Transcript: Dems Will Stay Weak Until They Stop Obsessing Over Polls

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this episode here.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now by The New Republic. I’m joined by Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s a political strategist. She works for progressive groups both here and abroad. You’ve probably seen her on MSNBC or seen her or heard her podcast. She’s all over these last four or five years, particularly. She’s been all over the place. She’s a very eloquent and has a lot of interesting thoughts about politics and policy. So, Anat, welcome.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So let me start—and I try to avoid long preambles, but I’m going to violate that today—which is that there was an interesting discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein in The New York Times podcast about 10 days ago.

And the sort of narrative throughout that was Ezra Klein was essentially saying the Democrats need to move to the right or move to the middle to win elections. And Coates basically saying ... I’m a writer. I’m not here to like, I want to talk about policy and my values. That’s what I do. And then Coates saying, yes, but we talk about elections. And sorry, Klein saying, yes, we need to talk about how Democrats win. And Coates saying, no, I don’t do politics.

But it left me with a challenge, which is that it seemed to me that Klein was sort of saying, Democrats, move to the right. Coates was saying, I don’t want to engage in that, which left the implication in some ways that Coates might agree with Klein that the political move, the electoral move, to move to the right, is correct. But he didn’t necessarily want to condone that or lay it out himself.

So I’m happy to have you here because you’re a progressive person, I think, on some politics issues. But you also—you do work in elections. You do work in winning. You do get into these issues of politics. I want to talk to you about that.

And I want to start from the premise, which I think is a lot of the sort of popularist or poll-ist—we’ll get into what we should call them in a second. I think their argument, at the core of it, is: If every Democrat who ran for the House, the Senate, and the presidency ran on Joe Manchin’s platform—and we can talk about why that might be morally wrong, which is where I might be and where Coates might be—let’s say that were somehow possible. I think that’s the advice they’re giving, is if every Democrat, the whole party in unison, said these things that polled well and were bland and didn’t offend anyone—Democrats would win more seats.

I think you might disagree with that electorally. Is that correct?

Shenker-Osorio: Just a little.

Bacon: Okay. We’ll talk about why then. If we all move to the right, if collectively the party moves to the right, why wouldn’t that work?

Shenker-Osorio: So that premise, which I call in my piece polling-ism—it’s known, as you said, by the name popularism, but I actually think that’s a misnomer—it is built out of a set of assumptions that, on the face of them, seem very logical. And I think that that’s why they’re so easily adopted.

Premise number one is, you ask people their issue preferences, they tell them to you, and then you repeat those back. Right? That seems logical.

Premise two—and I’m not going to go through all of them—you then formulate ads, which you concentrate at the end of the cycle, because truth, most people are low-information voters, they’re paying no attention. If they tune in, it’s sort of at some point in October, you hope. And so you kind of blow your cash on end-of-cycle ads that are about that popular issue or those popular issues, which you’ve tested through randomized control trials and found out that this ad moved vote choice, which is the metric you use.

Again, seems logical. The name of the game in an election is to net more votes. So shouldn’t you test things on the basis of a dependent variable that says, yep, this ad in the test says more people wanted to vote for my candidate? So it all feels very logical.

Bacon: It feels kind of Moneyball-ish to go back, maybe to date myself a little bit like we have data. The data shows this. And you and I agree that polls can show you something, right?

Shenker-Osorio: This is the irony of this piece is that I co-founded an organization called the Research Collaborative. I probably do as much research as all of these people. I’m in focus groups every week. We’re in surveys every two weeks. I do RCTs. It’s not like I have a beef with research. What I have a beef with is using a thermometer to try to change a tire.

So basically, the reason why those seemingly logical assumptions don’t actually stack up in the real world is a few things. Number one, if you want to persuade people—and hopefully what I’m about to say is absolutely, utterly uncontroversial so I can get to controversial later—they have to hear what you’re saying.

A message that nobody hears cannot persuade them. That feels like everyone should sort of be able to agree. If people don’t hear what you’re saying, then you don’t move them.

And we live, as I think everybody on this live knows, in an extraordinarily saturated environment in which information, messages, propaganda, lies, you know, sports, reality TV, your children, the homework, et cetera, is all happening.

