Speaker 1: So this is not and we've lazily called it a
Nicki Haley voter. It's not a Nicki Haley voter. It's
an anti Trump voter. And that's very important. That distinction
is really really important because we're trying to gauge the
true sentiments of why they're breaking off. They're not voting
for Nicki Haley. They were never voting for Nicky Haley, right,
they were voting against Donald Trump exactly, and that is important.
It's really really really really really important for messaging. Okay,
so that what I'm gauging, what I'm looking for is
the math that says how many Republicans are just anti
Trump and then why? Okay, and the why then becomes
very important. There were three pieces of information that we
did not have heading into November twenty twenty. The big
Lie double Linewy election is January sixth, and the Dobbs decision.
All three of those were incredibly powerful motivators for Republicans
to bail on this guy, and they all happened after
the twenty twenty Okay, So what we have also seen
if you even watch sort of anecdotal evidence or like
kind of watch some of these groups putting out ads
of like the local person saying I'm against this is
why I'm not voting for Trump. I can't do it again.
Ninety nine percent of them say one of those three things.
They're not saying I felt comfortable because Dick Cheney came
out right. So the permission structure is important, but it's
not the primary lead of why people are leaving right
and thirty days out. It's great to kind of show momentum.
It's kind of like the yard signs. It's a good
sign in your community. There's yard sides coming out. People
are showing momentum. But the yard sign itself is not
convincing people. What is convincing people is those three messages.
And if Harris wants to close a record number of Republicans,
they've got to hit those issues in those messages more
than they need to put the messengers out front of it.
They both help, don't get me wrong, but messengers alone
aren't going to carry the day. It's those three reasons
that have gotten us to this unprecedented potentiality of losing
upwards of ten percent of Republicans. And if Harris peels
off ten percent, she will be the next president. Of
the United States.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's talk about the people that because that
gets us right into what you have written. By the way, folks,
it's a great new book out, the Latino Century. That
Mike and I were laughed when he came up with
the title. We were talking. He said, I have the title,
and I'm calling the book the Latino Century. And I said, oh, yeah,
that's going to throw some people. That's gonna make some
people go, that's the problem, right, right, But the book
goes on. The title really kind of reflects the story
that you want to get into, and that is how
America's largest minority is transforming democracy and we're seeing it
in so many quarters of the country that unfortunately for
a lot of white Americans. And again I'm not pink
with a broadbrush, y'all know who I'm talking about. That
there's that neighbor down the street that when you walk
by the house, you just shake your head. Right when
you see me in the grocery store, you go, my god,
they're so bad. Right, Those are the folks I'm talking
about who have this sort of idealized view of an
America that never existed a nineteen fifties. You know, brand
new television expectation a father knows best, and folks like
that living in a suburbia with the wife and the
apron that America never existed, and a lot of folks
know that. What people also know is what you get
into is how much even then the country was changing.
And it wasn't just with this kind with the white
immigrants who had come at the turn of the twentieth cent,
at the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. But what
had happened and what was beginning to happen as more
and more folks in places like Cuba and Puerto Rico
and elsewhere a greater affinity started calling America home, started
raising their families and creating legacy. And that that part
of the story, I think is going to be a
big X factor in this election, because the Latino vote,
like the Black vote, is not monolithic. It's culturally as
well as politically diverse within what was arguably the broader
Latino community. Talk a little bit about how those changes
impact a race like this.
Speaker 3: Brother, you just wrote my whole book.
Speaker 1: Look, and this is why I love having conversations with you,
is because the nuances and the understanding of people who
come as you know, men of color who come up
with our own different experiences. You're in the East coast,
me on the West coast, black brown guys just coming
up in the Republican Party and knowing what those nuances
are and speaking the same language and not even have
to say the words, but only talking about right.
Speaker 4: It's like it's magic for me. So I appreciate you
more than you know, because it's been a very lonely
road and in so many ways. And I know that
you as the chairman of the party, I mean, you
got to the pinnacle of this whole thing. So, look,
America is changing, and it's going to change the way
we look at everything.
Speaker 1: It's going to change the way Latinos view themselves, black
people view themselves, White people for sure view themselves. A
lot of this change that we're witnessing is, frankly, this
kind of regression of white people to behaving like this
aggrieved racial minority. They always blamed everybody else for being right.
You're seeing it in the entitlement that you know, Donald
Trump comes out with, as we're entitled to this, this
is our birthright, this is our country. You know, government
largees should be going to our tribe and to our people.
And that's okay when it goes to our people, but
it's it's well burned handouts when it's everybody else. And
that's why they're coming here illegally, is to get all
this money and all of these racist tropes. And that's
really what it is. It's just you can't get past that.
We are going through. I think this very tumultuous time demographically,
and America is becoming for the first time in her
history a non white European people. Yeah, that's that's serious business.
There goes the neighborhood. It's in the country, right, Well, there's.
Speaker 2: A lot tied up into that. There's a lot of
money tied up with it, power.
Speaker 1: And going, keep going.
Speaker 5: Yes, all of it is tied up, all of it.
Speaker 1: It's the whole conceptualization of what America is. It was
supposed to be, what it was meant to be, what
it was suposed to be. And we've always had this
like mythical anybody can come to America and be American and.
Speaker 5: You know, black people are going, what is about you're
talking about?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: And and and so it's challenging this whole idea of
of the founding credos.
Speaker 3: Of all of us are in out by.
