No, She Didn't 'Lose' 15m Democratic Votes

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:00 Thomas: And welcome to this show. I don't know what it is because I'm not sure where I'm going to publish this. Maybe everywhere. Maybe all my shows. I'm Thomas Smith and okay, this is my second take. I recorded for just 85 minutes straight. Just talked.

0:00:17 Thomas: Unusable. I mean, it'd be usable if I had like 10 hours to edit it, but I just don't. So what I'm going to try to do is reset. You don't need to know any of this, really. I'm gonna try to take things simpler. I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna try not to branch out too much. But I am gonna start with a little bit of personal stuff. Just about yesterday, as I'm recording this. Right now, because it might matter for where the votes are. For me, it is Wednesday, November 6th at about 11 p.m. Pacific.

0:00:49 Thomas: So yesterday was horrible. It was terrible for me. I have anxiety. I wouldn't say I have a generalized anxiety disorder necessarily. I'm not anxious like all the time or anything. But I do have like acute anxiety, like performance anxiety and around certain events, which I know a lot of people do. Um, mine, mine really just makes me feel like I'm dying, which I think is pretty common, but for those who don't have that, uh, be thankful. But yeah, yesterday I was dying. I felt horrible, um, sick and my head was killing me. Um, know, very quickly it was obvious this wasn't going well. And, last night was horrible. Terrible, um, able to get to sleep at like 3am. I think I slept until, I don't know, like 7am maybe. That, I thought I was, I am so exhausted, I was exhausted. I got no sleep. I spent so much time in anxiety, which really takes it out of you. If you have dealt with that, I woke up at about 7am and my first thought was like, I need to know what happened. I need to find out why this happened. And I've spent the better part of an entire day holed up in my room with every piece of data that I can find to figure out what happened here. And here's why you should listen to me. Not saying I'm the only person you should listen to, but here's, here's why I think I'm worth listening to. Have found over the years that there's one asset I have, that is perhaps a little uncommon among your average person, and that is that I do not convince myself of anything. I am incredibly realistic. It's why I've been depressed all my life. I'm not capable of cognitive dissonance. Feel pretty shitty all the time about a lot of bad things. I did get a little better once I medicated for ADHD, so my mind wanders less, but that doesn't cure it. It just kind of helps me spend a little less time thinking about, I don't know, the genocide happening or the, you know, any number of things. So I bring it up because right away after this happened, you had so many people telling you, wouldn't you know it, the thing they've always said was the reason this happened. Know, if it's the far left, then Israel-Palestine was why this happened or some other far left policy. If it was centrist, then, you Know, Kamala's defunding the police, her border, open border, you know, everyone just went with what, wouldn't you know, it coincidentally was already what they thought. And that's the reason we lost. My solemn vow to you, my pledge to you is despite the fact that I'm very progressive, if we were to do some sort of survey of just policy positions, I would come out very far left. Despite that, I don't let that influence my thinking about tactics and about what would actually win elections. Because one of my largest takeaways here that I hope to convey to everyone is we don't live in a progressive country. We don't live in even a liberal country. We live in a conservative country. And it's interesting because I think people know that sometimes, but then when they go to talk about strategy, all of a sudden it's like, there's a lot of like, no, if you just did this perfectly leftist ideology, actually that would win. And that's always seemed dissonant to me. I think there's some amount of that that makes sense when it comes to populism and kind of a Bernie Sanders -esque thing. I think some amount of that is valid, but certainly not like all of it. I mean, there are a lot of things like immigration. There's, there's, There's all kinds of things that the country is not liberal on. They aren't. My one thing I want to convey and that I think we on the left, the group of people that is trying to stop the fascism and the horrible things and the rounding up of immigrants and the God knows what else to trans people and so forth. I think we need to let up on ourselves a little. When you look at, especially for this election, this was a, this was not an election that we were going to win more on that later. And I have a lot of good reasons, I believe for saying that. But overall, we, we should not go too hard on ourselves because of this. We got to do everything we can. But when it comes to, I don't know, like losing weight, I think we've pretty much realized that like just shaming people over and over is not helping in the same way. Like, yeah, OK, if we want to try to shame Democrat elites, sure. I don't ever talk to any Democratic elites. But yeah, make your voice known if you have a problem with how they handled it. When it comes to you and I together, us voters and like, let's just let's just fucking ease up on ourselves and each other, because honestly, we didn't there wasn't much we could have done when you look at the fundamentals of what happened here. OK. Stepping back, there is one thing I want to clear up so badly. It is driving me fucking insane that everywhere and by everywhere, I mean social media, on Reddit, on Facebook, wherever, anything talking about the election. And there'll be like in a big subreddit, it'll be like our politics. Someone's like, hey, what happened? Why did Kamala lose? Top number one comment. Well, if you look at the numbers, Donald Trump didn't even get any voters, kept the same number of voters. Kamala lost 15 million. 15 million Democrats didn't show up. You know why they didn't show up? Because she lost the working class, blah, blah, whatever their reasons are. That's fucking wrong. It's incorrect, factually. I can't believe that this is so prevalent and this is one of the things that I want to talk about is how ill -informed our voting populace is this is a good indicator of that we are too stupid to do democracy I don't even mean that in an insulting way too because we also are too overloaded we're working too much being a parent is fucking impossible no one can afford anything there's a lot of reasons we can't stay up to date our education system fails us I don't want to sound like I'm personally mad at everybody, but the fact is that we are too ignorant in many ways to be running the kinds of campaigns we're running because facts barely matter. Policy doesn't matter at all. And everyone's wrong about everything all the time, all the Time. I'm not saying I'm right about everything, but The number of people who just spout off an incorrect opinion and then that gets latched onto and goes on forever. So if you're someone who thought that Donald Trump's vote stayed roughly the same and Kamala's went down by 15 million, you might think that the total vote for 2024 would be something like 15 million less than 2020. Would it surprise you to learn that we're on pace for it to be damn near identical to 2020? Same turnout. Damn near identical. It's a little tough to tell for sure because they're they're still reporting, but it's very close. It's even worse than that when it comes to how factually inaccurate the previous statements I said are. So here's what I've done. This has enraged me so much. I know there was probably a better way to do this. I don't know how to do it. I wasted a lot of time. I just hand fucking entered numbers into a spreadsheet. I put in every number of all the votes of the states, and then I put the percentage reported by AP and did some simple multiplication. This is not meant to be a fucking Nate Silver, Steve Kornacki, perfect projection of the votes. It's not. All I'm doing is roughly estimating where we're going to end up. And I'm assuming, like, let's say a state is 50% reported. Then I'm just going to double the totals for Kamala, double the total for Trump, double the total for other. And then look at what the votes are going to be. Very simple. It's not going to be 100% accurate. It. But it's going to be close because there's not really any reason to believe that on the whole across all these states that they're that the voting should be like much different that they'RE counting now. It really like it honestly really shouldn't. It was different during COVID when Trump demonized the vote by mail and had his people vote in person. But that didn't happen. There wasn't a red mirage. There wasn't like the voting has been pretty uniform.

