couple of phrases at every single political story. Something. Something. Texas. Something. Something. You know, reaching the voters, meeting them where they are. Like this language is constant. It's perennial. And yet here we are, I think, in a way at an inflection point in what is a long running conversation. Even if you took a cursory step back to George W Bush, compassionate conservatism and Cuban migrants and things like that. There's been a long leaning of various parts of the Latino community. Into the Republican Party. So what is remarkable about this tipping point?

Chuck Rocha

00:07:04

I think what surprised me about what happened is that we expected the ongoing trend that we've seen now for three cycles. I think it's important to mention this vote has been maturing before our eyes. And that means it's not it's mom and daddy's or mom. Mom and dad is your granddaddy's vote. These Spanish speaking Mexican majorities were very Democratic, about 7030 up until a few cycles ago.

Audie Cornish

00:07:26

I like that word maturing, right. Because every group has a political maturity.

Chuck Rocha

00:07:30

The Italians matured, the French, whoever you are who came here. The average age of a Latino voter is 28 in this country. When we judge them against white voters or even black voters who the average age is 40, it's not the same thing.

Audie Cornish

00:07:44

I think that all the time. Yeah.

Chuck Rocha

00:07:45

So it's different. And so this as this demographic has become more mature, they're looking at politics different than their mom and dad's. And so back to the point of what shocked me is what really shocked me in this election was I knew would be tough in the battleground states. But to watch what happened in New Jersey and in New York and in California, where there was no presidential race, there was no governor's race. You saw this shift, a major shift in the way that working class Latinos will get more data as we go. But really moved because there's an anxiety that I saw in polls and I saw in focus groups that I think is the undertow here of people really feeling like they're anxious about where they are in their life. We all do. And I'll end this little matter on this is that I knew that there was a chance of of this election happening in this way because a majority of Americans for a year have told me in focus groups in campaigns from California to New York that I work on, that they thought the country was going in the wrong direction. We assumed as Democrats, though, they wouldn't vote for Donald Trump because they didn't like him. A lot of them who don't like the way he talks and what he does still voted for him because they wanted gas and groceries to be cheap as they were four years ago.

Audie Cornish

00:08:54

And we should mention you were working with if can I say this, Ruben Gallego, who is running for Senate in Arizona, performed.

Chuck Rocha

00:09:01

Way over way more than every other Democrat.

Audie Cornish

00:09:05

'Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Darren Soto in Florida, Gabe Vasquez in New Mexico, and even in the Wisconsin Senate race. How did you try and draw those campaigns in the direction you're talking about?

Chuck Rocha

00:09:23

I think it's important for.

Audie Cornish

00:09:25

Because I don't know if people call you to be like, yeah, get some Latinos. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's Latino guy. Can you I don't know a bodega. Like, I used to get this as a reporter. Like, can you go to the barbershop and give us our black voters story so they see you in the cowboy hat and they're like, you know, do that thing you do.

Chuck Rocha

00:09:42

Go get them Mexican rednecks, you know em well. A lot of people would call me for that, but not the people you mentioned.

Audie Cornish

00:09:47

Okay.

00:09:48

The people you mentioned live in the community, and fight for the community. So I love working for AOC or Gabe Vasquez. But let's talk about Ruben Gallego, because it's an important storyline here. If there's...

Audie Cornish

00:09:58

He was running against Kari Lake in Arizona, she had already had a failed bid. Right. Running for governor in the last cycle. So the voters were familiar with her and.

Chuck Rocha

00:10:09

She had name ID.

Audie Cornish

00:10:09

And some of her also in the national audience was familiar with her from everything from SNL to her election denialism.

Chuck Rocha

00:10:17

And loves Donald Trump. Loved Donald Trump more than any other candidate out there. She went to Mar a Lago more than she ever went to Tucson, like she loves her some Donald. So there's no separation there. And this is my point is that when you look at how Ruben Gallego performed with Latino men, with Latinos overall and working white class voters, he overperformed the top of the ticket in some cases by 15 points with Latino men, for just one example.

