State of the 2028 Primary: Kamala’s Fragile Lead, AOC’s Surge, and the Trump-Vance Dilemma

Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
Welcome back to the newest episode of Progressive.
I'm here with my Co host Ben. We have a really special episode
planned for you guys today. We have split ticket and the
Yale youthful Healer with ArmandThomas and Milan Singh.
Our Milan welcome to the show. Hey.
Nice to be here. Thanks for having us very
excited. I got to say, having two of the
heavyweights of polling, it's making me feel super inadequate

(00:28):
about having no clue how data science works or how these
numbers or excel. But anyways.
That's why they're here to explain it so so as layman can
understand. I'm just not happy with the
night. No, no, no, I just, I just make
models. Milan here is the one who's with
the big dogs. He's the one running the
youthful, which I was to say if anyone has been living under a

(00:49):
rock or is not interested in polling, that's what we're here
to talk about. So let's go ahead and open up
the I see we got the crosstabs here, but let's go ahead and
open it up. Milan take the stage.
Yeah. So we just got out of the field
about two weeks ago with the spring version of our survey.
We did our first survey after weestablished ourselves last fall.
We asked a bunch of questions, stuff on generic ballot for

(01:11):
2026, Mccratic primary, Republican primary in 2028,
social policy, education policy.That's a salient topic right
now. We did some interesting AB tests
that I'm happy to talk about later on.
Homelessness policy and then taxation of the spending, the
budget deficit, Some stuff on foreign policy in the border,

(01:32):
including immigration, and then finally our usual battery of
objective and subjective civics questions.
Stuff like, can people correctlydefine the Senate filibuster?
Mostly no. Objective stuff like what do
people see the role of the judiciary as?
Yeah, bunch of stuff. Happy to get into it.
Well, real quick, what's an AB test?
I'm not familiar. Oh yeah.

(01:53):
Sorry, an AB test is that we split our sample in half and
half of them gets one version ofsomething, half of them gets
another version. So specifically say with the
homelessness 1. So what we did is we split the
sample in half and they each gotone version of a question.
So the first version then split a the conservative message is
the same in both. It just says homeless people are

(02:16):
often drug addicts or mentally ill and they need to be taken
off the streets and locked up toprotect law abiding citizens.
This we kind of took from, you know, typical Republican or
conservative messaging on homelessness, stuff that you
might see the New York Post run,stuff that you might see
conservatives online talk about.And then in each version of the
split, we offered a different progressive message.

(02:38):
So in version A, we offered a progressive message where we
frame things as a human right. So housing is a human right.
And the way to fix homelessness is for the government to
guarantee housing to the poor. And the second version says our
response to homelessness should focus on helping people find
shelter and treatment, not on throwing poor people in jail.
So similar policy implications are obviously not super

(03:01):
detailed. The main difference is how the
progressive side is framed. We did this because I was
curious to see how human rights framing impacts support for
progressive policy. You see progressives often say,
for example, Healthcare is a human right or a living wage is
a human right, or a good job is a human right.
And I'm assuming they're saying this because they believe it

(03:22):
helps persuade people. And I wanted to check whether
that was actually true. And at least when it comes to
homelessness, we found that it was not true.
We found that, you know, just look at the data here.
When you frame it as a, as a human right, about 63% of people
take the progressive position and total 38% take the
conservative position or say they're not sure.

(03:43):
When you frame it not as a humanright, 85% take the progressive
side, 8% take the conservative side, and then 7% are not sure.
So it does seem, at least for this issue, that framing things
as a human right reduces supportfor the progressive policy.
Well it's interesting I noticed that the the non human right
framing also does mention treatment specifically kind of

(04:06):
in to address the the drug addict part from the other
options. So I wonder I might play a role
as well. But.
I think it's it's, yeah, that's definitely a good point.
It's not certain that the home that the human right framing is
the main driver, the biggest driver, the only driver of

(04:26):
differences in support. But I do think it's, it's
interesting, right? I I have you, you know, the more
left wing people you see talkingabout homelessness often focus
on what's called housing first, which is, you know, as it
sounds, get people into housing first, then focus on the other
stuff. And the more moderate liberal,
liberal approach often talks about, well, we need to get
people treatment, we need to getpeople in shelters if they're

(04:47):
having drug addiction problems, etcetera.
So, yeah, you're right, that could be a factor as well in
kind of changing the well. Interesting.
OK, Well, so with these AB tests, obviously you framed the
progressive policies as human rights.
I mean, it seems to me that thisis part of a growing pattern of
like toxicity of progressivism, if I'm getting that right.
The idea that all these, you know, oh, it's a human right

(05:07):
things or things that you would just otherwise associate with
the city of San Francisco are. I was going to mention that.
Yeah, right. The what this poll seems to be
showing is not even necessarily,you know, an opposition to
homelessness in general the way Republicans would want, because

(05:29):
the second option says we want to treat homelessness, right.
You know, if you phrased it as give people houses versus, you
know, lock all the homeless people up and throw away the
key, that's one thing. But you said, you know, let's
focus on treating these people, right.
People don't want homelessness to be a thing.
And they think, right, this is amore reasonable, sensible

(05:50):
approach. That is something that's more,
you know, baby steps rather thanpie in the sky.
And that's different from the predominant progressive way of
thinking, which says, you know, we deem something as a human
right. And once that thing is a human
right, you have to argue for it every single time or else you
oppose human rights and you insert whatever bad word that

(06:10):
you want to call that person right.
And as you've now seen that thatstyle of messaging among
Republican voters, obviously, but now Democratic voters as
well, too, you know, they are starting to reject that on mess.
It's interesting that like that kind of like maximalist framing
where it tries to almost make itimpossible to take the more

(06:31):
conservative position by framingit in such black and white
terms, kind of has the opposite effect.
And we were talking about this last episode in terms of
immigration and how some of the backlash relates to progressives
kind of more taking the framing away from like a self-interest
rational choice model for the voter, where it's like, here's
how immigration is going to improve the country.
And these are great people who are going to come and lift this

(06:54):
all up and improve our country as a whole versus these are
people who we need to help. These are, it's a human rights
issue. Like we, it's, it's our
responsibility. And I, I, I wonder if this goes
hand in hand a little bit. And that's kind of like a
broader progressive messaging issue at the moment.
I think a lot of it is related to everything that everyone has
said about, you know, education,polarization and all, right,

(07:16):
Americans especially like to think of themselves as smart,
practical people who don't like being told what to do by, you
know, you know, you can use the word uppity, right?
People who, you know, occupy more influence than they ought
to, right? And in this case, these are
people who don't necessarily share the same cultural values
as the people they're trying to convince who come out, you know,

(07:38):
come to these places and say, you know, these are these human
rights that you have to support.And you know, I, you know, I
don't read everything that Matt Iglesias says, but people who do
will note that he says that a lot of those people are very,
very annoying, right? And that's a big reason as to
why a lot of their messages get rejected is that the way that
they present themselves is fundamentally annoying, which is

(07:59):
to say you're wrong. I'm smarter than you.
If you don't believe this, you are stupid and you need to be re
educated, right? And that's right.
In every polling question, people hear one thing, but then
under that there's the subtext for what it's actually trying to
get AT, right? And they're instinctively
responding to that, whereas the way Question B is framed is not

(08:22):
only, I think, more in line withwhere people are, but also, you
know, is framed in a way that's a little bit more agreeable and
on the level of where people arein terms of how they want to be
talked to. Yeah, I think.
I think that's, that's, you know, one thing I think that
kind of shows that in the data is that if you look at the
difference between question A and question BA, lot of the

(08:44):
decreased support for the progressive position when you go
from B to A goes to people saying they're not sure.
It's not that you see people, you know, agreeing with the
conservative side. It's a lot of people who say,
oh, you know, compared to that more reasonable, more baby steps
option that's like, oh, I'm, I'mnot necessarily on the side of
the most right wing position here, but you know, I'm, I'm not

(09:06):
sure I can endorse the most fullthroated left wing position
either. I think that's important to
notice as well. This is this is a really, really
great day for radical centrism. This is what I'm getting at
here. Is that what I'm hearing?
On that note, maybe we would, maybe we should take a look at I
think what, what drew the biggest headlines from this
poll, your Democratic 2028 primary top line results, which

(09:29):
I thought were very interesting and I I believe this was your
first post election Democratic primary poll for 2028.
So did these results surprise you?
Obviously the big headlines withAOC and Pete Buttigieg over
performing probably where people's expectations were
Kamala underperforming a little bit still in first place.
So what were your big takeaways and were you surprised with

(09:51):
these results? Yeah, I was surprised that AOC
polled as high as she did. That was not what I was
expecting going in. I thought it would be Harris,
then probably Pete, and then some spattering of like the most
well known other people on the list.
As you can see down here, a lot of these people have pretty low
name recognition, so that might help with some of their vote

(10:13):
shares. But I'm surprised how well AFC
did. I think, you know, the context
of her doing the national fighting oligarchy tour with
Bernie. Maybe that's a reason.
Maybe Democratic primary voters are more aware of her or, you
know, registered Democrats are more aware of her in terms of
favorability, you know, which potential candidates national
Democrats like and don't. I was a little surprised to see

(10:34):
Federman as far underwater as hewas.
I assumed he'd come in at kind of like or something.
I also don't know what, what Stephen A Smith did to make
people so mad at him. I don't you know, I mean he he
has pretty low name recognition,but like.
Calling out Brawny, he crossed the line.
I guess I mean, maybe LeBron rigged this toll.

