What happened in the 2024 elections, and what happens now? Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House, Republicans will control the Senate, and it’s possible they will control all three branches of government when the dust settles. Democrats’ “blue wall” crumbled in the face of the MAGA-led “red wave,” but that picture gets more complicated when we survey the results of other key races and ballot measures across the country. So, what really happened on Tuesday? What do the results tell us about the political landscape and the balance of power in the US? How did Democrats lose so soundly, how did Republicans pull off such sizable wins? And what implications do the elections have for the future of civil rights, immigration, protest and social movements, public policy, the climate, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and America’s place on the world stage? In this post-election livestream, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner, host of The Marc Steiner Show, are joined by a range of guests to help break down the wins, losses, and strategies for moving forward from the 2024 elections. Guests include: scholar-activist and artist Eman Abdelhadi; Rick Perlstein, columnist at The American Prospect and author of numerous books like “Nixonland,” “Reaganland,” and “Before the Storm”; Laura Flanders, host of “Laura Flanders & Friends” on PBS; John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent at The Nation; Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project; and TRNN reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, who have been on the ground in Wisconsin all week. Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam ColeyPre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Kayla Rivara, Jocelyn Dombroski Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome, everyone, to our postelection breakdown livestream here on The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and we are so grateful to have you all with us. Marc Steiner: And I’m Marc Steiner here, host of The Marc Steiner Show on The Real News. I’m also happy to be here. Maximillian Alvarez: Donald J. Trump is headed back to the White House for a second term. Republicans will control the Senate, and it’s possible they will control all three branches of government when the dust settles: the executive, legislature, and the judiciary. Republicans currently have the lead in the battle to control the House of Representatives, with 207 seats compared to Democrats 194 seats. But enough races remain competitive and uncalled as of this recording that the future of the House is still uncertain. In the presidential race, however, Democrats’ blue wall crumbled in the face of the MAGA-led red wave. Trump not only won the key swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, but he also flipped Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. All of those states, with the exception of North Carolina, went for Joe Biden in 2020. And Trump currently has commanding leads in Nevada and Arizona. In these last harried months before Election Day, Democrats made a cynical, dangerous, and fateful calculation. They bet that a winning coalition of today’s never-Trump Republicans, i.e. yesterday’s neocons, undecided “moderates”, and all manner of people terrified into submission to vote against Trump would counteract the precious working-class youth, Arab and Muslim American, progressive and other voters that they have hemorrhaged by recklessly continuing to fund and support Israel’s genocidal regime, by presenting Harris’s platform as a lockstep continuation of the Biden administration, and by failing to articulate a strong, populist vision that spoke to working people’s deeply felt lack of economic security. And they were wrong, catastrophically wrong. So what happened on Tuesday, and what happens now? What do the results tell us about the political landscape and the balance of power in the United States? How did Democrats lose so soundly? How did Republicans pull off such sizable wins? That picture does admittedly get more complicated when we survey the results of other key races and ballot measures across the country, and we are going to talk about that today as well. But what implications do the elections have for the future of civil rights, immigration, abortion rights, protest and social movements, public policy, the climate, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and America’s place on the world stage? On today’s livestream, we’re going to dig into all of this. And this will not be the only livestream we have to address these issues. But we’ve got lots of incredible guests with powerful voices and vital perspectives coming on over the next two hours to help us unpack your biggest questions about the elections. We’ve got scholar activists and artists and Amman Abdelhadi; we’ve got Rick Pearlstein, columnist at the American Prospect and author of numerous books like Nixonland, Reagan Land, and Before the Storm; we’ve got the great Laura Flanders, host of Laura Flanders and Friends on PBS; John Nichols, national affairs correspondent at the Nation; Bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project; and Real News reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, who have been on the ground in Wisconsin all week. And we’re going to bring on our first guest, Amman Delhi in a minute, but by way of getting us there, Marc, I want to turn to you at the top here and just get your thoughts on where we are right now and how we got here. Marc Steiner: We’re in a very scary place, and I think I have to lay some of what happened here at the doorsteps of the Democratic Party, who placed a very narrow campaign, thinking they could go to the right to win, which was absurd. And we see what’s happened. I think that it’s interesting to me how the Democrats have lost their ability to find their roots. By that I mean their roots were in labor unions and organizing and the Civil Rights Movement and organizing. They’ve lost the organizing roots. They weren’t out there at the grassroots. They weren’t pulling people in. They weren’t doing a media campaign that talked about not just the dangers ahead if Trump wins, but talk about what the vision was for a different kind of America. They didn’t do any of that, and I think they put the nails in their own coffin. Maximillian Alvarez: They tried to articulate in a vision and it was not a compelling one. I think that’s also a clear takeaway. It just wasn’t hitting. And we’re going to talk about why, over the course of this livestream and over the course of our continuing coverage and your coverage all the way up to the election and beyond has been incredible, so thank you for all that work, brother. And thank you all once again for joining us. We know you’ve got a lot of questions, we’re going to try to get to as many of them as we can, but please do send us in your questions and we will try to address them in more segments, more livestreams with more guests in the coming days and weeks. Right now I want to bring on our first incredible guest, Eman Abdelhadi, scholar, activist, and artist who has been doing incredible coverage for outlets like In These Times in the runup to this week’s elections. Aman, thank you so much for joining us on the Real News Network today. I really, really appreciate it. Eman Abdelhadi: Thanks for having me, Max. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, we need your powerful voice, sister, now more than ever. And you know as well as we do that right now, a lot of people in a lot of high places are going to be looking for people to blame this week’s results on, and one of the utmost obvious and softest targets that they’re already going after is the Gaza Solidarity Movement. Anyone and everyone who expressed genuine concerns over Harris’s continued support of Israel’s genocidal Zionist regime. So taking those narratives out of our heads for a second and asking you to help us unpack this, what role do you see, from your perspective, what role has Israel and Harris’s support for the Zionist genocide seemed to play in this election writ large? And then, what is a second Trump presidency going to mean for Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and all of that moving forward? Eman Abdelhadi: I think we have to think about the voter who has been watching children under the rubble every day for the last year, for over a year now, watching a genocide unfold on their phones every single day. And knowing that this system, that this ruling elite has been completely committed to this genocide, has gaslit us about it over and over. Then this moment of asking this voter to put all of that aside and show up to the polls and vote for the people who have not just enacted this genocide but have patronized the people protesting it, have criminalized the people protesting it, and are offering very little else, are not saying, okay, put aside the genocide because we have this great amazing vision for you on this other ground. They’re not doing that either. And so I think a lot of those voters stayed home. Kamala lost 10 million votes from previous elections. I think that there’s this way that we ask the left to put on their big boy pants and, as a recent article said, to basically be these hyper-rational, focus on strategy voters, whereas we make a lot of room and leeway for other voters’ proclivities. There’s a sense that you are just going to be able to put aside Gaza. I think a lot of people didn’t, and they weren’t being offered anything meaningful — And, in fact, they were being told that they shouldn’t care at all. Now, will Trump be worse on Gaza? It’s actually hard to tell. His rhetoric is certainly a lot worse. His foreign policy was really hard to pin down, I think, in his last presidency. He’s certainly no friend of Arabs. He’s no friend of Muslims. He’s no friend of the Palestinian people. His rhetoric has been terrible. But I think that people need to understand that, in terms of US support for Israel, there has been no red line and there have no been no checks on the Israeli government. So it’s hard to imagine a worse case. It’s hard to imagine things getting worse in terms of the Middle East, which is what we’ve been threatened with this whole time, this whole campaign — Oh, it’s going to get worse, it’s going to get worse. And I think what voters have been saying is, what is worse than a genocide and an open tap of weapons and support that no amount of brutality has stopped? So I don’t know what’s going to happen with Iran. We do know that Trump tends to be an isolationist. I think he’s less committed to the vision of the world with US leadership that Clinton and Bush era politicians seem to be arguing for. I don’t know what that’s going to mean on the ground. I think it’s going to be a question of what becomes lucrative for him. Maximillian Alvarez: And what about, I guess this is a question that’s on a lot of our minds. It’s a question that makes me think of the fact that the last time we were together in person was there in Chicago, covering Gaza solidarity protests around the DNC in August. Right now, I think the knee-jerk reaction from a lot of folks is we gotta hit the streets. We gotta hit the streets even harder. We gotta protest even louder. And I’m not saying that we don’t need to do that, but I am saying that the first story I reported on in Trump’s first term was when his administration was cheering on the mass arrest and the attempts to charge mass amounts of protesters, journalists, legal observers at the inauguration protests with felony riot charges. So we are entering a new terrain when it comes to grassroots action, protest actions, and otherwise. So as you see it, as someone who’s covered these protest movements all year, where do you see us heading in terms of the terrain of struggle, particularly as it pertains to protests moving forward in the Trump administration? Eman Abdelhadi: We always knew that whoever was going to be in the White House, headed to the White House in January, was going to be an enemy. And the question is which enemy do we have? And right now we have an enemy that, it has no qualms about calling the military, has no qualms about criminalizing protests. Now, a lot of us have been facing off against the police and these repressive tactics under the previous administration. So I think we need to think about our tactics not from a place of fear and from a place of, well, what are they going to do, necessarily, in response, but more where are we as a movement? We need to think about where our movement is in terms of its potential, in terms of its energy. And I think that street mobilizations and street actions have been really important for growing our base, but we’ve also hit up against the limits of them a little bit. And so I think that what I’m seeing on the ground is a lot of people turning towards organizing and power building as opposed to mobilizing just street actions. Thinking about your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, thinking about your local politicians and your local political scene and whatever other institutions are within your sphere of influence, and thinking about how do I hold these institutions accountable to their relationship with the state of Israel to their complicity in the genocide? For me, it feels clear that the American public is going to have to divest from Israel before we force the ruling class to do it. And we are going to have to do that through all of this bottom-up work and grassroots organizing. So I think we should still be on the streets. I think we have to protect the right to be on the streets, but I also think that we have been expanding into other tactics as well. Marc Steiner: I watched this whole thing unfold and the Democrats just blew it. Kamala Harris and her team did not come up with an alternative to what’s been happening. I don’t expect the Democrats to go, oh, we’re pro-Palestine and goodbye Israel. I don’t expect that at all. But what I did expect and what they should have done at the very least is to say, we are going to end the violence right now. We’re going to do something to build peace in the Middle East, to build a peace platform. And it may have saved them votes, but B, it just set it apart. Because you can’t… It was just really disappointing to watch this unfold. And I think that I’ve been in this struggle around the Palestinian Israeli struggle since 1968, and we’ve been fighting against this occupation for that long, and organizing and coming up with strategy is what has to happen now. The Democrats have seen what they’ve blown, and I’ve talked to a couple of people in the Democratic Party over the last two days, and people really have to push to change the way they approach the subject, period. It’s just obscene. And that’s a huge reason why they lost. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and to turn that into a question for Eman, I mean, again, I don’t want to ask you to speak for whole swaths of voting constituencies here, but again, having watched what we watch, having heard what Marc just said, I mean, what would a better alternative vision have been or needs to be moving forward to get the faith back from so many folks? Not just Arab and Muslim Americans, but working class voters, youth voters, folks around the country who feel like even in the face of a threat like Donald Trump, that the prospect of things getting better is just so hopeless that they stay home or they don’t put their faith in any of the options on offer. What does an alternative to that even look like? Eman Abdelhadi: I think a left wing candidate… Listen, I don’t think our full liberatory potential as human beings is ever going to be on the ballot in the current system as it is. We’re never going to have liberation on the ballot. But I think that, even within the current system, if you had offered people a left-wing, truly progressive alternative with actual policies. At the DNC, she said, we’re going to build the most lethal fighting force on earth. She said this to her voters who largely are anti-war, anti weaponry. And there are these ways that they could have even lied. What’s so wild about having watched this campaign, it’s like, you could have lied and said you were going to do more than you did and then ended up doing what every Democrat has done, which has moved to the right when you’re in office. But they couldn’t even offer that platform. And I think that speaks to the intense disjuncture between this party and the people who are supposed to be its base that somewhere there’s this consultant class of Democrats who truly believes that if you send Bill Clinton to Michigan to speak to Arab communities about how terrible Gazans basically deserve to die, that was a good election strategy on the eve of the election. So I think there’s so many ways that they could have done things differently. And within our lifetimes we’ve seen that. We’ve seen the energy around the Bernie campaign. Bernie is not as far left as I would like him to be, but I even knocked on doors for him. We saw the energy that could happen if you had an actual progressive candidate on the ballot. And here in this election, we saw that she lost states that voted for left-wing policies. In my own home state in Missouri, voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump, and they also voted for a minimum wage hike. They’re trying to spin this right now as America moving to the right ideologically because they voted for Trump. And I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing here. