Nothing about it makes sense.

The education part was weird.

It's also, she's trying to make it into this like moral statement, right? which is just so troubling because it completely ignores the incredibly islamophobic campaign that mike rogers is running and like you can't even win on those grounds either i think that there are a lot of people obviously in the democratic party who are sympathetic to some of her positions and her points about abdul and how she feels about his rhetoric on israel um And there's a world in which she could have really been kind of, you know, someone who was in Abdul's ear about this throughout the rest of the campaign and like a leading voice on some of that stuff.

But the selfish way that she's gone about doing this is just completely torched.

Her entire career in Democratic politics.

And it makes no sense because let's say Abdul wins.

She has no future in Democratic politics.

so that's uh someone in the audience screaming at her that she's a traitor um yeah i guess the question is how do you see this playing out now we have two days before the election

But did you pick any of that up or have a sense of

that? Yeah.

It was a little early for me to pick some when I was there because it was spring.

But what I think is so interesting about Mississippi is that coming out of the 2024 election, right, Democrats were having this huge kind of come to Jesus moment about how do they expand the map long term, right? Not just for this election cycle, but how do you build sustainable majorities? What are other states? You can no longer rely on The traditional blue wall in the Midwest in the same way that Democrats have in the past, where do you add states to the map? And Mississippi kept coming up, which, you know, 18 months ago sounded like kind of crazy.

But you start talking to folks, start talking to strategists and, you know, that's... they'll point out that it is, uh, has one of the, I think the largest black population of any state in the U S it's like around 38%.

And that's really kind of like what roots a lot of the democratic party's optimism with the state, um, is if you can drive up, get black turnout as high as you possibly can.

Um, and then hope that the white turnout is somewhat depressed.

I think if Lindsey Graham were alive, we would assume South Carolina would be reasonably safe for the Republicans suddenly looks very much in play.

Chuck Schumer said if the election were held today, he is confident Democrats would take back the Senate.

Yeah, and I think he's got a point there.

It's just remarkable, Kate.

I think it's worth just remembering where we were at this point last year.

The idea that Democrats could win the Senate just felt almost like, you know, a fool's errand.

And I think the fact that we are now, you look at all these election forecasting models, Democrats are favored in a lot of them to win the Senate, which is just a remarkable fact and just shows how much has changed in the past 12 months.

And I think a lot of it, again, speaks to Donald Trump's unpopularity and the fact that this is a White House that has done pretty much nothing to try and confront some of these political headwinds.

Walk me through the, what are you calling them, the Bernie dogs? Thank you.

When do presidential campaigns traditionally start?

I was looking back at this.

I think Warren was the first person to announce, if I remember correctly, for 2020, and I only remember this 'cause I think it was either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, I can't remember which one.

I only remember this 'cause I was the...

I was at NBC at the time, and I was the on-duty person who had to [laughs] write the breaking news story.

Um, so she was early, but w- I think some folks have already sort of suggested that, like kind of like laid like midterms this year as sort of the marker of when they're gonna make decisions.

And when I was talking with some advisors to some of these can- top-tier candidates, they all sort of expected that we'd have a few announcements, um, in November and December.

But, like, is there s- is there that version of someone this go around, or is that too early?

Does that align with the reporting that you've been able to gather?

Yeah, you know, I think it's important to remember here that Trump won in 2024 in large part because he won working class voters across the spectrum.

And that was because he made a promise on affordability that he just has not been able to keep this far.

And because a lot of those voters were a soft converse to Trumpism, they're not kind of your traditional diehard MAGA voters anymore.

Many of them are very sour on him right now and they're negative on the president.

I think the question for Democrats going forward in these next eight weeks is whether they can convert all these voters to their team right now.

And there's a huge battle going on in the Democratic Party about which kind of candidates are best suited to doing that, whether it's a more progressive or moderate type candidate.

What's happening?

Can you talk about some of the problems that, that Democrats in Florida specifically have faced in recent years?

Yeah, I think it really goes back to probably the twenty twelve presidential election.

If you remember, Obama just barely won Florida.

That was kind of like an early sign that, oh, shit, Democrats are starting to lose some ground here, and since then, things just have kinda gone downhill.

