Platner’s Top Campaign Strategist on What Went Wrong

Quite soon.

So if you have any questions, email us at [email protected] with the headline AMA.

The Democratic Party's in a tense moment right now, and the implosion of Grand Planner Senate campaign in Maine has become a focal point for those tensions. Democrat Grand Plattener said he is dropping out of his state Senate race. It follows allegations of rape and physical abuse which he denies. "I just want to make it clear.

This is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen." After months of debating what the lessons of Plattener's sudden rise were, now it's all about the lessons of his even more sudden fall. And every faction has a lesson and wants the other faction to learn.

To the Democratic establishment it shows the failures of the populist to vet their candidates. You can't trust them.

Look at how Plattener fell apart under scrutiny.

What if that had happened after the date when Maine's Democratic Party could still choose a new candidate? The populist want to protect what Plattener seemed to be proving before his implosion. That the Democratic establishment is intensely vulnerable, but it's out of touch with the electorate. Plattener did, after all, beat Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine.

Chuck Schumer's handpicked candidate before his campaign collapsed. And a lot of the anger has focused on Morris Cats, a strategist at the political insulting firm fight agency. You may not have heard of Morris Cats, but he is a consultant in his late 20s, so he's young.

And he's sort of burst onto the scene as Zorn Mombani's key political advisor. And then as Plattener's strategist. But before that, Cats was the admaker for John Federman's 2022 campaign. He was one of the key strategist on Dan Osborn's independent run for Senate in Nebraska in 2024.

So there's been a certain kind of working class coded populist campaign that Cats has really become central and defining. So here was this guy who people really had been heard of before, and there was the right handman of the two Democratic politicians by getting the most press this year. And now, among both the left and the center, the knives are out for him.

You have all these stories about the Slipshod way he was running the campaign. You had a DSA letter being circulated, trying to argue that the DSA shouldn't work with him any longer.

“And I think you can really see this one both ways, Cats made genuinely huge mistakes.”

It is very possible that the failure to effectively that Plattener could have cost Democrats of the Senate this year. Cats has also clearly figured something out about this political moment that strategist many years as senior have not. So I want to have it on the show.

Ask him both about what he truly has gotten right and what he just has clearly got wrong.

As always my email as reconshow at mytimes.com.

More scats. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So we're talking in the aftermath of Grand Plattener's campaign imploding after a credible accusation of rape, because a lot of people angry at you, some of the people you worked with

for poorly vetting Plattener, but also I think for attacking people who are trying to raise the alarm on him.

“So now that you've had some time to digest what's happened, what do you think went wrong?”

I think a lot of the critiques and anger are fully valid. I've been very critical of the Democratic establishment frequently and where those critiques come from is not that they make mistakes. It's that they make the same mistakes over and over again because learning from those lessons would pose a threat to their kind of power.

And I don't want to do that. And I think they're like things here. Many of the critiques that have been made that are incredibly valid and things to learn from. The conversation around the vetting, there is no standard vetting process that would

have found the credible allegation that ended the campaign. Eric Swallwell served on the House Intelligence Committee for a decade and then saw similar allegations on his campaign.

“And being said, I think in hindsight knowing what we know now, the Reddit posts alone should”

have been enough. The tattoo should have been enough. The initial New York Times story and troubling behavior should have been enough. And I think both things can be true that we need different kinds of candidates running outside of the political arena and that it's the United States Senate.

And there are a lot of incredible people who are not part of the political arena, a lot

of incredible working class Americans across the country who don't have those problematic reddit posts or who don't have a problematic tattoo or don't have quite the level of controversy in their past. You would describe the reddit post for him on point as an asset.

“I think that there was a belief that I am still kind of wrestling with.”

I think over the course of the campaign, one of the things that was really frankly inspiring to see that we have so little grace in our politics and so little room for nuance. And it felt like this opened up a lot of those conversations. You saw people just extend such grace and open up their hearts and be willing to hope and believe in not just that we could change our politics but that people could change.

And I think that was something we needed and I don't want to lose that.

I don't want people's lesson from this to be that there should never be room for grace.

And I think that there are a lot of people who've made mistakes or said controversial things who we want to win the support of who we need to earn the trust of. But I also think I was wrong and not it's not to say that everyone who has said controversial things on Reddit would then have things like this come out. I don't think that's the case, but it's to say that there's a higher risk there of

it happening. When there are things like that and there's too much at stake and there are so many people who don't have that potential liability and you know, it's the United States Senate. I want to go back to the beginning of it. The story has been somewhat told by Dan Moroff, but I haven't really heard you tell

it in public. So, how did you meet Grandpa and how did you find what was a process that led you to him? The initial kind of factor that led to the broader efforts of recruitment in Maine was a lot of angst around Janet Mills being the presumptive nominee. This was someone who was polling is one of the least popular governors in the country.

Who would have been the oldest freshman member of, you know, it's Senate and Senate history. And who had made a lot of enemies out of key components of Maine, labor unions, tribes. And a network of us kind of connected with different local folks, labor leaders, organization leaders with a vision of recruitment.

“And I think one of the important factors in that is, you know, there's been a lot of criticism”

obviously around it, but many of the people, and I still believe this, who are best equipped to serve, are not people who are going to raise their hand and sign up for it. And so there was a lot of conversation, I thought around the kind of candidate who could win Maine would be a veteran, would be someone from outside of the Portland area. I do, you know, a community in which Trump won and someone tied to an industry that has

a specific resonance in Maine, the kind of waterfront industry was leading factor there. And that was a broader process in the series of meetings that folks to gram. So you're, you're looking in a way for someone in, he's doing lobstering, who's an oyster farm was a fisherman, right? You're, you're almost casting a candidate.

I think it's listening to the kind of specificities of an area and the specificities of the problem is facing that area and saying like, who's a voice that should be representing these people in Washington, who should be fighting for them in Washington, who's most in

“touch, I think there's a problem of like the lived realities of so many of the people”

run for office are so disconnected from the lived realities of the people that are running to represent. There's a friction there that is impossible to reconcile. And so how do you overcome that? You need people who don't have that same gap.

So why not somebody like Trojaxon, right? He's now going to be, it looks to be the nominee. And I find this interesting because Jackson is somebody who, you know, I think fifth generation logger if I'm not wrong, very, very populist politics doesn't have Platinum's Christmas just like I think it is fair to say that.

Has been a state Senate president there, has this kind of mix of like the right politics, but also, you know, an insider, a person who's been in politics for a while, was that why he was not the sort of exciting figure for you guys? Troj was really committed to running for governor at the time. I think of Trojaxon was running for Senate, there would not have been a process.

What did you see in Platinum when he first met him, what was that conversation like? I saw someone who lived on the same road he grew up on, who clearly loved Maine a lot

and who I thought really articulated in a powerful way, both a story that could capture

the anger and angst that so many people feel over the status quo, but also had like an affirmative vision of what government could do about it. How many people did you and Moraff and land collectively meet with before settling on

There were a number of meetings in which I was not a part of, but the kind of entire process

was not limited. It was an extended process to land it on ground. And it was an effort to convince him, right? I've read like there are like 30 some efforts to get off his lawn. Yes.

