Episode 1835: The cherry on the pie

Annalise 0:01

Welcome to The Strategist, episode 1835. I'm your host, Annalise Klingbeil, and with you, as always, Zain Velji and Corey Hogan.

Zain 0:10

We got rid of him.

Zain 0:12

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. It took two weeks, but we got him.

Zain 0:18

He was right about the election, and

Zain 0:21

and then we had to ship him off. Yeah.

Zain 0:23

He was too good at

Corey 0:28

can't have steven predicting things right or wrong good or bad he's gone because he's not here no now he's just sad he's upset we had to we had to ship him away do we want to expose his

Zain 0:38

people can go find him because the the patreon will they

Zain 0:42

they will go oh

Corey 0:43

dox him yeah they will dox him uh let

Zain 0:44

let let's give them no clues they'll dox him regardless okay

Corey 0:47

okay yeah you know what we'll drop subtle clues yeah that's throughout um throughout the

Corey 0:52

the episode that's That's good. Okay.

Corey 0:54

How's that sound? What's your favorite fruit? Mine's the kiwi.

Annalise 0:57

Where in the world? I was going to say, the problem

Corey 0:58

problem is I don't know anything about New Zealand.

Corey 1:01

I'm a little... We nailed it. A little challenge. We nailed it at the same time, Corey. That's good.

Zain 1:04

I nailed it a little bit earlier than you, but I'll give it to you.

Annalise 1:07

Guys, how are you? I appreciate

Zain 1:08

appreciate that. It's been a

Zain 1:09

It's fine. It has been a minute. Recovering from COVID, recovering from the election, but excited to jump on the bandwagon of white dudes talking about what the Democratic Party did wrong.

Corey 1:20

Yeah. Can I tell you how much I appreciate... I'm just going to breeze right past you describing yourself as a white dude. Can I tell you? Sorry, socioeconomically

Zain 1:26

socioeconomically white, something that Democrats would

Corey 1:28

would never see. That's fair.

Corey 1:29

They're too stuck in

Zain 1:30

in the woke genre.

Corey 1:32

I really appreciated how you and Carter both went totally off the grid as soon as the US election occurred, as soon as the biggest news in politics in four years happened. I really appreciated that. You guys are reliable,

Zain 1:45

reliable, so that's a real thing.

Corey 1:47

Yeah. Apparently not so bad that you didn't give like opening remarks at like a Margaret Atwood event.

Zain 1:52

We're going there. We're calling you out on that. I nailed it. Just

Annalise 1:54

Just defend yourself, then we'll start. I

Zain 1:56

I think I did well. I think I did quite well for five minutes. And I think you're going to get a good five minutes from me on this show.

Zain 2:02

Oh, good. That's the best

Corey 2:03

best you're going to get. Okay, well, that's five more good minutes than we usually get from you. So I'm okay with that. Yeah, fine. Okay,

Annalise 2:07

Okay, guys, let's get into it. Zane has the strategist hat on tonight. Zane, you're feeling better?

Zain 2:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. I'm good. Perfect.

Annalise 2:14

Perfect. Guys, it's been almost two weeks. almost two weeks since the election. There's a lot of questions, a lot to digest, a lot to think about, and we're going to get into it. People have been waiting. They've been hungry for this episode. We're going to break it into three different themes. We're going to talk about the past, about what happened, talk about the present, and then talk about the future. So let's do this.

Corey 2:37

And then are we going to buy an orphan a Christmas ham? I don't

Corey 2:42

don't get the reference, so you don't

Zain 2:43

don't need to. It

Corey 2:44

It was actually a turkey, too. You know what, I kind of blew it. I

Annalise 2:46

I have no idea what the fuck

Corey 2:47

fuck he's talking about.

Annalise 2:48

about. Carter's not here, Corey. Carter would have known. It's just us young'uns. Do you think he's going to get a cabinet appointment?

Zain 2:52

appointment? I'm pretty sure he is. Yeah.

Zain 2:55

Oh, Carter? Carter for cabinet should be

Corey 2:59

Well, now it's going to have to be.

Annalise 3:02

Guys, first segment, the past. Corey Hogan, you've written a sub stack. You've been waiting two weeks to talk about this. What happened? What went wrong for the Harris campaign? And what went right for the Trump campaign? Oh, yeah, you wrote

Zain 3:16

wrote a thing. Okay,

Zain 3:17

so that's why we're talking about this.

Corey 3:22

listen, the thing I wrote was probably more about the future than it's about the past, because it was the lessons we might be able to take for Canadian politicals. We'll get there. We'll get there. Just wait. But in terms of what went wrong, you know, it's interesting to me, because

Corey 3:39

there's a lot of knee-jerk opinions, including from myself. Like, we all see it, and it becomes a bit of a Rorschach test, right? Like whatever you didn't like about Harris or the Democrats or the state of society becomes the reason why she lost. And I think the reality is it's going to take a little bit of time to disaggregate and to look at it relative to other jurisdictions and understand what's uniquely American. But I think two things are fundamentally true. And I actually think the argument about which one is true is missing the point because they can both be true.

Corey 4:09

And they both stack on each other in alarming ways here. One is, it's absolutely true that incumbents are taking a beating all the way across the democratic world. But it is also true that the Dems don't know how to speak to people that they used to know how to speak to. And these are not, these are not unrelated. And they can both be true. Because I guess just to get us kicking off here, what I would say is, look,

Corey 4:32

look, yes, it is true that there are anti-incumbency vibes across the Western world, right? But it's not as though the Democrats being in a precarious position against a historically bad candidate is something that just occurred this year. They shouldn't have lost in 2016. 2020 should not have been close. Donald Trump is historically bad and an unprecedented threat to American norms. You know, nobody could convince me otherwise about that. And that didn't just happen in the last 12 months here, right? But Donald Trump is is also tied into that broader story because dissatisfaction with the system is real is a real concern and by the system i don't mean american democracy i kind of mean democracy like people are mad everywhere left or right they're mad at their government nobody in all of democracy land seems happy and people are starting to come to some worrying conclusions right a lot less enthusiasm for for fucking democracy as a result of people just feeling like the system is not not getting them what they want. So what happened?

Corey 5:32

I mean, everything, everything is happening. It's all kind of happening. And we should all be looking at the lessons and we shouldn't overreact to them.

Corey 5:38

But we also shouldn't hand wave them away. And we shouldn't underreact to them.

Annalise 5:42

Kissing. Corey says everything is happening. What's you've had a couple weeks to digest what happened?

Zain 5:48

Well, I haven't had much time to digest because I had COVID. Right. And then I had to prepare for my five minutes, in which I blew the crowd away in front of Margaret Atwood. Right. So like, I haven't had a lot of time to think about this. Yeah. And I just want

Corey 5:58

want to make sure you

Zain 5:58

you guys I have

Zain 5:59

have an accurate representation of where my time has been invested.

Zain 6:02

Corey's right in some ways. I think the most fascinating element to this sort of outcome for me is that you could have walked into this election on election night and had the scenario that played out, and it could have been blindingly obvious that this was going to be the case, that Kamala Harris was an extension of Joe Biden. And of course, this was going to be a referendum on Biden when we knew that the anti-incumbency wave was one compounding factor. But the other one was the fact that people were looking at this through the cost of living and economic question. And Kamala Harris didn't do enough to separate herself. It was blindingly obvious that this was going to be the case. It also could have been blindingly obvious if Harris trumped it with 300 plus electoral votes that it was, of course, Donald fucking Trump on the other side. So I think Corey's right, like we can't overreact one way or the other. Because I think one of the things that the Democrats need to do in this particular case, as cliche as it might seem, is think about the things that I think they did right. And I really think they had an excellent six-week stretch with Harris, where they were actually nailing the freedom side of things, the vibes. Actually, I think that is a huge part of their success and why it was so close. And I would hate for them to think about throwing that sort of stuff away. Adding to that, I think there's a lot of commentary out there by people much more, quote-unquote plugged in, but perhaps that's actually not of benefit in their analysis. But I will circle a few things that I found interesting. Number one, perhaps there was a bit of a mirage for Team Biden in 2022 in terms of overplaying the democracy and women's rights angle, which found itself to be a core focus in 2024. Perhaps to Corey's point, people don't care about democracy because it doesn't mean a lot to them when their grocery bills are so high and the the economy isn't necessarily performing to the way that they need to. And then the third point I'd kind of add onto the table, which I think Corey also alluded to, is the Democrats really need to do something about their, in its highest form, messaging, but I think in its more precise form, language. They have an issue with language, whether it's linguistic simplicity or just meeting people where they're at and how they speak. speak.

Zain 8:15

And Democrats have had a long historical sort of Achilles heel around taking popular things and making them less popular with how they package them and how they speak about them. That's actually been a longstanding thing. And in fact, it's been one of the reasons why Democrats have shied away from popular policy positions is because they actually haven't had the ability to necessarily communicate them in eloquent, simple terms that connect with people. And now I think there's a really interesting postmortem sort of battle going on right now because some people in the Democratic Party are trying to give honest postmortem. Very few, I would say. And most people are trying to continue to win the tug of war because the existential crisis for the Democrats is now just not simply on linguistic messaging. It's about which direction this party goes. Is the left to blame for the social issues? Is the left actually the only reason that they were this close with economics, the left sort of leading economics that Biden pulled ahead? And there's a longstanding sort of debate that's now going to find itself in real time as the Democrats try to, you know, do the live on air tug of war that is the future of their party.

Annalise 9:24

Some good thoughts from Zane there. Corey, you wanted to respond to at least some of it?

Corey 9:30

Yeah, look, I think Zane and I, I suspect would probably agree. It's not a one of the above thing. It's all of the above in some combination. And we're just we're talking about which one is probably the most prevalent. And so I think the Democrats can't hand wave away one or the other. They've got to look at the whole package. Frankly, as Canadians, we shouldn't look at one and just say that's that's the reason it is here. But one of the things that I'll tell you that I don't actually believe was a huge problem for the Democrats, with a little last risk I'll throw on the end here, is Harris. I think Harris was pretty good. Like, I would not have picked her. I think that there should have been a primary. I think even if she had won the primary, it would have strengthened things. But people just sort of immediately decided, okay, here we are. And Zane's right. Then the vibes were pretty good for a while. And she was, she was pretty good. She killed Donald Trump in the debate. Like, I have not seen a debate that one-sided in a long, long time.