Obviously, twenty sixteen, Trump comes in, he wins the state of Florida, and Democrats have essentially struggled to win statewide ever since.

And that's dovetailed with this, you know, Democratic, uh, brand nationwide kind of being co- becoming a lot more toxic in the state.

Um, and they've struggled to figure out how to solve that, and this has really become a giant problem for the party because, uh, and I write about this in my, in my upcoming newsletter, the 2030 census is a huge, huge, big deal for Democrats.

What's she running on? Like, what's her, what's her platform? How'd she land this plane, and, and what's she trying to do going into the general?

He's got actually Muslim, like, a real Muslim constituency in, I don't know if it's also his new district, but definitely in his old district, right? And you went there.

In the old district, a Little Kurdistan, which is this part of Nashville.

Nashville has a, a huge Kurdish population.

Um, I think it's the biggest actually in North America, and so there's this neighborhood in Nashville that's called Little Kurdistan, great Kurdish restaurants, um, Kurdish markets, the whole thing.

And it, that was, fell into his old district, so he's, when he's tweeting these things off earlier this year, he's doing so as he has [laughs] this huge Muslim constituency and just, like, does not give a shit.

Um, and so I went there when he, this was all going down earlier this year and talked to a lot of, uh, his Muslim constituents who were all just like, "Yeah, we know that this man is insane.

Um, but please don't quote me on the record because I'm really terrified that he's gonna, like, come after me," which is just, like, a crazy thing to say about the person [laughs] who's supposed to be representing you in Congress.

Or in Tennessee as a whole.

Talk to us about this data and your reporting.

Yeah, coming out of the 2024 election, I think there was agreement among all factions of the Democratic Party that their key goal is to figure out how to win back working class voters.

And what we've really seen from the left and from progressives in the Democratic Party is this idea that if you.

Amp up economic populism.

If you run candidates that have this sort of like harder edge working class aesthetic to them, that's how you're going to fix this problem.

So we've seen this embodied in people like Graham Plattner, Abdul El-Saeed, Zoran Mamdani to a certain extent.

But what we've seen in polling data thus far in the cycle is that their base still is among college educated voters.

What's your read? Could a change be coming?

H- how could it get worse than it was, Lauren? Where, where do we go from here?

Well, look, the Democratic National Committee is going into August with $2 million in debt.

That is pretty bad.

I think there was some hope at the beginning of the year that Ken Martin was going to be able to turn this around, that once we got into 2026, some of these big donors would come back to the table, and that clearly just hasn't happened in a very meaningful way.

And the big concern now is that Ken Martin is essentially driving the DNC to irrelevance.

The whole point of the DNC in a midterm year is to basically act as a bank and to give out money to the big party committees, the DS, the DS, the DTRIP, um, and Martin can't do that right now.

So there's essentially no coordinated campaign going on amongst these party committees, and that is, again, the DNC's entire purpose is to do that in a midterm election year.

Our pets' heads are falling off." Um, I think of that because when it comes to the financial state of this, Lauren, that question of how do you get out of a hole like this, um, why isn't that automatically disqualifying, the fact that it's gotten to this point? Why is there an argument around the finances when it seems like the argument as a headline is quite clear?

Okay

...

there are a few other things.

He's been to the dentist three times so far this year.

He had an MRI last year, but didn't really tell us why.

It's...

He's not transparent about his health, which is obviously not exactly, like, a new thing for presidents.

And, you know, Democrats aren't pushing that, and maybe that's just because there's so many things to push, like, or information overload, right?

Excited to chat about her latest piece about how campus protests have largely gone silent in Trump 2.0. I'm curious if you can give us a little bit of the background into the gist of the piece and the inspiration for reporting it.

Well, I covered the Biden White House all four years, and obviously the last year and a half, I guess, of that administration was just completely dominated by campus protests and protesters that would just interrupt him and Vice President Harris no matter where they went.

I mean, I have all these memories from traveling with the president or being on the campaign trail where anytime Harris would get up and give a speech, you could bet that she would get interrupted at least, you know, like a dozen times with pro-Palestine protesters basically saying that she was complicit in genocide.

