Platner’s Top Campaign Strategist on What Went Wrong

26:38The thing that I really notice about that list of candidates is that's not far from a list of candidates who have gotten the most attention in their cycles. The thing that even your critics who I talk to say about you is that you as an ad maker, as a storyteller, as somebody sort of both helping to recruit candidates or choosing candidates to work with, have figured out a way to break through attentionally at a time when it's very, very, hard to do so. So there are a lot of people who are outsiders, but not everybody who is an outsider is going to be a good candidate. Not everybody who is an outsider is going to be somebody who goes viral on social or algorithmic media.

27:27One of the things when I was asking you about where you found Plattner that I feel from the stories I know that you sort of underplayed is the casting dimension of him, like actually looking for a charismatic candidate with a kind of bio. Now, like you didn't invent looking for bios. The DCCC has been doing that forever. The Republicans who've been doing that forever. It does feel to me you look for people who feel like their bios, which is a little bit different. I've watched a lot of veterans run in politics and they just feel like normal candidates. John Fetterman, sort of an insider, I would say, a lieutenant governor, like a known political quantity, but certainly in that campaign with his shorts and his tattoos, there was an aesthetic to him that felt different from other candidates.

28:13So when you're finding these people, when you're looking for them, when you're framing their stories with them, what is it beyond that sort of simple outsider insider thing are you looking for? What do you feel like breaks through and what doesn't? You know, there's a misconception sometimes in politics that to win an election, you're sitting down in a job interview. And I think right now where voters are, they believe that every single thing you're saying at a job interview is a lie. Like they're just not going to believe it. They'll be, oh, because you got some bill through the state legislator, well, you're never going to get it done in Washington.

28:50Oh, you say you're going to lower prescription drug costs? How come nothing's happened? You know, maybe you'll get it done in 15 years. And we're actually not engaging the job interview. We're engaging in something of a dating process with people who've been on, you know, 100 bad dates in a row and are holding out a little bit of hope that maybe tonight's going to be different. and how can you make people who've been given every reason to give up on love fall in love again? And I think that that's much like love. There's something magnetic to it. And I think to shake that loose, I think you need a candidate and a campaign that is telling a story that can bring people who have every reason to be out back in.

29:30John Fetterman was a story about Braddock as much as it was a story about him. A forgotten steel town that believed its best days were generations ago that still deserves to be fought for, that doesn't deserve to be left behind. A bio isn't just bullet points, but a story to tell. And I think people talk about hope as kind of a political tool or like an abstract thing and not a tangible thing in and of itself. And I believe that there's a power in hope, even just as a thing that people are feeling. Like everyone's having such a hard time. I also think there is an X factor in our politics, right?

30:04Like someone could run for president and have the exact same policy positions as Barack Obama, but Barack Obama had an X factor that made him unique. So did Bill Clinton, so does Donald Trump, so did George Bush. The people who kind of rise to the highest ranks of political power in this country do have an X factor and we can't ignore that. And I think you uniquely can't ignore that in the modern media environment where you can't just run a campaign on 30-second television ads. So this is what I want to zone in on because I think FITE as a consultancy, you as a consultant, are good at finding people the X factor.

30:38And one place where I think Democrats have the strategy of the broad coalition of the Democratic Party has fallen apart is I think they were looking for the ability to raise money, not the X factor. I mean, I think there is a deep lack of updating in the strategy to kind of break down the way that this traditionally works is there's a district or a state where there's a competitive election. And the institutional approach to recruitment there is who can raise the most money in the first 48 hours. And that is literally the driving determining factor in who the Democratic establishment wants to recruit.

31:17inherent in that. When the question you're asking is, who knows the most wealthy people? That is probably someone ill-equipped to make a credible case as an outsider running against a rigged economy. And I think it's the job of the consultant class. One of the reasons I do what I do now. One of my first jobs was in North Carolina, working for a candidate there, Erica Smith, who had an incredible story to tell. She also had some issues of her own, but it was from a rural part of the state that was rapidly falling behind and had been kind of left behind by the political establishment where Democrats were collapsing.

31:53She had a decent electoral record even as a state senator, a pastor, grew up on the same family farm that her family was enslaved on, like a really profound story about North Carolina and overcoming hardship and a vision. And we did a hundred county tour in a hundred days across all of North Carolina. And in that campaign, in that tour, I saw kind of two things. One was the political establishment did not exist in a way to see there's a candidate here with a really compelling story and some really good talent. How do we wrap around her and protect her and lift her up and fill in the blind spots here and support it?

32:31It was, she can't raise the money. It's unserious. Or someone from there can never rise into political power. Is the issue that it did work differently before? I mean, I always understand money as having been able to buy two things. Money could buy a certain amount of attention by buying mailers, by buying TV spots, that kind of thing. And money could buy a certain amount of organizing by paying for yard signs, by sending out people into the field. And that both of those things have gotten, in a way, harder to buy. People don't watch TV spots anymore in the same way they used to. And easier or more straightforward to earn.

