Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Astead Herndon:

Some of this was politics and it was exposing how insider politics is just completely distinct and frankly disconnected from the public input. And I think that was really obvious to a lot of the public, at least the folks we were talking to.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Astead Herndon. He’s a national politics reporter at the New York Times and host of the politics podcast, The Run-Up. Herndon’s been covering the key issues that shaped the 2024 election for years, talking to real voters about what’s happening in the country, their lives, and how it impacted their decisions at the polls. Now, like the rest of us, he’s making sense of what drove a majority of voters to reelect Donald Trump and just as importantly how the Democrats lost a once loyal constituency, the working class. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions. So it’s now been a little over a week since Donald Trump was elected president for the second time. And since then you might imagine we’ve gotten a lot of questions from listeners wondering what’s going to happen with all the pending cases against him. So let’s talk about a few of those.

This question comes in a tweet from Abbie who writes, “What happens with the appeal of the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the validity in that circuit of Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel? Is there any chance Cannon’s decision can be overruled before the case is wound down / ended?” So that’s a great question and I think it’s not possible to know for sure. If you’ll recall by way of background, the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case was dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon back in July of this year on the grounds that the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel was unconstitutional under a couple of different provisions of the Constitution, the consensus of experts, myself included, if I can call myself an expert, thought that that decision was an outlier and incorrect, and liable to be overturned by an appellate court.

So Jack Smith, believing the same presumably appealed the decision in August, and that’s been pending before the appeals court in that part of the country, the 11th Circuit ever since. In response to Jack Smith’s appeal, the Trump team filed their brief and Jack Smith has a reply brief that’s due this week. Also, this week we learned that Jack Smith is preparing to wind down his cases against Donald Trump, finish his duties and responsibilities and obligations, and step down from office before Trump takes office himself on January 20th and as he has promised fires Jack Smith in two seconds.

That still leaves your question, if the appeal is still pending when Trump takes office on January 20th, you would imagine that he would direct his Justice Department or his Justice Department on its own would make the argument that the appeal is now moot. It doesn’t need to be decided because the sitting president can’t be prosecuted. So why decide that case? There’s still a number of weeks between now and January 20th. It’s possible, I guess, that a panel of the 11th Circuit may still want to very quickly rule either in favor of or against the underlying ruling. It’s also possible that Jack Smith may not press the matter and may decide not to file a brief as he winds down his work.

Now, one could ask the question, why does it matter? What is the point of the 11th Circuit ruling one way or the other? And I suppose that in the longer term it could matter. It could have an impact. In the shorter term, meaning during the course of Trump’s presidency, if the 11th Circuit held that the lower court decision was correct and that the special counsel was unconstitutional, that’s favorable to Donald Trump. It’s a blow to the special counsel position, not just Jack Smith, but the special counsel generally, and he would be an advocate for that. That would align with his views, align with his Justice Department.

If on the other hand the lower court decision is overruled and it was decided that the dismissal was an error and that Jack Smith was properly appointed, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans really because Jack Smith will already have been gone. And you can imagine that the likelihood of there being some other special counsel like Bob Mueller or Jack Smith during four years of a Justice Department whose leaders are appointed by Donald Trump is basically zero.

So that analysis I just mentioned goes for the prospect of a special counsel who might or might not be appointed to investigate Donald Trump. That’s not going to happen during a Trump presidency. I guess on the other hand, there is this possibility consistent with Trump’s promises and encouragement of the prosecution of other people, including his political adversaries like Jack Smith himself would he direct his own department to do that or would he suggest, or would the department itself under his supervision decide for their purposes that such retaliatory cases and investigations should be done by a special counsel?

In which case, I guess you could make that we’re getting very, very far ahead of ourselves and far afield now. You could make the argument that even in the perverse world in which Donald Trump wants to pursue vendettas against people through a weaponized Justice Department, it might be useful to have a special counsel. I think at the end of the day, if he pursues such things, he’s not going to want that to be done by someone who has putative independence and separation from the department. If he’s going to weaponize the department, he’s going to weaponize the department.

Here’s another question sort of related about Jack Smith that comes in an email from Jane who writes, “I’m a dedicated fan of CAFE Insider and I thank you for all the work you do.” Thank you, Jane. “Do you think Biden should preemptively pardon Jack Smith and others that may be a target of the Trump DOJ? Is there a downside to doing so?” Thank you, Jane. That’s sort of an interesting speculative question in a season during transition of speculative questions that are coming fast and furious to people’s minds, some of which are coming to us at the podcast.

And now as an initial threshold legal matter, the preemptive pardon is not unlawful, is not unconstitutional and is not unprecedented. The most famous example, of course is when Gerald Ford, President Gerald Ford took the White House. He pardoned Richard Nixon. And people forget that Nixon had yet to be charged with anything, federal crime, state crime, local crime, and that was a preemptive pardon and that was accepted and that was widely understood to be legitimate and proper.

Now, the weird thing in your question is what on earth would President Biden be pardoning Jack Smith for? Now, it’s not necessary as the Ford pardon of Nixon demonstrates. I believe that the pardon has to specify which violation of which statute is being pardoned. Presumably to persist in your hypothetical for another moment, Biden could say that Jack Smith and his team are hereby pardoned for all potential crimes and misdemeanors arising from their work as special counsel. And that would cover sort of everything and you’ll have to identify a particular statute.

It’s a little bit of an odd thing to do. It’s very speculative. I think it risks causing an impression in people’s minds that there’s something actually meritorious about an investigation in prosecution of Jack Smith, which I don’t believe there is. So it’s an interesting question, but I don’t think it’ll happen and I don’t think it should happen. I will be right back with my conversation with Astead Herndon.

THE INTERVIEW

New York Times reporter, Astead Herndon has been tracking the lead up to the presidential election. Now he’s breaking down what went wrong for the Democrats. Astead Herndon, welcome back to the show.

Astead Herndon:

Thank you. I appreciate you having me.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s very upbeat response. That’s not the kind of response I’ve been getting from my Democratic friends and colleagues in the last week.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. I mean, well, I am not the Democratic friend or colleague. I am a journalist-

Preet Bharara:

Well, I also have not…

Astead Herndon:

… whose work would’ve continued either way.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I restate and say I’ve not been getting that kind of response from journalists either. Not because they’re partisan, because it’s just been a week.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah, no, it certainly has. I mean, I think maybe sleep-wise I haven’t had my best week of work.

Preet Bharara:

Sleep-wise, it’s not a pretty great week.

Astead Herndon:

Other than that we’re doing all right.

Preet Bharara:

Well, how much sleep do you think you’re going to get the next four years?

Astead Herndon:

That depends on what I do. So I guess I… That’s partly a tie question because I think some of this might be so, so disruptive if you ask bigger questions.

Preet Bharara:

Well, we were thinking… I shouldn’t spring this on our listeners who tune in for particular subject matter, but we were thinking about changing this to a horticulture podcast. I don’t know if we would lose listenership or gain. Maybe we’d gain a lot of listeners. We could talk about politics through metaphor maybe.

Astead Herndon:

After the 2020 election, I was on the road so much, I told myself that whatever I did next I was going to make sure to have a bunch of plants in my apartment because they would at least force me to come back and tend to something. And I am glad that through the 2024 cycle, all 12 of my plants are still thriving.

Preet Bharara:

Well, so I will now reveal what I said to you when you were on camera briefly before we started recording this conversation. I said, “Are you outside?” You’re like, “No, that’s just a plant.” That I’m such a city person that I see a man in front of a plant and I assume you must be outdoors.

