What are the Americans who will decide the 2024 election thinking?
Anat Shenker-Osorio is a legendary messaging expert and the host of the fantastic Words to Win By podcast. And she’s constantly in focus groups with the “double hater” and “disaffected swing” voters who will decide if this republic will embrace fascism.
So, she has a good idea of the challenges that Joe Biden, democracy, and we all face. Making the threat of Trump feel real somehow remains a real obstacle. But the good news is that the more voters know, the more they tend to lean Biden.
We spoke to Anat about embracing “freedom,” how to talk about the best jobs market of our lifetime without telling people to “Quit yer bitchin,” and why talking about Trump’s felonies is far better politics than imitating Trump at “the border.”
Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here.
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
Jason Sattler: Social media has turned us all into pundits. You do something that most pundits would never do. You listen to voters talk about this election all the time. And it's very early June 2024. How would you describe this election from the eyes of the voters you've been hearing from recently?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, and I want to specify, we listened to two groups of voters in particular for reasons I think are going to be very obvious when I describe them because there are the two groups we desperately need. So when I answer the subsequent questions, they're really about how things look from these two groups, and those two groups, our names for them, are disaffected Dems.
So these are people who have voted Democratic in the past, probably voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I say probably because some of them are younger and so they've aged into the voting process. If they're younger, they couldn't have voted for Joe Biden. They're too young. But they are right now very much in the no category.
They're double haters. They're feeling despondent and disaffected. They're very unlikely to vote for Trump. And in fact, that's not this category of voter at all. They are deciding between Biden and staying at home, voting third party, or skipping the top of the ticket. That's giving the top-of-the-ticket answer in case folks thought they'd thought of they'd come up with every nightmare scenario that is an additional one.
I'm happy to offer you that, actually, in 2016, 1 to 2 percent of the electorate and battleground states skip the top of the ticket. So, it is not an inconsequential threat.
Jason Sattler: We know this well from Wayne County, Michigan, in 2016.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are our disaffected Dems.
Hopefully the label tells you who they are and what they're about. And then the other group that we spend lots of time with are our disaffected swing. These are folks who are less reliably democratic. They also are not like perfect turnout people by any means, but they have pretty solid turnout, but they have a more mixed partisan voting record.
So what we hear from these two groups that are underscore underscore, absolutely integral to winning. This is it. This is the name of the game. This is where it's at for us. Is A few things. The first is that they find the mega agenda completely and totally. Repellent is the kindest thing that I could possibly say about it.
Repugnant, disgusting, like anything. We show them highlights of Project 2025. Nope. Nope. And some more. Nope. We show them the Time magazine interview with Trump. Absolutely not. We showed them a political piece. It's not. There's no part of them that is, "Ooh, concentration camps for immigrants. Or, um, eliminating the ACA. I'm intrigued. "They're not, "Outlawing contraception? Oh, interesting." They're very not excited about the agenda to speak euphemistically. The challenge that we are running into is what I call the credulity challenge. So we get a lot of first of all, until we present it to them, for the most part, they're like, haven't heard of any of this, didn't know about any of this.
So first there's just, they had no idea in many cases. And then, once we walk them through it, and they tell us they hate all of it, they say, "Eh, it's not gonna happen. Not gonna happen."
Jason Sattler: Didn't happen the first time I survived. I'm, I didn't die of COVID for a second or third time. It's okay,
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, they didn't do this the first time around. You yelled and screamed the first time around. He didn't do this the first time around.
Jason Sattler: He didn't personally nuke me.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. We have this, major "fragility" problem and I'm happy to talk through what we do about that. The next thing that we hear From the higher information ones in this cohort That's really challenging is but all of this happened on Democrats watch.
Jason Sattler: Dobbs, for instance.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Dobbs fell on Democrats watch. Abortion was made illegal in states on Democrats watch these voting restrictions and places Happened on Democrats watch.
"You told us to turn out in 2020 to protect ourselves from this, and we did. And look, it happened anyway. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything."
Actually, we had groups last week, and we were talking with them about how -- because one of the things that we find promising is shifting the conversation away from vote for the candidate you want to vote for the country you want and this idea that this election is a fork in the road and we're at a crossroads and so on, and two different futures. But In our last groups, in the white men, group in Pittsburgh, one guy said I don't really see it as two different futures. I see it as two parallel futures and basically the Republicans have us in a speeding car toward this authoritarian future and the Democrats are a slow walk...
Jason Sattler: Okay, I'd take the slow walk, but sure...
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are some of the dynamics that are going on.
Jason Sattler: Are you seeing this strange thing that is showing up in the polls that's never happened before and in recent times that people who never vote and are voting for the first time are leaning toward the Republican candidate, leaning towards Donald Trump?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah.
So the important thing to understand about that, and that's the basis for this new pundit idea called "turnout terror," or my colleague, Michael Podhorzer calls it "turnout terror" that actually somehow higher turnout is disadvantageous to Joe Biden when, we know that historically the reverse has been true.
So the important thing to understand about that is that there is… And so what you're seeing is, if not a one-to-one, a close to it correlation between how much voters know about the agenda and how much voters believe that the MAGA agenda is likely to be implemented, and whether or not they have moved away from Biden.
So what you're seeing is that these non-habitual voters or these brand-new voters, they are understandably, by definition, very low information. If you haven't been participating all along, or in many cases, you're a young person who, is newly entering into the electorate, then you're going to tend to be Statistically speaking, obviously individual cases very much vary. Talking about millions of people. So there are differences among individuals. You're going to be a person who is less likely to be paying attention. And so the phenomenon that we're seeing is not that these non habitual voters or these sort of brand new to the electorate voters are feeling warm and fuzzy toward Donald Trump.
It's that they are not aware. Of what is at stake and they are understandably displeased with the present. So rather than make it basically I think the way that the dynamic can be most readily understood is if folks are viewing the election as a referendum on Joe Biden's performance. That's a tough spot.
If folks are viewing the election as the question of whether MAGA will come and take away our freedoms or not, then they very clearly know what to do and they will do it. So it's really a question of how many of the voters are clued in to what's going on.
Jason Sattler: One thing that you gov found in a poll earlier this year is that the only source that people really trust when it comes to news is their friends their loved ones. Is that true that people are relying more on each other for their information about voting?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Absolutely.
Yeah. These are folks who largely tune out, pay no attention to mainstream media. Now, with that said, these are porous borders and I think that it's impossible to say You know, I think that when mainstream media, let's say, puts a lot of reporters on the Trump trial beat, and there's a lot of coverage, and that's the front page of many newspapers, as we saw when the Bragg conviction came down, I think it's undeniable that has an impact in terms of what's on TikTok.
That is filtering into what becomes the dominant conversation on social media, which is, yes, how these disaffected voters are getting their quote unquote "news" or information.
Yeah, there is definitely a huge uptick in people's reliance on their own social networks. Interestingly, we find that anytime there is more information available about anything. I'll take a more neutral topic, like restaurant reviews. You're in a new city, you're trying to figure out where to eat.
There's 300, 000, Google has reviews and Yelp has reviews and Yahoo has reviews and who knows what else has reviews and the proliferation of that information actually renders all of that information less useful because now you have to contemplate which of those reviews are just a person who had an ax to grind, which of those people have the same taste as I do.
So the more that we've moved away from expertise, in the olden days, there would be like a restaurant critic and so on. The more that information is of less reliable value, both in reality, that is a true story and in people's perceptions. And so then they become reliant, understandably on word of mouth.
Jason Sattler: That makes a lot of sense. And so speaking of word of mouth, there's this debate on social media. I don't know if that means anything in reality, but whether how they should, how the Biden campaign should talk about the Bragg convictions, as you just called them there's, Joe Biden has a kind of natural disposition to refer to every opponent, like "my dear friend" in the Senate, and it doesn't seem very within his kind of capability to say, this guy's only convictions are felonies and stuff like that.
But at the same time this debate, Is one of the few stories as you pointed out that broke through that got it is in that is beyond just the freaks like us who pay attention to the news. So how are you talking about these convictions and why?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I think there's two questions inside of your question, which is how are we talking about it? And then what would be advisable for democratic leadership to talk about?
So let me take those in that order. So as far as how we're talking about it, it's really important to anchor whatever we're saying in a shared value. So in the Bragg case, it's saying something like most of us believe that voters deserve the full honest truth of who is running to represent us.
But Donald Trump, and the MAGA Republicans who aided and abetted his criminal conspiracy has now been convicted, is now convicted felon, under 34 counts of attempting to falsify business records in order to keep voters in the dark because he knew that if the full truth came out about his actions, it would endanger his ability to win the 2016 election.
So we always want to sort of juxtapose, we want to use the convicted felon thing. We want to make clear that this is a case of election interference or even more explicitly voter deception. We want to emphasize how most of us think it's the most basic thing on earth that voters ought to know what the people who are running to represent us have done and what they're up to it's really helpful to talk about how this is part and parcel of the broader bag agenda to take away our freedoms, that this is another proof point just like Dobbs is a proof point that they will stop at nothing to seize and hold power because that is what helps with that incredulity problem that I described before that, you know You say that, but they're not really going to do it.
As far as what should Democratic leaders be doing, what is it with this kind of above it all above the fray, I'm going to be very polite. I understand that, impetus, and in some ways one could even say that it's admirable. But one of the fundamental challenges that we have, and again, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about focus groups, is that if our electoral prospects hinge on voters understanding that the building is on fire, by which I mean the threat of eminent fascism is nigh. And our prospects do hinge on that. Then it's very incongruous to have the presumptive firefighters saying nothing, let alone not attempting to put out the blaze. And that's exactly what we get. We get, "Well, you say all of this terrible, horrible stuff? is going to happen, but wouldn't Democratic leaders be talking about it. How come I've never heard of this? How come I didn't know that this was going on?"
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And so the trap that you get yourself into, if you choose to be above it all, is that in the moments where you are calling it out, perhaps most notably in the State of the Union, it becomes "Which you, am I supposed to believe? The you that made an analogy and rightly I would argue between Putin and threat that he represents and Donald Trump representing essentially domestically the very same threat. Is it that you, or is it the you that doesn't even want to mention -- and I should pull back on that and say, if you're following the social media of the Biden social media campaign, they actually have started inching the gloves off a bit more, so I don't want to You know declare that's not the case because it's not fair. Yeah, if you're both the sitting president and a person running for president and you're hanging your hat on the argument that you are here to ensure the continuation of whatever we call this thing we'll make believe it's democracy I would argue it isn't but you know the semblance of it that we've got
Jason Sattler: As close as we're going to get.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah for now Then how is it possible that you're not yelling from the rafters exactly what the threat is before us?
Again, either that means that threat isn't true, and so insofar as other people are yelling that, they're being hyperbolic. Or, it is true, in which case, isn't that a dereliction of duty?
Jason Sattler: I was going to ask about what I see, it's a similar thread, what at the border where it's "If he's so bad, why are you proposing his policies and trying to, and insisting that they pass?"
And I think everybody who's in this mind frame gets why that's a problem.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And there's an additional piece to the border thing, which is that the toxic challenge with asking people all the time, "What are your top issues when you're making your electoral decision or when thinking about this election, which are the top issues and then presenting them a punch list that says jobs in the economy, cost of living and inflation, national security, the border and immigration, et cetera?" And different people, that list is written different ways, but like more or less I listed some abortion, democracy, housing costs, depends who's writing it.
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: So the average person is going about their day. They're living their life. They're getting their kid to school. They're going to their job or they're, sitting in their living room, doing their job on zoom or, they're like paying the bills. They're going to the store. How often do they think about the border? Especially if they live nowhere near the border. Not often.
Jason Sattler: When they watch Fox News.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, when they watch Fox News.
But in an average day, the kind of thought bubble popping into a human's head of "Oh, have I thought about the border today?" No, that doesn't happen. Now, that doesn't reflect when you're taking a survey and by definition you have been made to think about the border because it's been offered to you as a choice.
And to be sure, I'd be lying if I said differently, when people are offered that choice, i. e. that is brought top of mind to them, many people select that. And in fact, what we see. Thanks to the Republicans, because they understand that the job of a good message isn't to say what's popular, it's to make popular what you need said.
They understand that their electoral task is to make salient the issues that are most advantageous to them, duh. So it's not just what you're going to say in the conversation, it's deciding what the conversation will be. So for five minutes. Six minutes, I'll be generous. There was a conversation about Trump is a convicted felon.
He's been convicted. Felony, convicted felony convicted, felon, voter deception, election interference, push money. And however many minutes into that, you decide, here's a great idea. It was too good.
Jason Sattler: Yes.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: A news cycle about something that is obviously bad for my opposition. So here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to change the news cycle.
Jason Sattler: Only fair.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I'm going to pick a topic and not only am I going to change the topic, I'm going to pick a topic that is disadvantageous to me and make that a source of conversation. So it doesn't make sense in both dimensions.
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Both changing the topic to something that is disadvantageous to you. That's very foolish thing to do, especially when, how desperate are they to get the topic off of what's going on and you just did it for them. So why would you do that? And then the other piece of it is essentially what you said.
If you tell voters the way to make this electoral choices on the basis of who is going to be RoboCop, they're going to pick the folks who have that as their brand, regardless of what's true in your attempted gotcha that they didn't follow through. And no matter what you do, as far as rhetoric, and even as far as executive orders, that's not your brand strength. It's not what people associate with you. And it is dispiriting to your base. And the number of people among these disaffected Dems who have swallowed whole the rhetoric of both sides and who tell us, you know what, both sides are the same, both sides are the same, both sides are the same. It's a little hard to rebuff that claim when you're literally implementing the policy of the other side.
