[MUSIC PLAYING] So it's great to be here. Yes, gulp, it's
worse than it looks. Yes, I'm a Democrat. I'm going to be
talking about this from a democratic perspective. Third Way, my
think tank, is kind of more of the center leaning
part of the Democratic Party as opposed to sort of
like the Bernie leaning part of the Democratic Party. So I just want to kind of
put my biases out there. I'm going to run through
a whole bunch of numbers, looking at the election. Feel free to interrupt for
sort of like clarifications. But I definitely
want to leave, I'm going to leave a lot
of room for discussion, because I think
the discussion is going to be most interesting. Let's see how this works. What do I need to
do to-- here we go. OK, so let's start. Why am I saying it's
worse than it looks? And I'm going to run through
kind of five lessons, five reasons why we need to look
at this election and elections previously. That for Democrats this is
really kind of a dire situation and that we need to expand our
map and expand our coalition. And reason number
one is, yes, sure, Hillary won the popular vote. We all know that,
by almost 3 million. And in the three
blue wall states that flipped and really
cost us the election, the margin was very, very thin. It was like the margin that
would fit into a sports arena. Comey, Russian hacking, a few
things, she wins this election. But the truth is that Hillary's
defeat is really for Democrats the final indignity
of a series of defeats that have been going
on for eight years and have left Democrats in
the worst electoral position they've been in
since Reconstruction, really since the 1870s,
really since the light bulb. And I want to take
you through it. So since the halcyon
days of 2009, Democrats have lost one
fifth of our Senate seats, US Senate seats, about one
fourth of our US house seats, about one half of our governors. And more than one half of the
state legislatures we control. And you know, that's
like the beginning slope, the intermediate slope, the
black diamond slope, and then the double black diamond slope. And now would be great
if we were skiing, but not if these are
your electoral seats. And then, if we just look
at governors for a second, there are now seven
states where Democrats have the governorship and
both houses of the state legislature. I know this map looks like
it's only three states. That's because four of
the states we control are the four smallest
states in the country. One of them being this state,
and your wonderful governor Gina Rimando, who I think
is absolutely spectacular. Republicans control 25
governorships and the state legislatures in those states. And that's almost
to the point where you can start passing
constitutional amendments. So there is a sea
of red out there. So reason number one that
this is worse than you look is, you know, it wasn't
just Hillary losing. This has been a long
thing for Democrats. Number two is
Democrats are starting to look like a regional
party, not a national party. Let's start at the
presidential level. Yes, Hillary wins the popular
vote, and we know that. But she wins the popular
vote because in New York, Massachusetts, and California,
arguably the three wealthiest, the three most educated,
the three most cosmopolitan states in the country,
she won overwhelmingly. She won by seven million votes. In the other 47 states,
she lost by four million. And not only that, in
those three states, she outperformed Obama
by a million votes. She did better than
Obama 2012 by a million. And she underperformed
Obama in those 47 states by 3 million votes. And then, if you look at
the congressional level in these same three states,
Democrats have a 66 to 23 lead in US house seats. And we trailed 128 to
218 everywhere else. And I'm going to expand
this out just a little bit. So on the East Coast it's
going to be the Acela Corridor, and then on the West
Coast we're going to do the entire Pacific Coast. And House Democrats have a 98
to 33 lead in house seats there. And we trail 96 to
208 every place else, like better than a
two to one margin. And in these 40 states,
in these 40 states that are not the Acela Corridor,
West Coast, again wealthiest, most educated, most
cosmopolitan, most sophisticated, most embracing
of globalization and technology, in those other 40
states, Hillary lost the electoral
college 306 to 80. So this is what a
regional party looks like. And nothing says regional
party more than the county map. So this is a map of the
presidential election broken down by who won the counties. Red is Trump. Blue is Hillary. And you know, Hillary
won 493 counties. Trump won about 2,600. Now not all counties
are created equal. You know Queens
County in New York, you'd rather win that
than Schoharie County up in the Catskills of New York. Counties are very,
very different. But you can go from the Atlantic
coast to the Pacific coast and never touch blue soil. And you can go from the Canadian
border to the Mexican border and never touch blue soil. And the truth of the matter,
whether we like it or not, our constitution gives a lot
of power to sparse places. And it always has been. So Montana gets two senators. New York gets two senators. Wyoming gets one governor,
California gets one governor. And the electoral
college has a slight tilt towards rural, sparse places. So if you're not doing well
in this kind of vast areas, you're going to be in trouble. And this is what a
regional party looks like. Let me go to lesson
number three on this, and why it's worse
than it looks, and why we need