Audie Cornish

00:10:41

And when you say overperform, this is political speak for did you get more voters than the guy at the top of the ticket or the separation.

Chuck Rocha

00:10:49

Between him and vice president? Harris Yeah, and there's a separation across the country, to answer your question, it was because of the brilliance of Chuck Rocha, which I'd love to tell you because I need to get more work. That's not it at all.

Audie Cornish

00:10:59

I think you're going to get more work.

Chuck Rocha

00:11:01

Ruben Gallego was very intentional from the day. He's one of my best friends. That's why I worked for Ruben Gallego. And he from the first day was very intentional about centering men, Latinos and working class people in the middle of his campaign.

Audie Cornish

00:11:14

What does that mean exactly?

Chuck Rocha

00:11:16

What does that mean? That means that everything that he did was to message to them about him being that person. He grew up with a single mother. He had three sisters. He never had a bed to sleep until he went to college because the girls had the bedroom. He slept on the couch. He made it intentional to have carne asadas, to make it intentional, to have boxing match viewings for the Canelo fight for any Mexican out there. The canelo fight. I remember fighting consultants in our own team that said we're going to do what with boxing and violence. And Ruben was like, yes, we're going to because this is where our community is. I kid you not. Last Friday, we had a and sponsored a rodeo and had ten live bulls. These are things you normally don't see in a Democratic campaign that's very different. And leaning into the cultural competency of what Ruben Gallego as a candidate brought to this race.

Audie Cornish

00:12:05

What are some of the reluctances when you deal with campaigns, particularly Democratic ones or progressive ones, who are resistant to the things you're talking about? What how do they challenge you?

Chuck Rocha

00:12:17

They challenge me because it's not sometimes the way things have always been done. And because it's literally a business, they're very cautious on anything that happens that's outside of the norm.

Audie Cornish

00:12:26

So like boxing, like.

Chuck Rocha

00:12:28

That's not normal.

Audie Cornish

00:12:29

But it's it is normal for Republicans, right? It's one thing we saw with Donald Trump, who was side by side with the UFC CEO, Dana White on stage, giving him a moment to come out and not just shout out Trump, but shout out even as you mention, all the male podcasters in in that world. They're all of a piece. We've talked about this on the show, but it seems like there's nothing comparable for Democrats.

Chuck Rocha

00:12:55

'There's not. And then the bifurcation of media and the way that people consume information. When I started this career, I had a beeper and I was working for Ann Richards and TV was on three channels. Now it's spread over everything. So when you're talking about trying to reach specific men or specific demographic, just Latino voters, for one example, multi-language, multiplatform, and in most houses, multi-generational because they're newer immigrants. So they're living with their grandmother. That makes it very hard to reach them. And then when you finally do, if you show up with something that may not be appealing to a 20 year old dude because you're talking about whatever the issue of the week is from a policy book, because Democrats love to talk policy because we know we're right on policy to help people's lives better. It's the delivery.

Audie Cornish

00:13:38

Can't tell if that was sarcasm just then.

Chuck Rocha

00:13:40

Look, there's a running joke in the Chuck Rocha mantra, which is we're always bringing a policy book to a boxing match. And that's how we always get beat because folks just want something simple. Donald Trump has told us that he put his entire policy book on the front of a red hat and made it cool to wear. I don't think it's cool. I don't think it's good policy, but it was easy for people to comprehend. Oh, I'd like for things to be like they were four years ago. I'd like for a gas to be at this price. This is where I think we need to really do an inflection because we're right on the issue. We just have to be better at delivering that.

Audie Cornish

00:14:12

When we look at some of the issues in the exit polls, Latino voters especially men, talked about the economy as being number one. And of course, that was across the board for most voters. Abortion. Third and maybe fourth on their list of important issues. And one of the things I've sort of been thinking about is how in this country, especially in the political class, we wrestle with identity and what that means to a voter, that there's sort of like a hierarchy of who you think you are. And some politicians might think the most important thing about me is that I'm a black woman and that that is like the most important thing to do and appeal to me just through that lens and through the things they think will appeal to me as a result. But that that was deeply way off, at least for Democrats when they looked at the voting blocs we're talking about.