Astead Herndon:

It’s very funny.

Preet Bharara:

Bad assumption. Maybe that makes me bad at a lot of kind of analysis and I should leave it to other folks. So here’s a question for you before we get to sort of analysis of the election a week out, which is a good enough period of time that we can act like historians and say, “This is exactly what happened. And here the reasons why the Democrats lost and how they might’ve won.” My question is one of process. So you’re a journalist and these are the questions on people’s minds and this is the beat that you cover in part. How do you come about your conclusions during this past week? Do you sit and reflect? Do you take a walk? Do you talk to other journalists? Do you read particular people? Do you meditate on it? A combination of those things? Or what do you find most helpful in trying to understand what happened politically?

Astead Herndon:

Well, that’s a good question. I mean, I think it starts way before election night. So I think that for me, if I was drawing conclusions just based on the map of the results, then I don’t know how I would have any confidence in that. That’s just the kind of analysis that I think anybody can do from anywhere. What I try to do is speak to things that have been built on our scope of reporting efforts, which has been unique. We’ve been building to this for the last couple years and we did a very intentional focus to prioritize the electorate and prioritize hearing voices in battleground states.

I mean, I think that we were in some of these places asking people about the race a year and a half ago. And so, so much of what I think have… the analysis that’s flown out of the last week or the things I saw on election night are really built from that. So I guess more so than talking to other journalists, it’s just been the process of reporting along the way that I’ve been doing for our podcast, The Run-up and it’s been pretty public. So I guess I feel confident in that I’ve kind of shown my work in this process and that hopefully would allow whatever kind of analysis or conclusion I’m providing to be one that’s based out of reporting and fact than just based off of personal projection.

Preet Bharara:

You had a lot of preparation. Can I test that for a second?

Astead Herndon:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Did you predict this result?

Astead Herndon:

No, but I wasn’t really trying to.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I guess, all I’m asking is did all of that work, the preparatory work and the reporting and the researching, and the conversations you had, how did they feed into the final conclusion if they didn’t sort of portend this result? And maybe that’s a bad question.

Astead Herndon:

Well, I think that you… I mean before the result, I think the type of work we were doing can help explain why people ended up making a choice they made no matter which one it did. So I think that if you highlight slices of the electorate and then you see how their choices ends up lining up, you can go back to the ways that you talk to those people to have pointed to that choice, period. But I guess I’m saying broader than that, the fundamental story we learned from election day is one of Democratic Party’s popularity, is one of rejection of the administration, is one where folks have prioritized things like inflation and immigration over other things.

And those were certainly things we had talked to people about over and over and over. And so I guess it’s like whether Trump won, it is less important than how he won. And the how he won is definitely something that I think our workers has spoken to. And I guess I don’t think that that’s that controversial. I think we can point to direct episodes of the exact states that say those things.

Preet Bharara:

No, we’re going to get to all sorts of things. And you said a lot of interesting things over the last week that I want to ask you about. Did you get taken in by that Iowa poll in that last weekend and believe it was going to go a different way? I don’t mean to gang up on her, but boy, that turned out to be wrong.

Astead Herndon:

Again, and I think this goes back to how I think about polling because no one individual poll is going to change my mind in a huge way. So I guess what I saw in the Selzer poll, which was true in other things and definitely was scenario kind of won for if Democrats were to win, was a coalition of women and prioritization of abortion rights that the Harris campaign was banking on. So I took that poll as maybe a sign that that was kind of gelling together particularly in neighboring Midwesterny blue wall states. And that didn’t end up to be true.

But I guess it was only one piece of evidence that was already lining up with the scenario we could have seen. And so I guess I was more… I’m one of the people who believes in polls, which I know was like a hot topic this year.

Preet Bharara:

But not that poll.

Astead Herndon:

But not that poll. I believe in polling aggregates. I believe in statistical models to point us to the possible scenarios. And so what I was going into election day thinking is reading the Times polling, reading Nate Silver’s stuff and being like, “Yeah, there’s a chance that all of these things break one way. There’s a chance all of them break another way.” And the abortion led kind of Selzer scenario was option two. And I think what played out was option one.

Preet Bharara:

The thesis behind the Selzer poll seemed very credible and it had worked in 2022. The problem was, as people have pointed out, and I wonder if you agree with this, that in that off year, that midterm year anger about abortion was one thing, but Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot. And Donald Trump being on the ballot changed everything, right?

Astead Herndon:

Oh, absolutely. But there were signs that the extrapolations from the midterms were one-to-one with the presidential in the first place. Part of the work we were doing in early 2023 was about how Democrats were consolidating around Joe Biden after the midterms. And in doing so, I remember doing an episode where we took this direct question to Nate Cohn, the Times chief polling analyst and was like, “It’s so clear that Democrats are taking the midterms as a justification for their electoral course in the presidential.”

He did a whole thing about how wrong that was, about how the types of people who vote in presidential races are completely different, how there’s a lot of evidence that Donald Trump himself changes things. And so while the thesis could turn out to be true, the certainty in which they were moving was one that was not backed with evidence. We were doing that in 2023. And so I’m saying the fact that it has turned out to be an electorate that did not match up with the midterms map that the strategy did not map up was always part of the risk calculus. And so it was always mind-blowing to me that what you heard from Democrats was basically a certainty that things would move in the way that they did, and they were sure things were going to break late in their direction and things like that.

And I’m like that’s just placing a lot of chips in a basket you’re not acknowledging is not as stable as you’re presenting. That informed a lot of our work early last year too. And I think as you look at the map, obviously that turns out to be true.

Preet Bharara:

Some people have the view, and I may even agree with them, but I’m still sorting through it, that you can simultaneously believe that Kamala Harris in the abbreviated campaign that she had the opportunity to run did a pretty flawless job. Happy warrior, got all her ducks in a row, got all the allies behind her. There was no bloodbath. There was a lot of unity. There was a lot of joy, et cetera, et et cetera. And that still she was doomed to fail. And there are other people who have the view that she could have done something differently. Which is the better view?

Astead Herndon:

I would say I believe both, I think. I guess, I think the biggest thing-

Preet Bharara:

You’re hedging today, man.

Astead Herndon:

I’m not. I don’t think the biggest thing that happens in this race happened in the last three months.

Preet Bharara:

Right. No, no, I totally agree with you.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah, so I guess I’m saying I will always start from-

Preet Bharara:

And the seeds were sown before.

Astead Herndon:

… that Harris was a reflection of a structural democratic problem of not listening to their base and to the evidence. So if we take that-

Preet Bharara:

Was there any way for her to… No, I totally agree with that. In some liberal positions, people argue she took… Previously she couldn’t shed. But given the world as it was inherited by her, when the campaign started in earnest, was there something she could have done differently and won? I don’t think so.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. I don’t take that view. I don’t take that Democrats were always going to lose. And I think that’s because it goes back to what I’m saying before, kind of like a one-trick pony here, but I think that the-

Preet Bharara:

We’ll find a second trick.

Astead Herndon:

… administration was madly unpopular and what she could have done in the last three months was make a more explicit break from that and to chart out more clearly the new way forward that she said she represented. That is not really what they did.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a risk of hypocrisy there. It’s a tough balance, isn’t it?

Astead Herndon:

Why?