I think the state Senate tried to recruit him in 2020, he had been, I think, a number of people reached out over the years.

“You should run for office, you should run for office, and what his life was, and articulated”

of skepticism of being possible to defeat Janet Mills and so it was a running process. So I know when you did settle on him, there was a vetting document created. What did that document find?

The document found a Reddit account, essentially there was the inclination of there were problematic

post some Reddit, not the full degree of what later came out, but that was the extent of what that document found. And I think like an even more robust process would have found more of the specific Reddit comments and potentially the tattoo, but again, like a standard vetting process probably doesn't uncover most of the things that came after.

So one of Platinum's old Reddit posts regarding victims of sexual assault stated, "Holy fuck, how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up? They wind up having sex, they don't mean to." So that's from 2013, what do you think when you heard it now?

I think it should have been a red line.

He talked about it being like one of the things you regretted saying the most, that it

was indicative of the time of his life when he was lost, when he was angry, and it was in no way reflective of who he was.

“And I think when I knew, when I talk about the need for a different kind of standard for”

a public office, I think we can both have a standard of which a normal person can say something deeply hurtful and harmful online and not be exiled from society in day to day life. If they've changed, if they're putting the work to change, but also that doesn't mean if they're entitled to a role in elected office. So I'm a big believer in grace and politics, and I think that we need to create a lot of

space for people to change. Everybody from politicians to voters, one of the things that really shifted my thinking on pot, or though, was something that you did know early on, which is about him sexting as many as it doesn't women in the early days of his marriage. So there was this narrative that I found, you know, at least I was very open to it, which

this is a guy with a dark past, with a tough past, who put in a lot of work and changed, and he asked to be judged on his present. So when that came out, it made me wonder about his present and particularly what it made me wonder about fundamentally was his honesty. But we sort of publicly didn't know that for quite some time.

It was brought to the campaign early on through his wife, Amy, what did you think when you learned about that, and why sort of combined with some of these other things, the tone-copp tattoo, the Reddit posts, why did that not begin to worry you more about whether or not he could actually be trusted in what he was saying? I think it both did worry me more, and some of those concerns at the time were eased by

the communication from Amy herself and from grandma, but this was something that they worked through extensively in their marriage that seemed like a good faith engagement of two married people working through a difficult thing and working through it together and handling it in all the ways that one would handle something like that once it came up. And I wanted to, I think, respect both the privacy of their marriage and that, and also there's

a difference between consensual sexting and the allegations that ended the campaign. I think there was China hold room for all of those different things at once, and I think the challenge of all of this was like, as someone who does deeply believe in grace and

“nuance and the fact that people are complicated and life is complicated, and maybe politics”

should reflect a little bit more of that. There was a constant weighing of like how much is too much, and what is the red line? And I think, obviously, I did not see it soon enough. Some people who were involved did see a red line sooner, so Genevieve MacDonald was a campaign's political director.

She resigned back in October 2025. She knew about the sexting. She knew about the red epostes, the tone of cop-ta-two, and so it's been reported that when you heard she was speaking to the Wall Street Journal about plateners cheating, you demanded you attract her comments that she sent you a recording of her talking with reporters,

retracting her comments, and if not, sort of you would, like attack her for sabotaging the campaign. Do you owe her an apology? Have you apologized to her? So there are parts of that description that I would take some issue with.

The thing on that specific issue that I was articulating was, of which it was a violation of Amy's privacy.

process requires is a lot of honesty and transparency from candidates. And when, as a team, you go to them and say, "Hey, we need you to tell us everything." Part of what didn't work in a sentence is when there was not full transparency. And in that specific instance, Amy came to her and was fully honest, and to see Amy's trust violated like that, and to see that kind of practice that allows campaigns to operate,

and us to get to first of honesty violated like that, was frustrating.

I think I can understand that, and on the other hand, I think one of the questions is what does responsibility of a campaign to the public, the people around to candidate who maybe no more than the public knows, or frankly, to the party or to the larger project of the politics. I mean, what seems to me to have happened.

I mean, there are a number of people who resigned from the campaign over time. I sort of had this impression on me outside, no one thing until a final revelation was to me disqualifying for Plattener. And I said this on a podcast a bit ago, it seemed like a lot of smoke, a lot of decisions that didn't look great, and you just wonder, like, what is there that you don't know?

And also, is this a person who should be in the Senate?

“And so I think I can both really understand the frustration you must have had, people sort”

of revealing things around the campaign or confirming things that have been coming out in internal vetting. And on the other hand, there is this complicated question of what happens when the campaign consultants know things that maybe the public should know. Just to be clear on one of the points, there's been speculation of what we knew around

some of the more serious later allegations in one, and we did not know until the day or two prior to that story coming out, that there was a credible and serious allegation right. So the kind of area we were in of the things we knew were sexting, reddit, tattoo land. And I think to your point, many of those things alone in the vacuum was necessarily disqualifying.

And also, there was so much momentum and energy from the voters in Maine, Graham was traveling

across the state. The campaign was building a movement of thousands and thousands of volunteers, bringing

“people off the sidelines, and I think that friction of like really wanting to believe.”

And again, I said to my candidates a lot, like I think a lot of candidates get a strength so they're greatest weaknesses, you know, you're an outsider, but you're an experienced there. You're experienced, but you're part of the establishment, you're a policy wonk, but then you're overly in the weeds, and I think one of my, I think it's true for people in general,

I think one of them is like, I take the work that I do, I think very personally, and maybe naive at times in the sense of wanting a different kind of politics to be possible. And feeling that friction of sensing, yes, this is a lot of smoke and kind of being almost disoriented by that, but then also the euphoria of seeing a politics of what could be possible of town halls of hundreds and hundreds of people in areas Trump won talking about

the new deal, and a different kind of populist politics and taking on corruption and Republican saying that they'd have enough, and independent saying they hadn't voted for cycles, but this campaign was bringing them up and the friction of all of those things was a lot. And if I was doing it over again, I would do a lot of it differently, but that was kind of what was happening.

One of the things that McDonald said is that she did come to you, and she started trying to vet Platinum or more herself. We reach out to her, we were unable to talk to her, but that fight, consultancy, you all, we're not interested in going further down the vetting pathway. And she's expressed a lot of anger about that.

And I mean, the finance director resigned, like, there were people who felt something was going wrong, and I wonder, just in the sense of what you are trying to learn from this, if you look back on those conversations, if you look back on people sensing that something was up here, what were these other members of the campaign beginning to see that eventually proved out true, even if they didn't know exactly what would prove out true eventually,

that sort of you and fight didn't?

“Well, so I think like, you know, fights not a vetting agency, that's not a service we offer.”