Bacon: Let me interrupt and ask something. Okay, so you’re saying a message nobody hears, it doesn’t work. But we agree that TV, like if you spend a billion dollars in TV ads, people probably literally heard the message. You mean they don’t remember the message or you mean they literally didn’t hear it? Because Kamala Harris had a lot of ads running. Surely most Americans heard what Kamala Harris said, right?

Shenker-Osorio: At a literal level, largely no, because a lot of people, even if you’re paying top dollar for non-skippable things, people are still multitasking. People are still sort of halfway paying attention. Most people actually don’t watch linear TV, and they’re finding ways to sort of not watch it. And then even if they did sort of catch half of it, then they also caught 50 ads saying the opposite thing.

So the next thing is, so a message nobody hears doesn’t convince them. The next is a message nobody believes also doesn’t convince them. So let’s say you’re Kamala Harris, and you find out that, or you believe through surveying that you have this debility on the border—we’re just gonna cut straight to the heart of it—and so you decide, or your super PAC that we need to put out a bunch of ads, or at least a few, where you are the tough person, right? And you say—and there was a literal ad, I’m not making this up—a 30-second ad in which she said “the border” five times, and the words the border appeared on the screen six times in 30 seconds. So in essence: I’m going to get tough on the border. Also the border. Also, I was a prosecutor and the border, and I’m from a border state and the border. Did I mention the border? Have I made you think about the border—for the people who actually catch this?

So the idea is, you know, you have a perceived weakness on this, so you’re going to come back by essentially presenting what I would call a Republican-light version of the same message. Because people are concerned about this, and so you need to also sort of offer them the thing that you believe that they are wanting.

Donald Trump then—not only makes ads, but also does Truth Social posts and also goes on podcasts and also gets his red-hat-wearing army to all make ads and posts and videos and talk—and this is the most important part—to their friends and family constantly about how she’s full of it. She doesn’t mean it. She’s going to turn the border into a sieve and lure newcomers here with fat checks on real Americans’ dimes. So now you’ve raised the saliency of the border, if people indeed heard that.

You’ve credited the opposition’s argument. And you actually didn’t succeed in characterizing yourself as also tough because politics isn’t a soliloquy. It’s a shouting match.

So that’s the next reason. You can’t just expect that the claims that you’re making are what people hear. They’re also hearing the unrelenting din. And then the third reason—if I’m on three; I might be on 12, I don’t know.

Bacon: Let me interrupt and ask one question. So you gave a very specific example of Kamala Harris and immigration. So Kamala Harris lost—so we sort of assumed that—but let me put my popularist hat fully on now. I think they would make two arguments. One is, maybe Kamala Harris would have lost by even more, except that she moved to the right on the border. And then two, because I said Joe Manchin at the beginning here—so imagine if Kamala Harris had not run for president and said all these lefty things in 2019. Maybe she would have been more credible with her border message then. So address the 2019, and address the she-would-have-lost-by-more arguments.

Shenker-Osorio: Sure. Basically, if you want to win an election, you have to make it about a thing that you can win on. Okay? If you want to win a debate, you have to make the debate be about a topic that favors you. Because people are extraordinarily low information, for the most part. Not the people listening right now, so it’s hard to internalize. But if you were to watch focus groups, I can’t tell you the degree to which people, like, have no clue what’s happening in politics. Really, truly, deeply.

And so, basically, that Joe Manchin strategy, let’s call it. Joe Manchin is running as Joe Manchin, let’s say, nationally, or whatever his figure, his archetype. And there’s still, let’s say, a Donald Trump running who, regardless of what Joe Manchin is actually saying, is saying that Joe Manchin is a socialist, is saying that Joe Manchin is handing out abortions—and would you like fries with that? Is saying that Joe Manchin personally went to the border to, like, be a coyote to bring people over.

Because of course—I mean, I can prove this with an example—Chuck Schumer is a socialist, right? The senator from MasterCard, a.k.a. Joe Biden, before he became vice president and president, is a socialist. They’re not confined by a reality-based view of the world.

So even if you’ve maintained your Manchin-ism, that doesn’t actually mean that that’s what people hear about you. Because again, a lot of this polling-ism is credited—it’s run on the fiction that what people believe about Democrats is made out of what Democrats say. And it’s not. It’s made out of what is said about them.

And then the next thing is that it’s credited on the fiction that what people believe about a politician is what that politician or their super PAC paid for by to say. When in fact, most of people’s judgments come filtered through their identity or what their friends and family say.

