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3:11All right, we are live at Crooked Con in Washington, D.C. I have Jim Newell, Claire Malone, Galen Druk. Guys, welcome. Great to be here. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us, yeah. This past weekend, as Democrats were savoring their massive midterms win, a group of progressives gathered in D.C. for CrookedCon, a convention hosted by Crooked Media. We were there, too, talking to Democratic policymakers. Look, I think the appointment of Stephen Miller is a reflection that perhaps this president hasn't learned the lessons of Tuesday and what the voters made clear, which is that they wanted a politics that is focused on the cost of living and addressing corruption, not a politics of cruelty, which Stephen Miller is the architect of.

3:56I also think it's very possible that this president's feeling so insecure that he just wanted someone more unlikable and more unpopular than him in the cuck chair in the Oval Office next to him. And so he might just want a bad cop. I'm not entirely sure. We'll see. Because Donald Trump, at the end of the day... Did you just say cuck chair? Yeah, I did. I did. OK. That was Congresswoman Sarah McBride, by the way. But there was one thing on everyone's mind, besides Stephen Miller on the cuck chair. It was who leads the Dems? I put that question to Crooked's Claire Malone and Galen Druk. They co-host the podcast Still Counting and Slate's own Jim Newell.

4:36Well, I mean, it's funny you mentioned the leadership races because I wasn't really aware until I looked at social media yesterday how much people want a leadership race even happened. You know, Schumer has majority leader locked up. I am pretty sure Jeffries has Speaker locked up. They both just won enormous majorities, you know, in the House, the biggest majority of the century in the Senate. The biggest one in, I don't know, 15 years or so. It's just there's still this real anger to try to get fresh blood inside leadership. But I'm just not sure that's going to happen. Claire, downstairs, there was like a little bit of murmuration.

5:14Alyssa Slotkin said she would not rule out challenging Chuck Schumer. I feel like at this point because it's funny when we were doing our recording this morning um like and subscribe to still counting no but it's but there was um we talked a little bit about how like El Syed and Annie Andrews both in the last couple of days had been like I would support generational change right and then um then there was like a sort of blind uh quote in like the hill or the New York Post or something that was like Chris Van Hollen will not be the will not challenge chuck schumer for speaker and i feel like it's almost become a little bit of a a virtue signal signal to the base where they know it's maybe not going to happen but it's kind of a good look to be like man i am also frustrated with how old the leadership is but like what are you going to do but it's like i think you're right jim it's like it's it it is going to be schumer and jeffries who knows how long you know i think like whether or not schumer runs in 27 well yeah Yeah, that's a separate question about the wisdom of that.

6:15But I don't know. I mean, curious, Galen, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, Alyssa Slotkin is playing to a crowd that after an arduous months-long midterm campaign is literally paying money to hear from more politicians. Right? Most people in America right now who decided this election in the battleground states do not want to hear from another politician for as long as possible. But the people in this convention center where we are very much do. So the things that are being said to the people here and the views that they are representing are not the difference makers in American politics, I would argue.

6:55Right. Like if you're talking about the people who decide elections are the people who are changing their mind and deciding whether or not to turn out like you're somebody who's just not all that engaged in politics. And so for the people here, the first thing that may come to mind when they hear, you know, Democratic Senate majority would be like, like, fuck Chuck Schumer. The first thing that is on most people's mind right now, if you look at the exit polls, is get down the price of all of the things that the grocery store, gas, like for people taking victory laps, right? Nothing has actually changed for Americans who just voted in these people, right?

7:31Like everyone's excited because their team won, but nothing has changed when it comes to the actual issues that they were elected on. And so I think if Democrats waste a lot of time on this kind of stuff, they're going to be turning off people who really just want them to be legislating. Well, that's the big question I have really for all of you. Legislate or hearings? Legislate or subpoenas? I feel like there is a very small window in which, as you're saying, Gillen, like they could lose the goodwill of voters very quickly. Well, I do. It's a little bit of a tough spot to be in. Yeah. Maybe you can kind of thread the needle of giving some red meat to the base to be like, whatever, we're going to try to stop Trump.

