| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Bill and former Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel come together for a bipartisan dialogue on Tuesday's election results, potential impact on the 2026 midterms, and increasing partisanship. | |
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| Ceasefire, bridging the divide in American politics. | ||
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| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist. | ||
| Simon, welcome to the program. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| So in your post-election analysis, you wrote this, quote, 2025 was a blue wave election. | ||
| The country is more Democratic today. | ||
| Democrats not only won the big races, we also won in local races, school board, city council, mayor, county across the country. | ||
| Why do you think that was? | ||
| The election was a clear repudiation of Donald Trump and his first year in office. | ||
| I mean, the country, he's done enormous harm to the country, and people are pissed. | ||
| And they came out and voted in very large numbers against the Republicans all across the country. | ||
| Now, President Trump said Republicans lost because he was not on the ballot. | ||
| Now, he will not be on the ballot anymore. | ||
| Ever again. | ||
| So does that mean Republicans are in trouble? | ||
| The Republicans are in trouble. | ||
| I mean, what's happened if you look at the party ID and what's called the generic ballot, the whole battlefield has shifted between 7 and 12 points towards the Democrats. | ||
| And historically, when that happens in an off year like this, it means the party has a very good, you know, us, the party that had that kind of shift towards us, would have a very good midterm election. | ||
| And I think that, you know, Trump is now facing both incredible levels of unpopularity, but what's more important for the Republican candidates in the Republican Party is that his agenda is more unpopular than he is. | ||
| And they have to run on that agenda. | ||
| They just tried to run on that agenda all across the country and failed. | ||
| And so I do think the Republicans are in trouble now. | ||
| The agenda being what? | ||
| Well, what he's done as president, the economic agenda that has slowed the economy and raised our prices, the attempt to gut health care, raising electricity prices, throwing people into foreign gulags and trampling our civil rights and civil liberties, the broad agenda that has done enormous harm to the country and to the American people was roundly rejected. | ||
| I will tell you, somebody's been doing this a long time. | ||
| This is like my 16th or 17th election cycle since I came to Washington. | ||
| The margins of the Democratic wins were shocking. | ||
| I mean, even for us. | ||
| So, Simon, let's put that on the screen, actually, talking about the margins. | ||
| So, looking at New Jersey, and these are not final results. | ||
| Those are still coming in. | ||
| Governor-elect Mikey Sherrill won by 13 points. | ||
| Governor-elect Spanberger by 14 points in Virginia. | ||
| And New York City mayor broke the 50% margin in a three-way race over Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sleewa. | ||
| And then that prop 50 in California on redistricting was plus 28 points. | ||
| Well, and in Maine, we had a ballot initiative the Republicans brought to limit voting. | ||
| That won by over 20 points. | ||
| The retention races in Pennsylvania for the three Supreme Court justices, which was heavily contested by the Republicans, we won by more than 20 points. | ||
| You know, the candidated Miami mayor, where we haven't had a Democratic win since the 1990s, you know, won more votes in his leading going into the runoff in December. | ||
| These were huge margins. | ||
| The California vote, right, was over 20 points. | ||
| And you just don't see 20, 25-point victories like that on things where Republicans contested it, right? | ||
| These weren't things that were sort of willy-nilly that they weren't fighting. | ||
| They fought in all these campaigns. | ||
| These are all blue states. | ||
| And what Speaker Johnson said is Democrats voted for Democrats. | ||
| And what's noteworthy about that? | ||
| Nice try, Speaker Johnson. | ||
| In Virginia, as you know, there was a Republican governor, a Republican Attorney General. | ||
| The Republicans controlled the state in Virginia. | ||
| We flipped all that. | ||
| In Maine, it was a Republican ballot initiative that they brought up. | ||
| In Pennsylvania, they tried to get rid of the three Democratic Supreme Court justices. | ||
| And so, wherever there was a contested race, not only did we win, but we won by enormous margins. | ||
| You know, if you had guests on here in the last few weeks, the Republicans thought they had a chance of winning the New Jersey governor's race, right? | ||
| They were very bullish on the Mikey Sherrod. | ||
| They thought it would be closer. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it was a blowout. | ||
| And so I think for anybody who is being honest about the data, Democrats performed at the very upper end of what was possible for us in this election, meaning that we didn't just win, but we won big, and it was a clear repudiation of Trump and his policies. | ||
| If you've got a question on the future of the Democratic Party, a question for our guest, Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, you can start calling in now. | ||