0:09:03 Thomas: It's not will get us within a ballpark. And when I do that, some very interesting things happen. Oh, not to mention a lot of the states are already virtually all reported. So here's my only little hiccup, minor, stupid arithmetic thing. States that are, um, the highest state is according to AP or New York times or anybody is 99% right now. And that actually kind of makes a difference. Like, I don't know what that 99% means. If 99% literally means 99%, then we're on pace to be just about at 2020 level. So 2020 total votes were 158,429,000 and change. If 99% means 99%, we're at basically 158 million. So like half a million short, which is nothing. If 99 actually means like a hundred, then, you know, we're a little shorter. We're like a million short. Let's split the difference and say 99.5 just for fun. Cause there are, they are still counting votes, but I don't know if 99 means like, you know, 99.9 or something, but splitting the difference and going 99.5, we are about 800,000 off of 2020, which was incredibly record-breaking, 2020-wise, and there was, vote by mail was widely available, it was much easier to vote in a lot of ways, I guess in some ways it wasn't, but vote by mail was more universal, it Was a record-breaking election, and this election should be very close to that in terms of turnout. If the 99s are, you know, it could surpass it. I don't know. But it should be roughly around the same. And when you do all that math, and again, taking those assumptions on, which might not be 100% accurate, but they're going to be close. Donald Trump, instead of only keeping exactly his voters from 2020, is on track to improve by about almost 5 million votes, about 4.8 million, give or take. That's a lot. Now, Kamala, from where Biden was in 2020, is on track to be about 5 million lower. So if you want to make the claim that Democrats didn't show up or whatever, you could claim that 5 million Democrats didn't show up and that's why she lost. But that would not really be right. Because when you look at the details of where those differences are coming from, It's entirely states that didn't matter. And this is really interesting. I think this paints a, honestly, a pretty flattering picture of what Kamala was able to do, because we know that there are only some states that matter. We know. It's the Electoral College. There are only certain states that matter. The states this time that basically everyone was looking at were Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona. Arizona.

0:11:55 Thomas: Now, if you thought the storyline was about how Kamala lost all these votes and nobody showed up for her and Trump stayed the same, blah, blah. Would it then surprise you to learn that she's on track to, and actually this isn't even that much of my math because most of these states are already all reported. So this isn't even, with the exception of Arizona, which is only 69% as of recording, basically Nevada's 87. Those are the two. Everything else is 98, 9899. So this isn't even much of my math. This is just what the numbers are. Would it surprise you to learn that in those seven states, those seven swing states, Kamala gained 76,000 total votes over Joe Biden from 2020? Gained. That's an average of about 11,000. That seems pretty good because if you were somebody who picked up a campaign with only, what was it, 110 days to go or something. I think you'd probably focus on those states, right? You'd focus on the only states that matter. You'd do everything you can for those. And to come out of those ahead of Joe Biden in 2020 is pretty fucking good. Hey, here's the problem. You might notice there's a problem. Donald Trump in those same states gained 1,140,000 votes. Again, using also my arithmetic, but it's already close to that anyway, without my projections. 1.1 million votes, an average of 162,000 per each of those states on average. He gained. Those are new voters. We know they're new voters because we're all in positive land here.

