Who Is the Real Base of the Democratic Party?

25:19They're alienated from the process. Right. And they just sit quietly when you talk about Trump, you know, at the office, you know, coffee thing. And they just don't say anything for a while, even though they know they kind of like the guy. I wrote a story for The Atlantic about why Gallup withdrew from the presidential polling business. And there are a lot of conspiracy theories about it. But it was basically, it had become a very costly way to raise your profile with ever-increasing risk that you were making a terrible mistake. But how many calls it took in 1990 to build a statistically valid sample versus how many it takes today.

25:51So it just costs much more to build statistically valid samples. And the people who don't respond to your poll questions are not randomly distributed. that the people who pick up the phone and talk to a stranger about politics are more connected, more trusting, more pro-social than the people who don't. And if you've got a candidate who appeals to the less trusting and the less pro-social, the polls will systematically fail to capture that candidate's strength. One of the things I tell young operatives when I've done trainings or people come and see me for their mentor, they need a mentor and they're trying to figure out what to do with their life is try to find ways to listen to strangers.

26:27This is like the whole point of polling. is to listen to what people are saying who don't necessarily know what your interest is in the outcome of their point. But that is getting harder and harder to get. And now online, I'm finding this, which is people think they're listening to strangers. People think that they're getting random bits of information from people, but really they're all existing in the same algorithmic silo and they're just kind of pinging each other back and forth. And so you have arguments and conversations with people about what's happening and they'll tell you no everybody i know is believes this thing everybody i know is saying this other thing well this is family famously attributed to pauline kale who is the film critic for the new yorker back in the 60s and she is supposed to have said and she was joking people think she was being funny she was joking she said in 1968 how could richard nixon have won no one i knew voted for him right and and being the film critic for the new yorker that conjures up everything you need to know right there But that seems to happen a lot.

27:26And it happens now, yes, in the pro-Trump right, but also very much in the progressive left, where a lot of these people have convinced themselves that from policing, immigration, to their obsession with defaming Israel, Gaza, that since everyone they know thinks a certain way, this is going to work. There is a fantastic book about Trump and television called Audience of One. And the thesis of the book is that everything in America today is cable TV. When I was young, you had, at any given moment, four, maybe five choices of what was on TV. And you typically had one TV in a house. And given that math, the goal of network executives was to find what they called the least objectionable program.

28:12Everybody likes zebras drinking from them. Sure. We're hanging around the pond. We put Sunday night when the whole family's watching TV together, it's zebras at the pond night because no one will object to that. Then we get cable. Then we get more TVs in the house. And you start producing things that are more extreme. And the thesis of the book was that Donald Trump is a classic cable TV candidate. Those who like him, like him a lot. Most people don't like him. And Biden, if there was ever the least objectionable candidate in American history, it was Biden. And he was like, he was mutual of Omaha's wild kingdom right there.

28:44I mean, no one minded him that much. He was. It was his core political asset, right? People thought he was a good guy. It was his core political asset. No one minded him that much. Right. And he became unpopular in the end, but that was less personal to him and more the inherent tragedy of the human condition that we all are susceptible to. Yes. If Biden had been healthy, Biden would have won that reelection. I agree with that. But also if Biden had been healthy, there were a lot of decisions that should have been made that didn't get made in his administration. There are a lot of moments where you had disputes between approaches and things that a president, a more effective president would have been able to say, we're doing it this way, not that way.

29:24And we're certainly not doing both at the same time. And we're not both talking to the press also and telling each other how much we hate the people who are advocate the alternative approach. We have one policy and I said it. Yeah, and so here's what I saw at the time. time, Afghanistan was to Biden as Katrina was to Bush. It's just that Bush didn't have to run for reelection again. His poll numbers dropped, you know, 15 points or whatever it was, 20 points after Afghanistan and never recovered. And I think partially because people thought it confirmed what they were worried about, maybe with the age, that maybe he wasn't actually up to this.

