Pete Buttigieg: We're in a "Make or Break" Moment

The Best People with Nicolle Wallace

In this episode, Pete Buttigieg discusses the high stakes of the current American political landscape, characterizing the 2020s as a 'make o

Key takeaways

• Buttigieg reports seeing significant energy in red and purple districts, such as rural New Mexico and Texas, during his recent campaigning.
• He argues that Supreme Court legitimacy is at risk and proposes reforms like term limits or expanding the bench to a 'balanced bench'.

Main topics

• Democratic campaign strategy
• Supreme Court reform

Notable quotes

The 2020's are gonna be remembered like that.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a call to action for political engagement and in

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hey everyone, it's Rachel Maddow here to tell you about the MSNOW membership. You can connect directly with your favorite hosts and other MSNOW fans. You can stream live TV and much more. Visit ms.now slash membership to join. Speaker 1 (0:15) I wouldn't do this if I didn't believe in my bones. That our commitment to being a freedom-loving people and our values as a country are deep. We don't always live up to them. Lord knows, we never have been perfect, but they are real. They are what make us a country and they will carry the day because they run so much deeper than any one presidency, even this one. Speaker 3 (0:46) Hi there, everyone. I have been popping popcorn and settling in to watch Pete Buttigieg on television for about eight years now. Whether it's a Fox News town hall or a campaign speech, he always engages where others will simply doom scroll. And he connects with voters of all ideological persuasions at a time when that ability to listen and understand people's lives is urgently needed. Currently, he's at or near the top of the polls in terms of Democratic presidential hopefuls for 2028. Right now, he's crisscrossing the entire country campaigning for Democratic candidates in red and purple and blue states and districts. One of the most effective communicators in our politics and in our country with undoubtedly the best political spouse in the nation. This is The Best People and this is Pete Buttigieg. Hello. Speaker 1 (1:33) Hi, good to see you. Thanks for having me on. Speaker 3 (1:42) We have wanted to talk to you for so long, but I feel like it was worth the wait because you are now in the center sort of of our politics on the campaign trail. And you're in these red spots that are suddenly, not to my surprise, based on what I've covered every day, but to my, I guess, my optimism is piqued by the places where you're campaigning. Tell me what's going on out there. Speaker 1 (2:05) Yeah, I'm extremely encouraged by what we're seeing. We've been to something like 35, 36 states since I left the cabinet. And I kind of specialize in trying to be helpful in the redder and tougher areas. And this year, each month more than the last, I've seen so much energy. We were in rural Southern New Mexico a couple of weeks ago. Something like a thousand people filling the high school gym where we were with the... Democratic candidates there. I was in Texas with Katie Padilla Stout and Johnny Garcia running for Congress there. So from a place like that to the Hudson Valley, New York, where I believe that Kate Connolly is going to defeat Mike Lawler, it's just extraordinary to see not just the number of people who are showing up, but the energy that they bring with them. And it's Democrats who are feeling motivated after a lot of pain and suffering with the last election outcome. But it's also a lot of independents and, frankly, quite a few people who voted for this president and usually vote Republican saying, this is not what I had in mind. You add all that up together, I think there's enormous energy if we sustain it. But there is an onslaught of money coming from the other side, including these super PACs. We got to do everything we can to try to keep up with that and stay ahead. Speaker 3 (3:20) What is the onslaught about? What is the opposition even, is it just? monumentally negative about the Democrats? Or what is the battle happening on the ground? Speaker 1 (3:32) Yeah, well, what's so interesting to me is it's not really a battle over the issues. I mean, in each place they try to find something, it kind of shows that they're flailing, that there's no cohesive message on the other side. Because, of course, they can't defend their results or their policies. You know, the results are unpopular. I mean, they said that costs were going to go down on day one. Instead, cost of gas is up. Cost of diesel is an all-time record high. It was a direct result of the decision to go to war in Iran. You've got mortgage and rent up. Part of that is interest rates being high, which is directly affected by the insistence on tax cuts for the wealthy that all these congressional Republicans voted for. They certainly don't want to be talking about their decision to cut Medicaid and cut SNAP. So on all of these issues, even immigration, which was such a winning issue for them before, the extreme behavior of this administration. So they can't talk about the issues. I think it's why you see a different strategy, which is. They're not even trying to persuade the voters. So you got a threefold strategy of trying to rearrange the voters through gerrymandering. And that was the big push over the last year. Trying to overwhelm the voters with the onslaught of money and then trying to block the voters with some of these voter suppression measures. Luckily, the courts have blocked this attempt to make it harder to vote by mail, which is something that I'm especially. passionate about because that's how I voted from Afghanistan when I was deployed. And we should never stand in the way of eligible citizens voting by mail. And then if all that fails, they just try to fool the voters with this thing of $5,000, which I think everybody knows is not going to happen. But it shows that they're really struggling on the issues and trying to think of any other way to somehow cling to their majority. Speaker 3 (5:07) Yeah. And I mean, it isn't even $5,000. Speaker 3 (5:11) out of goodwill is $5,000 if and only if you vote for Republicans. I mean, it feels like that gambit is as obvious a measure of how numb some people in my line of work have become. I mean, what do you make of how people are so inundated by the garbage coming from Trump? Speaker 1 (5:31) Well, look, the inundation is part of the point, right? Because if nothing else, they just want you to stay home. and you get all this garbage coming your way, I think it is designed to be a turnoff, not to persuade you to vote for a Republican and against a Democrat, just to persuade you to throw up your hands and walk away from the whole thing. But of course, this is the worst time to do that. This is a time to be more engaged, more activated. And that's part of why I'm so excited. I mean, to be in some of these districts we didn't think we'd be competing in. And then some of the ones that have been