We work with campaigns, and campaigns work with vetting professionals. I think there's a fair critique of fighting more pressure and me, putting more pressure on people to ensure that they're vetting process taking places responsible and robust. And I don't recall that conversation that Genevieve is outlining, I think there was a mix of different kind of personal dynamics in some of those decisions, but I also think, you

know, they were, they were right to feel that something was an S earlier. Kind of partner as accusers was Lindsey Fivefield, who had been a partnership with him and accused him, it came out in the time story of being physically abusive when they were together.

was just politically motivated. She was just a Republican-trended destroys campaign. Her story really bothered me for two reasons. One obviously, the abuse, but the other was a contemporaneous, her telling other people like, "Look, this guy told me his tattoo was a toten cop."

I had always been pretty skeptical of the tattoo story.

I didn't think Platten was in any way in anti-Semite or a Nazi, but I wasn't really sure he didn't know what his tattoo was.

“Do you see her story differently now, and which you reacted to that story differently?”

Yes. I think knowing what we know now, there should have been more credibility, given immediately, so that story went and came forward. So this, I think, begins to get to the broader topic, because a lot went wrong here. So some things went really right, until the last moment, Plattener, had racked the sitting

governor of Maine in the primary. You know, throughout the campaign, you and many of your allies were arguing that Democratic

party sort of only wants to run your word was allusers, who have wanted to be president

since they were in fifth grade, and that what the party needs is like normal, real people, and real people have checkered pasts, and that that just needs to be accepted to have a more authentic politics. Plattener's such an unusual case because the strategy both worked and failed at the same time.

So how now do you see that same theory?

“I think real people have checkered pasts, and also there are many, many, many real people”

who do not have that kind of checkered past. It often seems to be a little insulting to like what gets called real people. Exactly. I think it's a yes. And I think the online stuff is fair of like a lot of people have posted online, so I think

the content of those goes probably a step beyond what most people have said, and I think they're both the room for some level of nuance conversations about people of live lives, not tailor-made for politics, and also more strict standards on it, but like even after the two days after the political story came out, there was a poll that had ground down the Susan Collins, but had Janet Mills running five points behind Graham Plattener, even

after the start of the day he suspended his campaign. We have a Republican majority in a house. We have a Republican majority in the Senate. We have a Republican in the White House, and we have no functional path to a clear governing

“democratic majority, and I think there were mistakes made here, and they need to not be made”

again, but to go entirely in the other direction, and decide, OK, well, we're going to totally write off, trying a different approach. We're going to totally write off, bringing outsiders in to run for office at a moment in which the party establishment, any kind of establishment, institutions of power, deeply unpopular, does not feel like a good faith effort to me to get to the place we need to get to.

And if we're all serious about a powerful governing majority, then that is going to require a different approach. It's going to have to tap into the level of anger and angst that people are feeling and also this deep, deep desire for hope that I think this campaign tapped into. I Man of Martin, the host of the modern love podcast.

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What is an outsider to you? My understanding of the sort of list of campaigns you've been centrally involved in in the past couple years of John Fetterman, where you are pretty centrally responsible for the outstrategy, and after his stroke, he was really reliant on that strategy, is Dan Osborn, the independent who ran before and is running again in Nebraska, and wildly overperformed

of and he's no introduction, is Grant Platner, is Nathan Sage, who was running in Iowa for Senate.

“Some of these candidates are what you might call an outsider, right?”

Platner did not have political experience, Nathan Sage, I think, did not have a lot of political experience. Fetterman was a lieutenant governor of his state, all his born was a little bit better known as a sort of major union leader, when you talk about this strategy, what is an outsider?

Inherent and part of the problem is that the people who are in the siders right now in positions

of power are incredibly narrow, definition, you know, it's an incredibly small group of people who have power and influence and resources in our politics and our country right now, and anyone who's outside of that orbit, I think, is an outsider, and I think it's similar to, like, you get in, you know, the discourse around class right now, it's like, majority of people are working and do not feel like they have enough to live the lives that they

should be able to, and there is such a profound exclusion of the American people from access to resources, from access to power of access to the lives they want to be able to live.

“And the people who are in that category, I think need to be running for office, and that”

should look different in a lot of places that has a lot of different faces, a lot of

different backgrounds, but that I think is the goal that we should be coming to.

The thing that I really notice about that list of candidates is that's not far from a list of candidates who have gotten the most attention in their cycles. The thing that even your critics who I talk to say about you is that you, as an ad maker, as a storyteller, as somebody sort of helping to recruit candidates or choosing candidates to work with, have figured out a way to break through intentionally at a time when it's

very, very, very hard to do so. So there are a lot of people who are outside of this, but not everybody who is an outsider is going to be a good candidate, not everybody who is an outsider is going to be somebody who goes viral on social or algorithmic media. One of the things when I was talking about where you found Platner, that I feel from the

stories I know that you sort of underplayed, is the casting dimension of him, like actually looking for a charismatic candidate with a kind of bio. Now like you didn't invent looking for bios. The DTRIP will see has been doing that forever, the Republicans have been doing that forever. It does feel to me you look for people who feel like they're bios, which is a little

bit different. I've watched a lot of veterans run in politics and they just feel like normal candidates. John Federman, sort of an insider, I would say, a lieutenant governor, like a known political quantity, but certainly in that campaign with his shorts and his tattoos, like there was an aesthetic to him that felt different from other candidates.

So when you're finding these people, when you're looking for them, when you're framing their stories with them, what is it beyond that sort of simple outsider insider thing

“are you looking for? What do you feel like breaks through? And what doesn't?”

You know, there's a misconception sometimes in politics that to win the election, you're sitting down in a job interview. And I think right now where voters are, they believe that every single thing you're saying at the job interview is a lot, like they're just not going to believe it. You know, because you've got some bill through the state legislator, well,

you're never going to get it done in Washington. Oh, you say you're going to lower prescription

records, how come nothing's happened? You know, maybe you'll get it done in 15 years. And we're actually not engaging the job interview. We're engaging in something of a dating process with people who've been on 100 bad dates in a row and are holding out a little bit of hope that maybe tonight's going to be different. And how can you make people have been given every reason to give up on love, fall in love again? And I think that that's

much like love. There's something magnetic to it. And I think to shake that loose, I think you need a candidate and a campaign that is telling a story that can bring people who have every reason to be out back in John Fetterman was a story about Braddock as much as it was a story about him. Forgotten steel town, I believe it's best days for generations ago, that still deserves to be fought for. That doesn't deserve to be left behind. A bio isn't

just bullet points, but a story to tell. And I think people talk about hope as kind of a political tool or like an abstract thing and not a tangible thing in of itself. And I believe that there's a power in hope, even just as a thing that people are feeling. Like everyone's having such a hard time. I also think there is an X factor in our politics, right? Like someone could run for president and you're in, if have the exact same policy positions

as Barack Obama. Barack Obama had an X factor that made him unique. So did Bill Clinton,

ranks of political power in this country, do have an X factor. And we can't ignore that.

“And I think you uniquely can't ignore that in the modern media environment where you can't”

just run a campaign on 30 seconds television ads. So this is what I want to zone in on because I think fight as a consultancy, you as a consultant are good at finding people the X factor. And one place where I think Democrats have the strategy of the broad coalition of the Democratic Party is fallen apart is I think they were looking for the ability to raise money, not the X factor. I mean, I think there's a deep lack of updating in the strategy to kind of break

down the way that this traditionally works is there's a district or a state where there's a competitive election. And the institutional approach to recruitment there is who can raise the most money in the first 48 hours. And that is literally the driving determining factor in who the Democratic establishment wants to recruit. And here in that, when you're the question you're asking is who knows the most wealthy people that is probably someone ill-equipped to make a credible case

“as an outsider running against the rig the economy. And I think it's the job of the total class.”

