What Democrats don’t get

America, Actually with Astead Herndon

In this episode, Astead Herndon interviews Sarah Longwell at the Texas Tribune Festival regarding her book 'How to Eat an Elephant'. The con

Key takeaways

• Longwell asserts that Washington pundits 'launder' their own opinions as voter analysis, failing to listen to actual constituents.
• The Republican party currently lacks a clear successor to Donald Trump's unique parasocial relationship with the electorate.

Main topics

• Democratic political strategy
• Authoritarianism and persuasion

Notable quotes

Washington is 100% not listening to voters.

Conclusion

The episode provides a strategic roadmap for Democrats to regain elect

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) For this week's bonus episode, I'm talking to Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, host of the Focus Group podcast, and author of the recent book, How to Eat an Elephant. Sarah's book argues that the way for Democrats to defeat authoritarianism is through persuasion, to treat voters like adults, and to embrace issues like combating corruption. But can Democrats run on corruption if they're in league with the same donors? And how does her strategy account for the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America. I asked Sarah this and more at this year's Texas Tribune Festival in Austin. Let's dig into that conversation. Speaker 1 (0:44) Hey, guys. Speaker 2 (0:45) Hey, how's everybody doing? Look Speaker 1 (0:48) at all Speaker 2 (0:49) of Speaker 1 (0:49) you. This Speaker 2 (0:49) is so exciting. I'm pumped to be here. My name is Ested Herndon. I've been a politics reporter for a decade-ish, and I now host a podcast at Vox called America Actually. And we'll be taping a live episode here with none other than Sarah Longwell, who we are so... happy to have with us. Sarah is the publisher of The Bulwark, the host of the Focus Group podcast, and most recently, the author of How to Eat an Elephant, one voter at a time, which I hope you have all picked up. Speaker 1 (1:22) It doesn't sound like enough of you have picked it up, actually. Speaker 2 (1:26) That just means after. That just means they're waiting for a book signing. Let's jump into it. You know, Sarah, we were talking in the back about the book is kind of personal and political. You make an argument, obviously, about the playbook to defeat authoritarianism. But you also say a lot about yourself and how you got to this point. Before we dig into the politics of it all, I wanted to start there. Like, what was the process like? And how did you decide which parts of yourself to share? Speaker 1 (1:52) Well, a lot of it was just, look, I wrote this book for the bulwark community, and I don't know, are you guys bulwark people in here? Like, yeah, we got some bulwark people. And so one of the things that's weird about the bulwark is it got sort of an extra layer of popular right after the 2024 election. Like, we saw this at enormous scale, which also brought sort of new scrutiny from people who were just meeting us. And so a lot of the questions that I would get were like, you know, you guys haven't apologized for being Republicans. Like, how does that even happen? And I was like, well, Tim wrote a whole book about it. And that was kind of the first two years of the podcasts that we were doing was sort of reckoning with the party. But we were sort of past that. But we still got a lot of those questions. And so some of them curious, some of them, you know, just annoyed. And so I wanted to talk about like what the journey was, especially because there's a lot of people who I think quite fairly go, okay, Republican, fine, but like a lesbian Republican, like explain that to me. So I was like, okay, I will explain that to you. But also, you know, there was a lot of things that I wanted to talk about why I started doing focus groups in the first place, because I think a lot of people didn't know that actually the origin story for the focus groups were that Bill Kristol and I thought we were going to primary Donald Trump. back in 2018, and we were running around the country trying to convince Mark Cuban and Larry Hogan and Adam Kinzinger and Will Hurd. And it turns out, actually, if you are trying to tell somebody they should run for president, lots of people will take a meeting with you because they are like, oh, would you like to tell me why I should be president? I'd love to hear about that. But they also wanted to know whether or not it was even remotely possible that that could happen. Speaker 1 (3:36) I said, okay, well, we'll go do some research and we'll do some focus groups. And so I flew to New Hampshire and that was a genuinely shocking scales from the eyes moment in terms of me having thought there was a Republican electorate who cared about the same things that I did that made me kind of a John McCain Republican, which is why I went to New Hampshire. I thought that was a place where moderates could do well. And it wasn't true. And so I wanted to talk about the origin, the focus group, all of that stuff. And then the last thing, and this was the one thing I really wrestled with was, The thing that happened in 2016 that I had never really talked about publicly was when my son was born, my first son, he was born with a congenital liver defect that meant that he was in the NICU for a very long time and that he will need a liver transplant. And we thought he was going to need a liver transplant, you know, then. And so I was watching Trump accept the Republican nomination like. on the little plastic couch in