And so if you’re a political person who isn’t tuning in much and you live, let’s call it, in rural Pennsylvania or in the middle of Ohio or in the Central Valley of my state, California, and it’s coming close to election time, you haven’t thought about it at all, and you wander around and your bowling buddies are wearing red MAGA hats, and no one is wearing any other kind of hat, and you’re kind of like, oh, I don’t really know about that, what is that, back in the day? And then you conclude, understandably, that this is what people like me think. People do the thing they think people like them do.

Bacon: So you said something back a few minutes ago along the lines of like, okay, so Democrats cannot control ... Okay, so you need to say things that people remember, that are believable, as I think what you said in the so ...

Shenker-Osorio: You need to make them believable.

Bacon: Okay, so is the argument that Kamala Harris should not run immigration ads or is the comment essentially that Kamala Harris should make sure the election is about—Kamala Harris cannot win an election on immigration policy or getting tough on the border. She can win an election on other issues. So the key is to make the election about other issues. Is that the idea here? Kamala Harris cannot win an election on who’s tougher on the border against Donald Trump. So she needs to make the election about something different. And she is that what the sort of sub-argument here is, or one of the arguments is here.

Shenker-Osorio: The argument is that you need to make the election about something you can win on, which is not an argument to say, don’t talk about immigration. Because again, as I said before—I mean, that would be hypocritical of me—politics is a shouting match, not a soliloquy. You don’t get to pick that immigration is just not going to be a topic. You don’t get to pick that trans kids are just not going to be a topic. You don’t get to pick that, you know, “inner city crime,” which is just a dog whistle for race, isn’t going to be a topic—because the topic is defined by what’s in the discourse, which the opposition is very much interested in setting.

And so, at a practical level, what that means is that rather than running yourself as Republican-light and crediting this idea that immigration equals border—that that is the only thing to know about that topic—what you say instead, and newsflash, we tested it, because I do actually believe in testing, and we tested it in combat testing after exposing voters to a real-world Donald Trump ad, not a make-believe kind of message that we invented ourselves.

And an ad that says—they watch a Donald Trump ad, then they watch a “the border, the border, the border” ad, and basically there isn’t movement. They watch a Donald Trump ad, and they watch an ad that says some version of, most of us would move heaven and earth for our families. Immigrant Americans move here for the promise of freedom and opportunity in this country. And we know that moving is one of the hardest things a person can do. Today, Republicans peddle hate and take away what all of our families need, hoping we’ll point our finger in the wrong direction. Let’s trade Republican hate peddling for Democratic problem solving.

You basically say, hey, here’s the shared value behind immigration. Then you say, hey, here’s the actual villain. Then you say, hey, they’re trying to get you to point your finger in the wrong direction. You essentially narrate the dog whistle, and then you close with some sort of vision or something desirable.

And that structure, which has a name—we call it the race–class narrative or the race–class–gender narrative—we’ve used over and over and over again. And at risk of taking us too far afield (you can pull me back), an incredible example of it happening right now is Zack Polanski, who is just absolutely killing it in the U.K. as a leader of the Green Party.

Another way of putting this is that you level with people and you say: Yeah, you’re right, someone did take your job. You’re right, someone did take your healthcare. You’re right, someone did take your ability to have a single income and be able to go to Disneyland once a year with your kids. If you’d like to know who took your money—it’s the people with all the money. That’s how you can tell. But if they can get you to point your finger at the Black guy or the Brown guy or the trans kid, then we actually will not be able to confront the people who’ve screwed us all over.

And that’s it. That’s it.

Bacon: So my top-level question was if the entire party sounded like Joe Manchin, would it be better? And I think part of your argument is people would not, Americans would not hear that or they wouldn’t notice it or they wouldn’t respond to it.

Shenker-Osorio: Well, first of all, stalwart Democratic voters wouldn’t act as required to repeat the refrain. They would not, whatever the blue hat thing would be that the Joe Manchin would produce, the like, what do we want? Incremental change. When do we want it? Let’s get around to it. Like, they’re not going to wear that on a hat because they believe in fundamental—or whatever the Joe Manchinism is. Right.