33:09If you have enthusiasm, if you're somebody compelling, all of a sudden your videos can go viral and people scrolling through TikTok in your area will see you, that it actually was optimized for something that made sense at one time and that now that's no longer true? Or is it just that you just get the money a different way? The money still matters just as much, but you get it differently. I think money still matters profoundly and you get it differently. But I do think the main thing is you can't hide behind 30-second ads anymore. You can't just run a campaign predicated on paid media, you are constantly expected to be communicating.

33:44And I think people's standards for transparency has risen in the social media age. Like we now know everything about our celebrities. The standard for the ways in which LeBron James has to interact with the public are fundamentally different than the standards for the way Michael Jordan had to interact with the public. If LeBron James was at casinos till 5 a.m. every day, we'd be telling a very different story about LeBron. And I think there's a similar thing in politics of everything's under a microscope. You're being recorded at any given moment. You can't put on a 30 second facade and hope that that's enough.

34:17You need every part of a campaign working together to tell a complete story that can't be artificially constructed and you can't cover up for a lack of talent candidate. Still, I think the most compelling indicator of candidate overperformance is candidate quality. And we can have all of these different debates, but that just, I think, remains fundamentally true. The candidates on that list have an ideological range to them. Fetterman sort of changed a lot after the campaign, so he's a little bit of an unusual case here after the stroke. But Dan Osborne running as an independent was a very populist candidate, but very moderate on other issues.

34:56You did an ad, maybe you made the ad, about wanting to help build the wall on the border with his own hands. You have Plattner, who's much more progressive, Zoran Mamdani, who's a Democratic Socialist, Nathan Sage, who was sort of in between that. You've said before that for you, the candidates don't need to be progressive. They need to be populist. What's the difference? I think, frankly, a lot of the difference is in the labels the general public assigns to it. But what I think frustrates me about the current state of the Democratic Party is we have a big tent party that is constantly kind of shifting and rearranging to exclude people who challenge the powers at the heart of it.

35:40And a lot of the specific, what do you mean by that? I mean, watching people who are like the Josh Gottheimer of the world, for example, who's someone who's very like, we need a big tent party, member of Congress, member of Congress, but no one in DSA should be allowed in that party. It's like, well, that's not a big tent party then. Or you see, you know, people who anytime anyone's critical of Israel, well, that's not who the Democratic Party should be. And I'm interested in a big 10 party that kind of flips that a little bit, where we're allowed to disagree on, you know, people have different politics on the border or slightly different approaches on a variety of issues across the country and candidates and campaigns can reflect those.

36:17But we are united in a belief that we're not even having a good faith conversation until we've done serious things about corruption at the heart of our politics and until we're working to address an economy that's broken. And to me, that's the baseline of where people are. And the longer it takes us to get to that place of kind of being a party that's embodying a challenge to the status quo rather than embodying a protection of the status quo, the longer we're going to be in the wilderness. You sort of dodged my progressivism versus populism question. So let me sharpen it. What is populism? I think it is a belief that the people should have more power is kind of how I think about it.

36:55And that's a very, my specific interpretation, but I think a lot about the nature of power in terms of how much people feel like they have it in their lives. And I think a lot of the issues we have stem from the fact that we're at a moment in history that I think people feel more powerless than ever before. Was Obama populist? I believe so, yes. I think his entire theory of the case is deeply populist. he told the story of the country belonging to everyone and that being at the heart of things. And he told and particularly his reelection campaign, I don't think gets talked about enough for just quite how populist the approach was.

37:32Mitt Romney was a Wall Street villain who had shipped our jobs away, who wanted more money for himself and his Wall Street friends. Well, Obama was a president who took them on, who brought the economy back, who stared down those same villains. I think that's an example where populism allows for a big tent. And the people who critique it are just absurd because it's against their own interests. Fight, and I think this was not as much specifically you, but worked on Tom Steyer's campaign for governor of California. Tom Steyer's a billionaire. Can a billionaire be a populist? If you're a class traitor.

38:06I think Pritzker is another example of like, they act in a way, their policies in a way are in conflict with the interest of the billionaire class. I think one of the things I'm trying to get at is in your theory of where the Democratic Party has gone wrong, in your theory of where politics is going, what separates the candidates able to make the kind of appeal that you think works from the candidates who can't? I don't know Janet Mills myself, but I am certain if we had Janet Mills in this studio, she would say she also believes more power should go to the people. She also believes that politics is corrupt and has certainly had to make compromises as any governor has, as Zoran Mamdani has to make compromises as people in power do.

38:51But she would probably see herself within that definition as fitting within it. So would many of the people, most probably, in the establishment Democratic Party that comes in for pretty regular tongue lashings from you and some of the people around you. So what is the line here. The ability to name villains. It drives me insane about that. You have these people who've kind of taken on affordability. And so can you hear these politicians talk about it? And they're like, you know, we have an affordability crisis, which is why I'm here talking about affordability, because what Democrats need to do is we need to talk about affordability.

