• President Joe Biden addressed the nation Thursday for the first time since Election Day. He promised to “honor the constitution on January 20th” and peacefully hand over power to President-Elect Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the blame game and painful soul-searching within the Democratic Party has begun in earnest. Jon Favreau, co-host of ‘Pod Save America’ and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, stopped by to discuss what comes next.
• And in headlines: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell says he will not resign when Trump takes office, former New York City mayor and disbarred attorney Rudy Giuliani goes to court again, and Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey pushes back on the Associated Press’ race call against him.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, November 8th. I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day. The show that has moved on to the avoidant stage of acknowledging everything that’s going on and is very interested in whatever you’re up to. Any hobbies, got any book recommendations you’d like to discuss in detail? Any, like long meandering stories you can tell us to keep us from doomscrolling? [music break] On today’s show, what does the Democratic Party do now? And Rudy Giuliani goes to court again. Let’s get into it. President Joe Biden addressed the nation Thursday for the first time since Election Day. He promised a peaceful transfer of power to President elect Donald Trump. 

[clip of President Joe Biden] I will do my duty as president. I’ll fulfill my oath. And I will honor the Constitution. On January 20th, we’ll have a peaceful transfer of power here in America. 

Jane Coaston: Biden also praised Vice President Kamala Harris and the campaign she ran. 

[clip of President Joe Biden] She ran an inspiring campaign and everyone got to see something that I learned early on to respect so much, her character. She has a backbone like a ram rod. She has great character. True character. She gave her whole heart and effort, and she and her entire team should be proud of the campaign they ran. 

Jane Coaston: But the blame game and painful soul searching within the Democratic Party has already begun. Because after the election, Democrats are facing the prospect of being shut out of power at almost every level for at least two years. As Trump reshapes the federal government in his right wing vision, whatever that turns out to be. Woof. On Wednesday, independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders issued a scathing statement on Harris’s loss. He wrote, quote, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people, would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Also in the line of proverbial fire, Joe Biden. Barack Obama, misogyny, racism, identity politics, speech policing and global backlash against incumbents. Basically, the Democratic Party is like that Spider-Man meme where the three spider-men are all pointing at each other. That’s where we’re at. So for more on where the party goes from here, Jon Favreau, co-host of Pod Save America and former speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, stopped by the What a Day studio to chat. We talked about the working class vote, the Obama era, and who will be the next face of the party. Jon Favreau, welcome to What a Day. 

Jon Favreau: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: So there’s a lot of finger pointing going on. Most people seem kind of reluctant to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for the loss. But do you think she actually ran a good campaign? 

Jon Favreau: I do. I think the idea that you only have 100 days to put together and run a presidential campaign is like not something that anyone has ever tried before. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: I think that any analysis of the race has to start with the broader political economic context, which is there’s a chart in the Financial Times today that– 

Jane Coaston: Basically every incumbent is getting blamed for inflation pretty much everywhere, all over the place. 

Jon Favreau: It has not happened since 1905 that in every developed country in the world, the incumbent party has lost vote share in the same year. And so that is the backdrop. And also, if you look at the battleground state margins versus the shift towards Trump in the non battleground states, it was much less of a shift to Trump in the battlegrounds than it was in the other places. Which goes to show you that where the Kamala Harris campaign existed. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Jon Favreau: Where she campaigned, where there were television ads, where there was a ground game, they actually did much better and they came closer. 

Jane Coaston: But I think a lot of people are I mean, we’re doing this thing where everyone’s mad and everyone’s mad because they do that thing where it’s like, if only she’d done the thing that I–

Jon Favreau: My thing. 

Jane Coaston: My thing but former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney became one of her top surrogates in the final stretch of the campaign. A lot of people are mad about that. Do you think that was a good idea? I personally think like the idea of let’s just bring together a broad coalition of people in opposition to this other person. I think that people were like, 2020, that’s kind of what happened. You can see people can vote in a lot of different ways. The country over party thing seemed effective, but clearly it may not have been. What do you think? 

