Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, host of The Focus Group podcast, and author of How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sarah Longwell discuss why Donald Trump has dominated American politics for a decade, where Kamala Harris went wrong, and how the Democratic Party can win back working-class voters.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I’m really excited to talk about the book—and how on earth we can defeat Donald Trump and the broader movement he stands for. Do you want to give us your elevator pitch?
Sarah Longwell: If I had to give you a thesis, it would be that Donald Trump is a unique figure in our politics, that there aren’t a lot of other people like him, because of his relationship to America for decades and decades, not just as a television game show host, but as somebody who lived on Page Six, somebody who wrote The Art of the Deal, someone who’s been on all of these luminaries and talk shows. Obviously, he had strong relationships with every sort of big radio personality, and so he was omnipresent for the public.
Sometimes people say, well, we need to run a celebrity like Donald Trump. And I say, no, celebrities are different. People may be like, I like Brad Pitt or I like The Rock, but they’re playing characters. Donald Trump has always been who he is, and that has given him this unbelievable natural advantage in the psyche of the American public. When I do focus groups with voters, which I do all the time, they say, well, he’s a businessman. They don’t even think of him as a failed businessman, they think of him as a rich person who has been a developer, who’s run television shows, owned a football team, and so on. There aren’t a lot of people who can compete with that in public life and translate that into political power, which he has.
The Republican Party then totally abdicated to Donald Trump. They stopped having ideas, they stopped having candidates that had their own sort of pitch for who they are. Now it’s a cult of personality, which means that as he is on his way out, there is a unique opportunity in this moment to put him in the rearview mirror and not let it linger, if Democrats or the broader pro-democracy coalition are able to rally together and dominate the Republicans going into the next three or four years.
Mounk: Let’s get a little bit more specific about some of the ways in which Democrats have failed to do that. You have an interesting story of moderating an event with Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, and you argue that part of the problem is that voters didn’t really know Kamala Harris. It speaks to what you’re saying about Brad Pitt being popular, but running Brad Pitt is not going to work because people don’t know Brad Pitt in the way they knew Donald Trump.
Obviously Kamala Harris isn’t somebody who is famous as an actress. She was a politician and so on. Why is it that voters didn’t know who Kamala Harris was? And was that a personal failing of Kamala Harris as a political candidate, or is that a broader symptom of how Democrats are failing to respond to this political, technological, ideological moment?
Longwell: I don’t want to pick on Kamala Harris too much, but I do want to say that Kamala Harris absolutely should not run for president again. I’m clear about that in the book. That’s not because I don’t like Kamala Harris. I actually think Kamala Harris very much outperformed expectations when she ran. I think she was done dirty by Joe Biden and his team, who never did anything to elevate her and then wouldn’t let her put any daylight between Biden and herself.
Mounk: This is just nitpicking but what do you mean, they didn’t let her? At that point she was the head of the Democratic Party, she was a presidential candidate. I know they tried to bully her, but just fucking pick something you disagree with and say it…
Longwell: Well, you’re making a great point. But that’s the failure. Part of the failing is that Kamala Harris didn’t know who she was in a strong enough way to go out and do that. So when Joe Biden’s team says to her, no daylight, kid—what they were saying is, if you start crapping on us, we’re gonna crap on you back. That kind of garbage makes me insane because it speaks to the broader disconnect between Joe Biden and Democrats who’ve been telling voters that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, but then don’t act like it. They let all their petty grievances get in the way of it.
But to your point, after Kamala Harris lost, I went back and listened to all the focus groups again with this hindsight. And the thing that was so clear in there, and I saw it when I was listening in real time, but I don’t know that I heard it as loudly as it was being expressed by the voters, was, I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what she stands for. I don’t trust her. I don’t know anything about her. She doesn’t seem like she can tell me what she thinks. This is not solvable by just getting more reps in or fine-tuning your policy positions. She didn’t know how to connect with voters in a way that was omnipresent and clear. And Donald Trump, for all of his bad ideas, knows what his ideas are. He knows that he loves tariffs. And he knows how he feels about immigration.