39:29It's like you're not saying anything. Everyone is dealing with some version of an affordability crisis across the country. The villains of it are specific in specific places. In some places, it's broken right to repair laws. In some places, it's bad landlords. In some places, it's electric monopolies. In other places, it's specific billionaires or corporations. I don't think Janet Mills would name the people who are taking the power and using it to hurt working people. So that's the point of populism. It's not just believing that people should have more power, but it's believing that there is a small group of people or corporations or something that has collected the power, and that's what needs to be broken.

40:06And articulating that conflict clearly. I mean, I think there's a case to be made that's like basically populism is a politics that points. And what we have in the rising in the Republican Party is a populism that points the finger down or to the side, targeting trans communities, targeting immigrant communities. And what we are advocating for is a populism that points the finger up. And I think the friction and the fight right now with a lot of the Democratic establishment is there is a belief that we are not in this populist moment or that we can just kind of get through this moment and things will collapse.

40:44The reason that frustrates me so intensely is I don't think there is any electoral indication that that is true. And I think there is going to be a populist future in this country. It is a question of who's going to control it. And if it is not the Democratic Party, then it is only going to get worse on the other side. And so we need to start pointing up before there's no one left around. You mentioned Obama's 2012 campaign before. Obama has these two campaigns that are different. You have the 08 campaign, which is very hope and change and we can all come together. And the 12 campaign, which is harder etched, more about plutocrats and billionaires and Bain Capital, et cetera.

41:24And I still see the Democratic Party sort of vibrating between those two approaches, Right. You know, and you can see reasons to think about both in polls. People are very upset about political division. They want politics to feel differently that it does. It is a Big Ten party that needs to have many kinds of people inside of it. And on the other hand, you know, you ask people like, do you think the political system basically needs to be burnt down? And they tell you yes. So how do you think about the balance of there's simultaneously a desire in the public for a politics at points and a politics that unites and has a kind of fellowship to it?

42:05it's an interesting question i think and this is a slightly different answer to the question you posed but like i think there's a sustainability question with it like there's this kind of friction of you know how quickly incumbents not just america all over the world are turning over because you can ride this populist wave but then then what i think we need a populism that's actually i guess to play to the crowd like married to a bit of an abundance you simultaneously need to restore another word for the kind of unity i think is a restoration of faith in government. I think that contributes to a dividing factor and kind of this baked in cynicism that's divisive.

42:43Populism can be hopeful if you marry it with an abundance-esque approach of the deep belief that government needs to work. This is sort of the Zoran Mamdani approach. Yes. I don't think it's a credible claim that we're going to take back all this power and all this fortune from the billionaire class or from the oligarchy if we can't even build 100 homes. and marrying those things together, I think, begins to tell a story of a populism that's hopeful because it's like you can believe in it. It's tangible in your life and it's a reorientation of power. And it's all of those things combined. And I think we need more of that.

43:18It frustrates me when we get into these debates over like, you know, you can believe in antitrust policy or you can believe in abundance. I've also found those debates frustrating. I think we can massively cut red tape that makes people's lives more difficult and we can impose new regulations that protect people from predatory actions. Also, I think there are a lot of people who are doing a compelling job of this in raising the finger from pointing to your neighbor to pointing towards the powerful. There can be a story of unity and of hope and of love. I think about, I did not come up with this.

43:53I can't remember who came up with it. So I apologize to whoever it is. The idea that it's Obama's we and it's Bernie's them. It's this Obama-esque coalition that's inclusive and that we're all a part of and we're stronger when we're all in it together. And we're taking on the Bernie Sanders version of the villains who are opposing us. I want to come back to some of the synthesis questions, but I want to stay in populism for a minute. One thing that connects the candidates we've been talking about is they're all men. Is there a connection for you between populism and gender and between what you think the public reads as populist and working class and gender?

44:29I think the public tends to more loosely assign that term to men. And I don't think it's particularly accurate. I think there's, you know, a lot of candidates, like I think about Rebecca Cook running in Wisconsin, who meets all of those same criteria. I think about even like Governor Sherrill across New Jersey, who I think is an example of not like necessarily the traditional populist, probably something of a kind of technocratic populist hybrid, but has campaigned in that way and has governed in that way. AOC as an example of this. And I think the way people use the term populist oftentimes is they're kind of code switching.

45:08If something's progressive, it's unelectable and populist becomes the electable version of progressive. That's not my interpretation of it, but I think that that then contributes to like people are afraid if they start saying AFC is a populist, then it undercuts their arguments to keep her from running for president or to keep her from being president. And then there's a kind of component of that. But is there an outdated idea of what the working class looks like here? Yes. Because there is not all these candidates. It doesn't fit Momdani or some of the others. But if you look at Nathan Sage or Fetterman or Plattner, Dan Osborne, it has this kind of guy who could be, you know, work on a on an oyster farm, on a lobster boat, in a factory when, you know, the working class today is almost like in a more modal sense.