Um, they followed Biden and Harris around wherever they went.

And obviously, the campus protests were a huge, huge deal.

I mean, Biden had to address this from the White House.

It was something that his entire communication shop was incredibly sensitive about.

But I'm curious, when you spoke to, uh, Democrats who were kinda looking at the discrepancy between the activism then and the lack of it now, what did they have to say and what was sort of their rationale behind it?

I, I... you know, we live in an obviously materialistic world, but I, I suppose that's the case, where it's just like that person looks youthful and vibrant, and, you know, I'm, I'm more inclined to support him or her because of it.

Yeah.

There has been some political science studies, and I talked to, uh, one professor who did one of these studies, and he was basically like, "We...

There's so...

It's so hard to get information about elected officials." Um, you know, if you're just kind of a normal person who isn't tuned into politics every day, election season comes around, there's this flood of information, all different kinds of sources.

There's attack ads, and you're trying to make sense of everything, and so people plug in these physical attributes to help them make decisions.

It's almost just kind of like a shortcut to, to figure out who you want to vote for.

That's true

Tell me all about Louise Lucas, uh, if I'm someone who hasn't heard of her.

So I feel like a lot of the conversation about Democrats this past year, and this is where, like, our beats kind of intersect, 'cause you know all the discourse that's happening online, uh, but so much of the Democrats' focus this past year has been like, "How can we rival the Republican Party's grip on social media?" Uh, it's just something the Democrats have honestly, like, been pretty bad at.

Um, and that's why you've seen people like Gavin Newsom start these podcasts.

You've seen donors sink millions of dollars into all these projects about, how can we get more creators to create content that's pro-Democrats, things like that.

And then, as all of this is going on on the national level, there's this state senator in Virginia who's kind of crept up out of nowhere over the past couple years, at least for me, I'm not a Virginia resident, who's just had, like, the most just kind of sassy, shit-posting-type personality on Twitter, and she's really broken through over the past couple of months because of all the redistricting stuff that's going on.

Virginia right now is trying to redraw their congressional maps.

Um, this is part of the Democrats' response to what happened in Texas, uh, last year, and she's just absolutely trolling the Republicans about this, um, giving them hell online, to the point that there's been some Democratic consultants who've actually brought her tweets to members of Congress to be like, "Hey, guys, this is how you are good at social media." And it's hilarious that it's coming from this older woman in the party who's not even really a, a nationally known name.

Um, this maybe represents a new direction for Democrats, Lauren, wouldn't you say?

You can ignore the second question.

[laughs] Um, so this new think tank sent out this memo to lawmakers, uh, in the House and the Senate this morning, and basically they're arguing, which we've heard over the course of the past few days, "Stay away from abolish ICE." They basically describe it as f- playing into Republicans', uh, like, trap.

Um, they say it's incredibly toxic, and that all you do is communicate that you're not willing to enforce laws.

And instead, they're saying you should lean into proposing reforms, um, you know, whether it's weeding out bad apples that are... that the Trump administration has recruited to be in ICE, um, revamping training processes, things like that.

Um, so it's...

Uh, their whole thing is, yeah, we need to s- get away from abolish ICE, but then what? Like, we have to propose something.

We have to give our voters something to show that we're, like, seriously trying to come up with solutions to this and acknowledge that this is a really tough problem.

[laughs]

What are they trying to do? Yeah, why don't you just talk about what they're trying to do here?

There's a recognition that Democrats have to figure out how to navigate the attention economy.

It's something that Trump and Republicans have been really good at for a really long time, and Democrats have frankly just kind of sucked at it aside from a few people, right? Like, an AOC or mo- more recently Mamdani.

These kinds of folks who tend to be f- more from the progressive flank of the party are really good at it.

They're good at making viral content.

It is not a natural thing for more, like, centrist, moderate minded candidates who are just, like, not coming out with a super, like, exciting new policy, like freeze the rent, something that's gonna naturally kind of take off online.

And so the challenge is, how do you make these kinds of candidates that are the, they call them the majority makers, which is fair, I think.

Right.

What do you think is driving the shift? Why do you think they've suddenly been like, "We need to age this down just a bit, guys"?

I think a few things.