Corey 10:27

But she only had 100 days. And it was what it was. Like, you were not going to fundamentally change the frame in 100 days. And as Zane said it, right, Biden was a bit of a millstone around her neck here. And that was never going to change in 100 days. Maybe if she had 300 days, 400 days, she could have created some distance, a little bit of that Kabuki theater where she has a different position than the president, and it looks like they're disagreeing in a way that's not hurtful, but actually helpful. That all could have been possible, right? But I think that ultimately, one

Corey 10:58

one of the, so the asterisk here is, like,

Corey 11:02

like, she did fine within that pretty limited construct. And I do think that on reflection, there were a couple of things that we should have looked at. And it actually goes to Zane's point about messaging and language, and

Corey 11:14

and the Democrats struggling a little bit with those things. I actually also think there's a delivery mechanism question. I think it's a fundamental nuts and bolts. How do people make decisions? How do people form opinions in 2024 thing? I'm sure we'll get into this a lot over the coming weeks and months, years even, but I don't think we know how people make decisions anymore at all. And I just, I think about that debate, the debate where I believe Harris killed him.

Corey 11:44

Most people interpreted the debate through media, right? They got it from their friends, or they got it from the news media, or they got it from social media, whatever it was, they

Corey 11:53

they got it secondhand. And one of the things that I think a lot about now, especially with the benefit of hindsight here, is every single one of those stories, all of them that said that Harris won the debate or was really strong and essentially put Trump on the back foot. Like, you couldn't find many people who thought Trump won that debate. But all of those stories talked about, and then Donald Trump only turned to the economy at the last minute, which was his strongest position, and why didn't he spend more time on that? And I was thinking about it, like, how much water got carried for Donald Trump in some of that analysis, even the analysis that said Kamala Harris won, because it was just a given that Donald Trump was better at the economy. And why didn't he talk about the economy more? And the critiques of Donald Trump became oblique critiques of Kamala Harris. And I

Corey 12:42

just think that that starting position and the way it was set is not something you can change in 100 days. And

Zain 12:50

And so that's where I think fundamentally

Corey 12:53

waves matter, where Harris was matters. But yeah,

Corey 12:57

yeah, there's a lot to unpack. And one of them is maybe a kick-ass debate performance doesn't matter. Maybe that's just such an old media approach to these things. And I think evidence now suggests it is. Zane,

Annalise 13:07

Zane, was she doomed from the beginning? Or do you think more time would we'd be having a different conversation right now?

Zain 13:14

could make a case that she could probably tighten things up if she had a bit more time. I think there is a strategic failure on the campaigns part. I, like Corey, think she was not a perfect candidate. But man, did I think she ran an excellent 100 plus days. I mean, the fact that she came in there, won that debate, had an incredible launch, fantastic convention. intervention um you know and and i and i think this there is like a race and gender component to this where even in in this in this post-mortem phase so many people are blaming a single answer that she gave on the view where she said she had nothing that she would do different than joe biden as being the her demise i mean fuck that right like joe biden is allowed 50 fucking gaffes a week and he was still the candidate this woman isn't allowed like one moment in which she cleaned up fucking 15 seconds later, and you're going to use that. You're going to simultaneously argue that mainstream media doesn't matter anymore, and

Zain 14:09

then argue that an answer that she gave in a 10 second clip on The View broke her candidacy. You can't have it both ways. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons the Democrats are so fucking

Zain 14:19

fucking dumb sometimes in terms of trying to process blame. They want to be the smartest people in the moment, and they want to be the smartest people people after the moment. They're one of the most crystallized thoughts versus the most logical thoughts, which is you can't say that there's a right-wing media ecosystem that had already incubated a particular viewpoint for millions of Americans and nothing mattered six months before the election while simultaneously saying, fuck, she could have had it if she'd said something different on The View. Like, get fucked. Like, that's not a real thing, like, to me. And so- Yeah, I agree with that, for sure. You know, and I think that you cannot understate the importance of the right wing media system that has been created. And I don't even think I'm not even talking about Rogan here. I think that was just a cherry, you know, on the pie for Trump, or on the proverbial sort of, you know, Sunday. I'm talking about like the deliberate right-wing media ecosystem that has been created that is a parallel, not even of the Manosphere podcast universe that has been kind of seeding these messages, taking ground away, communicating like a Howard Stern or an Opie and Anthony Wood during the daytime to your Hispanic or your black construction worker sort of dude all across the States for months. This wasn't like the last six weeks they turned it on and they killed it. This has been happening for months. And the Democrats ignore that that particular aspect as well to their peril. I'll add one more point here. And I know we're kind of going a yes and sort of thing. There's also another really fascinating element to this to me that gives me a bit of hope. And I know we're not talking about the future. But if I'm a Democrat or a progressive, you could also and Corey, you may agree on this. I suspect you will. And I haven't had a chance to reach your sub stack piece. But you

Zain 16:04

you could also, you could also overcorrect if you're the Democrats, you could also overcorrect in terms of what this election meant to you. You've lost black men, you've lost Hispanic men, you've lost white women, like you could just go fucking nuts and be like, we got to rebuild everything from the ground up. And part of it, like there's a case to be made. But at the same time, it is true in the American electorate system that coalitions aren't passed through, right?

Zain 16:32

right? Right? Like, you know, Clinton was not able to hand his coalition to Gore. Obama wasn't able to hand his coalition to Clinton. And I mean, Hillary in this case, right? And so in this case, when you're looking at what Trump was able to do, don't assume this coalition is going to be handed to the heir apparent of a J.D. Vance or whoever. And yes, I am speaking of a world in which we have future elections. But don't suspect that this coalition is just going to be handed over and And overcorrect the lessons that you're learning here in a certain way versus like deliberately thinking about things that apply across the board in terms of how you think and how you communicate going forward.

Annalise 17:10

Corey, you touched on this, like

Annalise 17:13

like not knowing how people make decisions. There's this whole right wing media aspect that we can get into. But I think kind of boiling down, like do campaigns matter nowadays in 2024?

Corey 17:23

Yeah, well, my growing thesis is they don't. Which is not to say that elections don't matter, but I don't think campaigns know how to reach people. And maybe Donald Trump's does. Maybe by accident or design, it does, because there does seem to be some

Corey 17:39

some evidence of that. See him winning two of the three elections he's been in being, I don't know, it's kind of floating right at 50% of the vote right now. But he's got almost a majority of the vote, which is almost unheard of for Republicans in this day and age here. But I don't know. Like, we also are starting to see a little bit of evidence develop that both here and in the United States that once it's on, it's on. And it's kind of where it was at the start, wherever you want to sort of define the start. And I think I mentioned in that Substack piece I wrote there that it's

Corey 18:13

it's going to get 12 more plugs, I think, Zane, before the end of the day.

Corey 18:16

day. Is this going to be the only

Zain 18:17

only Substack piece you ever write? Because I suspect it might be. It's the first one. First

Zain 18:21

I feel like it's first and last. It's like most people's podcasts. They do one episode and they're like, we're not good at this and we should stop. And then there's us. How dare you? Who've got larger egos than that.

Corey 18:33

the Alberta campaign, the Saskatchewan campaign, the BC campaign, the polls or sort of the aggregate of three or four polls just before the writ got dropped, ended up being closer to the final result than the three or four polls just at the end of the election cycle. Right. right and there's two people you can look at and say oh that doesn't look great for you one of them is pollsters right because pollsters are seeing perhaps trends that don't exist and why is that and i have some thoughts on that but maybe you got to go read the substack to get them i don't know that's a tease what's

Annalise 19:03

what's your substance cory hogan cory

Corey 19:08

dot substack dot com yeah k-o-r-i-e hogan yeah that's up yeah you gotta spell my first name right which nobody does but once you've done that it's right there for you i spelled it for them okay

Corey 19:18

okay then there's the uh the

Corey 19:21

the uh the other people you can kind of say what do you do in our campaigns like if people cannot change your opinion through the course of a campaign with all of the advertising with all of the ground with all of the everything we do you

Corey 19:33

you got to ask yourself some hard questions about whether we're investing in the right things as campaign strategists whether whether this actually actually matters in a world where we are just saturated day in, day out. Like, let's just zoom out for a minute. You know, I'm just going to throw this on the table. I don't know if this is true or not. I'm going to call this a thought experiment. It's the

Zain 19:51

the very Carter of you. I don't know if this is true or not. It

Corey 19:53

It is very Carter.

Corey 19:54

I miss him so much. I'm so glad. Yeah,

Zain 19:55

Yeah, let's not dox where he's at, but you know, a

Zain 19:58

a flight of the Concords, great band. Anyways, keep going.

Corey 20:03

in the 90s, you'd pick up your newspaper, you'd read your newspaper for the day, you'd go you'd talk to your friends at work you'd move on with your life you'd watch the evening news right but your your kind of touch points of news were i don't know three i'm gonna say in a day maybe it's the newspaper maybe it's the evening news and maybe it's talking to your friend bob who has opinions about everything right but now we have these little fucking devices in our pockets which saturate us 24 7 with news and opinions at such a pace and with such like rhetoric and such heat that

Corey 20:34

that we cannot avoid and just pull us deeper and deeper into these cones why why do we think a brochure competes with that why the fuck do we think that

Corey 20:44

that handing somebody at the door a little brochure and saying i think you should consider my candidate matters why do we think a 30 second ad matters in that context like like like the the overall overwhelming surge of shit that you're Whether you're on the left or the right, or you call yourself a centrist or whatever, that you're just in perpetually.