Jon Favreau: I could be convinced that it was neutral at best. I think it was neutral or helpful. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Jon Favreau: I do not think it hurt in any way, shape or form. There’s no data to suggest that, in fact, she actually won independents in one of the exit polls I saw. That wasn’t the big challenge. Right? The challenge was she lost a lot of working class voters. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: And I guess you could make an argument that, like the time she spent with Liz Cheney, which was two events, three events, in a course of 100 days, could have been better spent trying to get other voters. But I have not seen and I go through the debt all the time. I have not seen one voter be like, well, I was leaning towards her but then she did an event with Liz Cheney and that was it for me. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. And what about Biden? You know, he’s getting a ton of finger pointing, basically people saying like, you shouldn’t have run for reelection. You should have dropped out sooner. There’s a conversation to be had that if he came out in 2022 and it was like, look, my time is over, let’s move on. And then you have basically the full primary process. But is that just wishful thinking? 

Jon Favreau: Uh. It might be wishful thinking, but I’m going to agree with that take. Uh look I think that Joe Biden deciding to run again was a catastrophic mistake. I think that his approval ratings were very low. I think that they took the wrong message from the midterms from the Democrats doing better than expected in the midterms. They thought that that was about Biden when it was really about the Democrats in those races and the issue of abortion. And the Senate candidates that the Republicans nominated who were all–

Jane Coaston: Blake Masters? 

Jon Favreau: –cuckoo for cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. 

Jane Coaston: Absolutely. 

Jon Favreau: I think that Biden saw that and thought okay, well, now I should run again. His challenge was both his age and inflation. Right. And anger over inflation. And I think if there had been time for a primary, Kamala Harris could have emerged from that a stronger candidate or someone else could have emerged from it. I’ve never really bought into like the fear of primaries. You know, whether they’re primaries from left, primaries from the right, like it’s we believe in democracy. We’re the democracy–

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Jon Favreau: –party. We should not be afraid of primaries. 

Jane Coaston: So the polls were mostly accurate. We saw a race within the margin of error, but the national results tell the story of a red wave. Basically, Harris didn’t lose by less in the rural areas. She lost by more. She didn’t improve margins in the suburbs. I think when I started getting nervous was when they started talking about uh [?] Virginia, which as you know, Northern Virginia is democratic country. 

Jon Favreau: Yup. 

Jane Coaston: And when those margins were bad, I was like, uh oh. So she didn’t improve margins in the suburbs and she seems to have lost support in cities. So in your view, what is the reason for this across the board shift? Does it go back to the inflation issue or what do you think? 

Jon Favreau: We have to get more data, which we will in a couple of months, but I do think the exit polls are useful to analyze voter attitudes. And if you just look at the exit polls, it’s like, you know, 75% of voters said that they have faced either extreme or moderate hardship because of inflation over the last year, the year that inflation has fallen back to normal because prices still remain high. And I think when you’re looking at a uniform shift where it was a swing that went across every demographic group, then it has to be a bigger explanation than like a Liz Cheney or this or that. Like it’s something much bigger going on when the whole country shifts. 

Jane Coaston: I have to ask, because there are eras in politics, you know, the Clinton era, the Bush era, which now everyone pretends never happened, which is weird. Is the Obama era over? 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, I think so. 

Jane Coaston: Is that a good thing, do you think? 

Jon Favreau: I think it’s just a thing. The Democratic Party at this point needs to figure out what’s next. I think you’ve had a lot of I can say this because I worked for him, but you have a lot of Democratic politicians who, like try to be the next Obama or sort of copy his style of speaking or the or just the way he’s, a whole bunch of stuff. And I think that like, you know, maybe that worked for a while back in the day. But if you look at the politicians who win these days, it really is people who are like and they’re a little rough around the edges, not just the politicians who win I should say, but the politicians who are like popular. And I think that like, if you start from what the voters feel, which is this like deep distrust and cynicism of institutions. I think it means that politicians who do not seem like they come from Washington, who maybe aren’t as polished, but who are like very real and sort of just can connect with people that way. I think that’s probably where we’re going to need to go. I think like Dan Osborne outperformed in Nebraska, the independent candidate. Like Ruben Gallego in Arizona. Right. Like, these are the kind of politicians that I think will succeed. 

Jane Coaston: I want to get into the class conversation, which is one that’s always really interesting for me because I don’t think we’re all agreed on what we’re talking about, because Bernie Sanders came out with a statement in which he said, argued that Democrats have abandoned the working class. First and foremost, who is he talking about? Because I keep thinking about like I had great conversations with the head of the SEIU and when we’re talking about working class I’m like, let’s talk about like waitresses and the service economy. But I’m aware that when Americans talk about the working class, they mean people with trucks. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: So first, what do you make of that statement about abandoning the working class? And two, what would the Democratic Party need to do about that? Especially because Democratic policies are very pro-union. Joe Biden did about as much as he could possibly do on behalf of labor unions, on behalf of working class voters, and yet it didn’t come through. So what do we do with that? 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, and I think that’s the issue. Right?