Preet Bharara:

Well, you wake up one day and like now I’m the nominee and now I’m going to do everything differently from Joe Biden. I’m trying to think, what would’ve been the breaks with Joe other than…

Astead Herndon:

Or in Gaza.

Preet Bharara:

I think almost most importantly, I’m younger. I’m going to continue to be young.

Astead Herndon:

No, the biggest break would’ve been the war in Gaza. The biggest break would’ve been a different tone on economy and inflation. I mean there were lots of options. And the break she basically chose was to say, “I’ll be more Republican.” The break she chose was to say, “I’ll be more open to business and Silicon Valley.” That’s a campaign strategy choice. I guess I don’t start there as the reason they lost as some of the, I think progressive side has been saying over the last week or so.

But I definitely think that some of the energy from the DNC tapered off by the time you got to election day and things like youth vote ends up being a place where they do much worse than Democrats previously, partially because they failed to live up to their own standard of charting a new way forward. I remember being on CNN after her initial interview with Dana Bash after they hyped up, after she wouldn’t do an interview. And so the first one got hyped up so much.

It was clear that they understood finally, finally after two years of denial that this was a change election, right?

That’s how she was speaking, and she was saying that she represented that in terms of identity, in terms of new generation, things like that. All of those are just stylistic changes. And what they never did was embrace a substantive change. They embraced an actual material change that spoke to the reasons why folks were upset with the last four years in the first place. So in my opinion, that’s the biggest thing they could have done in the last three months to have spoken to the fundamental fact of this race, which was the party’s unpopularity and the desire for change among the electorate.

So if when they didn’t do that, this became Trump versus anti-Trump. That’s all the tools they really decided to play. I guess to me, I’m like, I don’t think she definitely was going to lose the whole time. I don’t think Donald Trump is some insurmountable electoral lion. I don’t think the majority of people who broke in his direction actually agree with the majority of his ideology or the ways he has promised to reshape government. I don’t think it’s a full endorsement of his kind of policy positions or vision. I really think it was a rejection of right now, and Democrats made a lot of bad choices that made them the faces of right now.

Preet Bharara:

One of those bad choices was persisting with Joe Biden too long. Right?

Astead Herndon:

That was the fundamental flaw, fundamental mistake was his decision to run for reelection, the party consolidation behind him, the shutdown of anybody who talked about a primary or even debates for him. All of that that led to the crisis after the first debate, more than even just wasting time, more than not having a primary to allow them to recalibrate positions from 2019 when the party was way too liberal.

All of those things could have happened if they would’ve had a normal process. But more than anything, I think it undercut the urgency of the message. They were so sure that Donald Trump will be inherently unelectable, inherently invalid because of January 6th because of the legal problems, things like that. But the thing we heard on the road most clearly, the reason people were most willing to dismiss that was for a year they were saying, “Well, I don’t want Biden either.” Right?

Their actions of Democrats undercut the urgency of their message because for some people, a lot of people, the reelection premise of Biden was so absurd. It belied the premise of an urgent democracy on the line, election. And they should have acted like democracy was on the line from the start.

Preet Bharara:

Are there people in the Democratic Party either supporters, donors, activists, who today believe, who’ve you’ve spoken to or heard about who today believe that Biden could have won and the Democrats should not have switched to Kamala Harris?

Astead Herndon:

I haven’t heard that from anybody except-

Preet Bharara:

Okay, good.

Astead Herndon:

… I’ve read it from nuclear-

Preet Bharara:

Like Jill Biden.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah, like the insular Biden world. I haven’t read a person who does not have financial and personal ties to Joe Biden ever say that.

Preet Bharara:

Have you heard anybody… So same question, different… I mean, same constituency I’m talking about. Are you aware of people or have talked to people on the Democratic side who are of the view that a lot of reflection and postmortems are not necessary because the election went the way it went because their fellow citizens are largely racist and misogynist?

Astead Herndon:

Yes, I’ve heard that more than Biden.

Preet Bharara:

So what do you make of that and those people? Who are they?

Astead Herndon:

Well, I think it’s a type of liberal who has collapsed their entire political worldview into these kind of identity markers over the last several years. And I guess I want to start by saying it obviously.

Preet Bharara:

Do they live in Plato’s cave or something?

Astead Herndon:

I guess I’m saying… Well, I don’t want to dismiss it fully, right? Racism and sexism are-

Preet Bharara:

Totally. I’m sorry. Just to be clear, the question I’m asking is not whether those factors played a role, but whether or not the appropriate responses, we don’t need to do any reflecting, we don’t need to do any postmortem, we don’t need to do any changing because this was overdetermined by racism and misogyny.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah, I guess that explanation leads me to say, “Well, one, are you just going to run white men over and over again?” Is the only view of how Democrats win, one in which there’s no person of color or woman at the ticket? I don’t think that’s the lesson for the last four years. I think Democrats have run a lot of races with people of color, with women. And I think the presidential election was winnable. I also think that we should remember in 2019, Joe Biden used that same type of electability framework to position himself as the only one who could beat Donald Trump.

So many of the people, alive voters I talked to leading into that primary who would say, “Oh, I want someone who is electable.” We’re basically only saying they wanted a white guy or someone who would be free of the racism misogyny attacks. And so there are impacts to this type of language, but it’s not impacts that lead to a more diverse democratic bench or candidates that can break through.

It actually benefits the same type of people, I think a lot of the Democratic base is frustrated with. The other thing I would say is racism and sexism didn’t just matter from a voter perspective on last Tuesday. I think to me, a huge impact of racism and sexism that we saw was the treatment of Democrats to Kamala Harris as she was assuming the role of VP in the first couple of years. And the reporting I did last year on a profile about the vice president, I was asking the administration, “Did you do anything differently because a Black woman was in this role? Did you think about setting her up differently? Did you think you had to set her up as the next leader of the party and there had to be more intentional steps taken?”

But no, they were still citing Al Gore. They were still citing Joe Biden when he was in the White House. There was a refusal to see the impacts of how racism and sexism could matter on this person differently and move differently with that in mind. And so all I’m saying is I don’t like it when people say, “Oh, nothing could have happened because the voters wouldn’t have accepted a Black woman.” But I think that’s a very reductive view of how this has worked.

Racism and sexism impacted the way she was seen, at least even initially, the way even some of Biden White House and other Democrats treated her. I have to say, as someone who reported on her, I had never heard Democrats more willing to shit on a national political figure in private to a reporter than I heard Democrats willing to talk massive about Kamala Harris. Never. And I think that is a big racism and sexism impact. I think that that created an ecosystem where even before she was the Democratic nominee, before they needed her, she was someone who was an easy punching bag.

If we’re going to acknowledge the voter side of the coin, we should also acknowledge how Democrats themselves fueled some of the narratives that voters ended up latching onto.

Preet Bharara:

You’re going to get a lot of mail about this.

Astead Herndon:

And I say, I do not care.

Preet Bharara:

You heard that. He doesn’t care. You made another statement and comment about racism that is very interesting. You said on The Daily, I’ve never heard of that podcast. I don’t know what that is. Some small outfit somewhere. “We’ve actually had a lot of evidence to say that the demographic destiny undertone is one that is a faulty premise. The fact that they’re holding onto the Obama era, in my opinion, is a racist assumption.” What’d you mean by that?

Astead Herndon:

It’s so funny how much I’ve had to explain this.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s interesting.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. I’m happy to, I think back to-

Preet Bharara:

And by the way, my goal here is to make sure that your inbox is as full as possible.