8:19and he's doing some new crazy thing. But I have an interest. I don't really know how they are going to thread that needle. I don't think you want to do the things they did in the first Trump administration, which has turned everything into a democracy issue. Because obviously, as we've learned in the Trump era, that's actually not what wins elections or maintains voters' interest in what you're doing. But I don't necessarily think these things have to be at odds with each other. Because if you look at two of the top issues in the election, affordability, the economy, and then corruption. I mean, they have a mandate to kind of pursue both of these things.

8:54They don't need to necessarily make it all about, you know, what he's done to smash norms to democracy or things like that. But if they want to look at, say, prediction markets and who is betting on that inside the White House or insider trading, you know, and not only can they investigate that and get a lot out of those investigations, But they can roll that into legislation where if you ban, you know, prediction market gambling from inside the executive branch, like that would be extremely popular. You could pair that with the already existing proposals to to ban stock trading in Congress. So I think they have a lot of leeway here.

9:30I was in Iowa two weeks before the election and I spent a godforsaken two hours watching local news and all of the ads that that meant. And what I saw when, for example, Josh Churik was running against Ashley Hinson in the ads about corruption was it was the corruption is having an impact on your life. It was saying like, you know, she voted not to release the Epstein files. And it was because that very same day she was receiving a donation from some from a donor who appeared in the Epstein file. So it's like the corruption is that conflict of interest, the donor. But the thing that you care about is maybe the Epstein files or whatever.

10:15So, you know, which is a bipartisan issue, which is a bipartisan issue. So I think that to the extent and I kind of have that question coming out of this election. Is it do they mean corruption in the way that Bernie Sanders means corruption, which is like the deck is stacked and it's just the people at the top who are benefiting from this American economy? Or do they mean like whatever Kimberly Guilfoyle is doing at four o 'clock in the morning in Athens? Right. Or like, you know, Don Jr.'s wedding that was paid for by some oligarch. I think the latter is ultimately, like, it's great fodder for people like us.

10:47But I think ultimately people are going to be more interested in corruption insofar as it also feels like it's impacting their life. This is not true, but people feel like the reason that the cost of goods is high is because of, like, coordinated monopolies that are, like, increasing prices through unfair practices. And, like, sometimes that happens. That's already illegal. that can be litigated when it does happen. But like people kind of, it's like, is the prosecuting corruption like dragging in Trump officials or is it like CEOs? I think that's, so I'm going to bring up something I think you'll disagree with, but it's, I think there's the, the sort of Baroque corruption of like Kimberly Guilfoyle and Don Jr.

11:29is the tabloidy stuff that people want to read. I mean, I, and I, it feels like a mafia. And by the way, I do count the Epstein stuff as part of that. Like the Epstein stuff has been tabloidified in certain ways, which is like which I do think is the through line from like tabloidy people who Trump is giving favors to who, you know, in Texas, like Republicans are giving a bunch of tax breaks to and it ends up at your door. And this is how like and this is how the corruption flows. Today on the show, a post-midterms party autopsy from the first big gathering of progressives since the blue tsunami.

12:08I'm Lizzie O 'Leary, in for Mary Harris, and this is What Next. Stick around.

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15:40I actually want to ask you guys about the map. which sounds like a weird pivot, but I think it ties into the degree of patience that voters have. If you look at kind of the states that went blue, right? I'm going to look at my list. Texas, Georgia, Kansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, arguably Iowa. Are these one-offs? Do they stay blue? I'm trying to figure out how much of a real realignment we are seeing versus a moment that was caught with bad politics for the Trump administration and talented candidates. Because I think that ties into how long voters are willing to give a new Democratic Congress some room to run.

16:25It's certainly a moment, right? It's certainly like the repudiation of Trump. But I also think the reason why it could potentially be, you know, looking back like, oh, this was an election where the map got scrambled and there was maybe a new map, is because both parties, obviously both parties will have open presidential primaries. And both parties are kind of looking to reconstruct what their identity is. I mean, the Republicans, I would argue, have to do a more radical reconstruction because in 2016, Trump literally tore up the traditional Republican Party platform that was like the big news out of the 2016 convention.