(10:55):
You know, 34% of people saying they don't like him.
I was, I was a little surprised with him.
Yeah, I'm I'm calling BS. Honestly, a good amount of
Democratic primary voters answering a poll 3 1/2 years
before the actual election probably don't know who Stephen
A Smith is, if we're being honest.
I was, I was going to ask with the sampling on this one like
are we? I don't worry.
It's like a sampling issue because you know, we all know

(11:17):
primary voters are not the same as general election and these
people that are answering this kind of like you said, poll this
early are very different than your casual hey.
Answering a poll like this now are probably all on Twitter,
right? This is the most plugged in
Group of people who are saying these things, right?
And if you look at the Democratic primary base that's

(11:39):
on Twitter in a lot of this appeal is not really
ideological, right? It's it's it's a team sport.
It's right, which, you know, which star, you know, batter, do
we want to hit as many home runsout of the park, right.
And that changes based on the latest actions that people take,
right? You saw there was that poll with
Cory Booker that, you know, rosereally high after he did his

(12:00):
filibuster thing. Honestly, you should include
Chris Van Holland in his in the next poll.
Yeah, I'm, I'm sure if we had been in the field after Booker's
filibuster, we would have put him in and he probably would
have scored pretty well. I think it was AOC.
So you're surprised about AOC? I'm really not as surprised
about AOC because AOC's role within the Democratic Party
she's been in, she's been aroundfor six years now, right?

(12:22):
She's not new anymore. When she first got onto the
scene, I was, I was in college at the time.
I remember all the energy about that.
One of my friends actually, you know, worked on that campaign in
2018. She was very much an insurgent,
right? Go going from the outside in and
the way that, you know, a lot ofmainstream Democrats who

(12:46):
fundamentally, they might not love everyone in the
establishment, but they broadly thought that the direction of
the Democratic Party was, you know, in going in the right
direction. They were afraid of what AOC was
trying to do. Six years later, I don't think
the Democratic establishment, the way it is, has that
credibility. And six years later on, AOC
herself has also built up enoughloyalty in terms of actually

(13:10):
standing for the capital D Democratic Party brand that, you
know, the MSNBC watching demographic of establishment
liberals is actually willing to say, you know what?
She, you know, I'm negatively polarized by Trump, one, but
two, you know, she's been standing in the trenches long
enough that I'm, you know, open to voting for her president.

(13:32):
And, you know, she does speak towhere the primary base is in a
very, very, you know, appealing way in that sense.
So I'm not as surprised that that's that that's where it is.
You know, in terms of AOC, Pete Buttigieg, I think that's just
an artifact of, you know, the demographic that answers these

(13:53):
polls being again, the MSNBC watching college educated
liberal demographic that loves Pete Buttigieg, right.
When I've talked to some of my friends, both at the youth poll
and just otherwise about Pete, most of them think he will not
make it on the Democratic primary, primarily because they
think he will not do well in South Carolina.

(14:14):
Which I mean, probably is true if I had to guess.
I mean, do you remember 4 year? I guess it'll be 8 years ago
There was that SNL joke they made about how a black family
and they said they were supporting Pete Buttigieg and
everybody was like ha ha ha. I I remember that one Washington
Post column that was like, is this because of homophobia?
And there's a huge furor. Oh my gosh.

(14:35):
It's racist to say that this might be because of homophobia,
But yeah, I mean, he never pulled well in South Carolina,
and he did decently in Iowa and in more northern states where
the Democratic primary electorate was more white.
So essentially, it's more what we're seeing the data versus
well, what what I don't say attracts logically, but there's
a correlation, you know, no, no causation, nothing to try.

(14:59):
But also, I guess the thing too,I want to circle back though,
with with AOC, is this one of those situations where this
primary base, like you said, theMSNBC watching ledge college
liberals, which I say that knowing that that includes me
are way more favorable to votingfor someone like that.
Because with all these like favorability ratings and all
these, oh, most likely to win the nominee hits like I don't

(15:21):
know if that's a winning candidate for anyone who is no
longer in that camp. Very similar.
To, well, that kind of thing. Go ahead, Milan.
No, we, we did. We're waiting to get so we have
all the data back from this. We didn't get a chance to clean
all of it. We had some issues with the Max
DIF tests. For those who don't know, a Max
DIF question is you might have alist of say, in this case, 16

(15:41):
candidates. We asked people which of these
candidates is more likely to beat a Republican to win the
presidency, and we presented them too randomly.
And then, you know, in expectation.
If the candidates were all equally likely, you'd expect
them to get 50%, right? They'd be selected 50% of the
time because they're each zone. We still have to crunch the
numbers for that. We have the raw numbers, but

(16:02):
they're not cleaned. By that I mean that what you
should be doing, if you want to be very precise, is you say, oh,
count the times they were shown to people and then divide or use
that as the denominator for the times they were picked.
We still are waiting on that. And because it's exam season
next week, I haven't asked anyone to do it yet.
I did eyeball it. Eyeballing it, the most

(16:23):
electable candidate among Democrats was Mark Cuban, then
Josh Shapiro, then the least electable candidates were, let
me look this up. I sent this to someone.
I'd be curious where Kamala would rank in that.
Think she was like, middle of the path.
Yeah. The least electable candidates
were Stephen A Smith was the worst, Ruben Gallego's second

(16:43):
worst, and then JB Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer tied for the
third worst. Some of that might be a function
of just not everyone knows who Stephen A Smith is.
People might not know who Ruben Gallego is, but, you know, like,
I would guess. I mean, Armin, you give me your
take, but if I asked you who themost electoral people on this
list were, I don't think you'd disagree with that as a top
three. Yeah.

(17:03):
I mean, I don't, I mean, I thinkthat.
I mean, we all know Democrats have been harping on
electability since 1972, right? Like, this is, this is not new.
Like, my, my mother, every time there's some vaguely Liberal
Democrat who gets nominated, she'll mention George McGovern
and Walter Mondale, right? And granted, the left has not

(17:25):
been drugged that thoroughly in now 40 years, but 2024 kind of
felt like that to a lot of people.
And so they're really, you know,scared of screwing up again.
I think it's notable that the top three there were Cuban,
Shapiro and Kelly, who are all, you know, white men, right?
There's definitely a sense that,OK, you tried a woman, it didn't

(17:49):
work. You tried a black woman, it also
didn't work. So maybe America is just
fundamentally A misogynistic country or something.
I'm not, you know, an expert on gender relations, so I can't
really speak to that. But I think it makes sense,
right? You know, they know that Mark

(18:10):
Kelly is an astronaut, right? When you when you think of what
you know about these people, right?
Mark Cuban is a businessman. He's a lot richer than Donald
Trump. He's from Texas and he owns a
sports team, right? The average person's ideological
sense does not boil down to liberal or conservative, right?
Nobody thinks, oh, he supports this bill or that bill, and

(18:30):
that's going to make him do wellwith this demographic, right?
It's it's, it's like, it's like the question in the poll, right?
Can I get a beer with this guy? Is this guy cool?
Right? Mark Cuban is pretty cool.
Joshua Bureau, Very, very cool guy, right?
Mark Kelly, the guy literally went to space, right?
Like those those people are objectively, you know what I

(18:50):
think the average voter would say are cool in terms of that
being the electorate. I mean, Josh Shapiro won by 15.
OK, granted, he he won by. 50. He's a crazy guy, but he still
won by 15. Well, he.
Won a lost by three against the crazy guy so.
And and as he won. His AG races.
Yeah, the attorney general races, right.

(19:12):
He won both of those when Trump,OK, well, the first one was when
Trump won the state and the second one, some would say Trump
won the state then, but no Biden, Biden won the state, no.
And for Kelly, right, Kelly notoriously has been very good
at winning in tough, you know, environments, right, 2020, you

(19:33):
know, Trump nearly won the stateand the electorate that showed
up in 22 definitely was pro Trump and he still won.
And some of that was, you know, possibly due to Blake Masters,
right? But even in 20, he ran against
Mcsally right in 2020. Seems like by all accounts a
normal Republican. Definitely at this point, the

(19:55):
best Republican candidate that Arizona Republicans have, you
know, nominated in the past eight years, so.
I mean, kind of speaking on whatwhat Armin mentioned about
perceptions of candidates, you know, what's seen as cool,
what's not. I was talking to a couple of my
friends about this, you know, after the election over the last
few months. And something one of them said

(20:16):
to me stuck out, which was it isnot cool to be a Democrat if
you're a young man these days. And I think that is really true.
I saw like the stupidest clip oflike Andrew Saltz today where he
was like, I would used to be a Democrat because Bill Clinton
cheated on his wife in the Oval.And that was and now Trump.
Podcast, I'm sorry, I have no idea who these people are he's.