Corey 21:06

Why do we think the campaign tactics that worked 30 years ago amount

Corey 21:09

amount to anything in that? And I'm not even saying that they don't have a certain level of sophistication. I'm just saying, by sheer volume of political conversation, do

Corey 21:19

do they matter? Like, what is the actual thrust that's driving our opinion? That's a question I think we need to dig into. how do

Annalise 21:25

do you break through in that and when you have resources like there's new york times piece today about um harris's 1.5 billion dollar campaign in 15 weeks you fuck

Zain 21:36

fuck we did not get to play in that cory i wish we did you've

Annalise 21:39

got resources how do you break through cory that's

Zain 21:41

that's i don't even think that's including the pack spending sorry annalise but that's

Zain 21:44

that's an insane insane dollar amount yeah

Annalise 21:46

yeah do you want to let

Zain 21:48

let cory jump sure

Corey 21:49

sure it is but can i just say like the media market in the united states depending on how you want to measure it is somewhere between 700 billion and over a trillion so just to go back to what i was saying a second ago the fuck does 1 billion dollars matter in that what's 1.5 billion dollars matter in that and uh there is just this whole ecosystem you turn on 1.5 billion dollars what do we think the value is of all of the fox news commentary from harris being nominated until election day what do we think the value of all of the msnbc commentary is from harris being nominated to election day like we have these mental models and we think oh that's so much money and the campaign's doing so much stuff but when you think about the the

Corey 22:31

ocean that this boat is floating in does it doesn't matter at all and and if it doesn't the question becomes how are you actually

Corey 22:39

maybe it's not about the boat maybe it's about the ocean and how are you making the ocean different

Corey 22:42

different right like what are you doing long term so

Corey 22:45

so that you're seeding the ecosystem you need to

Corey 22:48

to be successful what's

Annalise 22:48

what's what's your solution cory how do you change the ocean

Corey 22:53

well you know zane was talking a little bit about the the right wing manosphere i think you called it zane i'm calling i

Corey 22:59

are no that's what everyone's calling it but that's that's the phrase you pulled out well i get

Zain 23:03

with that so i'm very familiar with all these players and it's funny to me when most people have no idea who the nelt boys are or like who schultz is or like all these folks right and i think it's because i'm a dude of a certain age that like my algo like targets me with this content right so i'm very familiar with charlie Kirk and all these folks, where it's like, not a thing for many folks. And I think, yeah, I just found it surprising that like, it was, I

Zain 23:29

I think we can go into a diagnosis why the Democrats like didn't kind of have a, there's a lot of conversation now, whether they need their own version of it, or whether they didn't go on these shows, because I don't think they're naturally right wing. I genuinely do not think they're naturally like Republican, so to speak, as some people would in saying that they're a radicalization training ground. But but anyways,

Zain 23:47

going. Some of them.

Corey 23:50

I think that we can't deny the fact that there is, there's

Corey 23:54

there's a more interesting combination of positive feedback loops if you're a player in that right-wing sphere, right?

Corey 24:00

100%. You know, and

Corey 24:01

and that's for a lot of reasons. And I don't know. I mean, I think that that then to say, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to run an ad about democracy against Donald Trump, and I'm going to show up and I'm going to have a big rally with Beyonce. And again, I'm not knocking Harris. I'm really not. Like she was dealt a hand and she played it. And I think she played it pretty well in that context.

Corey 24:21

But to go back to Annalise's question here, maybe

Corey 24:23

maybe you're sitting there and

Corey 24:26

you're playing cards, but you don't realize it's really about the building you're in. Like everything was determined with the minute you walked in that door.

Corey 24:32

And so that's when I say that, I wonder if campaigns matter. That's what I mean, right? Like I'm starting to wonder if campaigns can matter in this context. And I also worry that

Corey 24:43

there isn't a real willingness or eagerness of campaign practitioners to

Corey 24:48

to really assess whether if anything they're doing matters at all because there is such an incentive as we move into these big like listen man like i'd be curious your thoughts especially in the context of some of the recent campaigns you've done but you

Corey 25:02

you go into a campaign and

Corey 25:05

you create an ad and you're going to put that ad in front of focus groups and then you're going to run that ad and you're going going to see from your

Corey 25:10

your YouTube algorithms, how many seconds people are watching, and you're going to AB test different versions, and you're going to see which ones have higher click-through rates. And if you're halfway as competent, halfway as competent, even if the ad didn't do a fucking thing, you're going to have a certain amount of data that says, actually, I'm very good at my job. And that's even if you lose. If you win, you get to point yourself as a genius anyway. I think the ability to be truly self-reflective and say, did this fucking matter, is approaching approaching zero in politics i truly believe that and and i think that people get lucky a lot but i just do not feel that there's this rigor and candor and one of the things that is a consequence of swimming in analytics is there's always a metric that says you're good and if you're willing to self-delude yourself you will find the metric in in fact i'd

Zain 25:58

i'd say the platforms are well aware that everyone's got a boss yeah

Corey 26:04

yeah what do you mean by that zane totally agree with Totally agree with you, Zane. Totally agree with you. That

Zain 26:08

That if I'm the social media manager, if I'm the digital director, if I'm the analytics chief on a campaign, and I'm talking about corporate campaign, nonprofit campaign, advocacy, political,

Zain 26:19

that I've got a boss, and they're going to give me a firehose of metrics that make me look good to my boss. And then when you scale that out amongst a Democratic consultant class of which, you know, when you combine the PACs and you combine the history and the longevity of how long some of these folks have been working on these campaigns, one of the things I'd kind of go back to is when you go ask your question, Annalise, do campaigns still matter? matter. I have been on the other side of Corey's sort of, no, they don't, for a while. But I think he makes some really compelling points. And I think one of them, and I know you've made this argument, Corey, I think you started making it during the BC election, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah.

Zain 27:05

And I think what this American campaign has brought to life for me is I might jump into

Zain 27:12

into a version of this and say, this is what I believe. It's very much like borrowing from Corey, which is, I think machine-run campaigns don't matter. And what I mean by that is that one of the things we were touting, that the media was touting, was the Democratic machine. In fact, fuck, like, GOTV, they've got a machine in Pennsylvania. Like, can you beat the Democratic machine? Trump doesn't have a machine. Trump

Corey 27:34

Trump has no machine. And

Zain 27:36

And not to be too cute about this, but

Zain 27:38

but what is a machine at the end of the day? It's like this uniform, singular, mindless, non-friction. It's no gloss. I'm not finding the right word. It just gets the job done. There's no sex appeal to it. There's no character. There's no personality. There's no rough edges.

Zain 28:02

And in fact, I think all the things I've just listed right now are things that have been part part of the democratic downfall in the sense that the machine is too it's it's too well oiled the machine runs too well it's run it's running at a point where its job is just to run not get an outcome its job is to put out an output create

Zain 28:24

create ads fuck the democrat machine can create ads man are they good fuck if i know right and that's actually that's actually probably their internal dialogue right now can the machine create ads fuck yeah we've got ad makers for you But is it about linguists? Have we studied linguistic simplicity? And is it the right message?

Zain 28:41

Couldn't tell you, right? And I think right now where I'm landing is that campaigns, they have to have like a machine-like feel to them. And I'm not saying that they're over-engineered or that they're too professional. I'm not trying to undercut professionalism. I'm not trying to say do it like Trump and be fucking nuts and dominate the media all the time and who cares what else happens. But there is something to be said about how the machine here might be part of the downfall. I'm just working through some thoughts here. Who knows if this is

Corey 29:06

is like that? No, I totally, listen, I

Corey 29:08

I think you're right. And like, I won't call out a specific media tracking platform, but when you say they know you have a boss, I'll just say, you can get the exact same number of eyeballs year over year, and the estimated dollar value will go up every year, right? And that's just a

Corey 29:26

a little disingenuous. And the multiplier effects are getting to the point where it's really absurd. And you can go to a client though, and you can say, hey, I got you $130,000 I've earned media did you did you fucking really or is that just what they said because they know every year that number's got to be a little bit bigger and so that's a bit of a challenge and i think people need to take a jaundiced eye to some of these metrics that are designed to make communications teams look good and i say that as somebody who has spent his professional life running

Corey 29:54

running communications teams right i think the other challenge though and you were talking about this zane or maybe you weren't but i want to throw this on the table anyways is

Corey 30:03

they're they're they have these machines that are designed to optimize a play but they're not really designed to change a game right and so yeah story and narrative yeah

Corey 30:11

story and narrative in my opinion is is being shortchanged and

Corey 30:16

and and the things that could really change the game like creating a feeling building a movement getting a sense out there that something is right or a sense out there that something is wrong i

Corey 30:27

i don't know they're just not as good at that as you need them to be i think and i think for all of the things that we can complain about donald trump for and that list is really fucking long just let's not let's just not lose sight of that he

Corey 30:42

he knows how to consume the media to create a narrative to challenge narratives to totally turn the fucking table over and say you're going to talk about what i want but let's also not forget cory

Zain 30:51

cory that there was a six-week stretch in this campaign where we did not donald trump was not dominating the daily news. That's when Harris ran on the vibes, the walls pick, freedom, I thought was a really interesting message and crystallization. And then the Democrats did what the Democrats do, the machine took over, and they had to appeal to all their constituency groups. And an election that was supposed to kind of be run on a feeling of joy and putting stuff together went back to being a 2022 rehash in some way of women's rights, and it became a policy election. And they kind of found themselves, perhaps to their own—perhaps an own goal in their own right, having a policy election when they were setting themselves up with a candidate who wanted to really not have that type of election, at least

Zain 31:38

least from the get when

Corey 31:41

when she— Well, look, I mean, given—it's quite possible that even at the peak of vibe mania, Kamala mania there, she was actually losing, right? Oh, I very much think she was

Corey 31:51

but I think she narrowed

Zain 31:51

narrowed the gap significantly.

Corey 31:52

Well, I 100% agree with that. You know, so it goes back to this broader thing of Democrats

Corey 31:59

Democrats need to spend some time to figure that out, right? Like to really understand where they actually were, do the retrospective, say, okay, with the benefit of knowing what actually happened on election day, where do we think we were? 100 days out, 75 days out, 50 days out, 25 days out. When were things going good and trending in the right direction? When were they going wrong and trending in the wrong direction? And what can we learn from that? That's going to be really important. Can

Zain 32:21

Can I add two points really quickly, Annalise? I think the first one, Corey's kind of mentioning all these tactics and stress testing them. I think that is an action that this is the time that they should do that, right? Including some of your most cherished tactics, like door knocking. In fact, I think door knocking needs its own – like, logically, taking our campaign hats off, interrupting someone at home when people do not want to talk to you and asking them about a topic that they don't want to talk to you about sounds like an insane thing to do.

Zain 32:56

Like, it just sounds like an insane thing to do, but it is cherished amongst all stripes and all types of practitioners in politics. Like stress testing that as a core tactic, for example, just like you would test the radio spot, the TV spot, the 15 seconds, the sixes, the 30s, all these things I think is a really helpful and interesting thing to do. The second thing that I can't overstate enough, though, is that Trump's

Zain 33:21

Trump's campaign, with all its rough edges, got into a cultural conversation. And

Zain 33:26

And in an era where politics is part of culture, where people know it, to Corey's point, like they know pop culture, or like they talk about movies or films or all these things, politics has infused itself over the last decade as being as such. the democratic campaign was not infused in culture all those stars came

Zain 33:45

came on as like add-on endorses they weren't necessarily part of a cultural conversation unlike where i think trump was in many ways and

Zain 33:53

think that's something they need to think about where i think that one of the big failures was they

Zain 33:57

they just didn't meet the people in in a cultural way the the harris campaign i think they tried to shoehorn and i think they knew it was a delta like they needed to close the gap there i just don't think they did it successfully guys

Annalise 34:09

guys let's move into the present talk just because we're going that way anyways um present like when when is the time that you rethink all that stuff that you're talking about that you rethink door knocking that you burn the whole system to the down down to the ground that you rethink the traditional media that you um

Annalise 34:26

um you know going forward the manosphere podcast like that sort of stuff talk to me about the present saying you've You've been on some recent campaigns where

Annalise 34:35

where like, OK, it happened. It's in the past. Everyone has opinions about what happened, what went wrong, what could have been different. Talk to me about the present.