29:58And so every piece of evidence they ever got in either direction, I mean, like, people were wildly fond of his of his policies he was passing bills in a divided congress and sometimes a you know democratic congress he was passing these bills and they were all working out the problem was that nobody ever gave him credit for it because nobody believed that joe biden this old guy on tv could possibly be up to doing these really great things they never gave him credit well i may not have liked those bills as much as you did but what i what can be pointed out is he passed more legislation with a thinner margin.

30:33Obama at one point had 60 senators. Biden was playing cards in a pair of twos and a pair of threes. And he would get things passed. So whether you like the legislation or not, the legislative accomplishment, especially in the first year, was quite enormous. He also, if I can talk about your former boss for a minute. Yeah. Because he never faced mortality. He never made the decisions about a vice president that someone who is thinking about succession would. But I've always thought the way you set a vice president up for success is by giving them jobs that are high impact but low ranker. And the classic example of this is what Clinton did to Gore in the late 90s.

31:13Airplane travel in the 1990s was not as safe as it is today. And there were some high-profile crashes in, I think, either Clinton's first term or second term. And so he convened a national commission on airline safety, and he put Gore in charge of it. That's a perfect job for a vice president because who's against airline safety? But also, no one's looking over the vice president's shoulder, that everyone understands that if you put the vice president in charge of an airline safety commission, that is the highest level of scrutiny these decisions are going to get, because there's no appealing this to the president, because he's dealing with issues of war and peace and taxes and budget, unless they do something really radioactive.

31:49He is not going to review it. The vice president is the senior official, so deal with him, and you enhance the vice president's authority. You give them something to talk about that they have done, something that's broadly popular. The worst thing you can do to them is give them something like the border, which is high intensity, where everyone knows they have to look over. The vice president can't make these decisions stick. Everyone will be looking over the vice president soldier to the president, will always be the real decision maker on the most sensitive issue of the day. And if you do that, you set the vice president up for failure.

32:19And I thought again and again, Biden did not set Harris up for success because he couldn't bear the thought he might have to have a real plan to let her run in 2024. Oh, I think that's right. I think he had no plan ever to have her run in 2024. I'm not sure. I think other people heard him say transitional figure and they thought he meant, you know, the next four years. I think he always was thinking I was setting somebody up for the next eight years. And so I think there was a real concern about that. Maybe if the Democrats had done worse in the 2022 midterms, I always, you know, look, we did well in 2022 midterms.

32:51We stopped the red wave or whatever it was. And I think that gave people a greater sense of confidence about him and about the prospects for 2024 than was warranted. And so a bunch of decisions were made after that. Because if you are thinking about that, you do what you said. Clinton wasn't that great to go in the first term. But in the second term, he knew what was happening. And so I think he did try to take care of him. Biden probably had the same idea. Like, oh, well, you know, we'll help the kid out after election day and then she'll have the chance to show what you can do but yeah immediately before no that's not how it worked well your point about 2022 is so important and powerful uh because republicans gained the house or a slim majority in the house in 2022 i don't think people remember now how big a democratic year that that was but and especially at the state level two governors races an extra senate seat and four state legislative bodies right but maybe the illusion created was that those state races were very much driven by abortion politics.

33:47And that led to the idea that the 2024 presidential race could also be about abortion politics. And I think Harris made a big bet on that hypothesis and it turned out to be wrong. Absolutely true. Absolutely. We were all enamored. We were, look, it was a horrible day, the Dobbs decision day. I remember it very vividly. It was a horrible time. Everybody was very depressed about it. But when she locked in and started focusing on it and the White House gave her permission to talk about it and to run on it and actually encouraged her to do it and supported her to do it, it became a very motivating factor.

34:18And I think it was the time that she was at the height of her power in the White House because she was at the height of her power in the country. And people in the country were waiting for her voice. They heard it, they responded to it, and they wanted to hear her. She got invited everywhere to come and talk about it in the democratic world. And so that was not the case prior to that decision. And so while it was a bad decision from a Democrat or progressive standpoint about abortion, politically, it was something that really benefited Harris. And I think she kept running on it. But the tail had narrowed on its impact.