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a referendum on Democrats’ economic vision, on their vision of the world as a world that’s led by US hegemony, and they’re losing that referendum, that people have voted against it. And those two things, the domestic side and the international side, are two parts of the same coin. We need a candidate who says, I care more about Americans lives here. I’m going to actually invest in working class people here, and I’m going to do that more. And it’s more important than protecting the interests of corporations or weapons manufacturers or Israel. And well, we haven’t seen that. And I think if we had seen that there was a moment where Kamala could have pivoted to that and she did it and she lost as a result. Maximillian Alvarez: And also worth noting that not only did Missouri vote to raise the state minimum wage, but it was also one of the seven states that voted to enshrine abortion rights in its state charter. I mean, along with Arizona, Colorado, New York, Maryland, here in our home state, Montana, Nevada. I mean, as I said at the top, the picture does get more complicated than just sort of the red Trumpian wave when you look at all the way up and down the ballot. And I want us to continue to unpack that over the course of this live stream. But it does sort of raise an important question here, Aman, that I wanted to pose to you because I know we only have you for a few more minutes here. But as we said, the pundit class, the consultant class, like Democrats at the top of the party, they, they’re going to do what they always do and they’re going to look for a way to blame voters for the outcome that voters kept telling ’em they were going to get if they didn’t change course. But they don’t really seem to have a case to make here the way that they tried and succeeded in doing in a lot of ways after 2016 because now granted, in terms of the national total voter results, there are still a lot of results in populous states like California that are going to be counted. So we’re expecting that the total voter turnout will be closer to what it was in 2020, but it still appears to be less than what it was in 2020. And there also appear to be key dropoffs in democratic support. But those dropoffs do not correspond to the amount of people who voted for say, Jill Stein or Cornell West. So it doesn’t even feel like Democrats and sort of like their supportive pundits in the media can even say all those people who voted third party are the difference that could have swung this to Harris. It feels like something else is going on here. I just wanted to get your thoughts there with the caveat that more is going to become clear in the coming days and weeks. Exit polls need to be taken with a huge pinch of salt, but based on the results that we have, what do you actually think are the takeaways that people should have rather than trying to just blame this all on uncommitted folks or people who voted third party? Eman Abdelhadi: I think the takeaway is that the Democratic party has abandoned working class Americans, and it’s abandoned any pretense that it was the sort of more peace anti-war party. And as a result, its base has abandoned it. And I think there’s this way that if you don’t offer something exciting and something interesting in a world, in a country that is increasingly disillusioned with the whole system is increasingly disillusioned with voting, you’re just not going to win. And so I think that’s the key takeaway. But I think broadly as a leftist, as someone who, like I said, doesn’t believe liberation is ever going to fully be on the ballot, but that the ballot is worth engaging and that it’s not something to throw away and that it is important and that we should participate as leftists, we should be seizing any ground that we can. And I think we have to think broadly about the world we need to build and what the hurdles are to getting there and how to push for that. It became clear to me around the DNC that the sort of electoral possibilities of ending the genocide and Luda had been reached that we were not going to push her any further, and that it was time to focus our energy back to local organizing. So I think for each of us, there has to be this question of what do I need to do to protect the people around me and to advance the causes that I care about in this moment of incredible weakness for the left Maximillian Alvarez: Brother? Mark, any final questions you have for Aman? Marc Steiner: Yeah, I am very curious, from all the work you’ve done and what we face now in the Middle East and building a coalition that makes some changes here in America, how do you see that unfolding? How do you see that happening? We talked a bit about organizing and more, but because it infuriates me watching these Democrats not be able to make the leap to say, end the war in the Israel Gaza, stop it because we are the only country on the planet that has the power to stop it. So I’m curious, what do you think the next moves are to push that and to push that as an idea for Mass Americans to take hold of and to change the Democrats if you can? Eman Abdelhadi: Yeah, I mean, I think that we need to make commitment to this war extremely costly. I think we do that by leveraging our power through things like unions. I think we need to basically create both social and economic costs to continuing to support this war. I mean, we sort of did do that in terms of the vote. I mean, I think Kaza was a part of why she didn’t win, but I think also this is a long-term battle where we need to basically build power, whether that’s through street mobilizations, that disrupt business as usual or through moving labor has been solidly on the side of Palestine, but there needs to be more work in that arena. I think the broader problem is that we are left after decades of neoliberal in a version of this country that makes it incredibly hard to leverage any people power. The fact that we have so few unions that we have and we’re stuck in these kind of ideological debates without a lot of actually points of leverage. So I think a lot of the work that’s been happening on the sort of cultural realm of realm has been really important. But what we’ve seen is that hasn’t translated into policy. So yeah, it’s hard to say beyond. And I think organizing locally, so here in Illinois for example, we are organizing around a divestment campaign for Illinois bonds. So I think there needs to be a sort of systematic attack on all of these links that bolster the Israeli government and it’s sort of murderous campaigns. I wish I had a silver bullet. I wish Maximillian Alvarez: You all had it right? Oh no. None of us have a silver bullet, but I mean we only have a couple minutes left with Aman, and then we’re going to welcome on our next guest, Rick Pearlstein and Laura Flanders. And so by way of asking you this kind of final question, Aman, mark and I were talking about this leading into Tuesday about what the message was going to be if Harris won because I think for the left or whatever that means today, or for people who have principled commitments that you could define as more left-leaning or progressive, there was going to be a very sobering reality on the other side of a Harris win, which is that the progressive wing of the Democratic party is at its institutionally most powerless point, and it takes two election cycles to wash the Bernie Sanders stain out. And Harris would’ve gone into her administration feeling next to no compulsion whatsoever to even cater to that Bernie side, that progressive side of the Democratic party that Biden felt compelled to cater to in 2020. There was going to be a real soul searching question of what is the left, where is the left, and what do people who believe in that vision of the world, where are we and what do we do moving forward into a Harrison administration? Now we got Trump. So in a lot of ways, the equation’s the same institutionally. We ain’t got no power in that administration. We have less and less in all three branches of government. So that is both a terrifying prospect and a critical one because for all the reasons that we can justifiably say people want an alternative so that we’re not in this same situation in four years, that needs to start now, that needs to start yesterday. And a lot of people are feeling maybe too scared and too anxious to even begin thinking in those terms. So I wanted to give you the sort of final word here. If you could speak to people who are in that position, people who desperately want an alternative but are currently fearful of what a next Trump administration’s going to be, don’t know where to start, don’t know what our goal needs to be beyond just defense of ourselves, our communities, and our livelihoods. What would your message be to those folks right now? Eman Abdelhadi: I would say start with the local level. I would say we need to build a bench of progressives that can move through these. I mean, in 2018 after there was a blue wave of folks that were elected all over really on all levels of government who were progressive and on the progressive end of the party and all of that kind of dissipated, they got eaten up into the, either they sort of got co-opted into mainstream democratic party politics or they sort of got marginalized. But I think that it’s important to think about these moments as of potential mobilization. And so I think on the electoral level, we need to build a bench of progressives who can sort of move through local elections and eventually kind of make their way up. And we need to keep them accountable through the movement, not by constantly immediately canceling them all the time, but constantly holding them back, accountability to their base. And then I think people need to organize. I mean, the reality is I didn’t feel I had very much power in the previous administration either, and no one that I organized with felt like we had power vis-a-vis last administration. And so I think we need to build coalitions and organize again in our spheres of influence, whether that’s our workplaces or our schools or our districts, and build these coalitions that can either be used electorally or more importantly for broader movement wins. Maximillian Alvarez: So that is the great Aman Abdelhadi. You should read anything and everything Aman has ever written. Follower on social media, scholar, activists, artists. Aman, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News. Thank you for everything that you’ve done and we’re sending all our love and solidarity to you from here in Baltimore. Eman Abdelhadi: Mentioned that I’m sending it right back, max. Thanks so much. Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you, sister. Thank you. So we’re going to bring on our next guest in a moment. We’ve had them on before. In fact, we had them on together to help us break down the Trump conviction news that feels like it happened 10 years ago, but it was only a few months ago. And we said rightly then. And we were addressing this to all the folks out there who were taking a premature victory lap and hoping that the legal system of checks and balances would sort of just take the Trump problem off the country’s plate back in the spring. Our message was very clear. That’s not going to happen. What in the Trump era would make you think that he’s just going to go away or that the system is going to treat them with the same callousness that it does working people like us? And here we are months later in a much different world. And so we’re very excited to have our guests, Rick Pearlstein and the great Laura Flanders joining us today at this critical and dark moment to help us make sense of this. Laura, of course, is the host of Laura Flanders and Friends, which you can catch every week on PBS. She is a journalist legend, a hero of mine as is Brother Rick Pearlstein, the most brilliant mind analyzing the American right that the American left has ever produced. Laura, Rick, thank you both so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. We really appreciate it. Laura Flanders: Alright, it’s great to be with you. Glad to be here Max. Good to see you, Rick. Rick Perlstein: Yeah, it’s a comforting place to be and a very uncomfortable time. Maximillian Alvarez: That’s good to see you both. Well Mark, let’s open it up with you. Marc Steiner: Yeah, I like hear both of your analysis about what just happened here, how the Democrats blew this and the growing power of the right. I’ve been covering the growing power of the right in this country for some time now here for Real News. And what we’re seeing now is they almost have a trifecta politically in Washington dc. It could be extremely dangerous from everything from civil rights to labor rights to the future of our country and our democracy, everything’s at stake. I’m curious, how did we get here? How do you think at this moment we came to this point? Rick Perlstein: Can I start Laura, Laura Flanders: The historian? Rick, go for it. Rick Perlstein: Yeah, I mean I’m going to lean away from any preliminary judgment at this point that the Harris campaign necessarily blew it. I mean, maybe they did, right? But I’m just going to give a little example of my day-to-Day life. My car got towed and at the impound lot in the middle of a neighborhood in Chicago, the Mexican American clearly working class clerk, we got into a conversation about the election and he said he was for Trump, and he said he heard that every undocumented immigrant was getting a $9,000 check. I just got the latest issue of the Economist, and the cover is the American economy is the envy of the world. Speaker 6: Now, Rick Perlstein: Of course, we still have a profoundly unequal economy. There’s lots of vultures, for example, in the housing market who are just stripping people clean. But if you look back also at say in the Biden administration, the fact that we had a party where young black men were called super predators, and now they’re nominating public defenders to the bench, or the fact that Kamala Harris chose as her running mate, basically a Scandinavian social Democrat who when the federal government took away the Biden administration, let’s be frank, took away the Covid stimulus checks for families. He just brought ’em back. So I don’t think it’s as easy as just saying the administration and the campaign rejected the left, and that’s why they lost. I mean, here I am in Chicago and we elected the Bernie Coalition and they just screwed up everything and the mayor as a 15% approval rating, I’m going to really place the blame on the fact that people only know what the candidates are saying or doing through mediation. And that medium is the media, right? I just got a text from a friend of mine who works at a major metropolitan newspaper, basically in a blue state, a blue city in a red state, and he said, journalism deserve what it has coming to it. Discussion in the newsroom. This is a newspaper newsroom about Project 25. So very clear, no one’s seriously grappled with anything before today. Just one more example, inflation, right? I mean, there’s this huge debate over inflation, right? Did anyone in the media ever say that the president really has no control over inflation? Right? So I mean, to me, the reason the word fascism is useful is because it’s only possible in this kind of deranged