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: And so, yeah, like I just said, that Joe Biden made a mistake running again. I believe that. But I give him a ton of credit for his economic agenda. He called himself the most pro-labor president, and he was, right? 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: And I think Bernie’s analysis of the situation is right in that working class voters are abandoning the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party, especially over the last four years, passed legislation and took action aimed at helping working class voters, both in red areas of the country and blue areas of the country, and it did not redound to their benefit. And so the question is that I think we have to figure out and we don’t know the answer to yet, is why are working class voters leaving the Democratic Party? And is it more of a cultural issue? 

Jane Coaston: That was my thought. 

Jon Favreau: And when I say cultural issue, I don’t even necessarily mean how we think of like social issues. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: But, you know, Dan Pfeiffer was just saying this when we were in Pod Save America, like Trump sees almost like the economy as a cultural issue. And what we mean by that is like, who is fighting for you? Right. And sometimes as Democrats, we think like we put together a bunch of policies that are going to be helpful for working people. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Jon Favreau: And we think like, that’s enough. But you sort of need to like have an economic story, not just an economic agenda. Right? 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: You have to have a theory of the case of why people are being left behind. Who’s to blame? How you’re going to fight that. And then like Bernie does, right? 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Jon Favreau: Like Bernie is actually very good at going around and staying on message. Talking about the economy. And Sherrod Brown was very good at that and fell short in Ohio. AOC is very good at that, right. Like Barack Obama ended up being very good at that, but didn’t start off as good but like became better. So, like, it’s not even necessarily ideological. You see it on the far left. You can see it on the center left. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah.

Jon Favreau: But I do think you need to, like live and breathe economic messaging. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: To convince voters that you give a shit. 

Jane Coaston: So we’re two years out from the 2026 midterms. Yay. 

Jon Favreau: Yay. 

Jane Coaston: So who are going to be the next leaders of the party? Because something I think people are kind of forgetting, except when we were having a whole conversation about VP choices is like Democrats actually have a pretty solid bench, but the bench is still tethered to what was. You still have a bunch of candidates who have done great before, but like looking forward, who are going to be the people because it wasn’t Obama in 2004. People were not talking about Barack Obama running for president even after the DNC speech so. 

Jon Favreau: I am hoping there’s someone that we’re not talking about. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah exactly exactly, but like of the people–

Jon Favreau: Of the–

Jane Coaston: –we do know. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. So I think of the people we do know. Look, a successful presidential candidate answers the question, why me and why now? Right. And so their bio, their life experiences meets the needs of the moment and what voters want. And I think to me, if you’re going to run for president, or if you’re going to lead the party or whatever, the first thing you have to do is answer those questions to yourself and make sure that they match up. And before you get to the consultants, polling, messaging, all that stuff, you just got to like ask that. But I do think of the current crop. It’s like you’ve got Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro. Now, Ruben Gallego will be in the Senate. Raphael Warnock. I think there’s a lot of folks, governors, senators that we have to choose from. But there could be someone who surprises us. 

Jane Coaston: Where does the party go from here? I know we’re in the recriminations and grief stage. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: But that’s boring to me. So where do we go? What’s next? Because I think anti-Trump resistance/defiance/whatever you want to call it, is going to look different than it did the first time around. I think people are tired. I think people are annoyed. And I think that people are a little divided as to what to do. So what next? Where do we go? 

Jon Favreau: Having been through this. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Jon Favreau: I think we give people time to be sad or be angry or fight with each other or point fingers. There’s no avoiding it. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: Right. So do that for a few months. Donald Trump becomes president, and then we are going to have to figure out how to limit the damage. But also the fact that he is a lame duck president now. You know, the silver lining is that we can start looking ahead. And for the first time in eight years, the Democratic Party can think beyond just Trump. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: About like, who are we? What do we stand for and what is the case we’re going to make to voters that doesn’t have anything to do with Donald Trump? 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jon Favreau: I think that is going to be a useful exercise. I do not pretend to have all the answers right now, but I think that is the conversation that we’ll need to have over the next year. 

Jane Coaston: Jon, thank you so much for joining me. 

