Jon is joined Democratic message guru Anat Shenker-Osorio and longtime political strategist Michael Podhorzer to talk about how swing voters are reacting to a Harris-Walz ticket and what message the campaign will need to win them over in November. They break down why Tim Walz has been a uniquely effective messenger, how Kamala Harris is reclaiming freedom from Republicans, and how Minnesota’s 2018 “Greater than Fear” campaign set the stage for this moment.

TRANSCRIPT

[AD BREAK]

[clip of Tim Walz] Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, [audience laughter] had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on. That’s not what middle America is. And I got to tell you. I can’t wait to debate the guy. [cheers and applause] That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up. So. [cheers and laughter] See what I did there?

Jon Favreau: Well, the good vibes just keep on rolling. As of Tuesday, we officially have our ticket. Vice President Harris selected a joyful Midwestern dad to be her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a veteran former teacher and high school football coach, has kept the momentum going that Harris ignited when she took over from Joe Biden just three weeks ago. But as good as the vibes are, we can’t let ourselves forget that this race is still incredibly close, just like the last one was. Most polls have Harris and Trump basically tied in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. States she will absolutely need to win in November. So this race could very much go either way. But as I said last episode, the vice president is already in a stronger position to defeat Trump than Biden ever was. Now she’ll just need to ensure that the message she delivers and the one we deliver to the persuadable voters in our lives, is one that really resonates and gets them off the couch. I swear, I was not trying to make a JD Vance joke there, I promise. Today I want to spend some time talking about the Harris Walz ticket, their message, and how it’s playing with voters. Joining me to break it down are two of the smartest messengers and strategists in Democratic politics, Anat Shenker-Osorio and Michael Podhorzer. Anat is a longtime message guru who’s led trainings for Democrats up and down the ticket, including our new VP nominee, Tim Walz. And Michael Podhorzer is a longtime strategist and former political director at the AFL-CIO. We sat down together to talk about what they’ve been hearing in focus groups, and to evaluate the ways Governor Walz and Vice President Harris have keyed in on some messages that Anat has been advocating for since the earliest days of the Trump administration. Let’s get into it. I’m Jon Favreau. Welcome to The Wilderness. Anat, Mike, welcome back to The Wilderness. 

Michael Podhorzer: Great to be back. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thanks for having us. 

Jon Favreau: So now that we officially have our presidential and vice presidential nominees for both parties, I wanted to talk to both of you about how the race has changed, what it will take to reassemble the anti MAGA coalition that beat Trump in 2020, and most importantly, the best way to persuade people who haven’t yet decided who they’re voting for or whether they’re voting at all. Mike, it’s hard to believe, but it’s only been 19 days since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, not even three weeks. Aside from our new Democratic nominee and the addition of two running mates. How has this race changed in your mind since the president stepped aside? 

Michael Podhorzer: Sure. And yeah, it is. It’s like there’s a famous saying that for decades nothing happens. And then in a week decades happen. 

Jon Favreau: Feels like it. 

Michael Podhorzer: That’s what we’re living through. I think that in a way, the basic structure didn’t change in the sense that even with Harris as candidate, both are underwater in terms of favourability, that we’re still in an election in which it really comes down to whether it’s a referendum on the future that Trump wants to take us in, or on people’s grumpiness about the last four years. And what Biden stepping aside did was make it much less likely it’ll be about the latter. Right. Because people were saying pretty loudly in polls and elsewhere for quite a while that they felt that his age was disqualifying. And that would have made it easier for them to make the election about Biden’s age. Right. That’s off the table now. So I don’t think the structure of what it’s going to look like has changed. But the opportunity to make it an election about clean, about what they are going to do has just really become easier. 

Jon Favreau: Anat, you are quite familiar with another national campaign where an old guy stepped aside for a younger woman with just six weeks until the election, and she won. Uh. Talk about Jacinda Ardern’s 2017 victory in New Zealand that made her the world’s youngest woman head of state. And what lessons do you think Kamala Harris and the Democrats can learn from that race? 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. For sure. Necessary caveats. New Zealand is like more sheep than people. It’s roughly the size of Minnesota, which I think will come up in future conversation. It’s not a global superpower, so nothing that I say discounts the reality that New Zealand is sort of the land of make believe, where literally everyone is cousins and the United States. But that said, I think what was really, really extraordinary about that dynamic is that Andrew Little, who was the head of the Labor Party, read the tea leaves, saw the writing on the wall and assessed his party’s ability to overtake the then ruling conservative coalition and thought, if I stay here, we will lose. Brought Jacinda Ardern to the fore. She was a relatively unknown backbencher and in six weeks they already had the ads made, they had the banners printed, everything was done and so they had to remake an entire campaign, which sounds pretty exhausting in very little time. And I think the main thing, I mean, besides the fact that their slogan, which they ended up going with, which is let’s do this, you know, is the fact that Harris has so prominently featured Let’s Win This, a homage or a nod to Jacinda. I don’t know, but a fun thing to speculate. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Is that it really revivified the campaign, it took a kind of known entity, known quantity and shook it up. And I think that that dynamic to add to what Mike was saying, yes, it’s absolutely about in the US case putting MAGA’s agenda and just exactly the many, many ways that they plan to screw you and not in the fun way on the front burner. But it’s also that right now, as we saw in New Zealand back in the day, the choir actually wants to sing from this songbook. And that’s not nothing. It’s not nothing to have, even if it’s just activists. And it seems from the data and at least the conversations we’ve been having in focus groups that the disaffected Democratic base is much more excited about singing this song. And that’s really the only way to break a signal through the noise, is to have something that the choir wants to repeat over and over again. That’s what Jacinda did. That appears, at least for now, like what Kamala is doing, even if it’s just in our own social media bubble. People actually now want to talk about this. They want to show visible support for it. 