17:02and you've seen you know like ron de santis um trying to you know diagnose the problem jd vance like you're seeing these people try to step into the void you're also seeing like a realignment of populism and class and how people vote based on education so i kind of think it might be a it could be a point of demarcation of saying like yeah okay like maybe it's not crazy to i mean i I do actually think like Mississippi is probably an aberration. I mean, like you saw Doug Jones win in, in Alabama and that, you know, like it didn't stick. But I think there are lots of places like the Ossoff win in Georgia is, I think like in many ways, like the most notable win because of how big the margins were because of the voters who turned out.

17:57The margins are pretty big. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I think about it, I think about I try to approach it from a data perspective. Yes. Give me the data. You know, I'm like and we're still sorting through all the data. But like to what extent is are the results that we're seeing the responsibility of a turnout differential between Democrats and Republicans, which would be more equalized in a presidential year when you would expect Republicans to turn out and vote for a Republican candidate for president? because like as much as we did pay attention to this midterm, nothing really takes up oxygen in American life as like a presidential election.

18:32And so we did see a lot of the margins, you can chalk them up to a turnout differential. And, you know, there are other kinds of circumstances that Democrats can try to recreate to recreate that turnout differential. But the place where we saw some of the biggest swings in terms of persuasion, like people voted for Trump in 24 and voted for a Democrat in 26 were in places like Texas. I mean, the swings were so, and it's actually Texas as an outlier in some ways as being so persuasion driven. Whereas like in the Bible Belt, we see there really was an enormous turnout differential between black voters and white voters.

19:11Is that because of Calais, do you think? Yeah, I think that's certainly part of it. Like we have seen also with like the inaction of voter ID laws and things like that, when like voters are told they're trying to disenfranchise you, Like nothing will get people to turn out more enthusiastically than in that kind of a situation. I would also just say like in general, like a like a easy heuristic is Democrats won nationally by 13 points. If you subtract, if you say you want to get us back to a neutral environment in order to judge how well, you know, Democrats are doing in those states, subtract 13 points from the margin.

19:47right you subtract 13 points from talarico's margin and you're still at a competitive texas right you're like seven or something oh yeah he won by 11 points so so basically it's still like a two-point race in texas i think texas is now i mean especially they won governor like texas is now on the map georgia is like democrats need to be winning georgia but you look at some of those northern states you subtract 13 points and democrats are losing so i think that like while obviously in a tsunami environment, these small differences make basically, they don't matter. If you try to imagine getting us back to a more neutral environment, I do see long-term Democrats having obviously more room to lose ground in the North and more room to gain ground in the South.

20:35And this is kind of like reverting us back to what people thought in the Obama era. Right. Well, so this is a question about resource allocation too, right? So let's look at Florida and someone like Angie Nixon, right? There is an argument to be made, and some Democrats are making this, that actually the Democratic Party should have put more money into those races and that they could have picked up seats in Florida. I mean, I'm skeptical of the argument because if you look at how the election went on, like Trump's numbers just kept getting worse and worse as things went on. They were not recovering.

21:08People were not really coming home at At the end, this gap just kind of got maintained. So at the end, what did they do? They threw some money at South Carolina. They threw some money at Mississippi because those were states where you could get involved cheap and make a big difference. I think, you know, for most of the cycle, they probably thought, especially after Angie Nixon's nomination, you know, with her DSA affiliation, they're probably pretty skeptical of that. It's like Florida is not really a state where you can come in two weeks before the election, throw in a million dollars and expect to make up three points.

21:35It was, you know, if you're going in for Florida and you're buying late, like you're looking at tens or like 100 million or something to really make up that kind of difference. So, you know, it's something like if they had known the electorate would be this broad maybe six months ago, maybe they would have had a different strategy. But I don't view that as really a botched job. I mean, I'm curious what you guys think, too, about Louisiana and whether, you know, that should have been one of their tail states where they threw a couple million dollars in at the end. Would that have made it? Yeah.

22:04Yeah. Like hindsight being 2020, probably. I think what it does, I think what this election might change to the, speaking to the Florida question and maybe like the Louisiana stuff too, is just, is, you know, Schumer has been taking a victory lap talking about his candidate recruitment, which I actually think he, he probably deserves to take that victory lap, right? Like he, you know, convinced Sherrod Brown to run again, right? Things like that. Like, you know, who could, who's the only person who could win in Ohio? voters thought that Sherrod Brown was still the senator you know like that's that is a that's a good poll and I do think maybe this election will make the Democrats sit down and take a closer look at candidate recruitment like all the way down in the state legislature you know level and say across the map right like yeah okay where can we cultivate people who you know who are going to be good in two years four years six years whatever it might whatever it might be and I think that that's probably a conversation that's happening now of like, okay, well, what kind of person would win Florida?