45:55an immigrant woman working as a home health care aide. That there is this, our politics treats the working class as if it goes to work in a hard hat. And it has been a critique of you, but it's broadly speaking been a critique, I think of Donald Trump, of Bernie Sanders, of a lot of people in modern politics that they have not tried or managed to come up with a more modern way of thinking about and presenting what it means to be working class. I certainly can't speak for Donald Trump and I can't speak for Senator Sanders either, but I think there is an element of, it's the ways in which these things are written about and grouped and covered and the perception.

46:38Someone like Jamal Bowman is a working class candidate who the stories written about him were oftentimes tended to leave out the fact that this is a working class outsider because it was more convenient to lean into other critical narratives than to embrace that. Or, you know, Cori Bush and two members primaried by AIPAC last cycle. And because they don't meet the traditional definition, then that tag is not applied to them, which then perpetuates the cycle. Another way of putting this and a different direction from it is even in polls before Plattner dropped out, Susan Collins was winning by quite a lot among white men in Maine without a college degree.

47:18And there's sort of like two dimensions of this. There's been a well-documented shift where the Democratic Party has become the party of the college educated. The more left you go in the party, in some ways, the more true that often is. So the DSA is doing incredibly well among people with postgraduate degrees who have struggled in the economy, for instance. And the critique has been, as I have heard it, that the Democratic Party's theory of how to win back the working class has been to sort of cosplay the working class. And one of the reasons that's not working is that, one, it's not what those actual voters want.

47:57Again, Plattner did very well with people who had postgrad degrees. That there's some sort of weird conflict here between the Democratic Party's image of itself and whether you call the Democratic Party or the DSA, who's actually in it. How do you see that? I think it is not a problem that we're going to solve in one election or with one campaign. I think it is indicative of a massive brand problem that now comes when you have a D next to your name or even frankly don't have an R next to your name. I mean, it's kind of foundational to it sounds like a bad political speech riff, but it's like it is fundamentally true that the worker in Michigan whose factory closed has more in common with a waitress in Texas who's working at the starvation wage as a minimum wage in Texas, regardless of their races and genders and ages, than at any point probably in kind of American history in terms of the degree that there's just this kind of broad class erosion.

48:58I think to change it, we need so many of these people stepping up and running. There are people who would say that we need more than just an economic argument to win back these people. I don't think that that's untrue. I would argue that I think there are alternatives to mass moderation. I think localized moderation for their things is appropriate. But I think we need to be telling a story as part of this populism that does extend beyond just economics. How much is the kind of candidate you look for somebody who actually has to feel themselves failed by the institutions. I think the credibility thing is absolutely a component of what needs to be factored in.

49:37Like what gives you the credibility to make this argument and to have voters believe you? But I also think there are a lot of people who are not trying that hard to make this critique. Look, I think that there's a whole segment of the Democratic Party that still believes like the end-all be-all problem is Donald Trump. The entire critique is one of Donald Trump. Every problem we're facing is the result of Donald Trump. And our heads are in the sand if we can't acknowledge that for 12 of the last 17 years, Democrats have had the White House. Over those periods of time, we had control of both chambers multiple times.

50:08And people's lives have gotten worse. And so we can't just go and tell people Donald Trump is the reason everything's bad when they've been alive this whole time and experienced it. Clearly, there's a systemic issue here that extends beyond any one president or any one office. Yet a lot of our party, or at least the people in positions of power in the party, aren't levying that critique.

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51:46To what degree does this demand in the Democratic Party, these candidates who can code switch? So one of the interesting arguments is made in the party going way back, right? Norman Mailer wrote about this. There's a famous Ron Brownstein piece on Barack Obama about the sort of wine track and the beer track in the Democratic Party. But Plattner, an attack people launched at him, which I thought was sort of wrong, was, you know, he came from a family that had been well off. You know, his dad helped by his home. He went to an elite private school. But you see something like this with Momdani, who comes from a sort of family where his mother is a celebrated director, his father's an academic, that, you know, Donald Trump himself is a billionaire.

52:28oftentimes what you end up seeing in candidates who sort of succeed is this ability to operate across different worlds and so is that something you look for is that something you think is important like how do you rate that i don't think it's something that should be important there needs to be a way for people to get elected without having kind of coastal communities getting all on board with them. And even still, there are ways to challenge SSCO, there are ways to overcome it, there's grassroots money, but you, to some degree, need buy-in from coastal communities to be able to really launch to the degree you traditionally have to.

53:12That's because you need to raise money from them? Money and media. I think the mix of money and media attention. And it's just a lot harder. And I think there's something to be said for the political utility in being able to talk to a variety of your constituents, and that should be important. But I think once you kind of extend into, oh, how comfortable do they make a donor feel? We're not in a place anymore that's serving an electability goal. The campaign here that you worked on that didn't take off was Nathan Sage in Iowa. What went wrong? So, I mean, he was one of the people I had in mind when I was saying this.