0:13:38 Thomas: So the story is not how Kamala fumbled the ball and how the Democrats just didn't speak to the blah, blah, and nobody turned out and they they suck and whatever. It's not. That's not what happened. Instead, there's something deeply, deeply horrible happening. And that is that our country wanted to elect Donald Trump or our country wanting to change, which isn't so horrible in a vacuum, but it is when the side that's in power is actually doing a good job, all things considered. And the side that wants to come into power is fucking fascist trash. That's when wanting, quote unquote, just change, change it up, break the system, do the work. That is when it is really bad and harmful. So, I am utilizing a lot of exit polling. I am using obviously stats from last election and all that. And exit polling, it is important to note that it will take some months before it is calibrated to the actual turnout. So it is not going to be perfect. This is going to change, But largely speaking, it pretty much tells us it pretty much tells us what's going on and honestly Latinos is a big I'm not, you know, putting all the blame on one group because even though white people went slightly away from Trump, they are still largely obviously we are still largely obviously the problem when it comes to voting conservative and Latinos did still majority vote for Kamala but the the change if you're looking for what changed changed holy shit did Trump make gains on Latinos and black people as well here's a CNN one again these aren't gospel but they should be an indicator Clinton won black men by 69 points Biden by 60 Harris by 56 in these exit polls that's meaningful and our elections are always a knife's edge even this one that seems like we lost by a lot which you know we did not lose by a lot, but it's still, when you look at the swing States, this is still all within like 1% of poll. It's like, it's all very close. The polls were right. Actually this time they were pretty much right. Um, black women plus 90 for Clinton, plus 81 for Biden, plus 84 for Harris. So not a ton of change, but change. And that matters. Latino men ready for this Clinton plus 31 Biden plus 23 Trump plus 12. So that's a flip. Latino men, according to this CNN exit poll, went from plus 23 Biden in 2020 to plus 12 for Trump. That is massive. There are a lot of Latino voters. Now they aren't a monolith and we don't have the data yet to really dig into like more detail. Oh, and I'll tell you that was Latino men. Latino women, Clinton plus 44, Biden plus 39, Harris plus 22 that's another huge I mean still you know Latino women doing better than Latino men but that's still that's that's how do you overcome that now you might be wondering tying this all together since Harris actually made gains in those seven swing states well where the fuck did she lose all these votes well I'll tell you uh Texas Florida Ohio Virginia Virginia, California lost a ton of votes in California or on pace to Illinois for some reason. But yeah, Illinois, Illinois is a weird one. I can't wait to see more about that. New York, many of the states, pretty significant Latino population.

0:17:23 Thomas: I mean, honestly, that might be the story of it right there. That might account for a lot of what happened here. There's more. There's storylines. There's never one thing. There's things that cut across purposes and net out that are factors. But that's that's significant. I mean, seeing how Florida went is just nuts. You know, that's just and I think this explains it. And I think so what's going on? Do you think that Latinos are really worried about Israel -Palestine? No, I don't think so. Sorry to judge broad strokes, but they're not. And I also know that because basically, statistically, no one voted based on Israel -Palestine. Now, I can't prove that there weren't a bunch of people, a zillion people who actually stayed home because of Israel -Palestine, even though Trump would be far worse and is going to be far worse on Israel -Palestine. But no, they stayed home. There were some people. I can't guarantee 100% that that didn't make up some like unknown, like there was just millions of people who didn't. But I'll tell you, it didn't matter because in the swing states, as I already said, Kamala gained votes. So that's not the story. The story is Trump gaining more votes in the swing states and Kamala losing a lot of votes in states that didn't matter. So let's get into why we were pretty much doomed to lose. And that leads me to my central thesis, which is people are not voting on facts. Voters are not voting on facts, they're not voting based on reality. And so there's this really frustrating thing that happens every four years or maybe every two, where us, you and I, the political junkies on the left who listen to podcasts, who read newspapers, who follow all this crap, we form a theory based on reality, based on policy, based on what Trump actually is, based upon what he is going to be. All these things that I think are pretty solid facts, pretty solid, or at least reasonable conjecture in a lot of cases, but basically reality. And so we're like okay so people will be voting some somewhat based on that and then they might just have a different opinion on what that what about that maybe um and then what actually happens is most people who matter in our stupid system of electoral college most of them are voting based on not that they're voting based on the economy in quotes and by the economy what they mean is what they, and I don't blame them for this, inflation, the prices that are high, the gas prices, the food prices that happened in 2020, 21, 22, that are still really high. That's what they're voting on, which, hey, that's real. I'm not telling them, I am not here to say that's not real. That is real. You know what isn't real? The idea that A, Joe Biden caused that, and B, B, Donald Trump would fix that. That's not real. That's not reality. Donald Trump not only wouldn't fix it, he didn't even offer an idea to fix it. He doesn't have a plan to fix it. I know we know all this, but I think it's important to emphasize, because if we're going to beat ourselves up as a party, if we're going to look at what happened, we have to realize

0:20:40 Thomas: That it's not a matter of the right policy. It's not, I don't even think it's a matter of the right message. There are people who are not informed and are not voting based on reality. And here's the thing. I don't even think it's like a Fox News thing. Those people are all just going to be Trumpers anyway. They're out in Fox News land, Trumper land. I think the real issue here is for a lot of understandable reasons.

