Raging Moderates: The 2028 Democratic Bench for President (ft. James Carville)

How can Democrats message against Trump in the midterm elections? Jessica is joined by veteran political strategist James Carville to talk about the future direction of the party, process the several different things that went wrong in 2024, and lay out what the Blue Team should do to win races in 2026 and 2028. Plus — the Ragin’ Cajun gives his three-point plan for how to win any election, his problems with identity politics, and his inside take on what the Harris campaign was really up against. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Follow Raging Moderates, @RagingModeratesPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:19Speaker 02

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• 1:48Jessica Tarlov?

  Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlov. Scott's off for the month of August, but don't worry. We've got an incredible lineup of guests filling in. And to kick off Scott-free August, we're starting strong with the one and only raging Cajun himself. Welcome to the show, James Carville. It's so great to have you here.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Well, thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.

• 2:06Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, I'm so glad we could work this out. And we're just going to get into it. We are going to be talking about Kamala's return to the spotlight, Trump's promises made, promises broken, and the Sydney Sweeney saga, which I'm going to try to make you interested in it from a culture war angle. Just when Democrats thought we could turn the page on 2024, the past is back in the spotlight. Kamala Harris is promoting a book about her short-lived presidential run and prepping for the midterms. Joe Biden is back on the speech circuit, and Hunter Biden is stirring controversy on podcasts. As the party looks for fresh leadership, its most familiar faces keep stepping forward, complicating our reset. Meanwhile, in Texas, Republicans are escalating a redistricting battle with national implications.

• 2:48Jessica Tarlov?

  Governor Greg Abbott is threatening to remove Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to block Trump-backed maps that could give Republicans five more House seats. James, how do you think we should be handling the map wars?

• 3:02Speaker 04

  Well, it's really unfortunate, and I guess I'm like anybody else. Well, if you're going to do this, which is a highly unusual thing in the middle of a decade, we have to do it also. I mean, it's going to end in a pretty unfortunate place, but I don't know if there's any other answer to it, honestly, Jessica. I'm open to any other suggestion. I think this is a really counterproductive use of the legislature's time, but what else can you do?

• 3:32Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree with you, and I mean, that's a new position, I guess, for me. A few weeks ago, I would have said, you know, you should wait for the census to come out, and we all should have voted to, you know, ban partisan gerrymandering, which is what Democrats supported in 2021. I'm, I guess, a little bit worried that we can't win this one. Like, Governor Newsom can add five seats in California, and that's what the plan looks like as of now, but Kathy Hochul in New York is saying that she wants to get involved but can't do anything until 2027. So, do you feel like this is going to be what shifts the midterms potentially back to the Republicans?

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Well, I think we're going to win by more than five seats.

• 4:16Jessica Tarlov?

  Okay.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm-

• 4:18Jessica Tarlov?

  You're feeling good?

• 4:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's really hard to imagine that the Democrats don't win the House back. I mean, even if they gerrymander five more seats, I don't think that's going to be deterred. But, look, I thought Harris had won in 2024, so you have every right- To be skeptical, but I don't see Democrats losing anywhere. Not in the election, not in the poll, not in any, anything.

• 4:44Jessica Tarlov?

  Wow.

• 4:44Speaker 04

  I mean, I, I don't know if you can argue whether it's the strength of the Democratic Party and then probably be skeptical of that. But this is the, you gotta forget, this is the most unpopular administration at this point in history that there is. The, the big, beautiful bill is the most unpopular piece of legislation that I can remember. I mean, this thing is severely underwhelming. And it's just such a golden thing for Democrats to run on. Every time they get away from it, I get a little miffed of something like that. So what you got right in front of you. You can talk about the issues and, and there's 10 things in there that are just utterly horrific.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  But you see these town halls, I mean, I look to these things very closely. There might be some Democratic plans in there, but not very many. And the kind of questions they ask are not questions that a Democratic operative would put in somebody's head. You know, they asked about detaining people and, you know, ICE agents wearing masks. You know, I would have said, ask about rural hospitals or ask about this. I mean, and last night in Nebraska, you know, I'm sure Lincoln, there's a lot of Democrats in Lincoln's University of Nebraska. But a lot of stuff is organic, man. They're just, people were belling against this and they're going to keep going as long as they keep pulling these town halls. The leadership told them not to, and this guy thought he was going to pull something off.

• 6:11Jessica Tarlov?

  Mike Flood?

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it didn't work very well for us.

• 6:14Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess a little of a, of a hat tip to him for actually showing up to do it because he knew what was going to happen. Whether there were some plants who showed up or just his regular constituents.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  And I don't, maybe he knew, maybe he was just used to being in that Nebraska district and, you know, having everybody agree with him. I don't know, I don't know who to say to my voice.