| The lines are by party. | ||
| So Democrats are on 2028-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| So exit polling, ABC News exit polling in Virginia shows that the most important issue was affordability and cost of living. | ||
| I know you can't speak for Republicans, but do you think that they just missed that? | ||
| That that is so important to voters and that they didn't emphasize that enough? | ||
| No, I think they look the problem they have is that Donald Trump has made things worse for everybody. | ||
| And when I think about, if I were a Republican, they have to defend the indefensible. | ||
| They have to defend the tariffs that have raised our prices and slowed the economy and created large deficits in America. | ||
| They have to defend the health care cuts that are going to make health care more expensive and people are going to lose their care. | ||
| They have to defend raising electricity costs. | ||
| I mean, one of the most interesting polls that I've seen the last few days, a little bit of data, is that when you ask people what costs are rising and what's causing them pain, number one is groceries, but number two is electricity costs. | ||
| I mean, I think this is a much bigger issue that people haven't really settled on. | ||
| And electricity costs are rising because of Republicans and the big, ugly bill that they passed earlier this year. | ||
| So the reason I think that we did so well is that Republicans have actually made the lives of people worse. | ||
| And in the grand scheme of this business, this was not a hard argument to make. | ||
| Things have gotten more expensive because of their policies. | ||
| And Donald Trump, that was his central promise that he betrayed to the American people. | ||
| He said he was going to lower costs. | ||
| They've gone up, and I think they've paid a big price for it. | ||
| If you could just explain how electricity costs, you said electricity costs went up. | ||
| They've ended the clean energy subsidies, which have caused energy prices, electricity prices specifically, to rise across the country. | ||
| Let's talk about New York City. | ||
| There's a new ad from the GOP Congressional Campaign Committee after Tuesday's Mamdani win. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play that, and then you can talk about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A radical left earthquake just hit America. | |
| The epicenter, New York. | ||
| The new socialist mayor, Zorhan Mamdani, built his movement on defunding the police and abolishing ICE. | ||
| Now the socialists are celebrating. | ||
| They call it progress. | ||
| We call it chaos. | ||
| Bureaucrats instead of doctors, social workers instead of cops. | ||
| This is the future House Democrats want, and your city could be next. | ||
| Stop socialism, stop Democrats. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Good luck with that. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You don't think it's going to resonate? | ||
| No, no, no, no, he's not going to be on the ballot next year. | ||
| We have Democrats running in individual races just like we had all across the country, and voters will be able to make up their mind based on the Democrats and Republicans that are in those races. | ||
| But this ad is saying that the Democratic Party has become socialist. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| And that that's going to spread. | ||
| Yeah, but why do you think that that's not? | ||
| Because it's obviously not true, right? | ||
| I mean, look at the agenda that Democrats are pursuing in the House and Senate. | ||
| What Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger ran on, what our candidates all across the country ran on. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, New York is a very unique place. | ||
| I'm from there. | ||
| I grew up in, I was born in New York. | ||
| My family, both of my parents grew up there. | ||
| New York's got its own dynamic. | ||
| And I think what happened in this election is that candidates who fit their districts and fit their states won. | ||
| And I think the diversity of the Democratic Party is our strength. | ||
| I mean, a healthy party is one that has diverse voices and has strong internal debates about the future. | ||
| I think that's what we're having now. | ||
| And I think it's a sign of health for us, not a sign of weakness. | ||
| I want to get to calls, but I want to ask you about the shutdown, the impact the shutdown had on the election, and what impact you think the results will have. | ||
| Well, I agree with Donald Trump that the shutdown had a big impact on what happened. | ||
| And I think it did in two ways. | ||
| I think one is that Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer showed that they were going to fight. | ||
| And I think for Democrats, that fight, the fact that we were fighting Trump more aggressively, was a motivator for us in this election all across the country. | ||
| The second thing is the polling data is very clear. | ||
| I mean, people blame the Republicans much more for the shutdown than the Democrats. | ||
| And so I think that Trump's assessment that the shutdown contributed to their losses was correct. | ||
| All right, let's talk to callers and start with Lance in Sterling, Colorado, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Lance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Mimi. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| And I appreciate C-SPAN. | ||