to expand the map. And lesson number
three really is it wasn't supposed
to be this way. We had an electoral
theory as Democrats. And when I say we, I
don't mean my group. Because we always felt
this was not going to work. But there was this belief. And there was a
book that came out in 2002, very well-researched,
called The Emerging Democratic Majority. It was by Ruy Teixeira
and John Judis, Jr. who are both very,
very, very smart guys, and they did a good
job on this book. And what they argued was that
the changing face of America, the increase in essentially
non-white Americans and the millennial generation,
and an increase in the number of single women and
non-religious people-- that these are
democratic leaning folks, and this was going to basically
make democratic majorities inevitable. So you know if we
just basically held our own among white voters,
this change in the population was going to make democratic
majorities inevitable. And in fact, the
party could move further left because that's
the way it was going to be. And it was called
demography equals destiny. So why didn't it work? Well, the first thing I want
to show you on this chart is why this theory was powerful. So this is the electorate
from 1976 to 2016. These are people
who actually voted. And it's broken down
into two categories. The light gray are white
voters and the dark gray are nonwhite voters. And starting in
1976, you can see that 88% of the electorate in
the Ford-Carter race was white. And then you see that
it bounces along, and then it really starts
to change in the late '90s. And by the time you
get to 2016, you know the electorate's 70%
white and 30% nonwhite. Those non-whites vote full
overwhelmingly for Democrats. You know, you can see why
this theory would take hold. This should work for us. So what happened? Couple of problems
with it, I'm just going to use a couple
of slides to illustrate. The first is that
demographic change is not evenly distributed
across the country, and really not even close. So one way to look at
congressional districts is you can divide them
into three categories. There's 435 congressional
districts, house members and the US Congress. And you can put them into
three categories, easy blue, easy red, up for grabs purple. And these categories,
those are my names, but these categories
were developed by an organization called
the Cook Report, which is a nonpartisan organization
that analyzes elections in congressional districts. And they basically
say, look, there's 159 congressional districts
that just by their past voting behavior, these are safe
Democratic districts. It'll take a miracle
for a Republican to win, and sure enough Democrats have
seats in 158 out of those 159. Well, those districts are
45% white and 55% nonwhite. In the 90
congressional districts that are up for
grabs, the districts are 70% white and
30% nonwhite, which resembles the 186 easy
red districts that are 74% white and 26% nonwhite. Because of gerrymandering,
because of the way people sort themselves out, where
they decide to live, all sorts of factors, the
non-white portion of America lives in concentrated
places, and that's what it shows up
on this House map. And it's even more so when
you look at the Senate. The second reason that this
has not reached fruition was that it was
based on the notion that we would hold
our own among whites. We didn't have to win whites. We just had to hold our own. So this is exit polls
from the 2016 election. 70 percent of the
electorate was white. And among white voters,
according to exit polls, Hillary got 37%, Trump got 58%. Do the math, Hillary
lost by 21 points. By way of comparison,
in 1992, Bill Clinton lost the white
vote by one point. Now for Hillary to win,
she doesn't need to-- or a future Democrat
to win, you don't need to win the white vote or
break even with the white vote. You don't even have
to lose by 10 points. But if you're losing
by 21 points what it means is, if you're
winning African-Americans 88 to eight, winning them by
80 points as Hillary did, that's not enough. And if you're winning
Asians by 36 as Hillary did, it's not enough. And if you're winning Hispanics
by 36, as Hillary did, it's not enough. So if you look at
Bill Clinton 1992, 1% loss to Hillary
2016, 21 point loss, there's basically kind of a
straight line, trend line, that is taking you
from that one to 21%. There's a bit of a blip in 2008
because Obama does so well. There's a little spike
among white voters. So the portion of the
non-white electorate is going to continue to grow. But if in the next
election in 2020, we lose by what is expected--
the trend line will take us, we're going to
lose by 24 points-- even as this portion
here starts to grow, and we're winning by
these big margins, we're always going
to fill like we're just one election away from this
demographic change taking hold. So this demography
is destiny only works if you lose among
whites by just a bad margin, not like a horrific margin. Reason number four that
it's worse than it looks is that turning out the base
is super, super, super, super, super important. And a lot of analysis
of this election is that if we'd only
turned out our base more we would have won. But the truth of the
matter is base turnout wasn't that huge of a
factor in this election. So there were six states
that flipped from Obama 2012 to Trump 2016. In three of those
states, turnout was up. In two of those states,
turnout not only was up, it was up a lot. In Florida, turnout was
up almost a million votes and more than 11%. In Pennsylvania, turnout