23:08And I think a DSA candidate wouldn't. I think that's pretty clear. It's funny because they ran a former Republican for governor and they ran a socialist for Senate. And neither of those worked, obviously. And so I think, well, first of all, the whole like former Republican thing was something that they tried with Charlie Christ previously as well. And so maybe they need to develop a Florida democratic brand that's strong enough to not have to rely on like someone being a former Republican to try to exist because yeah, it used to exist. And like, that's also what I think about when I think about what like Rob Sand in Iowa or now, you know, Adam Hamilton in Kansas is like, and James Tallarico in Texas, they're trying to create a new brand for the Democratic Party.

24:01They're not saying like, oh, well, I'm not really a Democrat like Dan Osborne, the independent in Nebraska, who kind of under, like not kind of straight up underperformed. They're saying like, okay, well, whatever you thought of the Democratic Party, that's not who I am. And it's not what the Democratic Party needs to be. But I will say to the point about candidate recruitment and candidate quality in the Trump era, Democrats have done a much better job of recruiting high quality candidates than the Republican Party. I mean, just think about Ken Paxton, Darlene Graham, Blake Masters, Carrie Lake.

24:36It's just a who's who of like, what the fuck are you thinking? But isn't that just a function of like, the party is one guy and therefore you get the weirdest collection. It's personnel decisions by an erratic person. Yes. And right. And so I think more than the Democrats even necessarily like having a come together moment right now, I'm being like, who are we going to nominate and whatever, they'll maybe think about Florida more seriously. I think Republicans are also thinking like, OK, what are we going to do about candidate quality? Because like Ken Paxton in Texas was the first sort of like, you know, leak that ended up breaking that dam.

25:16I think that if John Cornyn had been nominated, re-nominated, who knows? I think he would have lost still. I think you do. I think if it's like 12 points, say he does five points better or something. I don't know if there was a 13-point candidate quality issue there. Like it was just so much larger than I expected. No, and there wasn't. And I think that though that the fact that Ken Paxton was on the ballot encouraged Democrats very early to be like, we could win this. you know i think if you want to measure candidate quality like look at jeannie inhosa versus greg abbott where like they're both decent candidates and jeannie inhosa won by seven right so like you know in an environment where average dem and average republican are resulting in like a seven point gap in favor of democrats like yeah that's maybe not an environment where john cornyn wins either but i do wonder if like ken paxton created the environment he helped create i mean i think ken paxton will go down as like the single worst candidate in American history.

26:14No, I'm genuinely, I'm really serious about this because he basically created a national media environment in Texas. Like, I think if John Cornyn had run, it would have been, people would have paid attention because Tallarico is a good candidate, but just like the ability to make buzzy viral ads, like following his antics in Dubai, like it's just a kind of nuts, like Streisand effect almost. And it allowed Tallarico's particular brand of politics to really shine through where he can be like, Ken Paxton, like everyone's like, Ken Paxton's like the most corrupt philanderer, whatever. And he goes, he's a child of God.

26:50I love him. Right. And like, you can't do that to John Cornyn, like to the same effect. It was like Martin Luther running against him, like the Borgia Popes. It was crazy. This is why we love having a Catholic on the panel. Yeah. Good, deep pull. Can we talk a little bit about race? We talked about Calais a little bit. I mean, here we are. It's four white people. Let's talk about race. But if we look at the southern states and if we look at Texas, we had, you know, gutting of voter protections and ACE. And those two things moved voters. I mean, seeing your neighbors torn away moves people to vote.

27:37is that the end of i don't even want to use this word i don't want to say trump's kind of coalition but trump's ability to pick off non-white voters no no i think they're still i do i do think the immigration stuff was latino voters did especially in like places that are near the border yeah they do want more immigration control. I do think the Democrats probably need to come up with the more cohesive sense of what the party stands for on immigration, right? Like that. I just talked to Adam Smith. He was like, we've got to do a big immigration bill. Okay. But I think they, but I think they need to find what their message is to voters.