34:55Well, how much are you worried about that history repeating itself in 26 and 28? It looks like 26 is shaping up to be a big Democratic year. Tariffs, price increases, now the Iran war. It's all bad news to the Republicans. But a lot of those are issues that a 2028 Republican nominee can jettison. It may be hard for, if it is Vance, for him to jettison the tariffs because he's been so enthusiastic about that. But he can jettison the Iran war. And should somebody else be the nominee, and that's not impossible, they can jettison both the Iran war and the tariffs. And meanwhile, Democrats may make decisions about 26 that lock them into place for 28 or may learn lessons from 26 that don't hold to 28.

35:37Yeah, I think that this is something that Democrats have to pay a lot of attention to. You have to be thinking about the next campaign and not the last one. I think everyone wants to always base, you know, the future off of that past and it doesn't really work out. Vance will have a harder time. And I think it may not be a particular issue, but it all depends, again, as I said before, on how people perceive the Trump era and what they're looking for as a palate cleanser from Donald Trump. There's almost nothing that J.D. Vance can do to get away from it. I mean, Al Gore tried to get away from Bill Clinton's, Monica mess.

36:09And it led to people being ambivalent about Al Gore. And we sort of had an ambivalent result in 2000, right? And so you really do have to, you just, you got to run with the person who brung you. And if Trump is viewed as in somewhat more popularly, Vance has a chance. If he's viewed as someone who was a wrecking ball to the country and an international standing in the world, I don't see how J.D. Vance escapes that. Marco Rubio may also have some trouble with it, but he may be able to distance himself a little further than J.D. Vance, who is conceivably in the White House for all the big choices.

36:43Well, you have some options. So George H.W. Bush ran in 1988 as, I'll keep the main things you liked about Reagan, especially the no taxes promise, but it's going to be less hard edge. The things you remember from that campaign are his promise, a kinder, gentler merit. Yes. A thousand points alike. Yeah. I'm going to conserve what you like about Reagan, but I'm not going to do more. That was this message. I'm not going to go farther. And I'm going to just bring down the temperature a little bit. Gore with Clinton had a problem, which is what do you do with the scandals? And it wasn't just Monica.

37:15It was fundraising scandals. Clinton raised money in a way. I mean, now we're used to it, but then it was pretty shocking. And so Gore had, I think, two options. One was to say, you know what? I completely, I'm Clinton's man. I agree with Clinton. I'm going to defend him. And the Monica thing was a hoax or we wouldn't have said a hoax in those days. It was an unjust persecution I defend him. And then you accept that you're going to lose Tennessee, which Gore did, his home state, but maybe make it up in some other states where they like Clinton better. Or else you say, you know what? I'm repudiating him on this issue and saying that was terrible.

37:47I will never treat women that way. I'm my own man. Then you lose some of the big Clinton groups, but you probably keep Tennessee. And either way, you win. But he couldn't decide. Yeah. And there was a third option, which I think was on the table that they didn't pursue. And nobody could have done it better than Clinton. I think Clinton would have come out and said to everyone, well, you know, what I've done was scurrilous. I haven't been the best person I should have been. You know, he would have done all those things that a sinner does. And then he says, but you know who didn't do that? Al Gore.

38:17That man, he was the one who told me when I was wrong. He was the one that stood up when I was making mistakes. And he, Clinton could have validated him in that way, but they wouldn't, they wouldn't. That's brilliant. But then you need a very close personal relationship with play exactly because that's a big ask to ask him to do that and i think but i think he would have done it i think that gore was really trying to figure it out on his own i mean this happens to people right like it happens i'm sure it happened to my kid it happened to me as a child of my parents you know like you sort of you want to stand on your own two feet and i think sometimes that gets in a way of maybe making the best choices about you know how to be helped uh going forward so so vance will have that problem and maybe it will be in super bowl for vance And Vance also has a couple of other disadvantages which are unique to him, which is he was very much elevated faster than on schedule, not by his own drive, but by his own ability to ingratiate himself with the nominee.