Mounk: He’s loved tariffs since the 1980s. It’s actually genuine. He was obsessed in the 1980s with tariffs on products from Japan like Toyota. This is not something that he made up, though he’s wrong headed for it maybe.
Longwell: Wrong headed, but he was consistent, whereas she wasn’t even consistent between when she ran for president against Joe Biden and when she ran in 2024. And voters can feel that stuff and they see it as the way regular politicians act, while they see Donald Trump as the more authentic choice.
Mounk: I have two ways of thinking about the source of that. One is, I think, personal, which is that Hillary Clinton had genuine weaknesses as a political candidate, but I don’t think that anybody doubted that if you woke up Hillary Clinton at 3am and asked her what she wanted to do as president, she would have been able to rattle off 27 policies that she cared about. Everyone who wants to be president has to be sufficiently narcissistic to think that there’s something unique and special about them. But I think somebody like Hillary Clinton additionally also had a genuine set of beliefs about what she wanted to do. I think it was obvious to everybody that that was the case. In fact, when people attacked her, it was always that she had a secret agenda that’s really dangerous as opposed to her being vacuous.
With Kamala Harris, I’m struck by the fact that, even chatting with people who’ve known her for a very long time, they can’t really say what she’s about politically. Like she’s about wanting to get ahead politically, which is really deadly in our political environment. But the other thing that struck me about Kamala Harris—and I just wonder what you think about that and how that relates to the focus groups you do—is that the Democrats claim to be the party of the working class, have historically been the party of the working class, but are now so far away from the working class that not only do they not have any working-class candidates, but they don’t even know what working-class voters would consider working class. I think that was part of what was going on with certain senatorial candidates in this cycle that were sort of made out to be these super working-class people when they weren’t.
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But it’s also true about Kamala Harris. I understand that she’s obviously a racial minority in a double way, etc. But her father is a professor at Stanford. Her mother is a PhD scientist, who happens to be a Brahmin Indian. Clearly Kamala Harris didn’t always grow up with privilege. Clearly, she did experience some genuine discrimination growing up in the United States in the time that she did. But to claim that somebody who is the child of two highly, highly educated people in this kind of way is a natural part of the working class in the way that she did just always struck me as very wrong-headed.
It’s interesting, I think, to point to because that is a broader thing about the Democratic Party. It keeps running people who don’t really have working class backgrounds, who claim to be working class, who claim to be speaking for the working class. Now, you don’t need to be working class to speak for the working class. Tony Benn, the British socialist, a very influential member of the Labour Party, was a hereditary peer who had to renounce his peerage when his father died so that he wouldn’t ascend to the House of Lords, because he didn’t want to. But people were aware of that. He wasn’t in denial about that. He said, as somebody with this privilege, I’m going to act in these kinds of ways. Is that fair that this is part of why it’s hard for people to know the Democrats?
Longwell: Let’s think about it from the Trump side. Trump has a gold toilet, and a Liberace aesthetic, and yet somehow managed to be sort of this populist working class hero. Why? It was because he talked basically at a fifth grade level, all the time. He deals in repetition, but he talks to people like they’re regular humans. And I think that the Democrats really have a “good on paper” problem, where they think, this person ticks these boxes, and that’s why they lean so hard into, well, she’s a minority, but without thinking for a second, does this person actually appeal to everyday people? When they talk, do regular people get what they’re saying? The Democrats have too many people who are more comfortable in a faculty lounge than they are on a shop floor.
Donald Trump was actually pretty comfortable on a shop floor. Why? Because he was around builders all the time. His locker room talk was also a stand-in for, I’m a dude like the rest of you, and I would be comfortable, you know, shooting the shit in the back room. Kamala Harris doesn’t have any of that. Joe Biden did. He was too old for it to work anymore, but he had that in his career
Mounk: By far his greatest strength as a political candidate is that he came from a reasonably modest background, but more importantly, that he has this ability to connect with people. I remember in the 2020 campaign he was going up to the editorial board of The New York Times to persuade them to endorse him and they didn’t endorse him. I think they jointly endorsed Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. But on the way up he had this conversation with a janitor who just loved him and they had this genuine moment of connection that went super viral and it was more important than the endorsement of the Times. So that really was a strength of his, while he was with it.