0:21:09 Thomas: A lot of people don't follow politics. They don't care. They know a little bit about it. And they vote based on broader surface level things. So I'm not talking about MAGA for the most part, because MAGA is MAGA. What Trump did was he got out MAGA and then a bunch of other people. So who are those other people? Well, I think they're people who vote largely on time-honored myths that don't really hold up and misremembering the Trump years a little bit, and just heuristics. So like, for one, things are bad. Things are bad, that's a fact. For a lot of people, things ARE bad. No one can afford a house. Wages have stagnated. Healthcare is too expensive. All the things, those are bad! That's undeniable that things are bad. And when things are BAD, obviously, negativity is going to prevail. The drive for change is going to be there. And when you see, when you're somebody who, oh, by the way, when you're a working person, because things are bad, likely, and you don't care about politics or you don't have time to really focus in too much on the ins and outs of it, not to mention our failing education system hasn'T really taught you it, NOT to mention the media doesn'T really cover anything accurately, or you'RE not even dialed into it. It'S not even that. You'RE not EVEN really dialed in to it. The big divide is NOT left and right, so much as junkies and non-junkies. People pay attention to politics all the time, people don't. And the problem here is the people who don't, in terms of what changed. And for those folks, they do not think of Donald Trump like you and I think of Trump.

0:22:57 Thomas: They see that the economy in quotes is bad. Prices are high for them, the other things I just said. To them, that's economy equals bad.

0:23:08 Thomas: Historically, conservatives are associated with, for some some reason, better economy stuff. It's always been a lie. It is not real. But it is a powerful myth. It Is a myth that continues to this day. And a lot of it, I think, is just maybe the nature of thinking like how conservative, you know, conserving your money, budgeting, being tight, you know? Not making crazy choices. Like, just on a surface level, I think that is associated with quote-unquote being better on the economy. And not to mention, really bad luck in terms of timing. Bad luck that inflation happened on Joe Biden's watch. His policies, I don't think, made much of a difference. Even if they did, they were good anyway. And regardless, you and I know that the only chance of doing the right thing is having Democrats in there. It's not a guarantee. The only chance of doing the, the, right thing when it comes to something that takes expertise, like economics, broad economic policy, the only chance is having the right people in there, is having a Democrat in there or if the right thing is to do nothing or like cut taxes or something. Whereas Donald Trump doesn't do anything based on expertise at all. He could get lucky once in a while, I suppose, but he just wants to tariff about it. He's just going to tariff about it, that's what he's going to do, he's a tariff man, he'll tariff. That is inflationary and he's gonna cut taxes.

0:24:37 Thomas: That'll blow a giant hole in the budget and it just helps the rich, which doesn't help anybody. So that, so the, the reality of the situation is Joe Biden was doing a good job, best he could, bad luck with the timing and the, and the inflation was severe. And it was going to be incredibly difficult for any Democrat to run away from that. It would have actually, in retrospect, I think Ezra Klein is, is vindicated here because what needed to happen probably was Biden needed to never seek re-election. We needed to have an open primary. We need to see, and I don't even know if this would have worked. I don't think it would. None of this is a guarantee. We need to stop acting like there was some easy guarantee way to do it. There wasn't. This is really difficult. Again, back to my central message why get to use an analogy when I play ice hockey for fun I play beer league uh there's a wide discrepancy in talent on the teams and sometimes we're against a team that's they're just a lot better that's the fact they're a lot better maybe we can get lucky maybe we have a good game there's some variance in hockey but a lot of times it's like boy that's I don't really think we could have done with what we have here couldn't have done much and sometimes that's a fact and you could get really mad at yell at it and yell at everybody for not being better somehow but that's kind of pointless in my mind when I think I've faced a much better team I'm like well I'm gonna do my best I'm going to give it my all I'm not giving up never giving up I do my best do everything I can but I'm Not going to treat it like this was mine to win and if I didn't I'm a fucking idiot and so and I just did something stupid that's that's not what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with a conservative country coming off a horrible economic backdrop for us.

