The Lever transcript: Krystal Ball's review of Trump's 1st term, her read on the electorate's turn from Democrats

[ancianita]

Yes, it's long. But it's worth the read -- not just to weigh in along with our party leaders' and media's slow take on how we lost and need to regain the popular vote. No.

It's worth the read because if we ever want to win again, we must learn who the popular vote electorate now is.

The Intro
Hi everyone, it’s Arjun, and I wanted to share a quick message before we get into the main show.
Now that the presidential election is officially over, today we’re going to break down what happened, and why we saw a rightwing shift in nearly every part of the country this week.

Joe Biden’s tenure in office saw the country come out of a pandemic and the economy roar back into action. Unemployment hit record lows, and he passed several major pieces of legislation. Two wars, in Ukraine and Gaza, also saw the administration pulled into global affairs amidst a changing geopolitical landscape. And his administration made a historic effort to rein in corporate excess, even earning the first antitrust win against Google.

Even so, Biden’s presidency was always viewed in contrast to what came before and what could come after.

Now, we know the answer.
Voters had been telling pollsters for a long time that they were feeling frustrated economically. A bad bout of inflation and the raising of interest rates imprinted itself on people's perception of their own pocketbooks.


And consistent warnings from Biden, and then his vice president Kamala Harris, about Trump’s authoritarian instincts and similarities to dictators of the past didn’t seem to matter to a majority of the voters in the country.

In these early days, we’re not going to be able to fully know why so many voters chose Trump at the ballot box.

So, right now, all we can do is our best to try and make sense of it.
And that’s what I’m going to try and do today here on Lever Time.

While I do have some strong thoughts about why we saw Tuesday play out the way it did, I wouldn’t be honest if I said it was anything more than an educated guess.

So, to help me make sense of it. I sat down with Krystal Ball, host of the show Breaking Points.
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The Interview:

Krystal
Yeah, I was definitely surprised. You know, I was someone who I think overlearned the lessons of 2022 because I really thought we were in for a red wave in 2022. I was looking at the economic numbers, the wrong track numbers. I thought, this is all set up for a disaster for the Democratic side. And then it didn't materialize predominantly for two reasons. One, people are disgusted with stop the steal in January 6 and two, the overturning of Roe versus Wade.

Last time around, with Trump on the ballot and him being more unhinged than he's ever been before, and with continued deep concern about abortion rights being taken away and him continuing down the stop the steal direction, I thought he was awful enough that some of the inadequacies of the Democratic Party and the Kamala Harris campaign specifically could be overcome. Clearly, …

that was wrong. And, you know, I think there's there's a micro picture here of what happened, what went wrong, which is embodied in the choice of campaigning with people like Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban versus, say, Bernie Sanders and U.A.W. Sean Fain.
But I think there's also a bigger macro story, which is that...

After the financial collapse, the nation was disgusted with the what we call the neoliberal era, which was sort of kicked off a little bit by Jimmy Carter, really embraced full-hearted by Ronald Reagan, and then cemented in place as a bipartisan affair with Bill Clinton. And
the rot and the failures and the fundamental immorality of that system of letting the markets dictate, you know, everything and putting capital over human rights and human beings.
That all came to a head after the financial collapse.
And you had these two movements that really sprung up as a result of that.
On the right, you had the Tea Party, which leads to, you know, a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment, leads to the birther movement.

Trump gloms onto that and that facilitates his rise ultimately. And then on the left you had Occupy. That leads to Bernie Sanders. And these were two ideological competing visions for what could come after neoliberalism, which the public had broadly now rejected and was ready to move on for.

And so the Democratic Party, in response, of course, to Bernie Sanders rise, has spent the past nearly decade doing everything they could to not only crush him, but crush anyone within the party who might be able to take up and push forward that vision.
So that's left them in the place of continuing to try to run on a neoliberal ideology that has been thoroughly rejected. You know, I know it's it's trite to say like, Bernie would have won.
I don't mean specifically Bernie Sanders at his age at this point in time.