| But Rosenberg, is that your name? | ||
| Anyway, you got that everything bad about Trump. | ||
| This is what I'm saying. | ||
| Democrats are becoming socialists. | ||
| It takes four or five to eight years to get rid of everything Biden and the Democrats did in the past four years. | ||
| Everybody knows that you're an intelligent man. | ||
| And all you can do is blame Trump and say, hey, those are blue states that just nominated communists and Democrats. | ||
| They've been blue states. | ||
| They're Democratic states. | ||
| We don't feel bad. | ||
| I feel bad. | ||
| And all I can say is anybody that voted for socialism, communism is an idiot. | ||
| All right, let's get your response. | ||
| There's a lot in there. | ||
| What can I pick out? | ||
| Yeah, look, we feel good about what happened. | ||
| I mean, this is our best election since 2020. | ||
| We had a tough election last year, a year ago. | ||
| We've been on the losing side of these things. | ||
| But I'll tell you, as somebody who's been involved in these elections for a long time and been on both sides of waves and been on winning presidential campaigns and been on losing ones, is that this was an earthquake election for the Republicans. | ||
| And any attempt to sort of mitigate, to sort of pretend otherwise and sort of look away means that they're not paying attention to what the message the voters just sent them of this discontent against. | ||
| The caller did say socialism a couple of times. | ||
| And I mean, do you agree that New York City has gone towards socialism? | ||
| I mean, a rent freeze, free buses, free childcare is going to be incredibly expensive. | ||
| Let's see what the mayor does. | ||
| Let's give him, you know, obviously he's a dynamic and powerful new figure in our political ecosystem in the country. | ||
| You know, let's see what he does. | ||
| And, you know, he's a young guy. | ||
| New York is a hard place to govern. | ||
| And, you know, I wish him well, but let's see what he does. | ||
| Here's Frank in Staten Island, New York, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Frank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Dan. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Yes, I voted. | ||
| I live in Staten Island, New York, voted for Cuomo. | ||
| Didn't want Mamdani at all. | ||
| And we think a lot of us feel that he would really wreck the city. | ||
| Talk about like repudiation of Trump's policies. | ||
| Okay, I mean, you know, I'm against the tariffs, too. | ||
| I'm a capitalist and stuff like that. | ||
| But I don't see how a party moving further and further left becomes a repudiation. | ||
| I think it shoots themselves in the foot, if you want to use a good metaphor. | ||
| That's what the party does. | ||
| And you could laugh all you want. | ||
| You're hurting the Democratic Party with a candidate like Mandani. | ||
| The voters of New York chose. | ||
| I mean, we are a democracy. | ||
| And, you know, he overcame a lot to win in that election in New York. | ||
| He obviously inspired a lot of people. | ||
| The youth turnout there was pretty spectacular. | ||
| The turnout overall was the highest since the 1960s. | ||
| So he's brought a lot of energy. | ||
| And I think that people, you know, just like with Mikey Sheryl and Abigail Spanberger, they won their elections, but now they have to govern. | ||
| And governing is a lot harder than winning a campaign. | ||
| And so all of them are going to be heavily tested over the next year. | ||
| Here's Lanny and Missouri Democrat. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I wanted to make the point that what goes on in one county in one state doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be the same in every county and in all the states. | ||
| I think the direction the Democratic Party needs to go is more of a diffuse policy. | ||
| The old saying is, all races are local. | ||
| And I guess I'm making that point. | ||
| And it just, it seems to me like we want to attach too much importance to the outcome of one particular election in one particular place. | ||
| And I think we do that as a country, not only as a party, for that matter. | ||
| Well, and if I can just build on that, you know, going back to New Jersey, which you know the Republicans were very optimistic about, Mikey Sherrill not only did much better than Kamala Harris, but Jack Chitterelli did far worse than he did four years ago. | ||
| So, you know, they fell backwards in New Jersey from where they were in 2021. | ||
| This is why. | ||
| It's a blue state. | ||
| But their candidate who they rallied behind, and I think if you're a Republican candidate across the country right now, you have to be worried about 2026 because Donald Trump did not campaign for these candidates. | ||
| He didn't campaign. | ||
| And, you know, he could have gone to various red parts of the country in the last few weeks and been out there making the case. | ||
| They took him off the trail. | ||
| He didn't spend any money on them. | ||
| he abandoned these candidates and so for what do you think that is Because I think it was a huge mistake for him. | ||
| I think they should have spent, he's got $500 million or whatever it is in a bank account, a political bank account. | ||