• 6:35Jessica Tarlov?

  So many have not shown up though, so I'm glad that they did. And mostly because we got the footage of people talking about it. And there were such a range of issues, you know, from the Epstein stuff to healthcare, to alligator Alcatraz and what's going on with ICE. But I guess I have a little bit of PTSD from 2024 when Donald Trump was historically unpopular as an individual. And, you know, we felt good for 40 of the 107 days that Kamala ran.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  So I blame 2024 almost exclusively on Democrats. No, I don't need that because it was evident two years, year and a half before the election. People, A, did not want President Biden to run for reelection and B, they wanted a change in direction. He didn't decide until July 21st. We now know that Harris was under orders from the president not to say that she would do anything different. We managed to pull this off. We gave Democrats no say so and who their nominee would be or the direction their party would go in.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  And then we said on the biggest issue that the country was looking for, changes, acknowledgement that we can't argue with people if they want something different, you just give them something different. And there were a thousand things that she could have done and she did none of them. And I don't have a problem writing a book. I think in my memory, most every defeated presidential candidate goes out and writes a book. I know Hillary wrote her book, I think, and, you know, Mitt Romney or whoever. But it's clear this party wants to move on now. 2024 is just something that Democrats don't want to think about, talk about, relive. They're ready to take the next step and that's clear. It clears the bell.

• 8:27Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, no, I definitely feel that way. I live in New York City and we just had our, I guess over a month ago, but it feels recent, our mayoral primary where a lot of people wanted to move on with Zoran Mamdani. And I was curious if you could talk about, I mean, this is really going backwards, but how any of the lessons of the 90s and the Clinton era relates to today? Because as someone whose politics are more moderate and Scott, who is on vacation, but we co-host together.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  I'm probably more liberal than you are. I'm not, I'm not on the progressive side, but I don't, nomenclature is not what's important. Go back to 92. There were three things, three things. Change versus more to say, that's our message. It's never going out of fashion. All right, somebody a couple, three weeks ago asked me, James, what's new in American politics? I said, nothing. And nothing will ever be new. You either like what you got, or you want something different. Then the economy's stupid, of course, that drives, you know, how many economic reactions there's a human being having a day, you know, figured out, I couldn't count that high. And then don't forget healthcare.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  But what about the change? Well, just run on that. And it's all contained in a big bad bill. If somebody gives you something, well, take it. And they giving us a, a, a simple teed up message. Let's just deliver it. We don't need a lot of hoo-ha and this and that and running around. Just talk about what's in there. We need to change this. It, it's putting, you know, fat cats over ordinary working people, putting people that already have it made and hurting people who are trying to make it. I mean, you could just give a thousand literations of the same message. We don't need anything new. Keep those three things.

• 10:26Jessica Tarlov?

  Okay, well, what do we do about all the stuff that keeps popping up then? I mean, we have this moment, right? We have Democrats on the proverbial lamb, right there in Illinois and New York because of the redistricting. That's eating up the cycle. You have Epstein.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Well, the redistricting itself is unfortunate, but I don't have any other choice. And I mean, I think at some point, people have a, a basic sense of fairness. I don't think this, I'd say they poll you on it, but I don't think this Texas move is going to be very popular.

• 10:55Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, it's definitely not. Democrats are totally where you are, that, you know, they say just fight fire with fire. Mitch McConnell did this to us.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, we would rather not do this, but as long as there's a three-point line, we're going to shoot three pointers.

• 11:09Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  I would much prefer to talk about how we can get wages up. I would much prefer to talk about how we can make rural healthcare about it and improve rural hospitals, but unfortunately, I have to deal with this in the meantime.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  I mean, do it, but don't act like there are other things that you would rather be doing and that they're almost forcing you to do this. And just in the element of basic fairness. I mean, Epstein stuff, it doesn't take a lot to keep it going. There's questions everywhere. Can't we finally get some answers? All we get is stonewalling and prison transfers and the house going out of session so they couldn't subpoena the records. There's so much we don't know. Why don't we get some answers out of here? Let's ask them and then, you know, this is a giant distraction and go back to your message. But it's kind of hard to tell people, don't talk about a guy who either hung himself

• 12:08Speaker 04

  or was hung in a jail cell and you had underage women all over the place and you had a British socialite in the middle of it and God knows everything. I mean, how do you not talk about that? You can't.

• 12:20Jessica Tarlov?

  No, it's definitely made for TV kind of stuff.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's easy to understand and it fits on what a lot of people, a lot of people on the right say, there's this giant cabal of coastal elites that are harvesting these young females. You gotta give them credit, they're two thirds right. It's just they got the coastal elite wrong. There was a bunch of coastal elites, international coastal elites, I guess I'd call them, who were grooming and harvesting young women.