Zain 34:43

Do it now. Do it. Do it a little bit later and then keep doing it. I mean, so do it now in the sense when it's fresh and you've got these reactive thoughts, do it a bit later when those reactive thoughts are less reactive and you're able to have a clear eyed perspective on what is real and what wasn't. and what was kind of emotional frustration. And then when you do it continuously, I think that's where you run the experiments. I think the big, I'll say it again, the big mistake that the Democrats can make is that thinking that their entire campaign was shit. And I think that the overcorrection that they can make is thinking that that coalitions are lost forever or for a generation. Will they have shitty Senate rounds in 26, 28, and 30? Yeah, they will. Like it's going to be bad for them just because of the red states available and what they have in terms of availability to flip the board in terms of the Senate. But that does not necessarily mean that those coalitions that Trump will transfer over to whoever will be as such. So, you know, go in with a set of assumptions that are more robust than just thinking through what we could have done this time, because that's not necessarily helpful to you. It's more about what we can do going forward. And then I'll add a Corey Hoganism to the table, which I suspect he would have anyway. So let me get to it before he does, which is, you're also not trying to build the playbook

Zain 36:00

for this election next time. It's

Corey 36:02

It's not going to

Zain 36:02

to be the same. So you're not necessarily trying to do it in service of that. And make sure that you have that as like a core reminder, right? That he's not going to keep his coalition, so to speak, or transfer it over. So don't overcorrect. Everything you did wasn't shit, right? Think about like things from its broadest perspective in terms of longevity. But also, you're not trying to recreate the 2024 campaign Bible that would would have allowed Kamala Harris 130 days out to win an election. Who the fuck cares if you could, you know, reverse engineer that? Yeah,

Corey 36:30

Yeah, that's not going to be relevant at all. Totally.

Zain 36:32

a great academic exercise.

Zain 36:33

exercise. I would love to see it, but like, what

Zain 36:35

useful would it be for you? Yeah, like

Corey 36:37

like our parallel universe machine is in the shop, so. Yeah, exactly. C'est la vie, right? Look, I generally agree. I don't know that they want to do it now, depending on what it means. I do think right after something like this, you need to capture your reactive thoughts. you need to gather information before that information gets lost but you

Corey 36:56

know do it like make those changes a bit later outside of the heat of the moment like it's so human to go through something and to overreact and to overcorrect and to overswing and to Zane's point there

Corey 37:08

there was a lot good that they want to make sure that they're not throwing out too and so that's really where you've got to think about things in terms of incrementalism you've got to do these things gradually and slowly and look at the evidence, honestly look at the evidence and see if they are making an effect. And the great thing about the American system is

Corey 37:26

is it does allow you to test things in 50 states and across 435 congressional districts. You don't need to go all in in a way that's going to potentially break

Corey 37:38

break your coalition. As much as people are saying, oh my God, the Democrats got the lowest percent of black men's votes that they have in, I don't know how long but it's still like generation 78 80 like based like for fuck's sake like that's that's an absolute overwhelming route uh with a demographic and you don't want to start saying well i guess we've got to change our democratic or demographic focus that's crazy right

Corey 38:02

right you've got to think about those things but i do think that one of the other things the democrats will have to contend with as as they're doing it whatever it is whatever they decide to change is i

Corey 38:12

mean they're all so close and they're also invested so i

Corey 38:15

don't think it's a crazy idea to go to new zealand and find a canadian political strategist and say just you know hypothetically speaking here

Corey 38:23

say can you run a bit of a debrief for us or like go through the data and try to understand it and it doesn't actually need to be a stephen carter type but i do think you want to look at people from outside of your jurisdiction they don't have a dog in the fight they're a lot more likely to be clear-eyed about it and not exclusively rely on their inputs but have that be an important part of the review too and that'll be tough for americans because americans never believe the best ideas come from anywhere but the united states can

Zain 38:52

can i make an argument for what to do now yeah i think the one thing this group right now needs to do because

Zain 38:59

because i agree with cory largely like and when i let's define what it is and in the debrief but i think there's one thing that they should do right now that you would not necessarily suggest if this was a positive outcome. I think there's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of angst. And frankly, there's a lot of bile and hatred for one's own party. And if I was a Democrat and if I was smart, I would actually collect that right now.

Zain 39:26

I would actually say, right now, you're in a reactionary, emotional state. Lay it on me. Give it to me. It may not be constructive or useful, but that catharsis, I think, is actually super strategic. In order to allow a rebuild, I think people don't want to wait months in order to give someone a piece of their ear. And I think any good organization recognizes that there's feedback that's useful and strategic and constructive and feedback that just needs to be given so that the other person feels heard. And I think there's a lot of folks right now in the democratic sort of universe, whether they consider themselves part of that aforementioned machine or or not, but are supportive of the outcomes of the Democratic Party's principles that feel like shit right now. They either have a, I told you so, we should have done this, I've got thoughts. And to me, that is actually a mark of engagement, continued engagement. To me, the fact that they still, like they're angry shows to me that they're engaged. And if I'm the Democrats and I'm smart about it, I actually want to get that energy, and I want to harness that energy, and I want to use as part of what the rebuild looks like. I think political parties that fail to do that, to capture that energy and let these people internally kind of boil, will ultimately lose those people. And these people are ultimately assets that they need down the line. So that's one argument I can make for what they should do at this junction, even without proper DNC leadership, so to speak.

Annalise 40:53

How do they collect it, Zane? What's your pitch on how they hear that? This

Zain 40:58

This is what's the beauty of the United States. It's states, right? So many people operate in their states. I would actually split this up by states. I would have national leadership fly into certain jurisdictions. I would have multiple Zoom calls. I would do this relatively quickly. I would set up a schedule for this. I would, you know, even arrange it as, like, support groups for Democrat organizers and others, right? Like, you know, let you reel a bit. Like, you're not going to do anything constructive or productive, but if you're at least part of the collection of this bile or maybe this not necessarily useful feedback that's going to create the next future, but it's part of someone's catharsis, I think that's an incredibly important opportunity.

Annalise 41:40

Corey, good idea, bad idea?

Corey 41:43

little of both i think one of the interesting things about it is in some ways it um it for

Corey 41:49

for me it almost gets to what do you need to do next and so you've got to be a little bit cautious on that front like one of the you know the american system we're talking about is you know a couple of times and so like yeah and they can do all these crazy things but there is a version of it their parties are quite different right um even

Corey 42:06

even in canada after a loss like this you will see a certain growth in and factionalism, you'll see people say, well, they only lost because they weren't left wing enough. Or let's use the NDP as an example. They weren't committed enough to the environment. They weren't committed enough to labor. They weren't committed enough to being moderates, right? You know, that kind of that centrist version of a new Democrat, right? And there'll be some arguments about it. And people will start to self-collect and self-organize and say, well, we're going to change things. We're going to get a leader who believes in X. We're going to get policies that It's do why. We're going to organize ourselves at the ground level around Zed. And so that happens here, and that really happens in the United States, right? Because we've said it before, and I'll say it again, like in

Corey 42:48

in the British system, parties pick their candidates. In the American system, candidates pick their parties. We're a little bit of a hybrid. But if you don't like what's going on with the DNC, you're

Corey 43:01

you're probably not going to sit it out in the same way we would mean sit it out here in canada which might be going to a different party not engaging in the same you're just going to engage with the faction more deeply and maybe at the expense of the whole and so i think if you're not reaching out and giving people an avenue for them to be involved in let's just call it the democratic establishment they're

Corey 43:22

they're going to put that effort elsewhere so uh that's that's a danger for you if you think that one of the things that needs to occur is more of a commitment to the team, or maybe the Democrats were too consumed with factionalism in certain ways. Maybe they were too consumed with the, you

Corey 43:37

you know, that classic broker politics of the Democrats where they do thing for group A and thing for group B and thing for group C, and group D's mad because they did things for groups A, B, and C, right? Like, if you think that's part of the problem, then you probably don't want to allow people to drift to and become more deeply involved in the quote unquote factions. You know, so you're going going to want to get on that pretty quickly here but if you think that what the democrats need is strong independent voices then you know fucking just let it happen it'll happen right but that's you know i don't necessarily believe that's what the democratic party needs but um but certainly there are people who do although

Corey 44:14

although they might phrase it differently

Annalise 44:16

anything else to add to present what they should be uh doing

Annalise 44:19

doing right now yeah

Corey 44:22

we're talking about a very inward looking exercise here. But there's also a lunatic a minute being named as the nominee by Trump to become a cabinet minister. And I

Corey 44:35

I don't think you can entirely ignore that. Or maybe you can't. Like, I actually think it's an interesting point of discussion. Like,

Corey 44:42

once Trump won by so much, and the Senate was so clearly with the Republicans, I had actually kind kind of hoped in a funny way that the republicans would win the house because it's like well they'll have all the fucking keys when

Corey 44:56

when it's a clown car they'll have nobody to blame but themselves and like that that's just one way to do it right like don't get in their way in a sense let let them be the most extreme and worthless version of themselves possible but there is another version that says that's very dangerous that's very high stakes especially at a moment like this and now Now is the time to stand up for democracy, stand up for these institutions and fight, fight these nominees. And so I

Corey 45:22

I don't know how I feel about that, to be honest. You could convince me with a good argument one way or the other, but I do note that there seems, let's put it this way, for

Zain 45:34

for how horrible these cabinet picks are, and

Corey 45:37

and they are like generationally bad, you know, probably of the five worst cabinet appointments of all time. Four of them have been announced in the last two weeks here. You know, I don't know that that's an exaggeration. It's been pretty quiet, you know? It has. Like, you haven't seen the uproar and the attempts at getting uproar that you might expect in a moment like this.

Zain 45:58

this. You know, extending this out a bit too, right? Like, even beyond the cabinet picks, because, yeah, like, while you have an insane pick a minute coming from Trump, we know that's just the start of it in terms of the outright insanity. And the Democrats have actually boxed themselves in in a really interesting way, because they have said that electing Donald Trump is electing a fascist, right?

Zain 46:21

Like, on its face. Like, they've taken John Kelly's words and they've put it back. That is what this guy is.