One of the reasons I do what I do now, one of my first jobs is in North Carolina,

working for a candidate there, Erica Smith, who had an incredible story to tell. She also had

some issues of her own, but it was from a role part of the state that was rapidly falling behind and had been kind of left behind by the political establishment where Democrats were collapsing. She had a decent electoral record even as a state senator, a pastor grew up on the same family farm that her family was enslaved on, like a really profound story about North Carolina and overcoming hardship and a vision. And we did a hundred Italian tour in a hundred days across all of North Carolina.

And in that campaign in that tour, I saw kind of two things. One was the political establishment, did not exist in a way to see there's a candidate here with a really compelling story and some really good talent. How do we wrap around her and protect her and lift her up and fill in the blind spots here and support it? She can't raise the money. It's on serious. Or someone from there can

never rise and it's a little power. Is the issue that it did work differently before? I mean,

I always understand money is having been able to buy two things. Money could buy a sort of amount of attention by buying maillers by buying TV spots, that kind of thing. And money could buy a certain amount of organizing by paying for yard signs by sending out people into the field. And that both of those things have gotten in a way harder to buy. People don't watch TV spots anymore. And the same way that you do any easier or more straightforward to earn. Like if you have enthusiasm,

if you're somebody compelling, all of a sudden your videos can go viral and people are scrolling through TikTok and your area will see that it actually was optimized for something that made sense at one time. And that now that's no longer true, or is it just that you just get the money a different way? The money still matters just as much, but you get it differently.

“I think money still matters profoundly and you get it differently. But I do think the main thing”

is you can't hide behind 30 second ads anymore. Like you can't just run a campaign predicated on

paid media. You are constantly expected to be communicating. And people's standards for transparency has risen in the social media. It's like we now know everything about our celebrities. The standard for the ways in which LeBron James has to interact with the public are fundamentally different than the standards for the way Michael Jordan has to interact with the public. If LeBron James is at casinos till 5 a.m. every day, we'd be telling a very different story about LeBron.

And I think there's a similar thing in politics of everything's under a microscope. You're being recorded at any given moment. You can't put on a 30 second facade and hope that that's enough. You need every part of a campaign working together to tell a complete story that can't be artificially constructed. And you can't cover up for a lack of talent candidate. Still, I think the most compelling indicator of candidate over performance is tended quality. And we can

have all these different debates. But that just I think remains fundamentally true. The candidates on that list have an ideological range to them. Federal men sort of changed a lot after the campaign. So he's a little bit of an unusual case here after the stroke. But Dan Osborn running is independent. It was very populist Candidate, but very moderate on other issues. You did a ad. Maybe you made the ad about wanting to

help build the wall and border with his own hands. You have partners much more progressives or I'm Donnie who's a Democratic Socialist Nathan Sage who has sort of been between that. You've said before that for you, the candidates don't need to be progressive. They need to be populist. What's the difference? I think frankly, a lot of the differences in the LeBron's

Democratic Party is we have a big tent party that is constantly kind of shifting and rearranging to exclude people who challenge the powers at the heart of it. And a lot of the specific, what do you mean by that? I mean watching people who are like the Josh got hammer of the world, for example, who's someone who's very like, we need a big tent party member of Congress, member of Congress, but no one in the essay should be allowed in that party. It's like, well,

that's not a big tent party that or you see, you know, people who anytime anyone's critical of

Israel, well, that's not who the Democratic Party should be. And I'm interested in a big tent party that kind of flips that a little bit where we're allowed to disagree on, you know, people of different politics on the border or slightly different approaches on a variety of issues across the country and candidates and campaigns can reflect those. But we are united in a belief that we are not even having a good faith conversation until we've done serious things about corruption

at the heart of our politics, and until we're working to address an economy that's broken. And to be like, that's the baseline of where people are. And the longer it takes us to get to that place, of kind of being a party that's embodying a challenge to the status quo rather than embodying

a protection of status quo, the longer we're going to be in the wilderness. You sort of dodged my

“progressivism versus populism question. So let me sharpen it. What is populism?”

I think it is a belief that the people should have more power. It's kind of how I think about it. It's a very my specific interpretation, but I think a lot about the nature of power in terms of how much people feel like they have it in their lives. And I think a lot of the issues we have stem from the fact that we're at a moment in history that I think people feel more powerless than ever before. Was Obama populist? I believe so, yes. I think his entire theory

of the case is deeply populist. You know, he told the story of the country belonging to everyone and that being at the heart of things and he told, and particularly his reelection campaign, I don't think it's talked about enough for just quite how populist the approach was. Mitt Ramley was a Wall Street villain who had shipped our jobs away, who wanted more money for himself and his Wall Street friends. Obama was a president who took them on, who brought the

“economy back, who stared down those same villains. And I think that's an example where populism”

allows for a big tent. And the people who critiqued it are just, I'm sorry, because they don't they're against their own interests. Fight, and I think this was not as much specifically you, but worked on Tom Stier's campaign for covering him California. Tom Stier's a billionaire, can a billionaire be a populist? If you're a class trader, I think crit scares another example. I'm like, they act in a way, their policies, in a way, are in conflict with the interests of

the billionaire class. I think one of the things I'm trying to get at is, in your theory, over the Democratic Party has gone wrong. In your theory, where politics is going, what separates the candidates able to make the kind of appeal that you think works, from the candidates who can't. I don't know, Janet Mills, myself, but I am certain if we had Janet Mills in this studio, she would say, she also believes more power should go to the people.

She also believes that politics is corrupt and has certainly had to like make compromises as any governor has, as Zorn Mondani has to make compromises as people in power do. But she would probably see herself within that definition as fitting within it. So would many of the people, most probably, in the establishment Democratic Party, that comes in for pretty regular tongue lashings from you and some of the people around you. So what is the line here?