| He should have spent $10 million in Virginia and New Jersey to show that he was the leader of the party and fighting for his candidates. | ||
| And what he did is he threw him overboard. | ||
| And so for all these people who are running in 2026 as a Republican, and you're wondering whether or not you can run on this awful agenda that's deeply unpopular, that people fail to be successful all across the country. | ||
| And now you're wondering whether Donald Trump is really going to show up for you because he didn't show up for the Republicans in 2025. | ||
| And as somebody who's been around a long time, I think the White House made an enormous error by not looking like they were trying and that he was out there fighting for Republicans as they went into battle. | ||
| But wouldn't President Trump be really incentivized to campaign in 2026 because he's afraid to lose the House? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But I think that in this town where people read body language and sort of know things, I think there's probably a big concern about whether or not he's going to take care of me. | ||
| I mean, look what's happened in California, the redistricting that happened in California. | ||
| A bunch of Republican congressmen's political careers are over now because of Donald Trump. | ||
| And so, you know, he's got very small majorities in the House and the Senate. | ||
| And the question is, you know, can they, they can only lose three seats, right, in the Senate on any vote, I mean, three votes. | ||
| They lost the tariff vote three times last week. | ||
| We started seeing enormous cracks in his congressional coalition. | ||
| The cracks in the House are so severe that they've had to keep the House out for most of the last three months because they've lost ideological control of the House. | ||
| And I think now the question of whether or not Donald Trump can maintain this kind of congressional loyalty that he's had, given now that his agenda has proven to be unpopular and Republicans got mowed down all over the country, I think it's going to weaken his control over Congress itself. | ||
| And this is going to be very important for the coming budget negotiations. | ||
| Here is Lee in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Lee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I hope you guys are all doing well. | ||
| Morning, Lee. | ||
| My question is, now, with Mondani being elected and being a socialist and, you know, how the Democrat Party feels about that. | ||
| Also, the Democrat Party seems to like anything that is anti-Republican. | ||
| As far as Mandani or the New Jersey Attorney General race, look at the, they elected a guy that threatened to kill, wanted, fantasized about killing Republicans and their children. | ||
| Now, to me, that's the Democrat Party gone kind of crazy. | ||
| As a Republican, I would vote for the best person. | ||
| If you're a Democrat and you say the right things and you're going that way and your Republicans are not offering it, I'm going to go Democrat. | ||
| But what I see the Democrats doing now is the juice they have drank has just turned them all, I guess, crazy. | ||
| I mean, one thing that's interesting just from the calls today is that we had Democrats won all over the country, right? | ||
| We won in places like Ohio and Texas. | ||
| We won in Mississippi. | ||
| We won all across Pennsylvania. | ||
| There were thousands of elections. | ||
| Focusing on one election in a broad, diverse country like this and making it somehow the symbol of the party is absurd on its face. | ||
| I'm just going to say this, right? | ||
| It was a single election. | ||
| We had moderate centrist candidates win in New Jersey and in Virginia by much bigger margins than Mamdani won in New York, for example. | ||
| And so this attempt to sort of paint us with a brush from a single candidate, I think, is incredibly dishonest and is not going to fly with voters. | ||
| People are going to make up their own minds as the caller just said about each individual candidate running in their district. | ||
| And I think the second thing I just wanted to say is that, you know, I'm very proud that in the last few weeks, Democrats have actually worked with Republicans. | ||
| I mean, we had a big moment last week where Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate to repeal and voted three times to repeal Trump's terrible tariffs, as I call them. | ||
| So we're not always attacking Republicans. | ||
| We can work with Republicans. | ||
| The other way we worked with Republicans recently is that we voted to release the Epstein files in the House at the end of July, right? | ||
| There was a bipartisan effort to release the Epstein files. | ||
| The Department of Justice has continued to not follow through the vote that happened and not produce the information they're required by law to produce to the House. | ||
| So Democrats can work with Republicans, and I hope that we can work together, for example, in the next few weeks to restore the ACA subsidy cuts. | ||
| That's what I wanted to ask you. | ||
| There's this kind of negotiations happening now to say, look, let's go ahead and open the government, and then the Senate's going to promise a vote on the ACA. | ||
| That's the Republican offer. | ||
| Okay, that's the Republican offer. | ||
| Do you think the Democrats should take it? | ||
| No, I think we are in negotiations now. | ||
| I think that's not the Democratic position. | ||