Zain 46:27

And so he's brought fascism to America. And

Zain 46:30

do you apply the modern rules of attention, of political strategy, of allowing the time for the rebuild, the honeymoon period, knowing that you're getting memed by the Republicans? Do you apply those rules, the newly learned rules, to fascism? Or do you have to attack fascism because this is a crisis? crisis, right? And so the Democrats have to not just pick a lane on this. They have to figure out what their tone is going forward and how they want to deal with this, because they

Zain 47:05

they have told the country that doing X, in our eyes, voting for Trump is going to usher in this new era. And how do you then deal with that when you have to oppose it? How do you deal with that when you have to oppose it? And I think they've kind of boxed themselves in, in the sense that I think they're going to have to go hard in the paint, Corey, even if they don't want to. I think they're going to have to.

Corey 47:28

Yeah, you say that. And then Joe Biden is all smiles when Donald Trump goes

Zain 47:32

goes back into the Amazon,

Corey 47:32

Amazon, doing whatever. To White House. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Annalise 47:36

what should he have been doing at the meeting on Wednesday?

Corey 47:41

Do you know? I don't know. Let me let me paint a parallel picture. I'm not sure it's a better one, but I'll say this is a challenge to Democrats.

Corey 47:49

Well, yeah, I mean, this is a challenge the the democrats have like their rhetoric and their actions don't match we've talked about this on the show again for a while yes right yes

Corey 47:57

and this this is another example of it you can't call

Corey 47:59

call somebody an existential threat and then treat them like they're an everyday normal candidate and so that to me is probably the thing that irritates me the most like you're gonna have to pick a lane 100

Corey 48:09

and um and it's very frustrating i also feel like one of the reasons why he did this was just to show that he was better than than donald trump right like yeah i'm inviting you here we're gonna do this transition look at me i care so much about this orderly transition they've all been

Zain 48:25

been doing this even kamala in her in

Zain 48:27

her in her speech being like and there will be an orderly transition to power oh massive applause line right it's like because

Zain 48:33

care about like it's almost like in loss we will still find this thing to to claim victory about yeah

Corey 48:38

yeah like this incredible smugness about it like it's fucking crazy to me it is to me it's so great like i just try to listen i'm not not trying to draw this parallel but i'm going to draw this parallel right like would you brag about an orderly transition of power to hit like would you brag about an orderly transition of power like no because their rhetoric has been along those lines and now they're now they're all about the orderly transition in the systems and

Zain 48:59

and they're probably there's probably part of them being like but you don't give allowing an orderly transition of power is the way we protect these institutions from this fascist right that's probably the internal logic which to me is fucking No, I agree. I'm with you. Okay is exactly the answer I would give. But you can see that that's where their mind is headed on this, that if we are above it all and allow these institutions to continue and be as orderly, then maybe he won't fuck them up.

Corey 49:29

Well, yeah. And maybe you won't generate such a backlash where he does something even crazier. I don't know. I mean, like, it's just, it's a lot to take in. And I do think that there are two types of organizers right now. There's the, I am so depressed, I'm going to avoid everything to do with politics, and I'm going to avoid all of the news. And then there's a type that are just not ready to give up the fight. And that happens with every campaign

Corey 49:55

that you lose, to be honest. Like, you always have a mix of people like that.

Corey 50:00

one of the fascinating things about the American system, this is like the fifth time we've talked about one of these differences, is like, there's

Corey 50:06

there's no leader of the Democratic Party. You know, you could talk about Harris having been their candidate, but now, you

Corey 50:12

you know, you've got views

Corey 50:13

views from all sorts of Democratic governors, you have views from Democratic senators, you have AOC, you cannot stop talking about the people who have voted for her and Trump and why she's so fucking awesome. Which, by the way, I just think is a rough look in general, but it is what it is. Do you think AOC has got ambitions?

Corey 50:30

I think AOC has got ambitions. Fuck, I'm like, I'm so into that, AOC.

Zain 50:35

I'm not. Oh, yeah, no, I totally am. That is what's giving me hope right now, is the Bernie mantle being passed.

Corey 50:42

I just, yeah, okay, well, I'm going to be up at night worrying about that. um yeah but like this is um this is an interesting thing to see because there's nobody who can say this is what we're supposed to do now right yeah everyone's going to do what they think is right but

Annalise 50:56

but do you like it and kind of to the earlier point about rethinking polling or rethinking mainstream media and just different environment that we're operating in do you burn it all down do you throw out the tradition book do you throw out the rule book and just do

Corey 51:12

Go ahead, Corey. Well, look, I mean, there is a school of thought that says, yeah, and just let people do it and go nuts. And like the best ideas will naturally percolate to the top and the best ideas will naturally then take hold of the Democratic Party. But it's such a weird

Corey 51:30

weird view of a political party to me, right? It's like, I don't really care what we stand for or why. You guys all duke it out and the one that's most popular is what we'll be. like that, that to me, that's not our model of political parties, right? Political parties are supposed to stand for something. But again, you go to that American, people choose their parties rather than the parties choosing the people. I

Corey 51:50

I don't know, like, if you actually don't care about anything but winning, fucking go for it, like create this free market of political ideas, and just see whichever one is the most successful. But if you actually believe in things, if you actually care about outcomes, and not just winning the sports match,

Corey 52:05

to me, that's a pretty nuts way to run a political party.

Zain 52:08

I also think there's an establishment within the Democratic consultant class that is not going to let this thing burn to the ground because their literal dollar is attached to it, how they make their money, and the control that that Democratic consultant class, which, by the way, sounds like this. It's a lot of people who've run campaigns before, who've had White House jobs before, who are the other side of K Street now, who are running lobby shops, who are running ad firms, who are doing all these things. I mean, it's not like, you know, in the democratic world, it is not frowned upon to have played both sides. And in fact,

Zain 52:44

fact, that is who fuels the entire operation, largely, till this day, these ad firms, etc. etc. So there's this really fascinating tension of folks that will not let this thing go by the way of AOC or Bernie or others who want to say that this is what we need to do. They might agree on economic left policy or populist economics as a future cause, but they're not going to hand over the keys to be like, and there you are, said Godfather, the machine is now yours. No, that's not going to happen at all.

Corey 53:15

Yeah, and you know, it's not just lobbyists these days. Increasingly, it's also media personalities who make

Corey 53:21

make good money being paid

Corey 53:23

paid commentators on one of the major networks or even have a media empire of their own. And I think just to be clear, I don't think people understand this. The three

Zain 53:31

three of us occasionally do political media in this country. In the United States, that is a salary paying gig for many folks. So when you see the Axelrods of the world show up on CNN, that's like a several hundred thousand dollar gig that he gets to to be available to cnn like and and i think it is not the same here in canada and i think just

Zain 53:56

you get scale by

Corey 53:58

by yeah you get like which is like two three four

Corey 54:00

dollars awesome nice like

Zain 54:03

change but it's not gonna be a gig in the united states this is a gig for hundreds of people hundreds plural of at major networks where they get paid several hundred thousand dollars to be contributing columnists or a on-screen commentator for for or something. So when Corey talks about media, yeah, it's not like, hey, it's a nice sort of like, oh, people will get to see me 15 minutes at a time. Oh, no, that affects one's pocketbook significantly. Yeah,

Corey 54:26

Yeah, like it's not like a bump up of 10, 20% of your income. Or

Zain 54:30

Or just like a nice sort of hit so people know your name, like which is what it is in Canada. No, no, no. It's very different in the US. Yeah, very

Annalise 54:37

much so. And as you said, Corey, the little media empires that they can then create their sub stacks, In Canada,

Corey 54:43

Canada, there's like three, you know, and you're listening to one of them right now. But in the United States, there's there's like a lot, a lot of these little empires, because just the size of the population, right? Like, you know, let's just talk about the strategy. Let's pull back the curtain a little bit, right? We might have 30,000 people listen to an episode. Our country is

Corey 55:04

is a tenth the size of the United States. 300,000 people change that economics times 10. It just, it fundamentally changes it from being like a fun thing you do on the side to a job, right? There's a lot of people who have that job. So

Annalise 55:16

So let's say we've touched on it a little and I just want to touch on it briefly is just Trump strategy here in terms of transition. I mean, we're not even two weeks into this and we've talked about the political appointments that cabinet picks like just

Annalise 55:29

just wild and several wild ones a day. Do you want to just talk about kind of the design of of of doing it that way and what what's in store for the next the next little bit?

Corey 55:45

it? Who knows? Okay.

Corey 55:48

It's an interesting question, because we don't know if we should take Trump at his word on this, where he's going to be a dictator on day one. There's a lot of commentary about how he might try to get some very non-desirable cabinet picks into cabinet positions. We should circle back to that point in a second. But it's not uncommon for when you're an elected president, a newly elected president-elect. Actually, one of the interesting interesting things, by the way, is all of his letterhead doesn't say president-elect, it says President Donald Trump. Like, you know, he's coming back and maybe he was always president in his mind, right? But yeah, you're always going to be announcing these appointments or these nominations is a better way to put at it. It's just, they

Corey 56:27

they don't usually hit like this. And I do generally feel like, and I could be wrong on this, but my feeling is they tend to usually happen a month later, right? Like a little bit of time, because a

Corey 56:37

a more, quote unquote, normal presidential presidential transition would have a

Corey 56:41

a presidential transition team really then working with the infrastructure of government to

Corey 56:46

to do those security reviews, to do those things that take some time before you announce the names. And

Corey 56:52

And Donald Trump clearly doesn't care about any of that. So he'll just name the names and let the chips fall where they may. Whether you be Matt Gaetz, a man who, if he had waited three days, we would see the House report about his ethics, right? Which which apparently now we're not supposed to see, but I would wager we will. Or, I don't know, like maybe before you announce Elon Musk is in charge of government efficiency, or at least is half of that team doing that with Vivek Ramaswamy.