Bacon: And why is it important? I think these guys would actually say, we want indivisible. They wouldn’t say quite directly. We want the activists to move the party to the left. We don’t want them anyway. Oh, good. The choir is not saying liberal things. Great. I think they might be for that, right? So in some ways, why is the choir speaking important? Because the choir is going to vote for Joe Manchin. Most of the choir, a lot of the choir is going to vote for Joe Manchin over Donald Trump, even if they don’t enjoy the song, so to speak.

Shenker-Osorio: First of all, no, they won’t. They’ll stay home.

Bacon: Well, that’s an assumption we gotta talk through, but OK.

Shenker-Osorio: Ok. We win or lose by 1%. So some of them is meaningful, even when it’s teeny tiny.

Bacon: Yes, I agree.

Shenker-Osorio: So some of them staying home is a big deal. So that’s first. They’ll head to the couch.

And then second ... those are the folks who actually spread your message. So the reason why this is meaningful—I mean, if you look at the Obama era, in the Obama era and in the Mamdani era right now—these are human beings who, in their own very different ways (and there are other people in this category), have perfectly hacked the idea of brand advocates. That’s what this is known as in marketing, right? The people who are so excited about and loyal to your product—not that humans are products, but in marketing—that they will bake the chocolate cake with Miracle Whip, you know, serve it at the family reunion. The family eats it and says, this cake is moist and delicious. What’s in it? Would you believe Miracle Whip?

And suddenly people are entertaining Miracle Whip that never, ever, ever would—and especially wouldn’t if Kraft Foods sent them an ad. Because when Kraft Foods sends you an ad saying Miracle Whip is delicious, you’re like, I don’t believe you. That’s your job. You sent me this ad because that’s your job. But if your friend gives you a piece of cake, hmm, you might entertain it.

So translate that into politics. These are the folks who, first of all, at a practical level, literally go door to door for you and register voters and get them to the polls and drive them and remind them when the election is and actually ensure that the voting happens. So that’s just a practical thing. And if they’re not excited about the candidate, then they’re not going to do it. And that’s a sort of volunteer base that you really, really need.

And then short of people who are that dedicated—which obviously is not most people—they are the ones who are spreading the gospel and who are saying to you, you know, you need to do this. This is what I’m excited about. This is why you should be excited about this. And telling person after person after person, because a message is like a baton. It has to be passed from person to person. And if it gets dropped along the way, it doesn’t get heard.

Bacon: Let me ask. So a lot of the advice the Democratic Party is getting is sort of rooted in this 1992, 1996, if you move to the right. So was Bill Clinton’s message, did he have a message that was beyond? A lot of it has become convinced to us that Bill Clinton’s message was black people have too many ... we should have more policing, and we should move to the right, and so on. But is your argument essentially that Bill Clinton, that that’s outdated? Or that Bill Clinton had a message that did spread that is not the sort of negative move-to-the-right one, or that that, or that that kind of polling-ism can work, but there are alternatives to it.

Shenker-Osorio: I have two different arguments. So the first is that right now, we are relying on tools that, in their moment, were innovative and arguably matched reality. So when you lived in a reality in which people watched linear TV, and there were many, many, many fewer sort of sources of entertainment or news or, you know, what passes as news, then if you’re doing a randomized control trial—and, okay, we’re getting deep nerd—in a randomized control trial and in a survey, by definition, you have a captive audience.

You have recruited people to pay attention either by giving them a financial incentive or because of the way a test is configured. You literally, like, can’t leave the platform. It’ll cancel you out of the test. It knows when you’ve sort of wandered off into another tab. It can tell. So you make people listen to your 100-word thing or you make people watch your 30-second ad inside of the test. And they know they’re being studied. Like, they know they’re in a survey. They know they’re in an RCT.

And then you measure vote choice. Does it make you more, you know, want to vote for Bill Clinton or more want to vote for Bush or whatever, right, is going on? Then you say, okay, this is the ad that did that the most relative to the control, which got no ad or got a placebo about something apolitical. And then you think that’s going to translate out in the real world. Maybe once upon a time, where people were more like a captive audience—for the younger folks, you’re just going to have to believe me—you used to just have to watch commercials. If someone in the chat can back me up.

Bacon: Yes, yes. You had to.

Shenker-Osorio: This used to happen. Then you could more closely credit that the kinds of responses you were getting matched the kinds of responses that actually occur in the world, because there was a little bit more continuity between those two situations. And this whole, “if your message doesn’t get people to stop scrolling in the first place, then it doesn’t work” was less of an issue.