(20:38):
A shit comedian. Is that the Joe Rogan crew?
Kind of. Yeah, no, I, I don't interact
with those people at all. The.
Only one with Gillis is funny, but Andrew Schultz is like, I
don't know, I don't think he's that funny, but I think it does
get at something. Zachary and I were looking at
the crosstabs today. He tweeted this out and he got a

(20:59):
good number of likes on it. But he found in our data that
among 18 to 21 year old men, Trump's net approved net
favorability, excuse me, was +7.So 52% said they liked him, 45%
said they disliked him. Harris's net favorability was
-48 so 24% said they said they liked her and 72% said they

(21:19):
didn't like her. 24% favorability rating for Kamala
Harris among young men is that blew me away.
That's not that. I mean, so I think I mean, you
guys have had the Rooney on thispodcast, right?
She can talk about gender relations a lot more than I can,
right? But what I think I would say,
right, is at least when you lookat it from the sense of the

(21:40):
Democratic Party, right? You had Barack Obama and then
after Barack Obama, what would the big social, you know,
cultural movements that happenedthat the left responded to,
right? You had gay marriage in 2015.
You had Hillary getting nominated in 2016 by, you know,
repudiating the Class 1st stuff that Bernie was doing and doing

(22:02):
all in on, you know, race identity issues.
And in response to that, the party doubled down on that.
And then in 2018 and 19, you hadme too, right?
That one 2-3 punch combo is naturally the type of, you know,
cocktail to get some kind of radicalization of the male
population going, right, especially for younger Gen.

(22:23):
Z people. These people would like 10 years
old when Donald Trump was president the first time, right?
Like when I was 10 years old, OK, Obama was president, right?
But when Bush was president, I don't really remember what Bush
did, right, whether he was good or bad, right?
People don't necessarily know what Trump did.
And even if they even if they like Trump or dislike Trump,

(22:44):
that's not saying they support all of those conservative
policies that he's doing, right,the tariffs or the deportations
or all that. And I think, oh, this guy
vaguely says the right stuff that I kind of, you know, my
vibes kind of align with, right?And even if I disagree with him,
right, then that's going to put me on the side of Kamala and the

(23:04):
Democrats who have now set theirentire partisan agenda as being
affirmatively pro woman and affirmatively pro LGBT, which
are two things that, you know, alot of traditional masculinity
is defined in opposition to, right?
And for a lot of non white people especially, I mean, white
people too, but non white peoplewho are in, you know,

(23:27):
traditional, more traditional environments, you're gonna see,
you know, swings towards the GOP, which is, you know, I
guess, you know, now taken the mantle of defending traditional
masculinity, or so they say. I think that's so true.
And I think something that's important though for Democrats
that I've noticed is it's not necessarily that like Democratic

(23:49):
politicians were dominating and completely like proposing all
these radical like anti men policies or whatever.
I think it's that Democrats had a huge cultural dominance even
through the Trump term that I think among young people really
like is just thought of as connected with liberals and the
Democrats. Like even I feel like Hollywood

(24:11):
as a whole is thought of as thatwhere like weirdly, people will
connect. Like among these young people,
they come out, they came of age in a time where people would
connect like not liking the new Star Wars movie to actually be
kind of the Democratic Party's fault in a weird way.
Like I, I think that is a connection that a lot of young
voters made. And when they came of age,
you're talking about how Trump was like barely starting his

(24:32):
first term and they're still in middle school or whatever, but
they also came of age like the kind of woke culture or whatever
backlash was kind of a younger person counterculture to years
of conservative. Yeah, and.
I think they came of age where that was like the Dominic
culture. And if anything, if they came of
age being told like, oh, you youcan't say this or you might get

(24:53):
in trouble for this. It that became the
counterculture to be like anti woke, like kind of Joe Rogan
barstool types where they're notnecessarily that conservative,
but it's just a cultural like it's cool to rebel thing.
I mean, I want to write a lot about this, but like, a lot of
it has to do with the rise of social media and the Internet,
right? Like when we were kids, like

(25:13):
Twitter was sort of a thing, butit wasn't used as a mass
communication way that it is now.
Oh, and the, the other thing I need to mention, right, I
mentioned all the gender stuff was all of the police shootings
as well that were videotaped andbroadcast all over the Internet,
right? And 13 and 14 and 15, right?
That had a big, oh, and Oh yeah,2020, of course.

(25:35):
How can we, how can we, how can we forget that, right?
When when I was a kid, everybodyused to make jokes about George
Bush and the Iraq War and, you know, him doing 911 and all of
that, right then that was the thing that everybody was
rebelling against. I just don't think a lot of
people, especially, you know, discourse generators who live in

(25:57):
very blue areas where everybody is a liberal, realized the
extent to which what they saw asnormal, you know, in terms of
the cultural zeitgeist was very abnormal for a lot of people and
for young people. They were reacting to that.
So one thing I remember that wasstriking.
I had a couple of buddies from school who were on the Biden Ben

(26:18):
Harris campaign last summer. There were 14 people on Kamala
Harris's digital team who did, who ran social media and
everything. Guess how many of them were
straight men? 0 Zhu, Seg. 111 guy and you
know, I'm, I'm not trying to say, oh, this is like why
Democrats have lost ground. This is like my one theory of

(26:38):
everything, but I think it is a bit of a tell.
You know, the campaign, there were all these tweets and memes
about Brad Summer. And like, I listened to the
album because I heard people talking, but it was crying, but
they didn't speak about the Kendrick Lamar Drake beef once.
Every young guy I know is following that.
And I was like, come on. That's kind of malpractice to
not even address, you know, or to try to get in on that

(27:00):
cultural moment if you're going to get in on a different
cultural moment that frankly, you know, more appeals to women
and gay men that's. Another Tim Wolz tweet from the
official account saying that AOCcan run a mean pick 6 and that
he can get an audible on a play.I will say I think on people who
live in very blue areas, I'm from Massachusetts arm and you

(27:22):
are too. It's very blue where we're from.
And so, you know, in high school, you see like all the
like, oh, like we have like school walkouts.
We have like for climate change,for gun violence, for all these
things. You see a lot of left wing
overreach. You know, I recently talked to a
friend from here who's from South Carolina, and this person
is gay during a, they're very show person, but they mentioned
like, oh, yeah. Like when I came out, my mom was

(27:43):
like, don't tell your dad. And I remember thinking like,
wow. Like, that's surprising because
your parents are both, like, your father's a doctor.
They're both educated. And I remember I texted my
friends from back home like, hey, guys.
Like, I think we forget sometimes.
Like, yeah, we see like, people going too far, but like, we're
making up stupid shit like neo pronouns and whatnot.
But there's still a lot of places in this country that are
not accepting. And I think that some of the

(28:06):
liberal efforts to be more inclusive or targeted towards
that, but as Armin said, and if alienate people who whose only
experience is living in actuallya very blue or very democratic
or very liberal leaning culturalor online.
David Shore had some numbers on the Ezra Klein show about this,
about the effect of social mediaon people's political views.
I think he found that like if you're a regular TikTok view or

(28:28):
you're probably selling like eight points to the right 2020
to 2024. And like to some extent I get
it. Like, I care about policy and I
pay attention to it, so I'll never vote for Donald Trump, but
if I did not know or care about policy, I probably would have
voted for him 'cause he's a funny guy.
Yeah, a lot of people think, oh,that guy's.
Fun, whatever. When he got shot like that, shit
was hard. What you said about, I want to

(28:49):
piggyback on what you said aboutTim Walz talking about the mean
pick 6, right? Yeah.
Tim Walz was a football coach for decades, right?
He very obviously would not havewritten that, right?
And I think what a lot of men like about Trump, and this is
not all men being misogynist because I'm not one of those
Twitter posters that says that and gets 200,000 likes.

(29:11):
No, right. And, and those things in are in
their own way, you know, partially responsible for a lot
of the woes Democrats have with men, especially young men who
are online who see that kind of stuff, right, is that Donald
Trump does not give a damn what he says.
And he doesn't have anybody editing his stuff, right?
Yeah. And the average man is not

(29:33):
necessarily, you know, the average man is not a racist or a
bigot or whatever You want a badword you want to say, right?
But the average man definitely likes.
And I'm a teacher, right? So when around kids, you say
this, you know the average man wants somebody who stands on
business. Right.
Yeah, right. Donald Trump stands on business,

(29:53):
right? Yeah, I mean, guy got guy got
shot and pumped his first like it was like it was that.
That's hard to. Find.
Yeah, that's cool. That's cool.
Like, I saw that and I was like,OK, like, objectively, Donald
Trump is an ass. But I mean, I I have to respect
the showmanship there. Like he knows what he's doing.
When he logged on, he was like donaldtrump.com mug shot.