• 12:51Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  That's true. It wasn't being done in Comet Pizza.

• 12:55Jessica Tarlov?

  With Hillary standing at the front of the store.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. You got the wrong guy or wrong person.

• 13:02Jessica Tarlov?

  Do you feel like, I understand that the tide would be going in our direction and historically that's just what's going to happen anyway with midterms. But we've spent a lot of time thinking about the way that we message and who the right messengers are and if you're on social media and whether your videos look good and are you using the right font and filter. How are you feeling about the way that, I guess, the Democrats are presenting? Because our approval rating is absolutely abysmal. I happen to think it's because we're not fighting hard enough. It's not because people actually hate the party or think that we don't stand for the right thing.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  So people belong to a political party because they want to win elections. That's what a political party is supposed to do. We lost. People are not happy. I don't have a positive image of the Democratic Party. Okay, the title of my documentary is Winning Is Everything, Stupid. You didn't win. Period. Okay, end of case. I don't think people are prepared for what's getting ready to happen in Virginia. It's one thing to know that somebody's gonna win an election and the other side knows they're gonna lose. When the magnitude of this deceit is real, i- it's gonna change a lot of things.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  And the image of the Democratic Party will go up some because they'll watch Spanberger and they'll watch Cheryl on election night and they'll go, God, yeah, we won it. Great, go Team Go. Then, this is why I am a real kind of optimist going forward, if we get to forward. This is the most talented potential growth of presidential candidates in the history of American politics. Understand, not in this century, not compared to this. If I took the talent level of all of the potential candidates, and I think a lot of them are gonna run. I'd sit there, ask me, I said, man, Rudd, get out there.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  And when people see and Democrats see, you mean, we got somebody that can string a sentence together? I didn't know that. We got somebody that can frame a thought? Gee, Wiz, look at this, come see Martha, look at this guy. Or look at her. And look at that. Then you're gonna see something. But it takes a little trust and a little forward thinking to say, well, we're gonna win in Virginia and New Jersey. We are. We are gonna win in 2026. We will. I think the Senate is more in play than most people do, but it's a reasonable thing to assume that we can't win the Senate back. And I think the talent level in our party at the potential presidential level is as high as it's been in American history. I love that.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  And it's one thing to say it, it's another thing to see it. We all know who they are, who they potentially are. And the other thing that 2028 will do is it'll settle. And you know, people say, Madonna, the party needs to be more progressive. You know, there are more people that live in New Jersey and Virginia than live in New York City. Now, you wouldn't have known that, but there are. And the primary voters are going to decide the direction of the party. And that's the way it should be. And they're going to have a healthy array of candidates to pick where they want to go in a direction and the person they want. And I think that they're going to do it very wisely. I'm very, very convinced of that.

• 16:26Jessica Tarlov?

  So you don't feel like we're in the midst of, and I know in your op ed, you said, this is a civilized civil war, but we have to delay it.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:35Jessica Tarlov?

  So can you expound on that a bit more for me? Cause it's a hard, I mean, maybe just because I work in TV and everything feels immediate. And you get asked questions like this constantly, like, what does Mom Donnie mean for the future of the party? What is AOC getting more small dollar donations than any other candidate? And it's all over the state, right? There are people in Buffalo that like AOC and people in Queens that like AOC. And I think that does say something about where the party is.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Well, and there's younger, more progressive people, it's their turn. The old people need to get out of the way. The future is now. Uh, good, run. And if you get the authority of winning the nomination behind you, then you've made your point. But I don't really count how, how many people you get in Idaho. Or how, how many overnight contributions you get. I mean, it's a sign of energy. It's a sign that, that people are there. But you know, Jessica, the Democratic Party has never nominated the most left candidate in a race.

• 17:40Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  And I don't think it's going to happen now. Most people don't know the process for selecting a Democratic presidential candidate. Let me explain it to you in two words, southern blacks. Okay. That's where that, that when, you know, we had lost New Hampshire. Okay. We didn't run in Iowa. Other people had lost Biden. He was, he wasn't even scratching. He even Nevada, New Hampshire, whatever. And then one day Jim Clyburn dropped a hammer and the whole process was over. It was it. Boom. Okay.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  So you're going to see in, in, I happen, because of the situation, my birth and my politics and my region, I happen to know Southern Blacks better than most Caucasian consultants. And I got news for you, they're not all that liberal.

• 18:40Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  Like Clark said, the most conservative person I've ever knew in my life was my daddy. They're going to come down and bring in a lot of that stuff in rural South Carolina, Georgia, the Mississippi Delta. I don't think you can go over that big. I really doubt.

• 18:55Jessica Tarlov?