Jon Favreau: So Anat, you just mentioned focus groups. I’m sure both of you have heard a lot about how voters are processing these last three weeks, either in focus groups or polling. Anat, you were kind enough to share some findings from four different focus groups conducted over the last month, persuadable white women in Michigan, persuadable Black women in Michigan, Black men across the battleground states, and young Black voters across the battleground states. I want to start with the two groups of persuadable women voters from Michigan, one made up of white women and one made up of Black women. Mike, two things in these groups stuck out at me. One, some of them aren’t really sure that Project 2025 could actually happen, and two, they don’t want to hear so much Trump bashing. Now, I know that you’ve said the Democrats will win if this election is about MAGA. So how do you reconcile these two seemingly contradictory views from voters? 

Michael Podhorzer: Sure. I think that one of the challenges internally in politics is that people are often not very good at telling you what’s going to persuade them, or what they do or don’t want to hear. And part of the problem in the political conversation is always taking them literally, and then being surprised when it turns out not to be true at all. Right. So if you’ll remember, like up until it wasn’t, if Democrats did the J6 committee hearings, it would backlash because people wanted to put that in the rearview mirror for, I don’t know, more than a decade. They said, don’t talk about abortion because it would never be a voting issue on our side, because that’s what people said in polls. Right. Up until Biden stepped aside, Harris wasn’t doing any better in the polls against Trump than he was. Right. And so you really have to be cautious about just take, you know, taking at face value what people say, right? I think that and I think probably Anat will go into this, but I think there are two kinds of ways of attacking 2025 and Trump and so forth. One is a kind of a wild ad hominem way, and another is really just making it credible that these things will happen, right? Because people basically categorize those kinds of attacks as negative advertising when they don’t believe that and as truth when they do. Right. And so what’s important is especially for people who are not seen as, you know, committed capital D Democrats to be concerned about all the things in 2025. 

Jon Favreau: Anat, what do you think? 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I mean, it’s a horrific thing to have me on tape agreeing with Mike, and I really wish that this isn’t the position that you put me in, Jon. I’m not really sure what I did to you. Uh. We’ve met in person very few times. I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity to be as offensive as I’d like, but clearly I did do something. And this is a very weird way of taking it out on me. I use weird very intentionally in this [?]. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. No, I’m sure. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Now I’m going to answer the question, but I just need you to know exactly what you’ve done, uh so that you can think about it. I think that, you know what Mike is talking about and what you’ve brought up is something that I have uh, termed the Credulity Chasm, mostly because Mike can’t pronounce that phrase for some reason. So it’s really perfect in that way. Um. And what we see, for example, in one test that we did, we asked folks, we sort of gave them the bare bones introduction to Project 2025. And I’m going to interrupt myself to say, one of the biggest challenges that we have serving about Project 2025 is that when we actually cut and paste verbatim from the Heritage document, people are like, that’s a bunch of bullshit. Like, why did you make that up? And what is wrong with you? And why are you lying to us? And we’re like, we actually have to temper what is in the document in order to be able to ask questions about it. It’s extraordinarily hard to write these questions because people think that it’s apocryphal and like, so we have to make it sound less terrible. 

Jon Favreau: What are some of the uh parts of the document that people are, like, least likely to believe because they sound so terrible? Are there any examples or just one or two? 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, the stuff about, for example, I mean, I don’t have it verbatim in front of me, but basically just, you know, more or less paraphrasing, it says that they’re going to outlaw porn and they’re going to imprison people who make it. It says that, you know, the stuff about enacting sort of biblical rules around marriage, ending no fault divorce. People don’t believe that, especially when coupled with, you know, Mr. Divorce himself. Donald Trump. 