Jason Sattler: It feels i'm hoping it's just a 90s Democrat tic that he just feels like he needs to cross this box and then move on and actually talk about what he's going to do that's my best case hope scenario but because I do think that in one big huge way and this is the episode one of season three , of where's it when you discuss the 22 election in the embrace of freedom like you mentioned before the State of the Union, which I thought was to get two excellent speeches both before the midterm election and then the State of the Union was It was the top I've seen from a Democrat, in terms of messaging, in my lifetime, I think. You've heard better speeches from Barack Obama, just because he's the best speaker that they got, but he's, the words were never better, I thought, at the heights of those. And this is, I think, a battle that you've been fighting for a long time, among others, is to get the word freedom into Democrats mouth and this is something that Joe Biden seems to get more and more at least in moments when he has the most people listening to him. How did that win? Was it just was it Dobbs that convinced people to start to take freedom seriously? What is the archaeology of Freedom becoming part of the democratic lexicon?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Thank you for the shout out. So season three of Words to Win By our opening episode was about the 22 midterms and the embrace of freedoms and then more fully protect our freedoms and the idea of really rendering the election in the battlegrounds a referendum on whether we would protect our freedoms or whether MAGA Republicans would take away those freedoms.
And the question you're asking is how I guess if you repeat the same thing over and over and over and over and over and then over again and then over again, some more eventually people will some people at least will begin to adopt it. I think that part of it. And it was, we just made a really hardcore data driven case, but I have been making this case and not just, I'm just saying me because I live inside of my own body.
Jason Sattler: And you know what you did.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Yeah. I know what I did. Lots and lots of other people did as well, so I don't mean to imply that at all. Sure. But it actually, believe it or not, was way back in 2012 that we first started to try to less marquee effect, to push this freedoms narrative, of all spots, in the union fight.
And what we found is that. In the Janus fight, which was a Supreme Court case around quote, unquote, right to work that was, heavily impacting public sector unions. Of all the messages that we tested, the message that said in America, we value our freedoms and CEOs are free to negotiate their wages and bonuses as they see fit. Working people just want the very same freedom, the freedom to join together in union. You can tell I've done this spiel for a while. I have the beginning of the message at least memorized. And what we found. Is that in that economic argument because normally people like yes, he has freedoms in the abortion case freedoms in the contraception case, but freedom and the ability to anchor to freedom applies across issues, and it always has. FDR knew that, right? Martin Luther King Jr. knew that when he said, free at last, thank God Almighty. People don't remember that is how the I Have a Dream speech ended. The Freedom Riders, the Freedom Summer, the absolutely essential pivot away from calling it the right to marry to the freedom to marry for the marriage equality movement.
So this argument has been integral to progressive victories for a very long time, but we become over and again afraid of our own shadow. And it's actually not dissimilar, interestingly, to 90s Democrat tic, where you just genuflect at the altar of the opposition, when we get scared or spooked.
Like all humans make bad decisions out of fear. And that is true that's true of our voters. That's true of our leaders. That's true of our parents. That's true of our that's...
Jason Sattler: Power forwards.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Everyone. Yeah, humans. That's how humans human. And so this tick where, oh no, they own that concept, right?
They own "freedom" and we can't be up in there. Or they own "family." Believe it or not, there was a long era where progressives were unwilling to make arguments on the basis of family because of family values and that being right wing. Another quintessential example is of course life and how thoroughly they have claimed this mantle of "life," obviously in the abortion context and us being scared that we can't touch it because that's their concept.
There are certain concepts that are just so integral to human functioning and belief that you can't, You can't let the right claim them, especially when they have absolutely no reason to be doing. Because they are standing for exactly the opposite. So I would say it's just been a slow and steady pushing and chipping and then part of it is just, nothing succeeds like success. And so in the places and campaigns where folks did embrace freedom and were able to be successful polling is nice, but winning is nicer and where we can point to real world examples that are like, look, this person embraced this and it was really, it was successful, absolutely essential to their win, then more people are willing to do it.
Jason Sattler: And it's so interesting how they tie it to the economic message, which is, I think, one of the most things I'm most excited about.. But there is this debate that you cover in the exciting two part conclusion of season three of your podcast is is about the economy and how to talk about the economy, specifically the "Jason Sattler: Social media has turned us all into pundits. You do something that most pundits would never do. You listen to voters talk about this election all the time. And it's very early June 2024. How would you describe this election from the eyes of the voters you've been hearing from recently?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, and I want to specify, we listened to two groups of voters in particular for reasons I think are going to be very obvious when I describe them because there are the two groups we desperately need. So when I answer the subsequent questions, they're really about how things look from these two groups, and those two groups, our names for them, are disaffected Dems.
So these are people who. Have voted Democratic in the past, probably voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I say probably because some of them are younger and so they've aged into the voting process. If they're younger, they couldn't have voted for Joe Biden. They're too young. But they are right now very much in the no category.
They're double haters. They're feeling despondent and disaffected. They're very unlikely to vote for Trump. And in fact, that's not this category of voter at all. They are deciding between Biden and staying at home, voting third party, or skipping the top of the ticket. That's giving the top of the ticket answer in case folks thought they'd thought of they'd come up with every nightmare scenario that is an additional one.
I'm happy to offer you that actually in 2016, 1 to 2 percent of the electorate and battleground states skip the top of the ticket. So it is not an inconsequential threat.
Jason Sattler: We know this well from Wayne County, Michigan in 2016.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are our disaffected Dems.
Hopefully the label tells you who they are and what they're about. And then the other group that we spend lots of time with are our disaffected swing. These are folks who are less reliably democratic. They also are not like perfect turnout people by any means, but they have pretty solid turnout, but they have a more mixed partisan voting record.
So what we hear from these two groups that are underscore underscore, absolutely integral to winning. This is it. This is the name of the game. This is where it's at for us. Is A few things. The first is that they find the mega agenda completely and totally. Repellent is the kindest thing that I could possibly say about it.
Repugnant, disgusting, like anything we show them highlights of Project 2025. Nope. Nope. And some more. Nope. We show them the time magazine interview with Trump. Absolutely not. We showed them a political piece. It's not there's no part of them that is ooh, concentration camps for immigrants.
Or, um, eliminating the ACA. I'm intrigued. They're not, Outlawing contraception? Oh, interesting. They're very not excited about the agenda to speak euphemistically. The challenge that we are running into is what I call the curdulity challenge. So we get a lot of first of all, until we present it to them, for the most part, they're like, haven't heard of any of this, didn't know about any of this.
So first there's just, they had no idea in many cases. And then, once we walk them through it, and they tell us they hate all of it, they say, eh, it's not gonna happen. Not gonna happen.
Jason Sattler: Didn't happen the first time I survived. I'm, I didn't die of COVID for a second or third time. It's okay,
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, they didn't do this the first time around. You yelled and screamed the first time around. He didn't do this the first time around.
Jason Sattler: He didn't personally nuke me.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. We have this, major "fragility" problem and I'm happy to talk through what we do about that. The next thing that we hear From the higher information ones in this cohort That's really challenging is but all of this happened on Democrats watch.
Jason Sattler: Dobbs, for instance.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Dobbs fell on Democrats watch abortion was made illegal in states on Democrats watch these voting restrictions and places Happened on Democrats watch.
"You told us to turn out in 2020 to protect ourselves from this, and we did. And look, it happened anyway. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything."
Actually, we had groups last week, and we were talking with them about how -- because one of the things that we find promising is shifting the conversation away from vote for the candidate you want to vote for the country you want and this idea that this election is a fork in the road and we're at a crossroads and so on, and two different futures. But In our last groups, in the white men, group in Pittsburgh, one guy said I don't really see it as two different futures. I see it as two parallel futures and basically the Republicans have us in a speeding car toward this authoritarian future and the Democrats are a slow walk...
Jason Sattler: Okay, I'd take the slow walk, but sure...
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are some of the dynamics that are going on.
Jason Sattler: And are you seeing this strange thing that are showing up in the polls that's never happened before and in recent times that people who never vote and are voting for the first time are leaning toward the Republican candidate, leaning towards Donald Trump.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah.
So the important thing to understand about that, and that's the basis for this new pundit idea called "turnout terror," or my colleague, Michael Podhorzer calls it turnout terror that actually somehow higher turnout is disadvantageous to Joe Biden when, we know that historically the reverse has been true.
So the important thing to understand about that is that there is. And so what you're seeing is, if not a one to one, a close to it correlation between how much voters know about the agenda, how much voters believe that the agenda by the agenda, the MAGA agenda is likely be implemented and whether or not they have moved away from Biden.
So what you're seeing is that these non-habitual voters or these brand-new voters, they are understandably, by definition, very low information. If you haven't been participating all along, or in many cases, you're a young person who, is newly entering into the electorate, then you're going to tend to be Statistically speaking, obviously individual cases very much vary. Talking about millions of people. So there are differences among individuals. You're going to be a person who is less likely to be paying attention. And so the phenomenon that we're seeing is not that these non habitual voters or these sort of brand new to the electorate voters are feeling warm and fuzzy toward Donald Trump.
It's that they are not aware. Of what is at stake and they are understandably displeased with the present. So rather than make it basically I think the way that the dynamic can be most readily understood is if folks are viewing the election as a referendum on Joe Biden's performance. That's a tough spot.
If folks are viewing the election as the question of whether MAGA will come and take away our freedoms or not, then they very clearly know what to do and they will do it. So it's really a question of how many of the voters Are clued in to what's going on
Jason Sattler: One thing that you gov found in a poll earlier this year is that the only people The only source that people really trust when it comes to news is their friends their loved ones. Is that true that people are relying more on each other for their information about voting?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Absolutely.
Yeah. These are folks who largely tune out, pay no attention to mainstream media. Now, with that said, these are porous borders and I think that it's impossible to say You know, I think that when mainstream media, let's say, puts a lot of reporters on the Trump trial beat, and there's a lot of coverage, and that's the front page of many newspapers, as we saw when the Bragg conviction came down, I think it's undeniable that has an impact in terms of what's on TikTok.
That is filtering into what becomes the dominant conversation on social media, which is, yes, how these disaffected voters are getting their quote unquote "news" or information.
Yeah, there is definitely a huge uptick in people's reliance on their own social networks. Interestingly, we find that anytime there is more information available about anything. I'll take a more neutral topic, like restaurant reviews. You're in a new city, you're trying to figure out where to eat.
There's 300, 000, Google has reviews and Yelp has reviews and Yahoo has reviews and who knows what else has reviews and the proliferation of that information actually renders all of that information less useful because now you have to contemplate which of those reviews are just a person who had an ax to grind, which of those people have the same taste as I do.
So the more that we've moved away from expertise, in the olden days, there would be like a restaurant critic and so on. The more that information is of less reliable value, both in reality, that is a true story and in people's perceptions. And so then they become reliant, understandably on word of mouth.
Jason Sattler: That makes a lot of sense. And so speaking of word of mouth, there's this debate on social media. I don't know if that means anything in reality, but whether how they should, how the Biden campaign should talk about the Bragg convictions, as you just called them there's, Joe Biden has a kind of natural disposition to refer to every opponent, like "my dear friend" in the Senate, and it doesn't seem very within his kind of capability to say, this guy's only convictions are felonies and stuff like that.
But at the same time this debate, Is one of the few stories as you pointed out that broke through that got it is in that is beyond just the freaks like us who pay attention to the news. So how are you talking about these convictions and why?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I think there's two questions inside of your question, which is how are we talking about it? And then what would be advisable for democratic leadership to talk about?
So let me take those in that order. So as far as how we're talking about it, it's really important to anchor whatever we're saying in a shared value. So in the Bragg case, it's saying something like most of us believe that voters deserve the full honest truth of who is running to represent us.
But Donald Trump, and the MAGA Republicans who aided and abetted his criminal conspiracy has now been convicted, is now convicted felon. Under 34 counts of attempting to falsify business records in order to keep voters in the dark because he knew that if the full truth came out about his actions, it would endanger his ability to win the 2016 election.
So we always want to sort of juxtapose, we want to use the convicted felon thing. We want to make clear that this is a case of election interference or even more explicitly voter deception. We want to emphasize how most of us think it's the most basic thing on earth that voters ought to know what the people who are running to represent us have done and what they're up to it's really helpful to talk about how this is part and parcel of the broader bag agenda to take away our freedoms, that this is another proof point just like dobbs is a proof point that they will stop at nothing to seize and hold power because that is what helps with that incredulity problem that I described before that, you know You say that, but they're not really going to do it.
As far as what should democratic leaders be doing, what is it with this kind of above it all above the fray, I'm going to be very polite. I understand that, impetus, and in some ways one could even say that it's admirable. But one of the fundamental challenges that we have, and again, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about focus groups, is that if our electoral prospects hinge on voters understanding that the building is on fire, by which I mean the threat of eminent fascism is nigh. And our prospects do hinge on that. Then it's very incongruous to have the presumptive firefighters saying nothing, let alone not attempting to put out the blaze. And that's exactly what we get. We get, "Well, you say all of this terrible, horrible stuff? is going to happen, but wouldn't Democratic leaders be talking about it. How come I've never heard of this? How come I didn't know that this was going on?"
