The

voters didn't give him credit for some pretty important things, including the recovery of the economy, but they didn't see that. They didn't

experience. Yes. Well, I mean, I think that this is an important point, though. You can't tell, and we learned this during the Great Recession. We were making progress, but people weren't feeling it. And you can't tell people how they feel. They experience what they experience. And one of the things that's happened in our society, and it's one of the things that's happened to the Democratic Party is I didn't feel inflation. I mean, I guess I was aware that things cost more, but I was in a position where it didn't change my life. I didn't have to make decisions based on that.

Yeah. Well, that's me neither, but most people aren't in that situation, unfortunately. We had 9.1% inflation in the middle of what, 2022 or 21?

Yes. And it's cumulative. So even as inflation comes doesn't go down.

The rate of inflation go down, that still means there's inflation and things are getting costlier. And people kind of expected, holy mackerel, they hadn't seen that kind of inflation since the Ford Carter years. Whip inflation now.

It's just, and you know, people would say to me, well, you know, democracy is on the ballot. Don't people understand that? And I would say routinely, my whole life is about this democracy and I'm the son of a refugee. So I appreciate it even more keenly. But if you are talking about democracy over the dining room table, it's probably because you don't have to worry about the cost of the food on the table. If you're worried about the cost of the food on the table, that's more likely to be top of mind concern.

That's your discussion. Mom, why can't I have another potato? And

how are we going to afford this? How are we going to afford daycare? How are we going to afford our cars broken down? How are we going to afford that? Well,

we're going to have the federal government pay for daycare. How that for child care well that was one of harris's you know propositions yeah

no listen the democratic proposals uh were great i mean they were they were they were great i think there were too many of them frankly and they sort of answered the question of you know is she substantive by doing what we do and coming up? What

was the one to start a business? You'd get 50,000.

50,000. Yes, 50,000 tax free. And what was to make capital available, I guess.

Yeah. In a way, do people want to start businesses or do they want to be able to have a lamb chop? I

think these things are all related. The point is, she arrived 90 days before the election and offered these proposals. And, you know, my complaint is or my advice to the Democratic Party is that we are still the party of working people. But too often, we approach them like anthropologists or missionaries. You know, we show up and we say, we are here to help you become more like us. We're going to help you go to college. We're going to help you get a job like us.

And does that cause any resentment at all when people sense that attitude?

It is an unintended but very felt bit of disdain. You people who work with your hands, you people who work with your backs, you people who grow the food we eat and ship the food and the products that we use, you people who care for us, you folks are less than us. It's not what we say. It's not even what we consciously think, but that is the message. It's what I consciously

think all the time.

It's, Al, you know, I think all the time, and I talk about this, about the pandemic. The pandemic for me, nobody close to me died. And the pandemic for me was in some ways, a very joyful period in a very dismal time because I was able to be home. I could do everything I do over a computer. Some of my kids moved into the guest house and we had a lovely time. You know, we took long walks. Wasn't

Harris going to give you a certain amount of money to build a guest house?

Yeah, that was, I don't know if that made the cut of the 80 pages of proposals. I think that may have been in Trump's. I don't know. But my point is this. While we were doing that, there were millions and millions and millions of Americans who had to go to work every day, who had to risk themselves because they were, we call them essential workers. that we needed. They grew food, they manufactured food, they shipped what we needed, and they cared for us. And we call them essential workers and we cheered them on. You're

so essential that we're going to expose you. And

then we're going to, yeah. But then we also said when the pandemic was over, they sort of faded again in our consciousness. They became part of the woodwork again. And I just think we as a party and we as a country need to value every person and their role and their place and understand that there's dignity in that work. It is essential work. We ought to stop being this sort of metropolitan, college smarty-pants party and live our

values. We lost, for example, Latinos in working class.

Yeah, well, working class men went 55% for Trump. He had the highest number of Hispanic voters, working class Hispanic men, highest number of Hispanic voters. So let's talk about that. This is a good example, again, of sort of unawareness on the part of, you know, white liberals in glistening apartment towers and nice suburban homes kind of thinking about and on frankly, on campuses, talking about the Latinos. The fact is that the Hispanic community is deeply diverse, many different cultures, many different backgrounds. The people who are voting, second, third, fourth generation Americans, they behave more like every other working class American. They're not looking for racial advocates, they're looking for economic advocates. And they're also, in the main, much more conservative on cultural issues. The idea that because Trump has kind of made immigrants his target.

That was what was confusing to, you know, people like me going like, how latinos vote for this guy who's talking about deporting 10 million people a lot of them latinos you

look at that you look at polling and focus groups and go to these communities i mean where where uh he did best among uh hispanic voters was in sort of the

real grande border, you know,

border communities because their folks were touched by that. But a lot of these voters thought, hey, I'm here. I'm legal. I came here legally. I became a citizen or I was born here and I am a citizen and I'm as outraged. I find it hard to understand how it took three years for the administration to focus on the border. I think there were mistakes made at the beginning that contributed to the problem. And, you know, and I think the assumption among a lot of voters and maybe some Hispanic voters is that Democrats did not want to, you know, they thought they'd be antagonizing their voters by taking a stronger stand on border security. And so they didn't do it.

And it took three years to kind of finally do it. And we tried to get legislation, which the Republicans shot down.

Right. After three years. Yes. But, you know, so that was a self-inflicted wound. But in terms of just getting back to the Hispanic voters, I think it was an example of how the Democratic Party, or at least some in the Democratic Party, are insular and have misread constituencies. Like, I think all the working class constituencies should be target for Democrats. Yeah.