Speaker 1: Our creator, right because we say this, and we've had
this mythology about it. And it's easy when you're an
eighty five percent white country, but suddenly, after two and
fifty years of that, when you're becoming less than fifty
percent white, it's like, wait a second, we didn't really
mean all of that, right, Like what.
Speaker 2: Do we really mean?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: Can't America be in America if it's if it's not
a white Christian nation? And that is so much of
the struggle that we're going through because we are going
through this incredible technological change and economic change. But the
most visible every day that we see is the complexion
of our country is changing. And that's the easiest way
to relate to it, and politicians will take advantage of that.
What's changing though, what's transforming? And this, by the way,
as you know better than anybody, is a lot of
these shifts are happening beyond just Latinos. It's happening with
African American men. Maybe not as much, maybe it's little.
I'm not an expert. I don't know, but I know
that it's happening. The New York Times did a phenomenal
analysis after the twenty twenty elections showing that in every
single immigrants dense precinct in the country, everyone there was
a right word shift.
Speaker 3: So it's not even just a black and brown thing.
Speaker 1: It's like an Asian thing. It's like it's an everything thing.
Speaker 3: And what that tells us very clearly is.
Speaker 1: The class separation is gotten out of control. Then it's
like beyond the Gilded Age, right, and our oligarchs are
like Elon Musk and Peter Teel. They're acting like populists
and they're acting like men of the people Donald Trump,
but they're the ones that are fueling this sort of
this this class rage, and it's got direct correlations to
the race and ethnic tensions in the country, any one
of which would be very very difficult to handle. But
they're both crashing on our shores of the same time,
and so it's it's really really hard for us to
find any sense of commonality right now.
Speaker 2: You you did a it was interesting there was a
Washington Post article that actually commented on some of what
you've written in what you said is said quote Madrid
criticizes the GOP as the biggest purveyor of identity politics
in America for its anti immigrant appeals to it sometimes
bigoted based. If Republicans abandoned the nativism and stress tax cuts,
he argues, they could regain power in Washington. Democrats conversely,
need to drop the denial about Latino's right word drift
and frame an economic message to appeal to a Latino
voting base that isn't wedded to the Democrats. And that
is the strength of the Latino community right now, is
that it is something that we've struggled with in the
black community after a long time, giving ourselves over in
the first instance, to Republicans and that didn't turn out,
and then giving ourselves over to the Democrats in the
nineteen sixties, and what we got was the Great Society
and a lot of people like but now just living
in a tenement and I still don't have a job, right,
so you have you have that, and so now, but
the Latinos in coming to the country, and and a
let's keep in mind, Latino has been coming to America
folks for a long time. Right, they just didn't start
showing up two months ago, Okay, they were They were
as much a part of helping to build the country
as a whole lot of other folks that we know
from Asia and elsewhere. But but the reality of it
is people don't understand that part of the Latino history.
Your book asked the question of whether the first you know,
the rise of Latinos put it that way, the rise
of Latinos will inflame or or begin to control and
and dissipate this, uh, this partisan tribalism. What we're seeing though,
is to the point you just made it, seemingly the
partisans want to pull Latinos into the partisan tribalism because
the grift and the political advantage over the Democrats, in
their view, is far greater than the respect for the legacy,
the history, and the aspirations of the very people. So
you trap them the way other communities have been trapped
into a lot of promises for shit they ain't gonna get.
Speaker 4: Again.
Speaker 1: Man, I'm glad I wrote the book before you did.
That's exactly right. Look, yeah, and that's exactly it. And
what is happening is a lot of this. I explained,
it's kind of demographic, right. What I was doing work
for on Latino stuff for George W. Bush in two
thousand and two thousand and four we were getting high thirties,
mid forties support levels. But back then, remember this is
twenty five years ago, Latino's were a much more recently
migrated voting block. There was a lot of naturalized citizens.
The dramatic explosion that's happening now over eighty percent are
US born and they're very young. It's like a huge
tidal wave that's coming. These are not migrants themselves. In
many cases, it was either their parents or their grandparents,
and so they're not as sensitive to that issue. And
Democrats have been speaking to them as basically as aggrieved
immigrant communities. And we have a deep reverence for our migrants,
there's no question about that. But at the same time,
we also have this immediate economic crisis that is facing
a lot of working class people right now. That is
very real, right and the polling has been telling us
overwhelmingly for three decades, Michael, for thirty years, it's economic
issues that they want to hear about. And then when
the Democrats hear them'll be like, yeah, I understand that,
but he wants to put your kids in cages. And
it's like, I hear you, and I get that.
Speaker 5: But I don't have the luxury of worrying about that
right now, because my kids are hungry to nights right right,
Like I got mouths to feed now and rent is
due on Friday.
Speaker 3: Politics bring that to me, Like, that's what I have
the capacity to worry about. And that is part of
this broader class shift. As the Democrats have consolidated college
educated voters overwhelmingly white, the Republicans have consolidated non college
voters overwhelmingly black and brown. And so now we've got this,
these parties isolated by culture, diploma divide, class divide, and
racial and ethnic relation is all pulling the country in
very different political directions. And one of the great ironies
of this moment, and I think again, you and I'm
gonna have to have a bottle of wine to talk
about this after November when we win, yes, is the
fact that the Republican Party has become far more diverse
under Donald Trump than at any time since the nineteen
sixty four Civil Rights Act. Like that's crazy talk, but
it's happening.
Speaker 1: Is happening because of the things that you and I
built our careers on, which was talk about economic opportunity
and economic issues foundationally first and foremost, because If we
can address economic issues, then we can better address our
race issues.