0:26:38 Thomas: That's just the New England Patriots from 2007 until the Super Bowl. That's not easy to win. That's non-easy to win this wasn't a question of oh we just did everything wrong it was fumbled it's like no we would have had to do everything right and then some. The easiest most trite thing in the world to me I'm so sick of it I'm so fucking sick of every election it's just that democrats they lost connect they don't their policies don't connect with the working man there's the elites they run the person they don'T care the bubble there's there's maybe a modicum of truth to that but again what is happening is people who don't ever hear the democrats message don't vote for them because they think economy equals republicans like that's honestly that's mostly what's happening here and what the other thing that's is happening is historically Latinos and black folks have been overwhelmingly Democrat because of Democrats being the lesser racist party, the party that's more interested in protecting their civil rights. But there's no reason to suspect, in fact, there's reason to expect the opposite, that black people and Latino people are like 90% liberal in their temperament and then their social politic. That's just not at all true. If anything, they may be more conservative than average, especially broad brush. I know this is a broad brush, but there's a high religiosity, there's social conservative. And I'm looking at polling numbers too, of just like self-identification and despite, you know, black people historically voting almost, you Know, like 90% Democrat, They don't identify as 90% liberal or anything. And so I think what's happened is over time, as Trump has normalized and as the media has sane washed him and as our memory has faded, I think there's a certain amount of, oh, plus, by the way, a healthy dose of sexism. I, I'm, gosh, I really am looking forward to reading those studies. Hopefully in several months, someone conducts a good study that tries to tease that apart and uses, you know, regression and all that to like isolate those variables and show that like, oh yeah, actually sexist attitudes do predict this change. I think that's going to be a big part of it. I think that's going to be a part of why certain groups broke so hard so fast, but maybe I'm wrong. I think that's part of it. I'm not saying that that's the only reason we lost in quotes, but I do think in close elections like all of ours are, that probably made the difference, to be honest with you. But I don't know, because I don't think Joe Biden could have won this either. So I don't know. Maybe that's wrong. It's hard to know for sure. Maybe, well, I was going to say maybe the sexism is overcome by people wanting to vote for women, but then I'm looking at the numbers and it's like, no, actually Harris did worse with women than Biden did, which is fucking crazy. But I guess people are kind of pricing in abortion now. They're not really voting on the basis of that. And well, I don't know. I guess they didn't with Biden either. We didn't necessarily know that Roe was going to be struck down before 2020. So yeah, I don't know. Anyway, looking at 2020 as the default and saying anything that went down from there was a failure of Kamala or the Democrats is incorrect.

0:30:12 Thomas: Here's something that I found really compelling. My first hint of it was on the CNN exit poll I mentioned, where I was kind of looking at stuff here and, you know, there's some interesting things. Then you see this question, voted for president mainly a for your candidate or be against their opponent. So when you look at this question, are people coming out to vote more against someone or for their candidate? And in 2020, Trump won that group by plus seven for, for your candidates. So more people were enthusiastic about their candidate. Then that makes sense because we're not a bunch of people wearing Biden hats and doing all that shit like that's to be expected. And in terms of voting against their opponent, Biden won that by 38 fucking points. That makes sense as well. Then you look to 2024 for your candidate, Trump made gains plus 11 against their opponent. Harris is at 23 from 38 to 23.

0:31:19 Thomas: Wow. That speaks more to not being scared of Trump enough anymore than it does to some failing of Kamala's. And when you tie that together with something here, I looked at this on AP. AP has a really fancy, this AP vote cast thing, I think is pretty useful. When you look at the issues that decided these elections, according to these, and they're not exactly exit polls. AP votecast is something more fancy than an exit poll, but I think it's good information here.

0:31:52 Thomas: 2024, nationally, we'll go national. It has the swing states broken out, but we'll look at national for now biggest issue as I already said economy 39 that's massive and that's a group that we know favors trump so already that's rough here's the second one 20 immigration so when this is the top issue that people are voting on and the top two that makes up 60 roughly is economy which we know is going to favor trump and immigration which is certainly going to favour trump because that issue is mainly made up. And when you look at the numbers of who voted where, the people who voted on the basis of immigration are overwhelmingly Trump. And then third is 11%, down to 11% is abortion. So that's going to be a Harris group. 8% healthcare, 7% climate, depressingly low on those. And that's nationally. When you look At the swing states, it's kind of even worse. But the economy was huge, was huge.

0:32:54 Thomas: Now, 2020, what's the number one issue? Oh, shit. Here's this giant balloon called COVID-19, 41%. And if people are voting on the basis of COVID-19, now, I suppose that could be people who were voting against the Democrats because of like, I don't know, vaccine mandates or something. But largely, I think those people are going to be an advantage for Biden. And they're voting on the basis of Trump's terrible handling of COVID. The economy was still second, 28%, but also back then people who were voting based on the economy actually favored Biden because the way it works is whoever's not in power thinks the other is ruining the economy. That's mainly how it is. And again, there's nothing we could exactly do about that broad trend that whoever's in power is going to be presumed to have a bad economy Pretty much no matter what. I mean, you look at a lot of the numbers and the economy is doing quite well. It's just inflation and the wage stagnation, meaningful ways it's doing badly, but not ways it's doing badly that aren't exactly the same with Trump anyway. Anyway, so when you look at that information and you look at COVID-19 being the massive, obviously, massive thing people are voting on in 2020, and that's not anywhere in 2024, it's not anyone's concern. Well, doesn't that maybe start to look like 2020 is the huge anomaly there? And honestly, I think that that passes sort of the smell test or whatever. When you look at how close that election was, I think, but for COVID-19, Donald Trump would have served a second term. Well, he's going to now, but I guess he would have already served it. And that's the way to more accurately look at this. You can't take what happened in 2020 as what should be the new default and anything departing from that is a failure of Democrats. There were a lot of people who went to the polls to vote against Donald Trump on COVID. We did not have that advantage this time. And to still come pretty close to be only $5 million off. By the way, by my projections, here's an important thing. By my projections Kamala is set to beat Trump's popular vote from 2020.

