Clip: Why Democrats lost their working-class coalition

Jeffrey Goldberg: Tim, I want to read something to you. First of all, I want to thank Susan for introducing Martin Van Buren into the conversation. It makes us feel very knowledgeable and erudite. And I don't think he's been mentioned at this table the entire --

Susan Glasser: You know, context, Jeff.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Context.

Susan Glasser: To keep understanding who we are.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to read something that turned out to be a very prophetic piece you wrote in 2022. It's about the Latino vote. And you said in part, quote, the very thing that breathed life into the Democratic Party 20 years ago, the focus on identity and inclusion is making it more popular with white voters and less popular with Hispanic voters.

This was in 2022 that you said this. A lot of people in the party understood this then. You were reflecting a view as well as advancing a view. How do you explain -- and maybe this is a question also about gender. How do you explain the incredible attraction that many Latino men felt toward a person who has been, objectively speaking, racist at many different kinds of Latinos? I mean, he's talking about Mexican rapists. That was -- the first introduction to Trump as a serious candidate was a disquisition about Mexican rapists. How do you explain this?

Tim Alberta: You know, Jeff, in that piece, it's really interesting. I characterize a few different conversations I'm having with Latino men who -- in the Rio Grande Valley, in the southwest, in South Florida, and they're all telling me some variation of the same thing, which is that, yes, I'm pretty sure that Donald Trump is a racist. I'm pretty sure that Donald Trump doesn't like people like me. But at least he's sort of open and transparent about it, and, in a way, I can almost trust him, whereas Democrats, use us as pawns in their political game. They act like they're our friend. They sort of -- you know, they tell us how important we are to their coalition, but then they never give us a seat at the table.

And furthermore, Democrats seem preoccupied with all of these sort of cultural, social issues and the sort of virtue signaling that can accompany them rather than on the concerns of people like me in our community, namely, the economy, and, yes, illegal immigration. If you go spend time in the Rio Grande Valley, and I've done a lot of it over the past five, six years, it is remarkable to see these counties that Hillary Clinton won by 70, 80 points, that Donald Trump has now, eight years later, flipped to red.

And what is the common theme through all of those areas when you spend time talking to people there, including Democratic mayors and Democratic sheriffs? They will say the same two things. Democrats stopped focusing on working people and Democrats stopped caring about illegal immigration.

And if you think back to even the Obama era, Barack Obama deported millions of illegal immigrants, more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton had. On a lot of these sort of core cultural and social touchstones, Obama, even though he was in his heart of hearts a progressive, was willing to at least sort of accommodate the center right in this country in ways that the Democratic Party, since his departure from office, has not been willing to do.

Asma Khalid: Can I just say --

Helen Lewis: - the amount of ways that Donald Trump and his campaign spoke to men as men. Like if you spend any time in the kind of spaces online that young men hang out in, I'm thinking of the podcast of people like Logan Paul, who started off as a YouTube prankster, then he moved into fighting, and then he was one of the many, many male influencers that Barron Trump, Trump's 18-year-old son, suggested that he do an interview with. So, they have just barraged these very male spaces in which are deliberately kind of punky, anti-authoritarian.

And I think you're exactly right. The kind of overt rudeness and shading into overt racism and sexism is a kind of badge of honor in those communities that we can take it, right? We're not these people who sit around in corporate offices and all know exactly the right language to use and the right cutlery to use. No, this is -- like this is raw. This is dudes hanging out together. And I think they very much rode what is a kind of zeitgeisty way? Like it is not a coincidence that Dana White, who is the head of, you know, the mixed martial -- like, the United Fighting Championship was there on stage for Donald Trump at his victory speech in Mar-a-Lago. They barraged sports fans with those transgender ads, you know. The campaign had a very, very strong strategy for talking to men as men. It did rely on --

Susan Glasser: But they also had a strategy of telling monumental amounts of untruths and lies. And I do think it's very important if we're going to talk about immigration to talk about the Trump campaign's -- campaign of lies around immigration. Do you believe that we are under an invasion? Do you believe that they're eating the dogs in Springfield? You know, this is also, I think, a story about propaganda and its enormous effectiveness.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, what lesson do you derive from that, about the media or about --

Susan Glasser: Propaganda is very effective, Jeff, unfortunately. That's one of the important lessons for I think all Americans of the last eight years and watching Trump's persistent hold over millions of people. Donald Trump lied, as we all know, about the results of the last election in 2020.

And he wasn't just isolated and made a pariah for doing that. In fact, millions of people chose to believe his untruth over --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me ask Asma a question, if you don't mind, and then jump in with whatever else you wanted to say. And I don't want to appoint you the spokesperson for the media, God forbid. But is Susan right that we were overwhelmed by propaganda? And obviously in your organization, and a lot of organizations, people are questioning the effectiveness of our truth telling, or what we believe in good faith is truth telling.