53:44I think like Nathan was an incredible candidate who I think would have won the U.S. Senate seat, who had an incredible story. He served three tours, I believe. He grew up in a trailer park in Mason City, worked his way through high school, went to serve, then served his small town chamber of commerce and brought small businesses back. And his anger and disdain for the people who had sold out families like his was profound and real. And he also connected deeply with voters when he was in a room with them at town halls, at campaign events. But I think to the kind of donor class, it felt abstract or they didn't quite see it because they weren't living the lives of other families struggling in Iowa.

54:34And so it didn't quite break through in the same way. And it's a different skill to pitch donors and to pitch press than it is to pitch voters. The collapse of local media, I think, has made this problem a lot worse. You know, 20 years ago, there's profound local media circuits that exist that are actually in the weeds. If you have really strong feelings about a factory that's giving workers cancer in Iowa, you can go and do five interviews about that and show your knowledge of local issues and show your passion the way that's going to make people's lives better. It's not a particularly sexy pitch to national reporters of, hey, are we going to, you know, do you want to write four different articles about a factory giving workers cancer in Iowa and a candidate who's incredibly angry about it?

55:14It also, I think, speaks to one of the pathologies of a lot of Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party to me right now is that it is a party of people who love institutions at a time when institutions are failing. And one of the places where I'm sympathetic to that is that institutions were actually one of the ways you got attention. I mean, there's a huge amount of Democratic Party just optimized for a period when you went to the newspaper editorial boards and you had to win them over. And so it wasn't just, could you get attention? It's could you impress the editors? Could you get the endorsement of the local civic groups?

55:50And now all these layers are weaker across much more of the country. There's less union density. There are fewer civic groups that have real memberships. There's fewer local newspapers and their editorial boards carry less weight. And so it means skills that were ones that are really important are less important and skills it once like couldn't get you anywhere, right? The newspaper would not cover someone who both did not have any support and was just making people mad by saying sort of outlandish things. But now, you know, you could be Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles and like rocket forward in attention at the very least from being a candidate like that.

56:26The gap between editorial rooms and corporate boardrooms and what is driving voters has never been more profound. And I think that's been exacerbated, I think, in the Democratic Party by what I think was kind of a problematic shift after you had in 2012 the kind of moderate to Republican elites essentially handpicked Mitt Romney. And he receives the nomination and Obama wins a daunting reelection on the populist campaign against him. And then you see Donald Trump rise up against that Republican establishment. And then I think you see this kind of misleading exodus from the Republican Party of donors, of institutional figures to the Democratic Party saying, I can't be a part of this.

57:11And of course, they're welcomed into the tent because they come with resources and they come with platforms that have historically been of electoral significance. we suddenly at a moment in which there is a massive uprising against institutions think that we're building a new coalition that is pro-institution and it's we took all the people who made the republican party unelectable folded them into our tent and let them influence our approach and i think it's fundamentally wrong and broken i think there is a interesting friction that's going to have to play out here of what is the traditional media's role in politics, which I think is fundamentally different than what it has been before.

57:54It would have been unimaginable 20 years ago if I told you the New York Times editorial board is going to write a piece essentially telling voters, do not vote for Zoran Mondani. And then that person was going to win the Democratic primary by 12 points. But that's what we saw happen. And I think there's just this disconnect. And I think there's a curiosity problem. I think of oftentimes we're not asking the right questions about what is driving this. You know, there's a, to now compliment the New York Times, Emma Goldberg did a good piece on this after the election, talking about the affordability angle of the New York City slate that won.

58:31But that was the only piece really written in a traditional media with that as the center point. And those are the main things those campaigns focused about, but all of the kind of dialogue was around unrelated components of it. And there's just this disconnect that I think there's a real, real friction there. When you met Mamdani the first time, what made you think there was some magic there? I think his profound and earnest belief that it was government's job to be making things better. The marriage of that with a vision is just, frankly, incredibly rare. And it shouldn't be, but it is like the number of people who sit down and say you're thinking about running for an office and whose initial answer is we have this crisis.

59:12I think this office can address this crisis if we just decided we wanted to. Yeah, I'm a big believer in campaigns aren't won in the content of the battle. They're won in the context in which they're taking place. And if we're taking campaigns in a context in which we are ashamed of government, in which we don't believe government can do anything, in which we're apologetic about government, then it's going to be really hard to convince people to vote for the party that is the bigger government party. And if we can't prove that government is one of the greatest tools for good known to human history, then how are we going to do anything?

59:45The first time Mamdani started coming on my radar, I think, was the halalflation video, where he was going around with the halal carts and just noting how much more expensive it had gotten. And it wasn't like this grand socialist vision for what government could be. It was very specific. It was the whole thing in miniature, like repeatedly. And every Democrat now wants to copy the Mamdani visual language and the Mamdani dominance of a vertical video. Very few are able to do it. You guys sort of built that together. When people come to you asking for lessons from it, what do you tell them to take from it and what do you tell them to not take from it.