  There is a push within the party to try to change that level of influence, though. And I mean, you still see everyone's showing up and wearing their Clyburn T-shirts and Andy Beshear, you know, is out there. And I think really putting himself onto the main stage in a different way than when he was auditioning to be Kamala's VP back in the summer of 2024. But so you see, nothing's going to change. It's been Southern Blacks and it's going to continue to be Southern Blacks.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  That's not going to change between now and 2028. And by the way, I don't want to say, they do a very good job.

• 19:30Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  They do a very thoughtful job of, of, of voting. And I don't think the appetite would be in a party to diminish the influence that, that Southern Blacks have in Democratic primaries. I really don't. I'm satisfied with that. However, you draw it up, somebody's going to have similar influence. Now, you know, Iowa, we don't do that anymore. See what happens in New Hampshire. But it's, all roads lead through the South.

• 19:58Jessica Tarlov?

  On that note, we're going to take a quick break. Stay with us.

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• 23:27Jessica Tarlov?

  Welcome back. Donald Trump loves to make big promises, but lately he's coming up short. He pledged to expand access to IVF after his Supreme Court picks helped overturn Roe v. Wade, but the White House now saying there's no plan to require insurance coverage or federal funding for fertility treatments. On immigration, Trump adviser Stephen Miller publicly set a target of 3,000 arrests per day, but in court, the DOJ denies the quota ever existed. And we've already talked about this a little bit, but despite Trump's history with Jeffrey Epstein and public pressure for transparency, the long-promised Epstein files remain largely sealed. Ghislaine Maxwell is in a cushier prison as of now, and we're kind of asking what happens when the promises don't match the policy? Do you think, I mean, I know you had your three-point plan.

• 24:12Jessica Tarlov?

  It hasn't changed. I love that. It's consistent. It's easy. We're always asking people, like, just give us our three-point plan. And now we can say we have the Carville Plan that has got us wins for decades. But do you give any stock to the idea that broken promises actually affects Trump's base?

• 24:31Speaker 04

  I wouldn't call it broken promises.

• 24:33Jessica Tarlov?

  Oh, okay.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Look, he told you that he was gonna cut taxes on rich people, he cut taxes on rich people. He told you that he wanted Project 2025, wanted to dismantle the VA, they're dismantling the VA. They told you they wanted to close rural hospitals, they're closing rural hospitals. Argue that he's powerful and he's successful. Don't argue broken promises. And by and large, they're doing what, Russell Boyd's most powerful person been in federal government for a long time. And now the broken promise has said it'd be transparent in the Epstein case, anything about that. Either he could always throw something in, but I wouldn't argue broken promises.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  I'd argue bad results, really bad.

• 25:20Jessica Tarlov?

  Is that, in that op-ed that I cited earlier, you said, we have to go out there and say we want to repeal absolutely every piece?

• 25:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 25:28Jessica Tarlov?

  That's the way forward?

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Yes. I mean, look at the horror of it. Now, it's 4.1 trillion in debt, they just recalculated it. And I'm sorry, you know, you never want to like predict economic times, bad, good, but Trump's numbers on the economy are terrible. As are his numbers on on cost of living. It's another thing I'm saying, never use word inflation, always talk about cost of living, always.

• 25:54Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, would have been nice if we talked about that in 2024, I guess.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  And she could have said, you know, we're gonna do the following things, because we know that families, instead of saying, it's not what you think it is, we've actually created X number of jobs. We could have just given people something to cling on, that, hey, I see something going on out there, I'm gonna change something to meet the moment. If we'd have had an open process, we'd have won, we'd have gotten 53% in 2024. We forced that result on ourselves.

• 26:25Jessica Tarlov?

  Do you have any insight into what actually happened within the Biden camp, which obviously seemed to be very, very insular? And then? Going back to what I brought up before, you know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are showing up again at a moment where we feel like we need to shed skin, right? That we need to become something new. And it's a reminder that people did feel betrayed by the Democratic Party and that they were looking to us to save them essentially from having to go back to Donald Trump. And to your point that we can force them into his bucket again.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  So I think I know what happened. When presidents get elected, they have a culture around it. So the Clinton culture was one way. The Obama people were different. The Biden and Biden's inner circle was, we won this, we beat Donald Trump, no one else could do this. We let this country out of the pandemic into, you know, out of areas, unprecedented prosperity. And we never get any respect. The Clinton people think they reinvented the goddamn wheel. The Obama people are arrogant and that it didn't return my phone calls when I was vice president.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  And, you know, they'll, because we Irish guys and grew up in Scranton and I think Mike grew up in Providence, you know, to hell with all these people, you know, they always tell us what we can't do. You know, we don't get the elite media doesn't give us the credit that we deserve and we're gonna run, goddamn it, and just get out of the way. I think that was a big part of the mentality of President Biden and the people around here. And then, of course, we know for a fact that there were all these elaborate mechanisms you had to go through to even get something in front of President Biden. You're not allowed to talk to him about it.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  I'm pretty sure that's a large part of what happened. And then, when it was just inevitable that they couldn't go out, they told Harris, we noticed for a fact, well, you can't do anything different. We did. You keep the same campaign manager, the same headquarters, the same artwork on the wall, the same phone number. And don't say you can do anything different. I, it's like, we always designed it. We had to do five really stupid things to lose and we probably did all five of them.