Longwell: The Republicans tried to turn him into a creepy Joe Biden, but the fact is, one of the things that Joe Biden did is he touched people all the time. He could put his hands on people and he brought them in. When people would talk about his empathy, he was just a normal human. I have lots of complaints about him. I have policy disagreements. I think the narcissism at the end was a real, real problem. But as a person and a candidate, this was a guy who had seen some life and felt like he could connect with people. That connection part is very important.
Donald Trump had an enormous leg up. Part of his durability, his Teflon-ness, is that people feel like they know him. He’s been in their living rooms for years. So all of the rules that apply to regular politicians don’t apply to him. We all know that, but there’s an important upside to that, which is that it cannot be replicated by somebody just walking in trying to be Donald Trump. He is unique in this regard, and that is why Democrats should have a renewed sense of optimism about what they can do, and why they should not squander this moment.
Mounk: Well, the other thing about Donald Trump in this respect is that he is authentic in who he is. There’s many things about which he lies, but he doesn’t claim to be a man of the people. He—and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy was somewhat similar in this regard—lives out the fantasy that ordinary people have of what it would be like to be a billionaire. A lot of billionaires actually don’t live like ordinary people think they would live when they’re billionaires. They’re super disciplined and they eat very healthy food, all kinds of things that people don’t imagine. Donald Trump kind of lives in the way that appeals to the less noble side of a lot of people. Like, if I was a billionaire, I’d have a gold toilet. I’d have a yacht. So I think that even though he’s very, very different from ordinary people, he’s closer to how they think they would act if they had as much money as him. And of course he’s not somebody who, unlike a lot of Democrats, claims to be poorer than they are and have had harder lives than they have. Trump lives in a different moral universe where it’s shameful to be all of those weak things. He doesn’t claim he has less money than he has. He claims he has more money than he has. So it’s a very, very different approach.
Longwell: Yeah, and what does he spend it on? Bulk McDonald’s orders. That stuff plays with people.
Mounk: What do you think Democrats should do to reach voters like that? Is the problem that they have these fake working class candidates when they need real working class candidates? Is it that actually we need to realise that their natural electorate isn’t the guy working the factory floor and that’s just not what the Democratic coalition is going to be going forward? Or do we need to take a kind of Tony Benn approach where we say, well, we might have PhDs from Princeton, but we’re still going to fight for you and somehow we’ll make you believe that? What’s the route forward here?
Longwell: I don’t think it’s just about having different candidates. I actually think it’s a top-down rethinking about who they are as a party and how they’re gonna communicate who they are as a party. I do a lot of messaging talks in front of Democratic politicians now, and people will often come up to me and say, what should my message be on X? And I do this crazy thing where I put my hand on their shoulder and I say, what do you believe? Just say it to me. Say to me what you believe. If you ask that on a bunch of hot button issues, if you take away the cameras and everything else, and you ask, what do you think on the trans issue around whether or not people who were born men should play women’s sports? They’ll say no. And I’m like, okay, well, if that’s what you believe, you’ve got to think about how to say that. My favorite chapter in my book is Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus, because I do have this rare perspective where I’ve been an operative now on both sides and I’ve run campaigns with both sides.
Mounk: So what do you mean by that? What does it mean that Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus?
Longwell: Just specifically on the operative side, I came up in Republican circles and they are just straight mercenaries. They start businesses in politics and their business interests are then tied to the political interests of their candidates, which is why they weren’t so bothered when Donald Trump came in and said, I’m going to radically redefine what it means to be a Republican, against things that you’ve always believed.