And then the second answer is that you can very much win the battle to lose the war. And Bill Clinton presided, as you know, over the great shellacking that the incumbent party has taken in a midterm. And of course, the incumbent party always suffers in a midterm election. I understand that that is a vibe because of differential turnout, and the out-of-power people want to go vote and the in-power people are lethargic and apathetic—speaking of the couch as another option.

But it was unprecedented, at least in modern history, how bad it was. So basically, Bill Clinton, and “welfare as we know it”-Bill Clinton, went in in an argument vilifying government, went in in an argument and a policy platform of NAFTA, actually sort of stepping away from the historic support that the Democratic Party had given to the working class—way back machine FDR times. FDR times, when being a Democrat wasn’t just something a working-class person voted, it was something a working-class person was. It was core to their identity, and it was an era of Democratic ascendancy we’ve never seen since.

So he wins the battle in terms of winning the presidency—obviously undeniable—and he ushers in an era of Democratic losses down the ballot across the country, which is then recreated under Obama. And he overall, I would argue, moves the country, the discourse, the belief system to the right—crediting the opposition’s argument that what you should look for in a public servant, what you should look for in a politician, is someone who says the government is bad. And again, that’s the Republican brand advantage. That’s not the Democratic brand advantage.

And so here we are now, and this is an argument that I’m having, obviously, live. If we believe that our job right now—and I believe it is—is to blunt the authoritarian assault that we live within, then we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that electing Democrats in 2018, in 2020—a trifecta, remember 2020?—and to the extent that we did in 2020, did not stop Trump. Electing Democrats in those instances—I’m speaking facts—that did not stop Trump. It did not stop the abductions. It did not stop the military into our cities. It did not stop all of the things that I don’t need to detail to you.

And so the question really is, for me, the purpose of politics is to enact an agenda. It’s to actually improve the material conditions of people’s lives. It isn’t merely to get Democrats elected for the sake of doing so. And yes, I understand that that process requires electing Democrats. But which Democrats we elect, and critically, how we get them elected, matters.

Bacon: Let’s talk about, for the rest of this, we have about 10 minutes left, talk about what you called “magnetism.” Describe that, because you said there’s a ... We’ve talked mostly about polling-ism, which I would argue is ... Everyone here knows what polling-ism is on some level, because when you watch Hakeem Jeffries say, “The police sent to Chicago is a distraction from my health care talking points.” That’s poling-ism. I think we all know what that is. We know where it’s coming from. We’ve lived it, we’ve experienced it. Magnetism, I struggled with a little bit more. I wasn’t as familiar with what you were getting at. So talk to the audience about that a little bit.

Shenker-Osorio: So magnetism is, unfortunately, what MAGA has run on. And what’s ironic is that in all of these sort of Democrats need to be more moderated, Democrats need to sort of eschew the base and even like crap upon the base. In all of that, what folks are never asked is, how come Republicans do the exact opposite and they win with it? Like that’s never asked, right? Why is it that that’s enough?

Bacon: I think the claim is that they have the geographic advantage based on the election. I think that’s usually the it’s usually you get this.

Shenker-Osorio: Sure. So magnetism is the idea that if you want people to come to your cause, you need to be attractive. So number one, that requires having a cause. That requires actually having an agenda that you desire to enact. Second of all, it requires understanding that the people who have previously voted for you— which the polling-ists eschew as “your base,” because they think only in demographic categories. When I say the people who have voted for you, I literally mean those human beings, not their demographic features. I mean those people. And yes, they have demographic features because people have demographic features. But I actually mean those human beings. First of all, you actually need those people to be carrying your tune. If you think back to the first six weeks of the Kamala Harris campaign, you know, the coconut tree and the meme and the cake hive and if you want people to come to your party, throw a better party and everyone and voter registrations going through the roof suddenly and people being excited and people wanting to affiliate and so on. So that’s the first premise is have a clause—