• 28:58Jessica Tarlov?

  For 2016, there was a moment that you could isolate on the chart, the Comey letter, right, where Hillary was going to lose 11 days out. And the interview on The View where Kamala came on and they asked her.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  What do you think would be the biggest, specific difference between your presidency and a Biden presidency?

• 29:20Speaker 06

  Well, we're obviously two different people. And we have a lot of shared life experiences. For example, the way we feel about our family and our parents and so on. But we're also different people and I will bring those sensibilities to how I lead.

• 29:37Jessica Tarlov?

  And she was there to roll out a policy that was distinct from the Biden administration for people who receive Medicaid, that you could get care in home for your parents. You want to talk about the sandwich generation. It was a good policy, right? And now that we're talking about healthcare, it would have been even better. And she just, I guess, wasn't allowed to do it. And then I thought that she did a great job with the hand that she was dealt, more or less.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  She wasn't dealt the hand, she was dealt the straitjacket. You can run, but this is what you got to say. That moment, I think the people on The View, I know I read this, like a gas that she gave that answer.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?

• 30:17Speaker 06

  There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  You didn't have to be an experienced political operative to know, oh, God, she didn't just say that, did she? Yeah, she did.

• 30:27Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, and I work in conservative media, so they're always playing, you know, tape of the word salads and her being embarrassing or whatever. But, you know, it was about Donald Trump, the election. Just with everything, he's larger than life. He eats up all the air in the room. And we didn't do good enough, I guess, in differentiating from the past.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  We didn't forget, this was a change election. And we decided that we weren't not going to give them that, which, and we almost won.

• 31:00Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  Think of, she just said, what policy I'm doing. So, you know, every President Obama was different. President Clinton was different. President Carter. And these are three things that I want to do going forward. Anything like that. And then you get, well, did you and the president ever disagree? And you could say, look, my counsel to him is my counsel to him, not people. But I want to talk about what I'm going to do differently. You could do anything like that. Just throw any little seed to somebody and it had glommed onto it. But didn't even give them that.

• 31:34Jessica Tarlov?

  Do you think that the Biden team really would have been vengeful about that? Because now they're floating this notion that they're going to reveal embarrassing stories about her if she comes out against him. But in your experience, like, do you think they really would have come after her? Because that, his legacy is, I don't want to say ruined, but certainly tarnished by what happened. And she was the one who could have saved it.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  If Biden gets out in September of 2023, the Democrats win, plain and simple. President Biden would justify to be going around the country, cutting ribbons at airports and overpasses and highways. And he would be going to Europe like Grant did. And whoever the modern Bismarck is, he would be visiting there. His, the University of Pennsylvania Biden Center would have some, would be swimming in contributions. Understand that. And he would have earned every bit of it. He's one of the most accomplished politicians of my lifetime. But one decision. And now, nobody really wants to hear from him.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  And the last thing that the Democrats want to do today is revisit 2024. It was a nightmare. It's over. Turn the page. It's that simple. This, this is not an argument that Democrats want to have right now.

• 33:00Jessica Tarlov?

  Do you think that means that the old guard in general needs to get out of the way as well? Or this is a particular Biden-Harris problem?

• 33:09Speaker 04

  I don't, I mean, I, I think the voters, first of all, being a part of the old guard myself, will get out of the way pretty fast. You don't have to worry about it. If you're talking about New York City, by the way, Biden really talked about the economy. That was his whole kind of thing. He's a pretty good interviewer. I gotta, I gotta tell you, he, he doesn't get out of his kind of cost of living argument, how hard, how difficult life is in the city. So why do you automatically assume that Mnuchin is the future of something but Spanberger and Sherrill are not part of the future? Understand, it's a very coastal, it's a very New York-centric view, but I'm not, I'm not sure that that's the correct view.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  But there will be a person from that wing of the coalition that's going to run in 2028. And I think, I think it's necessary that they do so these Democratic primary voters can weigh in on the direction they want their party to go in.