(30:15):
That was it. I was like.
Come on, it's pretty tough. It's a little tough.
There's a different way to like,and this is not to say that
women can't stand on business because they absolutely can too.
It just comes in a different flavor than, you know, doing it
as a man because everything is gender coded, right?
But the whole pick, pick six call inaudible on a plaything is
just emblematic of how everything is edited down and,

(30:38):
you know, watered down to try tooffend as few people as
possible, right? Because one of the key things in
the Democratic Party is that people try not to offend
everybody. And that's a noble goal.
But then that often has the sideeffect of just not achieving the
actual goal, which is. Getting you come off what?

(30:58):
You come off what, like you can't speak off the cop?
Well, and they come off fake too, because I think it
represents like a trying to a shortcut fix where they're like,
oh, well, we'll just pick AVP who's played football before or
like was a coach. And well, he comes off as very
conservative coded. He he wears flannels.
Well, when it if you don't buildthe broad infrastructure that

(31:19):
also supports that, you then have the people running the
account who have no idea how to talk like him.
Like we need more Tim Walls in the background of democratic
politics, not necessarily just. As like candidates, you know at
people who say that Walls was a bad pick because he really
wasn't right. AVP pick is just whatever the
campaign decides to present somebody as, right?

(31:41):
And walls on paper, objectively is a good candidate, right?
He won a district that was kind of tough and he held it down for
a while. And, you know, he's been a
serviceable governor of, you know, Minnesota and he has all
of those conservative values. But the problem is that he they,
you know, they packaged it the wrong way, right?
If you compare that to JD Vance,right, JD Vance, who's an

(32:04):
underperformer, right? He did worse, you know,
considerably than you would haveexpected in his 2022 election,
the only time he's ever been on a ballot, right?
But, you know, that campaign leveraged all of that, you know,
all of his bio and all to compliment the message that
Donald Trump was doing, right? You know, Donald Trump was here

(32:24):
talking about blood and soil. And here comes JD Vance saying,
my family has 9 generations of soldiers and that's why I'm more
American than anybody else who showed up here after my
ancestor, right? And the people there, you know,
even if you don't, even if immigration was not your primary
reason there, it was not the reason you didn't vote for him,

(32:45):
right? You're OK with that.
And I, I think and This is why, right, all of these polls about
2028, they're made-up of very ideological people and very
plugged in people. And we know this from all the
polling that's done. But the problem for Democrats is
the people who are not plugged in, right?
That's why, you know, even in 2028, if you run the same

(33:09):
playback, the election, I don't think you know, OK now, and I'm
not projecting macroeconomic conditions or anything, but I
think the coalitional problems of the Democratic Party aren't
really going to go away anytime soon because.
I think in 28 the Republicans will win the Hispanic vote
outright. They got 48% this time.
They'll get 51 next time. The, the people at the helm are

(33:30):
too blind to what's going on that they can't, they, they
can't see the disconnect like that.
And it, it's, it's, it's a question of fundamental values.
And you know, ultimately you know, and I, I do need to write
a lot about this. ChatGPT can help me with with
some. No, no, you're not using ChatGPT

(33:51):
to write bro. Come on.
No, of course not. I I use ChatGPT to help me, you
know, just like translate stuff though.
It's actually pretty good, right?
But they're just two separate worlds, right?
You know, Eric Adams, before he was outed as a criminal, said,
you know, right, when New York City, there's two different New

(34:12):
Yorks, right? There's the one that the
gentrified discourse generating class on Twitter inhabits, you
know, which is in Manhattan, in the closer parts of the outer
boroughs. And then there's the other New
York, right? And if you look at the trend map
in New York City, right, one trends to the left, one trends
to the right. And every election, it's
basically the same story, right?And nobody really seems to have

(34:36):
any idea to fix it. I think that if there was
anybody who is going to be an outright, you know, savior
candidate for the Democrats, youknow, my personal pundit take,
not backed up by any data but just my own vibes and thinking,
is that it's none of them. None of them in that list,
right? In 2012, remember, the

(34:56):
Republican Party was reeling. You know, they, they had
basically spent the past four years stocking all this racial
animus. You know, they got 63 House
seats, you know, on the Tea Party and all.
And in 2012, they were talking about making Obama a one term
president, right? And they lost, right?
And then they basically let out their own version of a Primal

(35:17):
Scream, which, you know, how does this story go?
Right? Mitt Romney was a nice small
bean candidate and Democrats were mean to him, right?
And So what did they decide to do?
They said, let's nominate DonaldTrump.
And, you know, it worked for him.
He blew up the system, right? I think for a lot of reasons,
Democrats could have their own, you know, Trump like figure, not

(35:41):
in terms of being, you know, a brash bully or whatever, but in
terms of just being somebody outside the realm of, you know,
what is considered, you know, the traditional universe of, of
politicians, right? Because there's a lot of people
that are just not served by the existing pool of, you know,
action figure Democrats that, you know, you could try to put

(36:04):
in there in the ring. I I completely agree, but my
worry is, is that person, that person would win as the
Democratic nominee. I have no doubts about that.
But I don't know that they win the Democratic primary and
become the nominee like I. Think and and that is the issue
we. Could come up with other names,
but like on that list, I mean, even though he was listed as the
most electable, I think the clearest example of like a

(36:26):
potential Democratic Trump is Mark Cuban.
He's at 3.2 percent, 3.5 among young people who you'd think
maybe would give him a boost with the like Shark Tank TikTok
approach. But that worries me because I
feel like, I mean, I can't really think of anyone honestly
besides him who fits that role. And I like literally in the
exact model of Donald Trump, where he's built his reputation

(36:48):
as a strong, decisive businessman who makes tough
decisions on TV for years among normie.
I think the reason. How did they breakthrough?
I think the reason for that is because no one has really been
able to seriously land a blow onTrump, right?
In metaphorical sense, right forthe viewers, We we have to
clarify that, right? A metaphorical blow, right?

(37:12):
The Democratic, I want the, the Democratic primary is controlled
by the college educated white liberal demographic right now.
And to a lesser extent, you know, black voters in the South.
Black voters in the South have alot to lose, right, by having
elections lose, right? So they've therefore they tend
to be very pragmatic and they won't back an outsider unless
they have a viable chance of winning.

(37:34):
Obama being the exception for obvious reason, right?
I think that if Cuban or somebody really actually was
able to land some kind of a blowon Trump that was more than a
rhetorical symbolic gesture, youwould actually start to see an
elite permission structure for generating that kind of outsider
enthusiasm, right? It's just we can't see it now

(37:56):
because it hasn't actually happened.
But if you think about it in terms of what the sequence is to
get there, that what do you? Think that kind of blow might
be? Well, so I don't know, I, I have
to be like Gandalf and, you know, look into the Palantir
and, and see exactly what is, you know, going to come in the
future. But there's plenty of different
opportunities that Donald Trump will present for overreach,

(38:20):
right, in terms of various things that he's doing that are
abusive to the kind of constitution and all the other
things the Democrats care about,right?
And any one of those, right, youknow, Donald Trump is going to
have to eventually, right? He's not going to be able to
eventually keep doing things with impunity on the course that
he's taking, right? Even if he doesn't cause a 1929

(38:44):
style Great Depression, his policies are going to cause
economic hurt to people. And all of the culture war fun
and games are only possible to, you know, for both sides to keep
up because the average person istoo wealthy to really care about
material politics in a meaningful way, right?
All of their stuff that they really, really care about is
fundamentally stable. And they still have, you know,

(39:06):
easy access to it, which is why they can indulge in nonsense
about, you know, what was that ad, you know, tax funded
mergeries for illegal. Transgender prisoners or
something? It's like Mad Libs ChatGPT
generated sentence, right, right.
All of that stuff gets pushed onto people by elites in the

(39:29):
Republican Party because I mean,that's just the easiest thing to
make a fuss about, right? You can't make a fuss about the
economy when the economy is, youknow, halfway decent.
I mean, when it when prices wereexpensive, right, you know, that
was the thing. But now that prices are, you
know, further down, the Republicans are naturally not
talking about it. But you can't keep just doing

(39:51):
the endless culture war stuff ifpeople who are used to having a
certain sense of material comfort have that threatened,
right? Especially if you're in power.
And exactly right. And at that point, that is when
assuming, you know, Democrats learn how to not, you know, have
all of their purity tests and all of their social issues.