Democrats, on the other hand, have this insane network of nonprofit organizations that basically push on issue advocacy. And rather than lining up to support candidates, they have an agenda which they are trying to pull candidates to agree with them on. So I had two thoughts when I got over to the Democratic side, which is 1) I felt genuinely bad about how unruly a coalition Democrats have to contend with. Their job is just harder. Republicans have a pretty homogeneous coalition, and it is just easier to understand who their voters are and what they’re going to respond to. Whereas Democrats just have this enormous, unruly coalition of people with different interests. Also, their people—the young people—are all trying to unionize their nonprofits or saying that they should have Fridays off. I would just say, the authoritarians are at the gate. You don’t get to work from home. You have to put on pants and come into an office. That’s what it takes to beat fascists.
Republicans have no compunction about these types of things. I just feel like Republicans are built differently. I think it shows up in their politics. And it really is damaging for Democrats to have to try to manage a bunch of people being like, well, I don’t want to work Fridays and I want to unionize my nonprofit, and also all of our nonprofits are going to tell you that you have to come to us, we don’t have to come to you, and Republicans just don’t have those same liabilities and it makes Republicans’ lives easier.
Mounk: It helps to explain some of the things you mentioned earlier. Why is it that Democrats are so confused about what their stance should be on something like trans women who’ve gone through male puberty participating in top-level sports? It’s because they feel that if they say what apparently they actually believe, this whole apparatus of nonprofits and linked media outlets and so on is just going to come down on them like a ton of bricks in a way that simply isn’t true in the Republican Party.
The strange thing is that that’s both the source of some strength on the left as well as the weakness. I mean, the existence of all of those notionally nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organizations is also that they can push ideas, socialize them, make them feel like—at least while there’s periods of Democratic dominance—what everybody believes. But the downside is that you can then go really badly out of whack with the American public, and that you’re fighting, on the other hand, institutions that sometimes are less well funded, but that are much more single-minded in the purpose of electing a series of Republican office holders and so on.
So I think there’s this kind of weird way in which each side is adapted to a particular equilibrium, which gives it strengths and weaknesses. I always think back to the time when I was at a dinner at Harvard Kennedy School and everybody was saying, Republicans have so much more money than we do. And I was like, who’s the ‘we’ here? Well, the left, the Democrats. It’s like, okay, so we assume that everybody at this dinner is on the left and are Democrats, which is true, including me, in one way or another, certainly at this time. But we’re not counting the salaries of anybody here. The food for this dinner here is not being counted. So the left has all of these resources that are obviously part of the left ecosystem, like Harvard Kennedy School—with a couple of token conservatives, but clearly part of a left-wing ecosystem. But the problem then is that there’s limitations on how you can actually use it. So do you think Democrats should just dismantle that, since that’s also one of the sources of their strength?
Longwell: It’s not about dismantling, it’s about building. In the book I have a section called Build Baby, Build, and I have these signs all over my office because—and again, I think some of this is in my DNA from being brought up Republican—when Republicans looked at the academic environment and they felt shut out there, they felt shut out from mainstream media, they complained and whined for sure. They also went and built competing ecosystems. And Democrats are going to have to do that too. This is a big part of the argument I’m making in the book about how you go on the offensive—you’ve got to build new things.
So many of the institutional advantages that Democrats have had, like the mainstream media, they don’t have anymore, actually, because the right-wing media ecosystem is now extraordinarily dominant. Republicans can live there—not just their voters, but their politicians and everything else. Whereas the mainstream media is still trying to do a sort of objective reporting that sort of treats both parties as though they are the same. And then there’s no corresponding sort of center-left-to-left media ecosystem. And actually, even worse than that, the only people who are getting it together to really build new media infrastructure tend to be on the far left because they have a more clear sense of what their message is than people who are just like, well, I want to tell you about why pluralism and liberal democracy are so important. Because, shockingly, that is not the kind of thing that animates the average American.
Mounk: I think there’s a weird thing where people on the right understand that a lot of the battle for ideas matters and that if they don’t act, it’s going to be won by the left because all of the superficially neutral institutions lean to the left. Whereas I think people on the left and even liberals have a much harder time understanding the importance of ideas, and of building institutions that actually fight for those ideals. So Persuasion is fighting for the values of liberal democracy, which is not a partisan issue, but certainly in our current political environment, it is more in tune with the actions and desires of some political actors than others. We have been lucky to get some great philanthropic funding, including recently, but it’s a real uphill struggle because it is really, really difficult to persuade foundations that this matters relative to narrow issue advocacy or something like that.