39:10I mean, this is not Carter picking Mondale because Mondale was one of the most important Democrats in the Senate. This is not Reagan picking H.W. Bush because Bush finished second in the primaries. This is a completely boutique choice that Trump made because he was flattered. That is going to have a hard time saying, yes, I'm my own man, because he has to deal with the risk of Trump undercutting him. And also, who is he really? He doesn't have a strong pre-Trump identity. The one thing everybody knows about him is that he is a member of the Trump administration who's been most hostile to America's role in the world, most hostile to America's allies, the one who called on Zelensky to grovel in front of Trump.

39:49So he may be able to walk away somewhat from Iran, but he can't walk away from the terrorists because he has believed in those. He's believed in them more fusibly than any member of the Trump administration, maybe even than Donald Trump himself. Yeah, I think that's right. Also, there's something else, David. I would love to hear your opinion about this because it doesn't usually matter in politics. But it feels like it's starting to matter. The level of incompetence of just – this is a podcast, so I'll say it – what my friends would call fuckery. like it just all seems like nobody is um nobody's quite up to the task the systems don't work the like what they're doing is is not is i don't know it feels to me like that's penetrating and maybe it's things like the white house ballroom and some of those things tearing down the east ring some of those things are starting to penetrate to people i mean i don't know are you here feeling that yeah well i think this was war is an example of this which is the united states has been war wargaming conflict with iran since the carter administration right maybe even before right and they're they're they're half a century of these war games and in every war game the iranian players first go-to move is close the strait of hornbrews right that's that's night you know that's moving the pawn out in front of the king right now that's just move one our move their move that's their their move one yeah everyone knows that that's their move one so when you finally decide after as carter decided not to as reagan decided not to as every president since the hostage crisis of 1979 has decided not to when you decide it's go time and look the iranians have a lot of american blood blood on their hands there's a lot of business here there have been a lot of presidents who i'm sure came very close to calling it go time but when you call it go time you have to anticipate okay so what do we do about the straight of hormuz problem what's our answer and the idea that you would call it go time on this issue and not have thought about the most obvious iranian counter move or not taking it seriously that that is as you say a level of what what do you guys do you didn't think of it you didn't plan for it the most obvious thing the other one that i think started it was the signal chat group not because of what happened necessarily although although people can tell you like what you put someone is that everybody uses social media people are texting all the time and like the idea that the secretary of defense inadvertently added somebody to his group chat the same way you inadvertently added your cousin to the wrong his name is starts with the same name as your best friend from college that doesn't hold a lot of water for people it penetrates and people think like what are these guys doing what's happening well that was a huge event in the history of the atlantic and and one of the things and again this may not be something that penetrates to everybody who's casually watching politics but one of the things that needs to be stressed about that was when when our editor jeffrey goldberg was inadvertently added jeffrey takes national security extremely seriously.

42:39He knew that Hegseth had put the lives of service members at risk, and he wanted no part of it. So his first story was written in very, first, nothing was published until after the operation was completely concluded. And second, even then, knowing their operational details, they didn't quote the text because they're always in these situations or often something that you, as even a fairly sophisticated consumer of this material, may not understand the gravity of. So you just don't you just be very careful with it because there may be something there that will put things at risk that are important and you don't know it.

43:12It penetrated through because it's such a mundane mistake at its core that a lot of people have made. And at the same way people believe that there are these great conspiracies that are behind all the big things that happen in the world. They also believe because of that, that silly dumb things shouldn't happen. because aren't you guys supposed to be the ones that are orchestrating like the future of Middle East oil policy and you did this? Like, what are you doing? Well, you mentioned the ballroom. Just think how much less trouble Trump would be in on the ballroom if he'd called it a conference room.