1:00:28There are a lot of incredibly talented people on that team from Melchized and Andrew. And I think as good as I might be, as good as they might be, everyone looks really good riding a Cadillac. And Zarmadani is a generational leader. And it's hard to take any credit for that. I think one of the roles that there is to play is frankly, like getting out of the way. And we have an entire consultant industry and a party establishment that has kind of built its role of being like, oh, you have a big idea. Well, don't do that. You have something that's going to expose you to some risk. Don't do that. You have a broad vision, scale it down.

1:01:06You have a new tactic you want to try. Well, not on our watch. And I think the reason is a lot of that was very specific to the mayor. And he had a vision. He had a specific way he was good at communicating. And we all worked to build a system in which he was able to do that, that could meet people where they were and then also could reimagine what an electorate would look like. And I think that's one of the issues we get into is we should have these like imaginary visions of a baked in electorate with no imagination of reshaping. I think this speaks like the white working class issue too. How much of the issues we face there are the result of the fact that we have pulled resources from the places that are predominantly rural white working class areas.

1:01:50If you combine that with the rise of conservative media in those areas, they are hearing a 365 day a year narrative that is going uncombatted. It is not enough in eight weeks or eight months to just fight back against that. It takes a year round effort to reach those people. I think what you saw with the mayor was a belief that no, maybe actually if we talk to young people and gave them a vision for a city they can afford, they will come out and show up for it. Maybe if you did not run away from Muslim identity, but embraced it, Muslim voters are going to come out in mass to support that vision.

1:02:21I think meeting people where they are and believing that people actually will want to take part in our politics if we extend a hand is something that can be taken to any campaign. One thing that was striking to me about you and Mamdani, and I always want when I'm talking about attention to not make it feel like I'm separating out political positions or, right, like the product you're selling is the most important part of selling it. But I think there's also something about having a touch for how stories and storytelling in this moment work. And Momdani's mother is a famed film director. Your godfather, I learned, was Philip Seymour Hoffman.

1:03:00Your father, I think, was a producer. Is there something right now for you, actually, just about the centrality of being able to storytell in this moment, right? Is there something in that campaign between the two of you around that? It seems to me not accidental. I think there's something to our politics that relating to some of the other things we've talked about, like the requirement of a leap of faith and that that takes more than just an argument, but it takes a story. A leap of faith from the voter. From the voter. I think a lot about my godfather, when Phil was doing Death of a Salesman, early on when he was first talking about doing it, he was describing it as the best play I've ever written.

1:03:44And he talks about how it's an incredible play, but barely anything happens. It starts with a sigh. It's the first stage direction, or first audible stage direction is a sigh from Willie Loman. And in that sigh, you've met a man who's been defeated by feeling like no matter what he does, it is not enough. He has no path to hope, to prosperity. And over the course of the play, what we just see is someone who's already given up on life finally give up on life. And I think we need to fundamentally, materially change people's lives in massive, massive ways. But we also need to find there's so many people right now who I think that is a version of the story they're living.

1:04:19Not necessarily literally, but just this deep hopelessness. And if we can tell a story that things can be different, if we can tell a story that they have a role to play, if we can tell a story that they matter, then that is an act of radical change, too. I was genuinely skeptical that the way the campaign was constantly present, the way Mom Donnie was constantly present during the campaign could translate into governing. Trump has done that, but he does it by constantly pissing people off, right? Unlocking constant energy through outrage and conflict and anger. Bob Donnie has managed to maintain a constant presence if you're in New York.

1:05:03Probably if you're not in New York, too, but certainly if you are in New York. And just the, you know, almost separate from what he is doing, though there are real things he's doing, you just kind of see him doing things for New York. all the time, right? You turn on your phone and there he is. It's genuinely felt new to me. Is that something sort of only he can do? And New York is an unusual media market. It's giant. A lot of the media is centered here. So he can sort of project outward from being here in a way that it is harder if you're in Boston or to say nothing of a smaller town than that.

1:05:37Or is there a genuine lesson there? I think there's a genuine lesson. I think the first lesson is to elect leaders who are serious about governing and who believe in a very proactive approach for governing. But I think in some ways, to me, it's like the second side. If you wrote a sequel to Abundance, I feel like it would be the communication side of it. And if we believe that there is a crisis of faith in government's ability to do things, I think there is an obligation to not just do things, to not just make it easier to do things, but to tell the story of doing things. in 2023, 2024, I was driving through Michigan and there was a sign somewhere that was like, this road is being paved because of the bipartisan highway bill.

1:06:19And it's like, barely any Republicans voted for that piece of legislation. And that is how we are marketing it. Why wouldn't we be leaning in? I mean, like, Democrats fucking did this. Sorry, I don't know if I can curse my... I did, so you're welcome. Okay. We're trying to get attention here, man. Attention economy. We need to campaign... at the speed of the modern attention span. And I just think you need to govern at the speed of the modern attention span. And there is such a laid back approach to, you know, in eight years, this is going to be phased in. In a decade, this is going to be built.