Jon Favreau: Right. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Like that feels especially difficult to buy because they’re like this man like, you know, this man does divorce at the drive through. Like, I’m not really sure that this is his agenda. And so, yeah, I mean, those are some of the kind of head scratchery elements. So to go back when we’ve asked folks, for example, you know, we’ll do sort of a barebones description of Project 2025 and this is some of what they intend. And we’ll even sort of water it down and say they plan to or they intend to or whatever. And then we ask them, do you think that this is going to happen? And we offer them a series of reasons why it could potentially not happen, like Democrats will stop it. The Supreme Court [fake laughing] will stop it. You know, they’re too incompetent to do it. They don’t actually want to do it. When we asked the question that way, we end up with 21% of voters saying they will do this. We can increase that number if we ask the reverse of that question by saying, what are the reasons why they could possibly enact this? But going back to that credulity chasm, which is real and much more marked in our focus groups among white voters, Black voters so far that we’ve talked to, they have no trouble. They’re like, oh, no, they’re they’re gonna do all that. That that’s that’s their that’s their plan. That’s their venue. Like they don’t live in the credulity chasm. They live in the reality. For folks who are sort of scratching their heads how this is possible, I would just remind you that we lived through at least a generation of people being like, oh, but they’ll never overturn Roe. That’s never going to happen. And so the just world theory, what uh psychologist John Jost calls system justification, it’s really strong in people, this sense that things are not going to be upended, the world’s not going to be turned upside down. My sort of desires in life aren’t going to just be taken from me. And so the ways that we have to contend with this, that we’ve seen are, number one, to point out that in states where they have full control, where they have a red trifecta, they have implemented lots of these. That’s a helpful sort of proof point. Always pointing back to Dobbs and the fall of Ro is a helpful proof point. And then actually, what we find is ensuring people feel that they have agency to stop this, giving them the sense that this is their plan, this is what they intend, but not on our watch. And we are like they will have to go through our dead body to do it increases people’s willingness to accept that this is actually their plan. Because much like climate change messaging for lots of time, if you just simply present people with, you know, this is the horrible abyss that awaits us, they have a natural response to want to be like la la la la la la la la la la. Because how are you supposed to take that in? And so it’s about sort of how we present it, not presenting a laundry list, just picking out, you know, three things, making clear that they’ve done it before in other places, and making sure that whatever we say about the badness it comes packed inside of a but we’re going to defy them. [music break]

Jon Favreau: Mike, one thing you hear from a lot of these voters is when they’re asked about Kamala Harris. They know of her, know her, a lot of them say, I want to know more. I want to know what she stands for. I want to know who she is. How much do you think Kamala Harris needs to define herself and her, and talk about her plans and her agenda in a race that, as you’ve said, needs to be, in a larger sense about MAGA and the threat of MAGA. 

Michael Podhorzer: I think one of the things that is really important is that, like, there’s just not one thing that every actor should be doing, right? There’s no, like, just comprehensive this is what everyone should be saying or doing, right? Harris, my view of the part of why she’s been as successful as quickly as she has been is because she has been defining herself in a pretty good way, in by showing up and being comfortable in herself and in her attitude towards Trump and in ways that aren’t exactly well, here’s my position on this and here’s my position on that. I think really she just needs to clear the bar of people feeling comfortable with her being president, and then it can move to the other. I think obsessing over like what combination of issues is she going to talk about or what positions is she going to take is not what voters really are looking for. They just want to be comfortable with the idea that she’s going to be their president. And that has a lot more intangible to it. 

Jon Favreau: Anat, what if anything is different about the voters she still needs to persuade versus the voters that Biden needed to persuade. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: I mean, I think it’s still roughly the same calculus. Uh. I’ll talk about the differences after the similarities. You know, it’s still what Mike has termed over and again, this Anti-MAGA majority, it’s the folks who turned out for us in 2020, the folks who turned out for us in ’22, and the places that they did turn out where we won. I think that obviously people age into the electorate and some people age out of the electorate as they age out of their life on Earth. Uh. So there are some changes in terms of, you know, the actual physical makeup of what that voting body is. We have had, as I think you know well, struggles at the younger end. And so that’s a place where I think Harris is really, really well positioned to kind of harness this enthusiasm, this excitement. At the risk of presenting anecdote here. I think one of the sort of fun things that’s happened to us is that as we’re recruiting, we only really do two kinds of focus groups. One is with um swing voters, and one is with people we call disaffected Democrats who basically are kind of in that double hater category, so are the swing, to be quite honest. And the last couple of groups, we have actually had challenges with our recruitment vendor to get disaffected folks into these rooms because they’re not meeting the recruit, which is, you know, to say, I’m not excited to vote. That’s anecdotal, but, you know, a fun little nugget of hope. 

Jon Favreau: It’s a good anecdote, I’ll take it. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. Fun little nugget for you on a Friday. So I think that it’s largely the same group. I think that obviously, you know, we still woke up after this decision for Biden to step aside and hand the reins over to Harris. Living in the United States, I know that most people don’t want to remember that. And by that, I mean, you know, still a racist, sexist spot. And so it’s possible there are some people, especially in that more swinging category, who were okay with an older white man who are kind of less comfortable with a younger than him, woman of color. And so, you know, sort of how does that dynamic play? I think that I largely view the election as a question of kind of getting our Anti-MAGA coalition to turn out rather than try to lure people in who just kind of have no business ever voting for us. So I don’t think it’s that different. But I’m actually curious what Mike would say in terms of, you know, is it the same folks, different folks? 