was up nearly 400,000 votes and more than 6%. And a couple of places
where turnout was down, Iowa and Ohio, we
lost by such huge margins, it didn't really matter. I mean we just got swamped. So the truth is, turnout
hurt us in Wisconsin. It killed us in Wisconsin. It hurt us in
Michigan, but it was a non-factor or a minor
factor in these other states. And in fact turnout
in the 2016 election was bigger than turnout in
2012, and Hillary got more votes in 2016 than Obama got in 2012. Like people did turn out. Jim, just a second. This is Democratic
turnout, not total turnout? No, this is total
turnout in those states. This is turnout. So we don't know exactly who,
but for example, let's just take Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. If you add up the
number of votes that Hillary got in Philadelphia
and Pittsburgh combined, and those are the two most
African-American places in Pennsylvania, that
was more than the vote that Obama got in 2012. So she outperformed Obama in
total vote in those two places. Not in Milwaukee, down;
not in Detroit, down; but definitely to
combine Philadelphia, PA-- a little bit down in
Philadelphia, a little bit up in Pittsburgh. And in Florida, turnout
was up everywhere. There was no place where
turnout really wasn't up. If it wasn't turnout, what
was kind of the big factor? And this is maybe the
most wearing thing is that there was a
lot of vote switching. People changed their votes. So this is another county map
of the presidential election. And those red things and blue
things, those little things, they're arrows. This isn't a map of
who won those counties. This is a map about movement. How did the county
do in 2016 compared to how it did do in 2012. And so if the arrow is blue, the
county voted more for Hillary than it did for Obama. And if the arrow was red,
more for Trump than Romney. And if you look at
the blue arrows, you see kind of some
familiar patterns. It's again like the East Coast
and kind of the cosmopolitan areas in the West Coast. The Rocky Mountains those
are Mormon counties. You may recall that Trump
had some Mormon issues that didn't work out well. And then dotted in there are
some are some Latino counties. And then everywhere else you
just see this sea of red, and you see that there is a
movement in these counties more Republican, more for
Trump than for Romney. And a lot of these
counties, they moved a lot. So if you think about this
whole general election, the 2016 and 2012 elections-- the total vote, they
were very similar. Obama won by 3.8 percent. Hillary won by 2.1 percent
in the popular vote. You know it's very-- they look almost
like identical twins if you just look
at the vote totals. But underneath, there was
tons and tons and tons of volatility. And 28 states moved by
more than five points. And 24 of those states
moved more than five points in favor of Trump. So there's a lot
of movement there. And within those-- Yeah? I have a lot of questions here. I know that there are counties
on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina that
are very poor rural counties. And I think Dante Chinni
in The Wall Street Journal in his project called
them African-American majority counties. They're actually majority white. But they've got 40%
African-American. And his theory is that
in those counties, the African-American population
came out strongly in 2012 and did not in 2016. But that the white population
there came out strongly in 2016 but did not four years earlier. Well, there's definitely--
so we're going to know more. Because the voter rolls are
going to come out in May. And we're going to know more
about who voted about whether-- That are just switching in
people showing up rather than-- Right, we'll be able to
know like, in this county 87% of the people who voted
in 2016 also voted in 2012. We all know that
more forcefully. And I think there's
probably some truth to that. I think in certain areas you
saw some depressed turnout in African-American
areas, particularly in some of the states
where there's some voter suppression going on. So you didn't see that
in the urban areas though, for the most part. Except places like
Milwaukee and Detroit, where I just think the
campaign, Hillary campaign dropped the ball in
those areas and didn't do what they were supposed to do. Also North Carolina,
Obama really, really, really went
after North Carolina. And Hillary's
people, they started to back off on that, too. So I don't know if that's
part of it as well. But we'll know more
probably in May. On these like how much were
switchers and how much were-- Swappers. Yeah, I like that. [LAUGHTER] Trademark. Trademark, Marc Dunkelman. And there were 403 counties
that voted for Obama at least once, and then voted for Trump. And you could see there
are a lot in the Rust Belt and industrial Midwest. And then what I want to
do is I'm going to just zoom in a little bit closer. There were 93 counties
in the blue wall states that broke our
hearts that flipped, in Michigan, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin. And I just want
to give you, this is some of the bare bones
breakdown of those counties. First, the median
household incomes in each of those counties is
well below the median household income nationally,
which is about $56,000, and well below the median
incomes of those states by $5,000 or more. So these are definitely
downscale folks economically. You can see, as you've read in
the paper about this election, they tend to be-- they're not diverse. They're overwhelmingly white. They are the parts