1:06:54And like, that does not meet the urgency people are feeling. And to restore the bond between the public and government, there needs to be that urgency. What about at the level of affect? One way Momdani feels different to me than some of the other people who have been on your roster. and in populism in general populism in general i think has a reputation rightly or wrongly as being pretty pissed off and i'm not saying mom donny isn't like there is genuine anger in him correctly so about the ways people are harmed and ripped off and how unaffordable it is to live in this city but one he always looks like he's enjoying governing like he looks like he likes his job which a lot of people, they get elected and then they seem kind of miserable from then on, which fair enough, it can be a pretty miserable job, but he looks like he enjoys it.

1:07:46But there's also a positive affect from him, like a sunniness that I don't associate with Democrats in general. I don't associate with populace in specific, right? Bernie Sanders isn't known for his sunniness. I just don't see it from that many politicians. Most politicians and Trump is not like this, but most politicians, it's like they treat the work pretty grimly. You can't fake it. And I think that is one of the challenges. Like there are a lot of different things in politics you can fake. You can't fake a true love of the place and the people you're representing. And the mayor doesn't. The mayor loves, truly loves every single New York City resident.

1:08:32Like regardless of what they may say about him, like he just loves this city and it comes through. I think there can be a better job done on the kind of, at least on the left populist side of the spectrum, of articulating that this is a labor of love. I think Trump supporters are having a very good time. It's abstract to us, but there was a joy to when he was campaigning. It's like almost a cultural phenomenon of what it means. And you're wearing your Trump hat or your Trump sticker, like a badge of honor. And I think there's something to that, of like something people can take pride in, something people can see themselves in where they belong.

1:09:08And to me, it does relate to the power component of people feel a mix of factors from like globalization, economic factors to then like the influence of social media. People feel just so small. And if you can bring them into something that makes them feel big, which is what populism should be at its best, there's joy in that process and it needs to be reflected. One of the more radical things I think Mamdani has done has been to then use the kind of popularity as his mayor, the influences as mayor, to launch a series of primary challenges of either incumbents like Dan Goldman or sort of incumbent-backed, establishment-backed politicians to send allies like Brad Lander or Valdez to Congress.

1:09:54There's also been a DSA component of this, you worked on these campaigns, I think, sort of working through Mamdani. And it led to a lot of debate and discussion about whether or not the Democratic Party is in the beginning of a schisming moment. So is that how you see it? How do you understand the power building efforts that Mamdani, that the DSA, that some of the more, frankly, that the Plattner campaign represented? like what is the relationship of the sort of populist push and the established democratic party my perspective on it is either politicians can change or the voters for whom they represent are going to change who who's representing them the idea that anyone gets to be a gatekeeper to the party i find kind of absurd it is not our tent to define voters can define and we you know everyone can play their role in making the case to voters of what they believe it should be.

1:10:53And it's like, why are we not asking the question? What did Dari Elisa do right to energize all these new people and bring in all these young voters? And you can hold room for I disagree with whatever respective comments, but I'm also curious about maybe there's something here to offer. Putting aside the moral component of it and all that, it is bad electoral math to believe in subtraction. The job is to bring more people in. We have primaries, we have elections. That's how this works. And the sore loser component of it, I don't think is like particularly productive. And I think there is, we should be excited by the fact there's so many new young people showing up to vote.

1:11:31We should be excited by the fact that people who haven't voted in decades are shown to vote, that people are early voting faster because they're more eager. Like there is something good here that's happening. And I think the people who feel threatened by it could do themselves a favor by embracing it. The critique I hear from the sort of Democrats here, I think, talking about there is that what's going on now is that in safe Democratic areas, the party is going left. And that's, they might have whatever view they have on that, but their worry about it and their worry about the energy around it, their worry about the amount of media attention against from people like me, is they feel that it makes the Democratic Party's job in a place like North Carolina or Ohio harder.

1:12:17That the perception of the National Party is that it's becoming more socialist. You have people who've made all kinds of comments about defunding the police or abolishing prisons. So I think as somebody who does care about winning, not just in places like Maine, which is more blue, but in places like Ohio and Alaska, et cetera. How do you think about that challenge? Like how does this mass of democratic parties become one thing that can compete, not just in a New York city, but you know, in places Democrats used to win like Indiana and North Dakota. To me, there are two things are kind of true.

1:12:55One, there is a national brand problem that is undeniable to me, that national brand problem does not come from more liberal social perspectives from representatives in deep blue places. It comes from a tangible feeling the Democratic Party is out of touch with the things that voters care about. And if you look at polling, Bernie Sanders is more popular than Chuck Schumer. It is a disdain of kind of the elites and the powerful that I think fuels the Democratic brand issue. And that is what we need to address to overcome that. I think the other component is Democrats have an eat their own component that fuels these flames.