43:49Yes. The conference center, right. The White House conference center, right. We need a White House conference center. A lot of people say, you know what? That makes sense. I can see that you probably do need a White House conference center. Yeah, and this thing was built in 1942 and it's full of asbestos and it's out of date. Yeah, that makes sense. That's right. That's right. I talked to a former White House Social Secretary Democrat who told me that, he said, you know, if he had tried, he could have built a bipartisan coalition to do this because it is the thing that is talked about most among the White House Social Secretaries, like the limited space and how hard it is to host an event in the mansion at the White House.

44:29So everybody would have been in favor of building something new. but that wasn't what he's up to. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do. And it's not just for parties. If you want to bring in every living survivor of some past military event to honor them together, the East Room is the biggest room and it gets crowded. You can put them outside, but then in Washington, it's either raining or too humid or too cold. If there is a security concern, you could have gone to the Senate and the House and told them, we need a new security configuration. Here's how we plan on doing it. The things you have to do is you have to ask Congress.

45:02You have to have a planning committee. You have to make it respect other washing monuments. And you have to say, you know what, and we will pay for it properly. I don't have much more of your time left. I want to ask you one last thing. If you were advising a Democratic candidate of 2028, how would you tell them how to manage this tension between the activist, the more progressive, the hyper online, and the people who responded to James Clyburn's call in 2020? How, you know, older, more working class, more female, more Southern, less educated. How, what, is there a path, a true path to find? Well, the thing that is uniting Democrats right now, and I don't hear anybody talking about policy.

45:44It's amazing to me. I've not heard anybody really talk about democratic policy in the hinterlands, right? In Washington, people are thinking about it all the time. And there are these Project 2029 efforts. But the thing that I would say is, number one, get in it now. Don't wait. Don't wait till after the elections. People want to see you standing up. This is what Gavin Newsom understands well. I don't know if Gavin Newsom could be the nominee, but here's what Gavin Newsom understands well, which is that people want somebody who's going to stand up, who's going to appear to be fearless, who's going to try to call it as they see it, and is going to be creative in their online presence.

46:19So figure out your online presence. You don't have to be silly, you know, necessarily if that's not your bag. But you've got to figure out how to be creative online. You've got to figure out how to contest. What is your contest against Donald Trump? And I think that unites people because Trump is a uniting figure. That's not going to work in 2028. In 2026, it will unite people against him. In 2028, you ultimately then have to have something you're for. I've been thinking a lot about American competitiveness, American security, and American unity. right? That those three things all need to go together.

46:51And if we can figure out how we talk about those things in a way that brings Americans together to make sure that we're safe and make sure that we're going to be able to compete with our adversaries around the world, I think you can find a lot of domestic policy that can fit underneath those three things. But you've got to find something that people can rally around and be for. And like I said, you've got to figure out how to get in Donald Trump's face and make the argument that you're not MAGA and that you're willing to fight MAGA, wherever it is. My last point on this, the person who's benefited from this the most from Trump, Trump has basically created the Mark Kelly candidacy, right?

47:25I mean, Mark Kelly was a nice guy, Senator, you know, who doesn't like an astronaut, but the fact that Trump has attacked him because of his statement about not following orders for the upper echelons of the military if they're illegal. The fact that Trump has attacked him for that has turned Mark kelly and a more of a folk hero uh with people who weren't paying that much attention so i think how you conduct yourself when the fights happen when they come to you it's going to be incredibly important well not as a non-democrat uh and a long time for many years in the republican party knowing the how the other person plays their hands my one suggestion would be uh to borrow a phrase that the late fred siegel applied to rudy giuliani when giuliani was his maximum of success he said And the secret to Giuliani's success was he was an immoderate centrist.

48:12So a lot of people think that to be a centrist means to be always in that, well, gee, I don't know. I could do it one way. I could do it the other way. A little of that. A little of that. And the point to Giuliani was he had this ferocious manner. But while he was mayor, his politics were mapped more or less to where the center of gravity in his city was. And so Democrats are often offered these choices between people who are very large candidates, very big personalities, but have extreme views. or candidates who have more moderate views, but then are kind of, they look kind of wishy-washy and kind of frightened.