Zain 57:18

Like I say these things and it seems crazy to me. Could do

Corey 57:21

do a whole episode

Corey 57:24

That guy is going to have all sorts of challenges just based on his wealth and his investments and his connections, right? And again, you would normally want to go through a bit of a security consideration And really get deep into these things, right? And that's just not happening anymore. So he's just naming them. He's nominating them. Some question as to whether some of the truly wild ones like Matt Gaetz and I think RFK Jr. can get through the Senate, because

Corey 57:53

because in the American system, they need to be approved by the Senate. They have an advise and consent form. But there's talk about Trump using powers never before really used by the president to force the Senate into recess so that he can just make recess appointments of all of these people, which is a power the president has that allows him to essentially

Corey 58:13

essentially appoint somebody until the Senate can come back and consider. sitter because this is a document that was written at a time when it took months to count votes and literal weeks if not months in order to get from one side of the country to another if you happen to be a senator from a far-flung place right so so

Corey 58:32

so yeah i mean anything

Corey 58:34

anything could happen there is a lot of uh there's a lot of speculation as to the mechanisms he might use one of the ones that i was reading reporting on i think just yesterday is that if he can get the house of representatives to adjourn and

Corey 58:48

and the senate says no we don't want to adjourn the constitution gives him the power when there's a dispute about whether to adjourn or at what time to adjourn and until when to

Corey 58:57

to pick the date as president so all he needs is the house to say let's adjourn and then he can adjourn congress he can do all his recess appointments and he can bring people back

Corey 59:06

if he wants awesome

Corey 59:08

we're in weird uncharted territory uh

Annalise 59:10

uh speaking of that zane what what are you paying attention to right now in the present like what are you what are you watching for uh what's on your mind uh

Zain 59:20

uh nothing nothing really all of this is i i crammed all of this for this episode i actually had no idea any of this was happening nothing

Annalise 59:27

nothing but honest um

Zain 59:31

mean listen i think the trump strategy or you didn't ask me this question i think is just purely just loyalty that's

Zain 59:36

that's it and he'll do whatever he wants he said it don don jr said it he wants to find people who will not challenge the president and that are dumber than him in many ways okay and there you go and if you want to like squint and try to see some strategy sure rfk and matt gates make tulsi gabbard look less insane although

Zain 59:55

although tulsi gabbard is an insane pick and peak pete eggstaff is an insane pick right so though maybe you might say some of these These are like, you know, anchor picks so that if one or two get them off the board, then your next attorney general pick, even though it's going to be a crazy person, is not Matt Gaetz, seems less crazy. Maybe that's it. But above and beyond, I think it's just loyalty.

Corey 1:00:14

He's appointing his own personal lawyers for announcing that he's going to into all of these positions.

Zain 1:00:19

positions. I mean, I'm just going to take that guy at his word.

Zain 1:00:23

Who emerges amongst the Democrats? And I'm not saying who emerges now is going to be their nominee in 28. That's not what I mean. I mean, who in a time of reckoning,

Zain 1:00:34

reckoning, crisis, navel-gazing, whatever you want to call this moment, emerges for the Democrats? Because there's no natural leaders. We've talked about this in some way, but there's no natural leaders here. You see Bernie getting out up and early, being like, economic populism, where the fuck was that? And he's talking about that aggressively. AOC, so you clearly know they've got an agenda to make sure that they're not blamed for the loss here. In fact, they want to take this moment and cede more ground.

Zain 1:00:59

But, you know, I haven't heard from the Shapiros of the world. I haven't heard from the Whitmers or the Newsoms, others that you might think are spent forces. So

Zain 1:01:06

So they might actually be 2024 forces that never happened, and we never hear from them again. But who is the face, the name, the sort of coalition builder amongst the Democrats? And I'm talking about weeks and months here, right? I'm not talking

Zain 1:01:19

about projecting into the future. I'll find that interesting. I won't find it necessarily telling, but I'll find it interesting. So I'll look forward to that. Let's let's put that on the table.

Annalise 1:01:29

Corey, what are you paying attention to?

Corey 1:01:31

Well, look, I think that, so

Corey 1:01:34

so this is, when you look at Donald Trump when he was elected in 2016, I would describe his first moves as tentative, right? And some of the reporting was tentative. And some of the things he was deciding to do or not do were reported in a way that suggested there was a nervousness by Trump coming in. Like, what was he allowed to do? What was he able to get away with? What could he

Corey 1:01:54

he manage to pull off? And what was he thinking that might be a bridge too far for Americans? And so I'm going to go a little bit more slowly here. And that goes everything from like security reviews to

Corey 1:02:04

some of the appointments that he did to, you know, to some of the policies that he presented here.

Corey 1:02:10

There is no tentativeness anymore. And there is a unique danger and

Corey 1:02:15

opportunity if you want to take more of like a neutral lens on it. when somebody is going into a job they've done before he knows exactly how like from the small like you know this is what a security review looks like this is the kind of things it's going to come up with by the way you now know you don't technically need to follow those if you're president all of these things right uh he now has the day he is dangerous because he has knowledge and as

Corey 1:02:37

as much as people like to paint donald trump as this um you

Corey 1:02:41

you know this buffoon almost almost animalistic, who just reacts to stimuli around him right there. He knows things about government. He knows the levers that matter. He knows the things he can get away with after testing these norms for eight years. He fucking knows. And so the thing that I'm going to be watching him for is what he's just willing to do. And obviously he's said what he's going to do in a lot of cases. His actions show he is clearly following through on this notion of loyalty above above anything else. But that loyalty is also, like, they're going to execute these things. And when he starts putting his own personal attorneys into the Justice Department at lower, you know, like those undersecretary positions and around that, that's

Corey 1:03:21

that's like, do you really think if you end up in a situation where he orders the Attorney General to do something and they, A, they're never going to say no, because they're Matt Gaetz. But B, if they did, there are four other people that he can appoint to take their position and have it done. Like, Like, you've

Corey 1:03:37

you've got to watch for these things. And I think that that's telling us a lot about what's going to come.

Zain 1:03:42

I think Corey makes such a great point. The same investment

Zain 1:03:45

investment that they had made on, quote unquote, election integrity to try to ensure the election wasn't stolen for them, i.e. to, like, take it from the Democrats, right,

Zain 1:03:53

their plot, that same infrastructure is now being weaponized into

Zain 1:03:58

into forming government, right?

Zain 1:04:00

right? They just skip part one, go to part two, right? Right. The plan was always to put these types of folks that would never question Donald Trump in the bureaucratic level all across government while having Ramaswamy and Elon shrink bureaucracy so that these mid-level folks or attempt to so that these mid-level folks, you know, have have more power. Now, it's all going to be in the execution for Trump. But I think Corey's absolutely right here. And let's be clear, you know, this is a nightmare scenario in some ways. if you're a Democrat, rather than having Trump do eight straight years, back-to-back terms, he has this break in between where all the people who hate him leave, say they're against him, he gets to retool, rebuild, come at it again while learning things, right? Versus if he had just taken another four after winning his first four, you would just kind of like, the machine's too big in some ways, you just have to carry it forward. In this case, he gets four years to retool rethink and just get a brand new system um in place and and expedite it to his will and have a loyalty test where people came out of the woodwork to say yeah boss not with you great thank you step aside i'll find someone who is yeah

Corey 1:05:09

yeah yeah he definitely has a very strong sense now about i won't even call them friends who his supplicants are like who's willing to ride with him and just just do exactly what he tells now

Zain 1:05:18

now to that to that being said i would wager a steven stephen carter like that half of these cabinet positions are fired within two years and that elon musk isn't hanging out at mar-a-lago every fucking day like a like a uh you know fucking you're gonna

Zain 1:05:33

so sick of that yeah no no like i i like i think trump's still gonna be trump so like you know yeah he's gonna execute but yeah like i think a lot of these people are gonna go but you know scary

Annalise 1:05:44

okay guys future um where should we start on this one this is This is a Canadian podcast, so I think... Just let Corey

Zain 1:05:51

Corey do it all. We have to

Annalise 1:05:52

to talk about Canada. I want your takes. Does Trump's win bode better for the federal liberals or conservatives here in the next federal election? And I ask because I've seen takes on both sides. And I'm curious what your honest thoughts here. Zane, you go first. Who's it better for? Conservatives.

Zain 1:06:13

Conservatives. I'll throw it out there. I don't think anyone who is hoping that this would be a, oh, my God, we're so lucky to have Justin Trudeau and the liberals in Canada moment and say, you know, we got to do everything we can to protect progressivism. I don't think that's going to happen. I think the fact is, in fact, that the fact that Trump's coalition was much more diverse than perhaps we assumed it would be heading into this election gives a lot more people license here to vote conservative. I'm not comparing Pierre Polyev to Donald Trump. That's not what I am saying. However, it does give folks that license. There's just a natural kinship that you already see with the rhetoric, the linguistic language between the conservatives and Donald Trump and the Republicans. And then I think there's just some interesting X factors. One that I think is going to be talked about a lot more is how a sitting member of parliament in Jamil Javani is best friends, BFFs with J.D. Vance, like quite literally groomsmen at wedding level BFFs with the vice president and arguably the standard bearer of MAGA going forward. So I think that, you know, advantage conservatives is what I'd say.

Corey 1:07:23

look i i think that the individual event is probably advantageous to the liberals but it doesn't matter like it doesn't fundamentally change the fact that the liberals are 20 points down i don't know it gets them even a point democracy

Corey 1:07:35

democracy international relations norms rhetoric yeah maybe the liberals will pick up a little bit on that but none of those things i just talked about are what's driving the decision in voters minds right now as they're moving forward and so So actually, I might talk myself into saying advantage to conservative, but for different reasons, if the liberals think

Corey 1:07:54

think that this is an advantage and start to put their eggs in this basket and chase this election strategy,

Corey 1:08:00

it will get worse for them, not better. And if the signal they're getting is, okay, Donald Trump's there, we've dealt with Donald Trump before, we're seeing a little bit that Canadians trust us a little more to stand up to Donald Trump, which I've seen some preliminary kind of numbers suggesting that might be the case. and they start chasing that, I

Corey 1:08:17

I mean, it's not going to be the thing that drives it, right? They will run into the exact same trap that the Democrats found themselves in, in my opinion, which is they talked so much about the threats to democracy.

Corey 1:08:29

I get it. You know, I'm a guy in my 40s. I'm old enough that I do kind of remember the tail end of the Cold War and how we all felt about these existential stakes between democracy and not. But people

Corey 1:08:40

people don't care. They don't care. I want them to care, but they don't care. And if the liberals, sorry, decide that they're going to start making that the thing that they are fighting on,

Corey 1:08:54

they're going to lose. I mean, they're already going to lose, but they'll just lose harder. So

Annalise 1:08:57

So if you're Trudeau, if you're the liberals, how do you play this? How do you message this? How do you frame it over the next little bit?