(40:12):
You know, as they, you know, in 2006, they said, I don't care
what you believe on literally anything, you can basically be a
Republican with AD next to your name and let's go almost win
Wyoming, right? That's that's kind of what
happened, right. That type of situation is where
you really start to see, you know, momentum go against the

(40:33):
GOP. Well, it it.
Feels to me like when you're talking about landing blows, at
least among Democratic voters who are tuned in right now and
like respond to this poll, I feel like they perceive landing
a blow to be Cory Booker and AOCright now are the 2.
Of them who? That right?
Yes. Yes, and I'm sure well.
Dan Holland is the type of thing, right, 'cause that's, you

(40:55):
know it, it is a stunt, right? What he did was a stunt.
He went there, right? He could have, like you guys
know the story of Leo Ryan, right?
Jackie Spears, old boss who wentto Jonestown and got killed.
Because I don't exactly know what the story was, but he was
some kind of cult leader who wasdoing weird cult leader.
That's a crazy Wikipedia Reed. Right.
And he right, that legitimately could have been like, we didn't

(41:18):
know if Kilmar Abrigail Garcia was alive or dead, right?
And and honestly, given the lawlessness that Trump and Elon
and all have been acting with, they could have jailed Van
Holland too as well. And you know, I mean, they
probably wouldn't have, But would we have really been that
crazy to say, Oh, they won't, right.
There was a legitimate chance they could have.

(41:39):
And Democrats, that was the mosthopeful I'd seen Democrats in a
long time, right? That they actually stood up for
people's rights and got, you know, they actually got that,
you know, the people in power todo something that they wouldn't
have done otherwise, right? That is, you know what they know
the successful type of activism that I think people are craving.

(42:00):
And if you know whoever can figure out that formula to
actually do that is I think going to be the best position
there. I totally agree this is a little
fantasy booking. But the only other person that
came to mind when I was thinkingabout what you're saying with
landing a blow and having this kind of direct, like
confrontational appeal was honestly Kamala Harris.

(42:22):
If she does end up running for governor in 26 and wins, and
then she gets to be kind of a public face of like the
resistance and pushing back against some order that Trump
does, and she's the face of California doing that.
I think that could. I'm not sure if it's the best
Democratic Party, but I could see that happening.
Yes. However, it has to be tailored
the right way because Kamala Harris's constituency is liberal

(42:45):
white people and black voters inCalifornia, right?
Those are groups that she has noproblem with, but they're not
essential to winning a National Coalition, right?
As far as I can tell, you know, Kamala Harris, in every
Democratic primary she's had, has always been fairly weak with
Latino voters right in, in 26. OK, granted, in 2016, she ran

(43:09):
against, I want to say Loretta Sanchez.
Maybe it was Linda. It was one of the Sanchez's from
California. But I, I definitely think that,
yeah, Kamala could do it again. I don't see why if she ran for
governor in two years, she wouldwant to go run for president
again, especially because if a lot of, you know, they know

(43:30):
people's favorables of her are so bad anyway.
I don't think they're going to go up when, you know, it's
pretty blatant office shopping, you know, just to get back into
the spotlight like that. Well, it's it's it's interesting
that that all of what we're touching on here is like, it's
it I keep hearing outsider, justoutsider, outsider, outsider,
that whole thing of establishment of outsider,
outsider the whole Obama in 08 runs anti establishment.

(43:53):
He's like, I'm I'm new, I'm young, I'm a fresh face.
And it that's the magic that we're losing the sauce of
someone's new. They're going to shake it up.
They're cool. They say what they mean that
Obama can nail A3 pointer. And don't get me wrong, Obama's
really cool, like pumping your fist, getting shot really cool.
And it sounds like a lot of whatI'm hearing is just cool.

(44:14):
Outsider shakes things up and just has the sauce.
Like I don't know what to say it.
It's just someone who has sauce,someone who has just I'd sauce.
I really doesn't get any like clear middle ground.
Outsider that Democratic MSNBC types are actually OK with is
like a Josh Shapiro governor whocan say I'm an outsider to DC
politics and I know how to get things done in Pennsylvania.

(44:35):
Maybe that's like what Democratic primary voters are
willing to accept as an outsider.
And and for Josh Shapiro specifically, I think he is very
and, and you know, they, they frankly did, you know, a pretty
gross character assassination onhim with the whole VP thing with
respect to the Israel Palestine stuff right now, leaving aside

(44:55):
how that actual war in Israel and Palestine is playing out,
the way that it's affected politics in the Democratic Party
is going to be a a veritable hornet's nest to try to
navigate. And right, the would be assassin
on his house stated that the reason for this attempted
assassination was Shapiro supporting the destruction of

(45:20):
the Palestinian people or something like that, right.
Josh Shapiro has made no such statement, you know, supporting
that. And if anything, he's been very,
very sympathetic towards, you know, accommodating both points
of view in terms of, you know, Israel and of Palestine, right.
So he and I. I saw this week Tim Walz had

(45:42):
100% approval rating from AIPAC on his voting record while he's
in Congress too, wasn't like. There was some well, yeah, Walls
was a moderate, you know, middleof the road Democrat when he was
in Congress. And Shapiro can definitely
credibly say, do you really think I support these like,
lunatic protesters? And all, right, because even if

(46:04):
people are sympathetic to pro Palestine, right, in the sense
that they don't want to see tik toks of brutalized children and
all, they are very broadly not sympathetic with pro Palestine
protesters. Because again, it's the whole
Matt Iglesias theory of if you are annoying, nobody likes you
and whatever you're supporting, right?
Josh Shapiro can say these guys tried to kill me and my family,

(46:25):
why on earth would I support them, right?
So he's defending himself against, you know, people who
think that he bows to the left too much, which are frankly a
bigger constituency than people who think that he's not left
enough, both in a primary and ina general election.
He also seems to me to be the most likely to attack Biden and

(46:47):
say that he should have dropped out, because I know he was.
He was pretty not public during that time.
Yeah, no, yeah, I, I I think so as well.
Right. And Josh Shapiro has actually
won very competitive elections, right?
You've, you know, down, he actually beat Republicans in
what was then a very red down ballot county and, you know, the

(47:07):
early 2000s when he first got into politics.
So he's not, he's not new to this.
And I would say just to build onthis, I mean, do you think this
is something that Republicans would be aware of?
I mean, I remember reading in a fight by Jonathan Alec that
Trump for some reason had this weird thing that he thought Josh
Piro was gonna become a nominee when after the debate, like you
need just he just kind of assumed he was cooked like just
done. He was like, oh, they're gonna

(47:27):
nominate him and it's over. Like I do you think they're I
mean, aware of this? Like, I mean, it feels like this
is one of those things where theout of touch online MSNBC.
Twitter or whatever. I think that a lot of this has.
Trump is a very Shakespearean figure, and there's a lot of,
you know, Shakespearean narratives that get spun around
all of his campaigns, right? In 2016, they all thought they

(47:49):
were going to lose, right? I mean, by every, they had
every, you know, by rights, theyabsolutely should have lost.
That was a very badly managed campaign that won because
Hillary Clinton's campaign was somehow worse, right?
This time. Yeah, right.
Everybody who saw that debate knows Kamala handed his ass to
him, right? I don't know.

(48:12):
I, I, I think that they, Trump probably knew he was not going
to win if the campaign kept it up that way.
Do I think Shapiro would have made a difference?
I mean, Trump won Pennsylvania by two, right?
I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it would have
been enough on its own. Could have saved us that Senate
seat. It might have been able to save

(48:33):
Democrats. Bob Casey, Senate seat, Yeah,
right. But the Kamala campaigns
analytics team, right? I don't know about, you know,
some of their things, but they definitely had people a lot
smarter than me who ran all of the testing and said Shapiro
walls, Shapiro walls, Shapiro walls.
You know, Shapiro is, you know, not necessarily the greatest,

(48:55):
you know, fit or whatever. Let's go with walls.
And honestly, that's not a bad play, right?
If, if America and the Democratscan survive another 3 1/2 years
of this, right, Josh Shapiro is most likely going to have six
years of governing experience under his belt.
And he's going to say, look, I have a very good approval rating
with Democrats and Republicans in Pennsylvania.

(49:18):
You know, I am, you know, sort of middle of the road on some
things like vouchers and all that, which again, I know I'm,
you know, I live in Texas and there's lots of vouchers stuff
that's going on there. And a lot of Democrats don't
like it. But independents and Republicans
always love, oh, this Democrat, you know, every, you know, once
in awhile thinks Republicans have a good idea, right?
And that sets him up really well, you know, assuming he does

(49:41):
actually, you know, take the plunge.
And if you've heard the guy speak, you know, as Twitter,
people will joke he is what theycall Jewish Obama.
Well, him and Jon Ossoff. But.
I think that's that's true even beyond the like the actual big
speech approach, because I've I've seen it like he passes the
would you want to have a beer with him test.