| The Democratic position is we want to actually pass the ACA subsidy, you know, restore the ACA subsidies before the government gets opened. | ||
| So the Republicans won't, I mean, so far, they're not doing that. | ||
| Are you saying to keep it closed? | ||
| But Donald Trump told the Republican Party yesterday they lost the elections because they've mishandled the government shutdown, which I think is actually true. | ||
| And so I think that we are in negotiations now. | ||
| Look, Republicans control Washington. | ||
| This notion that somehow Democrats shut the government down is absurd. | ||
| And I mean, they're not. | ||
| But if the Democrats vote in the Senate, they can reopen the government. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the Republicans can also reopen the government without the Democrats. | ||
| And so they can do it tomorrow. | ||
| They can do it this afternoon. | ||
| You mean without the filibuster? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| They can do that in a heartbeat. | ||
| They have the power to do that. | ||
| Donald Trump has done all sorts of illegal and unconstitutional things as chief executive, including the tariffs. | ||
| You know, this is something they can do legally. | ||
| I don't know if he can do illegal things. | ||
| Why can't he do legal things? | ||
| This is just, it's whining from them. | ||
| I mean, they're whining because they're losing all the big arguments about health care, about the government shutdown. | ||
| They just lost the election. | ||
| They're at a very weakened and diminished position. | ||
| And so we, I think, should be pushing even harder for our agenda in the coming weeks. | ||
| Here's Ernest in Exeter, Rhode Island, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Ernest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Good morning, Dr. Mr. First and foremost. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| First and foremost, let's understand that the Republicans passed a big, beautiful bill by themselves. | ||
| And Donald Trump has refused to even let go of funds that were already authorized. | ||
| So we're dealing with a liar to begin with. | ||
| And there's no assurance that he won't continue to withhold funds. | ||
| But my call is more concerned about what's happening in the school board elections. | ||
| In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, considered ground zero for right-wing groups, okay, Democrats flipped control of both boards in 2022, 2023. | ||
| And on Tuesday, they ousted every Republican from both of these boards except for one. | ||
| The Pennbridge School Board is now eight to one with Democratic members in control. | ||
| The Central Buck School Board is nine to zero. | ||
| In Washington State, all four conservatives on the Douglas County School Board were up for reelection, and progressive candidates were leading in all these races. | ||
| And Ernest, what do you think that means? | ||
| Well, to think that this is just a little bit of a tremor for the Republican Party is outrageous. | ||
| All right, let's hear from Simon. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with the caller. | ||
| I mean, I think that it's been hard, I think, in the aftermath of this election to sort of see the total scope of the victory. | ||
| But anecdotally, and from friends of mine around the country, there were these kinds of school board races and mayor's races and local city council races all across the country. | ||
| And Democrats routed Republicans in Republican areas. | ||
| I mean, this is the point. | ||
| Like, Republicans were unseated. | ||
| This wasn't just Democrats electing more Democrats. | ||
| And the way that we flipped the Virginia governor's race and the Attorney General race, there were lots of flips all over the country. | ||
| I mean, in Texas, we flipped a bunch of, we won a bunch of seats we didn't think we were going to win. | ||
| So this was a wave. | ||
| And as you know from your other guests you've had on and through history, that when a political party in this first year after the presidential election goes through a wave election like this, usually what happens next is another wave that happens and comes in the next one against them. | ||
| And, you know, if the election has shifted, if the electorate has shifted seven to 12 points towards the Democrats, that means there are a lot of Republican candidates who thought they were going to be safe that are now going to have to be in competitive races. | ||
| It means the Senate is actually, I think, going to be in play for us. | ||
| I'm not going to tell you we're going to win it, but I think it's certainly going to be competitive. | ||
| And the chance of us winning the House back has grown very dramatically in the last few weeks. | ||
| Here's Joe, Cantonsville, Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
| Hey, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Pardon me if this is a little long-winded. | ||
| I'm trying to figure it out. | ||
| So I grew up Christian. | ||
| And a caller mentioned earlier about Beatitudes basically being socialism being the closest thing economically that we have to the Beatitudes. | ||
| And if you look at a lot of the people who brandy their Christianity, it seems like they don't want anything for the poor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seems like it's a level of money and Bitcoins and golden cast stuff. | |