Bacon: I think it’s an important thing to say, to note ... I remember the first few weeks of the Harris campaign had people doing these Black women or white men for Harris. These phone calls, they’d be on a boring Zoom call. People were going to events. And then ... And she was getting criticized, though, for parts of the party for not being centrist enough. And then she started moving. I want the most lethal military in the world. And then we get Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait and so on saying she’s running the greatest campaign of all time, look how brilliant it is. And then her numbers started stalling the moment she started doing the thing that they asked for. That is a note. Sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, yeah. So the “Freedom” ad, which, if you ask people, is the only ad that they remember from the Harris campaign. And I’m very biased because I ran an entire “Protect Our Freedoms” campaign in 2022 and “Our Freedoms, Our Families, Our Futures” in 2024, so, biased. But when there was excitement, that was magnetism. So you have a cause. And on the economic side, let’s remember, in those first six weeks, she was running on ending price gouging, which Donald Trump called communism and price controls. In the “let’s give them something to talk” about theory of messaging, which I espouse, when your opposition is attacking you because you’re going to implement price controls, that is quite different than attacking you on you’re going to turn the border into a sieve and “illegals”—pardon my use of the opposition language—are going to come and, like, destroy all of life as we know it. So she was making, like Mamdani, super concrete economic promises. She talked about raising the minimum wage. She talked about, you know, slashing childhood poverty. She talked about an extensive hike to the capital gains tax.

So it wasn’t just that she was being coconut meme, freedom, happy, throw a better party. She also had super concrete economic policies. Fast forward six weeks, the folks come in, tell, you know, the grownups come into the room, say, stop having your nice time. Yeah. And we veer from those concrete promises, which are important, to an opportunity economy, a walk back of the capital gains tax, no more talk about price gouging, and these sort of vague things plus Liz Cheney.

So magnetism is also an understanding that, like any magnet, you have a polarity. And what that means is, yes, you attract people to your cause, but you also repel. So let me give a super concrete example. You repel the portion of people that cannot, shall not, will not ever vote for you. Like, you will never have those people. Like me and Trump, like there is nothing he could ever do. He could say he could produce, he could provide. I’m never going to vote for him. Right. And he relishes in repelling people like me. And I’m speaking in the singular because I don’t want to speak for anybody else.

You understand that the job of politics is actually to agenda set, both because you want to make people’s lives better with public policy and also discursively you want to agenda set because you want people to be talking about your thing, including coming at you for daring to take on price gouging. Like, imagine if that’s what she were being attacked for rather than, you know, the border or trans kids. That’s an argument that you want to be having. So that’s what the right does over and over again. They figure out this is what we need people talking about.

So back in the day, not so long ago, it was critical race theory. Do you think there’s ever been a survey in history in which the majority of American voters were asked, what is your top issue, your most pressing issue? Critical race theory. Do you think there’s ever been a survey where the majority was like, my most pressing issue is trans girls playing volleyball or my most pressing issue is DEI? That’s never happened. Their most pressing issue is money. It’s always going to be money. So the right sees those issue surveys and they’re like, great. Nobody cares about this. Nobody knows what this is. We can use it as a vessel to populate it with our own disgusting meaning and then make an astroturf group like Moms for Liberty to be our choir and make believe this is a big issue. Or with DEI, we call university presidents into Congress. And have at them. So they don’t just issue talking points, right? They don’t just do a social media post. They do a 360-degree surround-sound strategy around issues that are not popular.

Bacon: So you’re saying in New York ... New York, I hadn’t thought of it this way, but saying, “I’m for free buses, I’m for free childcare,” and so on, and getting people to say, no ... Because I thought of him as being, he’s charismatic, he smiles a lot, he has good ideas, people like him, but you’re saying he is magnetic, Mamdani. I mean, he is magnetic to people who agree with him, but he’s also getting the right, he’s also drawing the right opposition in a certain way.

Shenker-Osorio: He is drawing the right opposition, he’s forcing—I don’t know if folks have seen that brilliant, brilliant dramatic reading of the piece from The New York Times about the people in the Hamptons who are crying themselves into their whatever, and I mean that is a perfect encapsulation of magnetism. He is reveling in repelling the billionaire class that’s very upset about him. He’s not making believe—don’t worry, a rising tide lifts all boats, it’s fine, Everyone’s going to do better, I’m not going to ... He’s like, “No.” I’m not sure if I’m allowed to swear here. This is the longest I’ve gone without swearing. “No, jerk face.” That’s my PG. “No, jerk face. I’m going to tax you. I’m not going to pretend I’m not going to. And when that pisses you off, I’m not going to be concerned about that. I’m going to call it magically delicious.”