Jon Favreau: What do you think, Mike? 

Michael Podhorzer: I think it it’s mostly the same. I think that right we’ve we’re now in our like fourth Trump MAGA election. Right. And over that period of time, there are at least 10 million more people who can vote this November who have voted for our side than voted for their side. And so, like beginning as if we don’t know that and as if we’re, like, just starting from scratch and looking for swing voters is really misguided, right? If we just get the people who voted for us to vote again, right, then we win, right? And that’s just a fact, right? And it’s very different from the way it felt in 2016. Where we’re desperate to find new voters. We have the new voters. Right. And I think one of the things that you said earlier, that was really I really appreciated was it’s not just a question of getting people to or undecided between which one to vote for. A much bigger audience are the people who may or may not vote. Right? 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Michael Podhorzer: And in the, certain mainstream commentary about the election, that part of the electorate is completely absent in the conversation, right? The conversation is always, how do I get them a voter to be for her instead of him? Never how do I get a voter to care enough who already again, is against MAGA to show up again? Right. And that’s really the what we have to do. I mean, it to me, as someone who follows this is it’s kind of mind blowing that after 2016, we had this really unprecedented increase in people voting, and no one pays attention to that, right? That there’s this new group that creates the anti MAGA majority. Right. The people who voted in 2016 and 2020, the people who voted in the Clinton and for Biden voted for both of them by two points, right. If they were the only people who came back, Donald Trump would be finishing his second of three terms or whatever. Right. But that isn’t what happened. Instead about for 30 or 40 million people who hadn’t voted in 2016 showed up and they supported Biden by 12 points, and like half of them really weren’t thrilled about it, but really didn’t like Donald Trump. And that’s basically what we have, who we have to get out. It’s young voters who really think the system has failed them, both Democrats and Republicans, and want to change things up a lot, but not in the way Trump wants to. And that’s why through these last several months, even with Biden on like still nominally the ticket, those voters, those voters who had voted for Biden were not going to Trump. Even in sort of the worst polls, only 4% max of people who voted for Biden in 2020 said they were going for Trump. Another 20% or so said they were undecided or going for a third party. Right? 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Michael Podhorzer: They just parked themselves somewhere else. And Harris quickly got a bunch of them back, which is what we’re seeing. But whether or not the rest of them show up comes down to the credulity chasm and whether they’re convinced again that they need to go out and vote because there will be a national abortion ban, or there will be national stop and frisk, or there will be, you know, reckless deportations of your friends and all of that. So that’s what has to happen. That’s who we have to win back. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Walz says and what the independent expenditures and what activists say, like it’s all a piece of the puzzle. But I think this is where I really have to praise Harris, because rather than fall into the trap of let’s take the temperature today and see that, oh, Social Security is the issue du jour, or repealing Obamacare is the issue du jour. Or you know, this tax cut is the issue du jour. She’s actually constructing a narrative, which is Hallelujah, lovely to see. And that narrative, I think it’s undeniable, is constructed out of two F words and those F words, not one of my favorite F words, but those two F words are future and freedom and freedoms, plural whenever possible. And I think that that does succinctly and powerfully what we’ve been talking about, which is really to make clear that this election is a referendum on which future we’re going to have, a future in which we allow MAGA Republicans to take us backwards into the Mesozoic era and to control our lives and to, you know, take the wealth of our livelihoods and basically to refashion the world in their own interest on behalf of the billionaires who have bought them, or a future in which let’s not pretend everything is magically delicious, but a future in which we sort of still possess the freedoms to be able to live to fight for the rest of the promise of the American dream that has heretofore evaded us but we still believe. And I think that that storyline which can be applied to then how you talk about Social Security or how you talk about Obama care, or how you talk about taxes or how you talk about unions, that’s what allows a signal to break through the noise, because it’s a repeated trope again and again and again. You know, I think it’s just really great to see that. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, yeah, it has been. Let’s talk about the running mates, who in some ways are like mirror images of each other. Uh. JD Vance was picked as the MAGA heir apparent for his uh working class, rural Midwest roots. Uh. Though what we’ve seen so far in the campaign trail is what Tim Walz calls weird. And he was selected by Kamala Harris for his rural, working class Midwest roots to project a very different image to America. Anat, you’ve worked in Minnesota on campaigns with the very same messaging we’re hearing from Tim Walz. Let’s hear some of that now. 

[clip of Tim Walz] Well, these guys are just weird. That’s who they are. So it ain’t it isn’t much else. Don’t give them the power. Look, are they a threat to democracy? Yes. Are they going to take our rights away? Yes. Are they going to put people’s lives in danger? Yes. Are they going to endanger the planet by not dealing with climate change? Yes, they’re going to do all that. But don’t lift these guys up like they’re some kinds of heroes. Everybody in this room knows. I know it as a teacher, a bully has no self-confidence. A bully has no strength. They have nothing. [whoosh sound] Their policies are what destroyed rural America. They’ve divided us. They’re in our exam rooms. They’re telling us what books to read. And I think what Kamala Harris knows is bringing people together around the shared values, strong public schools, strong labor unions that create the middle class. Health care that’s affordable and accessible. Those are the things you look what they’re talking about. They went right to division. [whoosh sound] In Minnesota. We respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves. There’s a golden rule. Mind your own damn business. 