I want to touch on a very different strand in the book, but I think we need to do a little bit of setup work for it, which is that you believe it was swing voters—people who are generally torn between voting for Joe Biden and Donald Trump or Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, or whoever else is going to run in 2028—who made the difference. A lot of people are quite skeptical of that. They say: these people are so far apart from each other. They’re such different universes. How can you possibly be hesitating between those choices? And so worrying about persuading those kinds of swing voters is just a kind of category mistake and what you actually need to be doing is to mobilize people on your own side. So you do that not by thinking about what the concerns of these undecided voters might be, but by sort of energizing the people who are already on your own side. Why, based on the many, many focus groups you’ve done and polling data and other things, do you think that swing voters are real and persuading them is a very important part of how to eat an elephant?
Longwell: First of all, I categorically reject the idea that it is only a problem of mobilizing your own side. Frankly, one of the things that I don’t think gets talked about enough is that, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, anyone who really looked at the data will tell you that if turnout had been higher, Trump would have won by more. I think Democrats have a fantasy that there are more of their voters out there, that if they could just grab them, they would turn out for them, and I think that is wrong. In fact, it is these lower information voters, meaning people who are less tuned in to the news—and I don’t use the term low-information in a negative way, because actually I think it’s really totally fine for people to go out there and live their lives. The fact is, many, many people are just trying to raise their kids, but they don’t think about politics and they tune in shortly before an election, and they make a decision between two people, neither of whom look that great to them. So the question is, well, who are they going to choose when they look up and they say, all right, Donald Trump, I don’t like him that much, but the economy was pretty good last time before COVID hit, and I haven’t seen much of Kamala Harris. I don’t really get a sense of what she stands for. I’ll go with him. I just know him better. That is the way that people who are not tuned into politics vote. Right now we’re gonna go into a midterm election and there’s going to be a big structural advantage for Democrats, because the people who vote in midterm elections are an entirely different population than people who vote in general elections.
Mounk: In the past, the assumption was that it’s the other way around. Because for a very long time, Republicans had the more highly educated voters than Democrats. When you’re more highly educated, you participate in elections more consistently. And so you’re relatively more highly represented in low-outcome elections like midterms. For a very long time there was this conventional wisdom in American politics that midterms really favor Republicans. So if Democrats do well in midterms, that’s a really good sign for the general election. But it’s taken a long time for people to understand that today the Democratic coalition is much more highly educated, and therefore it votes more consistently. So when in 2022 the Democrats did relatively well, people overestimated how good a sign that would be for 2024. I very much hope the Democrats are gonna do well in this midterm election, but there’s a danger that we’re going to make the same mistake again.
Longwell: That gets into a whole question of whether or not the Republican who runs in 2028 as the nominee is the same kind of turnout machine of low information voters as Donald Trump. Because—and again, this sort of goes to the thesis of the book, which is that I think that a lot of the lessons that have come from the Trump era are not necessarily things that we’ll carry forward. I think many of them are so specific to Trump that the Democrats should be learning some lessons from Donald Trump.
I think that there are communication lessons. I think there are lessons about the fact that we now live in an environment—I don’t think this is gonna change after Trump—where people are going to want to hear from their president pretty regularly. You cannot come in and do what Joe Biden did and be like, I’m just going to recede into the background. No, Donald Trump got everybody used to hearing directly from him every day. Always-on communication is going to become part of national politics, and Democrats have got to learn to live in that world. But I don’t think that other politicians will get the kind of deference that Trump gets on a wide variety of issues that are specific to him being Trump. And Democrats should take advantage of that. Donald Trump changed the electorate. I tell this story in the book—I was on a panel right after the 2024 election, and Kevin McCarthy was on the panel with me at The New York Times, and all he’s doing is talking about what an unbelievable turnout machine Donald Trump is. They can’t believe it. Republicans can’t believe what he does. He puts up Saddam Hussein numbers in these rural communities. Can Marco Rubio do that? Can JD Vance do that? That is a really big open question. Can Tucker Carlson do that?