of the country where the number of college
educated voters is very low compared
to nationally. So this number
nationally, college whites over the age of 25,
that would be above 30. And so these are a lot of
folks without a college degree. And then let me just
kind of take you to one county, which is
Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is a county that I've
become a little bit obsessed about. Luzerne-- does anybody
know Luzerne County? Is there anybody
familiar with it? I actually grew up
in Monroe County which is [INAUDIBLE]
border with New Jersey touching [INAUDIBLE]. Well, how would you
describe Luzerne County? Very rural, very
not to be offensive, redneck, very much so. No industry, nothing
really going on. No tourism even. It's very empty. So Luzerne County-- I picked it for a
couple of reasons. One is that's where I
was for Al Gore in 2000. I had Luzerne and
Lackawanna County. Lackawanna County is where
Joe Biden is from, Scranton. Luzerne is right next to it. Wilkes-Barre is the
biggest city there. And then it's a bunch of
small to medium sized towns. There's some farm land there. It used to have a lot
of industry, actually tons of industry. It doesn't anymore. The median household
income is $50,300. It is mostly white. Again, the education levels
are what we saw before. And it voted for
Bill Clinton by 15, then went to Gore by
eight, and Kerry by four, and Obama by nine,
then Obama by five-- and then Trump by 19. It's a county with
330,000 people. Trump outperformed Romney
by 32,000 votes there. This county in the past helped
elect Barack Obama president, Democrat Bob Casey to the
US Senate, Democrat Tom Wolf to be governor, Democrat Matt
Cartwright to be a congressman, and just put Donald
Trump, helped put Donald Trump in office. In fact, by the amount
that it switched from the last
election, that was 3/4 of the margin of Pennsylvania. That's only one of 67 counties. There it is, and that's
how much it changed. And it's not that much different
from a bunch of other counties out there. Can we win that county back? Can we win that
county back and also do well in Montgomery County,
that's where I grew up. Montgomery County is sort of
a wealthy, college educated, just outside of Philadelphia,
professional class county that moved 32,000 votes in the
direction of Hillary Clinton over Obama, the exact
mirror opposite. And also do well in
Philadelphia, urban, African-American,
Latino, urban problems, like can we get voters, do
something that gets voters back in these areas. So I'm going to spend a very
short time talking about what I think are three
things that I think the Democratic
Party, sort of writ large, sort of missed
on a little bit. And then we're going to
open it up for questions. Number one, I feel that
the Democratic Party needs to be the party about
more jobs, not just fair jobs. And what I mean
by that is if you look at the Democratic
agenda for the most part, it talks about a
lot of things that have to do with some
version of economic justice that is very important. Minimum wage
increase, pay equity, all sorts of issues to make
the workplace more fair, et cetera, and those
are important issues. But if you're not
sure that the job you have is going to
be there five years from now, if you're not sure
that the industry that you grew up in will be able to
employ your son or daughter, if you're not sure that
your kids are going to be able to succeed in
the area where they grew up, if you have doubts about that-- and a lot of people
have doubts-- then those issues having to
do with pay equity and things like that that are
very, very important, they seem like
side issues to you. If you feel that the forces of
globalization and technology is a gale force
wind in your face, those issues just seem to
be somebody else's problems. If you work at Amazon
at a distribution center and we're talking
about paid sick leave, well, they now have
robots that can move products from the
warehouse to out the door six times faster than a person. Paid sick leave, that's
the least of your problems. You know, you're thinking
about those sort of things. And frankly, for a lot of
people who dress like me or go to schools like this,
globalization and technology, it's exciting. It's wind at our back. We're part of this economy. And I think about a
third of this country is really part of this
economy, and that's where Democrats are winning. The Acela Corridor, the West
Coast, places like Colorado. But every place else,
where those forces are wind in your face,
we're losing those people. And I think we need
to be a party that is as passionate about
more jobs as fair jobs. Can we continue to make
social progress that's very important to Democrats
without heaping so much social scorn on people
who are not yet with us? And I think one
of the things I'm proud about as a
centrist Democrat and the founder of
an organization that was kind of the intellectual
center of centrist Democrats is, in the '80s and '90s, when
that organization started, the previous one, the Democratic
Leadership Council, which was a great organization, the
cleave in the Democratic Party was cultural. It was social issues. It was things like guns,
things like gay issues and things like that. That is not the case anymore. Democrats are united
on those things. I'm really, really
glad about that. I'm glad we're part of
making sure that happened. But there's definitely
a lot of people who feel like, OK, if you're not
sort of at the tip of the spear on these social