The ability to name villains. It drives me insane about that you have these people who've kind of taken on affordability. That's like, you hear these politicians talk about it. And they're like, you know, we have an affordability crisis, which is why I'm here talking about affordability, because what Democrats need to do is we need to talk about affordability. And it's like, you're not saying anything. Everyone is dealing with some version of an affordability crisis across the

country. The villains of it are specific and specific places. In some places, it's broken right to repair laws and some places. It's bad landlords and some places. It's electric monopolies and other places, specific billionaires or corporations. I don't think Janet Mills would name the people who were taking the power and using it to hurt working people. So that's the point of populism. It's not just believing the people should have more power, but it's believing that there is a small

“group of people or corporations or something that has collected the power. And that's what needs”

to be broken and are calculating that conflict clearly. I mean, I think there's a case to be made

that's like basically populism is a politics at points. And what we have in the rising and

the Republican Party is the populism at points, the finger down or to the side, targeting,

at points to finger up. And I think the friction and the fight right now, a lot of the democratic

establishment, is there is a belief that we are not in this populist moment, that we can just kind of get through this moment. And things will collapse. The reason that frustrates me so intensely

“is I don't think there's any electoral indication that that is true. And I think there is going to be”

a populist future in this country. It is a question of who's going to control it. And if it is not the democratic party, then it's only going to get worse on the other side. And so we need to start pointing up before there's no one left around. You mentioned Obama's 2012 campaign before. Obama is these two campaigns that are different. You have the O8 campaign, which is very hope and change and we can all come together. And the 12 campaign, which is heartaraged,

more about plutocrats and billionaires in being capital, etc. And I still see the democratic party sort of vibrating between those two approaches, right? And you can see reasons to think about both and polls. People are very upset about political division. They want politics to feel differently that it does. It is a big ten party that needs to have many kinds of people inside of it. And on the other hand, you know, you ask people, like, do you think that political

business basically needs to be burnt down? And they tell you, yes. So how do you think about the

balance of there's simultaneously a desire in the public for a politics of points and a

“politics that unites and has a kind of fellowship to it? It says in a question. I think”

and this is a slightly different answer to the question you posed. But like, I think there's a sustainability question with it. Like, there's this kind of friction of, you know, how quickly incumbents, not just America, all of the world are turning over, because you can ride this popular slave, but then then what? And I think we need a populism that's actually, I guess, to play to the crowd, like, married to a bit of an abundance. You simultaneously need to restore

another word for the kind of unity, I think, is a restoration of faith in government, saying that contributes to dividing factor and kind of this baked in cynicism, that's divisive. Populism can be hopeful if you marry it within abundance, ask a approach of the deep belief that government needs to work. This sort of disarrayment on the approach. Yes. I don't think it's a credible claim that we're going to take back all this power and all this fortune from the billionaire

class or from the oligarchy if we can't even build 100 homes. And marrying those things together,

“I think, is to begin to tell a story of a populism that's hopeful, because it's like you can”

believe in it, it's tangible in your life, and it's a reorientation of power. And it's all of those things combined. And I think we need more of that. It frustrates me when we get into these debates over, like, you know, you can believe in anti-trust policy or you can believe in abundance. I've also found this debates frustrating. I think we can massively cut red tape that makes people lives more difficult, and we can impose new regulations that protect people from editorial actions.

Also, I think there are a lot of people doing a compelling job of this in raising the

finger from pointing to your neighbor to pointing towards the powerful. There can be a story of unity

and of hope and of love. Like, I think about, you know, I can't, I did not come up with this. I can't remember who came up with it. And so I apologize to whoever it is. The idea that, like, it's Obama's Wii, and it's Bernie's then. Like, it's this Obama-esque coalition that's inclusive, and that we're all a part of, and we're stronger when we're all in it together. And we're taking on the Bernie Sanders version of the villains who are posing us. I want to come back to some of this synthesis questions, but

I want to stay in populous in for a minute. One thing that connects the candidates we've been talking about is they're all meant. Is there a connection for you between populism and gender? And between what you think the public reads is populist and working class and gender? I think the public tends to more loosely assign that term to men. And I don't think it's particularly accurate. I think there's, you know, a lot of candidates, like, I think about Rebecca Cook running in Wisconsin,

who meets all of those same criteria. I think what even like Governor Sheryl across New Jersey, who I think is an example, not necessarily the traditional property. There's probably something about the kind of technocratic populist hybrid, but has campaign in that way and has governed in that way. AOC, as an example of this. And I think the way people use the term populist oftentimes is they're kind of code switching. If something's progressive, it's unelectable and populist becomes

the electable version of progressive. That's not my interpretation, but I think that that then contributes to, like, people are afraid of, they start saying, I see the populist, then it undercuts their arguments to keep it from running for president or to keep it from being present. And then there's

Yes, because they're not all these candidates that doesn't fit Maldani or some of the others,

but if you look at Nathan Sage or Federman or Platner, Dan Osborn, it has this kind of guy who could be up, you know, work on an oyster farm, on a lobster boat, in a factory. When, you know, the working class today is almost like in a more modal sense, an agreement women working as a home health carried. That there is this, our politics treats the working class as if it goes to work

“in a hard hat. And it has been a critique of you, but it's broadly speaking been a critique, I think”

of Donald Trump of Bernie Sanders, of a lot of people on a politics that they have not tried or managed to come up with a more modern way of thinking about and presenting what it means to be working class. I certainly can't speak for Donald Trump and I can speak for Senator Sanders either, but I think there is an element of it's the ways in which these things are written about and grouped and covered in the perception. Someone like Jamal Bowman is a working class candidate who

the story is written about him or oftentimes tended to leave out the fact that this is a working

class outsider because it was more convenient to lean into other critical narratives than to embrace

that or, you know, Cory Bush and two members primary by a pack last cycle. And because they don't meet the traditional definition, then that tag is not applied to them, which then perpetuates the cycle. Another way of putting this in a different direction from it is even impulse to a poor partner dropped out, Susan Collins was winning by quite a lot among white men and men without a college degree. And there's sort of like two dimensions of this. There's been a well-documented

shift where the Democratic Party has become the party of the college educated. The more left you go in the party, in some ways like the more true that often is, so the DSA is doing incredibly

well among people with postgraduate degrees who have like struggled in the economy for instance.

And the critique has been, as I have heard it, that the Democratic Party's theory of how to win back the working class has been to sort of cosplay the working class. And one of the reasons that's not working is that one is not what those actual voters want. Again, Platner did very well with people who had postgraduate degrees that there's some sort of weird conflict here between the Democratic Party's image of itself. And what they call the Democratic Party of the DSA,

“who's actually in it. How do you see that? I think there's not a problem that we're going to”

solve in one election or is one campaign. I think it's indicative of a massive brand problem that now comes when you have a D next to your name or even frankly, don't have an R next to your name. I mean, it's kind of foundational to a town like a bad political speech riff, but it's like, it is fundamentally true that the worker and Michigan who's factory closed has more in common with a waitress in Texas who's working at the starvation wages, a minimum wage in Texas,

regardless of their races and genders and ages, then at any point probably in kind of American history in terms of the degree that there's just this kind of broad class erosion. I think to change it, we need so many of these people stepping up and running. There are people who would say that we need more than just an economic argument to win back these people. I don't think that that's

“untrue. I would argue that like I think there are alternatives to mass moderation. I think like,”

localized moderation for their things is appropriate, but I think we need to be telling a story as part of this populism does extend beyond just economics. How much is it kind of candidate you look for? Somebody who actually has to feel themselves failed by the institutions. I think the credibility things absolutely component of what needs to be factored in, like what gives you the credibility to make this argument and to have voters believe you, but I also think

there are a lot of people who are not trying that hard to make this critique. Look, I think that there's a whole segment of the democratic party that still believes like the end-of-be-all problem is Donald Trump. The entire critique is one of Donald Trump. Every problem we're facing is the result of Donald Trump. And then they are hedger in the sand if we can't acknowledge it for 12 to the last 17 years. Democrats have had the White House over those periods of time. We control both chambers multiple times.