Mounk: So I think we can distinguish here between sort of demographic shift and turnout. Those two things aren’t totally independent from each other, obviously, but when I look at this in an international perspective, I do think there’s been just a long secular trend in virtually every democracy I can think of, especially for native white working class voters, but but also increasingly, as in the United States, multiracial working class voters, shifting more towards the right while the educated voters are shifting towards the left. For the United States, I think of this as the kind of Simpsons problem of American politics. When the Simpsons were created, I think it’s quite obvious that Homer Simpson would have been a Democrat, and Ned Flanders, the sort of very religious, never swears, do-good neighbor, would have been a Republican. But today I think it’s quite possible that Ned Flanders would be a Democrat. Whereas Homer Simpson, I think, would clearly vote for Donald Trump without a hesitation. And there are more people like Homer Simpson than people like Ned Flanders in America.
Now, at the same time, I agree with you that Trump’s ability to mobilize voters and to appeal to his broader swap of voters is probably quite unique, and it’s hard to see Rubio and Vance replicating it. But I feel like the tendency is going in that direction anyway.
Longwell: This is why if Democrats could get it together in just a few places—and I get into this in my book. I talk a lot about how they both have to navigate the communications environment, and also how Democrats have to now think about the world differently. There’s a weird way in which Democrats still operate. Joe Biden gets in and he’s got a big press shop. But you can’t rely on press releases anymore. It’s not the world we live in. You’ve got to be able to be out there. One of the reasons that Joe Biden, if I think if he had been 10, 15 years younger, would have been had done a much better job, even if all of his policy positions had been exactly the same, is because he would have been able to communicate in a way that he couldn’t when he was 80.
Then there’s the policy problems for Democrats. And this is where I actually think politics could get much more simplified. And this goes to your question of what it takes for Democrats to get back to being a working class party or a party that can appeal to working class voters. This is where I would never recommend somebody who over indexes on college-educated suburban voters because there’s just way, way more white working class voters. The average voter in America is like a 55-year-old white working class man without a college degree. That is who your average voter is. Think about appealing to that person. Not only that person, but don’t forget that that’s your median voter, and here’s what swing voters want. Number one, they want to know what you’re going to do to make their material well-being better. In the political science world, we start to get into the slicing and dicing of demographics. But instead of thinking about what each demographic wants, what does everybody have in common? Everybody’s paying for gas, everybody’s got to go to the grocery store, everybody’s got to pay for child care if they’ve got kids, everybody cares about upward mobility, which often means education. Everyone’s mad about healthcare, both like navigating it and paying for it. Everybody has that in common. Spend 70% of your time talking about what you are going to do to improve people’s material well-being, because it’s the number one thing they care about.
I’ve listened to voters now for eight years—hundreds of focus groups, thousands of voters. You ask, how are things going in the country? They say, not that good. Why? The economy, cost of living, prices, rent, housing, healthcare, it’s all you hear every time. It’s what people bring up organically. You can go to them with a poll and say, well, what do you think about this and what do you think about this? But if you ask them, how do you think things are going and what matters to you, they’re going to talk about those things. A politician had better be talking about them too.
Second thing, people want to feel safe. They can’t access their compassion if they don’t feel safe, which means if Donald Trump is out there saying, these immigrants are bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, he knows exactly what he’s doing, right? There’s an activation going on in your brain: Illegal aliens means I am unsafe and the borders are open, and that’s making me unsafe. I’m going to vote for the person who makes me feel safe. That’s why Republicans love to focus on the border and on crime. Democrats have been wrong to abdicate these things. I hear Republican voters or Trump voters all the time talk about why immigrants are good for the country, the immigrant that they married, they’re not all hostile to immigration, but they believe in fairness around an immigration system where people who have like waited their turn and done it the right way are able to come into the country. And so Democrats have got to start recognizing that border security is the table issue for where voters are. This is not “Sarah Longwell’s preferred politics.” This is what I hear from voters day in and out, including many Democratic voters. So that’s the second thing.