issues, the Democratic Party is looking down on you. And I want to give
you one example. How many people here
remember the TV show MASH? The younger people,
of course, don't. How many liked it? OK, for those who
never saw the show, MASH was a show
in the 1970s that was the most kind
of forward thinking, progressive show on television. It was in some ways a
parody of the Vietnam War, although it used the
Korean War as a backdrop. And the star of the
show was Alan Alda, who was considered the
modern progressive man. He was even on the cover
of Time magazine to be-- you know, this is
the way, this is what the modern progressivism,
the modern man, American male should be. And it was the
paragon in some ways of liberalism on television. If that show came out today-- I watched it two months
ago, I tuned into it, I watched it for the first
time in about 30 years-- if that show came on today,
half the people in this room would picket it. Let me tell you,
the main character, Hawkeye Pierce,
the one that we all loved and thought
was the forward end of the social movement
of progressivism, was an absolute total pig. He was a misogynist. He was a womanizer. he was a philanderer. He would drink
martinis, and then he would operate on
American troops. He had a bunk mate
he didn't like. He bullied that
person incessantly. All the doctors in the
MASH outfit were men. All the nurses were women. The American army, the US
army as it was depicted, might as well have
been from Finland. You didn't find a black
or Latino face among them. They did have a
transgender person, someone who was a transvestite. His name was Corporal Klinger. He did it purely
by choice as a ruse to convince higher ups
that he was crazy so that he could get discharged. And that's not the worst of it. There was one competent
person in the entire outfit. Her name was Lieutenant
Margaret Houlihan. And our hero Captain Pierce
had a nickname for her, and it was Hotlips. OK, you're thinking,
what is this guy's point? My point is this-- in
1977, we looked at that and said, that is the edge of
social progress in America. There is an arc to social
movements in social history and social progress. And what looked like
the far edge then, looks like Neanderthals now. So if you were in 2017
and as a lot of Democrats, socially we're in 2017, and
we're looking forward to 2027, there's still a bunch of
people who are in 2007. There's some people
who are still in 1997. If you're in 1957,
you're a deplorable. But if you're in 2007, and
sort of waiting to catch up, we can't treat you like there's
something wrong with you. Everyone has their
own journey, and we have to show a little empathy
and patience for people who are on that journey. Last is we have to be for
better government as much as we are about
bigger government. We have to show people
that we care about reform. So the goal is to get to 270
electoral votes, 218 house seats, 51 Senate seats,
26 governors seats. We're not really close in any
of those places right now. Can we do this in a
way that can win back people in Luzerne County? Can still win the socially
liberal affluent people of Montgomery County,
where I'm from? And also appeal to
people in Philadelphia or in the urban centers of
Providence and New Haven and in New York, and rebuild
the Democratic Party that way? I believe we can. It's not going to be easy. But the alternative is that we
have this monster as President. And the Republicans continue
to win majority after majority after majority. So with that, let me conclude. And just with the time we
have, take whatever questions or comments that folks have. And thanks so much. [APPLAUSE] Who wants to kick it off? Who's going to be the first? So we have microphones
so that we can all hear the questions as
well as the answers. I'll yell. So just while
everybody's thinking about a question, a quick one. Would you get-- you're in
the middle of let's call it, a discussion in
the Democratic Party to which there are two sides. I think many of the
people here would possibly be a little skeptical of
the moderate side, Bernie, let's call them Bernie fans. Would you just
characterize how you see the two sides,
the differences, the real differences
between them, and what's the picture of
the Democratic Party today. So there's definitely a split
within the Democratic Party. And what happens is when
you have the presidency, the differences underneath
get papered over. And this has been simmering
for quite a while. And if Hillary had
won, those differences, they would have been
papered over again until a Republican had won. What I see as the major
difference between the two wings of the party
is the diagnosis of what the economic
problems are in the country. And so my wing of the party,
the centrist wing of the party says the problem is that we
have these forces, globalization and technology. They're basically,
I wouldn't quite call them unstoppable forces. But they're close to
being unstoppable forces. Certainly technology is. And that those huge
economic forces are extremely disruptive. And it's basically
created a society in which there are winners and losers. And I don't think those
winners and losers are the 1% or the 99%. I think it's the one
third and the 2/3. One third of this country
is doing very well. And 2/3 of this
country is [INAUDIBLE]. And that what my wing
of the party says is we have to figure out
a way to make those forces work for average people
instead of working against average people. So that's how we
diagnose the problem and that's how we think