| And pardon me if I sound apocalyptic. | ||
| It's metaphorical language. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the Democrats, like Chuck Schumer around there, a lot of the centrist main Democrats were mom on Mom Donnie, even though he's like the most popular, not popular necessarily, but fairly popular and very big story in the national news, even though it's just New York. | |
| But you mentioned that somebody asked you if Democrats are going socialist or you brought that up. | ||
| And well, like, should they be? | ||
| What should the position be? | ||
| Like, if we're a Christian nation and we, or, you know, maybe you are, maybe you're not. | ||
| But yeah, no, we got the question. | ||
| That was a great, great question. | ||
| And I think that I think the point he's making is that, you know, doing things to help people get ahead in their lives, you can put all sorts of labels on that. | ||
| But the thing that's unifying the Democratic Party right now is that we're fighting hard for working people to make sure their lives are better. | ||
| We want them to have good health care and good jobs and good schools and opportunities in their lives and to lower their costs when things are going up. | ||
| These are not very controversial things. | ||
| And the thing is, the Republicans have abandoned the playing field. | ||
| I mean, part of what happened in this election is that, you know, they've literally the Republican Party right now is for higher prices, for you losing health care and paying higher health care costs. | ||
| They want your electricity prices to go up. | ||
| They want, you know, they've slowed the economy down. | ||
| The deficit has gone through the roof. | ||
| These are all things the Republican Party has done. | ||
| And so we are saying we don't want higher prices. | ||
| We want good health care, affordable health care. | ||
| We don't want higher electricity prices. | ||
| We don't want soaring deficits. | ||
| We don't want all of this. | ||
| And the American people seem to be on our side in this fight right now. | ||
| Here's David in Englewood, New Jersey, Republican. | ||
| Hi, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I just want to say a couple of things. | |
| First of all, this fellow here is so smug. | ||
| He's typical of most Democrats nowadays. | ||
| I grew up in Chicago. | ||
| I was a Democrat. | ||
| And the party is so elitist. | ||
| All these nuts from San Francisco to New York City. | ||
| And they just think they can speak down to people that people are not aware. | ||
| Anything, tell me one country, one city that's done well under socialism. | ||
| And Mamdani acknowledged come out and start to say what he really truly feels. | ||
| He is a socialist. | ||
| Hakeem Jeffries is a socialist. | ||
| He hid behind and waited to the last minute to endorse this guy. | ||
| Chuck Schumer is a coward. | ||
| He did not come out and endorse him. | ||
| And yet, I bet you he voted for him. | ||
| So don't sting me. | ||
| Yep, we got it, David. | ||
| Go ahead, Simon. | ||
| Listen, we're a big tenth party. | ||
| And I think that, listen, what I'm honestly excited about about what's happening right now in the Democratic Party is that, you know, we are moving beyond the era of the Bidens and the Clintons and the Pelosis to a new era. | ||
| I mean, we saw new faces emerge in 2025, new tactics, new strategies. | ||
| We not only had Mamdani's incredible use of political communications and the internet and sort of pioneering a new style, so is Gavin Newsom. | ||
| I mean, Gavin has done a remarkable job in California in creating new ways of us challenging Trump and speaking to the American people. | ||
| And so I think you're seeing a new post-Biden, post-Clinton, post-Pelosi Democratic Party emerge. | ||
| And that's what we needed. | ||
| We lost the last election. | ||
| We lost the majority. | ||
| We couldn't stand Pat. | ||
| We needed to do new things. | ||
| And we are, this is a different Democratic Party than you would have seen a year and a half ago. | ||
| You also saw former President Obama coming out on the campaign trail. | ||
| And some people have commented that, you know, the Democrats don't have a leader. | ||
| And they're having to reach all the way back to Obama to get some leadership. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| I think we are in a period of transition. | ||
| I think we're moving into a new era in the Democratic Party. | ||
| And there is going to be, and what you've seen is new leaders are emerging. | ||
| Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker and AOC and, you know, Chris Murphy and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. | ||
| You know, I think it's an exciting time for us to. | ||
| You would include Chuck Schumer in the future of the Democratic Party. | ||
| He's a Senate leader, and he's, you know, he's leading us in the Senate. | ||
| And so I think that we, you know, listen, what I just laid out is a very diverse set of people, right? | ||
| Older people, younger people, people from different parts of the country, different ideologies. | ||
| I think that diversity is our strength and not a weakness for us. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist. | ||
| He has a sub stack at Simon WDC. | ||
| And thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
|
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