Astead Herndon:

Listen, I think that this is an important point because sometimes I really don’t want to absolve liberals of their own culpability here.

Preet Bharara:

We’re going to get into the liberal in a moment.

Astead Herndon:

I think that when I think about the… This is honestly… This is back where The Run-Up started. Our first episode was about the 2016 election and how a set of political assumptions had everyone believing Donald Trump couldn’t win. And the core of those assumptions was a belief in demographic destiny that came out of Obama’s two wins. The obvious idea that because America was growing in its numbers of black Latino, Asian-Americans, the country was getting more diverse. That meant the Democrats were going to win, that Republicans cannot win things like the popular vote anymore. So that’s what I was dealing with.

So I think what we have now because Trump won the popular vote and in way and the kind of manner in which he made improvements across demographic groups, specifically with working class, people of color, specifically with some black and Latino men, I think there’s a recognition now that that idea was wrong, that there at least that idea was too simple and that the ultimate belief was just too certain.

And all I’m saying to the point to the why I called it racist is when we think about what we have learned in that eight years, we are basically saying that we have learned that country of origin matters. When you’re talking about Latinos. We have learned that black people have difference in experience based on class. We’ve learned that whether or not you go to college, informs your outlook on this world. Those are basic learnings. Those are so obvious.

And I think the only reason, there was a political class that did not understand that the growing number of people did not have the same views, that the growing number of people, you could not extrapolate the experience of Mexicans to Latinos broadly, or you can’t extrapolate the way that African-Americans vote in big democratic numbers to people of color largely, I guess my question is why did you ever think that extrapolation was true?

These are different people from different places. It’s the difference between saying the words, Black people aren’t a monolith or X group is not a monolith, and actually moving with that in mind. And so all I’m saying is for it to be such a lesson that political insiders are taking from this, a lesson that required Donald Trump is to me, a reflection of their own insular view of people of color. It’s a reflection of how distant these communities are from the parties and the people who make a lot of the choices. Because if they had a smidge of connection to these places, they would know these basic facts about these folks.

It’s not that deep. We were in El Paso talking to people who live there, and they were like, “I don’t get why they call us Latino voters. I do not feel any collective group with these other people.” Right? I’m saying folks have articulated that for themselves.

Preet Bharara:

Well, what about should they be called Latinx voters?

Astead Herndon:

I’m saying this that is even further down the path. And so I’m saying, but don’t just say it is a small group of academic progressives or whatever. I think it has been core to the belief framework of Democrats that these groups will prioritize their racial identity over everything else. And my question to them is why did they believe that?

Preet Bharara:

Do we need better political scientists on the left?

Astead Herndon:

I don’t know about that. I don’t even think it requires political science. I’m like, “Have you met a person who didn’t go to college?” It doesn’t even require political scientists. It just requires getting out of your own bubble.

Preet Bharara:

You’re not going to get angry. So you’re avoiding getting angry mail from the political scientists.

Astead Herndon:

I have no beef with political scientists.

Preet Bharara:

I think you’ve been captured by political scientists, as they say. I’m going to read you a quote from a tweet from Congressman Ritchie Torres the morning after the election. Ritchie Torres represents one of the poorest districts in the country in New York City, in the Bronx, and he wrote, “Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like defund the police or from the river to the sea, or Latinx. There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world. The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.”

A, do you have any comment on that? B, do you find that that is a small minority view among Democrats? A broader view? Is it a big view on the part of Republicans? And are you aware of any reaction to that commentary?

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. I mean, it’s what I expect from kind of Ritchie Torres and that-

Preet Bharara:

What does that mean?

Astead Herndon:

Well, I’m saying there is a lane of house Democrat in particular, and I think a lot of members of Congress use these results to justify their own ideological framework. Ritchie Torres has been kind of banging the drum that the “far left antisemitism is turning off big swaths of people from the Democratic Party.” I mean, to be honest, every side of that issue could look at the results and say that. You could look at Dearborn and make the opposite argument. And so I guess it’s less about [inaudible 00:34:45]

Preet Bharara:

You don’t buy it?

Astead Herndon:

I don’t really buy it. I do think the kind of stench of 2020s language has lasted on Democrats. And so that’s not just defund though.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, the stench of which language? Defund the police?

Astead Herndon:

Yes, but I’m saying it’s not just that. I think 2019 and 2020 was a year in which the leading conversation of the Democratic primary and a lot big parts of the general election because of the pandemic, the conversation was led by a insular, liberal, nonprofit academic class. And I do think that particularly in that time, that was who was kind of setting an agenda items for Democrats.

Preet Bharara:

Well, who gave them the keys to the car.

Astead Herndon:

And I think that’s a fair argument, right? There was never the Democratic Party more so than there was a bunch of figures who Democrats were kind of co-mingling with, right? It’s not like you ever had a wide group of Democrats saying, “We should defund the police.” But for a while you did have a bunch of Democrats who kind of were sympathetic to cultural figures saying that as they said something, as they said, “We should rethink policing.” And so I’m saying that kind of footsie moment has lasted, and I think it’s on a range of issues, not just defund, but I don’t think what… We should acknowledge the rest of what he’s saying is completely wrong. I don’t think that Kamala Harris ran a particularly progressive campaign. I don’t think that she

Preet Bharara:

In ’24?

Astead Herndon:

In ’24. I don’t think-

Preet Bharara:

But do you think she ran an overly progressive campaign in 2020?

Astead Herndon:

I think the party was overly… And I don’t like using just progressive in a broad sense. I think the party was specifically focused on a cultural language that appealed to a small group of people in 2020. And I think that was true of a lot of people. So I’m saying the impact of not having a primary in 2024 is that we would see this issue as much bigger than Kamala Harris individually because of this. The entire Democratic Party needed to reset with the country from where it last was, which was a primary that was being led by the Ford Foundation, fundamentally. And so-

Preet Bharara:

You’re going to get mail from Darren Walker.

Astead Herndon:

So I’m saying Ford Foundation does good stuff, but I’m saying the Ford Foundation-

Preet Bharara:

Who’s been on the show, is a friend of the pod.

Astead Herndon:

This is not an insult on the work that they do.

Preet Bharara:

How many email addresses do you have?

Astead Herndon:

This is just me saying that the lens in which that primary was led by is not where Democrats want to be. That’s not the electorate. And so what a primary would’ve done was allow them to reset, because I do think the way that Harris flip-flopped or it got described as Harris flip-flopping from 2019 to now is basically a whole party thing. She’s more of a weathervane than she is like a policy leader. And so all I’m saying is the whole party has shifted on immigration. The whole party has shifted on how they talk about trans kids. The whole party doesn’t say Latinx anymore.

And so there was a way that they could have laid that out for the public, and it had been a whole shift back to a center that then flowed into the general election. But they robbed themselves of that by doubling down on Joe Biden. And so I definitely think that if there’s anything I agree with from the Torres tweet, it’s that the people’s last memory of Democrats was a quote-unquote, “too woke” primary of four years ago. I think that’s probably true, and I just think that they could have done something else to stop that.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Astead Herndon after this. Can we talk about attitude and tone? Because that I think is bound up with culture. A lot of people have said on the Trump side, people who voted for Trump who weren’t necessarily enamored of Trump that what really gets them is the utter condescension of the left. And the way in which folks on the left are dismissive of them, seem to have no respect for them, don’t view them as fellow citizens, and it riles them up. And it’s not a good way to be. And there’s an arrogance to the positions on the left. Is there any truth in your view?