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And so the trap that you get yourself into, if you choose to be above it all, is that in the moments where you are calling it out, perhaps most notably in the State of the Union, it becomes "Which you, am I supposed to believe? The you that made an analogy and rightly I would argue between Putin and threat that he represents and Donald Trump representing essentially domestically the very same threat. Is it that you, or is it the you that doesn't even want to mention -- and I should pull back on that and say, if you're following the social media of the Biden social media campaign, they actually have started inching the gloves off a bit more, so I don't want to You know declare that's not the case because it's not fair. Yeah, if you're both the sitting president and a person running for president and you're hanging your hat on the argument that you are here to ensure the continuation of whatever we call this thing we'll make believe it's democracy I would argue it isn't but you know the semblance of it that we've got
Jason Sattler: As close as we're going to get.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah for now Then how is it possible that you're not yelling from the rafters exactly what the threat is before us?
Again, either that means that threat isn't true, and so insofar as other people are yelling that, they're being hyperbolic. Or, it is true, in which case, isn't that a dereliction of duty?
Jason Sattler: I was going to ask about what I see, it's a similar thread, what at the border where it's "If he's so bad, why are you proposing his policies and trying to, and insisting that they pass?"
And I think everybody who's in this mind frame gets why that's a problem.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And there's an additional piece to the border thing, which is that the toxic challenge with asking people all the time, "What are your top issues when you're making your electoral decision or when thinking about this election, which are the top issues and then presenting them a punch list that says jobs in the economy, cost of living and inflation, national security, the border and immigration, et cetera?" And different people, that list is written different ways, but like more or less I listed some abortion, democracy, housing costs, depends who's writing it.
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: So the average person is going about their day. They're living their life. They're getting their kid to school. They're going to their job or they're, sitting in their living room, doing their job on zoom or, they're like paying the bills. They're going to the store. How often do they think about the border? Especially if they live nowhere near the border. Not often.
Jason Sattler: When they watch Fox News.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, when they watch Fox News.
But in an average day, the kind of thought bubble popping into a human's head of "Oh, have I thought about the border today?" No, that doesn't happen. Now, that doesn't reflect when you're taking a survey and by definition you have been made to think about the border because it's been offered to you as a choice.
And to be sure, I'd be lying if I said differently, when people are offered that choice, i. e. that is brought top of mind to them, many people select that. And in fact, what we see. Thanks to the Republicans, because they understand that the job of a good message isn't to say what's popular, it's to make popular what you need said.
They understand that their electoral task is to make salient the issues that are most advantageous to them, duh. So it's not just what you're going to say in the conversation, it's deciding what the conversation will be. So for five minutes. Six minutes, I'll be generous. There was a conversation about Trump is a convicted felon.
He's been convicted. Felony, convicted felony convicted, felon, voter deception, election interference, push money. Yeah,
yeah,
and however many minutes into that, you decide, here's a great idea. It was too good.
Jason Sattler: Yes.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: a news cycle about something that is obviously bad for my opposition.
So here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to change the news cycle.
Jason Sattler: Only fair.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I'm going to pick a topic and not only am I going to change the topic, I'm going to pick a topic that is disadvantageous to me and make that a source of conversation. So it doesn't make sense in both dimensions.
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Both changing the topic to something that is disadvantageous to you. That's very foolish thing to do, especially when, how desperate are they to get the topic off of what's going on and you just did it for them. So why would you do that? And then the other piece of it is essentially what you said.
If you tell voters the way to make this electoral choices on the basis of who is going to be RoboCop, they're going to pick the folks who have that as their brand, regardless of what's true in your attempted gotcha that they didn't follow through. And no matter what you do, as far as rhetoric, and even as far as executive orders, that's not your brand strength. It's not what people associate with you. And it is dispiriting to your base. And the number of people among these disaffected Dems who have swallowed whole the rhetoric of both sides and who tell us, you know what, both sides are the same, both sides are the same, both sides are the same. It's a little hard to rebuff that claim when you're literally implementing the policy of the other side.
Jason Sattler: It feels i'm hoping it's just a 90s Democrat tic that he just feels like he needs to cross this box and then move on and actually talk about what he's going to do that's my best case hope scenario but because I do think that in one big huge way and this is the episode one of season three , of where's it when you discuss the 22 election in the embrace of freedom like you mentioned before the State of the Union, which I thought was to get two excellent speeches both before the midterm election and then the State of the Union was It was the top I've seen from a Democrat, in terms of messaging, in my lifetime, I think. You've heard better speeches from Barack Obama, just because he's the best speaker that they got, but he's, the words were never better, I thought, at the heights of those. And this is, I think, a battle that you've been fighting for a long time, among others, is to get the word freedom into Democrats mouth and this is something that Joe Biden seems to get more and more at least in moments when he has the most people listening to him. How did that win? Was it just was it Dobbs that convinced people to start to take freedom seriously? What is the archaeology of Freedom becoming part of the democratic lexicon?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Thank you for the shout out. So season three of Words to Win By our opening episode was about the 22 midterms and the embrace of freedoms and then more fully protect our freedoms and the idea of really rendering the election in the battlegrounds a referendum on whether we would protect our freedoms or whether MAGA Republicans would take away those freedoms.
And the question you're asking is how I guess if you repeat the same thing over and over and over and over and over and then over again and then over again, some more eventually people will some people at least will begin to adopt it. I think that part of it. And it was, we just made a really hardcore data driven case, but I have been making this case and not just, I'm just saying me because I live inside of my own body.
Jason Sattler: And you know what you did.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Yeah. I know what I did. Lots and lots of other people did as well, so I don't mean to imply that at all. Sure. But it actually, believe it or not, was way back in 2012 that we first started to try to less marquee effect, to push this freedoms narrative, of all spots, in the union fight.
And what we found is that. In the Janus fight, which was a Supreme Court case around quote, unquote, right to work that was, heavily impacting public sector unions. Of all the messages that we tested, the message that said in America, we value our freedoms and CEOs are free to negotiate their wages and bonuses as they see fit. Working people just want the very same freedom, the freedom to join together in union. You can tell I've done this spiel for a while. I have the beginning of the message at least memorized. And what we found. Is that in that economic argument because normally people like yes, he has freedoms in the abortion case freedoms in the contraception case, but freedom and the ability to anchor to freedom applies across issues, and it always has. FDR knew that, right? Martin Luther King Jr. knew that when he said, free at last, thank God Almighty. People don't remember that is how the I Have a Dream speech ended. The Freedom Riders, the Freedom Summer, the absolutely essential pivot away from calling it the right to marry to the freedom to marry for the marriage equality movement.
So this argument has been integral to progressive victories for a very long time, but we become over and again afraid of our own shadow. And it's actually not dissimilar, interestingly, to 90s Democrat tic, where you just genuflect at the altar of the opposition, when we get scared or spooked.
Like all humans make bad decisions out of fear. And that is true that's true of our voters. That's true of our leaders. That's true of our parents. That's true of our that's...
Jason Sattler: Power forwards.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Everyone. Yeah, humans. That's how humans human. And so this tick where, oh no, they own that concept, right?
They own "freedom" and we can't be up in there. Or they own "family." Believe it or not, there was a long era where progressives were unwilling to make arguments on the basis of family because of family values and that being right wing. Another quintessential example is of course life and how thoroughly they have claimed this mantle of "life," obviously in the abortion context and us being scared that we can't touch it because that's their concept.
There are certain concepts that are just so integral to human functioning and belief that you can't, You can't let the right claim them, especially when they have absolutely no reason to be doing. Because they are standing for exactly the opposite. So I would say it's just been a slow and steady pushing and chipping and then part of it is just, nothing succeeds like success. And so in the places and campaigns where folks did embrace freedom and were able to be successful polling is nice, but winning is nicer and where we can point to real world examples that are like, look, this person embraced this and it was really, it was successful, absolutely essential to their win, then more people are willing to do it.
Jason Sattler: And it's so interesting how they tie it to the economic message, which is, I think, one of the most things I'm most excited about.. But there is this debate that you cover in the exciting two part conclusion of season three of your podcast is is about the economy and how to talk about the economy, specifically the Jason Sattler: Social media has turned us all into pundits. You do something that most pundits would never do. You listen to voters talk about this election all the time. And it's very early June 2024. How would you describe this election from the eyes of the voters you've been hearing from recently?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, and I want to specify, we listened to two groups of voters in particular for reasons I think are going to be very obvious when I describe them because there are the two groups we desperately need. So when I answer the subsequent questions, they're really about how things look from these two groups, and those two groups, our names for them, are disaffected Dems.
So these are people who. Have voted Democratic in the past, probably voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I say probably because some of them are younger and so they've aged into the voting process. If they're younger, they couldn't have voted for Joe Biden. They're too young. But they are right now very much in the no category.
They're double haters. They're feeling despondent and disaffected. They're very unlikely to vote for Trump. And in fact, that's not this category of voter at all. They are deciding between Biden and staying at home, voting third party, or skipping the top of the ticket. That's giving the top of the ticket answer in case folks thought they'd thought of they'd come up with every nightmare scenario that is an additional one.
I'm happy to offer you that actually in 2016, 1 to 2 percent of the electorate and battleground states skip the top of the ticket. So it is not an inconsequential threat.
Jason Sattler: We know this well from Wayne County, Michigan in 2016.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are our disaffected Dems.
Hopefully the label tells you who they are and what they're about. And then the other group that we spend lots of time with are our disaffected swing. These are folks who are less reliably democratic. They also are not like perfect turnout people by any means, but they have pretty solid turnout, but they have a more mixed partisan voting record.
So what we hear from these two groups that are underscore underscore, absolutely integral to winning. This is it. This is the name of the game. This is where it's at for us. Is A few things. The first is that they find the mega agenda completely and totally. Repellent is the kindest thing that I could possibly say about it.
Repugnant, disgusting, like anything we show them highlights of Project 2025. Nope. Nope. And some more. Nope. We show them the time magazine interview with Trump. Absolutely not. We showed them a political piece. It's not there's no part of them that is ooh, concentration camps for immigrants.
Or, um, eliminating the ACA. I'm intrigued. They're not, Outlawing contraception? Oh, interesting. They're very not excited about the agenda to speak euphemistically. The challenge that we are running into is what I call the curdulity challenge. So we get a lot of first of all, until we present it to them, for the most part, they're like, haven't heard of any of this, didn't know about any of this.
So first there's just, they had no idea in many cases. And then, once we walk them through it, and they tell us they hate all of it, they say, eh, it's not gonna happen. Not gonna happen.
Jason Sattler: Didn't happen the first time I survived. I'm, I didn't die of COVID for a second or third time. It's okay,
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, they didn't do this the first time around. You yelled and screamed the first time around. He didn't do this the first time around.
Jason Sattler: He didn't personally nuke me.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. We have this, major "fragility" problem and I'm happy to talk through what we do about that. The next thing that we hear From the higher information ones in this cohort That's really challenging is but all of this happened on Democrats watch.
Jason Sattler: Dobbs, for instance.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Dobbs fell on Democrats watch abortion was made illegal in states on Democrats watch these voting restrictions and places Happened on Democrats watch.
"You told us to turn out in 2020 to protect ourselves from this, and we did. And look, it happened anyway. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything."
Actually, we had groups last week, and we were talking with them about how -- because one of the things that we find promising is shifting the conversation away from vote for the candidate you want to vote for the country you want and this idea that this election is a fork in the road and we're at a crossroads and so on, and two different futures. But In our last groups, in the white men, group in Pittsburgh, one guy said I don't really see it as two different futures. I see it as two parallel futures and basically the Republicans have us in a speeding car toward this authoritarian future and the Democrats are a slow walk...
Jason Sattler: Okay, I'd take the slow walk, but sure...
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are some of the dynamics that are going on.
Jason Sattler: And are you seeing this strange thing that are showing up in the polls that's never happened before and in recent times that people who never vote and are voting for the first time are leaning toward the Republican candidate, leaning towards Donald Trump.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah.
So the important thing to understand about that, and that's the basis for this new pundit idea called "turnout terror," or my colleague, Michael Podhorzer calls it turnout terror that actually somehow higher turnout is disadvantageous to Joe Biden when, we know that historically the reverse has been true.
So the important thing to understand about that is that there is. And so what you're seeing is, if not a one to one, a close to it correlation between how much voters know about the agenda, how much voters believe that the agenda by the agenda, the MAGA agenda is likely be implemented and whether or not they have moved away from Biden.
So what you're seeing is that these non-habitual voters or these brand-new voters, they are understandably, by definition, very low information. If you haven't been participating all along, or in many cases, you're a young person who, is newly entering into the electorate, then you're going to tend to be Statistically speaking, obviously individual cases very much vary. Talking about millions of people. So there are differences among individuals. You're going to be a person who is less likely to be paying attention. And so the phenomenon that we're seeing is not that these non habitual voters or these sort of brand new to the electorate voters are feeling warm and fuzzy toward Donald Trump.
It's that they are not aware. Of what is at stake and they are understandably displeased with the present. So rather than make it basically I think the way that the dynamic can be most readily understood is if folks are viewing the election as a referendum on Joe Biden's performance. That's a tough spot.
If folks are viewing the election as the question of whether MAGA will come and take away our freedoms or not, then they very clearly know what to do and they will do it. So it's really a question of how many of the voters Are clued in to what's going on
Jason Sattler: One thing that you gov found in a poll earlier this year is that the only people The only source that people really trust when it comes to news is their friends their loved ones. Is that true that people are relying more on each other for their information about voting?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Absolutely.
Yeah. These are folks who largely tune out, pay no attention to mainstream media. Now, with that said, these are porous borders and I think that it's impossible to say You know, I think that when mainstream media, let's say, puts a lot of reporters on the Trump trial beat, and there's a lot of coverage, and that's the front page of many newspapers, as we saw when the Bragg conviction came down, I think it's undeniable that has an impact in terms of what's on TikTok.