Bacon: I think part of the issue is here, I guess people probably listening to this call and myself even, the paragon of our politics is a man who sort of famously said, there are no red states or blue states, which he probably knew was inaccurate at the time, and has become really much so. I don’t think Obama, I don’t think most of the time was trying to get everyone to like him and antagonize no one. So I’m struck by this. You need magnetism means not just being appealing, but also picking the right enemy, so to speak, or picking the right ... And I think it’s an interesting insight that I’ve got to think some more about.

Shenker-Osorio: I mean Obama, because—I’m going to provide you some information you didn’t know, Perry—because America has a slight problem with Black men, because there’s a little bit of racism in our country, which I’m happy to, I’m glad to explain to you. Because you don’t know never heard of it

Bacon: Yeah, never heard of it.

Shenker-Osorio: Boy I hope people can hear sarcasm. He was magnetic in the attractive-repulsive by his very being.

Bacon: Okay, that’s fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: As is Kamala Harris. And I hope it’s clear—that’s not a him thing.

Bacon: I agree, yes.

Shenker-Osorio: My younger son says to me, that’s an ish you, not an ish me. So that was an ish you for America, not an ish me. That’s just the reality of who he was, who he is, of course. But, and I talk about this in the piece, one of his most famous ads, which actually was only released on the web, they never spent any TV money on it at all, was a group of celebrities singing from the concession speech that he gave when he lost in his first primary or second, I don’t know, I think it was Iowa, was him saying, yes, we can, and speaking about enslavement.

Bacon: I’ll go back and look at that.

Shenker-Osorio: That is an example of magnetism.

Bacon: All right. Well, let’s, I think this has been a good, we’re going to come back and come back and talk to you again to get into this more. We can talk about this for two hours, but I’m going to stop here. Anything else with the piece or anything else about what you really about polling-ism and magnetism that you want to tell the audience that I didn’t ask about?

Shenker-Osorio: What I would say is that the siren song of authoritarians everywhere, both in contemporary time and in history, is to foment a counter-revolution against a revolution that never occurred. It is to say, would you like to know why you’re struggling? Would you like to know why you’re having a hard time? Would you like to know why you feel out of place? Would you like to know why you have more month than check and the world is making no sense to you? It’s because of those people. And those people could be welfare queens back in the day who are not working, who are living high off the hog in the system. Those people could be, forgive the terminology, illegals. Those people in other times and places are Roma in Hungary, or they’re Syrian refugees there as well, or they’re Southern Europeans in the case of Brexit, or they’re Muslims in the case of India with Modi. But this is what authoritarians do, right? There’s no quicker route to an “us” than construction of a “them.”

And if we don’t deeply understand that and that that is the argument that they are providing to their base, they are providing an origin story for people’s pain. It’s a lie. But they are telling people, these are the heroes. These are the villains. This is why your life is hard. And this is how we’re going to fix it for you. And when we are making believe that that isn’t going on and we are either actually crediting their argument by saying, you know what? You’re right. We did lose because of immigrants and trans people.

Bacon: Education is too woke. You know, yeah, yeah. All the things that they say.

Shenker-Osorio: Right. You’re saying that your opposition is correct. In some way, right? And you are feeding their origin story, their lie, and you are failing to give a correct origin story. But the only way that the correct origin story can work is if you actually mean it—if you actually mean that you are going to govern with, for, and by working people.

And that means that you can’t talk about, you know, the rules are rigged and we have to actually make things right for you and vote for, you know, crypto corruption. You can’t do that. And you can’t, you know, not full-throatedly support and endorse and force a hike of the minimum wage. You know, you have to full-throatedly support unions.

When FDR said about the billionaires—you want to talk about magnetism—“I welcome their hatred. I welcome their ire,” right? Because he knew there are sides, and the sides are the working people of America across races, places, genders, whatever, and the owning class that is taking the wealth our work creates.

And when you try to replace that and have no villains because you just want neoliberalism and a rising tide lifts all boats and we’re all going to do better and we don’t need to actually have and support unions and raise wages and all the rest of it, then you render people susceptible to this siren song of the right. Neoliberalism is the handmaiden to authoritarianism everywhere. That’s what I would say.

Bacon: And that’s a great note to end on, Anat. Thanks for joining us. Thanks to the audience who tuned in to watch. And we’ll be back next week. Thank you. Bye-bye.