Astead Herndon:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

Go for it.

Astead Herndon:

If you don’t think that’s true, I don’t think-

Preet Bharara:

Is that the truest thing that we’ve discussed so far?

Astead Herndon:

Yeah, the easiestly true thing. I think-

Preet Bharara:

Wait, I’m sorry. And by the way, because I think you said something very smart and perceptive that I don’t hear a lot of people saying, which is when I ask a broad question like that, who are we talking about? Are we talking about actual elected officials or are we talking about these other folks on the democratic and liberal side with whom elected officials are playing footsie?

Astead Herndon:

And that’s a real problem for Democrats. A lot of the stuff that they end up being tagged with is not from politicians.

Preet Bharara:

Senator Schumer for whom I worked and who is still for a few more days, senate majority leader doesn’t talk in the ways that we’re discussing and potentially critiquing.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah, absolutely. And so I do think that that conflation has to be talked about or called out, and I think Democrats have gotten a little… They’ve gotten a little better at it, but I would say they should remember… I remember when… I don’t know. I don’t know why this is the day I think about, but in 2020, in peak George Floyd post-foolishness, like in Black Square era time when people were doing that day of white silence where white people need to pass the mic to people of color to speak on their issues. Do you remember this day?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Astead Herndon:

Yes. I remember this day. I remember Elizabeth Warren.

Preet Bharara:

I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to speak or not.

Astead Herndon:

See, that’s the foolishness with it.

Preet Bharara:

I was in Twilight Zone.

Astead Herndon:

I hated this whole era. For the record, this is not someone who is looking back and then blaming 20… You can go back to what I was doing at the time. I was yelling, “This is stupid. This is so dumb.” But anyway, I was saying I remembered it was a lot of Democratic politicians.

Preet Bharara:

Adding to your inbox.

Astead Herndon:

I remember a lot of Democratic politicians doing stuff like that. So that’s what I’m saying is like was the time that conflated those lines. But I don’t think they’re doing much of that anymore. And I honestly know that a lot of the Democratic-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, because they got their butt kicked.

Astead Herndon:

And a lot of Democratic politicians took the lesson… Or even Joe Biden’s winning of that primary as a sign that they didn’t get a ton of return from that type of stuff. But to your point about Liberals, let’s do a different non-race example. The two years of telling people that inflation and their concern about rising prices was wrong because actually economic indicators were good, and they were so confident in that, they wanted to give it a fancy nickname and just tell people, and wait for their minds to change. That’s what I’m talking about. No, that was a choice that-

Preet Bharara:

We talked about that a lot in the podcast. I mean, the idea is the price of butter went up. It didn’t go back down. It’s still expensive no matter what the economic indicators are saying, which many people are not paying attention to either.

Astead Herndon:

And Harris only, I think, in the last month or so started working from what we understand, or even the price gouging plan, I’m like, “All of that at least works from a premise of understanding where people are in their priority. But they spent the first two years not doing that.” And so I guess I’m like, “That’s indicative of a tone where we can tell you whether your problems are legitimate or not.” I think that kind of self-certainty is the same thing that causes them to block out people’s concerns about Biden’s age, about to block out people who wanted things like a primary.

And there, they just had a fundamental kind of haughty misread of the 2020 election. So many Americans were making peace with Joe Biden and had concerns about his age and all that type of stuff, even back then. And for Democrats to ignore that and say though, actually we don’t think those concerns are that real and deep, or the things that folks are saying about inflation are that fundamental, and only basically get to realizing they were by the time of the first debate, that is a type of arrogance that has cost them this election, and I think is at the core of the type of lack of reflection that we’re talking about.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this on a very micro level that when you have a disagreement or a debate or an argument or a fight with your significant other or with a friend or with a colleague, the dynamic of that… And everyone can identify with that. One of the worst things you can say to somebody is some version of like, “You’re an idiot. You don’t know what you’re talking…” I mean, you can’t say that, right, if you’re engaging with somebody on a disagreement either inside or outside a relationship. And if you condescend to that person, all hell breaks loose and you risk not only losing the argument or talking past the other person, but you end up potentially losing the relationship.

That’s obviously in close quarters interpersonally, and there’s some danger in applying those kinds of dynamics to a broader political structure. But isn’t that a fair comparison?

Astead Herndon:

For sure. I hear Chris Christie say this, and that’s not a person I cite often, but I think there was a break of trust that they didn’t understand because a lot of people in the country thought whether… And I think we can fight about whether that thought was based in fact or not, I believe it was, but thought that Joe Biden was going to serve one term.

Preet Bharara:

The bridge.

Astead Herndon:

The bridge, whether you want to say that was implicit, that was political games, whatever it was, what is undeniable is we would hear people all the time. The most common thing we heard from voters from 2022 to 2023 was a dual shock at Biden and Trump’s return. And the Trump one was obvious because of January 6th because of all that stuff. But Biden was shocked too. And Democrats thought that only one side of the coin was shocking. They never realized that people were surprised at their return also and equally. I don’t think they really got how much faith was broken there, partially because the shutout, the reversal of that implicit promise and the haughtiness they moved with over the last two years for a lot of regular people.

And this isn’t even just… I know this is my personal feelings because they were condescending to me, so I know that that was true. But even people who did not know that.

Preet Bharara:

Who was condescending to you? What are their names?

Astead Herndon:

I’m not even just talking Twitter. I’m talking about literal Democrats, literal Biden campaign, literal Biden White House. When you were asking those-

Preet Bharara:

I want to know their names.

Astead Herndon:

When I was asking those questions about age, about unpopularity, about whatever, it was a level of dismissiveness that looking back is… I’m like, “Do you care about the causes you’re talking about or not?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So I have this in my notes because I’ve been thinking about what word to apply to folks who didn’t want Donald Trump to return, and I’m one of those people. But I hope that this label doesn’t apply to me, but maybe it does. And that’s a word to use a second ago, which is dismissive. There are other words that people have used like contemptuous, hating, condescending, we use that word, but there’s something about the dismissiveness of Democrats and people on the left, not only of Trump, but of Trump voters which hurts them.

And by the way, let’s pause on Trump for a second and maybe I’ll get some mail over this. The degree to which people dismissed him as someone who is not formidable or doesn’t know what he’s doing election-wise and is a dummy and is stupid. And I see people who are friends of mine and friends of the pod go on, and again say, he’s dumb, he’s stupid. Now, it depends on what you mean by that, but he shall act the hell out of Democrats in a comeback that we have never seen before. And so the idea that you have people who have lost the White House, lost the Senate, look like they’re about to lose the house and have the arrogance to say-

Astead Herndon:

It’s crazy.

Preet Bharara:

That guy is stupid, makes me really, really angry.

Astead Herndon:

What does that make you then? If someone is kicking my ass and I think they’re stupid, I would think, “What does that make me?” Okay? I remember this back in 2020 when progressives would do this about Joe Biden.

Preet Bharara:

Wake up.

Astead Herndon:

They would be like, “We’re losing to this guy?” I’m like, “Yes, that should make you reflect. You should actually think about that.” And so I guess I don’t really under-

Preet Bharara:

When you get your butt kicked that hard. We talked about this group of people you said exist who were like, “Yeah, we’re going to persist in what we do,” which is fine if you are an academic and you’re writing about some obscure area of medieval history. But politics is about having power. It doesn’t mean you surrender all your principles and all your ideals and turn into that which you abhor, right? But it does mean having some pragmatism. Look, Barack Obama was a principled guy in his policies. He was also a cutthroat politician. And if you don’t want abortion to go away and you don’t want a nine-zero Supreme Court, don’t want a Supreme Court, then you better wake up.