Jon Favreau: Anat, tell us a little bit about your work in Minnesota. For those who haven’t tuned into earlier seasons of The Wilderness and your fantastic podcast, Words to Win By. Tell us a little bit about your work with Minnesota and Tim Walz. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: So Minnesota, as a person from Wisconsin, people need to understand just how painful it is for me to say anything positive about Minnesota. So obviously, everything that I’m saying is true because, you know, no one from Wisconsin wants to praise Minnesota unless they absolutely have to. In 2016, Trump came within the closest margin of getting Minnesota. He didn’t, uh that a presidential candidate had done since Ronald Reagan. And what the right wing in the state saw in that and they, um in that year, they had control of the state Senate and the state House. They saw sort of their ability to weaponize the trifecta in the Minnesota case of anti- migrant, anti-Black, anti-Muslim hate baiting because of the significant Somali American population that is clustered in that largely white state. And so they went double, triple, quadruple down with all sorts of ugly dog whistles. And they had all of this messaging and all of this sort of discourse about specifically Somali daycare fraud and suitcases full of cash going to Mogadishu, like that was their story they were pounding that gong hard. And what organizers in the state and here I really just want to hold up SEIU Minnesota, education in Minnesota, faith in Minnesota, Unidos, the Somali Worker Center, or Better Minnesota, like so many folks, had already had the muscle of working together as a choir, of having a unified message, of knowing that in order to break a signal through the noise, you have to say fewer things and say them more often. And so they looked around and they’d been going door to door because they organize year round, God bless them. And what they found is that when they would knock on doors in rural Minnesota and they would give their economic promise, they would say, you know, we’re going to raise wages and we’re going to give you child care, and we’re going to do this kitchen table, kitchen table, kitchen table, kitchen table. People at the doors would say, that sounds lovely. But there was a guy knocking doors here about half an hour ago who said that immigrants are taking our jobs, or who said that, you know, we can’t go into the Twin Cities because there’s too much crime. And what they realized is that a colorblind economic only message has no hope of landing and penetrating in an arena in which people are subjected to a cacophony of this divide in order to conquer right wing strategy that we know well. And so they signed on to this project that I was really, really proud to help lead called the race class narrative. And then we actually started implementing it most thoroughly in Minnesota in 2018 when Tim Walz became the governor. And we called that campaign, we branded it Greater Than Fear, because that is the goofy way that Minnesotans refer to the rural parts of their state. They call it Greater Minnesota. Who knows? Right? They have to have their affectations. I think they also call soda, pop. 

Jon Favreau: That’s fine, I like that. [laughter]

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Do you know, this is a little aside, do you know that instead of calling it duck, duck, goose, they call it duck, duck, gray duck, which is honestly like, how are they calling people weird? Because that’s– 

Jon Favreau: That’s weird. I was just about to say it. 

Michael Podhorzer: Yeah. [laughing]. 

Jon Favreau: That’s weird. That is weird. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: It’s very controversial. Duck, duck, gray duck. It’s like the most upsetting thing to learn about Minnesota. I’m sorry to be the one to share it. I’m guessing this is going on the cutting room floor. So when we started assembling that campaign, Tim Walz had cinched the nomination for the governorship. And at a fundraiser, the organizers sort of encouraged, AKA forced me to after he and Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor assumed to be the governor of that state, woo whoo, made me give him a Greater than Fear shirt with our campaign logo so that reporters that were at that event could take pictures of him sort of wearing our messaging. And when I said to them, isn’t everyone going to think that this random lady from California is an asshole for interrupting a Minnesota fundraiser? They’re like, absolutely they will. But then you’ll get on a plane and go home. So Walz, really, through partnership with these extraordinary organizers and through his own incredible ability, props were due as an orator and as sort of everyone’s dad really figured out that you can’t just make believe that these attacks are not happening and try to kind of let them therefore dominate the conversation about race, about gender, about these sort of quote, “cultural issues,” and he really figured out, as did other folks in the state, how you have to have a message that presents a really big we and that presents values, whether that be mind your own business, whether that be looking out for your neighbor, whether that be freedom that most people believe in. And then call out the other side for precisely how their trafficking and division essentially reveal the magic trick, that it’s all a sleight of hand, that they want us pointing our finger in the wrong direction. They want us shaming and blaming some sort of constructed other so that we don’t notice that actually, they’re the ones that are making our lives impossible by handing the wealth our work creates to a small class of billionaires. And Walz has really perfected this, and I hope that it serves as a model that, yes, he’s real good at this, and that is somewhat an individual characteristic. But there’s also a formula to it, and it’s a formula that you can rinse and repeat and it works. 