That is filtering into what becomes the dominant conversation on social media, which is, yes, how these disaffected voters are getting their quote unquote "news" or information.
Yeah, there is definitely a huge uptick in people's reliance on their own social networks. Interestingly, we find that anytime there is more information available about anything. I'll take a more neutral topic, like restaurant reviews. You're in a new city, you're trying to figure out where to eat.
There's 300, 000, Google has reviews and Yelp has reviews and Yahoo has reviews and who knows what else has reviews and the proliferation of that information actually renders all of that information less useful because now you have to contemplate which of those reviews are just a person who had an ax to grind, which of those people have the same taste as I do.
So the more that we've moved away from expertise, in the olden days, there would be like a restaurant critic and so on. The more that information is of less reliable value, both in reality, that is a true story and in people's perceptions. And so then they become reliant, understandably on word of mouth.
Jason Sattler: That makes a lot of sense. And so speaking of word of mouth, there's this debate on social media. I don't know if that means anything in reality, but whether how they should, how the Biden campaign should talk about the Bragg convictions, as you just called them there's, Joe Biden has a kind of natural disposition to refer to every opponent, like "my dear friend" in the Senate, and it doesn't seem very within his kind of capability to say, this guy's only convictions are felonies and stuff like that.
But at the same time this debate, Is one of the few stories as you pointed out that broke through that got it is in that is beyond just the freaks like us who pay attention to the news. So how are you talking about these convictions and why?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I think there's two questions inside of your question, which is how are we talking about it? And then what would be advisable for democratic leadership to talk about?
So let me take those in that order. So as far as how we're talking about it, it's really important to anchor whatever we're saying in a shared value. So in the Bragg case, it's saying something like most of us believe that voters deserve the full honest truth of who is running to represent us.
But Donald Trump, and the MAGA Republicans who aided and abetted his criminal conspiracy has now been convicted, is now convicted felon. Under 34 counts of attempting to falsify business records in order to keep voters in the dark because he knew that if the full truth came out about his actions, it would endanger his ability to win the 2016 election.
So we always want to sort of juxtapose, we want to use the convicted felon thing. We want to make clear that this is a case of election interference or even more explicitly voter deception. We want to emphasize how most of us think it's the most basic thing on earth that voters ought to know what the people who are running to represent us have done and what they're up to it's really helpful to talk about how this is part and parcel of the broader bag agenda to take away our freedoms, that this is another proof point just like dobbs is a proof point that they will stop at nothing to seize and hold power because that is what helps with that incredulity problem that I described before that, you know You say that, but they're not really going to do it.
As far as what should democratic leaders be doing, what is it with this kind of above it all above the fray, I'm going to be very polite. I understand that, impetus, and in some ways one could even say that it's admirable. But one of the fundamental challenges that we have, and again, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about focus groups, is that if our electoral prospects hinge on voters understanding that the building is on fire, by which I mean the threat of eminent fascism is nigh. And our prospects do hinge on that. Then it's very incongruous to have the presumptive firefighters saying nothing, let alone not attempting to put out the blaze. And that's exactly what we get. We get, "Well, you say all of this terrible, horrible stuff? is going to happen, but wouldn't Democratic leaders be talking about it. How come I've never heard of this? How come I didn't know that this was going on?"
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And so the trap that you get yourself into, if you choose to be above it all, is that in the moments where you are calling it out, perhaps most notably in the State of the Union, it becomes "Which you, am I supposed to believe? The you that made an analogy and rightly I would argue between Putin and threat that he represents and Donald Trump representing essentially domestically the very same threat. Is it that you, or is it the you that doesn't even want to mention -- and I should pull back on that and say, if you're following the social media of the Biden social media campaign, they actually have started inching the gloves off a bit more, so I don't want to You know declare that's not the case because it's not fair. Yeah, if you're both the sitting president and a person running for president and you're hanging your hat on the argument that you are here to ensure the continuation of whatever we call this thing we'll make believe it's democracy I would argue it isn't but you know the semblance of it that we've got
Jason Sattler: As close as we're going to get.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah for now Then how is it possible that you're not yelling from the rafters exactly what the threat is before us?
Again, either that means that threat isn't true, and so insofar as other people are yelling that, they're being hyperbolic. Or, it is true, in which case, isn't that a dereliction of duty?
Jason Sattler: I was going to ask about what I see, it's a similar thread, what at the border where it's "If he's so bad, why are you proposing his policies and trying to, and insisting that they pass?"
And I think everybody who's in this mind frame gets why that's a problem.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And there's an additional piece to the border thing, which is that the toxic challenge with asking people all the time, "What are your top issues when you're making your electoral decision or when thinking about this election, which are the top issues and then presenting them a punch list that says jobs in the economy, cost of living and inflation, national security, the border and immigration, et cetera?" And different people, that list is written different ways, but like more or less I listed some abortion, democracy, housing costs, depends who's writing it.
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: So the average person is going about their day. They're living their life. They're getting their kid to school. They're going to their job or they're, sitting in their living room, doing their job on zoom or, they're like paying the bills. They're going to the store. How often do they think about the border? Especially if they live nowhere near the border. Not often.
Jason Sattler: When they watch Fox News.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, when they watch Fox News.
But in an average day, the kind of thought bubble popping into a human's head of "Oh, have I thought about the border today?" No, that doesn't happen. Now, that doesn't reflect when you're taking a survey and by definition you have been made to think about the border because it's been offered to you as a choice.
And to be sure, I'd be lying if I said differently, when people are offered that choice, i. e. that is brought top of mind to them, many people select that. And in fact, what we see. Thanks to the Republicans, because they understand that the job of a good message isn't to say what's popular, it's to make popular what you need said.
They understand that their electoral task is to make salient the issues that are most advantageous to them, duh. So it's not just what you're going to say in the conversation, it's deciding what the conversation will be. So for five minutes. Six minutes, I'll be generous. There was a conversation about Trump is a convicted felon.
He's been convicted. Felony, convicted felony convicted, felon, voter deception, election interference, push money. Yeah,
yeah,
and however many minutes into that, you decide, here's a great idea. It was too good.
Jason Sattler: Yes.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: a news cycle about something that is obviously bad for my opposition.
So here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to change the news cycle.
Jason Sattler: Only fair.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I'm going to pick a topic and not only am I going to change the topic, I'm going to pick a topic that is disadvantageous to me and make that a source of conversation. So it doesn't make sense in both dimensions.
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Both changing the topic to something that is disadvantageous to you. That's very foolish thing to do, especially when, how desperate are they to get the topic off of what's going on and you just did it for them. So why would you do that? And then the other piece of it is essentially what you said.
If you tell voters the way to make this electoral choices on the basis of who is going to be RoboCop, they're going to pick the folks who have that as their brand, regardless of what's true in your attempted gotcha that they didn't follow through. And no matter what you do, as far as rhetoric, and even as far as executive orders, that's not your brand strength. It's not what people associate with you. And it is dispiriting to your base. And the number of people among these disaffected Dems who have swallowed whole the rhetoric of both sides and who tell us, you know what, both sides are the same, both sides are the same, both sides are the same. It's a little hard to rebuff that claim when you're literally implementing the policy of the other side.
Jason Sattler: It feels i'm hoping it's just a 90s Democrat tic that he just feels like he needs to cross this box and then move on and actually talk about what he's going to do that's my best case hope scenario but because I do think that in one big huge way and this is the episode one of season three , of where's it when you discuss the 22 election in the embrace of freedom like you mentioned before the State of the Union, which I thought was to get two excellent speeches both before the midterm election and then the State of the Union was It was the top I've seen from a Democrat, in terms of messaging, in my lifetime, I think. You've heard better speeches from Barack Obama, just because he's the best speaker that they got, but he's, the words were never better, I thought, at the heights of those. And this is, I think, a battle that you've been fighting for a long time, among others, is to get the word freedom into Democrats mouth and this is something that Joe Biden seems to get more and more at least in moments when he has the most people listening to him. How did that win? Was it just was it Dobbs that convinced people to start to take freedom seriously? What is the archaeology of Freedom becoming part of the democratic lexicon?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Thank you for the shout out. So season three of Words to Win By our opening episode was about the 22 midterms and the embrace of freedoms and then more fully protect our freedoms and the idea of really rendering the election in the battlegrounds a referendum on whether we would protect our freedoms or whether MAGA Republicans would take away those freedoms.
And the question you're asking is how I guess if you repeat the same thing over and over and over and over and over and then over again and then over again, some more eventually people will some people at least will begin to adopt it. I think that part of it. And it was, we just made a really hardcore data driven case, but I have been making this case and not just, I'm just saying me because I live inside of my own body.
Jason Sattler: And you know what you did.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Yeah. I know what I did. Lots and lots of other people did as well, so I don't mean to imply that at all. Sure. But it actually, believe it or not, was way back in 2012 that we first started to try to less marquee effect, to push this freedoms narrative, of all spots, in the union fight.
And what we found is that. In the Janus fight, which was a Supreme Court case around quote, unquote, right to work that was, heavily impacting public sector unions. Of all the messages that we tested, the message that said in America, we value our freedoms and CEOs are free to negotiate their wages and bonuses as they see fit. Working people just want the very same freedom, the freedom to join together in union. You can tell I've done this spiel for a while. I have the beginning of the message at least memorized. And what we found. Is that in that economic argument because normally people like yes, he has freedoms in the abortion case freedoms in the contraception case, but freedom and the ability to anchor to freedom applies across issues, and it always has. FDR knew that, right? Martin Luther King Jr. knew that when he said, free at last, thank God Almighty. People don't remember that is how the I Have a Dream speech ended. The Freedom Riders, the Freedom Summer, the absolutely essential pivot away from calling it the right to marry to the freedom to marry for the marriage equality movement.
So this argument has been integral to progressive victories for a very long time, but we become over and again afraid of our own shadow. And it's actually not dissimilar, interestingly, to 90s Democrat tic, where you just genuflect at the altar of the opposition, when we get scared or spooked.
Like all humans make bad decisions out of fear. And that is true that's true of our voters. That's true of our leaders. That's true of our parents. That's true of our that's...
Jason Sattler: Power forwards.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Everyone. Yeah, humans. That's how humans human. And so this tick where, oh no, they own that concept, right?
They own "freedom" and we can't be up in there. Or they own "family." Believe it or not, there was a long era where progressives were unwilling to make arguments on the basis of family because of family values and that being right wing. Another quintessential example is of course life and how thoroughly they have claimed this mantle of "life," obviously in the abortion context and us being scared that we can't touch it because that's their concept.
There are certain concepts that are just so integral to human functioning and belief that you can't, You can't let the right claim them, especially when they have absolutely no reason to be doing. Because they are standing for exactly the opposite. So I would say it's just been a slow and steady pushing and chipping and then part of it is just, nothing succeeds like success. And so in the places and campaigns where folks did embrace freedom and were able to be successful polling is nice, but winning is nicer and where we can point to real world examples that are like, look, this person embraced this and it was really, it was successful, absolutely essential to their win, then more people are willing to do it.
Jason Sattler: And it's so interesting how they tie it to the economic message, which is, I think, one of the most things I'm most excited about.. But there is this debate that you cover in the exciting two part conclusion of season three of your podcast is is about the economy and how to talk about the economy, specifically the vibe session which is the sense, in, in reality, there's a record job growth.
Best job. If you just look at the numbers, and then you do a poll and it says more than half people think that we have record high unemployment and there's a huge debate off on social media about this is, people are just getting it wrong. Yeah, and you just need to tell people that they're wrong about the and that's how to solve the vibe session the episode definitely does not make that side it makes the case that you can't tell people that and I don't mean to be spoiler but it's really interesting how you make that case. But the press, Republicans who instantly, if you look at the graph of where they say, the moment Joe Biden becomes president, all of a sudden I'm, it's the great depression, and then also leftists who, have a vested interest in saying the Democrat has never left enough for them and they don't want to look at these incredible progressive wins that have happened. Because of progressive policies those people are all wrong and I want to tell them that they're wrong and that they deserve You know, the progressives deserve credit.
This is a great story. The press should be telling the story somewhat There's a quiet new deal going on all these things but I get why that doesn't work for swing voters. Is there a different focus that you can tell people that to take them on directly when it comes to the vibe session
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, I would say My guidance isn't exactly that you can't Lift up the stuff that's good. It's how you lift up the stuff that's good. And so I'm going to answer that by telling you a little story that may or may not be apocryphal that was shared with me by a friend and the story goes that there's like a junior level person at a talent agency and a big Hollywood star calls up and says, " Hey, I'm going to be in town and I need a hotel.
And the junior person says right away, "Sir, I'm going to get you a hotel, at your service." Hangs up. And the senior person comes and says, "Never say that. Never ever say that. Always say, 'Oh, there's a convention in town. Every room is booked. It's so difficult. I'm going to move heaven and earth. I will get you, I will kick someone out of their room to give you a room.'"
I'm exaggerating now, but you get the point. Yeah. I hate it. Because it's not an achievement if there are no obstacles. It's not a hero's journey if there was nothing to overcome. And so what is the point of that story? And did I forget the topic of this interview? So why did I tell you that story? Yes, please. Gotten the topic. No, it's because when you say to voters, "I gave you 35 insulin."
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: There are not unreasonable responses, "Why wasn't it free?"
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Or i'm not a diabetic. What about my heart medicine or what about my whatever?