Jon Favreau: Thanks for having me, Jane. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Jon Favreau, co-host of Pod Save America. We’ll get to the headlines in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe. Leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. Watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: And now more news. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of unnamed reporter] Some of the president elect’s advisers have suggested that you should resign um if he asks you to leave, would you go? 

[clip of Jerome Powell] No. 

[clip of unnamed reporter] Can you follow up on it? Do you think that legally you’re not required to leave? 

[clip of Jerome Powell] No. 

Jane Coaston: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Thursday that he will not resign even under pressure from Donald Trump. The remarks came at a press conference where the Fed announced an interest rate cut. Trump has been highly critical of Powell since appointing him to lead the Fed in 2018. He’s repeatedly threatened to demote Powell for raising rates and, you know, doing his job. Powell was also asked if he thinks Trump could fire him, to which Powell gave another admirably blunt response. 

[clip of unnamed reporter 2] Do you believe the president has the power to fire or demote you? And has the Fed determine the legality of a president demoting at will any of the other governors with leadership positions? 

[clip of Jerome Powell] Not permitted under the law? 

[clip of unnamed reporter 2] Not what? 

[clip of Jerome Powell] Not permitted under the law. 

Jane Coaston: It’s true. In things I did not know until today. Presidents don’t have the authority to remove Fed chairs. Congress would have to impeach Powell. Though it’s possible Trump could replace Powell when his term ends in May 2026. Democrats have lost another seat in the Senate. Maybe. The Associated Press officially called the Pennsylvania Senate race in favor of Republican Dave McCormack on Friday. He served in the George W. Bush administration and has been working as a CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund. That brings the GOP Senate majority to 53, with close races in Nevada and Arizona still to be called. However, Democratic incumbent Bob Casey is pushing back against the call. His campaign released a statement citing the Pennsylvania secretary of state’s figures that there are at least 100,000 votes still left to count and saying, quote, “We will make sure every Pennsylvanian’s voice is heard”. The race remains within half a point, which would trigger an automatic recount even if the race is called. Former New York City Mayor, Trump surrogate, and disbarred lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared in federal court Thursday after missing the deadline to turn over almost $150 million of assets in his defamation case. Giuliani has been avoiding paying up to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two former Georgia election workers who he defamed. But when Freeman and Moss showed up to claim the assets last week. They found Giuliani’s apartment virtually empty and learned many of the valuables had been moved elsewhere. On his way to court to get chewed out by a judge for not complying, Giuliani had this to say to reporters on Thursday. 

[clip of Rudy Giuliani] All the things that were appropriate were there and the apartment was pretty full of things. So they’re lying completely. Every room had furniture in it. 

Jane Coaston: Which is definitely not something you say when you’ve strategically left just one piece of furniture in every room so you can claim you haven’t emptied out your apartment, you know, like an asshole. As the world braces itself for another four years of U.S. foreign policy under Trump, tensions between the president elect and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are already high. The two have reportedly been in contact since the election. In a post on Twitter, Zelenskyy said he called Trump on Wednesday to congratulate him on his victory and, quote, “tremendous campaign.” But on Thursday, Zelenskyy told reporters in Budapest that Trump’s plan to end the war in Ukraine will not work. The comments came at the European Political Community Summit, a gathering of dozens of European heads of state to discuss policy. Trump has said many times that if elected president, he’d have the war, quote, “done in 24 hours.” He’s also insulted Zelenskyy’s leadership and even blamed him for Russia’s yearslong invasion of his country. Zelenskyy said on Thursday, quote, “We all want to end this war, but a fair ending. If it’s very fast, it’s going to be a loss for Ukraine.” And that’s the news. [music break] Before we go. Hey. The U.S. House is still in play. It’s our Hail Mary and best chance of stopping Trump from having unchecked power. Right now, there are a handful of House races scattered across the country, but concentrated in California that are too close to call. Four of them are in Southern California, including Derek Tran in Orange County and Will Rollins in Palm Springs. These campaigns will decide the fate of the House, and they need volunteers to knock doors and help voters who messed up their mail in ballots correct those errors before California’s upcoming deadline. So, please, if you have anything left to give, please go to VoteSaveAmerica.com/cure and sign up to volunteer. This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more at VoteSaveAmerica.com. This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. [music break] That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review. Continue enjoying whatever your self-care choice is because, honey, that bowl cereal is not going to eat itself and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how there’s going to be another Star Wars trilogy, which I genuinely don’t understand the audience for because man, we have done this like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and give those women their stuff, Rudy Giuliani. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.