And so, you know, it turns out that all the people who were talking about the Bernie to Trump pipeline, well, they were correct.
Actually, there was a Bernie to Trump pipeline because many of these same voters, when offered the choice between Trump's right wing authoritarianism and the Bernie Sanders social democratic left populist version, class first left populist version, they chose Bernie Sanders.

But when offered the choice between hollowed out neoliberalism and Trump,
They picked Trump.
And so that's where we are in a lot of ways.
I feel like this result, which is deeply painful to me, and I think deeply troubling and going to be deeply painful for the country, I think it is in a lot of ways Democrats reaping what they've sowed over the past decade of their approach to this movement.

Arjun:
...There was a lot of very good seeming things coming out of the Biden administration on regulatory moves on certain labor things, but it was very wonky and when you would talk to people who are supportive of the administration they would point to a lot of data points and say well look at the unemployment look at the fact that inflation is outpacing wages but

I would go out and I would talk to just people and I think one of the most interesting things was anytime I would take a ride share, I would talk to the the ride share drivers. I love talking to them because a lot of them are they love politics because they're listening to radio in the car all the time.

Yeah, almost every single time I spoke with a ride share driver here in DC, a lot of times they were immigrants. They were more favorable to Trump and part of it came down to what they felt was a cultural aspect of this where they felt that the Democrats did not represent people like them.
They didn't feel that they fit in with this sort of highly educated, fairly wealthy party.
But also they felt like they weren't talking about things that mattered to them. know, the Democrats to them were focusing a lot on Trump is a threat to democracy.
What happened on January 6th? I want to be clear that I'm not trying to dismiss those that side of Trump. And I think that's a very important and frightening aspect of Trump.

But in a campaign, you were trying to win over voters. And it seemed that that wasn't breaking through.
But what was breaking through was things about the economy and they were falling into sometimes the stereotypes of Trump.
He's going to cut taxes. That must be better for me. He's good. He's a businessman. he must know what he's talking about.

But clearly these economic issues were what mattered to them. They would say that they moved to the United States to find more prosperity. And so they weren't really thinking about this as this cultural, what is the direction of America in the 250 year scope of its history.
They were thinking about 'what is the path to prosperity that I have.'

And I wonder, where do you feel about this, this kind of cultural idea that the Democrats have culturally become very out of touch with just a lot of people in the country and that in some ways this might not have been a pro-Trump vote, but just a rejection of the Democratic Party

I don't know if I would call it a protest vote as much as a lot of people just signaling that they did not feel that these were the people that represented them and that they were more willing to take a gamble on the opposition to that this time. Change.

Krystal:
I don't think we can underestimate how much Trump himself is a uniquely compelling figure.
I mean, he outperformed every single Republican Senate candidate, save for one in the entire country. And that one was Rick Scott in Florida, which Florida's vast shift to the right, I think also can be directly attributed to Trump. So I don't think it's just a rejection of Democrats. actually, that would be an easier, more comfortable answer for me. I think it is an affirmative embrace of Trump and Trumpism.

I don't think the liberals are wrong about their assessment of the threat of him. I do think he's a fascist and you know, not to be hyperbolic, but if you just look up the definition, you go down check by check, like right wing, ultra nationalist, militaristic, tied in with capital, let's see Elon, anti-immigrant, autarky, right? We're talking about tariffs across the board. Like he checks the boxes. That is his ideology. And he is also, you know, deeply authoritarian instincts.

He's the CEO who wants to run the country the same way he runs his business, which means that every has to do exactly what he says when he says it. And I don't think for for many, and this this is, not to like besmirch all the people devoted for him. But I think that that sort of sense of I just need a strong man to come in and make it better is a feature, not a bug. Like when he came out and said, I will be a dictator on day one, I think there is a certain we have to be honest that there are a certain segment of Americans to whom...

That is appealing. Just fix it, right? And that's common.
America is no different from any other place. In times of chaos, tumble, change, et cetera, you are going to see a rise in acceptance of authoritarian tendencies and a rejection of democracy, especially when democracy seems like it is not delivering on its promise for individuals.
I mean, this is something FDR recognized, right? And FDR, if we look back in our history, of course, effectively like sort of a Bernie Sanders social Democrat and recognized that that was what was needed to check a rise of a similar, you know, fascist movement in America and also to serve, you know, the way he got the business community to not be happy about it, but go along with it for a number of decades, while the threat of communism also existed.