(50:02):
I saw him on The Breakfast Club.He like played basketball in in
college I think. Even like his like button down
suits and all that he wears likehe's he just, you know, I
remember how Obama was, you know, I was, was a kid, right?
Shapiro is the closest one who kind of matches that vibe,
right? Cool like look at the YouTube

(50:22):
comments from normies on any podcast appearance he does.
They're always like, it's the cliche, like, Oh well.
I wish all Democrats were like this.
I think that when everybody saysoutsider, right?
For the past 30 odd years, it's basically been the Clintons and,
you know, the Obama machine thathave been running the Democratic

(50:42):
Party, right? That's all, you know, people
have basically known for the past 30 years, right?
Because before that, Democrats were getting drugged by Reagan
and Nixon, right? And I think a lot of people are
just saying, right, that was a political organization, a
political coalition that was built to shoot that political
moment back in 1992. And we're now 30, going to be 36

(51:06):
years after that, right? 36 years is, you know, the
difference between, you know, God knows what, right?
You know, they, you know, 30-6 years, they still had zeppelins
in World War One. And then they had jet planes in
the Korean War. Right.
And 2028 will have been 20 yearssince the last Democratic
primary that what didn't have like a clear, kind of anointed,

(51:29):
obvious front runner going in. Right.
Like, there's just been a lot that has changed in the party.
And, you know, I'm not, you know, I supported Bernie in
2016, right? I was 17, so I couldn't vote.
I was not one of those people that said, oh, it was rigged or
whatever. Because, I mean, Hillary did win
that primary fair and square. But everybody knows, even

(51:50):
Hillary supporters know that theorganization put the thumb on
the scale to make it easier for Hillary to win, right?
And to a lot of people that are,you know, looking into the
political process and not reallyclubby like that, that just
looks like, oh, it's just, you know, a cartel of political

(52:10):
actors who are just trying to protect their own people.
So it was hold on, wait, wait, wait.
So if if we got Josh Shapiro andJohn office, let's take it, we
could have not one but two Jewish, Jewish.
I'm so excited as a Jew, I'm so excited.
Like I could have not one but two.
Oh yeah, my gosh. The other one I was going to
mention is if John Ossoff wins his Senate race this year, then
yeah, he goes up to the top of the.

(52:30):
List 100% that'll be like the biggest.
Him or Kamala being elected governor would be like the
biggest stories coming out of that midterm.
I'll just let you guys know it'sover for you guys.
We're getting kosher. Everything after that I'm
decking my house. We're getting Pickles.
We're getting that. What is this?
Sort of crab cakes? A lot.
Potato a lot. Because it's gonna be awesome.
The, the other one, who I haven't talked about a lot, and
I know that, you know, people like playing fantasy president

(52:52):
draft and all, but it's Raphael Warnock, right?
Because I mean, everybody knows there's also off there's
Warnock. I I joked back in 2021 that they
were the Han Solo and Lando Calrissian of Democratic
politics. Well, I mean, Warnock has won
many competitive elections. And granted, some of them were
because Republicans nominated, you know, frankly, you know.

(53:14):
Questioned the sentient. Candidates, right?
But he's objectively a very compelling candidate, right?
And he has, you know, a strong profile.
And he's the pat. He's the heir to Martin Luther
King's legacy, right? And he's able to build on that
in a way that does not come across as, you know, quote, UN

(53:37):
quote preachy. The way that Hillary's attempts
to talk about race and identity war, that's ironic.
He's a literal preacher who doesnot come across as preachy when
he does it right? And, you know, Joy, I mean, most
of George's electorate is white and black, but they also have
Hispanics. They also have Asians, right?
And those are all critical to building a winning coalition in

(53:58):
a state like Georgia. And, you know, Warnock would
actually be a very compelling, you know, candidate.
The main reason I think it's nottalked about is because if they
pass or resigned to run law, then Governor Kemp would
probably, you know, replace him with a Republican.
And realistically, we're not flipping the governorship

(54:20):
anytime soon, especially if Stacey Abrams decides to run
again. God, well, you know her third
term an offer. Well, Speaking of fantasy
politics drafting, like for somereason, when we're talking about
all these candidates, who to me,a lot of them feel like it, it
reminds me of the Veep stake discussion where a lot of them

(54:41):
kind of feel like, oh, they, they fill this kind of niche.
They, they appeal to this group and but maybe not like a full
thing. I, I'm thinking, I wonder if
there's a cycle where someone tries this time, perhaps
successfully, like the Ted Cruz 2016 approach where they early
in the primary kind of enter with a full ticket of one of
these two people kind of to likeseem like you're the, to force

(55:04):
yourself to be the front runner in a way.
Like if a, a Pete Buttigieg, forexample, wanted to do that and
like had someone who kind of balances him out with like South
Carolina and that kind of stuff and entered the race early with
that. I think that could be effective
in this race with so many kind of like prospects to pick for
almost. I'm, I mean, I think Veep
steaks, the people who do Veep steaks look at Veep steak

(55:26):
candidates as individuals too much right?
And they look at their attributes as like variables to
manipulate. Whereas, you know, think of it
as, you know, some people, I don't like peanut butter.
I, I'm not allergic. I don't like it, right?
Some people do, but peanut butter on its own is one thing,
but it's supposed to go with Jelly and bread, right, In order

(55:47):
to have a thing that's actually what, you know, you're trying to
eat, right? And that's the way that I think
people ought to be conceptualizing, you know,
veepstakes, right? Harris Walls made a lot more
sense just in a vacuum than Harris Shapiro, right?
Walls is very much, you know, a supporting actor type of

(56:07):
candidate, right? Shapiro is not Shapiro can't
really do a second fiddle act very, very well, right?
Everybody who knows him in politics knows this.
He's always wanted to be the topdog, top G, whatever you want to
call him. And having two of those is going
to cause problems, right? I think that the Kamala camp

(56:31):
probably knew that in terms of how, you know, they would go
around doing stuff like that. You know it's the same with
Trump in 2016, right? You guys remember when everyone
thought he was going to pick Chris Christie as his VPI was?
A little bit young. For that I don't remember that.
I was probably 12 so. Well, look, the thing about that
right is Chris Christie is basically a slightly less

(56:53):
boorish version of Donald Trump,right?
You don't need a carbon copy clone of you.
You need someone who's going to round out your weaknesses and
come across in a way, right. Pence helped with evangelical,
sure, but Pence was very much a doctrinaire, traditional
ideological Republican. And here he was giving the

(57:14):
mantle of approval and the permission structure for all
these other conservatives who didn't think Trump was really a
conservative and say, OK, Hillary's bad.
Actually, I'm voting for him anyway.
That it's really interesting to map that on to kind of the
Democratic primary side of things.
Like it was essentially him trying to appeal to his base as
like almost weirdly being seen as a bit of like a moderate

(57:36):
outsider type. I mean, I'd, I keep straining
the Mark Cuban as the DemocraticTrump comparison, but I feel
like it would be like a, a Mark Cuban picking an AOC almost or
something like that, which is interesting to think about like
in terms of electability and like how I feel like that would
be discussed in the Democratic primary as kind of an extreme
choice. But when he picked Mike Pence,
people kind of saw it as par forthe course and not alienating to

(57:59):
moderate swing voters or something.
Like extending like an olive branch to like the
establishment, creating like a structure of like, hey, like I'm
crazy and outside, but also hey,wait a minute, here's this other
person that you guys would love.OK, so let's let's game this
out. If Cuban was the presidential
nominee, who would be the most outsider V Like say he wanted to
double down on that, who would be the craziest outsider pick
for him to pick? Stephen A.

(58:19):
Smith or something like that. I mean, I was just up the list,
just going off that one, but I mean.
He would be a businessman type. Yeah, I don't think he picked
Stephen A Schmidt. That doesn't seem like him.
Honestly, I don't think he wouldgo outside.
I think it would be similar to the Trump blueprint there.
And I'd, I'd, I could see him leaning in on like technocratic
kind of competence, intelligenceappeal, like a Pete Buttigieg,

(58:41):
maybe a Josh Shapiro is that governing experience and could
say like we have the same agenda.
I saw that Shapiro was kind of running on the abundance agenda
stuff. That wouldn't surprise me if
Cubans into that kind of thing with the cost plus drug stuff.
But I don't know, I, I, I, I'm struggling in general in this
whole conversation to think of outsider Democrats.
That's why the Democrats have such an like.

(59:03):
Like who? It's like we're waiting for
Aragorn to show up and take the banner.
The more. Yeah, like I feel like all the
Democratic versions of this are celebrities and Hollywood types
who don't. Actually talked about that's not
going to work, yeah. The fact that like if if that if
it's someone we we would think is a good idea, it's probably
not because we are within that educated like elite circle.