Astead Herndon:

And I guess I’ve been seeing Democratic staffers do these photo dumps and say, “We left it all on the field.” And I’m like, “I would just keep that one in the drafts because does the impacts… Was this the biggest election of our lifetimes, or no? Was democracy on the line or not? How much do we care about mass deportations?” Because if the answer is yes to those things, I would go in a corner and think about the last couple years. And I guess I just… That’s to me, when we talk about the tone and attitude, that’s the important part to me of having done that work in real time, having asked them those questions in real time is because the thing that mattered the most to me is I don’t want it to be that political actors can say, no one asked. No one posed the question.

Preet Bharara:

What happened to the Democratic Party? I know certain people have fallen out of fashion in modern times, but what happened to the Democratic Party who took advantage of the fact that their nominee was known as Bubba, Bill Clinton? Right? That got him the votes of people who are no longer voting for Democrats. Fair?

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. And I think that there has to be a different type of approach to those communities. We did episodes on rural voters and the transitions… Donald Trump, the way that he can juice turnout in those places, and the way that Democrats seem to have no floor in those places is a big problem. And whether it’s a state legislature or a statewide race or a presidential race, at some point the way back from them being a party that is localized to college-educated folks in urban and suburban areas has to come back to them winning some of those places back. For me, I don’t have a prescription, but you can’t do that from a place with no curiosity. You can’t do that without listening. You can’t do that-

Preet Bharara:

As recline, right? You can either be contemptuous or curious.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. And I’m like, I don’t understand the route to winning elections with contempt. I don’t really get what the path is. And so-

Preet Bharara:

Unless you’re just interested in making… If you were in the business… Which is why maybe there’s this disconnect between activists such as they are, or people on the left who are commentators versus actual elected officials, is this idea. There’s a difference between making a point and having actual power.

Astead Herndon:

What the Trump wing understands is power. And what they have done both within their party and then now in the ways they’re seeking take that to the White… Or I will take that to the White House, is they work from the premise… Trump works from the premise of mapping out what their base would want and basically making everyone go along with it, daring moderate Republicans to cross over under the knowledge that they want, under the bet that their negative partisanship is much stronger than their dislike of the Trump wing.

But it’s not as if Democrats do that, right? And we should say that Democrats have a more diverse base. So it’s not easy to say just what working from the premise of their base would look like, but it’s not as if Democrats have a counterbalance of a type of political strategy that starts from what their group wants and basically makes the Liz Cheney’s get along. They’re doing the inverse effort. And so I guess one thing I am curious of is for the next Democratic primary, which will be a reset from 2019, ’20. What are the lanes in which people try to occupy? Because I think it’s more than just right, left.

That last primary was Bernie and Warren on one side, Biden on the other, Pete and Harris and all them trying to swim in between. And I think there’s more fault lines now. I think there’s a lane for democracy reform. I think there’s a lane for money in politics that is beyond just right, left. And so I wonder who’s going to try to occupy those spaces. And the other thing I’d say is there is a desire for an authentic voice, an authentic version of politics. And the way that Donald Trump has seized on the Republican side.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I want to talk about that. You’re anticipating as you have this entire interview what I want to ask you about, because there’s an argument that we’re overanalyzing all of this. And on the one hand, these things are predetermined because there was an anti-incumbency, tsunami across the globe, and Astead and Preet can have these little conversations on a podcast about this angle and that angle. But all of that was going to be overwhelmed by the global trend on one hand. On the other hand, you can make the argument that it’s about particular personalities.

And a super interesting thing was done by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, who was very, very different, I think we can stipulate from Donald Trump. And there are people who voted or said they would vote for both AOC and Trump. What the F is that Venn diagram? And she posted some of the answers that she got. And it goes to your point, which I think is very, very, very under-examined and under-discussed. Here’s an example of the things that people wrote about how they might be supportive of both AOC and Trump.

I feel that you were both outsiders compared to the rest of DC and less establishment. Voted for Trump, but I like you and Bernie. I don’t trust either party establishment politicians. And it goes on and on and on, which a little bit gives the lie to this idea that policy prescriptions and aid to people who have college loans or fracking or manufacturing or tariffs, that all of that matters. I don’t know how wide the swath is, if there’s a swath of the public that can vote for both AOC and Trump. Discuss.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. I mean, I think I met some of those people. I don’t find it that-

Preet Bharara:

What do they drink? What beer do they drink?

Astead Herndon:

I don’t actually find it that hard. I bet you could go into most cities and go and find a type of person of color, particularly working class, who is really upset with Democrats, particularly nationally, but likes their individual congressperson, particularly if their individual congressperson has a brand like AOC, which is more of a fighter broadly than I think is interpreted as progressive specifically. So I don’t think that’s-

Preet Bharara:

Maybe we’ll get to it. You talked to one individual voter who you call Monica from Michigan.

Astead Herndon:

Well, her name is Monica.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, it is Monica.

Astead Herndon:

She’s called Monica.

Preet Bharara:

You’re supposed to change the names. I don’t know if anybody told you. We’ll say her name maybe is Monica. Don’t you learn that in journalism school you’re supposed to hide? Is Monica a composite?

Astead Herndon:

No, the opposite. We don’t even include people who won’t give us their names.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. But you can’t give us her last name. What’s her last name? Where does she live?

Astead Herndon:

She lives in Michigan. I have her last name, but I don’t know her.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, okay. So the transparency only goes so far. But she said, and it’d be interesting for you to say other things she said that she would’ve voted for RFK if he were on the ballot. At the same time she’s like, “Oh yeah, but I also could have voted for Josh Shapiro.” That’s a little bit like the AOC-Trump thing.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah, absolutely. And so I remember her because I was trying to figure out whether there was a type of Democrat that did something for her that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did. And I think because she was feeling that Harris’s flip-flops made her a chameleon inauthentic candidate.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going not be dismissive, but I’m going point out that I find that interesting when Donald Trump has flip-flopped about-

Astead Herndon:

For sure.

Preet Bharara:

… every issue on earth, including abortion recently.

Astead Herndon:

Yes. A question I put to her.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, how did she respond to that, sir.

Astead Herndon:

People will make excuses for what they want to make. But I guess I’m saying is there’s a way that Donald Trump… You can see him as a flip-flopper because of all the reasons you laid out and I think are very true. But there’s things he’s been consisted on via immigration and some, I think, isolationist stuff. And so I think on some big things that people have like manufacturing for her or the EV mandate for her, which was really big, he’s not been inconsistent on.

If your thought is immigration, if you thought this country has an immigration problem, Donald Trump has not been inconsistent. He’s been the opposite of that. He’s been quite consistent. So I guess he totally-

Preet Bharara:

Is this voter worried on the EV mandate? Is she worried about the Donald Trump-Elon Musk co-presidency?

Astead Herndon:

Again, questions put to her. And she was-

Preet Bharara:

You tell Monica, I have a question or two.

Astead Herndon:

And she was saying that… And the reason I like talking to her was that she owned the fact that she was kind of making the choice between a vote that was for other people or a vote about herself. And she said, “I decided to make a vote about myself and literally bet who I thought would have a better opportunity to bring my job back and who I thought whatever.” And this was someone who had gone to a Trump event and said that she felt a sort of authoritarian energy she did not like there.