28:21That's not like, um, uh, you know, the, I mean, open, open borders has now become such a like, you know, boogeyman. Like, I think they have to figure that out, but ultimately Trump, won those voters in 2024 on promises of the economy and lost them in 2026 on failures to fill those promises. I still think at the end of the day, a lot of those voters are economic voters. And like you still like in places like Redding, Pennsylvania, right, a swing state where people have gotten there's a huge Latino population because they've gotten pushed out of New York City, right, because of housing prices. You still fundamentally need to probably continue need to appeal to them on an economic level.

28:59Yeah, I mean, they're true swing voters. I think that each party is kind of renting, you know, especially in like the Rio Grande Valley, a lot of these voters and the voters themselves are just waiting to see if anyone will not only get results, but at least even try to get results, which, you know, Trump just so directly, you know, made cost of living worse with some of these huge policy decisions he made. But like, I do not think Democrats in any way should think, oh, well, we've got this figured out. Everyone came back home. We're all set here right now. If they take power again and they don't do border security, I mean, I think the median voter, Latino voters want a secure border.

29:42They want violent criminals deported, but they don't want their neighbor being taken away. They don't want their schools filled with ICE officers. It's terrible for the economy down there. The South Texas Builders Association was screaming because they couldn't find any workers down there. So it's bad for economic growth. But I do think, you know, like, it's a very results oriented, oriented demographic, and Democrats spent a while, you know, not really locking in a lot of gains. And so they gave Trump a shot. They're giving Democrats a shot again, they need to show something. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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33:41Can we talk about Pulse? Please. I would really like to kind of understand how pollsters are feeling, right? I was listening to you guys in one of your shows right before the election talking about kind of the weighting issues. And I guess I just want to know, like, are pollsters in this cycle feeling good? Like, yeah, we nailed it. Some of them are. Some of them aren't. Who's feeling good? The Time Siena Bowl? Yeah, you know, I think I'm going to answer this more from a macro perspective first, which is like for our industry, which is like we use a lot of this data to help better understand the world, whatever.

34:26Like, I think in some ways, a high profile underestimation of Democrats was a good thing because it impresses upon people what we know historically, which is that the fact that the polls will have error is predictable. We know that there will be error. The average error nationally for the House, three points statewide, four to five points. You know, we saw a four point miss nationally in the House. So that's a bigger than average polling error, underestimating Democrats. And so I think it will be good going forward that people aren't just like, well, screw the polls. We're never going to pay attention to the data because we always know what underestimates.

35:06And like the rest is history. You know, I think it's also like if we're really just focused on accuracy, it is important to say that nationally the polls missed more in 2026 than they did in 2016. And there were all kinds of recriminations after 2016 about broken polls and, oh, my God, what are we going to do? Can't trust the data. We're not going to see any of that after this because I think a lot of that was like hand wringing from inside the Democratic Party. And they're just too happy now to give a fuck that they undercounted Democrats. But doesn't that need to get fixed going into the next cycle?

35:40Well, that's the reason that polling error is unpredictable. because if pollsters got it wrong, left the polls the way that they were, yes, they would be predictably wrong in probably the same direction every time. But because pollsters are, they have a strong professional incentive to get it right and fix the errors of the last election. And listen, sometimes they're overcorrecting for the errors of the last election. That's what happened this cycle with waiting to recall to vote. Like they were modeling an electorate that just didn't end up turning out because there were probably more 2024 Trump voters in their models than actually turned out in 2026.

36:16And so, yes, like, pollsters will keep tinkering away. And that's why this sort of direction of the error is unpredictable. So if we take some of the most accurate ones, Siena New York Times, YouGov, Tufts, Strength in Numbers, what do they have in common? I mean, Galen's better prepared to answer this, but it's basically the, like, when I left 538 six years ago, there was sort of a don't weight the polls to don't overweight the polls. Just look at the electorate, look at the demographics of the state. I mean, I was actually about to ask you, what what will other pollsters take from what the Times-Siena poll did right?