information environment in which it’s just very hard for people to just grasp reality. I mean, here we have this guy, I, Elon Musk, and I was looking at Axios today, and Axios report was, well, maybe Elon Musk isn’t so dumb after all, maybe he’d made an amazing investment by buying Twitter and by saying that, they’re saying this is a guy who basically was turned over the keys to something that’s going to be like state media, a state propaganda raus. He’s going to be the nation’s gables and one of these newsletters of the elite capitalist masters of the universe in Washington. All they can say about this is great business move. So yeah, I wish it was as easy as saying, Kamala screwed up. I kind of dug what she was doing. I think that it’s a calamity and a disaster that she wasn’t able to say anything about Gaza that was productive in any way, shape or form. But quite frankly, mass occurring brown people is not a big problem for a lot of Americans, as we’ve seen from them choosing Donald Trump. So I think the biggest crisis moving forward has to be dealing with this media that just does not know how to represent the truth to citizens in a way that allows them to act like citizens. Maximillian Alvarez: Laura, let’s toss it to you. Laura Flanders: Well, so many things there. I mean, I want to come back to the media. Of course. Huge, huge issue. I will give just a few quick takes on the Harris campaign for sure. I don’t think there’s anything she could have done that necessarily would’ve turned a totally different result, maybe incrementally different. But I do think it is really hard to run on and also against the economic record of the administration that you’ve been part of for the last four years. I also think it is really hard to run against autocracy and war and for human rights and be part of an administration that is flooding weapons to a foreign autocrat committing. I think it’s super hard to run a bottom up. People powered We are democracy in Action democratic campaign that nonetheless relies on big dollar donors by private interests. That’s our system that is fundamentally instills a level of hypocrisy and servitude into our political process. Finally, I think it is really hard to run as the nation’s first woman of color president in a continent as big as ours with 330 million people and do it in 106 days. So those are my hot takes on the Harris aspect of the story. The other aspect of the story though that I think Rick is getting at so well is it’s not about one party or one campaign or let alone one politician. There have been structural phenomena playing out here over decades that finally came to roost this election. Did the media ignore important aspects of what was actually happening under the Biden administration? Absolutely. I mean, when Nicholas Lehman writes in the New Yorker, in the issue that comes out the week before the election, Biden Nos is working, why is nobody noticing? You’re like, well, because the media, so-called most of our most influential media speakers are those cable network pundits who never leave the studio. So while Nicholas Lehman, bless him, goes out there and actually talks to working class people at the factory, making the school buses, making green school buses with union labor in a neighborhood that needed employment, employing people that were historically disadvantaged, all thanks to millions of dollars coming in from the Biden administration, it’s too little too late. And where was the reporting all this time about how this policy was actually playing out? I’m with Rick. I was never a huge Biden fan during the financial crisis. We remember the role that he played benefiting privileging banking over others. But heck in this administration, Biden nos showed the markers of the influence of the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. It really did. And there was a lot to actually run on and talk about. Not happy talk about how inflation is nothing and everybody’s lives are great and the market’s great, therefore you should feel better than you do. But actual real life stuff about what’s happening on the ground, that’s about as positive as you’re going to get from me about a democratic administration. But I do think there were things to report on there that simply got missed, and Harris could have run on some of that, but she was so intimidated, I think by the frames that the media had put on this election, which was that everybody was upset about the economy. What do we mean by the economy anyway? Who’s out there talking about what that means? We have many economies in this country, people getting by in all sorts of different ways and people being helped by government programs in all sorts of different ways. We could have talked about a lot of it. So I think there’s the problem of the media, what they actually do today. There’s the problem of how much advertising money they absorb. What if they just said, tomorrow we’re not running these ads, but instead they accept the cable companies, which are for-profit corporations, part of international global corporate capital, accept millions of dollars of advertising money to run ads that are lies. And we know that they were lies that worked lies around trans people, men in sports, not true. That’s not the issue. And lies of every other possible kind, and this comes back to our bigger fundamental problem we have. Well, two, they both have to do with capitalism. One of them has to do with you cannot have a democracy. I mean, Bernie’s, right? We shouldn’t have billionaires. You can’t have a democracy when you have billionaires allowed to pump as much money as they want to into our elections. It just doesn’t work. Secondly, we have had an extractive economy that has extracted culture and value and understanding and care and attention as much as it has extracted precious minerals from underneath the ground of our communities around this country, and concentrated all those resources and attention and information and caring in a few hands in a few places. So we do have a lot of this country that has been ignored for way too long in terms of the culture, what they see reflected back to them through their media, the kinds of people they see, talking back to them about the nature of the world. And I think that that is a longstanding problem that has been going on for years when people feel ignored, alienated, scared, alone, remote, disinvested in, not cared about. It is really easy for one to create a sense of community of the aggrieved and a community of the aggrieved that are led to believe through endless messaging that it’s not the wealthy and the extractors that are the problem. It’s the scrappy immigrants who are coming to take their jobs. And that’s what happened this time and we’ve, it’s not magic, it’s not rocket science, it’s not breaking news that that’s been going on, but that is, I believe at the heart of what happened today and leaves us with an enormous job of how do we reinvest attention, caring, consideration, not to mention resources into communities that don’t make it into our news. Marc Steiner: A couple of things here that popped up as both of you were talking. One has to do, we don’t have to belabor this, but the Democrats had a billion dollars to spend. They could have told the story, hired organizers really pushed a different agenda, exposed the things you were just talking about, Laura, all across the media. They could have done that and had people on the ground organizing. They didn’t do it. They did not organize this. And I guess having spent years as an organizer and running campaigns, give me a billion dollars, I’ll help you change it. That really drove me nuts. But the other thing is, let’s talk about what’s going to happen now. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, let me hop in there real quick. I want us to end in the sort of what happens now question. But I guess by way of getting there, I want to comment on the economy and a question about the media. That’s cool, right? Because again, agree with what you guys are saying, taking it all in, appreciate your perspectives that as always, and I want to just also offer kind of a perspective here as folks watching this know, yeah, the Real News Network is a nonprofit newsroom. We’re not competing with CNN or stuff like that, but we’re small, mighty, we care and we try and we talk to working people around the country week in, week out. I interviewed tons of them on my show working people all the time. And what I can also want to add to the conversation here is that in those conversations, you will hear how the people’s perception of the economy and people’s lived experience, it produces a sort of mixed bag. When we’re talking about the economy, it is not as simple as saying Omics is working. Why aren’t people talking about it depends on what people were talking about. I interviewed railroad workers last week on my show saying, Hey, Biden and Congress broke your guys’ strike. How are people feeling right now? How are they going to vote? The answer was, people are feeling demoralized. Our strike was broken under Biden’s administration and the rail companies got everything that they want. Then two months after we were forced to accept a contract, the derailment in East Palestine happened. They’ve been left behind. Railroad workers feel just as demoralized as they did three years ago before the country started to care about ’em again. They barely got any sick days. They got a little pay bump, but they’re still being run into the ground. So in terms of omics working for them, it’s not right in terms of public school teachers and counties all across the country, especially in places like Minnesota where I’ve interviewed folks, they can’t hire educators because the pay is so low and they can’t retain folks, nurses, healthcare workers, education workers are constantly telling us that they are being burnt out because they’re having more work piled onto fewer workers at pay that is not keeping pace with the cost of living. If you add into that young people who are dealing with a massive debt burden from getting the education we were told to get when we were young, those student loan repayments started up a few months ago. Housing costs still are skyrocketing. Omics is not working for a lot of folks there, and they’re feeling it. Now. Again, Trump’s not going to address that, but it paints a really complicated picture. As Laura said, there are many complic economies. Laura Flanders: Well, it’s complicated picture though, max, that I mean, if you had been, I bet if you had been running head for office, you would’ve said, listen, it’s not working for everybody. We want to do more, do it better. I mean, if you were a Democrat, you would’ve run on, we’ve been at least doing this and we could be doing more instead of we agree it’s been a big problem, which is what she basically ran on. So instead of saying, we need more of this and this is what’s been happening and this is what still needs to be done, she ran away from the whole story, which I think was a big mistake. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean, I think also people have a very distorted picture, which brings us back to the media about what the scene is for working class people and organize labor in this country. Folks still think we’re in the midst of this great organizing wave when the organizing wave that emerged out of Covid is still running through the mud of an underfunded NLRB in a viciously anti-union corporate class that has managed to stall so many of those unionization Rick Perlstein: Efforts. Maximillian Alvarez: So again, complicated picture point, very well taken. This brings us back to the question of the media, because I wrote this piece last week in these times in the Real News, a deeply personal piece trying to address this question because I went back home and visited my grandfather who’s dying of Alzheimer’s, who’s obsessively watching Trump and Fox News and OAN, and I sat there in his living room watching the screen that he watches that connects him to the world outside of his window. And the world looked very different than the one that I see watching the world in my social circles through the media that I consume, the reporting that I do. And that is a huge unspoken crisis that we are experiencing in the digital age right now where you could be seeing and imagining a very different country than the person who sits next to you on the bus, depending on what channels you watch, what apps you use, what podcasts you listen to. So there’s been a fracturing of not only the mass public that maybe television commanded a large audience of 30, 40 years ago, but that has sort of translated into a very fractured sense of the country that we’re actually living in. And so Mike, I wanted to ask Rick, the media is one of the core pillars of the Infernal Triangle that you’re writing about so much at the American Prospect. Can you talk a bit about that sort of reality warping and reality and casing sort of effect of the fractured media ecosystem we’re living in now? And Laura is someone who has been working in media and journalism, you’re on still public tv. How do we fight that? Rick Perlstein: Right? I mean, imagine if your work and your reporters in Wisconsin or East Palestine, if that was happening on the scale of the resources of a New York Times or a Washington Post or a CNN instead of your hard scrabble crew, literally probably literally a thousand fold resources, we would’ve a different country because the politicians would receive different signals because they’re very solicitous of what the media says about them and what’s going out there. And we take something like crime and crime committed by migrants. Every educated person knows that immigrants commit violent crimes at a level far lower than native foreign people. So logically speaking, if you want a less crime ridden country, you’re let in more immigrants, not less, and the lie that immigrants are invading, I mean, which is just like fascist rhetoric. I mean, the idea that a poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free are the people who are the threat to the country. It is like something out of Nazi Germany or Prof and the Soviet Union I spent a couple of weeks ago, I was in New York and I went to Ellis Island, so I really saw Ellis Island. I don’t know if some of you guys who are older might remember that Ellis Island was rehabbed and kind of reopened after a long closure in the 1980s during the Reagan era. At the same time, they restored the Statue of Liberty. There were all these scaffolding around it, and it was really a time when the civic religion just had a basic grasp and basic beliefs that immigrants were a good thing. And one of the things I found so fascinating was they had all these oral histories in which people told their stories what it was like going through Ellis Island. And one guy was like, there was a law that you had to have $25, so we would just kind of pass the same $25 down the line. And the immigrant inspectors looked the other way. They knew we didn’t have $25. And the fact that this was upheld in the museum is a story that we were supposed to celebrate showing the gumption and hustle of immigrants instead of the story now, which is told also by unfortunately Kamala Harris, did she ever say once that we want more immigrants, the immigrants are good. She said, we are a nation of immigrants, which is a very mild thing. Instead, the story about immigrants passing that $25 down the line would be, wow, these immigrants are cheating us. And that’s somehow become this kind of bipartisan thing, and it is backed by this lie that’s also passed on in the media because the Republicans say it. And if the Republicans say it, we have to report it without fact checking because fact checking would be bias that America is suffering a epidemic of violent crime. So yeah, I mean, I think really it’s very fundamental. And then you get to the issue of social media and their algorithms that basically valorize people basically lying in order to create fights, which creates more engagement. I think that the revolution now flows through the media, right? I mean, if we had an honest media that provided a reasonable picture onto the world, everything would change. Everything would change. Laura Flanders: I mean, Rick, you mentioned Bels, and I wrote a piece for The Guardian earlier this year that referred to Musk as today’s Bels. And I didn’t just mean because