Jon Favreau: Anat, what do you think about Walz defining JD as weird? What do you think about the weird messaging? 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, we’ve been having an internal conversation among, Mike and I both work in what I like to call cadena perpetua, the my lifetime sentence of working with Mike in a thing called the Research Collaborative. Um. So, among sort of all the pollsters within the collaborative, we’ve been debating this weird thing. So the experiments that have been done on vote choice, both sort of out in the world with different kinds of content, and more recently, a poll that Axios reported on with swing voters, they don’t show vote choice movement out of this weird thing. Perhaps not the most shocking. People do have some measure of their calculus baked in. It’s more important to highlight to folks that MAGA is dangerous than that they’re weird. It really needs to be voter facing. It really needs to be about, you know, not that Mike Johnson and his son co-monitor each other’s porn, which I was very, very shocked to see most Americans didn’t deem the most weird thing. And I was telling Mike the, I’m like, someone needs to do a PhD on that, because that’s obviously the weirdest thing. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. I would have guessed I would put that at the top of the list for sure. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, like, I don’t know if we just have a men problem and the two of you could fill us in on exactly what’s going on and why that’s not deemed weird. I don’t understand it, but the most important thing is really to have the messaging be what I call voter facing. And what’s interesting about that Walz clip that you played is, you know, him saying, yeah, they’re weird. They want to do this to you. They want to do this to you, they want to do this to you. And so for me. A few things about weird, number one, you know, it’s a question of what follows the word weird. Is what follows the word weird like they monitor each other’s porn, which like, is, according to me, objectively weird, but not voter facing. Like, that’s some sort of underground lifestyle habit that I don’t understand. But it’s not saying you don’t get health insurance anymore. It’s not saying you’re not going to be able to have Social Security when you retire. So it’s important that the way that it gets articulated is voter facing. The other thing that I would say about it that I think isn’t measurable in a traditional randomized control trial that’s looking at vote choice, is does weird serve the role of a pre buttle or a rejoinder to the anti-woke attack? Because if you take it at its essence, I think the Anti-woke attack is really about you don’t believe what “real Americans” quote unquote believe. You are outside of some kind of established norm. This is what most of us want. This is what most of us like. This is how most of us behave. And you’re out there on some sort of, you know, San Franciscan, uh Brooklyn Island. And what the hell is that? Uh. Silverlake can be included, too, Jon. You’re welcome. In Maryland, Mike. You’re good. [laugh] I think that to the extent that weird is an interesting rejoinder to that without actually calling attention to it, without saying we’re not woke or it’s fine to be woke, or why are they attacking us for woke? All of which doesn’t work. Weird sort of is serving the same purpose of saying this is the boundary, this is the norm. This is kind of what people believe, and these folks are so far from it that they’re kind of in their own category. I think that in that sense, it’s an interesting approach. I think it’s another permutation of this race class narrative thing where we’re sort of calling out the other side for being divisive and hateful, but that, again, you have to ascribe motivation. If it’s simply that there are in between husband and wife, call each other mother and father. That’s weird, but doesn’t impact me. If they want to like, tell me what I can and can’t do with my body, then that is a kind of weird that is really, really disastrous. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, Mike, I had been thinking that we shouldn’t necessarily be calling them weird because that’s just not as effective. But we should be calling their ideas weird because they could actually have an effect on on our lives, on voters lives. Anat said it better, but I was going to ask you because, you know, I’ve had this struggle where we’ve got to frame MAGA as dangerous and a threat, which is different than weird. But then now I’m coming back to this credulity chasm. Um. And so I kind of thought that maybe weird was helping some people who might not believe that it’s a real threat and dangerous, and that they should be scared by saying, yeah, well, I don’t know if it’s if it’s that dangerous, but it’s certainly weird and I don’t want that, but I’m just trying to figure out, like–

Michael Podhorzer: Yeah. 

Jon Favreau: –how you break through—

Michael Podhorzer: No yeah. 

Jon Favreau: –for people who aren’t sure that it sounds dangerous or or think people who say it’s dangerous are you know, just overexaggerating. 