We're union people. We've traditionally been the party of the working people.

Listen, Joe Biden, his program in terms of labor, for example, and in terms of taxes and other things, you know, he is he is a pro worker president without question. But because of all these other things that became much less relevant. But, you know, where where we lost, by the way, Alice, I mean, we lost marginally more among working class whites where the big loss came was among Hispanics, to a lesser degree among African Americans, but Hispanics and Asian American voters, both of whom voted two-thirds for Biden in 2020.

Now, how much did Harris lose by? Trump seems to be claiming numbers that justify saying it was a landslide or something.

Well, he wouldn't do that. Come on. No,

no, he did.

Yes. Donald Trump justifying- Haven't you been listening to him

over the last 10 years? He brags about

things he shouldn't even brag about. He still claims he won a majority against Hillary Clinton. He still claims he won the last election. So, of course, he's going to claim, over claim. Look, he's now below a majority of vote. He will win by somewhere between a point and a point and a half in the popular vote. You know, a couple of hundred thousand votes across seven battleground states. It wasn't a massive victory. It was a very narrow victory. Tell me

about Michigan, because we were talking about Michigan earlier. How much was that? What was the difference there? And how much was that the Muslim population?

Well, I think the margin was larger than the Muslim vote. While we speak, I am looking up what the current, because they were still... This is great for those of you who can't see

david is looking at something yes

i'm looking at results man i'm trying to find uh i'm trying to by, in Michigan, 50.6 to 47.8. He's got 104, about 140,000 votes more than she. He's going to win the state by two or three points. Yeah, that's

too much to say.

No, no, it wasn't. It wasn't. You can't blame it on one thing. There are counties in and there are communities. There is a Palestinian-American community around Detroit. There's a Lebanese-American community around Detroit. There are cities that Biden won overwhelmingly, Dearborn, Michigan, for example, where Trump didn't win and where Jill Stein did better, where Trump won and Jill Stein did better than Harris. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. But this was obviously a consequence of the war in the Middle East. And Biden and Harris were in this terrible position where Jews in some of these battleground states were angry about their denunciation of some of Netanyahu's tactics. And Arab Americans were angry because they didn't, but they continued to provide arms for him. So they felt that they weren't using the leverage that he had. There also were, you know, the campus protests and there was a backlash in the Jewish community about that. Although overall, I don't think the fall off among Jews was all that pronounced. But, you know, so they were sort of in this very, very precarious. The day that Hamas engaged in that horrific massacre was a turning point as well. But the

October 7th.

Yes. But I will say this. Hideous. Hideous and belief. But that doesn't mean, and I say this all the time and we're both Jews, I can feel as I do about this massacre, which was just an absolute, as you say, barbarian act. And I can understand how Israel had to respond to it because you had people who not only engaged in that, but were sworn to wiping you off the map and showed what they would do to do it. But that doesn't preclude me grieving and crying for the children of Gaza. And you can hold to these two thoughts at once. And I think Biden did, but his inability to affect events. He

cut off the 2,000 pound bombs for a little bit and then not. And I think he might've been able to do something like that a little bit, send some stronger signal. So

that, you know, put him in a jam. But listen, ultimately, all of this was, may have been irrelevant because, and I'll give you, I will give you three numbers and two letters that will explain the whole election. The numbers are 28, that's the number of Americans who thought the country was on the right track. 40, which was Joe Biden's approval rating on election day. 60, I believe 66 is the percentage of people who thought the economy was either fair or poor. If you, I as a political professional, if you would hand me to the sheet of paper, you would say no incumbent party is going to win reelection, whether the president's running or not with those kinds of numbers. And then you add the letters V and P, vice president, and you're running the number two person in the outfit that people want to fire. And so even with Trump's prodigious, historic, unthinkable baggage, the headwinds for Kamala Harris were extraordinary. And it would have been a miraculous thing to win that election based on history. This

is something. I mean, Trump is sort of a hideous figure. And I remember like in the last week of the campaign, you know, he would do this free association speaking, which he called, what did he call it? A weave, right? A

weave, yes. But

every once in a while he would go into, you see the one where he started to fillet a microphone?

Yeah. Okay.

Now, when you're doing that, when you're doing that, you have some confidence that you know your people better than we know his people.

Yeah.

You know? And I wondered how much did he they love me offending people? I

think that you saw the way they closed their campaign. And I will precede this by saying a lesson I learned in 25 years of doing campaigns that you're never as smart as you look when you win and you're never as dumb as you look when you lose. So everything looks smart in retrospect when you win. But, you know, he populated these. That's a good rule. They understand or they understood who their target was. Their target was largely men and young men. And their target were young men who were not regular voters. And they understood who they were and where they, you know, got their information because it wasn't from news and it wasn't from newspapers and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't from, it was from social media and podcasts. And he went on Joe Rogan and he went on a whole series of podcasts where you reach these young men. Their social media was aimed there. Elon Musk's petition, remember his petition? He paid people $100. If they were registered voters, $100 to sign a petition in support of free speech and the Second Amendment. And he paid them $47 a piece to get other people to sign it. He then cross-matched those names with the names of registered voters and their vote history, and he identified those people in the target who he could go out and reach. A lot of them were young men. I think he did expand the universe in some of these battleground states, particularly in Pennsylvania. I'm

not sure that their ground game, though, was anywhere near.

It wasn't. But what we have to evaluate is whether the ground game, I think the ground game means something. No,

it does.