Chuck Rocha

00:15:07

'I think you're right. And I think that the most interesting part of what you just said is you saw Kamala Harris not talk about being a woman or a black woman a lot. She didn't start every conversation that way. She leaned into her housing plan, her policy book, and as Democrats are supposed to do. But there's a piece of this emotional connection. People ask me all the time, How did you get 73% of Latinos to vote for an old white guy from Vermont with a Brooklyn accent? And I said, A, he was trusted. He had talked about this his whole career, even when it was unpopular. And we told a story in a narrative about growing up in an immigrant household in Brooklyn when his father immigrated here from Poland and couldn't speak English. A lot of Latinos story is that way. And whether you're talking about identity, if you're Italian, if you are Irish, whatever that immigration story is to America, whether it's through Ellis Island or walking across a desert in Mexico. We all in my family and most families tell that immigrant story. And so we have forgotten how that is something very personal for people. It may not be the reason that they're voting, but because there's a lot of well-meaning, overeducated white consultants who are trying to relate with these black and brown voters. Sometimes it falls flat because they don't have the personal expressed. They don't make them bad people, and they're really good consultants in most cases. They just have a different life experience and a lot of people. So sometimes they walk so far away from the identity that they don't use it enough to even be relatable to the voter.

Audie Cornish

00:16:31

I'm thinking about another aspect of this, which is that there have been a couple cycles in a row where Democrats in particular have decided this thing happening in immigration policy is a moral outrage. This comment made by Donald Trump, etc. this slur is a moral outrage, full stop. And the conversation is over. There should be voters out there that are automatically turned off by those things. And I just get the sense over and over again that large chunks of the Latino electorate don't feel that way. They don't hear a comment like this comedian saying, you know, that Puerto Rico is an island of garbage and think, "well, that's it for me and Trump," you know, tearing up the ballot. Like that's not really how it works.

Chuck Rocha

00:17:20

'The way that Donald Trump talked about immigration was not targeted, and I think we all know this at Latinos, it was targeted at scaring white women in the suburbs because he was losing these white women because of the Dobbs decision and the choice issue. You're exactly right about the way Latinos think about immigration. And they really, in the polling shows this. They don't think he's talking to them because most of them, if they are voters, are U.S. citizens and have come through some kind of processes. But it also doesn't mean that we're in line with him to start deporting our grandmothers or our cousins. In every single focus group, and they can't all be wrong, every Latino pushed back on that with me and said, no, that's disgusting. I don't like that. But -- this was the big thing and what we learned in this election -- but I'm willing to look past that to get gas and groceries back to a comparable rate, because what I'm dealing with today is feeding my family.

Audie Cornish

00:18:12

I'm talking with Chuck Rocha, Democratic strategist, former union organizer from Texas. We'll be right back.

Audie Cornish

00:18:27

This is The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish. Talking with Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha. I want to be forward looking here. Did we just see not just an inflection point, but what we're going to see in many think pieces, a realignment that long ago Democrats said demography is destiny. And therefore, just because there are more brown people, there will be more people who will be leaning towards voting Democrat. To some extent, you even hear this in the replacement theory, ight, on the right wing that automatically more brown people in the country means it's going to be a more Democrat leaning electorate. That's just not the direction this is looking in. Can you give me your take on what we're seeing?

Chuck Rocha

00:19:13

I think in this election, what we saw was not a realignment. I think that it's a movement of voters like we normally see from one election to another. Over time, that becomes a pattern.

Audie Cornish

00:19:24

But this is the beginning of a chapter or the end of one?

Chuck Rocha

00:19:27

I think it's the middle, because I think that if it wasn't for people like Ruben or Gabe Vasquez or Bernie Sanders, that shows a pathway back for these voters who want to be Democrats. Their alignment and values lined up with what the Democrats have stood for our entire career, my entire career. And again, we've let somebody circumvent our messaging around a very popular populist economic issue of I'll help you bring jobs back, but they're passing laws to not bring jobs back. And the things that they do line up against what our values are. I think Mitt, in that we got our but what this week in an election. Absolutely. And there should be a reckoning on the way that we go to win these voters back. And we should show up early and often to win these voters back, because at their core, they care about clean water, clean air, jobs in America again, and fighting a corrupt system, which is what the Democratic Party was built on.