0:35:24 Thomas: That seems like something to know, right? That seems important. Like if the whole story is how, oh, she just fumbled it. She didn't show up. Well, no. No, Trump got 74 million votes, according to my projections, which I think are going to be pretty reasonably close. We can check them in a week.

0:35:44 Thomas: Kamala's on track to get about 76 million more votes than Trump in 2020.

0:35:50 Thomas: And by the way, back to the main thing that matters, Kamala gained in all the swing states combined. She lost in Michigan. She lost Pennsylvania. She lost votes from 2020. all five other swing states she gained votes once again the problem is trump gained way the fuck more votes to an astonishing degree so my question to you is what the fuck were we supposed to do anyone who just has that knee -jerk easy answer that usually is just well the elites of the party blah blah you know you're not like I don't want there to be the Nancy Pelosi's in the the Clintons and the whatever elites of the whatever. I am entirely in favor of the party becoming younger and less fucking rich. A hundred percent. I'm not saying those are good things. Are they the problem though? Would they have mattered?

0:36:49 Thomas: How were we to overcome this? If you think there was some easy answer that we just didn't do because, you know, Democrats are idiots or the elite are idiots. I just think you're wrong. I think you are simplistic in your understanding of this, and I think you're incorrect.

0:37:08 Thomas: What could we have done about the fact that inflation took hold early in Biden's term? What could he have done better? What could we've done better. I am hard pressed to think of what it would be. Maybe there's some super wonky policy thing that could have helped, but I think he managed it pretty well. And I think Kamala, if you were taking any sort of rational look at it, Kamala would be better suited to manage the economy than Trump. Just obviously so. Obviously so. And my point is, we need to figure out a way to get people to be voting more based on reality. Or in the alternative, we need you to just start doing what they're doing. And honestly, I have a lot of thoughts on this, but they almost may not matter because I don't know that we have a democracy after this. But like, honestly, here's my crazy galaxy brain thought. Bernie Sanders might have won this election.

0:38:15 Thomas: I've come full circle, full circle from 2016 and the Bernie Sanders would have won the election when I argued against those people. And how, I mean, it almost doesn't matter. It might have been true then as well, but it doesn't really matter because he couldn't have won in the primary. There's no way to, you can't like force someone to win the primary that they're not going to win. And then they, anyway, point is somebody, we need to stop. Well, is it worth getting into this? I don't even know. I have a million thoughts on this, but I, we don't, I don't know that it matters going forward because for one, when things are bad economically, as they pretty much always are because capitalism, um, negativity is going to rule and, and because of our social media, our news environment, because of how humans work, negativity is king. Negativity is easy. Negativity spreads. And so running against the system and against the status quo is going to have a massive advantage. And Democrats became not that Democrats became the guardians of the system in a way that just nobody cares about apparently nobody cares it's they're wrong they are wrong not to care this is the thing just so we all are on the same page here when I look at 2024 issues that decided the election and I see economy immigration abortion climate health care foreign policy and then a tiny dot called racism and nowhere in there is donald trump ruining our fucking democracy not even on the list people are wrong to not be worried about that they are incorrect but what the fuck do we do it's not as though they're just kind of not valuing it they're they're not it's Not on the List we can't get anyone to give a shit about that and if you think there's going to be some easy messaging fix we can do they're Not hearing our messages because they're either trumpers so they never care they're actually in favor of the killing democracy or they don't follow politics and don't hear the message anyway or they care much more about the economy I don't know so I think it's important to say that that's wrong they should be more worried about our democracy because we might be fucked forever because of this and being fucked forever is not worth uh oh let's spin the wheel and see if trump can bring change because things suck, so we need change. We just need change We don't need change for change's sake We don't need change just because Of the simple -minded reasoning that Well, things are bad now So therefore, if we go with any fucking clown With a hammer That'll be better, because it's change No, it's not better We need competent people Doing their best to steer the ship They're not going to be perfect They're our only chance And I haven't even gotten into the fact that nobody understands that if we lose the house by a single fucking seat, government stops. No one knows that. No one cares. They don't understand. They have the simple -minded thing of, well, Democrats are in power, Biden's president, so why can't he fix everything? He didn't fix everything, so he's bad at fixing things. Oh, that means we need a different person in there. That's what we need to fix. I have so many thoughts, but I don't, why bother? I don't know if we're there, but But they're along the lines of hammering home a simple, and Bernie is good at this, I think it's Bernie plus a little bit, hammer home a single three to four messages, just like points. Don't go crazy. We're always the nerds. We're all the overachievers of the class. Democrats, we always are. Nobody, nobody fucking cares. We can't, they can't manage it. They cannot, we're too busy. We're work to death. Say we, I can, but I like managing. I like thinking about this stuff. Most people, they're not, they can't, they need a simple message that you need to not, you actually need to overpromise. I'm serious. Trump overpromises by $11 trillion and no one cares. Doesn't matter. He promises the moon, the sun, the stars, everything. You're going to, it's going to be so great. Nobody cares. They don't care that he doesn't deliver. They Don't Care. There. We need to start over-promising. And then when we inevitably can't do anything because Republicans control something like the House or the Senate or whatever, we need to nonstop blame them all the time. We don't know if this opportunity will come up again, but if it ever does, that would be what we'd have to do. Can we do it? I don't fucking know. I don'T know. Because it would require a lot of coordination in ways that Democrats just don't seem to do, but hammering the shit out of like, hey, we want to pass a $30 minimum wage. It's ready to be signed. Why don't you right now, sir, have a $30 minimum wage? Ask the Republicans stopping it. It would need to be non-stop that kind of thing in unison across all our media all the time, or at least toward that direction. That's what we have to do to overcome the fact that we are the party of complicated