• 34:09Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, I, I agree with you. I also think that it'll probably be a governor who ends up being the candidate. I think people will be, you know, looking for executive experience and the kind of deliverables that you just can't get in the same way if you're in the Senate or you're in Congress. And, and I'm excited about it. You know, your line unsurprisingly is better than mine, but our bench is very, very deep.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Don't underestimate the Senate talent, Democratic talent.

• 34:36Jessica Tarlov?

  Okay.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  I, I don't get into sort of picking and choosing here, but does anybody really think that Ruin Diego is not going to be on the ticket by 2032? No. Okay. I think Chris Murphy is a really talented guy. Warnock is one of the better communicators I've ever seen. Of course, there's Democratic talent and governors and there's also, but there's a lot of Democratic talent in the Senate. And the point I'm trying to get across here is the cavalry is coming. Okay, it's coming. It can't get here, as I said in the piece, right now, we're just all about being against the big, beautiful bill. There's no person in a Democratic coalition that doesn't detest the big, beautiful bill. It, it unites every Democrat.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  And now come the 2028 cycle, did we flush it out? But not until then.

• 35:28Jessica Tarlov?

  Okay, hold our powder until then. One thing, it's an extension of the bill because there was tons of funding in it, obviously for ICE, which now has a bigger budget than the IDF, which feels extreme to me. I think immigration will still be a major flashpoint in the conversation. It's the economy, stupid, but there are a lot of people who certainly have not forgiven Democrats for how terribly immigration was mismanaged under the Biden administration until the last year, let's say, and haven't seen a thoughtful plan for how we would be managing the border and our asylum system. How do you think that we can do a better job of that?

• 36:10Jessica Tarlov?

  Are there any folks who you feel like are doing a decent job in speaking to this? And I'm not saying, to me, it's not enough to just say, you know, we made a mistake. We have to be for strong border security and a humane process. Like, there has to be something more for people that really care about immigration, like there was in the 90s, like Obama, like Hillary ran on as well.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  So, you're right. The first point of the Biden administration was disaster, and the reason is he listened to those lefties. Okay. Bernie Sanders in 2016 was calling for open borders. Okay? That's what they were basically advocating. It turned into a policy disaster. By the end of the Biden term, border was perfectly fine.

• 36:57Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  Now, that's not the greatest thing to argue. The question then becomes, when you talk about immigration policy, right, we'll talk about southern border, what about the 14 million people out of here? You could just come over to someone and say, you know what? We're gonna have a point system. So, somebody's been in this country for 35 years, held the same job, raised three kids, they've all gone to college, that person gets 10 points. Somebody's here for three months and they've committed three crimes, they get no points. And what we need to have is acknowledge that people are here. We don't need to be raiding Home Depot and raiding this. Not every person that is in this country.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  That is not documented as the same. We, we absolutely need a, a healthy immigration policy and we need to, to deal with the people that are already here. Period in the case. Then people go, ah, it's not flushed out enough. What are you gonna do about this? And say, look, my policy is this, we like immigration, we like immigrants. We're gonna have an orderly process to get in the table and we're gonna have an orderly process with the people that are already here. People like immigrants. They don't like disorder. You gotta understand that. If you put, you have a favorable, unfavorable opinion on immigrants, it'd be two to one favorable.

• 38:21Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  I want to have immigration. I want to deal with it that's here. They want to get rid of it all and we can't do that. We don't want to. It's not in our interest. And you, you can see his, his numbers on immigration are now, not that good, actually.

• 38:37Jessica Tarlov?

  No.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  They're going south. Cause what he's given is actually some level more disorder.

• 38:42Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, well, there's a frenziedness to how this is happening.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  But just tell people, we want immigration and we want order and there's no reason that we cannot have both.

• 38:53Jessica Tarlov?

  I feel like we would have gotten a lot of goodwill if the Blue City mayors had played ball and handed over criminals, basically to begin, and then Stephen Miller and Trump would have looked even worse, even more quickly, frankly.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  People are, a lot of them are going to school, they're scared, even people that are here legally. I, I, my housekeeper, make her tape her passport to her rig. Cause if she gotta go back to Guatemala, I'm going with her. The clown in Nebraska was saying, a 28-year-old who doesn't work, we're just gonna give him healthcare. Okay, the course, audience didn't even like that. If a 28-year-old is here illegally, the last place, were you ever 28?

• 39:41Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  You never thought about getting sick? The last place you're gonna be? Is in the emergency room. All right, particularly if you're not here legally, shit, you'd die of a heart attack before you go to the.

• 39:55Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah, it's a good point, but they have to smokescreen it and they have to talk about the five able-bodied people that are on Medicaid that could be at work.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Tried it in Arkansas, it was a disaster. The problem with Medicaid and healthcare costs is not 28-year-olds. And I mean, some of their arguments, if you think about them just beyond the argument they're making, it's really stupid.