Audie Cornish

00:20:21

But the Republican Party has always tried to appeal to them through the economy and through social socially conservative issues. What are some of the socially conservative issues that you think Democrats did not take seriously enough as a potential roadblock or challenge?

Chuck Rocha

00:20:43

I do think in working in all of these elections and what I keep saying that to folks, it's not to brag that I got to work on a lot of elections. What it means is I got to watch the other side run ads against Democrats in New York, Michigan, New Mexico, Arizona and California. And across all of those, they never ran an ad saying, "we're going to do this thing to make your life better. Come vote for a Republican." What they said to the voters was, we're going to take Democrats want to take your tax dollars and help fund transgender surgeries in prisons, or they want to keep the border open for drugs coming in. At no point did any Republican where I was working in any race and we worked in 23 congressional races, did a Republican run a TV ad saying, we're going to do this thing and pass this law to make your life better. To your point, they would just use social issues to try to scare working class Latinos, black folks, white folks into saying you don't want to be a part of this party. They're crazy.

Audie Cornish

00:21:40

But is it trying to scare them or is it also tapping into the ongoing backlash to the political and social movements of 2020. And that that's not isolated to just Latino voters? Right.

Chuck Rocha

00:21:56

I think that they want to they have to win a portion, and I think they're winning a bigger portion.

Audie Cornish

00:22:01

Do you see what I'm saying about the social issues? Right. Like, I think one of the things I hear a ton on the right is if you are against certain issues, let's say trans related issues, it means you're a transphobe

Chuck Rocha

00:22:13

Absolutely.

Audie Cornish

00:22:14

And if you raise questions, so to speak, about various issues on race, you are racist that they were able to tap into something to the electorate to say, hey, maybe you aren't all those things. Maybe it's not fair that you should be labeled in that way because you think differently. Like I feel like that's sort of the argument I read in Substack Nation and newsletters.

Chuck Rocha

00:22:37

But I don't, and I push back on that a little bit and it's not push back is not the right word.

Audie Cornish

00:22:42

No please do because this is like on the pages of The New York Times, right? Like they're obsessed.

Chuck Rocha

00:22:45

But when I do focus groups with these voters, right, I'm in there intimately talking to them about they care about At no point does anybody lead with transgender issues.

Audie Cornish

00:22:55

So why do the ads work?

Chuck Rocha

00:22:57

Because they have to get just enough, because they don't have an economic issue. And this is how they brilliantly use it, because most people in all of these focus groups are. They don't care about who wants to be trans or who is gay. They have a gay member or trans member in their family. They would like to say, just, I'll stay out of your private life. You stay out of mine. So what Republicans did, which was really interesting, is they were like, we're taking your taxpayer dollars to fund this thing for transgender, which was what really was working for them, even though it happened under Donald Trump. Their messaging is so much more succinct on dividing than we ever do as Democrats.

Audie Cornish

00:23:33

More succinct on dividing than Democrats are at uniting.

Chuck Rocha

00:23:38

At fighting back. Or saying something like, Our lawyers would never allow some of the stuff that they do to us, for us to do to them, because I try to do it every day in the ads that I write, and they're like, look crazy ass Chuck Rocha. You can't put that on TV.

Audie Cornish

00:23:50

What kind of conversation would you like to hear among the political class in the Democratic Party in the next not the next few weeks? Because I think we'll be witnessing a live vivisection, the next couple of months.

Chuck Rocha

00:24:06

I'd like to hear us talk about a strategic plan to rebrand this party as the brand of workers and the sanctity of work. The one thing that stuck in my in my heart through this whole election was listening to focus groups in all of these races where these men, these women, these grandmothers who still have to work because they have no money. We don't talk to people about what it means to work and to work with your hands. Whether I say this, whether you're showering after you get done with work or you're putting on a tie and showering before you go to work. We didn't we forgot to talk about the sanctity of work and let Republicans steal some of that with Made in America it brings jobs back here.