48:43And the secret is to be not politically extreme, but to have a big personality. I think that's the thing that Gavin Newsom is trying to do. And as you say, he may not be the right candidate, but I think he's found an interesting approach of this. He doesn't take wild positions, but he takes them in a way that is very forceful and uncompromising and unafraid. You know who used to do that, which now we think of him because we think of all the bad parts. But Bill Clinton was that when he ran in 1992. and even in 1996, it was incredibly moderate platform, but he went out there every day and he sold it.

49:14You know, he put energy behind it and he sold it. And so he made people feel like, oh, this is somebody who I want to follow because he knows where he wants to go. And I think that is incredibly important. People always want to know what is the strength of this candidate? Can they take a punch? Can they deliver a punch? And I can think of a couple of Democrats right there right now who I like, but they've got to show they can take some punches and that they can throw some blows. And if they can do that, they'll be fine. Here's the one practical thing I've been saying to Democrats too. Don't fill out the questionnaires.

49:44All the groups in American politics will send questionnaires to candidates and Democratic candidates and say, where do you stand on these hundred issues? And you're supposed to check off where you are. Just have a blanket policy, no questionnaires. I'm happy to send you 700 word op-ed that explains my position on the environment, but I'm not filling out your questionnaire. Jamal Simmons, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. It's good to be here, David.

50:13Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto The David Frum Show.

50:50As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show, Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

51:34Thanks so much to Jamal Simmons for joining me today. My book this week is a novel, The Magician, by Karl Teubin. Published in 2021, The Magician is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of Thomas Mann, the great German writer. Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck in 1875 and died in exile from his native Germany in 1955. In between, he remade modern literature in German with a series of astonishingly important novels. He won the Nobel Prize for literature. And a man of conservative sensibility, someone who supported his country's government in the First World War, and only belatedly became a believer in German democracy in the 1920s.

52:18He was also an opponent of the Nazi regime, married a Jewish woman and had six Jewish children with her, all of whose lives were at risk because of the Nazi takeovers of his country, and who found himself in exile dealing with what had happened to the country he loved and to whom he gave such voice. Kamm-Toyman presents Mann as a man riven by deep internal contradictions and desires. Thomas Mann was a man of homosexual desire and some homosexual relationships, but he lived most of his life in a marriage, a seemingly happy one, that gave birth to six children. He was a person, as I said, of conservative instinct, but he became an important leader of German democracy and even visited the new East Germany in 1949 and tried to find some way of reconciling the division of his country after the Second World War.

53:05This novel speaks to me above all as the profile of someone who's a deeply non-revolutionary man living in non-revolutionary times and try to hold on to both a sense of his country's past and a sense of his own personal continuity as everything around him changes. How much is this a story of our own lives in these revolutionary times where it seems because of technology, but also because of political change, that the world we knew when we were young, even if we're not such old people as I myself am, seems to be receding out of hand. And yet there are values back there that we want to take with us into a new time.

53:45That was Thomas Mann's literary problem. It was his political problem. It was his personal problem. And it was something, and it is a problem to which Toybin gives powerful voice in this beautiful and intimate novel, Magician. I learned deeply from it, and I still find myself thinking about it in some of the quiet hours of reflection of the worlds that I myself sometimes feel that I have lost. Thanks so much to joining me on the program today. I hope if you want to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic, you will do so in the most effective way by subscribing to the Atlantic.

54:20I am so appreciative of your time and attention, whether you watch or whether you view. See you next week on The David Fromm Show. Bye-bye.

54:50This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

55:35not just the obvious stuff but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe how we talk to each other how we see ourselves and our neighbors if you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online Galaxy Brain is worth your time it's thoughtful, surprising and a little unsettling in the very best way find it wherever you listen or watch