about the solutions. And then we would
say income inequality is a symptom of that problem. The Bernie way, the Elizabeth
Warren wing of the party says, that's true. There's stuff like
that going on. But the real problem is this. This is a broken system,
and a rigged system. And that the people
and the entities that control most of the
wealth in this country and create most of the
rules in this country have basically set
up a system in which the benefits of this
economy is going to flow towards a very
select number of people and away from another
group of people. And unless you change
these rules then this is just going
to perpetuate itself. And they're the more
populist wing of the party. And they say, look,
not only is it rigged. But it's those people
are rigging it. That CEO, that politician,
on and on and on and on. So they have a list of enemies. I think just like any
movement that is successful, each side, including the people
who voted for Donald Trump, like they have their
own piece of the truth, and their piece of the truth. Like there's some merit to it. But those are
basically, I think, the fault lines within
the Democrat party. Yes, please. Well, I want to go back to
Luzerne County for a minute. For counties like Luzerne
County, rural, chronically underemployed, it
seems to me that those are the people who
rely most heavily on public education,
social security, you know, Affordable Care Act. Sitting here in
my blue bubble, it seems to me that they've just
shot themselves in the foot. But what are they thinking now? How do they see it? Are they worried
about what's going to happen to their education,
to their health care, to their social security? I would look at it this way. So I think that's
a very good point. They see their-- We want to capture it on audio. OK, got it. So they see the
trajectory of their lives and their community. And it looks kind of like
this or maybe like this. It's not this,
and it's not that. And they're saying, you know,
I could vote for Hillary. But I know basically
what's going to happen. My trajectory
whatever it is, it's not going to change that much. That guy, I'm not so sure. But something is going to change
and I'm ready to roll the dice. Because I know what's
going to happen-- think of Luzerne County as
a slowly leaking balloon. Like it still has its shape. You go there, parts of
it are really beautiful. Detached houses and nice
neighborhoods and hills and some nice restaurants
and things like that. But it still retains
its shape, but it feels like it's not as taut anymore. Just feels like
something is leaking. Everything is getting
a little bit smaller. And they're saying, I'm
ready to roll the dice. I'm ready to try something
different right now, even though I might lose on this. So I heard one voter said,
talking to somebody that I know I said, who was voting for
Trump, she said to the person, I just need to find a way out. And like with Hillary or
with Democrats are saying, this is not my way out. And out didn't mean
like out of the county. Just like out of my situation,
like something's got to change. That's what I think
was happening there. So back to Luzerne County, how
do we get Luzerne County back when we can't get
our message out? I feel like people in Luzerne
County are watching Fox News. I don't know where-- like when people
were watching MASH, they were watching I
would think ABC and CBS News, which seemed to be a
little bit more in the middle. That's not what's
going on right now. How many people
here watch Fox News? So we've got two
Fox News watchers. I want to say thank you, because
that's actually the only news station that I appear on. I go on Fox News, not
as often as I used to. But I used to go on, like
during the election, a lot. And my office mate, co-founder
of Third Way, Matt Bennett, he went on Megan Kelly's show
like 40 times during 2016. And let me tell
you, she is tough. She is good, and she is tough. I think one of the things
we have to do as Democrats, we have to go on Fox News. And I know how everybody
feels about Fox News, like how awful it is. But only two people
actually watch it. And I watch it some. It is pretty bad. I mean, I'm not
going to lie to you. But we have to
make our case now. Like we can't just keep
making our case on MSNBC, like nobody watches
MSNBC except us. OK? So we have to make our
case in other venues there. And you know, I'd say one
hopeful sign about this-- I'll give you the pessimistic
view and the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is Luzerne
County and counties like this, this is like what happened
in the South 30 years ago. They left the
Democrats because they feel the Democrats left them,
and they never came back and that's it. That's a possibility. And the other is that there's
a lot of Trump triers. They're not Trump voters,
they're Trump triers. And they're going to try
In this guy on for size. And the evidence of that is
that in the last six election cycles, we've had a change,
a change of at least one house of Congress or the
White House in five of them. And that's never happened. You know, maybe
it's happened before like in the 1830s or 1840s. So people are
trying something on, and then saying like, I'm
going to go one place else. There's one other thing I
think Democrats need to do. Since the election,
I've been talking to tons and tons
and tons of people, including a lot of the
political consultants that were in these races and ran ads. And one of them said something
that was really smart. He said, I can tell you