Asma Khalid: I mean, it's hard. I mean, look, I agree with Susan that it's very important to cover like the policy and the consequences of his administration and his words. At the same time, and maybe I feel this way a lot because I've spent most of my career, up until now, I was actually a campaign reporter, demographics reporter, I was out in the country, I grew up in Indiana, feeling that much of political coverage could be improved by spending time outside of Washington.

I think there is nuance, and I agree with you, Tim, to how different demographic groups feel, different racial groups feel about Trump's candidacy. I mean, I give an example, like just as, you know, Trump came down that golden escalator talking about Mexican rapists, Trump also, during the first few days of his administration, issued a ban on Muslim majority countries.

But you look at a number of Muslim Arab-American voters, they moved away from Kamala Harris this election cycle. You look at a city like Dearborn, Michigan, and Trump, according to the results, it looks like won Dearborn, Michigan. I mean, that is astounding, but he showed up, and I heard this from voters this cycle. He would take pictures. He promised to end the war in the Middle East. And there'd be like, you know, little images of him circulating on WhatsApp chats kissing a little kid at a restaurant in Dearborn. And that went viral in communities, where people wanted to hear that someone was showing up and someone was listening.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Was he just a better candidate as a candidate than Kamala Harris?

Asma Khalid: I think he showed up in a lot of different communities.

Susan Glasser: But what are you saying? I mean, I'm, I'm a little confused though. Like what are you saying? So, because people like Donald Trump kissing babies, that it makes sense for them to vote for the guy who handed American policy toward Israel over to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who refused, who cut off all U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority.

Asma Khalid: I'm not going to defend whether or not it makes sense or not. But I guess I'm saying from an emotional perspective, though, I think if people feel, and there's a very large, like Lebanese community, right, in Michigan, and I remember asking the Harris campaign, like what are you guys doing? Where are you in this area? Are you talking to people? I had people in the community asking me, like where is the Harris campaign? What are they doing, right?

But Trump was going there. His Tiffany Trump, his daughter's father-in-law is out there meeting with people and they're promising to end the war.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Helen, I want to jump on something. You use the expression, it doesn't make sense.

Asma Khalid: It doesn't matter --

Jeffrey Goldberg: And, again, I'm not -- you know, and I don't mean to put a pith helmet on you and you know, you're hacking your way through the American jungle or something, but does this make sense? How does this make sense now? I mean, is this the triumph of propaganda and populism and the manosphere? How -- I'm not asking you to bring coherence in the next 1 minute and 27 seconds, but bring a little coherence to this.

Helen Lewis: Propaganda is a really interesting word because if you think about the media that people consume online, they are listening to podcasters who, for example, in the middle of that Logan Paul interview with Trump, he breaks off to sell his energy drink, right? They listen to him.

Jeffrey Goldberg: While Trump is sitting there.

Helen Lewis: Yes. And Aden Ross, the streamer, gave him a custom Cybertruck before doing the interview, right? This is not stuff that happens in classic journalism, but it references the fact that for those younger people who are used to listening to TikTok, Instagram, other things, they're used to people talking to them face to face and being very open about their political views and trying to sell them things.

And so I don't think I don't think that necessarily those news consumers have the same idea about propaganda that we do. They think that we're all sitting here with a secret agenda, but what's more honest is people who just go --

Susan Glasser: So, like Elon Musk, who is the world's richest man, who purchased a social media platform, decided to endorse Donald Trump and Amplified his lies and conspiracy theories and misinformation as part of it in addition to giving more than a hundred million dollars to the --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Tim, last 30 seconds.

Tim Alberta: As someone who has stowed (ph) a lot of ink on Donald Trump's lies over the past decade --

Jeffrey Goldberg: A couple of books worth.

Tim Alberta: A couple of books worth. I just want to say this when we talk about propaganda. Arguably, the three most determinative things in this election were propaganda from the Democratic Party. Number one, Joe Biden is fine and totally fit to be president for another four years. He wasn't. Number two, the border is closed. It's under control. There's nobody coming in. That was not true. And number three, hey, don't worry about inflation, prices are fine, Bidenomics. Everything's great. You guys don't know what you're talking about. Actually, the economy is in great shape. This is propaganda to millions of Americans who said, none of that is true, and therefore, I don't trust you. They might not trust Trump, but they don't trust Democrats either.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now. It's a great conversation. It's not the end of this conversation. But I want to thank our panelists for joining us. And I want to thank you at home for watching.