(59:25):
It's like if it's someone. Yeah, so was a lot of the
Democratic primary base, like, Ithink that's why.
Most of us is, yeah. Stephen A Smith is flopping
after all this like Twitter discussion.
Like they they too are kind of too smart to fall for that, even
if, like maybe the general electorate would be.
I will, I will just say because yesterday, yesterday was Easter.
The story, right, is that the Messiah came from Nazareth,

(59:47):
which is a town that basically nobody at the time had heard of.
And people were like, oh wait, Nazareth.
Like actually you meet like Nazareth was basically like from
bum fuck nowhere, right? And this is the guy that came to
save the world, right? And so, you know, as the
prophecy says, God knows what the Nazareth of the Democratic

(01:00:08):
Party is. But you know, that's going to be
where the the the 2028 Messiah shows up from.
And you see right there, that's the other thing is a lot of
Democrats don't know how to talkabout religion anymore, too.
Yeah, that's very true. I was going to say when I was
in, I was in Texas last week andI went to a Methodist Church in

(01:00:28):
Dallas and seeing the way that it's done in Dallas, like I'm
from Southern California, right?Like I've been in church, we've
been a Lutheran once, like you name it, I've been there.
But the way it's done in Texas was antithetical to the way I've
seen it in California. You know, I've been to a bunch
from there. But like, I that was church.
That was like church, church with like, you know, capital
letter church. Like that was that was something
in like I was like, wow, like the like, I just was like, OK,

(01:00:50):
this is, this is different. I'm this is new, you know, I'm
learning, but we're the out of touch out of the leads.
Like I think about like, I want to tie this back into the people
think you're annoying. Matthew Iglesias thing, like
with the activist group is like,yeah, it can be kind of annoying
if I'm tripping your ear saying like you need to leave this
talk, this talk, do the way I talk, you know, land
acknowledgments, things like that, because we all thought it

(01:01:12):
was silly, but no one thought tosay it wasn't.
And it's kind of hard to catch up on that.
And historically, I mean you guys are probably not old
enough, but I remember when the annoying people were the Bible
thumping Republicans telling us what to do.
Right? I'm old enough to remember when
Democrats were the cool kids, you just wanted to do whatever
and Republicans were the annoying nags.

(01:01:32):
And now it's now. It's the revert.
Well, and I think even more recent history, I, I mean, I
think this wraps in with the theperhaps misogyny of the
electorate, but I think you could trace that the last three
elections where I think like 26th Hillary was perceived as
that. And then in 2020, with COVID and
Biden being like the calm, confident perception, I think
Trump was the annoying guy who was always on your TV screen and

(01:01:55):
you wanted to like the famous. Ad from the.
Election Biden's ad where it waslike, shut him up, filling up
the ballot box. It was his mouth.
So and then this election, I mean, I think people for better
or worse, were like, oh, Kamala,she's like, she's annoying,
telling me what to do. She's laughs.
Even though I can still maintainthat, I mean.
I don't even think it was Kamalaherself.

(01:02:16):
I think it was I, I don't think people disliked Kamalai.
I think they disliked the Democratic Party and therefore
disliked like. I don't think Kamala really had
much of A personality at all in this campaign to to most.
She cut off 'cause like, I saw her and Howard Stern and she was
fantastic. There should have been more.
That's the thing, right? So many Democratic politicians
themselves have actually won elections.

(01:02:39):
They know how to appeal to people, right?
So why don't they That that's the question that we have to
figure out. And this is not saying that
Republicans know how to because every Republican not named Trump
has failed to replicate the Trump magic, right?
We, we literally did an article on this, you know, that came out
today about the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, right?

(01:03:01):
Elon, who is now a, you know, vice president, whatever you
want to the. Trump.
Is like emperor. Or anything now I haven't seen
him in months it feels like. Trump.
Is like Palpatine and Elon is like Darth Vader.
We'll go with that. Right.
Where does Vance fit in? The.
The Vance is Vance is Governor Tarkin, you know, the guy who

(01:03:22):
says blow up all the round 'cause you didn't say thank you.
And, right, Elon spent like $80 million trying to get Brad
Schimmel elected. And Schimmel is not a bad
candidate, right? Like, he's won elections as the
attorney general before. He was one of Scott Walker's
guys when, you know, they ran the state and were turning it in

(01:03:44):
their right wing utopia. Problem is, you know, like the
electorate just got 7 points bluer because a bunch of
Republicans didn't freaking showup even with $80 million of
Elon's, you know, money at all. Well, I, I kind of feel like the
people who were convinced by Elon's spending and like the the
people who were convinced by thecalm list for they then add

(01:04:05):
those types. They're not turning out in a.
Supreme Court, they don't, they don't really tune into politics,
right? Like they saw that stuff on
TikTok and they were like, Oh yeah, like Democrats are weird
anyway. Like I probably wasn't gonna
vote for him at all, right? Whereas Wisconsin Democrats now
for a decade have basically beenreeling on their various right
wing, you know, well, politicians.

(01:04:28):
So they know about turning out, you know, to try and stop right
wing attacks and on their political system.
And, you know, Ben Wickler in the Wisconsin Democratic Party
have built a very well organizedsystem of turning out their own
voters, right? If you read our article, you see
that a lot of those counties in that driftless region, right,
that spine of western Wisconsin,up the Mississippi River, you

(01:04:51):
know, roughly to Minneapolis, you know, Democrats, you know,
roughly, you know, what about 20% more likely to turn out to
vote in that Supreme Court election than Republicans,
right? In some counties, it was like,
you know, 70% of Harris voters showed up and voted for
Crawford. And it was only like, you know,
50 or 55% of Trump voters who showed up and voted for Shimmel,

(01:05:15):
right? And, you know, every election
where Donald Trump is not on theballot, we've basically seen
that same type of pattern actually, you know, come to
fruition. Well, on that topic, I think
that brings up a really interesting thing to discuss
leading into 2028. So if we could briefly look at
it, you guys also pulled the 2028 Republican primary.

(01:05:37):
Yeah. And of course this is.
A Well, it's not a great result.It's not a great result for our
Constitution. No, it is not.
But of course you did a questiontesting the hypothetical Trump
running for a third term. But assuming he is not, this
will of course. You're.
Talking about an election without Trump on the ballot,
which we have not seen for threeelection cycles now, or

(01:05:59):
presidential election cycles. So what did you guys make of
these results? Obviously, JD Vance dominating.
Of course, there. Even if Trump isn't running,
there's always the Trump factor.This might change if he decides
he's not too confident in endorsing JD Vance, but would
you guys make of the results? My Zachary's theory is that I'd
say Zach a lot because he's going to help me with the

(01:06:20):
waiting, but is that Trump will toy with not endorsing Vance
right up until the RNC and then he'll endorse him at the last
minute just to fuck with him because he likes doing that.
I think unless Trump endorses someone who is not JD Vance, the
advance will be the nominee. Unless Trump decides to run
himself. I mostly think he's just talking

(01:06:41):
shit when he says like, oh, but you know, I could go for a third
term. 2020 was stolen so I actually get a third.
So like, I I think it's mostly bullshit.
Whatever Steve Bannon's OB stupid ass says no, if Trump
were to run for a third term like it seems like he'd get a
lot of support. I have friends here at Yale who
were like, I think he's run for third term.
And people were like, you know, that's illegal, right?

(01:07:03):
And he's like, Nah, but FDR did it.
And people are like twice like Mummy.
He's like, oh. Just ignore that as long.
As you let Obama, bro, Yeah, I know he then then the dude was
like denying like, Nah, bro, Trump would beat Obama for sure
bro. Love the dude, but like he
doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about about that stuff.
But no, it's concerning that it seems like a majority of
Republican primary voters will be open to giving Trump a third

(01:07:26):
turn. That's a possible
constitutional. He gets a higher percent than JD
Vance does in the poll where Trump isn't even.
Well, I mean you know, why wouldyou have?
Why would you have the knock offwhen you can have the original?
Yeah, but like, even without Trump, like JD Vance basically
alone in the field still gets less than an illegal Trump run.
Yeah, To me, it was concerning because if Trump runs, it's a

(01:07:47):
question of will Republican state parties put him on the
ballot in the primary, Will theyhave primaries at all if it's
very clear that he would have clearly locked up the support.
So that's a potentially dangerous and and scary question
for the country in four years. But assuming he doesn't run
because he's going to be 80 something, we've seen that 80
something real presidents don't typically do well in their

(01:08:07):
reelect. Yeah, it'll probably be Vince.
And I think that Democrats should consider which candidate
would be the best contrast advance.
What are Vance's weaknesses? What I've seen of JD Vance, he's
very online and he's in a lot ofweird, right?
Like, you remember the discoursethe other day about like that
fucking Canadian loser who was telling some other guy on
Twitter, oh, your parents weren't in the Civil War?