Audie Cornish

00:24:47

What do you think they've been doing instead?

Chuck Rocha

00:24:49

We ran and we should and I don't. This is I want to make sure I say this in the right way is that Dobbs was a big deal. It was a very big deal to women. And we should have raised and done all the work we can on Dobbs because we took a human right away from women in this country. And it's sickening. And we should run ads on it. But we could do that at the same time about talking about the sanctity of work of a mother or a man and talk about standing up for their rights as workers to make their lives better, because work is all people have to do. Everything. Work is really what ties people together Democrat, Republican, black or white. Work is what we all have to do if we want to feed our family. So we should talk about how we make work easier. Better. Where you get more work, you get better insurance, whatever that is. Centering work if you want to strategy. Because what I'm giving you right now is just a communication strategy on rebranding a party to go back to the reason I joined this party.

Audie Cornish

00:25:40

What do you think you'll end up talking about instead?

Chuck Rocha

00:25:44

I think we'll focus on winning a midterm election and what policies Republicans, if they have all branches of government and are unfettered. Whatever they do now, they all have to be accountable for. And you can use that if you're a half assed strategist to figure out how you show the difference between that party and this party based off of what they're doing.

Audie Cornish

00:26:03

So it's a defensive strategy, right? They do something. You react to it.

Chuck Rocha

00:26:07

While talking about what we should be doing to build this country. That's the sanctity of work piece.

Audie Cornish

00:26:12

Is that the same as kind of reconstructing the next step? Meaning if we've looked at the Obama coalition as not having legs going forward or not having another candidate who can carry it the same way. How should Democrats think about what their coalition is? Because there's a lesson probably to be learned from these numbers with Latino men. I mean, just to give one example, Star County, that's in your home state of Texas. 97, 98% Latino. Joe Biden won that county 2020, 52% of the vote. And now it's looked like it's flipped, first time in more than 130 years, Donald Trump wins it by 60% of the vote. Like, that's not just a flip. That's not just a swing. It feels like a sound rejection. So what would looking forward actually mean beyond the midterms?

Chuck Rocha

00:27:16

I think it would mean doing what we've talked about doing but haven't done. We talk about all the things we're going to do to help people, but we don't communicate that well enough for them to believe us. And unless we do that, it's just going to get worse. And and it's even worse than that because we don't have a leader right now. We just lost a presidential election. We will not have another one for four years. We won't have a Senate majority and probably not a House majority. But we need to have somebody that we rally around who's talking about the things that would attract more regular people to the party, which is what the Republicans have done for the last 8 to 12 years under the mantra of Donald Trump. And I do think Donald Trump is a little not taking anything away from him. But the man has 1,000% name I.D. and he sounds like me when I joined the party. What comes after Donald Trump? And who are one of 30 people right now who are already putting together a presidential campaign on the Democratic side for a 2028 run? There's going to be a lot of soul searching and a lot of finger pointing. But we should be figuring out what we do to help people and communicate that better. We focus so much on the policy and not on the strategy to deliver the the policy to the people. Joe Biden was an incredible president and did incredible things with legislation. He gets absolutely no credit for that. We have to do a better job at being the party of what this party has always stood for, which is a party of people.

Audie Cornish

00:28:39

Let me I want to ask this question a slightly different way. We've talked about one realignment here, right? This shift of Latino voters in some very key places. There is this other realignment that was happening, which is white, college educated voters just kind of firmly pushed into the Democratic column in so many ways. And we hear that in the conversation and in a way, the political obsession with the suburbs. How do these things how do you reckon write these two trends? Because can a Democratic Party that now is made up of mostly people with college degrees do and talk about the things you're saying effectively?