• 40:18Jessica Tarlov?

  I'm always astounded by it and I think, am I hearing the same thing other people are hearing? But we need to take one more quick break. Stay with us.

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• 42:36Jessica Tarlov?

  Welcome back. Before we go, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the culture wars. I don't know if you've been paying attention to this viral American Eagle campaign starring actress Sydney Sweeney. It sparked days of online debate with some critics saying it hints at eugenics. Trump called it the hottest ad out there once he found out that Sydney Sweeney was a registered Republican in Florida. And then he's going after what he sees as woke brands like Jaguar and taking another jab at Taylor Swift. I know in the wake of the 2024 election, you weighed in a lot on the woke issues, right? How the Democratic Party stopped talking like normal human beings and was spending too much time paying attention

• 43:17Jessica Tarlov?

  to a very tiny percentage of the population. Do you think that we're doing any better on that front? Do you think what's going on with the Sydney Sweeney ad matters at all?

• 43:29Speaker 04

  So the actual date is April 27th, 2021, when publicly said in Fox, this is killing us. There's so many things about it. I've said defund the police are the three stupidest words in the history of the English language. I mean, I don't like to call it the W word because it was actually kind of started by Ledbetter, who was a jazz musician from Louisiana, Texas, who brought that in a song, I think, in the 1930s. He said, black people should be woke, aware of the interactions with the police. It sounded like a pretty good idea to me. Okay, it's pretty smart Ledbetter was. The whole identity language was bad for the party.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  And basically what the identity left said, you have to look at me as a blank.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  First, and I can't, I can't do that. I gotta look at you as a human being first. I know if you're black or you, you know, female or whatever it is that you are. But humanity is our most important identity. And the public never liked it. And think of words they say, and this is where I think that the people that use the term communities of color, I actually think it's racist, and I'll tell you why. It is the assumption of educated white people that everybody that is not white is the same. Which is idiotic. Yeah. It's idiotic to say that all white people are the same. But it's a kind of, you know, like NPR people love this kind of language.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  And they don't even know, they don't know what they're saying. Remember when they were starting and their whole thing was gonna be BIPOC? Yeah. And they were just gonna hoard all non-white people in the same vat, which is historically ignorant and politically stupid thing to do. And, you know, we didn't, now, there's been a big bounce back. I mean, the non-whites, if you look at the latest data, are moving away from Trump pretty quickly. But we did not do that well with non-whites because I think a lot of that was the hangover of the identity area. Now, you don't hear political people use this kind of language anymore. It hurt us in 2024. It, it did.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  And you, you did all kind of data on late break and voters, the stuff was very sticky. And, you know, Alyssa Slotkin was pretty articulate about it, who won a very, very close race in a race in a state that, that, that Trump carried. They just need to talk like other people and we just, the longer we get away from that, the, the less the effects are gonna be. But it was one of the all-time stupid political ideas in this century, was we were going to change dictionaries and the way people spoke to each other. We will go do no such thing.

• 46:28Jessica Tarlov?

  Do you think we are doing better in this way?

• 46:32Speaker 04

  I do. I don't. Do you see anybody using that kind of language anymore?

• 46:36Jessica Tarlov?

  No, I certainly think that it's better. I, you know, the Sydney Sweeney stuff, I think, is one of those more right wing stories where they're taking, you know, some people online who probably vote the same way that we do that are outraged about it and, you know, saying it's Hitlerian, et cetera. But in general, I think we've been pretty good at being normal, which is a nice break.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  Don't talk about not being part of identity politics. Just don't be part of identity politics. You don't have to say it. You don't have to go through it and relive it. It was just a giant, stupid mistake that some well meaning people thought it was the future of communications. And it was just really, really stupid.

• 47:25Jessica Tarlov?

  Couldn't have said it better myself.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  But I don't want to drag it back up. Just let it go and to just talk like normal people.

• 47:33Jessica Tarlov?

  I'm going to tell my colleagues that I just don't want to talk about it anymore and hopefully they'll let me off the hook.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Well, that's what you do. You know, it's the whole thing. If you have the law, I'll get the law. If you have the facts, I'll get the facts. If you don't, either pound the tape. You don't want to talk about the failure of this administration to deal with the cost of living. You don't want to talk about all of the things that they pass from gutting veterans' benefits to rural hospitals to, you name it. And just do it like that. But they're going to keep trying to bring it up because it's their advantage to talk about it. It's not our advantage to talk about it. It was, it was a phase, just like teenagers go through phases. But that was all it is. And, you know, they're always going to come back to the trends in sports.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  It's, you know, I'm not, hadn't thought about the 400 meters and the girls' track meet, but the Athletic Association, I'm sure has ways to determine that we have equitable competition. I know that Senator Gago, Governor Newsom.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Congressman Moten have all said that they all have daughters and they want them to compete, to compete together, girls. That seems totally reasonable to me. It's just state the problem, state where you are. And this is before the pandemic, I went to Amsterdam. You know what they don't have in Amsterdam Airport? Gender specific bathrooms. You go in the bathroom, you close the stall, you come out, you wash your hands, and you go out. And I, I was just kind of stunned because I'd like never seen that before. And it was like zero issue.