(01:08:29):
So like, you're not an American?And they're Nazi, right?
Yeah. Well, I mean, that doesn't
narrow down. It's like Elon site now.
So a lot of them are Nazis. But you know, Vance like started
tweeting about like, oh, my ancestors built this country
that like your your mom like built herself a perk house or
something like whatever. But you know, I think that's a
sign that he's very online and into like weird online right

(01:08:52):
wing subcultures, which might contribute to his relative
weakness as a candidate in 22. But.
Well, so that's the thing, right, is the weird right wing
subculture stuff, especially as the educational sorting of, you
know, the parties continues to happen.
You see more and more, you know,for lack of a better word,

(01:09:14):
normal Republicans, you know, you see them moving towards the
Democratic Party, right? And so the college educated
people you have left in the Republican Party who are, you
know, the really high propensityturn out people that are going
to be the most reliable voters when Donald Trump is not on a
ballot. Those guys are increasingly, you
know, the ones who, you know, I guess have the politely, I guess

(01:09:40):
you could say the racial views of Woodrow Wilson, right?
You know, and, you know, believein all sorts of these weird
esoteric right wing socio cultural theories the way that
Wilson might have right. And Vance taps into that.
I I don't necessarily know that all of the Republican base
believes that stuff. Certainly the Nazis on Twitter

(01:10:02):
do, but the ordinary like average Republican on Twitter
probably doesn't. But if it actually came to an
election and they got their orders from the GOP elites,
then, yeah, literally the next day they would all be spouting
all this, you know, blood and soil stuff, right?
If Donald Trump told them to, they would, which I think is
very, very dangerous. The the interesting thing,

(01:10:26):
right, is how would that play ina general, right?
Because all the blood and stuff,blood and soil stuff is weird.
But to the average person, it doesn't directly affect them,
right? It's just a crazy guy who's
saying crazy things. And the instinct for Democrats
is naturally to go in and do allof the Mr. Smith goes to

(01:10:47):
Washington stuff about how that's evil and not who we are.
And all right. But Democrats have been baited,
you know, time and time again byTrump, right?
You know, I, I will not be a teenager and say the word, but
you could say Donald Trump is a master of bait.
And right, you know, Democrats keep taking it every time.

(01:11:08):
If the if they take the bait with Vance, then Vance, who is
now a veteran Twitter keyboard warrior, is not going to let up,
right? And so they have to figure out
how they can actually smartly, you know, break that fight down
without looking weak in the process too, as well.
This weirdly makes me think of the Tim Walz Madden tweet in a

(01:11:30):
weird way because I wonder. I think this is an emerging
problem for Republicans going forward where even if say JD
Vance loses by being a little too extreme and then they run a
semi normal Republican four years from then the entire
Republican infrastructure. Now all the young Republicans
work in politics. They are all extremely online

(01:11:51):
weird Elon Twitter Nazi types who are going to be doing Ron
DeSantis 2024 weird Internet campaign stuff.
I'm sure that stuff will be happening.
Yes, and that stuff will be happening.
Through the infrastructure of the Republican.
Party going forward, and I do think that's going to be
unpopular in general. Yeah, I think that it's, you

(01:12:12):
know, the same way that before Elon bought the site, a lot of
Democratic operatives spent a lot of time on Twitter and it
really warped their perception of what, where people were at.
Like, you know, every media taste paper even that, like he
was like, I voted for Bernie. Yeah.
Everyone was like, oh, Biden's like washed.
He's asked. He's not interesting in 2020.
And then he cleaned up in South Carolina and he was the nominee.

(01:12:35):
And I think, you know, in the same way that old Twitter put
Democrats out of touch by exposing them to a consistently
more extreme left wing segment of the population, I think new
Twitter is increasingly doing the same to Republicans and
putting them in this right wing echo chamber where they, you
know, collectively convince themselves that actually the
country all wants like blood andsoil, extreme right wing stuff

(01:12:58):
when like there is a constituency for that.
But I don't think it's as big orit runs as deep as like your
typical 10 hours a day screen time Republican comp staffer
might think. I mean, I don't even think this
is a future problem. Look at 2022, right?
Trump was not on the ballot, andRepublicans lost, what, like, at
least two or three seats becausethey nominated, you know,

(01:13:20):
either? Blake Masters.
Well, Blake Masters is the almost obvious example, right?
Doctor Oz wasn't crazy, he was just a bad candidate, right?
I don't know how he won that primary.
Oh, Trump didn't even endorse him, right?
You would know more than I would.
I don't think he, I, I don't remember if he did Georgia,
right. Herschel Walker was a

(01:13:42):
combination of insane and also, you know, stupid, right?
Just as AB disease. I thought it was CTE.
Antonio Brown like 'cause Antonio Brown had the biggest
case of CTE. At the debate, I am a sheriff.
Sure. That's the Brown.
That was so funny. Yeah.

(01:14:03):
And OK, worst of all, and this state is too red to matter.
But remember, Mike Lee came ten points away from losing in Utah.
And there was no Democrat. There was a very conservative
independent. But Mike Lee, Mike Lee masks it
because, you know, when he firstcame to office in 2010, the GOP

(01:14:24):
was not as openly permissive of being like, you know, weird and
crazy like it is now. But Mike Lee is basically how
Blake Masters would be in the Senate.
I mean like. He's a 50 plus.
Year old dude was a. Burner Mike Lee.
Yeah, it was a burner for years and it got discovered right?
And then now he just uses it as his own, as have.
You guys ever been saying, have you guys ever read this one

(01:14:46):
Atlantic profile? I think it was Tim Alberta about
Mike Lee. It's nuts.
Like the guys like it's the level of Dick riding he's doing
for Trump is crazy, but like it,it was just an insane article.
He was like, yeah, there's basically nothing that Donald
Trump could ever do that's wrong.
And I would do whatever for him,like anything.
Oh, yeah, and the other Senate race, New Hampshire, right?

(01:15:07):
Well, OK, in our war model, Maggie Hassan would have won
anyway. But, you know, even against
somebody like Chris Sinunu, she probably would have won, right?
But Don Boldic, you know, basically forced the Republicans
to stop caring about that race. You know, So granted, the
presidency is a different beast because, you know, they're going

(01:15:30):
to obviously care about that no matter what.
But there's still, you know, it's not helping them when they
nominate, you know, crazy people.
You know, everybody always looksat things and says they're for
ordained to happen, right? But that's not true, right?
You know, there's there's many different paths that the
universe can diverge onto, right?

(01:15:50):
Imagine if Hillary won right in 2016, Donald Trump and his
movement would probably have never been let within 100 miles
of a presidential nominating office ever again.
And they? Probably would have
overcorrected. Away from that, because Donald
Trump would, because if Hillary won, she probably has a
Democratic Senate with her as well as a liberal Supreme Court

(01:16:12):
that's going to be poking the bear at Republicans for the next
30 years instead of what we havenot, right.
And they would never let them live that down ever again,
right? It's the same way that, you
know, Democrats basically, you know, I after all the race stuff
in 1968, right, Democrats did not touch the issue of race

(01:16:32):
nationally with A10 foot pole ever again, right?
Because it was the thing that broke the camel's back of their
coalition, right? The only, the only time that
really started to come to the forefront again was when we are
alive now, right? When in the Obama presidency,
right, 50 years after all of that, right?

(01:16:52):
So one really stinging loss can really change things and, you
know, ruin the ability of it to get taken seriously, right.
It's the same with, you know, you know, all of the Palestine
activism, right? You know, can everybody said,
why are these people, you know, voting for Trump?
He's obviously a lot worse and all right, and people have

(01:17:13):
irrational ways for voting, right?
That's that's their thing. But you, you know, a lot of
people in power in the Democratic Party are not going
to listen to them seriously, right?
You can see on Twitter among thepeople in the Democratic Party,
a lot of people who previously voted demographic Democratic and
shifted to Trump, you know, if they're getting screwed over by
tariffs and deportations or whatever it is, the impulse in

(01:17:37):
2017 would have been, oh, I'm sorry, welcome back.
Come vote for us again. Now it's, oh, call the police,
fire help, you know, like, like there's just not empathy for it
anymore. 100% I, I, I don't wantto hold you guys for too long,
but Milan, I, I love your take on Trump IN2028I.
I could so see that happening where he almost, almost weirdly

(01:18:01):
like I could see him thinking like, oh, this is like to make
him not look like Kamala Harris or like in spite to prove that
we're the real Democratic Party.And he kind of thinks of it
like, oh, I want JD Vance to kind of prove himself having to
fight. Well, I don't even think it's
that, I just think he like, wants to fuck with the guy.
I remember. That too like it's kind of like
a it's a test of like Oh well, how will he fend if I kind of

(01:18:23):
screw with him like this Kenny rise to the occasion and I'm
sure the poll will look like that so it won't be a real race.
But I I love that theory of Trump endorsing at the last
minute. But I know you guys probably got
it wrong. We don't hold you too long.
I was just going to say thanks so much for coming on, guys.
I mean, obviously we didn't exactly cover exactly what we
intended, but you know what? It was a great time.
I'll be honest, I'm just sittinghere listening.

(01:18:44):
I'm like, wow, it's like having a like a like an episode just
just for me. And I'm just saying this is
great. Thanks so much for coming on,
you guys. Milan, thanks.
So much.

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