And people's letters have gotten worse. And so we can't just go and tell people, Donald Trump is the reason everything's bad when they've been alive this whole time. And experience that clearly there's a systemic issue here that extends beyond anyone present or anyone office. Yet a lot of our party, or at least the people in position of the pound,

Recently we asked about how you share your New York Times account and you had a lot to say about

New York Times games. I need my own New York Times login because my sister is so much worse at the crossword than I am. I discovered that he's already finished connections that day. And I'm like, "Jona, it was my day." It doesn't let us play the same game since each other. I play the stoke. I do the crossword. I do the spelling bee. I do the word all. Please help. My kids want to be able to play word all, but with the word all by.

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One subscription up to four separate logins in your existing stats and streaks come with you.

Find out more at nytimes.com/family. To what degree does this demand in the Democratic Party? These candidates who can code switch.

“So one of the interesting arguments is made in the party going way back, right?”

Norman Miller wrote about this. There's a famous Ron Brownstein piece on Barack Obama about the wine track and the beer track in the Democratic Party. But Platner, an attack people launched at him, which I've thought was sort of wrong. Was, you know, he came from a family that had been well off, you know, his dad helped by his home. He went to an elite private school. But you see something like this with Maundani, who comes from a

sort of family where his mother is a celebrated director as father's an academic. That, you know, Donald Trump himself is a billionaire. Oftentimes what you end up seeing in candidates who sort of succeed is this ability to operate across different worlds. And so is that something you look for? Is that something you think is important? Like, how do you rate that? I don't think it's something that should be important.

There needs to be a way for people to get elected without having kind of coastal communities getting all on board with them. And even still like there are ways to challenge us. That's where there are ways to overcome with those grassroots money. But you and to some degree need buy in from coastal communities to be able to really launch to the degree you traditionally have to

“just because you need to raise money from them. Money and media. I think the mix of money and media”

attention. And it's just a lot harder. And I think there's something to be said for the like political utility in being able to talk to a variety of your constituents and that should be important. But I think once you kind of extend into, oh, how comfortable is it to make a donor feel? We're not in a place anymore that's serving the likes of ability goal. The campaign here that you worked on that didn't take off was Nathan Sage in Iowa.

What went wrong? So, I mean, he was one of the people I had in mind when I was saying this.

So, I think like Nathan was an incredible candidate. Who I think would have won by US Senate

seat who had an incredible story. He served three tours, I believe. He was grew up in a trailer park in Mason City, worked his way through high school, went to serve, then served to a small town chamber of commerce and brought small businesses back. And his like anger and disdain for the people who had sold out families like his was profound and real. And he also connected deeply with

“voters when he was in a room with them at town halls at campaign events. But I think to the kind of”

donor class, it felt abstract or they didn't quite see it because they weren't living the lives of other families struggling in Iowa. And so it didn't quite break through in the same way. And it's a different skill to pitch donors and to pitch press than it is to pitch voters. The collapse of local media, I think has made this problem a lot worse. You know, 20 years ago there's profound local media circuits that exist. There are actually in the weeds, if you've really strong feelings about

a factory that's giving workers cancer in Iowa, you can go and do five interviews about that and show your knowledge of local issues and show your passion in the way that's going to make people's lives better. It's not a particularly sexy pitch to national supporters of, hey, are we going to, you know, do you want to write four different articles about a factory even workers cancer in Iowa and a candidate who's incredibly angry about it? It also I think speaks to

one of the pathologies of a lot of Democratic candidates and the Democratic party in me right now is that it is a party of people who love institutions at a time when institutions are failing. And one of the places where I'm sympathetic to that is that institutions were actually one of the

when you went to the newspaper editorial boards and you had to win them over. And so it wasn't just could you get attention? It's could you impress the editors? Could you get the endorsement of the local civic groups? And now all these layers are weaker across much more of the country. There's less union density. There are fewer civic groups that have real memberships. There's fewer local newspapers and their editorial boards carry less weight. And so it means skills that

“were really important are less important in skills. It wants like couldn't get you anywhere, right?”

The newspaper would not cover someone who both did not have any support and was just making people mad by saying sort of outlandish things. But now, you know, you could be Spencer Pratt and Los Angeles and like rocket forward in attention at the very least from being a candidate like that.

The gap between editorial rooms and corporate boardrooms and what is driving voters has never

been more profound. And I think that's been exacerbated. I think the Democratic party, but what I think was kind of a problematic shift after you had in 2012 the kind of moderate to Republican elites essentially hand-picked Mitt Romney and he receives the nomination and Obama wins a daunting reelection on the populist campaign against him. And then you see Donald Trump rise up against that Republican establishment. And then I think you see this kind of misleading exodus from the

Republican party of donors, of institutional figures, to the Democratic party saying I can't be a part of this. And of course, they're welcomed into the tent because they come with resources and they come with platforms that have historically been of the electoral significance. We suddenly at a moment in which there is a massive uprising against institutions, think that we're building a new coalition that is pro-institution. And it's we took all the people who made the Republican

party unelectable, fold them into our tent and let them influence our approach. And I think it's fundamentally wrong in broken. I think there's an interesting friction that's going to have to play out here of what is the traditional media's role in politics, which I think is fundamentally different than what it has been before. It would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, if I told you, the New York Times editorial board is going to write a piece of essentially telling voters,

do not vote for Zorn Mundani. And then that person was going to win the Democratic primary

“by 12 points. But that's what we saw happen. And I think they're just this disconnect and I think”

there's a curiosity problem. I think of often times we're not asking the right questions about what is driving this. You know, there's a to now compliment the New York Times. Emma Goldberg did a good piece on this after the action talking about the affordability angle of the New York city slate that won. But that was the only piece really written in a traditional media with that as the center point. And those are the main things those campaigns focused about. But all of the

kind of dialogue was around unrelated components of it. And there's just this disconnect that

I think there's a real real friction there. When you met Mundani the first time, what made you think

there was some magic there? I think his profound and earnest belief that it was government's job to be making things better. The marriage of that with a vision is just frankly incredibly rare and it shouldn't be. But it is. Like the number of people who sit down and say you're thinking

“about running for an office and whose initial answer is we have this crisis. I think this office”

can address this crisis if we just decided we wanted to. Yeah, I'm a big believer in campaigns aren't one in the content of the battle they're one in the context in which they're taking place. And if we're taking campaigns in a context in which we are ashamed of government, which we don't believe government can do anything, which we're apologetic about government, then it's going to be really hard for convince people to vote for the party that is the bigger government party.

And if we can't prove that government is one of the greatest tools for good, known to human history,

then how are we going to do anything? The first time Mundani started coming on my radar,

I think was a halal-flation video where he was going around with the halal cards and just noting how much more expensive it got. And it wasn't like this grand social television for what government could be. It was very specific. It was the whole thing in miniature, like repeatedly. And every Democrat now wants to copy the Mundani visual language and the Mundani dominance of a vertical video, very few are able to do it. You guys sort of built that together.