Michael Podhorzer: Right. So take this as a concurring opinion to what Anat said. I think that, um you we’ve all heard opinionaters say, you know, don’t bother attacking Trump. Everyone knows, you know, it’s been ten years. There’s nothing left to tell people they don’t know. And I think that’s not correct. I think it is correct if it’s about how weird he is, how offputting he is. Right? I mean, there’s a whole comedy industry based on essentially how weird they are, right? There’s, you know, MSNBC, which is business model is how weird they are, right? 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Michael Podhorzer: So it’s not really telling anyone that anything that’s going to help by calling them weird. What it does do though is make uh Harris and Walz relatable. Right. And that’s where I think it’s been really helpful in this time. Right. That for them instead of being super serious all the time and being like eat your spinach right. You can see that they’re people like God. Thank God they’re finally like acting like human beings and lot like automatons. Right. And so I think for them in this moment, it was a great part of the introduction to America, right? That they are loose that they can see that. And in terms of international elections, where we have the same kind of like fascist who’s going to ruin everything on this side versus the other, that the sweet spot is landing the Credulity Chasm, saying, yes, if they get elected, your life is going to be much worse. And treating the want to be dictator as a clown. Right. Not cowering at at them because the only way they’ll ever get the power is if they win the election. Right. And so I think for the candidates to be looking for ways to just laugh at Trump, that’s his Kryptonite. Right. Which we’re seeing him meltdown over it. Right. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Michael Podhorzer: It’s just don’t be sanctimonious. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. No, I totally agree. I think much more mockery of Trump and mockery in sort of like a, a light way that makes him seem like a clown, as you said. [music break] All right. Let’s talk about what Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, the Democratic Party, and hopefully everyone listening can do to persuade voters over the next few weeks. The Democratic National Convention is essentially a four day national TV ad during primetime. The message and the story we tell there is entirely in our control. Even if not everyone hears it the way we want to. And so far, the Harris campaign has given us a hint of what that message might sound like with their first paid television ad. Let’s listen. 

[clip of Vice President Kamala Harris] [Beyonce’s song Freedom starts playing] There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us, we choose something different. [people chanting] We choose freedom. 

[clip of Beyonce singing] Freedom. Freedom. I can’t move. Freedom cut me loose. 

[clip of Vice President Kamala Harris] The freedom not just to get by, but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty, where we can all afford health care, where no one is above the law. [clip of Beyonce singing plays underneath] We believe in the promise of America, and we are ready to fight for it. Because when we fight, we win. So join us. 

Jon Favreau: Uh so Anat, when I first heard this. I was like, is Anat writing her speech right now? [laugh] It’s like anyone who’s listened to The Wilderness and heard you on this podcast in past seasons will know will recognize the freedom framing. Um. Talk to me about the freedom messaging. Democracy’s out, freedoms in. Why does it work? I was provocative there. I was intentionally provocative. [laugh]

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Let me stand up for democracy for a moment and just say, because this ad actually has come out, there was even a Washington Post piece about this yesterday. To be clear, freedom is the way that we talk about democracy. It’s not that we are sort of eschewing democracy, it’s that democracy is too much of an abstraction for people to actually get excited about. Whereas freedom, to use a dorky word for you, you’re welcome, is corporeal. When you ask people for kind of the salient example of having freedom taken away, they will tell you, oh, it’s being confined, it’s being chained, it’s being unable to move. It’s kind of a thing that you can feel inside of your body. Whereas like, what is democracy? Draw me a picture of that. It’s just too nebulous. So the thing about freedom is that when you ask U.S. voters and this is true across public polling, it’s true across internal polling that we’ve done what value do you most closely associate with this country? It’s freedom and it’s freedom number one. And number two isn’t even close. And that’s true across demographics. It’s been true for a very long time. And so we’ve lived in this horrible universe in which we’ve allowed for a while the right to claim freedom, because they think freedom means that you get to worship your God as long as, of course, he’s Jesus and you get to worship your gun as long as it’s very, very, very large and you’re white. So they have claimed this, and the left has been for many, many years reluctant. And, you know, both Mike and I have experienced, as have others like people being like, oh, we can’t reclaim that. That’s right wing, that’s this. And what I would say to people all along is tell that to FDR. Tell that to Martin Luther King Junior. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last. Tell that to the marriage equality movement, who, not coincidentally, shifted from the right to marry, to the freedom to marry. Freedom is what we call a contested concept. It has different iterations in different kinds of frames. It does have a right wing version, and it absolutely has a left wing version. And so reclaiming it, as we saw really, really forthrightly in 2022 among, not coincidentally, folks like Governor Shapiro who really banged the protect our freedoms drum. What it allows us to do is, again, as Mike said before, be relatable. If this is kind of the top thing that your voters think is meaningful about your country, then you can’t really afford to just let it go. And it has a lot of credibility because of the fact that they came for our freedoms with respect to Dobbs, the freedom as Harris says in that ad, to decide for ourselves what happens to our bodies. And the same is true for contraception and for IVF and a whole raft of things. And so claiming freedom, what it allows you to do is have a story that you can tell about all the things, because you can talk about freedom to send your kid to school and know their biggest worry is, where did I leave my backpack? Freedom to retire in dignity. Freedom to join a union and be able to negotiate a fair return. It’s a word that allows you to connect issues together, rather than having to have a separate story about each thing. And it’s a direct contestation of what MAGA is doing, which is trying to take away our freedoms on every level and in every dimension. 

Jon Favreau: Mike, what do you think the uh party’s goals messaging goal should be for the convention? What do they need to get done? 

Michael Podhorzer: I think what they have to get done is things you were already talking about. Landing that we will all be comfortable if Harris is president and doing as much distance closing on the credulity chasm. One thing I want to add, though the, about the democracy part, which I think it’s really important, is that if you don’t think that the direction of the country is that great, which only about three quarters of Americans think. 