Jason Sattler: Yeah.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, what took so long? and so First of all, there's the issue of whether or not you frame those achievements that you've created in a contrast in a populist message, or you very inadvisably say, I gave you this. And people do say, "If you couldn't have done that, why didn't you do more? And I'm still struggling. And I still have this issue. And I still have that issue. And I still have that issue. And if that was presto chango for you, then like, why are you withholding?"
So in order for something to feel like an achievement, there has to be some sort of kind of rhetorical indicator that it is.
Otherwise, you didn't really do anything for me. So that's the first issue.
The second issue is that there is no way to say the economy is good without saying the economy is good. And what I mean by that is, this system, this setup, this way of doing business, which the majority of people now are very aware, is just a giant Ponzi scheme to funnel money away from people who work, to people who don't do anything and own way, way too much, and extract the wealth that our work creates.
And so rather than saying the economy is good, which not only feels like bullshit to people because they're having trouble with rent, they're having trouble with college, they're having trouble with medical expenses, they're feeling precarity, it can even feel a little bit like "Quit yer bitchin." And if you're saying to people what feels like quitcher bitchin, that's not going to be very popular.
So it's not that you can't say things are good. And, in one of those finale episodes, I talked at length with Celinda Lake, who was, big part of the Bill Clinton campaign. She's on the Biden campaign. She was last time as well. And she shares this story that Bill Clinton in his second reelection was also running on his jobs record.
And he would say, we made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. And they were doing a focus group with, I don't know who. And one of the people in the focus group said, yeah, can you tell the president that I've got three of them? And they would, clip key things, key moments from focus groups, and they would send them to him overnights.
And instantly he turned on a dime and he said, we've made this many jobs, but that's not good enough. It's not good enough until. The job that you have is the only job you need, not only to care for your family, but be able to save, take a vacation dah. He took that instruction and he adapted the message.
So the issue is not that you're not allowed to say, Things are, these are the positive things. It's really a matter of how you say it and whether it's the difference between saying, I gave you 35 insulin and I decided that drugs are too expensive. And so I took on big pharma. They fought me every step of the way.
They didn't want it. All they want is to make hand over fist, but not on my watch. So here's what I did. And I've only gotten started. You vote for me and there's more to come. That's, yeah. The difference it's not that you don't tell people that you did it. It's how you tell people you did it. which is the sense, in, in reality, there's a record job growth.
Best job. If you just look at the numbers, and then you do a poll and it says more than half people think that we have record high unemployment and there's a huge debate off on social media about this is, people are just getting it wrong. Yeah, and you just need to tell people that they're wrong about the and that's how to solve the Vibecession the episode definitely does not make that side it makes the case that you can't tell people that and I don't mean to be spoiler but it's really interesting how you make that case. But the press, Republicans who instantly, if you look at the graph of where they say, the moment Joe Biden becomes president, all of a sudden I'm, it's the great depression, and then also leftists who, have a vested interest in saying the Democrat has never left enough for them and they don't want to look at these incredible progressive wins that have happened. Because of progressive policies those people are all wrong and I want to tell them that they're wrong and that they deserve You know, the progressives deserve credit.
This is a great story. The press should be telling the story somewhat There's a quiet new deal going on all these things but I get why that doesn't work for swing voters. Is there a different focus that you can tell people that to take them on directly when it comes to the vibe session
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, I would say My guidance isn't exactly that you can't Lift up the stuff that's good. It's how you lift up the stuff that's good. And so I'm going to answer that by telling you a little story that may or may not be apocryphal that was shared with me by a friend and the story goes that there's like a junior level person at a talent agency and a big Hollywood star calls up and says, " Hey, I'm going to be in town and I need a hotel.
And the junior person says right away, "Sir, I'm going to get you a hotel, at your service." Hangs up. And the senior person comes and says, "Never say that. Never ever say that. Always say, 'Oh, there's a convention in town. Every room is booked. It's so difficult. I'm going to move heaven and earth. I will get you, I will kick someone out of their room to give you a room.'"
I'm exaggerating now, but you get the point. Yeah. I hate it. Because it's not an achievement if there are no obstacles. It's not a hero's journey if there was nothing to overcome. And so what is the point of that story? And did I forget the topic of this interview? So why did I tell you that story? Yes, please. Gotten the topic. No, it's because when you say to voters, "I gave you 35 insulin."
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: There are not unreasonable responses, "Why wasn't it free?"
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Or i'm not a diabetic. What about my heart medicine or what about my whatever?
Jason Sattler: Yeah.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, what took so long? and so First of all, there's the issue of whether or not you frame those achievements that you've created in a contrast in a populist message, or you very inadvisably say, I gave you this. And people do say, "If you couldn't have done that, why didn't you do more? And I'm still struggling. And I still have this issue. And I still have that issue. And I still have that issue. And if that was presto chango for you, then like, why are you withholding?"
So in order for something to feel like an achievement, there has to be some sort of kind of rhetorical indicator that it is.
Otherwise, you didn't really do anything for me. So that's the first issue.
The second issue is that there is no way to say the economy is good without saying the economy is good. And what I mean by that is, this system, this setup, this way of doing business, which the majority of people now are very aware, is just a giant Ponzi scheme to funnel money away from people who work, to people who don't do anything and own way, way too much, and extract the wealth that our work creates.
And so rather than saying the economy is good, which not only feels like bullshit to people because they're having trouble with rent, they're having trouble with college, they're having trouble with medical expenses, they're feeling precarity, it can even feel a little bit like "Quit yer bitchin." And if you're saying to people what feels like quitcher bitchin, that's not going to be very popular.
So it's not that you can't say things are good. And, in one of those finale episodes, I talked at length with Celinda Lake, who was, big part of the Bill Clinton campaign. She's on the Biden campaign. She was last time as well. And she shares this story that Bill Clinton in his second reelection was also running on his jobs record.
And he would say, we made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. And they were doing a focus group with, I don't know who. And one of the people in the focus group said, yeah, can you tell the president that I've got three of them? And they would, clip key things, key moments from focus groups, and they would send them to him overnights.
And instantly he turned on a dime and he said, we've made this many jobs, but that's not good enough. It's not good enough until. The job that you have is the only job you need, not only to care for your family, but be able to save, take a vacation dah. He took that instruction and he adapted the message.
So the issue is not that you're not allowed to say, Things are, these are the positive things. It's really a matter of how you say it and whether it's the difference between saying, I gave you 35 insulin and I decided that drugs are too expensive. And so I took on big pharma. They fought me every step of the way.
They didn't want it. All they want is to make hand over fist, but not on my watch. So here's what I did. And I've only gotten started. You vote for me and there's more to come. That's, yeah. The difference it's not that you don't tell people that you did it. It's how you tell people you did it. which is the sense, in, in reality, there's a record job growth.
Best job. If you just look at the numbers, and then you do a poll and it says more than half people think that we have record high unemployment and there's a huge debate off on social media about this is, people are just getting it wrong. Yeah, and you just need to tell people that they're wrong about the and that's how to solve the "Jason Sattler: Social media has turned us all into pundits. You do something that most pundits would never do. You listen to voters talk about this election all the time. And it's very early June 2024. How would you describe this election from the eyes of the voters you've been hearing from recently?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, and I want to specify, we listened to two groups of voters in particular for reasons I think are going to be very obvious when I describe them because there are the two groups we desperately need. So when I answer the subsequent questions, they're really about how things look from these two groups, and those two groups, our names for them, are disaffected Dems.
So these are people who. Have voted Democratic in the past, probably voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I say probably because some of them are younger and so they've aged into the voting process. If they're younger, they couldn't have voted for Joe Biden. They're too young. But they are right now very much in the no category.
They're double haters. They're feeling despondent and disaffected. They're very unlikely to vote for Trump. And in fact, that's not this category of voter at all. They are deciding between Biden and staying at home, voting third party, or skipping the top of the ticket. That's giving the top of the ticket answer in case folks thought they'd thought of they'd come up with every nightmare scenario that is an additional one.
I'm happy to offer you that actually in 2016, 1 to 2 percent of the electorate and battleground states skip the top of the ticket. So it is not an inconsequential threat.
Jason Sattler: We know this well from Wayne County, Michigan in 2016.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are our disaffected Dems.
Hopefully the label tells you who they are and what they're about. And then the other group that we spend lots of time with are our disaffected swing. These are folks who are less reliably democratic. They also are not like perfect turnout people by any means, but they have pretty solid turnout, but they have a more mixed partisan voting record.
So what we hear from these two groups that are underscore underscore, absolutely integral to winning. This is it. This is the name of the game. This is where it's at for us. Is A few things. The first is that they find the mega agenda completely and totally. Repellent is the kindest thing that I could possibly say about it.
Repugnant, disgusting, like anything we show them highlights of Project 2025. Nope. Nope. And some more. Nope. We show them the time magazine interview with Trump. Absolutely not. We showed them a political piece. It's not there's no part of them that is ooh, concentration camps for immigrants.
Or, um, eliminating the ACA. I'm intrigued. They're not, Outlawing contraception? Oh, interesting. They're very not excited about the agenda to speak euphemistically. The challenge that we are running into is what I call the curdulity challenge. So we get a lot of first of all, until we present it to them, for the most part, they're like, haven't heard of any of this, didn't know about any of this.
So first there's just, they had no idea in many cases. And then, once we walk them through it, and they tell us they hate all of it, they say, eh, it's not gonna happen. Not gonna happen.
Jason Sattler: Didn't happen the first time I survived. I'm, I didn't die of COVID for a second or third time. It's okay,
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, they didn't do this the first time around. You yelled and screamed the first time around. He didn't do this the first time around.
Jason Sattler: He didn't personally nuke me.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. We have this, major "fragility" problem and I'm happy to talk through what we do about that. The next thing that we hear From the higher information ones in this cohort That's really challenging is but all of this happened on Democrats watch.
Jason Sattler: Dobbs, for instance.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Dobbs fell on Democrats watch abortion was made illegal in states on Democrats watch these voting restrictions and places Happened on Democrats watch.
"You told us to turn out in 2020 to protect ourselves from this, and we did. And look, it happened anyway. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything."
Actually, we had groups last week, and we were talking with them about how -- because one of the things that we find promising is shifting the conversation away from vote for the candidate you want to vote for the country you want and this idea that this election is a fork in the road and we're at a crossroads and so on, and two different futures. But In our last groups, in the white men, group in Pittsburgh, one guy said I don't really see it as two different futures. I see it as two parallel futures and basically the Republicans have us in a speeding car toward this authoritarian future and the Democrats are a slow walk...
Jason Sattler: Okay, I'd take the slow walk, but sure...
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are some of the dynamics that are going on.
Jason Sattler: And are you seeing this strange thing that are showing up in the polls that's never happened before and in recent times that people who never vote and are voting for the first time are leaning toward the Republican candidate, leaning towards Donald Trump.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah.
So the important thing to understand about that, and that's the basis for this new pundit idea called "turnout terror," or my colleague, Michael Podhorzer calls it turnout terror that actually somehow higher turnout is disadvantageous to Joe Biden when, we know that historically the reverse has been true.
So the important thing to understand about that is that there is. And so what you're seeing is, if not a one to one, a close to it correlation between how much voters know about the agenda, how much voters believe that the agenda by the agenda, the MAGA agenda is likely be implemented and whether or not they have moved away from Biden.
So what you're seeing is that these non-habitual voters or these brand-new voters, they are understandably, by definition, very low information. If you haven't been participating all along, or in many cases, you're a young person who, is newly entering into the electorate, then you're going to tend to be Statistically speaking, obviously individual cases very much vary. Talking about millions of people. So there are differences among individuals. You're going to be a person who is less likely to be paying attention. And so the phenomenon that we're seeing is not that these non habitual voters or these sort of brand new to the electorate voters are feeling warm and fuzzy toward Donald Trump.
It's that they are not aware. Of what is at stake and they are understandably displeased with the present. So rather than make it basically I think the way that the dynamic can be most readily understood is if folks are viewing the election as a referendum on Joe Biden's performance. That's a tough spot.
If folks are viewing the election as the question of whether MAGA will come and take away our freedoms or not, then they very clearly know what to do and they will do it. So it's really a question of how many of the voters Are clued in to what's going on
Jason Sattler: One thing that you gov found in a poll earlier this year is that the only people The only source that people really trust when it comes to news is their friends their loved ones. Is that true that people are relying more on each other for their information about voting?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Absolutely.
Yeah. These are folks who largely tune out, pay no attention to mainstream media. Now, with that said, these are porous borders and I think that it's impossible to say You know, I think that when mainstream media, let's say, puts a lot of reporters on the Trump trial beat, and there's a lot of coverage, and that's the front page of many newspapers, as we saw when the Bragg conviction came down, I think it's undeniable that has an impact in terms of what's on TikTok.
That is filtering into what becomes the dominant conversation on social media, which is, yes, how these disaffected voters are getting their quote unquote "news" or information.
Yeah, there is definitely a huge uptick in people's reliance on their own social networks. Interestingly, we find that anytime there is more information available about anything. I'll take a more neutral topic, like restaurant reviews. You're in a new city, you're trying to figure out where to eat.
There's 300, 000, Google has reviews and Yelp has reviews and Yahoo has reviews and who knows what else has reviews and the proliferation of that information actually renders all of that information less useful because now you have to contemplate which of those reviews are just a person who had an ax to grind, which of those people have the same taste as I do.
So the more that we've moved away from expertise, in the olden days, there would be like a restaurant critic and so on. The more that information is of less reliable value, both in reality, that is a true story and in people's perceptions. And so then they become reliant, understandably on word of mouth.