When people come to you asking for lessons from it, what do you tell them to take from it, what do you tell them to not take from it? There were a lot of incredibly talented people on that team in New York, South and Andrew. And I think as good as I might be as good as they

And it's hard to take any credit for that. I think one of the roles that there is to play is frankly, like getting out of the way. And we have an entire consultant industry and a party establishment that has kind of built its role of being like, oh, you have a big idea. Well, don't do that. You have something that's going to expose you to some risk. Don't do that. You have a broad vision, scale it down. You have a new tactic you want to try. Well, not on

“our watch. And I think the reason it is a lot of that was very specific to the mayor.”

And he had a vision. He had a specific way. He was good at communicating. And we all worked to build a system in which he was able to do that that could meet people where they were and then also could reimagine what an electorate would look like. And I think that's one of the issues we get into is we should have these like imaginary visions of a baked in electorate with no imagination of reshaping. I think this speaks like the white working class issue too. How much of the issues we face

there are the result of the fact that we have pulled resources from the places that are predominantly rural work working class areas. You combine that with the rise of conservative media in those areas. They are hearing a 365-day-year narrative that is doing uncombatting. It is not enough in eight weeks or eight months to just fight back and set. It takes a year-round effort to reach those people.

“And I think what you saw at the mayor was a belief that no, maybe actually if we talk to young”

people and gave them a vision for a city they can afford, they will come out and show up for it. Maybe if you do not run away from Muslim identity but embrace it, Muslim voters are going to come out and mass to support that vision. I think meeting people where they are and believing that people actually will want to take part in our politics if we extend a hand is something that can be taken to any campaign. One thing that was striking to me about

you and Mom Donnie and I was want when I'm talking about attention to not make it feel like I'm

separating out political positions or like the product you're selling is the most important part

of selling it. But I think there's also something about having a touch for how stories and storytelling in this moment work. And Mom Donnie's mother is a famed film director. Your godfather

“I learned was Philip Seymour Hoffman. Your father I think was a producer. Is there something right now”

for you actually just about the centrality of being able to story tell in this moment right? Is there something in that campaign between the two of you around that? It seems to me not accidental. I think there's something to our politics that relating some other things we've talked about like the requirement of a leap of faith and that that takes more than just an argument but it takes a story. Believe the faith from the voter. From the voter. I think a lot about my godfather when Phil was

doing death of a salesman early on. He was like first I'm not doing it. His describing is like the best

play ever written. And he talked about how it since this is incredible play but barely anything happens.

It starts with a sigh. It's the first stage direction or first audible stage direction is a sigh from really lowman. And in that sigh you've met a man who's been defeated by feeling like no no matter what he does it is not enough. He is no path to hope to prosperity. And over the course of the play what we just see is someone who's already given up on life finally give up on life. And I think we need to fundamentally materially change people's lives in massive, massive ways.

But we also need to find there's so many people right now when that is a version of the story they're living not necessarily literally but just this deep hopelessness. And if we can tell a story that things can be different, if we can tell a story that they have a role to play, if we can tell a story that they matter, then that is an act of radical change too. I was genuinely skeptical that the way the campaign was constantly present, the way mom Donnie was constantly present during

the campaign could translate into governing. Trump has done that but he does it by constantly pissing people off, right? Unlocking constant energy through outrage and conflict and anger. Bhamdani is managed to maintain a constant presence if you're in New York. Probably if you're not in New York too but certainly if you are in New York. And just the almost separate from what he is doing with our real things he's doing, you just kind of see him doing things for New York

all the time, right? You turn on your phone and there he is. It's genuinely felt new to me. Is that something sort of only he can do and New York is an unusual media market. It's giant a lot of the media centered here so he can sort of project the outward from being here in a way that it is harder if you're in Boston or to say nothing of a smaller town than that.

Or is there a genuine lesson there? I think there's a genuine lesson. The first lesson is

for governing. But I think in some ways to me it's like the second side if you wrote a sequel to

a abundance. I feel like it would be the communication side of it. And if we believe that there is a crisis of faith and government's ability to do things, I think there is an obligation to not just do things, not just make it easier to do things, but to tell the story of doing things. In 2023, 2024, I was driving through Michigan and there was a sign somewhere that was like this road is being paved because of the bipartisan highway bill. It's like barely any Republicans voted for

that piece of legislation and that is how we are marketing it. Why wouldn't we be leaning in and like Democrats fucking did this? Sorry, I don't know if I'm cursing that. You're welcome.

We're trying to get attention here. Attention economy. We need to campaign

“at the speed of the modern attention span. And I think you need to govern at the speed of”

the modern attention span. And there is such a laid-back approach to, you know, in eight years, this is going to be phased in. And a decade, this is going to be built. And that does not meet the urgency people are feeling. And to restore the bond between the public and government, there needs to be that urgency. What about at the level of affect? When we mom Donnie feels different to me than some of the other people who have been on your roster. And populism in

general, pop as a general, I think has reputation rightly or wrongly, as being pretty pissed off.

And I'm not saying mom Donnie isn't like there is genuine anger in him,

correctly, so about the ways people are harmed and ripped off and how unaffordable it is to live in this city. But one young is looks like he's enjoying governing. Like he looks like he likes his job, which a lot of people they get elected. And then they seem kind of miserable from then on, which fair enough it can be a pretty miserable job. But he looks like he enjoys it. But there's also like a positive affect from him, like a sonnyness that I don't associate with Democrats in general.

I don't associate with populist and specific right Bernie Sanders isn't known for his sonnyness. I just don't see it from that many politicians. Like most politicians in Trump is not like this, but most politicians, it's like they they treat the work pretty grimly. You can't fake it.

“And I think that is one of the challenges. Like there are a lot of different things in politics.”

You can fake. You can't fake a true love of the place and the people you're representing. And the mayor doesn't. The mayor loves truly loves every single New York city resident. Like regardless of what they may say about him, like he just loves this city. And he let it comes to Britain. I think there can be a better job done on the kind of at least on the left populist side of the spectrum of articulating that this is a labor of love. I think Trump

supporters are having a very good time. It's abstract to us. But there was a joy for when he was campaigning. It's like almost a cultural phenomenon of what it means and you're wearing your Trump hat or your Trump sticker like a badge of honor. And I think there's something to that of like something people can take pride in. Something people can see themselves in where they belong. And to me, it does

“relate to the power component of people feel I think that of mix of factors from like globalization,”

economic factors. That I'm like the influence of social media. People feel just so small. And if you can bring them into something that makes them feel big, which is what populism should be at its best, there's joy in that process and it needs to be reflected. One of the more radical things I think mom Donnie has done has been to then use the kind of popularity his as mayor, the infos he says mayor to launch a series of primary challenges of either incumbents like Dan Goldman

or sort of incumbent back to establish them back to politicians to send allies like Bradlander or Veldez to Congress. There's also been a DSA component of this you worked on these campaigns. I think sort of working through on Donnie. And it led to a lot of debate and discussion about webinar with the Democratic parties in like the beginning of a schisming moment. So is that how you see it like how do you understand the power building efforts

that mom Donnie, that the DSA, that some of the more frankly, that the platter campaign represented like what is the relationship of the sort of populist push and the established Democratic party? My perspective on it is either politicians can change or the voters for whom they represent are going to change who's representing that. The idea that anyone that's to be a gatekeeper

know everyone can play their role in making the case the voters of what they believe it should be.