36:56Like what what techniques will they or waiting will they will they take from them? The question about what? Yeah. What did they do? Right. Is they iterate. Right. And so they, I mean, the New York Times is always trying, I mean, to the point where they did an experiment in Wisconsin where they sent people mail and told them if they responded like to the letter, they would get$20. And that ended up increasing. They have a lot of money. They have a lot of money. It's like the first answer. They ended up getting a phenomenally high response rate. And one of the things that they uncovered in that is that like most people who respond to polls are highly politically engaged and highly partisan.

37:36And so when you ask people about their priorities, the fact that you're getting just the most engaged people really skews that. And this was in 2022, I think, where, like, abortion and democracy were, like, the most important issues for Democrats. But when you ask this much larger pool of respondents who were motivated by$20, it becomes, the concerns became far more material-based. I think the Democratic Party has learned its lessons a little bit and has pivoted in a much more material direction in 2026. but like all of that is to say that you have to try different things right like originally it was having a real life person make landline calls then it was landline calls and cell phones now it's landline calls cell phone email text message sometimes mailing people an actual letter and I think using all of those different like reach it's kind of you know how campaigns are like we need to reach people wherever they are yeah for the 2026 media environment like we'll find you or like pollsters also kind of face the same challenges is they need to find americans wherever they are to try to get them to respond so that the polls aren't just skewed towards you know the college educated like highly polarized partisan like and the famous example of the old like ann selzer who i profiled in 2016 and i do genuinely feel for ann selzer sued by Trump famously.

38:55It's a really tough way to go out. It's a tough way to go out. But her secret sauce was always basically like, I'm taking the demographic of the state. I'm trying to find those people in my poll. It was a very kind of classical, I'm doing this the good way. And the 2024 results, I think, were scary for a lot of pollsters, right? I think that there's a bit of nerve. Nate on our podcast is very rough on certain polling institutions. And like, I think, fine, that's fair. I also have a certain amount of sympathy for people who maybe are doing bad statistical work, but they're like a little bit cowed by Trump's lawsuit, right?

39:37Like these are like a lot of, like it's kind of a human instinct of people to want to like protect their institution. And it doesn't make for good numbers necessarily, but it's in the environment. It's kind of another way that people are, I don't know. I think the way, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the way that Ann Seltzer, I mean, not only getting sued by the president, but just being dunked on by everyone, you know, into retirement. Like, I think that doesn't help with pollster courage, you know. So that's why you saw as these things, as things went on this month, you know, it was like every day there were just three new polls being like, you know, Democratic generic ballot, plus eight, plus eight, plus nine, plus nine.

40:13Like, it wasn't looking like anyone was actually sticking their necks out, except for the few who did. um obviously midterms are not presidentials but i think we are in unarguably quite unusual circumstances what do you guys take from where we are right now particularly in this environment where there are like democratic presidential hopefuls walking the halls walking the halls josh shapiro just trying trying to talk to reporters um what can we take from the lessons learned in these midterms and and point toward the democratic democratic presidential party and obviously the republicans as well but we seem to be sitting in you know the woodstock of living out is what i keep calling it it is the belly of the beast the live i mean i think kind of what to steal from galen you got to look at the data right and like what candidates underperformed i mean democrats won by big margins across the board but the more progressive candidates did do worse if you if you like dive down yeah so i think that's the that's people who are saying that about el sayed yeah so i mean i think you know like you've i think you have a lot of people who like when we were recording our podcast like when we did we did a 2028 presidential primary draft a sort of abbreviated version who got the biggest i mean asaf got the biggest applause in the room right i think if you like signing with pete budaj aoc felt like somewhat tepid compared to what I was expecting from the crowd.

41:43I think Ossoff's kind of like stolen, you know, stolen the thunder. But I think you'd get a lot of people sort of saying, like, and again, I think all of these parties have an ecosystem of activists, leadership, like Schumer, who are kind of there to whip the votes, you know, moderates to say, like, what about abundance, right? And I think, like, I think - That's what they're always saying. That's what they're always saying. And I'm sure you will see the very full-throated argument of like, well, what are we going to do with all of this sort of landslide power? Why not put forward candidates who sort of articulate the most, you know, the things that are our dream list of things?