Jason Sattler: That makes a lot of sense. And so speaking of word of mouth, there's this debate on social media. I don't know if that means anything in reality, but whether how they should, how the Biden campaign should talk about the Bragg convictions, as you just called them there's, Joe Biden has a kind of natural disposition to refer to every opponent, like "my dear friend" in the Senate, and it doesn't seem very within his kind of capability to say, this guy's only convictions are felonies and stuff like that.
But at the same time this debate, Is one of the few stories as you pointed out that broke through that got it is in that is beyond just the freaks like us who pay attention to the news. So how are you talking about these convictions and why?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I think there's two questions inside of your question, which is how are we talking about it? And then what would be advisable for democratic leadership to talk about?
So let me take those in that order. So as far as how we're talking about it, it's really important to anchor whatever we're saying in a shared value. So in the Bragg case, it's saying something like most of us believe that voters deserve the full honest truth of who is running to represent us.
But Donald Trump, and the MAGA Republicans who aided and abetted his criminal conspiracy has now been convicted, is now convicted felon. Under 34 counts of attempting to falsify business records in order to keep voters in the dark because he knew that if the full truth came out about his actions, it would endanger his ability to win the 2016 election.
So we always want to sort of juxtapose, we want to use the convicted felon thing. We want to make clear that this is a case of election interference or even more explicitly voter deception. We want to emphasize how most of us think it's the most basic thing on earth that voters ought to know what the people who are running to represent us have done and what they're up to it's really helpful to talk about how this is part and parcel of the broader bag agenda to take away our freedoms, that this is another proof point just like dobbs is a proof point that they will stop at nothing to seize and hold power because that is what helps with that incredulity problem that I described before that, you know You say that, but they're not really going to do it.
As far as what should democratic leaders be doing, what is it with this kind of above it all above the fray, I'm going to be very polite. I understand that, impetus, and in some ways one could even say that it's admirable. But one of the fundamental challenges that we have, and again, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about focus groups, is that if our electoral prospects hinge on voters understanding that the building is on fire, by which I mean the threat of eminent fascism is nigh. And our prospects do hinge on that. Then it's very incongruous to have the presumptive firefighters saying nothing, let alone not attempting to put out the blaze. And that's exactly what we get. We get, "Well, you say all of this terrible, horrible stuff? is going to happen, but wouldn't Democratic leaders be talking about it. How come I've never heard of this? How come I didn't know that this was going on?"
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And so the trap that you get yourself into, if you choose to be above it all, is that in the moments where you are calling it out, perhaps most notably in the State of the Union, it becomes "Which you, am I supposed to believe? The you that made an analogy and rightly I would argue between Putin and threat that he represents and Donald Trump representing essentially domestically the very same threat. Is it that you, or is it the you that doesn't even want to mention -- and I should pull back on that and say, if you're following the social media of the Biden social media campaign, they actually have started inching the gloves off a bit more, so I don't want to You know declare that's not the case because it's not fair. Yeah, if you're both the sitting president and a person running for president and you're hanging your hat on the argument that you are here to ensure the continuation of whatever we call this thing we'll make believe it's democracy I would argue it isn't but you know the semblance of it that we've got
Jason Sattler: As close as we're going to get.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah for now Then how is it possible that you're not yelling from the rafters exactly what the threat is before us?
Again, either that means that threat isn't true, and so insofar as other people are yelling that, they're being hyperbolic. Or, it is true, in which case, isn't that a dereliction of duty?
Jason Sattler: I was going to ask about what I see, it's a similar thread, what at the border where it's "If he's so bad, why are you proposing his policies and trying to, and insisting that they pass?"
And I think everybody who's in this mind frame gets why that's a problem.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And there's an additional piece to the border thing, which is that the toxic challenge with asking people all the time, "What are your top issues when you're making your electoral decision or when thinking about this election, which are the top issues and then presenting them a punch list that says jobs in the economy, cost of living and inflation, national security, the border and immigration, et cetera?" And different people, that list is written different ways, but like more or less I listed some abortion, democracy, housing costs, depends who's writing it.
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: So the average person is going about their day. They're living their life. They're getting their kid to school. They're going to their job or they're, sitting in their living room, doing their job on zoom or, they're like paying the bills. They're going to the store. How often do they think about the border? Especially if they live nowhere near the border. Not often.
Jason Sattler: When they watch Fox News.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, when they watch Fox News.
But in an average day, the kind of thought bubble popping into a human's head of "Oh, have I thought about the border today?" No, that doesn't happen. Now, that doesn't reflect when you're taking a survey and by definition you have been made to think about the border because it's been offered to you as a choice.
And to be sure, I'd be lying if I said differently, when people are offered that choice, i. e. that is brought top of mind to them, many people select that. And in fact, what we see. Thanks to the Republicans, because they understand that the job of a good message isn't to say what's popular, it's to make popular what you need said.
They understand that their electoral task is to make salient the issues that are most advantageous to them, duh. So it's not just what you're going to say in the conversation, it's deciding what the conversation will be. So for five minutes. Six minutes, I'll be generous. There was a conversation about Trump is a convicted felon.
He's been convicted. Felony, convicted felony convicted, felon, voter deception, election interference, push money. Yeah,
yeah,
and however many minutes into that, you decide, here's a great idea. It was too good.
Jason Sattler: Yes.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: a news cycle about something that is obviously bad for my opposition.
So here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to change the news cycle.
Jason Sattler: Only fair.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I'm going to pick a topic and not only am I going to change the topic, I'm going to pick a topic that is disadvantageous to me and make that a source of conversation. So it doesn't make sense in both dimensions.
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Both changing the topic to something that is disadvantageous to you. That's very foolish thing to do, especially when, how desperate are they to get the topic off of what's going on and you just did it for them. So why would you do that? And then the other piece of it is essentially what you said.
If you tell voters the way to make this electoral choices on the basis of who is going to be RoboCop, they're going to pick the folks who have that as their brand, regardless of what's true in your attempted gotcha that they didn't follow through. And no matter what you do, as far as rhetoric, and even as far as executive orders, that's not your brand strength. It's not what people associate with you. And it is dispiriting to your base. And the number of people among these disaffected Dems who have swallowed whole the rhetoric of both sides and who tell us, you know what, both sides are the same, both sides are the same, both sides are the same. It's a little hard to rebuff that claim when you're literally implementing the policy of the other side.
Jason Sattler: It feels i'm hoping it's just a 90s Democrat tic that he just feels like he needs to cross this box and then move on and actually talk about what he's going to do that's my best case hope scenario but because I do think that in one big huge way and this is the episode one of season three , of where's it when you discuss the 22 election in the embrace of freedom like you mentioned before the State of the Union, which I thought was to get two excellent speeches both before the midterm election and then the State of the Union was It was the top I've seen from a Democrat, in terms of messaging, in my lifetime, I think. You've heard better speeches from Barack Obama, just because he's the best speaker that they got, but he's, the words were never better, I thought, at the heights of those. And this is, I think, a battle that you've been fighting for a long time, among others, is to get the word freedom into Democrats mouth and this is something that Joe Biden seems to get more and more at least in moments when he has the most people listening to him. How did that win? Was it just was it Dobbs that convinced people to start to take freedom seriously? What is the archaeology of Freedom becoming part of the democratic lexicon?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Thank you for the shout out. So season three of Words to Win By our opening episode was about the 22 midterms and the embrace of freedoms and then more fully protect our freedoms and the idea of really rendering the election in the battlegrounds a referendum on whether we would protect our freedoms or whether MAGA Republicans would take away those freedoms.
And the question you're asking is how I guess if you repeat the same thing over and over and over and over and over and then over again and then over again, some more eventually people will some people at least will begin to adopt it. I think that part of it. And it was, we just made a really hardcore data driven case, but I have been making this case and not just, I'm just saying me because I live inside of my own body.
Jason Sattler: And you know what you did.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Yeah. I know what I did. Lots and lots of other people did as well, so I don't mean to imply that at all. Sure. But it actually, believe it or not, was way back in 2012 that we first started to try to less marquee effect, to push this freedoms narrative, of all spots, in the union fight.
And what we found is that. In the Janus fight, which was a Supreme Court case around quote, unquote, right to work that was, heavily impacting public sector unions. Of all the messages that we tested, the message that said in America, we value our freedoms and CEOs are free to negotiate their wages and bonuses as they see fit. Working people just want the very same freedom, the freedom to join together in union. You can tell I've done this spiel for a while. I have the beginning of the message at least memorized. And what we found. Is that in that economic argument because normally people like yes, he has freedoms in the abortion case freedoms in the contraception case, but freedom and the ability to anchor to freedom applies across issues, and it always has. FDR knew that, right? Martin Luther King Jr. knew that when he said, free at last, thank God Almighty. People don't remember that is how the I Have a Dream speech ended. The Freedom Riders, the Freedom Summer, the absolutely essential pivot away from calling it the right to marry to the freedom to marry for the marriage equality movement.
So this argument has been integral to progressive victories for a very long time, but we become over and again afraid of our own shadow. And it's actually not dissimilar, interestingly, to 90s Democrat tic, where you just genuflect at the altar of the opposition, when we get scared or spooked.
Like all humans make bad decisions out of fear. And that is true that's true of our voters. That's true of our leaders. That's true of our parents. That's true of our that's...
Jason Sattler: Power forwards.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Everyone. Yeah, humans. That's how humans human. And so this tick where, oh no, they own that concept, right?
They own "freedom" and we can't be up in there. Or they own "family." Believe it or not, there was a long era where progressives were unwilling to make arguments on the basis of family because of family values and that being right wing. Another quintessential example is of course life and how thoroughly they have claimed this mantle of "life," obviously in the abortion context and us being scared that we can't touch it because that's their concept.
There are certain concepts that are just so integral to human functioning and belief that you can't, You can't let the right claim them, especially when they have absolutely no reason to be doing. Because they are standing for exactly the opposite. So I would say it's just been a slow and steady pushing and chipping and then part of it is just, nothing succeeds like success. And so in the places and campaigns where folks did embrace freedom and were able to be successful polling is nice, but winning is nicer and where we can point to real world examples that are like, look, this person embraced this and it was really, it was successful, absolutely essential to their win, then more people are willing to do it.
Jason Sattler: And it's so interesting how they tie it to the economic message, which is, I think, one of the most things I'm most excited about.. But there is this debate that you cover in the exciting two part conclusion of season three of your podcast is is about the economy and how to talk about the economy, specifically the Vibecession, which is the sense, in, in reality, there's a record job growth.
Best job. If you just look at the numbers, and then you do a poll and it says more than half people think that we have record high unemployment and there's a huge debate off on social media about this is, people are just getting it wrong. Yeah, and you just need to tell people that they're wrong about the and that's how to solve the Vibecession the episode definitely does not make that side it makes the case that you can't tell people that and I don't mean to be spoiler but it's really interesting how you make that case. But the press, Republicans who instantly, if you look at the graph of where they say, the moment Joe Biden becomes president, all of a sudden I'm, it's the great depression, and then also leftists who, have a vested interest in saying the Democrat has never left enough for them and they don't want to look at these incredible progressive wins that have happened. Because of progressive policies those people are all wrong and I want to tell them that they're wrong and that they deserve You know, the progressives deserve credit.
This is a great story. The press should be telling the story somewhat There's a quiet new deal going on all these things but I get why that doesn't work for swing voters. Is there a different focus that you can tell people that to take them on directly when it comes to the vibe session
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, I would say My guidance isn't exactly that you can't Lift up the stuff that's good. It's how you lift up the stuff that's good. And so I'm going to answer that by telling you a little story that may or may not be apocryphal that was shared with me by a friend and the story goes that there's like a junior level person at a talent agency and a big Hollywood star calls up and says, " Hey, I'm going to be in town and I need a hotel.
And the junior person says right away, "Sir, I'm going to get you a hotel, at your service." Hangs up. And the senior person comes and says, "Never say that. Never ever say that. Always say, 'Oh, there's a convention in town. Every room is booked. It's so difficult. I'm going to move heaven and earth. I will get you, I will kick someone out of their room to give you a room.'"
I'm exaggerating now, but you get the point. Yeah. I hate it. Because it's not an achievement if there are no obstacles. It's not a hero's journey if there was nothing to overcome. And so what is the point of that story? And did I forget the topic of this interview? So why did I tell you that story? Yes, please. Gotten the topic. No, it's because when you say to voters, "I gave you 35 insulin."
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: There are not unreasonable responses, "Why wasn't it free?"
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Or i'm not a diabetic. What about my heart medicine or what about my whatever?
Jason Sattler: Yeah.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, what took so long? and so First of all, there's the issue of whether or not you frame those achievements that you've created in a contrast in a populist message, or you very inadvisably say, I gave you this. And people do say, "If you couldn't have done that, why didn't you do more? And I'm still struggling. And I still have this issue. And I still have that issue. And I still have that issue. And if that was presto chango for you, then like, why are you withholding?"
So in order for something to feel like an achievement, there has to be some sort of kind of rhetorical indicator that it is.
Otherwise, you didn't really do anything for me. So that's the first issue.
The second issue is that there is no way to say the economy is good without saying the economy is good. And what I mean by that is, this system, this setup, this way of doing business, which the majority of people now are very aware, is just a giant Ponzi scheme to funnel money away from people who work, to people who don't do anything and own way, way too much, and extract the wealth that our work creates.
And so rather than saying the economy is good, which not only feels like bullshit to people because they're having trouble with rent, they're having trouble with college, they're having trouble with medical expenses, they're feeling precarity, it can even feel a little bit like "Quit yer bitchin." And if you're saying to people what feels like quitcher bitchin, that's not going to be very popular.