Corey 1:09:06

know it's interesting because in the lead up to the election the last let's just even say the last year there was a lot of tough talk from um people in liberal orbit saying oh yeah if trump wins that's great for us he's such a chaos agent we'll be able to come in we'll look steady stable trudeau they're able to stand up to donald trump that's

Corey 1:09:27

that's not the strategy they seem to be taking right now they're taking one of uh dare i say appeasement right

Corey 1:09:34

they're they're going out there and they're saying oh it won't be so bad he's not so bad we've had donald trump before the sun still rose the sun will rise again as though uh you know his past performance in any way indicates the future will be steady for us fucking last time donald trump was president it was nothing but chaos and shit sandwiches for uh shit sandwiches for uh for canadians and um there's

Corey 1:10:00

there's no reason to believe otherwise right now now we just have the donald trump without the guardrails and why do we think that's better for canada why do we think that the rhetoric which has actually escalated in the united states about canada

Corey 1:10:12

canada you know i mean we've always been a particularly i

Corey 1:10:17

think a cute example for republican commentators saying oh look at canada with death panels oh look at canada with uh you know they they have no freedom and look at their economic states relative to ours like we're we're the people they point to even when they're absolutely wrong about things uh to say that's not working here that

Corey 1:10:35

that that rhetoric has escalated you know they're talking about us as though we're in some sort of like you turn on a newsmax or even a fox news on some of their crazier panels they talk about canada right now like we are a country under occupation by a communist government in justin trudeau and why why do we think this is going to get better for us it's not going to get better for us you

Corey 1:10:57

you had a question i didn't answer your question i can't fucking remember what it was cory

Annalise 1:11:01

you're pulling a carter on me i

Corey 1:11:03

i am pulling a car uh

Corey 1:11:06

wonder when he'll get back yeah

Annalise 1:11:07

yeah i wonder i wonder uh zine what what are some lessons here for canadians for progressives, for,

Annalise 1:11:13

for, you know, for people in strategy rooms as we look towards the future.

Zain 1:11:20

I'll throw one out there, maybe. I don't even know if it's a good one.

Zain 1:11:25

Maybe that campaigns are actually about building and arming your base, and that trying to get folks excited about you is the focus, and that you need to start communicating in a way that isn't alienating to them first. It actually, in fact, the opposite, it excites them. And then the second round is about persuasion. We know that there's research out there. And I think this is what I'm almost taking the lessons from the Democrats here, rather than being like, here's what Trump taught us. No, I think the Democrats have all roll on to something, that where they had their moment of zen, their exciting six weeks of joy, that they were doing something there, that there was something happening there. And I think, you know, whether they strategically or accidentally gave that up up is perhaps beside the point in terms of what I think a campaign needs to look like, because I think they're hitting on some really important things here that progressives should talk about, which is being part of the culture, the feelings of joy, being part of something bigger than yourself. I'd say Trump ultimately won that question. There was a lot of people from the manosphere and other places that Trump thought was selling a movement, not the Democrats, despite the fact that we saw the Democrats for six weeks looking like they sold a movement. So Democrats shouldn't forget that lesson, right? Like, I don't want to throw that away, because I think there were some good building blocks there of what they experimented with. And frankly, I'd say one thing that was fascinating about that period of time was,

Zain 1:12:49

was, I don't know how much of that was programmed. I don't know how much of that was built

Zain 1:12:56

built by the machine in a six-week stretch. And I think there's something to be said about that. And I'm not trying to like be too cute with my earlier point on the democratic machine, but when they built that stretch, it seemed authentic and organic and like of something natural. And maybe it's because it was. And maybe it's because it was rather than it was something engineered as the standard issue campaign that we would expect. And so there's something for progressives to think about around how you, you know, and of course, the standard progressive brain would overanalyze that and figure out how you try to make an organic moment and engineer it. But there was something to be said about yes, ending and saying, yeah, we're going to lean into this moment. We're going to like, you know, we're going to lean into Bratz summer, we're going to talk about the, you know, the Kamala pilling of situation. Most of that was not engineered, and you could tell. And there was a six-week spark there where I would do a case study on what the fuck happened there because I want to bottle that up and figure out what we do going forward and without necessarily being too overly analytical about it in certain ways. So maybe that's a start. I don't know if that's even a good point to make, but I'll throw it out there. I think there's something there.

Annalise 1:14:05

Good point, Corey. Bad point?

Corey 1:14:07

I don't know. I mean, it's a point. It's certainly something I think that's worth exploring because

Corey 1:14:12

because it's true. Like, in some way, it feels. Again, it's going to feel.

Zain 1:14:16

feel. say something that's not as obvious as a piece that you've probably written right where you had a lot of obvious things you've written yeah that's why you're going second so you could take all the obvious points just gonna read a sub stack

Corey 1:14:27

i'll tell you well look i i think that when it felt like the harris campaign was doing the best to your point that six weeks and i i agree i like that's when it felt the best i'm at

Corey 1:14:36

at this point whether it

Zain 1:14:37

it was good i agree

Corey 1:14:39

that i don't know if they were winning or not but i'll say this that was that was a pretty unhinged moment it was a lot of fun it was pretty amusing to watch jd van hey listen you kamala hq was not orchestrating jd vance being called a couch fucker right like it was just something out there and

Corey 1:14:56

and people were having a lot of fun with it when's

Zain 1:14:58

when's the last time a progressive campaign felt

Corey 1:15:00

felt like that though

Zain 1:15:00

even if it wasn't necessarily tightening the polls i think there's something to be said about feeling and

Corey 1:15:05

and how i don't think it like oh eight like i honestly think that obama

Corey 1:15:09

obama Have you been on

Zain 1:15:09

on one since, like yourself, that felt anything like that? I haven't.

Zain 1:15:14

No. Right? Like maybe close to it with like when we knew we were doing well with Nenshi. I mean, scales are different, right? To be absolutely clear. But like, I haven't felt something like, oh, this is like, you know, something like this is like culturally happening.

Zain 1:15:27

And I think there's a lesson there.

Corey 1:15:29

Yeah. Like I wasn't on that campaign, but the 2015 Alberta NDP campaign, certainly there was something in the water there. I think the 2015 Liberal campaign started to get some of those feelings near the end, but not like that. And there was, you know, this whole, like, we are so back energy that they brought to everything was fun. Like, it was always going to be difficult to stretch that all the way to the election. And I think they really struggled. And I think that they got on their own heads about it. And I don't know it would have been enough to win the election, knowing what we know now. But it's

Corey 1:16:01

it's an interesting thing that they should explore and they should be looking at more. And not

Corey 1:16:06

to try to shoehorn in my big thing here, but I do think part of it was there was a real sense of like theater

Corey 1:16:13

theater and story. Like, holy shit, like you had Biden and Biden did this debate and then Biden had to go and then Harris had to step in out of nowhere. And all of a sudden, Harris

Corey 1:16:23

Harris is everywhere and Harris is picking walls to be her vice presidential pick. And the internet is on fire about all of these things. And like, it just, it felt like something. It felt like something in a way that we don't often, we

Corey 1:16:35

we get talked out of a lot on campaigns, right? Like, ah, that's fine, but it's a swing. And we've got these polls that show actually swing voters like X or Y. And look, you got to follow that information. You got to do the right things. But sometimes

Corey 1:16:46

sometimes those small things don't matter if you can capture the big things. And I do think that there is something to that. But I don't think that's the only lesson for progressives there. I think the bigger one is they need to just sit and have some real honest conversations with themselves as to whether they know how to change minds or how minds get changed. She's like, you know what I want to do? Seriously, I want to put out a call almost and say, tell

Corey 1:17:12

tell me a time somebody showed up at your door and changed your mind. And I don't give a shit about a municipal campaign. I don't, because there's no parties involved. You just meet someone, you're a low information voter there all the time. I don't give a shit about leadership campaigns. If you're all on the same team and it's just somebody who all of a sudden becomes your friend or creates a compelling argument, I want to know when you were planning to vote for party A and

Corey 1:17:38

somebody from party B showed up at your door and you said, you know what? Holy shit. Or even better, representative of party B showed up at your door and you said, I've had this all wrong. This brochure changed my mind about this entirely. I want to talk to those. I'm sure they exist. I'm not pretending they don't. i want to fucking understand how somebody changed their mind from that technique i want to understand how somebody else has changed their mind from techniques i've never even heard of like this is a call out you know send

Corey 1:18:03

send me an email drop me something on blue sky join the old strategist discord tell me when your mind actually got changed through politics right now that's what i think progressives need to be obsessed with right now go

Annalise 1:18:14

go to cory substack and tell him go

Corey 1:18:16

go to my substance

Annalise 1:18:17

is the incorrect drop

Corey 1:18:17

drop a comment if

Annalise 1:18:18

if i'm wrong on this thing like

Corey 1:18:19

like and subscribe yeah

Annalise 1:18:24

Zane and Corey, the whole what you're saying here, Corey, about knocking on doors and changing minds,

Annalise 1:18:32

you talking about dropping brochures? I thought the whole thing about door knocking was not necessarily to change minds, but identify voters and get out the vote.

Corey 1:18:40

Yeah, absolutely. I'm talking about both, right? And I think when you're the candidate knocking on doors, your job's a little different. It's not just ID vote. It's actually to try to change minds, right? right? But yeah, I mean, okay,

Corey 1:18:53

okay, well, when you're going out, you're

Corey 1:18:57

you're generally going out as a volunteer to do one of two things, right? Either to door knock and identify vote or to do a lit drop. But if you're door knocking and identifying vote, you're also going to drop the lit, right? So there is sort of a sense that, yeah,

Corey 1:19:10

yeah, sure, we could pay Canada Post. Yeah, sure, you could just drop it in the mailbox. But we do think that there is a persuasive element to the materials We're providing you. And if you can hand it to them, that might help change somebody's mind. Right. Has that ever worked for you? Have you ever been handed a brochure so compelling you changed your mind? Get

Annalise 1:19:25

Get in touch with Corey. And Zane, I want you to weigh in here because especially too from that digital and that ad space and you have some very recent campaign experience. How do you change minds? Well,

Zain 1:19:36

I think it actually is like, yeah,

Zain 1:19:41

yeah, I mean, my thought here, and Corey, you may have said this, actually, I'm just trying to recall here.

Zain 1:19:48

It's this broader concept, like if I'm if I'm progressives in Canada right now, I actually should feel something else, which is perhaps this American result gives me a sigh of relief to say, fuck it. Like, all the things we've been doing to try to gain inches only get us inches. They're just, like, we've

Annalise 1:20:10

we've been taught to

Zain 1:20:11

to be professional coalition managers rather than, like, manage this group and get them excited enough. Manage this group and get them excited enough. Or keep them at bay. Like, don't let them leak. Like, don't let enough of them. Okay, are they satisfied? They're satisfied. Satisfied. Are

Zain 1:20:29

Are they satisfied? They're satisfied. Stitch them together. That's your electoral path to victory.