1:13:40So you see some of these candidates win. And instead of us wrapping our arms around them as a party, instead of it being like, look, we disagree with their positions on A, B, and C. But what we're all aligned on is that we should be spending our taxpayer dollars on babies, not bombs. What we all agree is that we need stronger unions to be able to lift up working people. We need, there's like a, yeah, they're a fucking radical. That's not my part. And it's like, well, are you so friendly to the establishment Democrats in the way that you're asking they'd be friendly to you? I think the people who I'm critical of oftentimes are not engaging in good faith the way that they're critical of our, like, I don't think, I think that when their positions are compromised because of the money they take and the people they're answering to, and that that is what is hurting the brand and then they have the audacity to throw other people under the bus for it it's bad faith and it's the problem i i'm just saying and i don't actually have i'm a big tent party guy i've done a lot of work on this and and i think i've proven this out but i am just saying sometimes i i find that both sides feel the other one that that they're willing to play nice and the other one isn't it's like you're the way i would describe what you are saying to me here is the Democratic Party, to the extent such a thing exists, but the sort of elites of it, should be more embracing of Claire Valdez and should recognize that even if they have disagreements with her, you know, everybody's kind of on the same side, you know, and you're like, look, the problem with them is that they're corrupt.

1:15:10And I think they might, you know, not see that as such a friendly way to frame the work they've been doing to say, try to win a majority. I'm not even saying they're not corrupt, but, and I'll just say that this is like actually one of the critiques I've heard, um, of you, a fight of it's like, you'll say they're corrupt. And then it's like, you know, I actually like Tom Steyer quite a bit, but it's like, as long as you're working with the right billionaires, it's fine. As long as you are, um, working with the right, more establishment candidates, like, uh, Michael Lasher in New York 12, which I think you were a little bit involved in that race.

1:15:43It's fine that anybody's fine as long as they're on our side. and that if they're on the other side, then they're possibly a corrupt traitor of the people. And what I'd say about that spectrum of candidates, none of them take money from lobbyists. Well, Tom is a billionaire. He doesn't need to. None of them take money from corporate PACs. All of them have a deep belief in government's role and what it should do. And I think we should give a ton of leeway for people running in Trump plus 20 places. What doesn't feel like it quite corresponds is a lot of the people who are like the harshest critics are actually not running in those Trump plus 20 places.

1:16:22Like you hear Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown punching left a whole lot less than you hear like, you know, the frequenters of certain cable news circuits who are just members of Congress and like D plus 10 seats or something. If you look at the people who really have proven records of overperformance, it's not the tactic they're taking. That's not to say they're like in lockstep with the party at large and everything. But they're not reaching those over performances by just piling on to the left. They're just carving out unique things to their places. So I want to loop back to Plattner here at the end.

1:16:58One of the things I thought was just most interesting about the Plattner story was that he was recruited, that you all went out and found a candidate you thought would fit Maine. And to a large extent, you were right. Now it fell apart at the end. But that sense that there are different kinds of candidates out there who could work in this moment, I don't think that's something that people should throw overboard. And so to my question for you, and honestly for sort of like others who might want to learn from what you all at least were trying to do there, is what have you learned both for good and bad about how to find candidates?

1:17:38If you want to say the Democratic Party needs to recruit a different kind of person to run, but also you want to take seriously that the people who have not been in politics and have not been aggressively vetted in politics might come with more downside risk. What would be your process next time? I think that there is a deep, deep hunger for a different kind of politics. There is a deep, deep frustration with the status quo. And what we're seeing right now is not a democracy the way the founders intended it. It was supposed to be something that looked more like a farmer going to serve their two terms than going home and a small business owner going to serve their two terms and coming home.

1:18:19And it was the idea of it being almost a cathedral representative of the fabric of America. And we are so far from that. And I think that is why we have so many of the problems we have. Only 2 % of Congress is from the working class. It is not baffling that we have policies that are screwing over the working class. And so there are many things that are devastating about all of this. But one of the many is the degree in which people who'd kind of written politics off felt inspired again. And I think when we do that, we're asking for so much for people to believe that maybe their lives can actually get better.

1:18:54Maybe politics can actually be a tool for good. We can't let them down. And that's going to mean different standards. That's going to mean a far more robust vetting process. that's going to mean, I think, bring in more partners and larger conversations. But I think there's too much at stake to walk away and things are so clearly not working the way they are right now. We need to find a way to bring more people in. And then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, a really stunning kind of human portrayal of the ramifications of the Holocaust and that entire era.

1:19:34Shame by McKenna Goodman. Beautiful book of kind of the friction of isolation and dreams and anxiety. And I think in some way it's not at all a political book, but it feels political in the way of the conversation we're having. I think the results of modern society on people. And then The Fourth Branch by Daniel Squadron. I think it's a really astute observation of where political power is and how we can kind of shape a government that's on a day-to-day basis improving people's lives.

1:20:05Boris Katz, thank you very much Thanks for having me, Ezra