0:43:29 Thomas: Solutions to complicated problems in a time where there's attention to average attention span for this is five fucking seconds how are we supposed to do that how are you supposed to tell people when something is bad well no there's a complicated reason that it is that for now and if we can get a bunch of votes in the house and the senate we can win that and then maybe maybe we can do the overturn the filibuster and then then we can start trying to pass stuff and then And hopefully it'll be not struck down by all the Republican courts and probably would be, but like maybe then, maybe, maybe then it could make something slightly better that honestly. And here's the thing. That's the truth. That's reality. That's real.

0:44:18 Thomas: So we can't campaign on that. It's no, nobody cares except you and I.

0:44:25 Thomas: So what, what the fuck are we supposed to do in this day and age when no one has any attention span we're the complicated right answers people are trying to get the right answers and they're the party of what do you want you want a million dollars I'll write you a check right now right when I get an office million dollars you there sir you want the ladies to stop treating you like the incel you are well when I am in power then you you can I don't know what be mad about them still but it's just promising whatever and it's so much easier because things are so bad because of capitalism, because of the oligarchy, because of the fucking corrupt everything. That's just this vicious cycle. If things are bad, fixing it gets harder and harder and harder. There aren't easy fixes. And so explaining why they aren't fixed gets harder and harder. And meanwhile, the demagogues can just say, look at the, how they don't fix anything. And I think the only redeeming quality of that is if we still have elections, I think we can win in 2028 by just going all against the system and running as outsiders. But I don't know how we hold on to power. That's the hard thing. And that's where that plan of mine comes into play. I think blaming them all the time in tangible, specific ways, specific ways. All constant offense, constant offense. This is, we need, like, not really, really, but we kind of need the left version of Trump. I've, I've come almost around to that. Not, maybe that's not even worth saying. We need something like that, but here's the thing underlying it. I actually want substance. So I want us to campaign on fiction or, or just campaign as though we're going to be gods who get to do whatever. So forget all the being modest about like, well, the house, you know, we'll see if we get the, no promise everything we would do if we were a king and then when it doesn't happen specific blame for specific republicans or I guess the courts that's a hard that's that's heavy that's hard thing to do to get people to understand that specific non -stop and always offense fuck defense no one it doesn't matter anymore no one's listening to it no one's listening to you explain why oh no well okay okay, with the immigration, what we'll do is, no, just like all offense all the time and constantly hammer what, who, like the names, like who's actually, if it's Mike Johnson, Mike Johnson you want to know why you don't have a $30 minimum wage? Mike Johnson he won't let it, he won't bring it to a vote. He won't break it to vote or he voted down or whatever. All the time, everybody, all the time. That's our only chance in my mind. I mean, as of now, that's my best idea. I don't know. I'm open to other ideas. But also, I'm going to stop talking about that because I don't know if we have a democracy anymore. So here's my worry.

0:47:22 Thomas: Here's my one worry. Oh, by the way, did you see Steve Bannon was like, hey, 2025, everybody, Project 2025 is the agenda. Psych. And we were like, yeah, we weren't fooled ever. But, you know, one of here's here's the tiniest of silver linings of this whole setup. It isn't true that the majority of people want Trumpism and want what he's going to do. The majority of people, well, I shouldn't say majority. Most of these people who voted for him don't know what he is going to. They don't understand it or they don't stand out bad. They don't understand that literally steven miller like already is talking man this boy this is gonna be a tough time guys this is going to be really fucking tough he's already talking about mass deportations and mass deportation I mean that is that I I don't think I even understand how bad that's going to b and I've tried to understand how bad it's going b that that's that's awful that's really really awful I don' t think most most people understand it. I don't think they do. I think a lot of people want it. I don't think the all 79 million, roughly, that he might get votes, I don't think they all want it, for sure. If that's any comfort. It's not really, but it's slight comfort, because when they see it, I think they will, some of them will regret it, maybe. I do not think they want Project 20. Nobody wants Project 2025. I actually know that for sure, because, when you actually poll on it. It's hugely unpopular. And so again, we knew that Project 2025 was going to be the agenda. We were right. Trump said, nah, never heard of her. Don't know it. Who's that? And then a bunch of idiots either didn't never found out about it or didn't care. What could we have done? What could we have done? And if your answer is that, well, Kamala, they're not listening to her. They never hear her words. What the fuck more could we have done about that? We were perfectly right. I myself put out quite a bit on Project 2025 and Matt as well, of course, but also on our social media. We did some work on that. Olivia did great work on that. We were 100% right. We got the word out. We even got it to land quite a bit like people to the point where trump had to disavow it and then idiots were like oh that's that then or they don't care they never found out about it and day one of trump being basically the president -elect steve bannon's like yep that was it that was the agenda don't need to hide it anymore what what are we supposed to do about that how how can we easily so my question is are not my question. My point with these rhetorical questions is to just, let's just fucking ease up on ourselves. Let's just ease up on ourselves. Let's focus on the Nazis. Let's focus on the assholes who are doing this.

