Two Great Discussions About the Election

Competing But Not Contradictory

When it comes to the November election, I found two discussions particularly interesting this week.

Pod Bros, Again

First, this discussion between two of the pod bros does a nice job of getting at the difficulty and complexity of the “turnout versus persuasion” problem when it comes to elections. You can either watch the four minutes I’ve queued up (until 36:53), or I’ve also included a lightly edited transcript below.

Jon Favreau:

One other perennial post election debate is the question of turnout versus persuasion. The way this goes is did Kamala Harris lose because more Biden 2020 voters stayed home or because more Biden 2020 voters switched to Trump. The answer is always in every election some of both but one reason it's heavily debated is that if the loss was mostly caused by voters staying home often there are Lefty types who will argue that it's because the candidate didn't sufficiently excite the party's liberal base if the loss was mostly caused by voters switching parties Centrist types will argue that it's because the candidate failed to win the middle moderates.

Nate Cohn at the Times waited into the debate this week with a piece where he makes a few points. One, lower turnout among Democrats was a big part of the story in non- Battleground States this election but not in the Battleground states where turnout was much higher and then his second point is the Times polling data suggests that the Biden 2020 voters who did stay home in 2024 weren't necessarily deciding between Kamala Harris and the couch is is often the phrase they were in fact more moderate voters less partisan less ideological voters who if they had turned out could have just as easily supported Trump. What do you think does this settle the argument once and for all?

Dan Pfeiffer:

This argument would never be settled John for the exact reasons you laid out which is people have an interest in yeah defining it one or the other when the answer was always both the argument will never be solved because people have an interest in continuing the argument it's happened in every losing election in my career and it becomes we were always looking for simple ways to tell ourselves a story right this idea that there's this this ocean of potential Democratic voters if we could just reach with our very compelling Democratic very Progressive message would turn out that like that would be a great world to live in because your path to Victory forever is obvious it a simple.

Another simple story to tell ourselves is if we could just sand down the edges on this issue or that issue then we could get this mythical group of Centrist very focused policy voters who line up the white papers of both uh campaigns on the on a dining on a diner table somewhere in Wisconsin and they make a decision no it's voters are complicated and they have different reasons for turning out different reasons for making their decisions they are cross pressured in thousands of ways.

I do think in this election the most brutally honest thing we can say to ourselves is that Donald Trump convinced our voters to leave us and join him yeah that is what happened and we can't shy away from that because away from that he did it in 2016 uh he he made more he added more votes in 2020 even as he lost by 40,000 votes I mean Donald Trump added like millions and millions and millions of votes to his total between 2016 and 2024 and a a good portion of that is people who have voted for Democrats Barack Obama Joe Biden it's just that's that's what happened yeah there's a bunch of Obama Trump voters got a bunch of uh Biden Trump voters like it is and it just it is hard and dark but I think you kind of have to just like reckon with the absolute wreckage that we're currently in so that you can right size what the solutions are because if you want to tell yourself an overly simplistic story and I think people in the center and the left are doing that then you're not going to do all the work you have to do together because we have to win [a lot of different groups].

In another segment, they also share some excellent news about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez launching a bid for the top Dem post on the House Oversight Committee, which will land her lots more clippable, and likely viral, moments. I also appreciated their acknowledgment that she’s the most talented communicator in the party. She’s a walking master-class indeed and I’d love to hear more about how she is thinking about our strategic future.

Stewart and Sanders

I’d also strongly recommend Jon Stewart’s interview with Bernie Sanders. If you listen at 2x speed, it will take less than 30 minutes and it is still quite excellent.

Bernie tends to beat one drum, and it can seem like these two recommendations are at odds with one another. Sanders might be accused of telling just-so stories, and certainly some of his followers do. But I actually think what he offers is different. He is not just saying, “If Kamala moved left, she’d have had different results and it would be all about turnout.” I also think Bernie has a fair amount of space for different people to adapt to the issues in their districts.

Instead, his argument is about the moral and cultural center of the Democratic party, what it means to be for working people, how to tell a clear story that is powerful for shaping the cultural narrative, and how that impacts the long term trajectory of who is interested in being part of the party.

I also appreciate that his overall policy prescriptions resist the neoliberal assumption that public goods are only for the poor, which tends to breed chronic underfunding and stigmatization. This same neoliberal approach has been popular among Republicans, some centrist Democrats, and some of the members of the Seattle School board.

Republicans recognize it more clearly for what it is. As Grover Norquist famously quipped: “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Anyway, while there is a little bit of tension between these two stories, I do not think they are strictly contradictory, and I think that holding them in proper tension probably gets us a lot closer to the truth of the matter when it comes to the future of the party.

Have a great weekend!