42:27But like, I do think you have to look at the actual numbers and how, like, if you're looking at the big map, what are people responding to? I mean, they're not responding to ads about democracy or abortion rights, right? As much as people might want that. they're responding to the economy. Yeah. I mean, I was skeptical after 2024 when everyone said, you know, like Democrats, we've really got to get back to economic populism and talk about, you know, people's material needs. Like we really have to get back to all of those issues. I was surprised they actually did it as well as they did. I mean, it was every candidate across the board.

42:59Like, um, I mean, you look at El-Sayed, I mean, yeah, he, he underperformed relative to some other candidates, but like they could ask about anything and he would talk about the price of groceries, the price of gas. I mean, there was pretty incredible message discipline across the party to stick to that. And like we were talking about earlier, the way they link that to corruption and made it, you know, that this corruption is costing you. I thought it was kind of an impressive party-wide endeavor. I don't know how sustainable that will be when you actually have to put forward a candidate of your own, like you will in a presidential race.

43:32I mean, they were able to attack on immigration when they had to, you know, and, you know, ISIS abuses, everything there. But now they're going to have to put forward a border policy of their own, which is going to be an enormous factional fight. Like, I feel like people will acknowledge, you know, that under the Biden years, they were left adrift, but figuring out kind of what the specific language they want to do, I think that could be a pretty messy process. So I think they understand sticking with the economic argument is the winner, but they're going to have to fill out basically a platform now, which they did not have to do last time.

44:11I mean, not the actual stupid piece of paper at the convention that no one looks at, but they're going to have to put forward what they believe in, not just run against Trump. So if we are sitting here in this activist, diehard, pseudo primary, I can't believe I'm doing this to us. The midterms just ended. I apologize for this. But like, what's the message you put in the ear of one of these electeds drifting around if they want to run for president? What is the thing that they have to say to bring voters along and show them something they can vote for? Yeah. You know, when we were talking about Latino voters and black voters in the South in this election.

44:57And like, yes, I do think the thing that comes to the fore is material concerns. That's obvious in the exit polling data and everything that people said pre-election, whatever. But I think there is an important sort of idea or a value in politics, which is letting people know or convincing them that I, me as a politician, I like you and I'm going to fight for people like you. and I think that Democrats lost middle status people in America by being nothing like them and not convincing that they were going to fight for people like them they would pursue the economic best interests of the poor and the cultural tastes of the rich or at least the college educated of which there are 38 percent in America the thing I keep on thinking of is it's just a return to Obama 08 politics like and all of these I mean this has been talked about a lot but like the millennial candidates who all came up and Obama was rhetorically like literal speaking style and messaging like a politics of love and hate like even al-sayed who I think gets a lot of press for being spiky does have those long form interviews or things where he'll talk where he'll kind of like uh I can't remember the exact phrase he uses but like speak to the politics of pain right they're all kind of going back to that um okay we know it's been a decade of like partisan divisions it's the obama hopey changey stuff right like that is kind of it's like oh i've seen this before and it was you know in the middle of the financial crisis and i do think um in addition to them all being young you know and just seeing like this millennial crop of candidates and some hot ones there has been a lot of there has been a lot of uh but but i actually think like on a serious level i think they're like oh like the thirst trap discourse right now is purely a reaction to the fact that like the people who have been running for president for the past overwhelmingly obama as an exception they've all been boomers or like the people running the party like hakeem jeffries who's i don't know how he's like 55 something like that he's not young but you're like wow look at this young guy you know like it's just it is actually really striking where it's almost like there is a little there is a little bit of a course correction where for a really long time the democratic party did sort of seem stuck in like the boomer cycle of like, well, it's his turn.

47:17It's her turn in leadership, you know? And I do think that just by virtue of like being young, some of the presidential primary candidates might - I mean, there's a good reason now why Democrats are looking for younger presidential candidates after what's happened, you know, in the last cycle. I think that's obviously going to be a huge advantage this time. You guys, I really appreciate you doing this. This was super fun. So fun. Gail Andrew, Claire Malone, Jim Newell. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. Claire Malone and Galen Druk co-host the podcast Still Counting, and Jim Newell is Slate's senior politics writer.

47:52All right, that's the show for today. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharm, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer for What Next and What Next TBD. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate, and Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. I'm Lizzie O 'Leary, in for Mary Harris. You can find me on Blue Sky, where I am at Lizzie O 'Reilly. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you soon.

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