Zain 1:20:34

fuck it, let's take some shots. Let's like, like take some like, let's try to get some yards. Let's try to go with like some big thinking. Let's be ambitious about what we want. Let's fall flat on our face with some of our creative. Let's fall flat on our face with some of our policies.

Zain 1:20:50

You know, versus being like the polling tells us this is how we keep all these 19 fucking coalitions stitched together. And frankly, I think this election result shows in some ways that you can try coalition management, you could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on coalition management, telling certain types of voters what you think they want to hear, but they'll still go after the big, sort of broad, broader

Zain 1:21:15

broader message in some ways. And I'm not saying Trump did that perfectly, but he was the version of that. And there is a lesson to be learned here that's saying, and maybe this goes back to why, Corey, you think campaigns no no longer are effective, because

Zain 1:21:28

because we're running campaigns as managers. We're not running campaigns as ambitious creatives trying to actually move the needle and sell people a brand new suite of things that could be part of a revision mandate. We're trying to sell them just what we think they want to hear. And there's something to be said there. Some people have called it the super majority style thinking, being like, I want to just blow the doors off this thing. And who cares? There's coalition management is second, right? Like, you know, and this is what we need. And I think if I'm a progressive strategist, manager, activist, whatever, maybe I'm like, look, here's our proof point that the stitching together coalitions piece by piece, poll by poll, and managing in certain way does not get us the outcome and does not even get us the mandate that we want at the end of the day.

Corey 1:22:12

Yeah. And, you know, I think that one of the lessons that needs to be learned concurrently, or else you're going to go in some strange ways, I suspect, is that bold is not synonymous with as left-wing as you can be. 100%

Zain 1:22:23

% as you can

Corey 1:22:23

can be. Yes. Okay. You can be bold within different frameworks. And in fact, I do think that another lesson we have from the Trump years and our own experience here in Canada in many ways is that this

Corey 1:22:35

this left and right frame is, it's not working for anybody anymore. Like

Corey 1:22:39

Like it's not a real

Zain 1:22:41

Bernie Trump pipeline, just examining that that alone. Oh,

Corey 1:22:45

Right? It seems to be proven out. Well, and in some ways, it seems to be establishment versus not, or kind of moderate or measured or whatever your preferred word is there or not. And there

Corey 1:22:58

there are just so many different ways to cut it. There are so many weird voters who are free marketers, but environmentalists versus you can have the religious left. And there are just so many weird permutations and combinations and i think what people are looking for is it's kind of clarity path forward yes

Corey 1:23:19

yes okay you're giving me a credit for fifty dollars a month that allows me to to send my kid to piano lessons what the fuck does that that doesn't speak to my soul where are we going with all of this what are we trying to do because things are not right right now and and i want them to be right like that that's a feeling that voters have and so i think I think

Corey 1:23:38

think bold is not synonymous with left. Bold is not synonymous with right. Find a way to tell the big stories, do the big things, play with that a little bit. If you're anybody except for the Trudeau liberals, you have some time before the next election, figure out what the fuck you're going to do. But now is the time, I think, to fundamentally assess some

Corey 1:23:57

some fundamental assumptions. OK,

Annalise 1:23:59

last one here for the future. Simple, simple question, guys. How do you how do you fight misinformation? How do you cut through the noise? How do you reach people?

Corey 1:24:10

simple do i look simple i

Corey 1:24:14

look i don't know i mean i

Corey 1:24:17

i do think that one of the challenges that we have is that you

Corey 1:24:22

you can find quote-unquote facts to support any point of view out there and so it's

Corey 1:24:29

it's just it's really tough you can you how many people have done this right been in an argument with their spouse and um just said well i'm sure they're wrong and like almost googled the opposite point of view to find the supporting fact base for the opposite i think that's just you

Annalise 1:24:46

it's not just me no

Corey 1:24:47

no i i mean i try i really try to

Corey 1:24:50

to stop myself that is extremely cruel oh

Corey 1:24:55

zane is nodding vigorously that

Corey 1:24:57

that he does i'm not nodding

Zain 1:24:58

nodding vigorously he's giving two thumbs up This is a video version of the podcast.

Corey 1:25:02

I think that it's a challenge. I think that it's not even so much misinformation. I mean, misinformation is a huge, huge problem, but it's that

Corey 1:25:11

that life is messy. Things are complicated. Things are rarely cut and dry, whether one thing is right or one thing is wrong, one approach is right or one approach is wrong. And in a world with so much data and so little regard for experts to make sense of that data, you can convince yourself of anything if you want to so we were

Zain 1:25:32

talking about like platforms on a different topic giving you the data to to impress your boss i'm not saying that's misinformation but it's in the same vein of being like you could stitch a story together with any pieces on the board well

Corey 1:25:45

well and it's it's part of i think what's fueling this modern day nihilism we have on basically fucking everything but maybe it's also another reason why you've got got to step out of that frame and talk about something that's a little bit more you

Corey 1:25:57

you know emotionally resonant moving like impactful like try to understand how you can how you can get people look

Corey 1:26:05

look you should believe things and you should follow facts and there is still a preponderance of evidence that facts matter they just take a little bit of time before they soak into people here but you've

Corey 1:26:16

you've got to you got to put them together in in a compelling package here and so when we talk about fighting misinformation what's

Corey 1:26:22

what's what's increasingly clear to me from the past i don't know 15 years of this growing challenge especially with social media is like

Corey 1:26:30

like you're you're fighting the symptom and not the disease right like there's there's just so much stuff out there and if you're going to play whack-a-mole and fact check everything you're almost missing the bigger point and the bigger point is we we no longer have trust in these things we don't think that they're working and we feel that our opinion is just as good as anybody else's opinion because fuck it why not

Corey 1:26:50

And so maybe we need to take a step back if we want to truly, meaningfully approach misinformation.

Annalise 1:26:56

Zane, any extra insight there?

Zain 1:26:58

Totally. Yep, exactly what Corey said. Nothing really, other than to say that I think it's not

Zain 1:27:05

not fair. And I think progressives can't just be on

Zain 1:27:09

on the, well, it was misinformation that got us this time, right? Or, man, there's so much disinformation. Yeah, okay, it's going to keep getting you. And you're going to keep losing elections. So you also have to start telling better stories, more compelling stories, more interesting stories. You're going to have to cut through in your own way. But I think just crying foul, not

Zain 1:27:30

not to say that's been exclusive to the strategy, but it has been quite a bit of a crutch, can't

Zain 1:27:35

can't continue to be. You're going to have to combat it, but

Zain 1:27:38

but you can't also cry foul on it at the same time. It's not fair. It's not a fair world. Well,

Corey 1:27:42

Well, and that's not, you know, anything you can do that would fundamentally change that is probably not in your hands for the next bit, even here in Canada, right? Because this next election is coming down on us so quickly. Things are not going to fundamentally change. And these big social media companies, which are the subject of much of our ire, and you know, these bootstrapped

Corey 1:28:02

bootstrapped media companies, which is also subject of our ire, they're not here a lot of the time, right? They're American ones, and that American argument is now propagating across the border.

Corey 1:28:13

We've got to deal with the problem you're talking about with misinformation. It's going to require regulatory change. It's going to require cultural change. It's going to require education. We're going to need to train people to be better at identifying these things. We're going to have to reward people who are critical of their own views and testing whether those views are accurate or not. And that's all going to take time, much more than one election cycle, two election cycles, three election cycles. So yeah, let's deal with that problem. But when we talk about the electoral considerations, don't

Corey 1:28:42

don't sit there and cry foul. As Zane said, you're going to have to find a way to work within that existing environment because that took us a long time to get here. We're

Corey 1:28:49

We're not getting out of it overnight. 90

Annalise 1:28:51

90 minutes, Annalise? I'm

Corey 1:28:52

I'm just noticing. This

Annalise 1:28:53

This is a record for me, Zane. Guys, lightning round. Lightning round. First question. Under. It's

Annalise 1:29:02

Corey, what worries you most about the next four years?

Corey 1:29:07

What worries me most about the next four years is, I mean, it's not complicated and it's not a blinding insight, but it's that we

Corey 1:29:14

we are America on time delay. And so the things that we're seeing in the United States are going to happen here. The things in terms of rhetoric, the things in terms of issues that matter to people. And we

Corey 1:29:27

we need to be really live to that. I just don't think that we can overstate how important that particular thing is, because we're

Corey 1:29:36

we're a relatively small country attached to a relatively big country, share a culture. And I don't know, there's no avoiding it. Like, we can sit there and say, oh, those damn Americans, they're not like us. They don't have bagged milk like us, right? But I mean, what does that get us? That fucking doesn't matter at all. Like, this is all coming across the border. It always does. All of a sudden, everybody is referring to EDI initiatives, equity, diversity, inclusion, as DEI initiatives, because that's what the Americans call them. And it comes across the border, sure as anything. So, you know, it feels like such a force of nature. Like, I just, I don't think it's avoidable. But I do think that we can be thinking about mitigations, we can be thinking about how we nudge, adjust things and start making some course corrections. Zane,

Annalise 1:30:20

Zane, what worries you most?

Annalise 1:30:24

Thanks. Short and sweet, Zane. Zane, what is the best thing you've read or listened to about the American election in the past however many days it's been, 12 days?

Zain 1:30:35

New Republic. It's got a piece sent to me by one Rob Brown. I'm finding it right here. Hold on. What is it? Wow. Rob Brown. That's actually not his last name. He's just a brown guy named Rob. Oh, okay. That's how you put him in his phone. So, New Republic, why does no one understand the real reason Trump won? Excellent. November 8th, Michael

Zain 1:30:58

Michael Tomasky. Worth reading.

Annalise 1:31:00

Okay, Corey, I like how you had that right there. Corey Hogan, what is the best thing you've read or listened to?

Corey 1:31:05

It's a sub stack from this guy, Corey Hogan. You

Corey 1:31:08

can find it, coreyhogan.substack.com.

Annalise 1:31:11

Zane, you should read it. Really

Corey 1:31:12

Really sure. I will not read it. Really sure.

Annalise 1:31:13

Okay, last lightning round question. This one's for you, Corey Hogan. Strategists have a blue sky. What's going on?

Corey 1:31:21

I started a blue sky account for us because I think Twitter is terrible, but we haven't really posted anything. So maybe

Corey 1:31:28

maybe we'll post this episode. Maybe there's somebody out there who will listen to this episode because I posted it there and it's going to bring it full circle for them. That's all

Corey 1:31:36

all I'm looking for.

Annalise 1:31:37

We're going to leave it there, guys. That is a wrap on episode 1835 of The Strategist. My name is Annalise Klingbeil and with you as always, Zane Belge and Corey Hogan.

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