When it's like why are we not asking the question? What did Dario Lisa do right to energize all these new people and bring in all these generators? And you can hold room for a disagree with whatever respective comments, but I'm also curious about maybe there's something here to offer. Putting aside the moral component of and all that it is bad electoral math to believe in subtraction. The job

“is to bring more people in. We have primaries, we have elections. That's how this works. And the”

sore loser component of it, I don't think is particularly productive. And I think there is we should be excited by the fact there's so many new young people showing up to vote. We should be excited by the fact that people who haven't voted in decades are shown to vote. The people are early voting professor because they're more eager. Like there is something good here that's happening and I think the people who feel threatened by it could do themselves a favor by embracing it.

The critique I hear from the sort of Democrats here I think talking about there is that what's going on now is that in safe democratic areas, the party is going left. And that's they might have whatever view they have on that, but they're worried about it and they're worried about the energy around it. They're worried about the amount of media attention gets in people like me. Is they feel that it makes it democratic parties job in a place like North Carolina or Ohio

harder. The perception of the national party is that it's becoming more socialist to, you know, you have people who've made all kinds of comments about, you know, defunding the police or abolishing

“prisons. So I think somebody who does care about winning, not just in places like Maine, which is”

more blue, but in places like Ohio and Alaska, etc. How do you think about that challenge? Like how does this massive democratic parties become one thing that can compete not just in a New York city, but, you know, in places that Democrats used to win like Indiana and North Dakota? To me, there are two things that are kind of true. One, there is a national brand problem that is undeniable. To me, that national brand problem does not come from

more liberal social perspectives from representatives in deep blue places. It comes from a tangible feeling the democratic party is out of touch with the things that voters care about. And if you, you know, look at polling, Bernie Sanders is more popular than Chuck Schumer.

It is a disdain of kind of the elites and the powerful that I think fuels the democratic

brand issue. And that is what we need to address to overcome that. I think the other component is Democrats have an eat their own component that fuels these flames. You see some of these candidates win. And instead of us wrapping our arms around them as a party instead of being like, look, we disagree with their positions on A, B, and C. But what we're all aligned on is that they're, you know, we should be spending our taxpayer dollars on babies and that bombs. We all agree

is that we need stronger unions to be able to lift up working people. We need, there's like, yeah, they're a fucking radical. That's not my part. And it's like, well, now are you so friendly

“to the establishment Democrats in the way that you're asking them to be friendly to you?”

I think the people whom critical of oftentimes are not engaging in good faith the way that

their critical of our. Like, I don't think I think that when their positions are compromised because of the money they take and the people they're answering to and that that is what is hurting the brand and then they have the audacity to throw other people under the bus for it. It's bad faith and it's the problem. I'm just saying it and I don't actually have, I'm a big tent party guy. I've done a lot of work on this and and I think I've proven this out. But I'm

just saying that sometimes I find that both sides feel the other one that they're willing to play nice and the other one isn't. It's like, the way I would describe what you are saying to me here is the democratic party to the extent such a thing exists. But the sort of elites event should be more embracing of a clerical does and should recognize it even if they have disagreements with her, you know, everybody's kind of on the same side. You know, and you're like, look, the problem with

them is that they're corrupt. And I think they might, you know, not see that as such a friendly way to frame the the work they've been doing to say try to win a majority. I mean, I'm not simply saying they're not corrupt. But yeah, and I'll just say that this is like actually one of the critics I've heard of you a fight of it's like, you'll say they're corrupt and then it's like, you know, I actually like Tom Star quite a bit, but it's like as long as you're working with the

right billionaires it's fine. As long as you are working with the right more establishment candidates, like Mike Alasher in New York 12, which I think you are a little bit involved in that race, it's fine,

side, then they're possibly a corrupt trader of the people. I mean, what I take about that spectrum

of candidates, none of them take money from lobbyists. Tom is a billionaire. He doesn't need to know them take money from corporate packs. All of them have a deep belief in government's role

“and what it should do, and I think we should give a ton of leeway for people running in”

Trump plus 20 places. What doesn't feel like a quite correspondence is a lot of the people who are like the harshest critics are actually not running in those Trump plus 20 places. Like you hear Roy Cooper and Shared Brown punching left a whole lot less than you hear, like, you know, the

frequent errors of certain cable news circuits who are just members of Congress and like D plus 10

seats or something. If you look at the people who really have proven records of overperformance, it's not the tactic they're taking. That's not to say they're like in lockstep with the party at large and everything, but they're not reaching those overperformance by just piling on to the left. They're just carving out unique things to their places. So I want to loop back to platner here at the end. One of these I thought was just most interesting about the platner story. Was that he was recruited

that you all went out and found a candidate you thought would fit main and to a large extent you're

right. Now it fell apart at the end. But that sense that there are different kinds of candidates

out there who could work in this moment. I don't think that's something that people should throw overboard. And sort of my question for you and honestly for a sort of like others who might want to learn from what you all at least were trying to do there is what have you learned both

“for good and bad about how to find candidates. If you want to say the Democrat party needs to recruit”

a different kind of person to run, but also you want to take seriously that the people who have not been in politics and have not been aggressively vetted in politics might come with more downside risk. What would be your process next time? I think that there is a deep, deep hunger for a different kind of politics. There's a deep deep frustration with the status quo. And what we're seeing right now is not a democracy the way the founders intended. You know supposed to be

something that looked more like a farm are going to serve their two terms than going home. And a small business owner going to serve their two terms and coming home. And there are the idea of it being almost a cathedral represented of the fabric of America. And we are so far from that. And I think that is why we have so many of the problems we have. Only 2% of Congress is from the working class. It is not baffling that we have policies that are screwing over the working class. And so

there are many things that are devastating about all this. But one of the many is the degree in which

“people who kind of written politics all felt inspired again. And I think when we do that we're”

asking for so much for people to believe that maybe their lives can actually get better. Maybe politics can actually be a tool for good. We can't let them down. And that's going to mean different standards. That's going to mean a far more robust vetting process. That's going to mean I think bringing more partners and larger conversations. But there's too much at stake to walk away. And things are so clearly not working the way they are right now. We need to find a way to bring more people in.

And then all is our final question. What if your books you recommend to the audience? Life and fate by Vaseline Grossman are really stunning kind of human portrayal of ramifications of the Holocaust in that entire era. Shame by McKenna Goodman, beautiful book of kind of the friction of isolation and dreams and anxiety. And again, in some way it's not at all political book but it feels political on the way of the conversation we're having when the results of modern society on people. And then

the fourth branch by Danielle Squadron. And it's a really astute observation of where political power is and how we can kind of shape a government that's sun in the day-to-day basis and prevent people's lives. Or it's cats. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me as well. [BLANK_AUDIO]