So we can look to our own history for what has been successful in combating fascist movements and you know, the Democratic Party and the way that they've approached it
is not that. So there's a lot there.

I do want to go back to your question about the cultural point, because I do think there's something there. And you see all these people running around on Morning Joe and whatever now go.

It's the part of fall to the far left. They you know do all this woke ism, etc, etc Well, let's remember where the woke Identitarian politics came from within the party.
It was weaponized by Hillary Clinton to claim that Bernie Sanders and his class-first movement was racist and sexist. That's where that came from.
You know, she said Breaking up the big banks isn't gonna end racism She used this try to position herself because she could see there was energy there at the left end of the party.
She used this to try to position herself as though I'm the real leftist because I'm talking about these identity focused issues. That's where that comes from.

And I agree that that has been very off putting. And but the reality is Kamala Harris didn't run that campaign. Kamala Harris didn't talk about her race or gender at all. She made a point of saying, I don't take anyone's vote for granted. You know, she really tried to use that rhetoric. So I don't even think at this point that that's a fair critique of certainly the way she ran her campaign.

Arjun:
Yeah, you know the last thing I want to ask you about is that...There was a shift with Trump and Vance where they were not just populist but willing to become anti-corporate and you know fight back against corporate power so, know on my last episode I pointed out that with JD Vance in particular that seemed to only happen when it fit comfortably within that kind of the right-wing dogma where it landed with, okay, this is fighting against electric vehicles, so we will support the striking auto workers.
It never seemed to challenge their actual base, but what did you make of this idea of right-wing populism?
... Could you expand on what you were saying about the idea of anti-corporate populism within the Republican Party and whether you think that's a true thing that's happening right now or if that is maybe more of a messaging point?

Krystal:
I do not think that that is a true thing that is happening.

...listen, they can prove me wrong, but we can just look at the record of the first Trump administration, which was extremely friendly to corporate America.
His biggest accomplishment is giving the wealthiest people in the country a giant tax cut that will be certainly extending those tax cuts is going to be a major part of this next administration. His largest funder is the richest man on the planet who is running around trying to rebirth Paul Ryan era austerity politics, promising he's going to cut two trillion dollars from the
federal budget, which you know he's not going to be able to do that, but if he did that is more than all federal government discretionary spending.
That is the level that we're talking about here.
No, I don't buy it. think you know it's hard.

Fascism really is kind of the most accurate framing of what the Trump vision is, but what has been a failure of the Democratic Party is ...
people understand the vision and the story that Trump is telling about America,
and that Trump is telling about the problems in America.
He has his set of heroes and villains. His villains are immigrants. His villains are quote unquote cultural elites. Hollywood, you know, any rich person who can be deemed quote unquote woke.

That's not a rejection of corporations...
or corporate CEOs or unfettered capitalism, that's a rejection of cultural leftism.
So, you know, that's his story of what's going wrong for people, right? These cultural elites are flooding your towns with immigrants. They're trying to change your way of life. They're assaulting your values that you hold dear.

And that is a factually incorrect story about America. It's an ugly story that demonizes some of the most vulnerable populations in the entire country, but he has a story.

The Democratic Party, in rejecting the Bernie Sanders movement, has failed to be able to tell a compelling rival story about what is going on and why things feel so unsettled for you, why you are struggling right now.
Know, Bernie Sanders had a story about that and it's a story that has the narrative actually being accurate, that it is about the millionaires and billionaires are in the language of Occupy, the 1%. It is about unfettered capitalism and that he had a series of compelling solutions to that as well.

So by rejecting that narrative and the movement that was pushing that narrative forward, Democrats have left themselves still trying to hold on to an ideology that has at this point here and around the globe been thoroughly rejected because populations have seen the way that outsourcing your morals and your values to the markets has been a failure for many and caused a lot of pain and destruction in people's lives.

Arjun:
...thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.