So this isn’t even coming from… She was very sympathetic to the democracy argument because she basically thought when she was there, these people don’t feel like Democratic people. But then I thought, “Okay, then why did you vote for them anyway?” And she said, “I just basically think I have a Democratic governor here in Michigan. And so I don’t think abortion rights or him being a dictator is actually going to happen.” And so I’m saying people will make… Marginal, a medium voter is so much less ideological policy driven than where we start from on these type of things or on Twitter, or on most kind of political analysis.

Preet Bharara:

So there’s an argument a little bit, and my former boss, Senator Schumer believed this, and it was very successful having feelings of nostalgia from the 2006 Senate races because some of those folks who came into the Senate took the Senate back from Republicans in that shocking election of 2006 are out the door, including John Tester. He believed, at least in the Senate and in the House, that quality candidate recruitment was paramount. And that’s a little bit of this lesson of the Venn diagrams with AOC and Donald Trump.

Often it’s the case that people are voting for a particular person or personality rather than a precise collection of agenda items as far as policy goes, right?

Astead Herndon:

Yes, absolutely. Policy is usually a proxy for people to understand the person they’re voting for, what they care most about and their kind of priorities. And so that’s the reason why at the DNC, the question we were asking was not as people were kind of in their high moment with Harris and the candidate switch is what will a Kamala Harris Democratic Party look like and how is that different than the Joe Biden led Democratic Party or just generic Democrats broadly.

Because I think that that was the question, the change question still was the fundamental one of this race. And for most people, when we talk about getting to know a candidate, that’s really what they’re trying to get to know is how does your bio, the policies you put forward, how does it make out a cohesive story that I understand who you are. And so more than just flip-flopping on an individual issue, a big problem I do think Harris faced is that her introduction to the country in 2020 was not a clear story of a person and what their values are.

And I think the campaign when they were reintroducing her this time didn’t understand they had a higher burden to clear because of that. And I guess one of the things I think about at least the last, my interactions with Democrats in the last three, four years is they keep going through this big torturous process of how to be everything to everyone rather than laying out what they believe in, what those priorities are and then trusting that that authenticity will bring others in.

So it’s not as if I’m saying option two means she wins election. But I definitely think they have not engaged in option two. And I wonder why not? Because I think that… Something like the death penalty. Anti-death penalty was the core of Kamala Harris’s progressive bonafides as she was coming up. It was the thing she actually took a lot of stick on in San Francisco and stood on it.

And then you get to nationally, and this comes at a time, the Democratic Party has removed anti-death penalty language from their platforms. And I think it’s been scared that they will be framed them as soft on crime or whatever. But the question I have is in taking that view, don’t you pull someone away from a story they’ve told their whole career? I think it makes a lot more sense for the person who’s always been anti-death penalty to remain that rather than to think you’re going to win someone over because a group of focus groups says that people aren’t as hot on them anymore.

One thing I think is the type of people who make decisions I think deeply have underrated in the Trump era how much authenticity matters and how much voters are actually willing to support someone they even have some disagreements with if they think they’re being authentic.

Preet Bharara:

Look, the best advice, I’m going to do this on a macro level again, like the argument with a friend, the best advice I’ve ever given or ever gotten in any context at work, at school, academically, otherwise is the most obvious piece of advice ever, particularly if it involves any kind of public facing component. And it’s be yourself. Now, if yourself is an asshole, sorry, then maybe you should try option B. Or if yourself is corrupt or otherwise unfit, then you’ve got a problem and then you have to go to plan B as I said.

But otherwise people can tell if you’re not being yourself. And yourself includes your record. And my working theory about Kamala Harris who I know, and like, and admire, and respect very much, because we’ve had somewhat analogous careers up until the point she went to the Senate. This is a person whose whole career was law enforcement and fighting for the rule of law.

Now, she adopted all that and used those terms of phrase in 2024. But when she ran for the Senate and when she ran for the presidency in 2020, you took everything that was the core of her expertise, of her success, of her being, of her articulation, of her skills and mission, and you stripped it away because of the times and because people thought you had to go very far left, and what was going on in 2019 and 2020. You kind of render someone like that who’s otherwise charismatic and charming and smart, and a rising star, you somewhat render them mute.

For sure. And people would say, how come she’s not connecting? I’m like, “Because she has not spent her life and career talking about trade and talking about the economy,” which is fine because other people who had lives as prosecutors become very, very successful politicians on the right and the left. And I would think to myself, if I ever decide… And I’m not running for office, but if I ever ran for office and if a pillar of my campaign was not emphasizing my career as the United States attorney and what I did, not just in terms of public safety, but how I cared about the rule of law, how I cared about constitutional rights, how I cared about corruption on Wall Street and in Albany, and in other places, and instead ran on these other things that are important, kitchen table issues are important, but if I abandoned my identity as a professional and the thing that got me to where I am, who’s going to vote for me?

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. I mean, this was a huge question I had for Kamala Harris in 2019 and ’20. She in that race, the big impact of the ideological push and pull between the Bernies and the Bidens and the whatever is not only that you could feel her kind of trying to swim and find her way in the middle, but it caused her to back off of the story that was the most clear and authentic to her career, which was one of law enforcement.

And you can say that maybe it was a different political moment or whatever, but she had the opportunity to tell Democrats some of the stuff that they’ve come around to now that Black and brown communities want policing. They just want policing that’s free of brutality. She could have been a leader on some of these things because her career has actually spoken to a lot of that stuff.

But instead of doing that, they tried to calibrate and shirk away. And I just don’t think… I mean to the point about being who you are, I think that’s just easier because the public understands that, the candidate is often more comfortable in that. And every other route to success requires a little bit too much cloak and dagger. And so I guess I just think that… A lot of this has happened very quickly, specifically for Harris. Remember she was supposed to be having a six-year senate term in 2016 because Hillary Clinton was going to be president and turned into a presidential candidate virtually overnight.

What I would just say is that is a big jump. And when that happened, I think that the party and the candidate, and those around the candidate would’ve benefited from really laying out a set of priorities that, that is the core to their beliefs and that they always come back to it, right? When you ask Bernie or Warren a question, even if they don’t have a specific answer, they have a worldview that they’re coming back to. Joe Biden I think has a worldview that he largely comes back to.

Preet Bharara:

Donald Trump has a worldview.

Astead Herndon:

Donald Trump does too. And when you ask her something because there is not a core set of vision, a core set of root cause of why things are the way they are, you could feel her looking for the right answer rather than working from a framework in which the world is interpreted through. And I think that’s reflective of someone who spent their career as a prosecutor and accountability-driven rather than legislator off of that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, because she does have a worldview. I don’t think she lacks a worldview. I think for various reasons, calculated or otherwise, there was not the full amount of comfort in using that as the North Star, what her normal worldview might have been. By the way, I have to amend something I said a few minutes ago because I think I’m not correct, at least in one instance. I said the most important advice is to be yourself, but if you’re an asshole, then you need plan B. Or if you’re corrupt, you need plan B. That’s not true always. Donald Trump is an asshole and he is corrupt, and he’s himself. He became the president two times without a plan B.