So it's not that you can't say things are good. And, in one of those finale episodes, I talked at length with Celinda Lake, who was, big part of the Bill Clinton campaign. She's on the Biden campaign. She was last time as well. And she shares this story that Bill Clinton in his second reelection was also running on his jobs record.
And he would say, we made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. And they were doing a focus group with, I don't know who. And one of the people in the focus group said, yeah, can you tell the president that I've got three of them? And they would, clip key things, key moments from focus groups, and they would send them to him overnights.
And instantly he turned on a dime and he said, we've made this many jobs, but that's not good enough. It's not good enough until. The job that you have is the only job you need, not only to care for your family, but be able to save, take a vacation dah. He took that instruction and he adapted the message.
So the issue is not that you're not allowed to say, Things are, these are the positive things. It's really a matter of how you say it and whether it's the difference between saying, I gave you 35 insulin and I decided that drugs are too expensive. And so I took on big pharma. They fought me every step of the way.
They didn't want it. All they want is to make hand over fist, but not on my watch. So here's what I did. And I've only gotten started. You vote for me and there's more to come. That's, yeah. The difference it's not that you don't tell people that you did it. It's how you tell people you did it. the episode definitely does not make that side it makes the case that you can't tell people that and I don't mean to be spoiler but it's really interesting how you make that case. But the press, Republicans who instantly, if you look at the graph of where they say, the moment Joe Biden becomes president, all of a sudden I'm, it's the great depression, and then also leftists who, have a vested interest in saying the Democrat has never left enough for them and they don't want to look at these incredible progressive wins that have happened. Because of progressive policies those people are all wrong and I want to tell them that they're wrong and that they deserve You know, the progressives deserve credit.
This is a great story. The press should be telling the story somewhat There's a quiet new deal going on all these things but I get why that doesn't work for swing voters. Is there a different focus that you can tell people that to take them on directly when it comes to the Jason Sattler: Social media has turned us all into pundits. You do something that most pundits would never do. You listen to voters talk about this election all the time. And it's very early June 2024. How would you describe this election from the eyes of the voters you've been hearing from recently?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, and I want to specify, we listened to two groups of voters in particular for reasons I think are going to be very obvious when I describe them because there are the two groups we desperately need. So when I answer the subsequent questions, they're really about how things look from these two groups, and those two groups, our names for them, are disaffected Dems.
So these are people who. Have voted Democratic in the past, probably voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I say probably because some of them are younger and so they've aged into the voting process. If they're younger, they couldn't have voted for Joe Biden. They're too young. But they are right now very much in the no category.
They're double haters. They're feeling despondent and disaffected. They're very unlikely to vote for Trump. And in fact, that's not this category of voter at all. They are deciding between Biden and staying at home, voting third party, or skipping the top of the ticket. That's giving the top of the ticket answer in case folks thought they'd thought of they'd come up with every nightmare scenario that is an additional one.
I'm happy to offer you that actually in 2016, 1 to 2 percent of the electorate and battleground states skip the top of the ticket. So it is not an inconsequential threat.
Jason Sattler: We know this well from Wayne County, Michigan in 2016.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are our disaffected Dems.
Hopefully the label tells you who they are and what they're about. And then the other group that we spend lots of time with are our disaffected swing. These are folks who are less reliably democratic. They also are not like perfect turnout people by any means, but they have pretty solid turnout, but they have a more mixed partisan voting record.
So what we hear from these two groups that are underscore underscore, absolutely integral to winning. This is it. This is the name of the game. This is where it's at for us. Is A few things. The first is that they find the mega agenda completely and totally. Repellent is the kindest thing that I could possibly say about it.
Repugnant, disgusting, like anything we show them highlights of Project 2025. Nope. Nope. And some more. Nope. We show them the time magazine interview with Trump. Absolutely not. We showed them a political piece. It's not there's no part of them that is ooh, concentration camps for immigrants.
Or, um, eliminating the ACA. I'm intrigued. They're not, Outlawing contraception? Oh, interesting. They're very not excited about the agenda to speak euphemistically. The challenge that we are running into is what I call the curdulity challenge. So we get a lot of first of all, until we present it to them, for the most part, they're like, haven't heard of any of this, didn't know about any of this.
So first there's just, they had no idea in many cases. And then, once we walk them through it, and they tell us they hate all of it, they say, eh, it's not gonna happen. Not gonna happen.
Jason Sattler: Didn't happen the first time I survived. I'm, I didn't die of COVID for a second or third time. It's okay,
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, they didn't do this the first time around. You yelled and screamed the first time around. He didn't do this the first time around.
Jason Sattler: He didn't personally nuke me.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. We have this, major "fragility" problem and I'm happy to talk through what we do about that. The next thing that we hear From the higher information ones in this cohort That's really challenging is but all of this happened on Democrats watch.
Jason Sattler: Dobbs, for instance.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Dobbs fell on Democrats watch abortion was made illegal in states on Democrats watch these voting restrictions and places Happened on Democrats watch.
"You told us to turn out in 2020 to protect ourselves from this, and we did. And look, it happened anyway. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything. Democrats don't do anything."
Actually, we had groups last week, and we were talking with them about how -- because one of the things that we find promising is shifting the conversation away from vote for the candidate you want to vote for the country you want and this idea that this election is a fork in the road and we're at a crossroads and so on, and two different futures. But In our last groups, in the white men, group in Pittsburgh, one guy said I don't really see it as two different futures. I see it as two parallel futures and basically the Republicans have us in a speeding car toward this authoritarian future and the Democrats are a slow walk...
Jason Sattler: Okay, I'd take the slow walk, but sure...
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, so those are some of the dynamics that are going on.
Jason Sattler: And are you seeing this strange thing that are showing up in the polls that's never happened before and in recent times that people who never vote and are voting for the first time are leaning toward the Republican candidate, leaning towards Donald Trump.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah.
So the important thing to understand about that, and that's the basis for this new pundit idea called "turnout terror," or my colleague, Michael Podhorzer calls it turnout terror that actually somehow higher turnout is disadvantageous to Joe Biden when, we know that historically the reverse has been true.
So the important thing to understand about that is that there is. And so what you're seeing is, if not a one to one, a close to it correlation between how much voters know about the agenda, how much voters believe that the agenda by the agenda, the MAGA agenda is likely be implemented and whether or not they have moved away from Biden.
So what you're seeing is that these non-habitual voters or these brand-new voters, they are understandably, by definition, very low information. If you haven't been participating all along, or in many cases, you're a young person who, is newly entering into the electorate, then you're going to tend to be Statistically speaking, obviously individual cases very much vary. Talking about millions of people. So there are differences among individuals. You're going to be a person who is less likely to be paying attention. And so the phenomenon that we're seeing is not that these non habitual voters or these sort of brand new to the electorate voters are feeling warm and fuzzy toward Donald Trump.
It's that they are not aware. Of what is at stake and they are understandably displeased with the present. So rather than make it basically I think the way that the dynamic can be most readily understood is if folks are viewing the election as a referendum on Joe Biden's performance. That's a tough spot.
If folks are viewing the election as the question of whether MAGA will come and take away our freedoms or not, then they very clearly know what to do and they will do it. So it's really a question of how many of the voters Are clued in to what's going on
Jason Sattler: One thing that you gov found in a poll earlier this year is that the only people The only source that people really trust when it comes to news is their friends their loved ones. Is that true that people are relying more on each other for their information about voting?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Absolutely.
Yeah. These are folks who largely tune out, pay no attention to mainstream media. Now, with that said, these are porous borders and I think that it's impossible to say You know, I think that when mainstream media, let's say, puts a lot of reporters on the Trump trial beat, and there's a lot of coverage, and that's the front page of many newspapers, as we saw when the Bragg conviction came down, I think it's undeniable that has an impact in terms of what's on TikTok.
That is filtering into what becomes the dominant conversation on social media, which is, yes, how these disaffected voters are getting their quote unquote "news" or information.
Yeah, there is definitely a huge uptick in people's reliance on their own social networks. Interestingly, we find that anytime there is more information available about anything. I'll take a more neutral topic, like restaurant reviews. You're in a new city, you're trying to figure out where to eat.
There's 300, 000, Google has reviews and Yelp has reviews and Yahoo has reviews and who knows what else has reviews and the proliferation of that information actually renders all of that information less useful because now you have to contemplate which of those reviews are just a person who had an ax to grind, which of those people have the same taste as I do.
So the more that we've moved away from expertise, in the olden days, there would be like a restaurant critic and so on. The more that information is of less reliable value, both in reality, that is a true story and in people's perceptions. And so then they become reliant, understandably on word of mouth.
Jason Sattler: That makes a lot of sense. And so speaking of word of mouth, there's this debate on social media. I don't know if that means anything in reality, but whether how they should, how the Biden campaign should talk about the Bragg convictions, as you just called them there's, Joe Biden has a kind of natural disposition to refer to every opponent, like "my dear friend" in the Senate, and it doesn't seem very within his kind of capability to say, this guy's only convictions are felonies and stuff like that.
But at the same time this debate, Is one of the few stories as you pointed out that broke through that got it is in that is beyond just the freaks like us who pay attention to the news. So how are you talking about these convictions and why?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I think there's two questions inside of your question, which is how are we talking about it? And then what would be advisable for democratic leadership to talk about?
So let me take those in that order. So as far as how we're talking about it, it's really important to anchor whatever we're saying in a shared value. So in the Bragg case, it's saying something like most of us believe that voters deserve the full honest truth of who is running to represent us.
But Donald Trump, and the MAGA Republicans who aided and abetted his criminal conspiracy has now been convicted, is now convicted felon. Under 34 counts of attempting to falsify business records in order to keep voters in the dark because he knew that if the full truth came out about his actions, it would endanger his ability to win the 2016 election.
So we always want to sort of juxtapose, we want to use the convicted felon thing. We want to make clear that this is a case of election interference or even more explicitly voter deception. We want to emphasize how most of us think it's the most basic thing on earth that voters ought to know what the people who are running to represent us have done and what they're up to it's really helpful to talk about how this is part and parcel of the broader bag agenda to take away our freedoms, that this is another proof point just like dobbs is a proof point that they will stop at nothing to seize and hold power because that is what helps with that incredulity problem that I described before that, you know You say that, but they're not really going to do it.
As far as what should democratic leaders be doing, what is it with this kind of above it all above the fray, I'm going to be very polite. I understand that, impetus, and in some ways one could even say that it's admirable. But one of the fundamental challenges that we have, and again, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about focus groups, is that if our electoral prospects hinge on voters understanding that the building is on fire, by which I mean the threat of eminent fascism is nigh. And our prospects do hinge on that. Then it's very incongruous to have the presumptive firefighters saying nothing, let alone not attempting to put out the blaze. And that's exactly what we get. We get, "Well, you say all of this terrible, horrible stuff? is going to happen, but wouldn't Democratic leaders be talking about it. How come I've never heard of this? How come I didn't know that this was going on?"
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And so the trap that you get yourself into, if you choose to be above it all, is that in the moments where you are calling it out, perhaps most notably in the State of the Union, it becomes "Which you, am I supposed to believe? The you that made an analogy and rightly I would argue between Putin and threat that he represents and Donald Trump representing essentially domestically the very same threat. Is it that you, or is it the you that doesn't even want to mention -- and I should pull back on that and say, if you're following the social media of the Biden social media campaign, they actually have started inching the gloves off a bit more, so I don't want to You know declare that's not the case because it's not fair. Yeah, if you're both the sitting president and a person running for president and you're hanging your hat on the argument that you are here to ensure the continuation of whatever we call this thing we'll make believe it's democracy I would argue it isn't but you know the semblance of it that we've got
Jason Sattler: As close as we're going to get.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah for now Then how is it possible that you're not yelling from the rafters exactly what the threat is before us?
Again, either that means that threat isn't true, and so insofar as other people are yelling that, they're being hyperbolic. Or, it is true, in which case, isn't that a dereliction of duty?
Jason Sattler: I was going to ask about what I see, it's a similar thread, what at the border where it's "If he's so bad, why are you proposing his policies and trying to, and insisting that they pass?"
And I think everybody who's in this mind frame gets why that's a problem.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: And there's an additional piece to the border thing, which is that the toxic challenge with asking people all the time, "What are your top issues when you're making your electoral decision or when thinking about this election, which are the top issues and then presenting them a punch list that says jobs in the economy, cost of living and inflation, national security, the border and immigration, et cetera?" And different people, that list is written different ways, but like more or less I listed some abortion, democracy, housing costs, depends who's writing it.
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: So the average person is going about their day. They're living their life. They're getting their kid to school. They're going to their job or they're, sitting in their living room, doing their job on zoom or, they're like paying the bills. They're going to the store. How often do they think about the border? Especially if they live nowhere near the border. Not often.
Jason Sattler: When they watch Fox News.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, when they watch Fox News.
But in an average day, the kind of thought bubble popping into a human's head of "Oh, have I thought about the border today?" No, that doesn't happen. Now, that doesn't reflect when you're taking a survey and by definition you have been made to think about the border because it's been offered to you as a choice.
And to be sure, I'd be lying if I said differently, when people are offered that choice, i. e. that is brought top of mind to them, many people select that. And in fact, what we see. Thanks to the Republicans, because they understand that the job of a good message isn't to say what's popular, it's to make popular what you need said.