One, you really can't underestimate the Biden factor in all of this.

Like, I think Democrats really have some trauma from everything that happened in 2024, so there's a sense of like, we can't do that again.

There are real risks when you just kind of let someone stay in office for forever and forever.

And then the other part of it is three members have died in Congress so far this year, three Democratic members, and that's a big deal.

They're all in the House and, you know, Republicans had a pretty narrow margin to begin with and, uh, those three members, they passed away in the spring.

That, the idea of how do we get, uh, these older, sort of entrenched people to understand that it's a new moment? Um, is there somebody that you see that's doing that work internally? Like, when you say it's happening organically, is that really organically or is there something going on, uh, some kind of organizational push? Uh, is it from donors? Is it from outside groups to say, "Guys, we need the new blood"?

You rip.

Yeah.

Democrats definitely also have some, you know, PTSD from that period (laughs) in the Biden administration.

Um, and, you know, I covered the Biden White House, and when you look back on it, it was really that summer that, like, in hindsight, it was like, "Oh, shit." Like, that was the moment where everything kind of, like, slowly started to fall apart.

And I think for Afghanistan, a lot of it was Biden looked really weak and he just confirmed sort of this, like, belief that voters had that he was this weak president, he was, you know, not up for the job, um, and he couldn't really come back and ever, like, convince them otherwise.

Um, so Democrats now are really trying to learn from that.

And they're heading into the recess, um, this August, trying to basically make Trump pay as big of a price, and Republicans, as big of a price as possible for the Big Beautiful Bill and for Epstein.

What do you think has happened for Democrats, where they kind of went from worrying that Epstein might be a distraction to feeling like it's a, they can go on offense on this? Like, w- what me- what memo did they get where they realized that this was fertile territory for an offense attack?

Uh, so talk about, um, your piece and how you reported it out.

Yeah, I think that this is something that a lot of Democrats recognize is a potential winning message, but there's a difference between recognizing that it's a good message and then actually putting it into practice, uh, which I'm sure you have some experience with that, Sarah, with working with candidates, is you can tell them, you know, they can sit in these meetings and agree that this is a really strong message, but then when you go out there on cable news, when you go out there on social media, not everyone is kind of able to deliver that message and get on the same page.

I have a Pelosi quote in the, in the piece.

She was on MSNBC just a few days ago, and she was asked about Epstein, and she stands there and says, "It's a distraction," and that Democrats should just be talking about kitchen table issues, which, like, eh, you know, it's kind of like, what are we doing here? Um, so there is a bit of a generational divide too, I think, with who's able to sort of, like, clearly deliver on this message.

Um, and, you know, if you spend some time on social media, if you are well versed in TikTok or other things like that, you probably know that Epstein is a really great way to get a foothold into people's attention and then broaden it out to the larger message, which is Trump is protecting the elites, and he always was.

And now you're seeing it with a k- thing that everyone is paying attention to, that being Epstein.

Like, what is going on with the fundraising on the Dem side right now?

Yeah.

(laughs)

Putting it delicately.

And just-... from folks I talked to this morning, the concern is, I, they really are worried that the party's going to overrate this and say, "Okay, the direction that we should tack in is to the left.

That's clearly what's working right now, that's clearly what voters want." And their, their whole argument is, "No, it's, it's not that that's the direction we need to go.

That's not what we should learn from this moment, but the one thing that we can learn from this is the tactics here clearly worked, and that Zoran sort of was really able to break through on social media." And so there are members, moderate members of the party that are like, "We should take away that lesson, absolutely.

We need to be better online, we need to be better at breaking through, but that does not mean we need to be, you know, more liberal or adopting sort of that vision of politics."

Got too pricey.

Right.

And so, like, what do you think about the generational divide in the party? Like, what do you think h- is happening there?

Yeah, Bernie's especially interesting 'cause he is old, but I think a lot of it is, and y- this word almost just gets overused at this point, but it's true, is there's an authenticity element to it.

When Bernie gets up there and he's doing his whole oligarchy thing, like, that feels like what Bernie Sanders actually means.

That outrage and his talking points feel genuine to who he is.

It doesn't feel like he's sort of pandering or playing a game.

