Carville: We spent half this interview talking about trans. That’s for people who are faced with this to do it in the most humane way that we can possibly do it. And we’re going to be sure that everybody has a bathroom that they feel comfortable going to. That’s it. End of it.
Sargent: I mean, that sounds like defending. I understand what you’re saying. You’re saying you don’t drawn into their frame.
Carville: All we do is talk about it. We’re talking about this like it’s the number one issue in American politics.
Sargent: No, you’re absolutely right. Let’s move on.
Carville: Thanks.
Sargent: Biden’s administration, most pro-worker in decades, arguably, right?
Carville: Easily.
Sargent: Biden marched on a picket line, made it easier to unionize, took on corporate concentration, expanded minimum wage and overtime protections, crackdown on labor violations, and his policies have unleashed a huge amount of investments in rebuilding the industrial base, including lots of advanced manufacturing jobs for people without college degrees and left behind areas. I don’t have an answer to this. Why didn’t any of that make a dent on working class voters?
Carville: All of this to be with you, the auto workers got a raise like we never saw before. The screenwriters, the Hollywood writers got huge raises. Everybody was getting competition in the workforce post-pandemic. We’re for raising minimum wage. We didn’t run on it. Why not say America needs a raise, we’re going to give them $15 an hour. Boom, we didn’t say it. Why didn’t we say the most consistently most popular thing in polling is raising in taxes on incomes above say four or five hundred thousand dollars a year. Pick a number. We didn’t run on this.
One of the reasons that I read that the Harris people didn’t want to accentuate the minimum wage because they thought it was anti-business. bullshit. OK. My God. If somebody’s running for president in 2028 as a Democrat, I would get a committee of billionaires to say, Don’t tax you, don’t tax the man behind the tree, tax me.
If we would have said, We’re going to raise taxes and our incomes above 400,000, made it central to our campaign, take that money, which is actually a lot of money over 10 years—it’s a lot—and put that into a first time home buyers mortgage relief fund, then we would have spoken to somebody, Greg. We would have spoken to them.
Sargent: A couple of things about that. A hundred percent. I absolutely agree that if the party is going to improve the working class voters, a big part of it is to be even more economically populist. Biden actually moved in an anti-neoliberal direction and all that. Pretty populist policies, generally pro-worker, but more. I agree, more of it, right? It feels to me like the problem runs a little deeper than whether to run on this policy or on that policy. It seems like what’s missing is a belief among working-class voters that Democrats are focused on their material plight. How do you fix that?
Carville: By focusing on their material plight, by telling them you’re going to raise a minimum wage, by telling them that you’re going to have a transfer of wealth to privilege older people and help younger people. So I was on a GI bill. You know what the GI bill did?
Sargent: Talk about it.
Carville: Where I went to law school, I got $300 a month, tax free, just to spend what I wanted on it. I bought a house, I was locked in at the lowest possible mortgage rate that you could get, and I didn’t have to pay a down payment.
First of all, half the battle is telling people you see them and you see their plight. We didn’t sufficiently do that. Again, we have a lot of misinformation. Military recruitment says actually exceeding targets; energy is so much, we’re producing so much domestic energy, even the people in the energy business don’t want to produce anymore, they’d like to produce less; crime has dropped historical levels. So as opposed to telling people crimes low, go around the country doing events with police people saying you’re doing a great job, you need more support to continue to work than you do it. There’s a ways that you can do this and get your point across and not get trapped in it.
But I’ll go back to our central point, Greg. We don’t know what medium to tell people this and how to get the information to them. We do know there’s a lot of bad information out there. That’s for sure.
Sargent: A big part of the problem is the communication channels. Even including with working-class voters. To go back to your original point, the Biden administration and the Democratic agenda can be more populist and should be more populist economically—left populism. It should be more, there should be more. But allowing for that, the problem isn’t just policy, it’s also communication.
Carville: Well, to me the problem is we don’t even know how people receive the information. So until we find out how they’re getting the information, then we can work on the information that we provide to people. But we’re not sure how they get it. We know that they’re not reading The New Republic or The New York Times. They’re not listening …
Sargent: Don’t remind me, James.
Carville: OK, I know. Or James Carville’s YouTube channel or anything like that. I don’t understand that, but if we actually find out how to reach them, then we could be more effective in what we reach them with.
Sargent: The next step will be raise some money from donors.
Carville: And figure out who are the best people to conduct this. I don’t want to give anybody’s name right now, but I’ve talked to a couple people, mostly on an academic level that I think do pretty good polling to see how we would design this. How would we do this? How would we reach these people? We can reach them by telephone like we used to. A real deep dive. A real deep dive. When we come out of that, when we come up out of the deep dive and we resurface, we’re going to have some gold nuggets here. It’s possible we could actually find something out that we don’t currently know. At least that’s the hope.
Sargent: Well, I’m 100 percent for it.
Carville: Thank you, Greg. Thank you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.