• 49:16Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  It, it was a cultural shock and I guess culturally we just can't do it or people would go crazy. But there's some gender, I'll be about, probably not the most elegant topic, but it's true.

• 49:30Jessica Tarlov?

  Well, it's a reality for all of us.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  The point is, you know, whenever you want to, we'll get back to the four hundred meters at the girl state track. But I, I, I agree with Senator Guygo, Governor Newsom, Congressman Moten. I think that's a reasonable position.

• 49:45Jessica Tarlov?

  Totally. And where eighty percent of the country is.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Yes. He said government of Utah, they asked an anti-trans sports thing. The guy, conservative is the next guy. He's a big Mormon, a lot of they say. He said that there are a hundred thousand high school athletes in Utah for trans. This is not my issue. Go, dump the veto and just send it back to the Utah State Athletic Association. They, they let them deal with that. How many, you know how many athletic governing bodies they are in the United States? Couldn't count them all.

• 50:18Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 04

  I'm just be concerned about how do we get them people motivated, Democrats raise taxes where they were pre-Trump on incomes over a half million dollars a year? And use half that money, which is trillions of dollars, to establish a first time home buyers mortgage relief fund. Because if you're, when, when you're twenty seven or twenty eight and you hear people and particularly Democrats talking about, now it's the Republicans, they telling you how good the economy is. And they will say, what the shit is she or he talking about? I have no hope to buy a house. I have no hope of getting an education. I'm living in my parents' basement.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  And they got every tax break in the world and they're telling me how good I got it. And we act like we don't see them. So when I was in law school, understand this, every month I got a check for $300. In 1971 dollars, I could do whatever I wanted, buy books, I can go to French Quarter, anything. Okay, that was what they call the GI Bill. I buy my first house, I am guaranteed the lowest mortgage rate there is. When I graduated from law school in 1973, there was one black and three females in a graduating class. We don't live in that world anymore.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  So we gotta give these young people tools that my generation of young people had. And we gotta quit telling them how lucky they are to be living in this economy at this time. It's a statement that actually irritates them. It's an old rich guy's idea of like, this guy started dollars and he became the regional manager. Yeah, one out of 100,000 of people that are sitting there for $9 an hour. They're not thinking they're gonna be the regional manager one day. The most important thing, if I ever left lesson, people want to be seen. Okay, that guy sees me or she sees me.

• 52:26Speaker 04

  And if you start talking about that, a young voter will say, well, at least they understand what I'm going through. And that was part of Trump's appeal with these rural whites. They didn't feel like Democrats saw them. And then Trump goes and promises a bunch of stuff, stamps in their back, of course. But he did do the first and necessary thing. He said, you exist, you're out there, I see you. And we don't do that with young people very much at all. And just, you know, understand that just acknowledging the problem with an imperfect solution is 100 times better than denying the problem.

• 53:04Jessica Tarlov?

  I love that. I can't thank you enough for your time. I don't know if you have anything that you want to wrap up with, but you've.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  I'll just say this, I go on any network, I go on any show. And I think the idea that we boycott any news outlet, I don't have to go on somebody's show and I don't have to agree with them. But I, I, I just wish Democrats would just say, look, goddammit, we've got swagger here. We've got some strong candidates coming. We've got a hell of an issue in this big, beautiful bill. We're going to romp and kick ass in Virginia and New Jersey. Let's go get them. Oh, James, the approval rating has said thirty-one percent. Well, yeah, because we lost. I don't like them either. Once you start winning, it's going to go up because what approval rating really lags is among Democrats because they don't like to lose.

• 53:54Jessica Tarlov?

  Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 04

  Okay?

• 53:56Jessica Tarlov?

  So no one likes to lose.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  Winning is everything, stupid.

• 54:00Jessica Tarlov?

  Winning is everything, stupid. Thank you for your time.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  You bet.

• 54:04Jessica Tarlov?

  And that's it for this episode. Our producers are David Toledo and Eric Genikis. Our technical director is Drew Burrows. Going forward, you'll find Raging Moderates every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to its own feed to hear exclusive interviews with sharp political minds. This week, I'm talking to Mallory McMorrow, who's running for the next Senator of Michigan. And make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. Thank you again, James.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  All right.

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