Chuck Rocha

00:29:28

'It's the question of the day. It's the question that we have to look at inside of our party. Our party. Like most things are run by college educated folks who are very successful, who should be who've worked hard and been through all the history, who knows policy, who knows how to fix things because they have degrees in how to fix things. But sometimes you lose the connectivity between that and regular people. And there's a moment in time. That's why I don't think we're at the beginning of the end of the story. I think we're at the middle of the novel and it can still be told to where it comes back to Democrats if we do the right things by connecting the smartest people in the party -- many of them, most of them have college degrees -- to strategists like me and other great strategists who maybe didn't go to college and who've been through a lot of trauma in their personal life, and who can help

Audie Cornish

00:30:10

I didn't mean to make that distinction as though that delineates smartness. Sometimes in political talk when I talk about college degree and not college degree, people think, I'm talking about smart, not smart. I'm literally talking about just having the degree in your hand. The majority of the country does not have a four year diploma somewhere.

Chuck Rocha

00:30:30

There's pain that connects all of us.

Audie Cornish

00:30:31

And Democrats didn't use to be the party of all the college degrees.

Chuck Rocha

00:30:37

'When people ask me, what is my strategy to messaging, I'm like many politicians and their consultants talk about their granddaddy did this, other grandmamma did this. I remember going to a payday lender to get 35 bucks to buy diapers for my son when I was working in that factory. I remember my truck getting repo 22 years ago and what that feeling felt like. So when I sit down to write a TV ad, I draw on those traumas in my life that weren't my granddaddy's or my grandmama's or my mother's, even though my mother went through a lot of the same trauma. I draw it from myself. It makes me a very imperfect man, but it also makes me a pretty good strategist of relating with common people because I've lived through what they've lived through. So when I'm arguing this point with somebody that's got two master's degrees and they're explaining to me about what's the right way to do this, to sell this policy that will make gas cheaper. I'm like, I don't think they're going to get it. We should talk about it in this way. And it's just one example. Donald Trump speaks in very simplistic terms, and the way that he speaks in those terms is a lot like how I speak in those terms because I don't have all of the fancy words either. Well, most of America, to your point, don't either. We need to make sure we can take complex policies. And I'm not going to say dumb it down because it ain't dumbing it down, but it's making it comprehendible to folks who are working two jobs, who got kids screaming at him, who are trying to figure out if they can pay for T-ball next week because it costs $35.

Audie Cornish

00:32:03

What are the three questions you have going forward after this election?

Chuck Rocha

00:32:10

A) I'll keep saying this. Can we return to the values that made me love this party which was fighting for working folks? The Working party of America? There should be a party that represents workers. And there should be a party that represents the workers bosses. And the Republicans were always the boss party. I still think it's that way. But the American people don't. We have to fix that. That's one. Two, we need to put more cultural competency into the apparatus of the structure of parties and campaigns. There were not a single Democrat or Republican congressional race in America that had a Latino manager. But we're all sitting here talking about how this Latino vote did this or that. When there's none of us at the table. So don't step to me and tell me about what we should or shouldn't be doing when you're not even including us at the campaign level. That's not the same for the party committees and their super PACs. They've realized we've had a problem for a couple of cycles and now they're spending a lot of money on consultants because they have money and infrastructure. But the candidates themselves, it's hard to break in if you're a poor brown or black kid into a campaign. And I think the third thing is we've stopped talking about aspirations. And people misthink of Donald Trump as somebody who's aspirational because people think that they can be rich like him. Aspiration in our community is very real because we're very young and we've quit talking to people in that way because our mothers or our grandmothers made unlimited sacrifices for us to have the great wealth and things that we have today. We need to go back to an aspirational message to folks to get them to make sure that we look past what makes us different and more about what brings us together.

Audie Cornish

00:33:43

Well, Chuck, thank you so much for talking with us. I really appreciate it.

Chuck Rocha

00:33:47

Thank you.

Audie Cornish

00:33:52

Chuck Rocha is a Democratic strategist. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. And this episode was produced by Jesse Remedios, Sofía Sanchez, Dan Bloom and Grace Walker. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We also had support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks, as always to Katie Hinman. And thank you for listening.

The Assignment with Audie Cornish