Third thing, I am using their framing here, but it’s woke stuff. I just hear from voters all the time. Number one, black voters, Hispanic voters, gay voters, whatever people are like, don’t put me in your box. Don’t tell me I have to vote this way or think this way because I look this way. That really bothers a lot of the swingier voters in the focus groups. It also becomes a question of how much time is allotted to issues. It’s why I focus on the 70% around the material well-being, because voters think Democrats have got it out of whack. Voters will be like, I believe in trans rights or I believe in gay rights, but do we have to talk about it all the time? So they just think the emphasis is off, which actually you can see right now with Donald Trump, where voters are again like, please lower prices, please lower gas prices. You said you were going to do these things. So when they hear about the ballroom, it’s not that they care about the ballroom. It’s that they’re like, you are focusing on the wrong thing. And that’s how regular sort of normie voters think about a lot of the social issues that Democrats focus on. They’re just like, sure, okay, but like, can we not talk about this as much? Because these other problems over here are bigger.
Mounk: Let me ask you for a clarification here. Is it that Democrats spend too much time talking about those things, but fundamentally the message is right? Or is it that there are parts of a message—not the whole message—that are wrong, and as long as Democrats don’t correct that part of a message, they’re not gonna get permission to speak?
Longwell: It’s different for different cohorts of voters. I always have to be very specific as sometimes people say, voters think this. And I’m like, well, some voters do, but there are, for example, Democratic voters who get very frustrated with the emphasis. I would say Democratic voters are frustrated with the emphasis. I think swing voters often think Democrats are just wrong on some of these issues. They think they are not right on immigration, not right on crime. It’s interesting on immigration, voters are not terrible often. A lot of the swing voters will say, I want immigrants to come here. I think immigration makes America stronger. I just want the border to be secure. Or they’ll say, I don’t care if an adult wants to transition, like God bless them. That’s their right. This shows up in polling too—a majority of Americans believe that trans people shouldn’t be discriminated against, that they should have equal rights in every way, that they should be allowed to transition. It only changes when you move it to the realm of sports or kids. So, the thing about sports is that now you’re again in a fairness question where advocates on the trans side will say, well, it’s about being fair to the trans person, but the vast majority of people think it’s about being fair to the women who are participating.
Mounk: Let me ask you a question about that, because it’s often asked if there are really swing voters? I obviously agree with you that there are. The harder question is: Are the swing voters actually reasonable? And to what extent do, let’s say, center-left philosophical liberals, which is a lot of what my audience is, as well as some center-right philosophical liberals, have to give up on their principles in order to appeal to those voters? Now, the optimistic story is not every one of these voters is reasonable, and obviously there’s a range in their views; there’s also a range in the level of their decency and intelligence, and so on—humans are humans. But actually, it turns out that most voters have pretty reasonable views. They have a view that immigrants bring a lot to America, and America is a country of immigrants, and would hate for immigrants to be discriminated against or treated poorly, but think we need border security, which, like it or not, is a very reasonable position. Or their trans position is that of course people should be able to transition as adults. Of course, we need to treat people with dignity, irrespective of how they dress or how they want to be addressed or anything else. But when it comes to female competitive sports, people who’ve gone through male puberty have an unfair advantage, and therefore, we have to have rules about who gets to participate in those sports.
Now, the more pessimistic account is that no, actually these voters are way more incoherent than that, and some of them may be way meaner than that. And if you want to win against somebody like Trump, you really might have to sacrifice more of your immigration policy than you might think is right. Or you might have to really sell out trans people. That’s something that critics of those who want to win over swing voters often say—ultimately you’re going to sell out things you believe in in order to do this. How optimistic can we be about those voters? Can we have this winning agenda that doesn’t you know, give up on key principles that a lot of your listeners and a lot of my listeners probably care about.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Sarah discuss the trans issue in more detail, who the next Republican candidate will be, and why AOC can’t save the Democrats. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…