of the role he is playing in communication, but structurally, I mean people perhaps don’t remember Bels, the communications director for the Hitler administration, as it were, the Hitler regime. He didn’t just do propaganda. He distributed cheap radio sets to Germans all across the country so that they well boosted the economy of the people that owned the manufacturers, but also gave people a free new medium that they could engage with and get their news from that they were excited about. It was very similar to Twitter or X. And I think that that idea of distributing not just content, but also form the pipes as well as what runs through the pipes, owning your own media platforms. I mean, the Trump team have several of them now. Trump has his own, which is increasing in value after the election, and Twitter Musk has x. I think that we, and always Max, when I talk about the failings of the media, I am not talking about you or me or the whole media, independent media ecosystem that has provided us our community over all these many decades. And it’s exciting to know that there are new generations of independent media makers and movement media makers and a new alliance that I know that you’re part of the Movement Media Alliance that’s thinking about how can we independents move more closely together, work more closely together, help one another survive better. I assume my days on public television are numbered because I think public television is to be zeroed out of the budget, at least according to Project 2025, Not than anybody at public television covered that part of Project 2025, but hey, I read that chapter with Care and Concern. I think they mentioned it on page like two. But I do think that this media piece also, another thing that I’ve thought about a lot is we have monopoly media, and when I talk about extraction, the extraction takes resources from a place, attention, people care, all of that and concentrates it somewhere else. And if you think of what’s happened in our media, national networks have taken over where there used to be local media and that local media that reflected back to you perhaps what was happening in your town, the little league scores and the stores and what’s happening in the church and the food pantries and anything would reflect back to you, your actual reality. In most parts of this country, there is no such thing. And I think that is another phenomenon, that it’s not just the addition of propaganda mechanisms, but the subtraction of the other media that made people feel that they lived in a community with other folks. Marc Steiner: I’d like to ask a quick question in time. We have here, Maximillian Alvarez: We’ve got a few minutes for our next segment, so take us out. Marc Steiner: Okay. So when you have people like Elon Musk, JD Vance in positions of huge power, these are both very bright and shrewd men in, and you have Project 2025, which they’re going to implement. We touched on it just briefly, it was brought up, but it seems to me one of the biggest issues we’re going to face is people like that running the government and implementing Project 2025. I’m curious, what’s your analysis of that is, what do you think? Is it going to take us and what’s the struggle against it? Rick, you want to jump in First? Rick Perlstein: Project 2025, I mean, one thing that is very important to understand about Project 2025 is how just thoroughly comprehensive it is. I tried to read through the whole thing and it gets to the most molecular granular levels of these agencies. You’ve never even heard of Marc Steiner: It. Does I read it? Rick Perlstein: Yeah. So is the contrast to kind of power building on the left is we don’t have that kind of granularity about where the levers of power live. It’s like we say the right things, we have the right ideals. But one reason I personally preferred Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders is she knew those millions of federal agencies and who worked there. And just to kick a quick example, one of my friends running for office running for governor said he supported Elizabeth Warren because he told a story about how when he was running for governor, he said he was trying to create this certain financial reform, and in order to do it, he had to pass this law. And Elizabeth Warren said, no, you don’t have to pass this law that’s already a federal law. You just need it enforced by this person and this place and dah, dah, dah, dah. So I think that kind of granularity, that kind of seriousness about power, that kind of really unglamorous stuff is what Project 2025 accomplishes that there isn’t much, much of a parallel to on the left. Laura Flanders: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think that we talk about the writers being anti-government, but Project 2025 showed just how good they were at thinking about the role of government and what government can do. Marc Steiner: The Laura Flanders: Other aspect, of course, of that whole initiative is not just the policies on paper, but the people that were recruited to line up to be appointed into these offices in a way that enabled there to be a lot of scrutiny of those candidates long before any transition team comes into play. So unlike the last Trump administration, they won’t be the same kind of lag in populating government. And I would just echo Rick, while they populate with loyalists, we need to look closely at local government and see where we can also shore up positions of influence at the local level. Because heck, we have got to look at any possible place in our entire government system where we can fortify resistance, fortify mechanisms that would act as at least a slowdown on this administration’s plans Rick Perlstein: Based decisions. Where were we are that are going to have an effect on this resistance. And I wrote a column, Google it, what will you do? And it’s about the faces, the kind of questions all of us will individually face under an authoritarian government, whether we’re in a government job or we’re lawyers or we’re working class people, we might have to stand in the gap. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, we’re going to go to Wisconsin in a minute, but while we still have Rick Pearlstein and Laura Flanders on with us, I want to kind of ask you guys in a second to sort of just help center our viewers and listeners right now. Where does the fight go from here? And what is your message to folks right now who are feeling scared, anxious, uncertain about why they need to be part of that fight? But I wanted to also just really underline the point about the importance of independent truth telling, principled, transparent, honest media. And if you support us here at The Real News, first of all, thank you. Secondly, please go support Laura Flanders and Friends if you don’t already. It is vital. The entire team there is great. They do incredible work week in, week out. And as you’ve seen here over the past 30 minutes, we desperately need Laura’s voice heard by as many folks as we can. Same goes for Rick. So if you are watching this, you support the Real news, please go support our friends at Lo Flanders and Friends. Please support the American Prospect where Rick’s invaluable column is published. Every week. So I wanted to put in a plug there for both of our guests and their incredible work, and I wanted to throw it back to you guys to kind of have the final word here again. What would you say to folks out there watching and listening about where the fight goes from here, why they need to be part of it, and yeah, how we steal ourselves for what’s to come? Rick Perlstein: I don’t know. Laura Flanders: Well, I had a question for Rick if we had more time, and I guess we don’t, but I’ve been thinking how does this moment compare to the worst of the Nixon years and is there any courage or any comfort to be had in the idea that we have seen bad times before? I’ll tell you, Rick Perlstein: Yeah. Nixon had a lot of this in mind for his second term, and that was all scotched by and Watergate in a lot of ways was the political elite and institutions in this country having the courage to stand up to, to someone who really had authoritarian designs in mind. So I’ll just say that we need all of us, whether we’re democratic office holders or radical grassroots activists, to figure out some way to find every possible lever of accountability and make it hard, make it hard. And that can just mean putting your body in front of us, in front of an immigrant who’s going to be deported, just make it harder. Laura Flanders: Immigrants, just very briefly, max, I will say, and first off, thanks for the pitch. If you absorb any independent media out there, fund it, send a contribution, whatever it is, support whatever avenue of information that you value, send them some money. Secondly, I had a show, we recorded a show yesterday that will be aired tomorrow at five and all frontline activists, and one of them is Lene Yosef, who works with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, the only Haitian-American organization working with migrants on the border. And this is an organization she personally with her organization brought a citizens lawsuit against Trump and Vance over what they had done in Springfield, Ohio. And she knows for sure she’s on any kind of enemies list that the administration’s going to have. She said, I’m Haitian, I’m indomitable. Don’t think for a minute that we are going to pause in our action. And while I was there, white lady saying, oh my God, worst night ever. She’s like, eh, we’ve seen many worst nights. And the other guests that we had on the show too, who have spent years fighting segregation in North Carolina or genocide on the reservations, they all looked at me like, get over yourself, get down to work, get busy. I think art culture, we’re going to need to really exercise our imagination and every possible tool of connection and place of connection that we have that into which we can invite the next generation and every other kind of wise that will help us build a better day and connect us to one another. So save the places that you care about and invite new people into them. Maximillian Alvarez: Absolutely. Hell yeah. So that is the great Laura Flanders host of Laura Flanders and friends on PBS and the great Rick Pearlstein author of numerous books, including Nixonland and Reagan Land. And you can catch Rick’s column, the Infernal Triangle at the American Prospect, Rick. Laura, thank you both so much for joining us at this critical moment. We need your voices now more than ever, and we appreciate you joining us and sharing them with our audience today. Take care of yourselves, and we’re sending love and solidarity to you guys from Baltimore. Good to see you both. Eman Abdelhadi: Great work. Yep, Maximillian Alvarez: Right back at you. Si. Thank you guys. So we have another hour to go here. We really appreciate y’all sticking with us and we really want to hear your questions, your comments, your responses to what’s being said here. As I said, at the top of this live stream, this will not be the only chance that we have to address the questions that are on your mind. We want to take the questions that you’re asking us now in the live chat, in the comments of this video and respond to them in future live streams and segments. So we are going to stick with you, we’re going to stick with this. We’re in this for the long haul, and we’re going to keep doing what we can to get you the information and perspective that you need to act. And today, in the second half of this live stream, we’re going to kick off the hour by going to one of the key battleground states that all eyes were on heading into Tuesday. It was a key pillar in the so-called Blue Wall in the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and both of which went for Trump. And we actually had our intrepid reporters, my incredible colleagues, Mark’s incredible colleagues, Steven, Janice and Taya Graham on the ground in Milwaukee this week where they also were reporting from during the RNC earlier in the summer. And they’ve had a hell of a week. And we want to sort of get an on the ground update from them on what they’ve been seeing, hearing, feeling there on the ground in Wisconsin as folks went to the polls. And as the results started coming in, we are hoping to also be joined by John Nichols, national affairs correspondent at the Nation to help us also get some perspective on what Wisconsin can tell us about the larger political realignment taking place in this country. But for now, I want to bring in my amazing colleague, Steve and Janice and Te Graham. Guys, thank you so much for first of all, the incredible work that you’ve been doing. The entire team here is so proud of you and so grateful. Speaker 6: Thank you Maximillian Alvarez: For your hustle and for everything that you’ve done to execute our mission. So I wanted to start there. I know you guys are tired, you’ve had a hell of a week. So why don’t we start there? A, how you doing and B, can you just sort of give us a sense of what this has all looked like from your vantage point reporting there on the ground in Wisconsin from Monday to now? Stephen Janis: Yep. It’s interesting because Tay and I always say when we reported on the ground for presidential elections since 2016 for the Real News, and there’s always moments that we have where we encounter someone or something that kind of gives us a cue. And I would say that this particular, we were on the ground out going to polls like we always do, and we went to Centennial, what was it, cental? Centennial Hall? Yeah, Centennial Hall. It Taya Graham: Was for awards 180 3, 180 4 and 180 5. Stephen Janis: But basically it serves Marquette and University of Milwaukee. And we interviewed several people and there were a couple of things that came to mind. First of all, there was a young woman who we thought was that you presume would be talking about reproductive rights or whatever, who said, and she’s like, I voted for Trump. And Tye and I both looked at each other and we’re like, wow, that does not bode well that we’re in downtown Milwaukee. And then another young man who was a student as well voted for Trump. But what was interesting about it relating back to our previous guest, was the information ecosystem from which they made this decision seemed so murky. And so really not within the realm of how policy actually works. And it harken back from me to what we had talked about right after the debate, Kamala Harris, where she soundly defeated Donald Trump. And we asked the question, would it matter? And I was just reading articles today in the New York Times about a Republican strategist who was stunned that after that horrible debate performance by Donald Trump, that Kamala Harris didn’t rise up much of the polls. And these students kind of exemplify that because they’re getting their information from places I think that don’t really have a concrete rendering of the vagaries of policy. And in this case, I think te you want to talk a little bit about with the young man, talk about the young man that was really interesting, you challenged Taya Graham: Him Stephen Janis: And just talk about that. Taya Graham: So I don’t think people realize how much the culture war that has been promulgated by the Republican party has been incredibly effective. So this young man we spoke to was actually from California. He’s an Asian American, and he essentially said, and in not so many words that he didn’t want his media to be woke. And what he cited was JRR Tolkiens, second thank you Rings of power and on Amazon Prime. And he cited that he did not want, I guess present deism put into his fantasy. And I said to him, quite pointedly, I said, so you didn’t like the Black Lady dwarf is what you’re saying? And he smiled and he looked down and he said, well, that and the L-G-B-T-Q ideology that I found in the art as well. And I did challenge him a little bit. I said, well, isn’t Art supposed to reflect the zeitgeist of the age? Isn’t that the point of any form of art, whether it’s a book being adapted that it’s supposed to reflect the culture of the time? And he said, no, I just want to escape when I watch whatever creative form that he’s interested in. So I was somewhat surprised by that. So essentially he’s saying, I’m rejecting woke ideology, and that is why I’m voting for Trump. Stephen Janis: The thing is, what you saw in some of the voters was the Democrats have a very sort of professional rollout talking points and somewhat, I think seemingly in this media ecosystem, an inauthentic approach as opposed to Trump who kind of permeates and gets through that morass of social media because he seems to them, and I’m saying to them to be a more authentic alternative. I mean, that’s the only thing I can figure because their grasp for the policy aspects of both the Democratic administration and what really is going to happen. I mean, this young woman was like, well, Trump improved abortion rights because he sent it to the states. Taya Graham: Exactly. Speaker 6: She Stephen Janis: Said that to us and maintain, and I kind of looking at each other, a Taya Graham: Little puzzled, little puzzled, Stephen Janis: And I mean you can talk a little bit more of that, but I think that just to emphasize that this is a social media tumble world they’re in and the Democrats are coming forward with a very professional campaign, but maybe that doesn’t work. Marc Steiner: Right. Taya Graham: The one thing that I can tell for certain from all the different people that we spoke to at the polls is that the Democrats did not do their job communicating to the public effectively. And for people can discuss for the next four years how Trump was so effective, whether it’s that he’s the perfect man for the social media ecosystem that we have, that he’s able to push through in a way that as Steven said, sort of granular policy analysis simply doesn’t Die. It simply dies on the vine. But these young people, I would say, and I don’t mean to say this, to be rude to the Trump voters in any way, we went to the Republican National Convention and also the people at the polls, when I spoke to delegates at the Republican National Convention, they could not cite specific policies. It was based on their feelings about Donald Trump as a leader. And that is exactly what that young woman said. She could not name a single policy from his previous administration that she liked, but she just felt that he felt stronger as a candidate. And so it’s an emotional connection and for whatever reason, Democrats have not been effective at making that sort of connection with the public. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really critical point. The emotional economy of vibes is playing a huge role in shaping voter attitudes and perceptions of the reality that they’re living in. I want to return to that point for sure in a minute, but I’m excited to welcome on our other guests for this segment, the great John Nichols, who is national affairs correspondent of the nation, has been writing on and analyzing Wisconsin and its place in the political terrain for many years. We’ve had him on Mark’s show. He is a brilliant, brilliant mind and we’re so grateful to have him on to help us unpack this. John, are you there with us? John Nichols: I think I am. I can see folks. Maximillian Alvarez: Beautiful. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to see you, man. John Nichols: It’s a pleasure, Maximillian Alvarez: John. How are you? Good to see you. Thank you. Good John Nichols: To see you my friend. Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you so much for joining us, man. We know you don’t have much time. We know you’re working your butt off right now, so while John Nichols: We amazing, we’re still trying to figure this one out. Okay. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. So while we’ve got you, I mean, I want to give our audience access to your rich perspective here. We need it right now, and there is a lot to be unpacked about the current results in Wisconsin that I want to ask you to try to of help our viewers and listeners understand what they’re seeing and where it came from, but to also offer us some larger historical perspective here. I mean, I was watching on M-S-N-B-C, they were showing the map from 2008 to 2024. It’s basically mirror images of each other in terms of, especially in the rural counties across Wisconsin that have now just deep red when they were blue not so long ago. And this of course is taking place in a longer political trajectory in a state that in many ways is the heart of modern progressivism. So I wanted to ask if you could, a, help us just unpack what we are seeing now in Wisconsin, what is happening in Wisconsin and what that tells us about the national scene right now and how the heck we got here. What can Wisconsin tell us about how we got here? John Nichols: Well, that’s a great way to frame the question frankly, because Wisconsin, of course, we begin with the fact that it’s the ultimate battleground state, more of a battleground state than any other in the country. Now, in the last seven presidential elections, the last seven presidential elections, five of them have been decided by under 35,000 votes, four of ’em by under 25,000 votes. So you can’t find another state in the country that has that pattern of deep divide. This is a state that has a democratic senator and a Republican senator. It’s a state that had a Republican governor, now it has a democratic governor. You know what I mean? It is kind of constant Out of this election. We just had a result that made our state legislature, our state senate, almost exactly tied. And so in that context, obviously small movements in one direction or another mean a lot, and you are basically right to focus on rural, and that’s a place where progressivism was in Wisconsin at its strongest. At one time, it was a combination of Milwaukee socialists and rural populist farmers. It was very effective coalition, and interestingly enough, it helped the Milwaukee Socialists faded and so did some of the progressive tradition, but still, you had a state that voted democratic in 19 88, 19 92, 19 96, 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012, right, this hope had. And then Trump comes along and he cracks into that. He doesn’t win by much in 2016, and he didn’t win by much this time, 20, 30,000 votes is what you’re talking about. That still makes Wisconsin, and when all is said and done, Wisconsin will end up being closer than most of the battleground states. Here’s the fascinating thing about Wisconsin though Tammy Baldwin, US city, US Senator, who’s clearly to the left of Kamala Harris on a number of issues, she won. She pulled it off. And just as Trump won Wisconsin, it looks like we had roughly 30,000 votes. Baldwin won by roughly 30,000 votes. So there’s a space there, but I think you have to be careful to assume that there were Trump people voting for Baldwin. There was a drop off. There’s I think a portion of Trump voters who just vote for Trump and don’t even vote for the rest of the Republican ticket. That’s something to take into the mix. But there were some folks who actually did cast a Trump Baldwin vote. It seems bizarre to us in many ways because that doesn’t compute. Tammy Baldwin an out lesbian who supports Medicare, has supported Medicare for all, who has been very progressive, not always and not as good as I might want on some issues, but pretty solid record winning in a state where Trump’s winning. How does that happen? What’s going on there? Why do you have this? Well, the answer, and we saw a little bit in Michigan with Slotkin winning the Senate seat narrowly over there, the answer is that Tammy Baldwins did something that the National Democratic Ticket didn’t do, and that is she wedded her campaign to trade unionism to the working class, to the labor movement. And this morning, just not long before I joined you today, I was at an event where she formally declared victory. She didn’t do it at a hotel downtown, hotel like Canada, like Democrats always do or almost always do. She didn’t do it in a office, some office someplace, or even frankly at her alma mater or the University of Wisconsin campus. She did it at a union hall on the edge of town, and the place was packed with union members wearing their shirts, steam fitters, electricians, teamsters, all sorts of other folks. And when she walked in the room, there was this epic cheering. And that’s frankly what Democrats need to have. They need to have union members cheering them on. They need to have an excitement about their candidates. Just as, I guess as an example, the Christian Wright gets very excited when a Republican walks in the room. And one of the things that Baldwin did in Wisconsin last, I’ll say this because I want to hear more of your questions of course, but one of the things that Baldwin did in Wisconsin was a wholly different set of ads. You wouldn’t have recognized them as compared to the Democratic party in a lot of other places. Her ads, one set of her ads featured teamsters who were sitting one after another, sitting in a chair talking about when they lost their pensions and when they were in very dire straits, the plan closed, the pensions taken away, and each teamster after another talked about an aspect of the story. It’s a very short ad, but they’re saying, when we lost our pension, we thought we were going to lose everything. And a couple sitting there saying, we thought we’re going to lose our house. These are real working class people talking about a profound issue. And then toward the end of it, one of ’em says, and so we called Tammy Baldwin and she went to work for us. And then, I’m paraphrasing here, but the close of it was, if you’re in trouble, if you’re having a hard time as a worker, you need Tammy Baldwin on your side. I mean, that is a kind of classic outreach to working class multiracial, multi-ethnic voting class. And she had other ads with people working in shipyards, people working on farms, and so she ran a campaign that reached out to the working class and it paid off. She won. Other good Democrats didn’t. That’s something to pay attention to. Marc Steiner: I extrapolate that a bit more when I think about Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s always been, people look at it as a progressive state, but it’s always been a deeply divided state as well. Politically. George Wallace did well there, Joe McCarthy bloomed out there. And so I wonder what you just said about Tammy Baldwin. What does that say strategically to you about what progressive leaders in this country have to do to build a majority and to take the fight to the working class and bring people together? I mean, what is the Wisconsin lesson? John Nichols: Well, the Wisconsin lesson is a pretty simple one for about 150 years. Wisconsin hasn’t liked elites, hasn’t liked people in New York or Washington or LA or other places that tend to tell ’em what’s going on, and there’s a reason for that. Wisconsin was historically a farm state, and the farm products that they produced had to be shipped by train. The railroads charged extreme rates, and that was very damaging to people. And so they developed this sensibility that which we do not control is probably going to harm us. And it’s one of the reasons why historically Wisconsin was a more anti-war state. Wisconsin tend to think wars came from Washington, Wisconsin was a state that was historically very strong union state, very strong and a lot of different issues, and also very anti-corporate in a lot of ways and very anti-monopoly, et cetera, et cetera. Our politics has become so muddled in recent decades that I think most people don’t necessarily see that Democratic party as an anti-corporate, anti-monopoly party. So if you’re going to get those votes, you have to remind people of that, or there’s a real chance that they’re going to vote for somebody else who sounds like they’re attacking elites. That’s how you ended up with a Robert and Lafa, the great progressive winning and son Robert and Lafa Jr. Winning a Senate seat, which ultimately went to Joe McCarthy. Now, you and I don’t get very excited about Joe McCarthy. We don’t like where Joe McCarthy was coming from, but in his time, he was seen by somebody who was attacking a certain set of elites. And that’s sort of the thing to understand that even came in through Russ Feingold more recently as a US Senator from Wisconsin losing his seat to Ron Johnson. All of this kind of a muddled politics. You have to cut your way through it. And what Baldwin did was her way through it, she said, Hey, by the way, I am the candidate of unions and of working class people. I don’t just tell you that in a speech or something. I don’t put ’em on my ads. I’m going to actually use them talking to the people of this state. It didn’t mean that she deemphasized issues other issues, her strong support of abortion rights. She’s arguably the leading supporter of abortion rights in the Senate. Didn’t mean that she played down her stances on a host of issues, but she turned up volume on these working class issues and it paid off. I think you saw a little bit in Michigan with Slotkin in her Senate race as well, but you didn’t see it in the presidential race. And I think that’s a subtlety of this thing. Kamala Harris had extremely strong union support and unions went to the mat for really worked hard all over the country, even when the Teamsters didn’t endorse her, Teamsters Regional and local councils jumped in to backer and gave her a tremendous amount of support. And so they did a lot of internal work. In fact, fascinatingly enough, the exit polling shows that one of the few demographics that didn’t decline for the Democrats in this cycle was union members. So the unions did great work with their members. The problem is that the Harris campaign, which did many things right? I’m not here to just purely complain about the Harris campaign, but they did not put that broader emphasis on working class issues at central to their campaign. And so as a result in the non-union working class, they experienced a lot of loss. And again, that multiracial multi-ethnic challenge that they faced. And I guess here’s the simple thing I would offer, yes, for Wisconsin lesson itself, so maybe to some extent upper Midwest, and that is this, people need to clearly know where you’re at and you need to remind ’em. You can’t assume people remember it from past elections or things like that. Our friends here, were just talking about the social media landscape and all these other ways that we get our information. Now, it’s bifurcated. It’s not the same daily newspaper or local radio station. It’s all sorts of sources. And in that Caity, you lose sight sometimes of core messages. What struck me is that Kamala Harris, who again, I thought did many things right, but why didn’t she, in every single speech say, we are going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage? Why wasn’t that part of every speech? Why wasn’t it part of every speech to say that Donald Trump renegotiated NAFTA and made it worse, actually undermined the auto parts industry in all sorts of industries and call it Trump’s nafta. Why not say that? Why appear everywhere with Liz Cheney, but almost never with Bernie Sanders and only rarely with Sean Fain? I mean the equation, it’s so easy to this out, and it always frustrates me that the Democratic Party has such a struggle to get to it at the national level. Again, some people like Baldwin and soccer and figuring it out, but why not? When you’re in that situation, why not take the step, deliver the message, appear with the people that are going to be useful to you politically? This isn’t just moral politics. I think being pro-union is a morally good stance. This is also practical politics, and the fascinating thing about it is that I looked at the data, all those places that Kamala Harris went with Liz Cheney, all that outreach to conservatives, the percentage of conservatives voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 was down from the percentage that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. They didn’t get anybody over. Nothing happened there in the suburban areas that they went to where they actually had these sit downs with Liz Cheney. They didn’t move numbers. Things didn’t get better for them there. And so it was wasted energy that could have been spent going to not just physically, but messaging wise to working class people of all races and in all communities. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, man, that’s making my blood boil, man. That’s a powerful analysis though. No, really helpful and vital information. And I do have a follow-up question if we got time. We only got Brother John Nichols for a few more minutes. I did want to give my colleague Steven, Janice te Graham, the chance, if you guys are still with us since you guys have been reporting there in Milwaukee. If you guys had a question for John based on what you’ve been seeing there on the ground, I did want to prioritize that, but no pressure if you don’t. Taya Graham: Well, first off, I just want to say I’m so glad that he mentioned Senator Tammy Baldwin. We were actually at a Harris Waltz rally. What was the name of that event center? Was that, was that the State Fairgrounds Stephen Janis: Expo? State Expo? Taya Graham: It was at the state Expo, Stephen Janis: Yep. Taya Graham: And we were there and there was so much excitement when she came onto the stage. I mean, people love her here, and I feel like I wish I could be a fly on the wall as the Democratic Party is doing the autopsy right now. Because I think there’s a lesson, and perhaps you can confirm this for me, that they did not learn either from watching Senator Baldwin or from seeing how much Senator Sanders was actually able to generate enthusiasm, which is when the Democrats, as they normally do when they start doing a national campaign, they start moving towards the middle thinking that they’re going to bring people over instead of perhaps taking a different alternative of leaning into being authentic and just leaning left, just going completely into progressive policies, completely embracing unions and instead of worrying about being characterized as leftists or Marxists or what have you, just so you know what, we’re going to be progressive, we’re going to stop trying to play the middle because I think they didn’t learn anything from Senator Sanders campaign or Senator. John Nichols: Yeah, I think it’s a brilliant question and you’re spot on. Bernie Sanders came to Madison about eight days before the election, Monday the week out, and they had about a couple hours basically to organize the event. It was in one of the main theaters on State Street in downtown Madison, big, big cavernous theater. It was packed. I walked over to where the event was, there was a line out the door around the block because Bernie Sanders was coming. He had a OC with them as well. They got up there, delivered a peer progressive message, and people were on their feet excited, engaged, and they talked a lot about these issues that we’re talking about. But there’s a deeper thing in your question that I think is really vital and that is leaning into a progressive stance. I think Democrats often think that makes ’em look weak or something That somehow, oh, you’re off in this place, or whatever. It’s the exact opposite. It’s Sanders has proven, when you come out as a genuine progressive and you’re proud of it and you speak about it strongly, people come to you, and I think that’s even people who aren’t ideologically necessarily with you, but they’re like, wow, that’s somebody who really means it. And I can give you an example on an issue that we haven’t talked about, but I think it’s vital here, or at least relevant, and that’s Gaza Joe Biden’s stance on Gaza is that he would like what’s happening there to stop. He officially says, oh, we want the killing to stop. We want the horrors to end. He says that as the president of the United States of America, one of the most powerful countries in the world and a very close ally of Israel, and does that project strength, no, I think it projects weakness. I think it says on this fundamental issue that tens of millions of Americans care about, you’re not willing to step up, you’re, you’re not going to use the power of your office to take a stand. And I think the same thing happened to Harris on that, such a muddled position on Gaza. So little messaging that I think could have reached a ton of people. And then you look around the country, you say, well, it’s a drop off in votes, obviously, among many Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, but also on campuses, right? Where students were so passionately concerned about these issues. And I guess what I would tell you is that on a host of issues, having a strong position makes people who don’t even necessarily agree with you say, wow, that person believes in things. I know that they get to Congress, they get to position power, they’re going to fight for me. And that is an intangible. In fact, you two were talking about just a second ago where you were talking about these kind of personality things and kind of all the media influences and things like that. Well, in that cacophony, if you’re a strong voice, it has meaning, right? It gets heard. And again, I think that takes us back to what we’re talking about with Baldwin a little bit on these working class, on these union issues. She jumped right in. She stood there strongly and said, this is who I am. She’s running against a very wealthy guy from California, as you know, from watching the state so well, it was perfect. It’s a perfect juxtaposition. And so what I would say for the Democratic Party as regards, our very good question there that led us into this whole discussion is the Democratic Party, I think needs to have a radical rethink, a deep, deep rethink about this because this campaign should not have ended this way at the presidential level, and frankly, even at the congressional level, it just shouldn’t have ended. Where it did something about that doesn’t suggest strength on Trump’s part. In my view, it suggests weakness on the Democratic party’s part. If that is the case, then the most important thing I would say about this rethink is please don’t say you want to rebuild the Democratic Party. Because the fact of the matter is, we have had this cycle on and off for decades now where the party wins and you say, oh, it’s perfect, and then it loses, and you say, well, we’ve got to rebuild stuff. But you keep going back to some of the models of the past. Politics has evolved. The Republican party is a very different party than the one they ran against in the past. And the messaging, the outreach to the Republican party now in many cases, aimed at working class voters at very frustrated, angry folks who have in many cases reasons to be angry at the system, if that’s what you’re up against, don’t rebuild, build something new, Speaker 6: Build John Nichols: A political party that is multiracial, multi-ethnic that respects people where they’re coming from, but also respects the fact that they’re struggling economically that in this capitalist system, it just doesn’t work very well for them. And speak to that in a way that is of the moment and looking to the future, talk about these issues we’re talking about. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, talk about the issues that are never discussed. Do you want to know what builds anxiety in America? There’s a lot of stuff. Inflation builds anxiety, right? No question of that. The inability to buy a house, all sorts of economic issues for women, the threat to their bodily autonomy, right? They assault on abortion rights for L-G-B-T-Q, people who were literally targeted in advertising throughout this campaign all over this country. All of that builds anxiety. You know what else builds anxiety, ai, artificial intelligence, the rise of machine learning. People’s lives are being radically transformed on a daily basis. How we communicate, how we work, how we study. I mean, you talk to a university professor, they’ll tell you everything is different in the classroom because everybody’s using chat, GBT and all this stuff like that. That was never brought up in this campaign, a democratic party that brought up how technology is changing our lives. It is a very future oriented party, but also one that understands the anxiety of working class people in this country. So again, a new democratic, if we’ve got to be stuck with a two party system, let’s have a new democratic party that actually takes in all the stuff that you are talking about that you are, that all these people are talking about and gets us to a point where ideally, ideally the counter to a cruel and angry, and I think in many cases, awful Republican message, right? One that is very dark and it has nothing to do with the history of the Republican party or anything like that, but then it’s one that’s really aimed at dividing people, aimed at, aimed at really building out that anxiety. The counter to that is a party that’s capable of looking at the future, explaining it, and offering a better route forward. Maximillian Alvarez: Very well put, John. Yeah, I mean, I wish I could keep this segment with everyone here going for another half hour, but I know brother John Nichols has a deadline to meet. John Nichols: I’m actually writing about some of the things we’re talking about. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, let me help out. That’s good. We can’t wait to read it. Everyone who’s watching this needs to go and read it. Steven and Te, I’m going to ask you guys if you can hang on for just a little bit, and brother John, I will say thank you and goodbye here. If you’re able to hold on for 30 seconds, cool. If not, we thank you so much. But I just wanted to add there because I’m worried that folks are taking, once again, the wrong sort of lessons from the political map here, especially as it pertains to the rural and urban divide in places like Wisconsin. John Nichols: Let me give you 30 seconds on that. Maximillian Alvarez: Please, please. What are the anxieties in rural Wisconsin? We were reporting there on the CAFOs, on climate affecting their crops. I guess for folks who are just thinking that people in rural America, they’re all driven by racism and uneducation and whatnot, what are the anxieties that folks there’re feeling to? John Nichols: Well, I come from a town I was born in, had 970 people when I was born, and so I grew up in the most rural places, and that was actually one of the biggest communities members of my family had ever lived in. They route back to places with 300 people and 200 and farms. And so that’s where I come from. And one of the things that I always start with is telling people that rural America is multiracial, multiethnic, and far more diverse than I think our national media even begins to understand. If you look at the main streets in rural towns, they’re being revitalized particularly by Latino immigrants, but also by Asian American immigrants. I mean, there are real amazing things happening. There are now small towns in Wisconsin that are majority immigrant families, right? Because people have come, they have revitalized those towns, they’ve rebuilt those towns. It’s an amazing thing. Now, it doesn’t mean that rural areas aren’t predominantly white in many states, but I always remind people that roughly a quarter of black Americans live in rural counties, mostly in the south, but a substantial population that the boom areas for obviously the Latino population, but also for Asian American population is rural areas because they’re moving there, they’re working there, they’re creating things. And so if we understand it as that, first off, we have to recognize rural America isn’t what our media tells us it is. It’s much more, it has a lot of diversity, a lot of distinction within it. The other thing that I always emphasize to people is this, that those blue and red maps are useless. It’s they’re a nightmare because they don’t tell you the actual percentages in those counties. Many of those counties that you look at that are red on the map are 45% blue, right? They’ve got fights within a real battles. And what in Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin would not have been reelected if it wasn’t for rural Democrats. She got a great vote out of Madison, a very liberal town, great vote out of Milwaukee, a multiracial, multi-ethnic town. I mean, she got great votes in these places, but she also held her own in the rural areas. She was endorsed for reelection by the Farm Bureau. I mean, that’s wild. But it was there because she’s been good on farm issues. What that means, what that translates to is that for the Democratic Party, which has been such a mess on so many issues for so long, is that they need to get better on rural. They need to talk to these folks. There are rural Democrats out there doing the work. They’re opening their headquarters, they’re knocking on doors. I can take you to the places and show you people that are putting so much effort and energy into this, but they do need messaging from the national level. And one of the things I would tell you is that the Democratic party will do dramatically better in rural areas if democratic nominees for president simply include three lines in their speeches. Not another rural post office will close if we are elected, not another rural school will close if we are elected and not another rural hospital will close if we are elected. Speaker 6: You John Nichols: Go out and say just those three lines in a speech and you stick to it, you watch some of those numbers shift. The reason Trump and Republicans do well in rural areas is often because people don’t think there’s a big difference between the two parties, and then they default to the anger of the division, right? But if you gave ’em a real alternative, I think we open up a whole new avenue for politics that does not deny the reality of ugly politics and people who do vote on the basis of race and typically toward folks or something that happens. I know that’s there not denying that, but what I’m saying is one of the counters to that is an outreach that actually says to rural people, we see you. We hear you. We want to respond to your actual problems, not to try and make you hate somebody else or not to try and make you see somebody else as a problem. There’s space there. There’s so much space there. And even though we’re staying longer than usual, I love talking about these rural politics issues because it’s frankly one of the spaces where both parties have so much to learn because both parties tend to treat rural folks as an afterthought that they just throw slogans, good slogans are bad at rather than actually going out and talking to the people. So I really thank you for giving me a chance to say that. Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you so much. John Nichols, the great John Nichols national Affairs correspondent at the Nation. We can’t wait to read your piece. We depend on your work. So please, yeah, keep doing it, brother, and let’s have you back on very soon. John Nichols: I appreciate it. And hey, I really appreciate what you folks do, and I love the reporting that you folks have been doing in Wisconsin. Some people come here and they just come for a minute and they pop in on the tarmac of the airport. You’ve got some reporters that have embedded themselves, and that’s a really big, big deal. It makes the reporting so much better. So thank you for treating Wisconsin and America seriously. Maximillian Alvarez: Great to see you, John. John Nichols: Thank you. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, speaking of those incredible reporters, Steven, Janice and Te Graham, do we still got you guys over there in Milwaukee? We may have lost Steven and Te here can hear us. No, they’re still here. You never hear Steven. Of course they’re there. They’re always there. Steven and TE are always there. That’s what you get with these incredible folks on the police accountability report and elsewhere. I wanted to a bring you back in, ask if you guys had any kind of additional thoughts after what John just said about Wisconsin, but also we are going to be wrapping up this live stream by bringing on our final guest the great Bill Gallego. So the Mexico Solidarity Project Bill’s been on Mark’s show recently. We’ve been working with him on some really great historical segments. Bill is also has years of experience in racial justice, Latino justice organizing, immigrant justice organizing, climate justice organizing. And so one of the things we wanted to talk to Bill about is helping to unpack the sort of narratives that are emerging about changing voter trends, specifically in Latino populations, Latino men, like being one of the current groups that are being talked about the most is having swung more for Trump. But this is also an area of reporting that you guys have been really committed to and have done great work in recent months where Taya has been out there going and talking to black and brown Republicans about how they are thinking about the election and voting for Trump. So I wanted to include that as a way to sort of bring Bill in here and continue the conversation that we’re having. So I’m going to toss it to you guys here. And yeah, we’ll have Bill Gallegos on the other side to hop in as well. Taya Graham: Well, I would be happy to speak on the black conservatives that I spoke with. I spoke to Tia Best, who is National Engagement Director for Moms of Liberty. I spoke to, I think dozens, literally dozens of black Republicans at the Republican National Convention the last time we were here in Wisconsin. That was so kind to hear Mr. Nichols give our work such a compliment. That was a huge boost. But back to the black conservatives, something I thought was interesting is that they said black people are naturally socially conservative. So this shift to the Republican party should be expected. But I’d like to say that the loss of black male voters was not that huge. I think depending on what states you’re looking at, 74% up to 80% of black men voted for Harris in any other ethnic group that would be considered a landslide. There was a slight peel off of black male voters and male Latino voters towards Trump. But in general, black voters held for Harris and held for the Democratic Party, whereas the Democratic Party was hemorrhaging votes from youth and actually so many different minority coalitions that in theory should be under the tent of the Democrats. But the one talking point I kept hearing from black conservatives is that we’re socially conservative. Black folks are church folks. It’s natural that the Democratic party is moving away from us. We didn’t move away from them, and that is what I’ve received from black conservatives. Maximillian Alvarez: So I want to bring in Brother Bill Gallegos here as well, because this is an issue that we’ve been talking about with him and that he’s been talking about and trying to get folks to pay attention to in the many months leading up to this election. Right. So Bill, do we have Bill Gallego? So the Mexico Solidarity Project with Bill Gallegos: Us, I am here and I’m glad to be here, and I’m really glad to be here with the folks in Wisconsin from John with you all, and I really appreciate it. I got to say my take is probably somewhat different than what we’ve been hearing so far. I think race was at the center of this campaign, and the only really significant increase in the electoral voting patterns was from white folks, and they overwhelmingly went for Trump, and his campaign didn’t start a year ago. This has been his consistent message since he started, but especially since he lost the election in 2020. There’s been a consistent message that centered race using immigrants as the focal point for it. But I think it was clearly aimed at dealing with this feeling that white privilege is at risk, the particular role of white people in controlling society. And we know it’s the 1%, but I think for a lot of white folks, this idea, Trump pretty much said, I will protect white suburban women from these immigrants coming into your neighborhoods and ruining not only the physical threat destroying your property values. So I think I am very concerned that this will get lost in the postmortem that we’re doing on the elections. I know I just saw something from Bernie where he said, the problem is is that we focused on identity politics instead of class politics as if you focus on the attack on black and brown voting rights. That’s not a class issue. That’s a huge class issue. And the working class is not just white folks. It is a multiracial working class majority women, and some of the most dynamic sectors are those in the black, brown, Filipino communities. So I really feel like we should be very critical of how the Democrats ran this campaign. I’m particularly critical of for years and years and years and years, they have been told, do not take Latinos for granted. Forget the Cubans. I mean, they’re, I don’t care what you do. They’re going to go with the Republicans, and we know the historical roots of that. But for the Central American community, the Dominican community, the Puerto Rican community and the Chicano community, that is not the case and has been solidly democratic even in the last elections at 20 and 20, 22, 70 to 75% of Latinos voting that most political parties in the world would kill for those numbers, they shifted this time, and we should look at that. But I think we really, really need to understand just given the history of this country as a racial capitalism, how deeply embedded that is not just in the politics, but in the psyche, the political psyche of this country. And if we run from it, I think it was what somebody said is that Kamala tried to run and hide on immigration. That was the exact wrong thing to do. All that did was give a much more open space to the racist messaging that was consistent from the Republican party and has been consistent for years starting with the Tea Party. When the Tea Party came out, it wasn’t just against Obamacare. That was that one of the first organized organizations outside of one of those anti-immigration rights groups that start talking about anchor babies And making that a part of their campaign and putting it into the Republican program. So I think we have to really take on this issue, not identity politics versus class politics. We had to see the connection here. And for example, when John is talking about the rural areas, farmers, well, nobody’s caught more hell than black and brown farmers. They’re barely holding onto the land that they’ve got all those years when the Department of Agriculture was giving loans to white farmers so they could hold onto their land and not giving it to black farmers, not giving it to Chicano farmers. And then when the Biden administration tried to set in some reparation money, that’s effectively what it was for black farmers. The Republicans killed it. So yeah, I want to talk about rural areas. I mean, my family were farmers in New Mexico and Colorado and the folks are trying to hold on desperately trying to hold onto that land there as well as black farmers in the South. So yes, we have to help our white farming brothers and sisters understand why they have to be the hardest fighters for black folks to get the money that they’re entitled to continue their farming and make it generational for Chicano farmers to hold onto their land that Monsantos trying to grab up there in Northern New Mexico. So I come at it a little bit differently I think, than we’ve been hearing, and I think we have to be careful about this thing that advancing class dynamics somehow doesn’t include issues like voting rights and gerrymandering and women’s reproductive rights. Those are class issues. Those aren’t elite issues. Those are class issues. The women that are going to be dying from these back alley abortions, not going to be rich white women. Marc Steiner: That’s right. Bill Gallegos: It’s going to be poor working class white women, and it’s going to be mostly women of color. So I think as we’re all sorting this out, and it’s too early to make any hard and fast conclusions, but we do know there are some things that we do know that the Republican party has become a party of apartheid of white minority rule. They pretty much say it, and Christian nationalism, and that’s rooted in mainly the white evangelical, evangelical churches. So I’m not discounting the impact of Latino evangelical churches. I think they did have an impact in this election, but I think we need to really get ahold of that. The second thing is I think we really need to understand that we’re not talking about a qualitative shift in political conditions now, I mean a quantitative shift, there’s a qualitative shift in political conditions when they’re talking about replacing 40 or 50,000 federal workers in all federal departments. That’s huge. That is a vastly different attitude than we’re talking about. If there was a democratic administration and we have to be ready talking about a labor movement and a working class movement ready to defend those workers, because we can’t just roll over and say, well, Trump’s going to bring in all these folks that project 2025 talked about. So we have to be ready to defend those workers in the interior department, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA. We had to be ready to do that. And we know that the right wing has been wanting to target the labor movement. They feel the most vulnerable sector is the public sector. So when they talk about eliminating the Department of Education, that’s only a piece of the puzzle. What they really want to do is just destroy the power of teachers unions. They saw the strikes in Arkansas and Oklahoma and California and every other damn place, and they want to crush that. And they make it very clear. It’s very clear that’s a big part of their agenda. So when we talk about class issues, I think that’s a key part of it. But we also need to understand that we are facing now a qualitatively different set of conditions when Trump talks about an ethnic cleansing campaign. Yet that’s different than even the deporter in Chief Obama or some of the shit that Biden has done. This is something qualitatively different, a massive ethnic cleansing campaign that even if we take the lower estimate of 15 million undocumented immigrants and we make a low estimate of maybe two or three of their family members will be impacted, that’s 40 million people directly impacted. That will have an impact on small business infrastructure and these poor black and brown communities on unions where the most dynamic sector of the union movement has been among immigrants and Latino women especially. It will have an impact on social organizations. It will have an impact. I mean, the impact would just be enormous. And Trump understands this, which is why he is saying it will be a military campaign. This is not just sending in the border patrol with a few trucks and vans. They’re talking about it. The only way you could do it, and we have to understand that the connection internationally is where they’re talking about setting up a series of concentration camps along the border because the overwhelming majority of these people will be Mexicano. What kind of pressure are they going to put on this new left wing government in Mexico on the shine bomb administration to take these millions and millions of working people. So we had to be ready to stand with our brothers and sisters in Mexico who will want to support their government in standing up to the United States. And it’s not just a political question because the United States has enormous political leverage over Mexico’s economy, enormous. When they make threats about we’re just going to wreck your economy, we have to take that seriously. But this is going to now become this question of immigration and this ethnic cleansing. It’s already an international question. Are they really going to ship a hundred thousand people back to Haiti? Are we going to sit and watch and let that happen? Where’s the labor movement? Yes, Sean Fein, I agree with you in 2028, we should all go out on strike. But now, right now, the labor movement needs to come out and stand for its immigrant, right? Brothers and sister workers. We have to say that not a single ice agent will ever get into our schools. We have to create sanctuary cities everywhere that we can. So I think we need to just in terms of the media, I’m worried about you all. I mean, I know they want to go after public television and public radio, that’s for sure. I think that’s scaries me. But they hate the Pacific Radio Network. You can’t be sure about that. They hate the Real News Network. Y’all are vulnerable unless we build a strong and broad resistance movement. The few voices that we had, I mean I know they got my address, max, I’m guessing they got yours. They know where to find us. We haven’t been hiding, and this is going to become very vulnerable. I’m worried. I know I work a lot in the climate justice movement. Most of these grassroots organizations are funded by foundations. These foundations are going to be under enormous pressure. There’s going to be congressional hearings. Are you giving your money to be under pressure to just start funding services and not organizing? So there’s so many that now including Greg Palaces, talk about the complete elimination of the Voting Rights Act, all of the other things that, the civil rights protections that we’ve had, the restoration of Jim Crow, this is real. This is real. It’s in Project 2025, but it’s also been very consistent in the messaging of the MAGA rights since they’ve taken over the Republican party and they got to the Latinos. I heard Maria Noosa talking about Spanish language, social media. The Republicans had 10 messages to every one that the Democrats put out on Spanish language, social media, and those are young Latino men who were already some ready. I ain’t going to vote for a woman, a black woman. Are you kidding me? To deal with in our community? So I think we just as we’re kind of brushing the smoke away and trying to pick through the ashes to see what happened, how did this disaster come about? We understanding we need to understand. This didn’t just happen since Biden dropped out and Harris came in. There’s real strong roots to this campaign. A lot of factors, a lot of white workers are concerned anybody about the economy. It’s black and brown women who got the worst of it, or ever before all this stuff was going on and did not run to the Republican party, did not run to the Republican party because there’s a level of political sophistication and understanding. I don’t think anybody has any illusions that the are going to bring out a totally liberatory society, but understanding that at least there’s some leverage there. And now I have to believe Miley when he says Trump’s a fascist and he believes it earlier. That’s talking about we really have to, I agree with that, but stand now that the Palestinian movement that we’ve had the last four years is going to be considerably more risk under a Trump administration. Marc Steiner: We all will. Bill Gallegos: They will try to drown it in blood. And they’ve already said that their immigration policy includes deporting anyone who’s been part of the pro-Palestinian movement, who’s an international student. So this is the reality that we face now. It shouldn’t panic us. What it should say is we have to build a broad based resistance movement, which is going to include some really folks that we ordinarily ain’t going to work with, but we have to build a broad based resistance movement both at the local level. I totally agree with that. We have to root it locally, but it has to be broad. And I’m not even getting into the whole climate thing here where Trump’s pretty much about ready to toast the planet and he says it. And the first communities that are going to feel the impact of his policies are poor, black and brown communities that are already choking like no other community on the toxicity and pollution that comes out of us capitalism. There’s a lot of areas you can say just a little Maximillian Alvarez: More about that Bill have, sorry. I want to underscore the fact that you have deep roots in climate justice movement. You know what you’re talking about on climate for everyone watching this is not just like, oh, the climate’s going to get worse. I want you to listen to Bill in terms of what the implications are for our shared planet right now. Bill Gallegos: Well, I’ll just start by saying this, that under the Biden administration, the environmental justice community one policies that we have never had with anyone, not even Obama. So for example, justice 40, which is a federal policy that a minimum of 40% of all federal environmental spending will go to frontline communities. Frontline communities are those that get the worst 40%. This is a larger allocation of federal resources than the war on poverty. It’s a hundred and some billion dollars, 190 some billion dollars that could potentially get to frontline communities. It’s been slow rolling out because the federal bureaucracy is very complicated. There’s every federal department gets a certain amount of money and they all have their own rules and regulations, but there are organizations that are trying to help frontline communities access these funds for cleanup, clean energy development, job development, all of those things, mitigation. So certain percentage of that is for affordable housing. So this was a huge victory that we’ve never had. It’s going to be gone. They’re saying that anything that has to do with equity will be gone. So those resources probably won’t survive a Trump administration. The Biden administration also adopt some very positive policies related to certain carcinogen, toxics and other forms of pollution that affect respiratory problems. Not everything we wanted. And they did open up a lot of drilling, and I’m not going to paint a picture that this was, we’re not talking about Iron Daddy Roy making policy for the Biden administration, but there was a lot that we won. I don’t want to just say it was because of the goodness of Biden’s heart, but because this movement has been organizing for years and we had support from a lot of the big green groups, the Sierra Club, the NRDC, earth Justice supported the Climate Justice movement in making these demands. So this was pretty significant victory for our movement that is now at risk. And I don’t see how we hold onto the things that we’ve won. And Trump is pretty much saying it. He’s going to put polluters in charge of the EPA, if not close it down the Department of the Interior. We’re not going to have Deb Halland in there. We’re going to have somebody who wants to just open all public land to corporate development. So we’ve got our fight cut out for us as a climate justice movement. What I think we need is we need unity within that movement because it’s been fragmented and we need unity with a broad sector of our sisters and brothers in these national green groups as well as with labor. We’ve always gotten played labor versus the environment, but now’s the time when we’ve got to come together. And we’ve always said that it’s not one or the other that clean jobs should be union jobs. We don’t want it to be a sweatshop and that there’s already this one of the fastest areas of job growth in the energy sector. So we need to make certain that that happens so that as we phase out of fossil fuel and that whole dependency on that fossil fuel economy, there’s a real just transition. But all of these things are now going to become qualitatively more difficult because of the fact that the Republicans probably got Congress, the Senate, and the White House and a Supreme Court that’s going to give many damn thing that they want. So we have a challenge, but hey, in the lifetime of some of us, I’ve seen Jim Crow go down. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen women win reproductive justice. I’ve seen our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers win the right to the marriage. I’ve seen foreign workers with the right to a union. So I’m always optimistic. But I have to say that I wouldn’t compare this to the Nixon administration. This is something qualitatively different here. We didn’t have Nixon administration, the John Birch Society was considered fringe. Now they run the party. Those kinds of racist and reactionary forces run and control one of the big ruling class parties of this country. And I saw the list that Standing for Democracy had. There’s something like 30 billionaires that had been funding this project, funding this kind of MAGA project 2025 thing. So there’s huge sections of the ruling class that are behind this. Speaker 6: So Bill Gallegos: I’m sorry a little bit from our randt here, but I guess what I really want to make certain is we don’t lose sight of the importance of the fight against racism and misogyny in this and not pitted against class politics. Those are class politics and they’re so central to any kind of change that we want to make, whether it’s in the environment or public health or education or just in the area of democracy of protecting and expanding voting rights. It’s always at the center because that’s the country we have the history starting with the dispossession of genocide of native peoples, the enslavement of Africans, the theft of half of Mexico’s territories. That’s the history that has shaped the country we have now and really contributed a lot to the electoral results we have now. And if we run from it, we lose. If we take it on, we have a chance to win. Maximillian Alvarez: Ain’t got to apologize for that ramp, brother, because I feel like that is absolutely the truth that folks need to hear right now, the sobering truth, but a truth that is not without hope. And Mark, I want to kind of toss it to you in a second to sort of offer your closing thoughts in that realm as someone who like Bill has seen American history change in significant ways that my generation only learned about in books, but you’ve seen it happen and we have also seen major change in our lives. I remember when gay marriage became legal, I mean as one just minor, not minor, but one example. It’s not minor, Marc Steiner: Right? Right. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. So I do want to give you the closing kind of word in a second about where we go from here and your closing messages for our audience. But I did just kind want to pick up on something that Bill said about the importance of race and understanding the dynamics here and how it shapes our vision of the world that we think that we’re living in, right? Because if you do the thought experiment here where you have aliens from Mars sort of airdrop in and look at what they’re seeing, what they’re going to see in this election is a monster’s ball of billionaire oligarchs surrounding another billionaire oligarchy serving politician from Musk like the richest man in the world, literally campaigning with Trump, taking over X, using it as a propaganda platform to the billionaires that own the Washington Post and the LA Times, putting their thumbs on the scale and not letting their papers like endorse a candidate to the crypto bros and the financial Wall Street interests that array to defeat senators like Sherrod Brown that are excited to get Lena Kahn out of the government by all objective accounts. This is a billionaire’s takeover of what remains of our fledgling democracy. But so many people don’t see it that way because conditions that we’ve been discussing for the past two hours have allowed and enabled people to instead identify people who look like me, people who look like Bill as the enemy, people who don’t perform gender the same way that you do or identify the same way that you do as somehow the enemy, right? I mean, they have managed to convince working people that their fellow workers to their left and their right because of their race, because of their immigration status, because of how they identify, are somehow more responsible for our woes than the fucking billionaires up there who are destroying our planet, destroying our democracy, and are going to do a whole lot more damage in the coming four years. That is an incredible feat that the oligarchy has pulled off and they have done it through ages throughout history. This is the eternal struggle of working people to realize who their true oppressors really are and to be able to cut through the noise and haze that makes us feel as if somehow our fellow workers who are different from us are responsible for our woes. And I say that Bill Gallegos: I want Maximillian Alvarez: To that not just as a reporter, not just as a historian, but I say that as a person who is deeply worried right now that people in my own family are going to be deported. I want you people watching this to understand I’m not just a fucking face on a screen, I’m a human being just like you are, just like your neighbors are. And we are terrified for very justifiable reasons and we need to not succumb to that terror. We need to feel it but not become it. But I need people out there to understand that the terror is real and that it is going to change the terrain of struggle for all of us, and that we are going to need you to stand with us and we are going to need to stand together to face whatever we are facing. Bill, I’m sorry to cut you off. Please hop in there Bill Gallegos: And Mark. No, absolutely. You’re right. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t carry around proof of citizenship with me and I’m widow, but they hear Gallegos, it’s dirty Mexican and I live in a community in southeast Los Angeles. It’s a black and brown working class community. Almost every house on this block is going to be at risk. Yeah, this is for real. And it brings me to one part of my rant that I didn’t get to drop in here, which is how the left and progressive woman in this country has consistently overlooked the Chicano Latino community as an important social force for change. There continues to be mostly black and brown framework, and that’s only because black folks, the black liberation struggle has insisted on being taken seriously. But it is another one of those things where I’ve been looking at a lot of these webinars that happen to talk about the elections and so on. Almost never do I see a Latino or Latina voice here in those conversations. There’s a big one that’s happening later this afternoon. There’s a huge network, national network that’s developing as a resistance network, which I think is really important. But when I looked at the five or six speakers that they have, they’re not a single one comes out of the Chicano or Latino, not the Puerto Rican community, not the Dominican community, not the Mexican American community. I mean, I know there’s only 37 billion of us, but I could help them find some, but, but I think this is a strategic problem. Do we want to win or not? Are we serious about building the kind of multiracial movement that really has a chance to impact our lives in the immediate and also for the transformative agenda that we have? So this is kind of a consistent issue that I raise. I’m on the editorial board of the Nation magazine. I raise it to them all the damn time. I raise it in other arenas where, hey, we’re here if, and the unfortunate thing is that the left within those movements, both within the Puerto Rican liberation struggle and the Chicana liberation struggle is very small. It’s weak. It’s, I think, stupidly fragmented when it doesn’t need to be. But that’s a problem because that leaves the political field opened to more mainstream forces, more less progressive forces. I mean, after all that happened with what the MAGA Wright and Trump said about the Puerto Ricans, they’re going to reelect this Puerto Rican pro-Trump governor. What’s going on there? Well, I don’t blame the Puerto Rican people. I’m blaming us. Where are we? Where’s the attention that we’re giving to that movement? And especially the democratic. They’ve got all these resources, but I’m also talking about the labor movement and the women’s movement. All these different movements need to direct their attention to an area where they have not had it. And that means not just with words, but with resources, with organizing. And don’t just come out every four years and ask for our vote. The Democratic party now is reaping what it has, sowed it, reaped it in this last election. I mean, I was shocked by even if I think the results are a little, their initial, clearly there was too many Chicanos and Puerto Ricans and other Latinos that were voting for Trump and the right against their own interests, maybe under some illusion that well, we’ll finally get admitted into the club like the Italian immigrants did and the Polish immigrants did. Since the 1840s, we haven’t been admitted into the club. I don’t think it’s going to happen. Now, Puerto Rico’s been a colony for how many years. They haven’t been admitted into that particular immigrant club. I don’t think it’s going to happen now, but I think there’s people who are desperate to believe that and that’s affected them. So yeah, we got a lot of work cut out for us. But what I’m really, really want to emphasize is for our folks on the left in progressive movements, don’t ignore us, you guys, real news. You’re one of the few programs that ran something on the Chicano Moratorium. We hear a lot about Kent State and we should about the murder that happened when Nixon invaded Laos and Cambodia and the people that were shot there, but the Chicano moratorium against the Vietnam War, three people were shot there. Why isn’t that an annual Commemoration? And not just in our community, but in the broader progressive, anti-war and peace community, why is that not taken seriously as an important historical event that has meaning for us? I guess I feel like I can raise this because I feel like I’m among friends in comrades when I’m raising this to comrades on progressive moments. And on the left, I feel like I can be honest and frank with you because you say that you’re for complete equity and equality and self determination and liberation and all of those things. So I’m going to take you at your word and say, stop doing what you’re doing and start broadening your attention and enrich the movement that we’re trying to build. Maximillian Alvarez: I think that is a powerful point to end on from our amazing guest, bill Gallegos of the Mexico Solidarity Project. He mentioned an episode of Mark’s show, the Mark Steiner show, where we had Brother Bill and other guests on to talk about the history of the Chicano moratorium. You should go listen to that episode. We released it back in August. So if you want to keep the conversation going after this live stream, go listen to that. But for now, we are a little over time. I have had such a great time. It’s been very helpful for me to unpack the events of this week over the past two hours on this live stream. We are going to do more of these. We want to respond to more of your questions. We want to bring more guests on. So I wanted to ask folks before I toss it to Brother Mark Steiner here to close us out with his final thoughts. Please subscribe to this channel if you’re not already become a member of this channel. If you’re not already, if you want additional perks and access to us and more engagement with us and our journalists, please write into the real news and let us know the topics you want to cover, the folks you want us to have on. And please, please, please support the work that we do here. Go to the real news.com/donate. Click the donate button over here on YouTube to donate to the Real News now because we can’t keep doing this work without you, and we know we are heading into hostile waters here and we’re going to need that support to hang on for as long as we can and to keep fighting for you. So our future depends on you and our collective future depends on what we all do next. And so with that, I want to sign off and thank you for joining us. And I want to toss things over to Marksteiner to give us his closing thoughts and we’ll see you back here on the next live stream. Thank Marc Steiner: You all so much for watching. I’ll make it short and sweet because we’re a little bit over time, but this, we are in a very important moment here, a critical moment. And I just want to go back for two seconds to think about the things that Bill just pointed out. People like John Nichols pointed out and others on this broadcast is that if the Democrats had taken the ideas as you heard some of the people say on this program and turned them into a media organizing campaign, we’d have a different outcome of this election. If we fought for the truth and showed the truth to the world, to our country, it would’ve had a very different result than what we see today. I think that’s a really important point for us to realize. And now the thing is we have to do that ourselves and we have to organize and we have to make a broader coalition of all the media organizations on the left that’s being worked on. We’ve got to bring people together to say no, there’s a different way. And we have to do it because we’re not just facing a Republican party, we’re facing a neofascist rise. These are very dangerous people who are now in charge of the United States government. They’re going to destroy the government Department of Education and more read Project 2025 on understand what they’re about to do us. And we have to stand up together to fight to stop it. We cannot allow it to happen. This is our country. It’s all of us. It’s the greatest heterogeneous nation in the history of the planet. We can stop them. We have to stop them. And that’s part of our work right here at The Real News. And I want to thank you all for joining us. Bill Gallegos: Thank you all. Really appreciate it. Marc Steiner: Thank Maximillian Alvarez: You guys. Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity forever.