It, it feels like what Bernie Sanders is saying is fundamentally what he believes in.

I think some of the issues you get with other members that are in the party that are a bit older is you can tell that they're just kind of, like, trying to go through, like, "Oh, what was it that my consultant was saying to me the other day about, like, this thing that is supposed to message test really well?" You can see them almost doing this, like, calculation in their head about what they think voters wanna hear, which just, like, never ever works.

And so I guess when you talk to Democrats, do you feel like Democrats know that distinction? The distinction between people hating Trump and being mad and wanting them to do something about it, versus feeling like Democrats have a plan that people wanna tag onto?

Sure.

And like, it was a lot of, like, g- grounding that and rooting that in, like, more social issues, and I think now, especially this past week, with tariffs and everything and DOGE, they feel like you, you make this big tent by focusing it on pocketbook issues, and that's gonna mean different things for different people in different parts of the country.

For some people, that might mean, you know, tariffs, for example.

For others, it could be that their whole, like, parks department in Idaho got cut and everyone in this small town is out of a job all of a sudden.

Um, so I, I, I think the, you know, the organizers, the lens of their, their thinking about this is really, like, yeah, those pocketbook economic issues, and bring as many people as you possibly can into the tent by making it just about that and that message will, again, like look different in different parts of the country.

Huh.

Um, so busy day for- for- for those folks.

But it was part of this- these events that the DNC is doing, um, around the country to sort of, like, highlight, uh, Republicans that are not hosting their own town halls.

[laughs] It's just not gonna go well.

You know, he's kind of pointed the fact that he's had a good track record of, um, winning Senate seats, um, that he knows that, you know, it's not just up to any one leader.

He likened himself to, you know, he's, he's leading an orchestra and there's different roles for a lot of different people to play.

But, I mean, anyone who knows Schumer well says there's just, like, no chance he's going to, uh, just willingly go.

Yeah

... and get people on board, like, either direction.

'Cause I think what you hear from a lot of people is like, "Okay, this was not...

Dems were in a bad position.

They've kind of locked the party into this, like I'll use the word again, this stayed way of interacting in the media.

Yeah, I think it's been interesting seeing sort of what's happened in the days following that first episode of Charlie Kirk, because a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill, when they're on cable news now, are getting asked to respond to this.

And I've been, in a way, kind of surprised by how few people have actually wanted to go and criticize Newsom publicly.

Some of them have clearly felt a little uncomfortable with the question still, and they you know, have a long way to go on sort of workshopping, uh, good answers to, to the, to the transgender sports issue.

But, you know, Alyssa Slotkin was on to meet the press over the weekend and she was just kind of like, ah, like leave it up to local communities.

I don't really want to go there.

Um, so on the one hand, I do think there's a recognition within the party that, uh, rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly, they were perceived as being way too far left on this issue and the 2024 election that they, them add that we've all seen the Trump ad was really effective.

Willing to, and this is much more important than communication, willing to face the wrath or displeasure of the HRC, of GLAAD, of other big parts of their coalition that have sway? And it's sorry to ask this two part question is, or maybe as you write your opposition newsletter, are you picking up that groups like the GLAAD or the HRC are willing to back off a little bit and not have such a strong line or a harsh line on, say, kids in sports?

What are they doing? Please tell me.

They are so afraid of messing up and just being themselves that it's creating this sort of like paralysis where they can't go out there and get their message across.

The Democrats, I think, have a problem where everything has to be message tested.

Everything from a simple tweet to a TikTok video, someone on their staff has to sit there, help them write it, help them practice it.

Nothing feels authentic.

Nothing feels real.

And in today's communication era, you can't not feel like an authentic person online if you're trying to get a message, especially a political message out.

Yeah.

... it's been four months, and have they fixed it?

D- absolutely not.

Yeah, they definitely came out of the last election and were like, "This is bad.

We know we are bad at this.

This is no longer a problem we can ignore," uh, because Republicans have just, like, dominated this space so much.

And when we talk about, like, how the vibes were in 2024, the vibe election, how Trump and Republicans just have so much more cultural capital than the Democratic Party does right now.

So why don't they just do that?

... be political adjacent.