They understand that their electoral task is to make salient the issues that are most advantageous to them, duh. So it's not just what you're going to say in the conversation, it's deciding what the conversation will be. So for five minutes. Six minutes, I'll be generous. There was a conversation about Trump is a convicted felon.
He's been convicted. Felony, convicted felony convicted, felon, voter deception, election interference, push money. Yeah,
yeah,
and however many minutes into that, you decide, here's a great idea. It was too good.
Jason Sattler: Yes.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: a news cycle about something that is obviously bad for my opposition.
So here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to change the news cycle.
Jason Sattler: Only fair.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: I'm going to pick a topic and not only am I going to change the topic, I'm going to pick a topic that is disadvantageous to me and make that a source of conversation. So it doesn't make sense in both dimensions.
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Both changing the topic to something that is disadvantageous to you. That's very foolish thing to do, especially when, how desperate are they to get the topic off of what's going on and you just did it for them. So why would you do that? And then the other piece of it is essentially what you said.
If you tell voters the way to make this electoral choices on the basis of who is going to be RoboCop, they're going to pick the folks who have that as their brand, regardless of what's true in your attempted gotcha that they didn't follow through. And no matter what you do, as far as rhetoric, and even as far as executive orders, that's not your brand strength. It's not what people associate with you. And it is dispiriting to your base. And the number of people among these disaffected Dems who have swallowed whole the rhetoric of both sides and who tell us, you know what, both sides are the same, both sides are the same, both sides are the same. It's a little hard to rebuff that claim when you're literally implementing the policy of the other side.
Jason Sattler: It feels i'm hoping it's just a 90s Democrat tic that he just feels like he needs to cross this box and then move on and actually talk about what he's going to do that's my best case hope scenario but because I do think that in one big huge way and this is the episode one of season three , of where's it when you discuss the 22 election in the embrace of freedom like you mentioned before the State of the Union, which I thought was to get two excellent speeches both before the midterm election and then the State of the Union was It was the top I've seen from a Democrat, in terms of messaging, in my lifetime, I think. You've heard better speeches from Barack Obama, just because he's the best speaker that they got, but he's, the words were never better, I thought, at the heights of those. And this is, I think, a battle that you've been fighting for a long time, among others, is to get the word freedom into Democrats mouth and this is something that Joe Biden seems to get more and more at least in moments when he has the most people listening to him. How did that win? Was it just was it Dobbs that convinced people to start to take freedom seriously? What is the archaeology of Freedom becoming part of the democratic lexicon?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Thank you for the shout out. So season three of Words to Win By our opening episode was about the 22 midterms and the embrace of freedoms and then more fully protect our freedoms and the idea of really rendering the election in the battlegrounds a referendum on whether we would protect our freedoms or whether MAGA Republicans would take away those freedoms.
And the question you're asking is how I guess if you repeat the same thing over and over and over and over and over and then over again and then over again, some more eventually people will some people at least will begin to adopt it. I think that part of it. And it was, we just made a really hardcore data driven case, but I have been making this case and not just, I'm just saying me because I live inside of my own body.
Jason Sattler: And you know what you did.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah. Yeah. I know what I did. Lots and lots of other people did as well, so I don't mean to imply that at all. Sure. But it actually, believe it or not, was way back in 2012 that we first started to try to less marquee effect, to push this freedoms narrative, of all spots, in the union fight.
And what we found is that. In the Janus fight, which was a Supreme Court case around quote, unquote, right to work that was, heavily impacting public sector unions. Of all the messages that we tested, the message that said in America, we value our freedoms and CEOs are free to negotiate their wages and bonuses as they see fit. Working people just want the very same freedom, the freedom to join together in union. You can tell I've done this spiel for a while. I have the beginning of the message at least memorized. And what we found. Is that in that economic argument because normally people like yes, he has freedoms in the abortion case freedoms in the contraception case, but freedom and the ability to anchor to freedom applies across issues, and it always has. FDR knew that, right? Martin Luther King Jr. knew that when he said, free at last, thank God Almighty. People don't remember that is how the I Have a Dream speech ended. The Freedom Riders, the Freedom Summer, the absolutely essential pivot away from calling it the right to marry to the freedom to marry for the marriage equality movement.
So this argument has been integral to progressive victories for a very long time, but we become over and again afraid of our own shadow. And it's actually not dissimilar, interestingly, to 90s Democrat tic, where you just genuflect at the altar of the opposition, when we get scared or spooked.
Like all humans make bad decisions out of fear. And that is true that's true of our voters. That's true of our leaders. That's true of our parents. That's true of our that's...
Jason Sattler: Power forwards.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Everyone. Yeah, humans. That's how humans human. And so this tick where, oh no, they own that concept, right?
They own "freedom" and we can't be up in there. Or they own "family." Believe it or not, there was a long era where progressives were unwilling to make arguments on the basis of family because of family values and that being right wing. Another quintessential example is of course life and how thoroughly they have claimed this mantle of "life," obviously in the abortion context and us being scared that we can't touch it because that's their concept.
There are certain concepts that are just so integral to human functioning and belief that you can't, You can't let the right claim them, especially when they have absolutely no reason to be doing. Because they are standing for exactly the opposite. So I would say it's just been a slow and steady pushing and chipping and then part of it is just, nothing succeeds like success. And so in the places and campaigns where folks did embrace freedom and were able to be successful polling is nice, but winning is nicer and where we can point to real world examples that are like, look, this person embraced this and it was really, it was successful, absolutely essential to their win, then more people are willing to do it.
Jason Sattler: And it's so interesting how they tie it to the economic message, which is, I think, one of the most things I'm most excited about.. But there is this debate that you cover in the exciting two part conclusion of season three of your podcast is is about the economy and how to talk about the economy, specifically the Vibecession, which is the sense, in, in reality, there's a record job growth.
Best job. If you just look at the numbers, and then you do a poll and it says more than half people think that we have record high unemployment and there's a huge debate off on social media about this is, people are just getting it wrong. Yeah, and you just need to tell people that they're wrong about the and that's how to solve the Vibecession the episode definitely does not make that side it makes the case that you can't tell people that and I don't mean to be spoiler but it's really interesting how you make that case. But the press, Republicans who instantly, if you look at the graph of where they say, the moment Joe Biden becomes president, all of a sudden I'm, it's the great depression, and then also leftists who, have a vested interest in saying the Democrat has never left enough for them and they don't want to look at these incredible progressive wins that have happened. Because of progressive policies those people are all wrong and I want to tell them that they're wrong and that they deserve You know, the progressives deserve credit.
This is a great story. The press should be telling the story somewhat There's a quiet new deal going on all these things but I get why that doesn't work for swing voters. Is there a different focus that you can tell people that to take them on directly when it comes to the vibe session
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, I would say My guidance isn't exactly that you can't Lift up the stuff that's good. It's how you lift up the stuff that's good. And so I'm going to answer that by telling you a little story that may or may not be apocryphal that was shared with me by a friend and the story goes that there's like a junior level person at a talent agency and a big Hollywood star calls up and says, " Hey, I'm going to be in town and I need a hotel.
And the junior person says right away, "Sir, I'm going to get you a hotel, at your service." Hangs up. And the senior person comes and says, "Never say that. Never ever say that. Always say, 'Oh, there's a convention in town. Every room is booked. It's so difficult. I'm going to move heaven and earth. I will get you, I will kick someone out of their room to give you a room.'"
I'm exaggerating now, but you get the point. Yeah. I hate it. Because it's not an achievement if there are no obstacles. It's not a hero's journey if there was nothing to overcome. And so what is the point of that story? And did I forget the topic of this interview? So why did I tell you that story? Yes, please. Gotten the topic. No, it's because when you say to voters, "I gave you 35 insulin."
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: There are not unreasonable responses, "Why wasn't it free?"
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Or i'm not a diabetic. What about my heart medicine or what about my whatever?
Jason Sattler: Yeah.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, what took so long? and so First of all, there's the issue of whether or not you frame those achievements that you've created in a contrast in a populist message, or you very inadvisably say, I gave you this. And people do say, "If you couldn't have done that, why didn't you do more? And I'm still struggling. And I still have this issue. And I still have that issue. And I still have that issue. And if that was presto chango for you, then like, why are you withholding?"
So in order for something to feel like an achievement, there has to be some sort of kind of rhetorical indicator that it is.
Otherwise, you didn't really do anything for me. So that's the first issue.
The second issue is that there is no way to say the economy is good without saying the economy is good. And what I mean by that is, this system, this setup, this way of doing business, which the majority of people now are very aware, is just a giant Ponzi scheme to funnel money away from people who work, to people who don't do anything and own way, way too much, and extract the wealth that our work creates.
And so rather than saying the economy is good, which not only feels like bullshit to people because they're having trouble with rent, they're having trouble with college, they're having trouble with medical expenses, they're feeling precarity, it can even feel a little bit like "Quit yer bitchin." And if you're saying to people what feels like quitcher bitchin, that's not going to be very popular.
So it's not that you can't say things are good. And, in one of those finale episodes, I talked at length with Celinda Lake, who was, big part of the Bill Clinton campaign. She's on the Biden campaign. She was last time as well. And she shares this story that Bill Clinton in his second reelection was also running on his jobs record.
And he would say, we made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. And they were doing a focus group with, I don't know who. And one of the people in the focus group said, yeah, can you tell the president that I've got three of them? And they would, clip key things, key moments from focus groups, and they would send them to him overnights.
And instantly he turned on a dime and he said, we've made this many jobs, but that's not good enough. It's not good enough until. The job that you have is the only job you need, not only to care for your family, but be able to save, take a vacation dah. He took that instruction and he adapted the message.
So the issue is not that you're not allowed to say, Things are, these are the positive things. It's really a matter of how you say it and whether it's the difference between saying, I gave you 35 insulin and I decided that drugs are too expensive. And so I took on big pharma. They fought me every step of the way.
They didn't want it. All they want is to make hand over fist, but not on my watch. So here's what I did. And I've only gotten started. You vote for me and there's more to come. That's, yeah. The difference it's not that you don't tell people that you did it. It's how you tell people you did it..
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, I would say My guidance isn't exactly that you can't Lift up the stuff that's good. It's how you lift up the stuff that's good. And so I'm going to answer that by telling you a little story that may or may not be apocryphal that was shared with me by a friend and the story goes that there's like a junior level person at a talent agency and a big Hollywood star calls up and says, " Hey, I'm going to be in town and I need a hotel.
And the junior person says right away, "Sir, I'm going to get you a hotel, at your service." Hangs up. And the senior person comes and says, "Never say that. Never ever say that. Always say, 'Oh, there's a convention in town. Every room is booked. It's so difficult. I'm going to move heaven and earth. I will get you, I will kick someone out of their room to give you a room.'"
I'm exaggerating now, but you get the point. Yeah. I hate it. Because it's not an achievement if there are no obstacles. It's not a hero's journey if there was nothing to overcome. And so what is the point of that story? And did I forget the topic of this interview? So why did I tell you that story? Yes, please. Gotten the topic. No, it's because when you say to voters, "I gave you 35 insulin."
Jason Sattler: Right?
Anat Shanker-Osorio: There are not unreasonable responses, "Why wasn't it free?"
Jason Sattler: Right.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Or i'm not a diabetic. What about my heart medicine or what about my whatever?
Jason Sattler: Yeah.
Anat Shanker-Osorio: Yeah, what took so long? and so First of all, there's the issue of whether or not you frame those achievements that you've created in a contrast in a populist message, or you very inadvisably say, I gave you this. And people do say, "If you couldn't have done that, why didn't you do more? And I'm still struggling. And I still have this issue. And I still have that issue. And I still have that issue. And if that was presto chango for you, then like, why are you withholding?"
So in order for something to feel like an achievement, there has to be some sort of kind of rhetorical indicator that it is.
Otherwise, you didn't really do anything for me. So that's the first issue.
The second issue is that there is no way to say the economy is good without saying the economy is good. And what I mean by that is, this system, this setup, this way of doing business, which the majority of people now are very aware, is just a giant Ponzi scheme to funnel money away from people who work, to people who don't do anything and own way, way too much, and extract the wealth that our work creates.
And so rather than saying the economy is good, which not only feels like bullshit to people because they're having trouble with rent, they're having trouble with college, they're having trouble with medical expenses, they're feeling precarity, it can even feel a little bit like "Quit yer bitchin." And if you're saying to people what feels like "Quit yer bitchin," that's not going to be very popular.
So it's not that you can't say things are good. And, in one of those finale episodes, I talked at length with Celinda Lake, who was, big part of the Bill Clinton campaign. She's on the Biden campaign. She was last time as well. And she shares this story that Bill Clinton, in his second reelection, was also running on his jobs record.
And he would say, we made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. We made this many jobs. And they were doing a focus group with, I don't know who. And one of the people in the focus group said, yeah, can you tell the president that I've got three of them? And they would, clip key things, key moments from focus groups, and they would send them to him overnights.
And instantly he turned on a dime and he said, we've made this many jobs, but that's not good enough. It's not good enough until. The job that you have is the only job you need, not only to care for your family, but be able to save, take a vacation dah. He took that instruction and he adapted the message.
So the issue is not that you're not allowed to say, Things are, these are the positive things. It's really a matter of how you say it and whether it's the difference between saying, I gave you 35 insulin, and I decided that drugs are too expensive. And so I took on big pharma. They fought me every step of the way.
They didn't want it. All they want is to take it back, but not on my watch. So here's what I did. And I've only gotten started. You vote for me, and there's more to come. That's, yeah. The difference it's not that you don't tell people that you did it. It's how you tell people you did it.
"Freedom at last" with Anat Shenker-Osorio