Jon Favreau: Right. 

Michael Podhorzer: Then like it’s democracy that’s failing, right? Unlike any other industrial country, we’ve never had anything other than democracy. Right, in like how we should govern ourselves has never been on the ballot or in terms of vocabulary contested. Right. And so what we just saw in France, where the not far right all got together in the spit, which Anat can take a lot of credit for, but in helping really quickly is because you don’t have to explain to people in France what fascism is, right? There have been different types of governments in all those European countries, right? We have no other word for how we live than democracy. And if you don’t think it’s going well, like to quote Anat, it’s like, what has it ever done for you? 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Michael Podhorzer: Right. And so I think we even are disqualifying ourselves when we talk to people who are not yet in our camp and say, but he’ll destroy democracy because anybody who would respond to that is already on our side. Right? What we have to do is make clear what tangibly is at stake, what they don’t realize could be taken away from them. Right. And I completely agree. It’s like we should have been contesting we’ve been trying to contest this, Anat and me for like what was it? Like when we did the labor thing in–

Anat Shenker-Osorio: 2012. 

Michael Podhorzer: Yeah right. It’s taken a while, but because the right wing version of freedom is essentially the freedom of privileged white men to do whatever they want, right? And that is what it has meant. And that’s why people on not just the left, but anybody else has shied away from it and there’s a great book called Freedom’s Dominion by Jefferson Cowie that really, like, makes that clear. So anyway, I think that freedom is much better. And we really overindex on how much people value democracy. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. No, I completely agree. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: The other thing about that ad, and generally speaking, when we test things is that the protagonist antagonist relationship that needs to be set up in messages, including when they’re spoken by Democrats and certainly when they’re spoken about Democrats by the rest of us, it needs to be that the antagonists obviously are MAGA Republicans and the protagonists are voters. They’re not the Democratic official who’s running. And that’s true both because hate to tell you, but there’s nobody who believes that Democrats are coming to save us. That just I mean, you want to talk about credulity. That’s where people [laugher] like absolutely are like, um uh funny, cute, no, I don’t think so. 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: But even if they did believe it, and as a focus group junkie, I can assure you they don’t. We wouldn’t say it anyway, because what we’re asking of the viewer of the ad or the listener of the message is we want you to feel like you got to do something. You got to get off. I now feel dirty using the word couch. Uh. I don’t [laughter] I don’t know if sofa’s better, but, like, sorry, like here’s–

Jon Favreau: I know. I was saying earlier, when I’m like, the voters that are going to get off the couch and I was like, oh, can we still say that? [?]

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don’t know what the rating is on this podcast, but like, I hope you have explicit already. So, you know, we need you to get up off the couch. Whatever you’re doing there. I’m not here to judge. [laughter]

Michael Podhorzer: Because you should have the freedom to do whatever you want on your–

Jon Favreau: That’s true. Yeah. And whatever piece of furniture you enjoy. 

Michael Podhorzer: Right. 

Anat Shenker-Osorio: You know what? I’ve heard good things about Ottomans. I don’t know. It’s not the way I go. It’s not how I do it, but, like okay. So I think that what’s going on in that ad, [?] better pieces of communication is that there is some element of and we’re the ones and let’s decide and we have the chance to make the choice. And that’s where that kind of two futures thing comes in, which we’ve been seeing in testing since, you know, back in January. And we saw in Poland, we saw in Brazil, we saw to a certain extent in France more recently, you know, not for nothing was the kind of Polish overarching message. Vote for the Poland you want, not the person you want. And similarly, at least in the uh days where we still had Biden at the top of the ticket, what we were finding is saying to people, vote for the country you want, not the candidate you want, was really, really potent because it is this kind of inflection and fork in the road between two possible futures, one with and one without freedom that gets folks uh to want to act and to do so in the ways that we need. 

Jon Favreau: Well, that that is a great place to leave it. Anat Shenker-Osorio, Mikel Podhorzer, thank you, as always, for making me smarter and sharing your uh, your insights with uh with our audience. Uh. Freedom. I’m in. 

Michael Podhorzer: [?] Yeah. 

Jon Favreau: All right, guys, take care. Thank you. 

Michael Podhorzer: Thanks. Take care. [music break]

Jon Favreau: We’ll see you next week for the final episode of The Wilderness. The Wilderness is a production of Crooked Media. It’s written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, our senior producer and editor is Andrea B. Scott. Austin Fisher is our producer and Farrah Safari is our associate producer. Sound design by Vasilis Fotopoulos. Music by Marty Fowler. Charlotte Landes and Jordan Cantor sound engineered the show. Thanks to Katie Long, Reid Cherlin, Matt DeGroot, and Madeleine Haeringer for production support. To our video team Rachel Gaewski, Joseph Dutra, Chris Russell, Molly Lobell, and David Toles, who filmed and edited the show. If The Wilderness has inspired you to get involved, head on over to VoteSaveAmerica.com/2024 to sign up and find a volunteer shift near you.