who's going to win the race, any sort of handicapped,
roughly even race by one factor. Which is the candidate
that seems most independent of their party? So Donald Trump was
essentially an independent who made a hostile takeover
of the Republican Party, and Hillary Clinton was not. Bernie Sanders
was an independent of sorts that nearly
made a hostile take over the Democratic Party, too. And he did extraordinarily
well in the primary considering his profile coming into it. So Democrats to win
these areas back, they have to show
that in some ways they are independent from the
orthodoxy and the doctrines of their own party. That's going to be tough to do. But I think that's
something that is necessary. Let's go here. How do you-- We'll do the mike switch here. I understand what you're saying
in terms of national races and in House and Senate races
in the major biennial elections. But it doesn't seem to
explain all those local, state legislatures. Particularly in
the instance where you've had a fairly vaunted
Obama machine in 2008 and 2012 that were getting
out votes, I think getting new members
or active members to the Democratic Party. And the Trump phenomenon wasn't
there then, I don't think. I mean what's happening
at the local level? Has the entire sinew,
the strength of the party just disappeared except coming
around for the 2008, 2012? I think that the relying on
demography as destiny, that believing that this was
going to solve our problems made us a complacent party. And said, like look,
there's a bunch of voters. And you can, by what box they
check on the census form, they're going to be with us. So we're set here. Like this is going
to be inevitable. And you know, we don't
have to pay attention to these voters as much
anymore, because these guys are going to carry us all the way. And then you add sort
of non-religious people and single women,
this is our ticket. So there was an electoral
theory that was followed, that basically said,
we don't really have to pay that much attention
to all these other parts of the country. Because things are just going
to automatically work out. You add to that Republicans
saw this and said hm. We're going to invest
in these areas. And whether it was the Koch
brothers, other big money, or the party, they
did what Howard Dean did in 2004 and 2006. And said, we're going to
have a 50 state party. We're going to invest
in these places. And we're going to invest in
city council races and things like that. And then, you know I
just think that there's a lot of people who felt
ignored by the Democratic Party. Jim, we're going
to take one more. OK, let's go all
the way over here. This person has the worst view. [LAUGHTER] Thanks very much. I enjoyed your speech. And I know time was limited,
so you couldn't cover probably all the subjects you wanted to. The thing that
stood out in my mind was that you didn't
discuss the gender issue. Because I imagine these
guys out in Luzerne County were just uncomfortable with
the fact of a woman with power. I think the two things
seem to go hand-in-hand. The larger point
I want to make is that I've been a centrist
Democrat, but I'm not anymore. Because I'm pissed off about
the way things are going, mostly because of the what I
consider the ineptitude of the Democratic
Party, that it keeps losing news cycles,
congressional races, Senate races, presidential races. So how would the Third Way
recapture a guy like me who wants to put the elbows
out a bit more in Bush v. Gore, the Willie Horton
ad, and 20 other issues. Where's the third way
on stuff like that? So I think the
challenge of centrism is how do you be as exciting and
bold as populism is on the left and populism is on the right? And I think if I was going
to say what is the biggest mistake that my organization
has made in the last 12 years, and we're 12 years
old, is I think we made a very, very, very
good case for our policies. But we never made it a cause. And I think we have to move
from a case to a cause. And that's how we inspire
people like you and others to say like, I want
to be part of this. And I think answering
people's economic concerns is primary to making that cause
and feeling like this is really going to make a difference. And this is modern. This is forward looking. And I'm part of this. And I also think that all
Democrats, including centrists, like we have to do more
listening for people. So one of the
things I'm doing is I'm leaving Washington
starting now a lot, and listening to other people. Because I think the answers are
going to come not where I am, but where you are. So that's your last question. The first one on gender-- you know, I had lunch yesterday
with Jennifer Palmieri. Does that name ring a bell? Yeah, so I've known
her for years. And she's a
wonderful, wonderful. I knew her when she worked
for Leon Panetta in the House, who was a great guy. So I've known her for years
and I had lunch with her. And she talked about how
there were just real walls that they could never overcome. And some had to do with gender. Some had to do with
people just hated her, that there were barriers
that in all the focus groups, all that sort of thing,
like there was something there that they couldn't overcome. Some of it I think
was unique to her. Some of it might
have been gender. Some of it might have been
gender following race. Like oh, we made
history here, you mean we've got to
make history now? But I don't know the
answer to that question. But I think it's
worth thinking about. Jim, thank you for coming. Thank you. This is great. I really enjoyed it.