the hospital room, holding, you know, this baby and feeling like a fear that I had never felt. Like when your kid is sick and people can't tell you why, because in the beginning nobody knew what was wrong, and you're a first-time parent, then you're also watching this thing happen with the political party. I was very aware as time went on that because I felt so unmoored in my personal life and didn't... know how to like get a handle on things and was so scared that feeling incredibly clear about how wrong Trump was, was this weird motivating thing. Like it was a thing that made sense to me, a thing I wanted to go fight against. And it gave me a sense of purpose and sort of clarity and grounding at a moment when everything else felt deeply uncertain. Speaker 2 (5:18) Yeah, it does feel like that sense of purpose comes through. I wanted to go back to that focus group moment in New Hampshire, because for me, that was the first kind of like eye-opening part of the book. I mean, in some ways, it seems kind of intuitive, you know, talk to voters where they are. Theoretically, that's what a lot of folks in Washington say that they're up to. What was that experience like specifically? And what did it teach you about the difference between maybe the way Washington says it's listening to voters and what you've done since then? Speaker 1 (5:47) Washington is 100 % not listening to voters. And this was actually, this was genuinely a revelation because I remember in the early days, I would come back and people were super interested in what I was hearing. And I would say, oh, you should come, like come listen, come watch. And people who are on TV talking about what voters think all the time. Or were we like, no, I don't want to listen to voters. And I realized that the entire pundit class is laundering their own opinions, like how they think the world should be, as a way of analysis. And that is leading us to believe. And I think it's uncomfortable for people. Like, I understand people hate listening to the voters, right? I get this feedback all the time. They're like, but they make me so mad. They're frustrating. It's not consistent. And they're stupid. Like, people are like, well, they're stupid. And I'm like, yeah, Donald Trump talks at a fifth grade level. Like, this is part of his appeal. And there was so much I started to understand because I had been in Washington for such a long time going to think tank conferences about education reform and getting the national debt down. And those were the things that I thought about. I had no idea what was going on underneath the surface. And I think the entire country was looking for answers when Donald Trump won, but they weren't, they were sitting in rooms talking about it, but nobody was really going out and trying to understand what was it about this moment that made people do such a radical thing, like elect this guy that we all thought in Washington was a non-starter. Speaker 2 (7:13) Yeah, it really busts up some of those assumptions. One of the themes of the book is to talk to voters like real adults. What does that mean? Speaker 1 (7:20) I mean, I do think, and this goes to also how our new media environment now wants us to interact, right? So there was a long period of time in our history where the artifice of politics was part of the performance of politics. You could give a good speech. And, you know, that's just not. You know, you do a debate. That is not the rules of politics in this communications environment anymore. Every single one of you, if you're a bulwark person, you interact with me where I am looking straight at a screen or I am in your ear and we're having a conversation. We have a parasocial relationship. I've walked in here and met a bunch of people and they were like, I feel like I know you. And people want to feel like that about their political leaders now. And so they want to know what makes you tick. Are you a real person? And so the artifice, I mean, the same thing is happening with mainstream media, is the artifice of a debate on CNN is starting to feel really stupid. No offense to CNN, but when you can go on the internet and watch people have like real debates where they're actually kind of getting into it and it's not mediated through like a nice moderator or for the pleasantries of TV and they were all just in a green room together kind of talking about things beforehand, like people demand more now. And so a lot of it is just that artifice is falling away for voters. But politicians on the Donald Trump understood that as a person who had been in people's living rooms as a performer, Democratic politicians still have not figured it out. Speaker 2 (8:49) Yeah. One of the things that comes through in both the book and I think the work that we both do is how that voters don't always fit into those neat ideological boxes. Obviously, this feels like one of the big misconceptions of Washington is an endless fight about moderates versus progressives when you talk to a lot of folks and they're picking and choosing from a lot of different buckets. I always tell the story about when I was in the Iowa caucuses and I remember in 2019 in the Democratic primary, someone telling me they were stuck between Bernie and Bloomberg. me asking, how did you get there? You know, and I think it's right. What was the answer? I think the short answer was they liked a strong guy where they knew what he believed in and they did not care which side of that coin that was as long as it felt kind of consistent and something they could put their hands around. I mean, I think that speaks to a lot of the