0:50:35 Thomas: Let's stop fighting. Let's just stop fighting what could we do you think your ideal candidate would have figured out a way to message to people who never hear it. Somehow they would have broken through? Maybe. I don't think so. Very skeptical. Very skeptical. We did everything right on Project 2025. I'm going to be so bold as to say I think we did just about everything we could, just to isolate that issue, to illustrate the point that there seems to be a lot of an attitude on the left that this is ours to lose. This should be easy because Trump is such an asshole idiot. And if we lose, we fucked up royally. Not, not just fucked up. Like this was so easy. It's always so easy that we're comically inept. We're, we're desperately inept if we lose. I'm here to tell you that's not true.

0:51:29 Thomas: This was a very difficult election to win. Very difficult. The more I look at it, the more I don't, I don't like, I, I look at those swing state numbers that I told you, and I see the gains that Kamala made over Over an already record -breaking turnout in 2020, she made gains in all seven, sorry, on average in all seven states, but in five of the seven states she's on pace to have made gains over Biden. Without COVID-19 to run on. That's impressive. That is a good campaign. I don't know what to fucking tell you. That's amazing. And the rest of the states where she lost all the votes, they don't fucking matter. Texas, we weren't winning. Florida, we were not winning. Ohio, Ohio. We weren't with California. We lost a million.

0:52:15 Thomas: California probably lost nearly 700,000 votes, but it didn't make a difference. We were already winning it. So it's like New York, New Jersey. That's where she lost a bunch of votes. That didn't, I mean, it matters for house races and stuff. It's, I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying when you're looking for what caused the loss, those votes did not cause the presidential loss.

0:52:40 Thomas: Anyway. All right. I think at this point, I've said what I came to say. I don't, I, sorry that this is unedited and a little raw, but I'm just trying to get it out because I mainly, most importantly, can you please correct people who say 15 million Democrats didn't show up? It's, it's just so fucking stupid. It's so frustrating. Talk about uninformed. And again, that's the people who are supposed to be the more informed people. They're like, yeah, 15 million Democrats didn't show up. Kamala lost them. Shut up. All right. Anyway. Oh, I didn't even say my, my biggest worry. Here's my biggest worry.

0:53:15 Thomas: In 2017, we were largely protected in a lot of ways by an anti-Trump backlash. There was so much energy. Boy, you know what's fucking crazy right now? We are going to be pining for the days of 2017.

0:53:37 Thomas: I'm just realizing that as I say that, I realize it's true. Because right now, we're fucking exhausted. And I worry that we're too too exhausted. We're too fatalist. We're too beaten down by what's happened. I don't, we're not going to have the pink hat March. We're not going to have, you know, we're not gonna have the Women's March. We're, no, I mean, this is my worry. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we can, that's our job. We got to get our energy up. We have to more than ever, because now there's no rules anymore. He's going to have every, I, they keep saying we could win the house. I don't see it. I don't, I could be, I haven't gone into detail, so I don't want to make a big claim there. At a glance, I don't understand how we could still win the House. We're like four seats behind where we'd need to be. But I guess if they're still counting California votes forever and somehow those turn around, maybe, like, I guess. I donno. But, I'm assuming we're losing the House and so there's no check on Trump whatsoever. He's got the Supreme Court. We're going to need the boots on the ground counter backlash to Trump more than 2017 by far, and we will have so much less of it is my fear. So that's our job, everyone. We got to find a way to not give up. We got find a ways to not pre-beat ourselves down. We have to do it. We have make a big fucking deal about the things Trump does. Us make a big gigantic fucking deal about the things he does and I'm going to do what I can to inform you about those things and you do what you can to inform me and everybody else as well

0:55:22 Thomas: Because we're a big team here and that there's no other option the other option is we just let a bunch of trans people die that's the other off would you get we give up we let a bunch of families be torn apart and depart deported this they might still happen but we're not going to let it happen. If we give up and provide no resistance to these things, then are we any better than the people who don't care that it's happening? Effectively, no. So thank you so much for listening. I hope this was helpful. I really, truly, from the bottom of my heart, I love you guys. I love your folks. I know that we have this space still. I worry it's shrinking because of a burnout. I really, I've seen so many comments today about like people taking breaks, burnout. I get it. And obviously if you're doing that, you're not hearing this anyway. I get it. So I guess, thank you. If you're hearing this, thank you for staying with it. Um, I'm all, I'm all ears. Lydia's all ears, Matt's all ears. We love your feedback. We want to, we want to work together. We want to figure this out together.

0:56:36 Thomas: All right. Thank you so much for listening. Let's get Get to work.