Astead Herndon:

Yeah. And I think there’s privilege we acknowledge in that. Men are allowed to be assholes if it’s themselves in a way that’s a different thing. And I think that that’s important to the story of this race. But I just think in general, one thing that has really stuck with me over the course of this reporting is there’s a set of people who make decisions about how democratic candidates need to behave. They’re like the unelected emperors around them, the consultants, the pollsters, the kind of operatives who have this rule book, particularly for people of color, particularly for women and who they can be.

One of the things that I have been trying to say from my reporting lens is I just don’t think that those assumptions are often always true. And a lot of the advice I feel like having covered Warren and Harris, a lot of the times when people are asking, “Why aren’t they doing this? Or why aren’t they doing that?” It’s because it was a group of people overwhelmingly of whom were men in the back room saying that they couldn’t do that. And I think that the next version of Democrats needs to take lessons that are informed by their base rather than taking lessons that are directed from these type of people who are really based in a Clinton era who really came up in the Obama era and don’t really have a pulse of the electorate as it is now.

And because the prescriptions they are giving, I think are old ones for new times. And so for some of the worst decisions we saw the party make over the last couple of years were really just once done a political deference, not really questioning Joe Biden’s reelection, shutting out the idea of an open debate or primary. Some of that type of stuff wasn’t because there wasn’t evidence or there wasn’t money for people or they couldn’t call out, right?

Dean Phillips made his late game run because it was obvious that some of this stuff was in the air. What was lacking was political courage on behalf of people who prioritized their own self-preservation over kind of calling things out. And I think what was also lacking is like a culture among Democrats of disagreement that’s allowed. And I think that’s something they need to break. There’s no reason given what we know about the drop off from people of color with Democrats that nobody in the CBC or the Congressional Hispanic Caucus was saying… So they’re all the fiercest defenders of Joe Biden.

We know that’s not even true of the districts they represent. So I’m saying some of this was politics and it was exposing how insider politics is just completely distinct and frankly disconnected from the public input. And I think that was really obvious to a lot of the public, at least the folks we were talking to. And they were really expressing how the last couple years showed them the systematic distance that political insiders have from the rest of the country.

So much so that I think that there was real permanent long-term damage done to trust in the Biden-Trump rematch. I remember a voter telling me he was shocked. I was like, “This is all 2023.” Before people really knew Biden, I was like, they’re like, “Oh, how are you feeling about the presidential election?” They’re like, “Oh, well, who’s going to be…” I was like, “It’s going to be Biden-Trump again.” And over and over people were shocked. And I remember this guy saying, “If that’s who the parties put up, whatever happens next is their fault, not ours. That’s very clearly not the best the country could do, and it’s very clearly…” I think for a lot of people, it felt reflective of a broken insider system, and I think that reputational damage has been long-term.

Preet Bharara:

Astead Herndon, thank you so much for your time. Let’s do this again soon.

Astead Herndon:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Astead Herndon continues from members of the CAFE Insider community. For the month of November, you can get 40% off the annual CAFE Insider membership. Head to cafe.com/november. Again, that’s cafe.com/november.

BUTTON

I want to end the show this week with a word about last week’s show, which we recorded on very short notice immediately after the election of 2024. The panel consisted of Joyce Vance, Joanne Freeman, Ian Bremmer and me. We did it on very little sleep in the midst of still figuring out what happened in the election and why it happened.

We tried to speak as honestly and candidly as we could from the heart and also a little bit from the brain. We received a lot of feedback on that episode, and I thought as we think about the coming weeks and months and years for that matter, I wanted to share something with you and end with a comment about the show and how we think about doing the show going forward.

Not everyone was pleased with the episode, and I want to share some of those comments as well. But first, the positive. One listener wrote, “I want to thank you so much for what you and your colleagues have so formidably tried to do for this election, and I sincerely appreciate the fact that you even have anything left to try to continue.” Another, “I just wanted to say how much I appreciated the conversation with you, Joyce, Joanne, and Ian this morning. It helps ease the pain of the present and start to plan for the future.”

Here’s another. “Yesterday’s discussion with Joyce, Joanne, and Ian was such a comfort. I always enjoy your podcast and I really appreciate that all of you made the effort to get out some thoughts as soon as possible, and such thoughts, such insights and such humanity. On a dark day your podcast was a great comfort. Thank you for all you do.” Here’s another one, “Dear CAFE team, thank you for all your insightful work. We need it more than ever for healing and for all the progress we can make after we recover from our initial election shocks.” And here’s one more. “I just finished listening. This podcast was like therapy for me after not being able to even get out of bed today. I feel a little better now, and I’m so grateful for the logical, heartfelt, and intelligent words you and your guests shared. Thank you, Preet.”

But in another example that everything that goes on these days is basically a Rorschach test and that different people see and hear the same things with different lenses and have different reactions. We had some fairly negative reaction to the podcast as well and I want to share some of those examples with you too. Here’s from one disappointed listener. “I love you guys, but this episode made me so mad. Is there really such a problem with the Democrats platform? I don’t think so. We lost as Joanne indicated by describing two conversations with Trump voters because those voters were misinformed, unable to see beyond a thicket of lies constructed over the last many years.”

Here’s another, “Hi, Preet. Perhaps I’m using this avenue as a way to vent and express frustration, but I found your panel’s general response to Trump’s victory to be out of touch with what is required for Democrats and people of moral dignity to ever win back political power. At this point in our political history, the left is the only political body able to accept results, accept failure, wish success to the other side, and get to work. As a long-time Democrat, I’m frankly tired of my party responding this way.”

Here’s another one. “I’m a big fan of your work, but I was deeply disappointed by the last podcast. As someone who speaks so eloquently about the rule of law, please remember that the trans and LGBT communities are people who need that protection more, not less. The last podcast veered far too close to the argument that Democrats lost because they defended gender minorities that most Americans don’t like and understand. Don’t go there.”

And there’s a particular complaint that was mentioned more than once in the listener feedback, for example, from one listener, “I’m not all the way through the Trumped episode, but I take exception to Ian Bremmer’s stated desire for Trump to be successful in his presidency.” And another listener also expressed dismay about how at the beginning of the latest Stay Tuned episode, “You and your guests talked about wanting Trump to be successful.”

So let me say I’m grateful for the positive comments. I appreciate the frustrated comments, and I think they’re both important. And we’re not always going to agree, and we’re not always going to see the same thing the same ways, especially after an election loss like the kind that Democrats suffered last week. One point I will say I think was well taken. What does it mean to hope Trump has a successful presidency? We didn’t really specify that or define it. I’ll tell you what I think when I hear that word and I hear that sentiment.

Speaking for myself, it means I hope the economy doesn’t tank. I don’t want to have a recession, or a depression. I hope the US doesn’t get dragged into a war. I hope that the US continues to remain in high esteem around the world. I hope that we maintain our alliances. What I don’t mean, and what I worry some people took it to mean was that I want Trump to make good on a number of his promises to be successful in the way that he defined success for himself based on some of his terrible campaign promises.

I don’t want him to be successful in mass deportation, or in the mass firing of civil servants, or in the weaponization of the Justice Department. So that hopefully makes that more clear. Now, I’ll say also, although it goes without saying, not everyone will like everything I or my guests say, and that’s good so long as we can respect each other and discuss the issues like respectful friends and citizens. And that’s what happened after the last episode, which is very gratifying.

What I can promise you is, especially now more than ever, that we’re going to try to be as honest as we can about the topics we discuss because honesty in public dialogue has never been more important. Keep the comments coming. We all really appreciate it. I’d like to know what you’re thinking whether it’s positive or negative.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Astead Herndon. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.