Kessler's speech was entitled "2016 Election: It's Worse Than It Looks." Kessler is part of the Third Way Institute, which means Clinton Democrat through and through. The vast majority of the speech was a very thorough demographic analysis of the election, which convincingly showed that the Democratic Party is thoroughly fucked if it does not change its ways. Basically, it showed that Hillary was wildly successful in the populous Pacific coast and in SOME of the northeast (specifically, Massachusetts and New York) and a dismal failure in the rest of the country.
What I found most interesting, though, was his policy issues: basically, he didn't have any. Now this guy is a think tank guy, not a politico or a commentator (though he has appeared on Fox News and MSNBC). But his responses on policy were comically nonexistent. In his speech he did not mention wealth inequality AT ALL. (He did address wealth inequality briefly in response to a question from the audience.) Nor did he have a single word to say about getting money out of politics. (Wonder who funds the Third Way Institute, hmmm?)
The closest he got to talking about policy was one of the two most revealing and interesting points of his speech. He said that centrists believe that "we are dealing with two forces that are inevitable, or almost inevitable: globalism and technology. Well, technology certainly is. And they have benefitted 1/3 of the country (the Pacific Coast and the northeast, by population -- ed.) but have harmed the other 2/3 of the nation."
And he said, "What we have to do is figure out how to bring the benefits of globalism and technology to the other 2/3 of the nation." And he stopped cold there, like a dog that had gone to the limit of its leash. He had no policy solutions to present, like, well, all the elected Dems, just a vague hint that such policy solutions might exist, and would be wonderful.
To my mind, there are a number of fairly simple policies that could be implemented to do just that: UBI for example. Or a $15 minimum wage for a start. How about a huge government program to employ people in converting the US to wind and solar power rather than coal and oil power? All of it funded by increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations? Or by grabbing some of that $27 TRILLION dollars that they have hidden in offshore bank accounts?
All of these are policies I can EASILY consider, as a progressive. But he CAN'T consider it, because the corporate masters who fund the Third Way Institute wouldn't like that. And that's where his limit is. He can't see it, and would probably deny it if it was brought up to him bluntly. He would insist that it's his own viewpoint, honestly arrived at. But the truth is, if he starts advocating stuff like that, he 's a progressive, and progressives don't have a lot of cushy think tank jobs.
The other interesting thing he said was when he addressed wealth inequality in response to an audience question. He said that he saw wealth inequality as a BYPRODUCT of globalism and technology. He did not say if he thought it was bad or good, but given that he thinks globalism and technology are inevitable, he undoubtedly thinks wealth inequality is inevitable, too. Once again, a very convenient sort of belief for someone working for a corporate think tank to have.
My big takeaways from the speech is:
1) If the corporate masters of the Democratic centrists can be persuaded that our policies might WORK for the 2/3 that are "left out" by globalism and technology, and won't harm the One Percent, they might go for such policies, in which case, the Dem centrists might actually join us in advocating for them. Like building green energy infrastructure. That's gonna make a LOT of rich people richer, and also provide lots of jobs to lower and middle class people, especially on the construction, installation and maintenance end.
2) We must be on the lookout for bogus policy "solutions" that will be offered that will please centrists' corporate masters but which will not work for the rest of us. I see a strong possibility of such coming up. Along with more repetition of the "retraining" mantra for jobs that don't exist.
This has been a public service by Pat Powers, watching centrists, so you don't have to. I mean, really, that's 50 minutes of my life I'll never get back.