a knife edge the whole time, like Denise Powell's district in Nebraska. seeing that she is going to win if we make sure that she's able to get her message out and deliver. Just incredibly encouraging and incredibly strong. We just got to keep that up. Speaker 3 (6:17) I love when Cook Political comes and makes their adjustments, you know, moves things either from a lean to a toss-up or a toss-up to a lean. But I used to be on the campaign and used to have my own bets. And I wonder, having spent so much time on the ground, like what on election night are you watching? And what for you, if it goes the way the Democrat will signal, what size wave? Speaker 1 (6:40) First, I'm Speaker 3 (6:41) going Speaker 1 (6:41) to look for these races that we've known all along are going to be tight. I'm thinking about Paige Cognetti in Scranton. We did a great event with her a couple of months ago. But then I want to see if these places are in play. where we didn't used to think they'd be competitive, but the numbers suggest that they are. I'm thinking about somebody like Jamie Ager in Western North Carolina. I visited his farm and saw the connection he has with the people there. Sean Harris, who I campaigned with in Northwest Georgia. This is Marjorie Taylor Greene's district. In the special election there, he came up short on the win, but he overperformed the last election by something in the neighborhood of 15 points. If that happens again, then it really is going to be a wave. And I want us to have that kind of wave, not just because obviously we want to win, but also the bigger the win is and the more seats that we clearly hold, the less margin there is for this kind of funny business that we see. as maybe the last refuge of the Republicans. You know, Speaker Johnson trying to find some excuse not to seat a few representatives. Stuff like that matters much less if it's not even close. Speaker 3 (7:45) Well, and this is what the people of Hungary internalized when they finally kicked out Orban. I mean, do you sense that voters have internalized the very real, very specific and grave threat to their rights to vote? Speaker 1 (7:59) I think there's certainly more awareness of it now, partly because, you know, you've got a Republican Congress and a president that are so much on the wrong side of the American people. It's one thing if they're popular and they're trying to consolidate that by manipulating the vote. It's another when they're unpopular and they're trying to overcome that by manipulating the vote. And that's where we're at right now. You know, for the first time, the president's approval ratings in some surveys have slipped into the 20s. That is not something you can come back from just through trickery, because if you tried, the people wouldn't tolerate it to begin with. Speaker 3 (8:31) What part of this cycle informs how you're thinking about, not necessarily you personally, but 2028 and this need to get out of the cycle where every four years America could be in or out of NATO, in or out of the League of Democracies and more closely aligned with the axis of autocracies? Like, what does the next presidential contest need to be about? Speaker 1 (8:52) Well, I think that we need to be very intentional in the event of that Democratic majority, that Democratic win that we're hoping for in these midterm elections. We need to be very intentional about what happens next. And I hope that leadership will be considering a way to really cement not only the economic policies that Americans want and that we are for and that Washington Republicans are against. I'm thinking about making sure people can get Medicaid. I'm thinking about expanding access to care. I'm thinking about raising the wage. I'm thinking about partially unwinding these tariffs to put money back in people's pockets. I'm thinking about a child tax credit, a fairer tax. I mean, we can go on down the list. There's like 10 or 15 things, two to one issues where people agree with us as Democrats that are going to make them better off economically and that we can do, or at the very least we can pass in a Democratic Congress and dare the president to veto it. He might even sign some of them. It's not like he cares about policy. Speaker 2 (9:47) Right, right. Speaker 1 (9:48) But if he doesn't, at the very least, we've had that clarifying fight. But to your question, I think at the same time, as we're doing that economic work, we've got to be chasing political reform too. I think we should have a gerrymandering ban right out of the gate in a new Congress. I think we should get to work on money in politics right away. And if the long-term play is... constitutional amendment to do away with Citizens United, then we should do that. But we also shouldn't wait for that to do what we can now with the tools that we have. The reason we need to do all these things is otherwise, I do think there's a fear that, look, this is great, but four years from now, we'll be right back where we were. I think about some of the great work that was done in the last administration that got so quickly wiped out. We've seen how quickly that can happen, but that looks different if... We have a better political system if we do away with gerrymandering. And there are competitive races in most districts instead of like one out of 10 districts. When Speaker 3 (10:45) you look at the people, right, and I think people got ahead of a lot of elected Democrats in the second Trump term. And I was on the air when people in Minneapolis spilled into the streets after the killings of Renee Nicole Goode and Alex Pready. And that's sort of when you start to see people in culture follow. Bruce Springsteen does his Land of Hope and Dreams tour. And then it feels like to a lot of Democratic voters that in Washington, the Democrats followed the people and then the cultural leaders. What is the disconnect between how some Democrats feel about their leaders and what they've actually done over the last two years? I'm sure you get that question. I hear it on the street all the time. Speaker 1 (11:32) Yeah. Yeah, look, I think one concern is this perception that Democratic leaders are out to restore the old status quo. And I think that's the wrong direction for the country. And I also think that's bad politics. I think it will be very important for us to be disciplined about this if we do have the big win that I'm hoping for and praying for and working for this November. But there will be some temptation to say, great, now we can reverse the damage, restore the old normal, put everything back the way it was. That's not what people are looking for either. People are hurting. That's part of what was so cruel about this $5,000 thing that's not going to happen is that that would actually make a huge difference to people who are paying hundreds more a year for gas, more than 1,000 more a year because of the tariffs, probably 1,000 or more a year if they were depending on those tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, and on down the list. But you see something like what happened in Minneapolis. It was,