Democrats: What the Heck Happened?

Prefer to read? Check out the Audio Transcript

Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Emma Varvaloucas: What’s one lesson from your time as DNC chair that you wish that more Americans understood?

Jaime Harrison: I think the biggest frustration that people have in politics is that their expectations don’t fit the reality of how things actually happen. There are a lot of people who believe that the DNC itself is this all powerful institution that can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. But that’s not the case.

And the DNC is very different and the role of the chair is very different when we have the White House and when we don’t have the White House.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of the Progress Network, joined as always by my co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive director of the Progress Network. And what could go right is one of our two weekly podcasts, this one where we talk to someone who we think is interesting and trust that you will think is interesting as well. Fascinating, scintillating, passionate, deep, controversial, sometimes. Our other podcast, the Progress Report looks at some news snippets of things that are going well, but surely I digress.

Politics, we do a lot on politics, we do a lot on a lot of things. We hope we kind of jump all over the place ’cause the world is a panoply of interesting, compelling stories, many of which don’t get sufficient truck in a world where only the negative gets high-lit and the positive gets buried under a mountain of negativity. It’s hard when you talk about politics, however, to not succumb to that mountain of negativity, given that so much of political debate and campaigns skew toward the negative and skew toward the hyperbolic and skew toward catastrophizing. You know, if the other person wins, the country’s gonna be ruined. You’re not gonna be safe. You’re not gonna have food, you’re not gonna have education. Culture’s gonna be destroyed. The world’s gonna fall apart. We’re all gonna disintegrate into some gurgling mass of chaos.

So politics is not usually the place of well reasoned, measured Marcus of queen buried debates and questions of high principle. You know, we all, some of us read the Lincoln Douglas debates in school. Lincoln Douglas, you know, the Abraham Lincoln against Stephen Douglas running for Senate in Illinois and hours and hours spent talking grand theories of who we are and what we’re gonna be in slavery and freedom and government. Most politics these days is just about who’s winning and who’s losing, and who’s dominating and who’s being dominated. It’s all very muddled and angry, but something we have to talk about because how politics and how the political process shapes our lives and chooses the individuals who at least nominally represented us in a representative democracy is pretty damn important. We’re gonna talk to somebody who’s been at the heart of that process for the past four or five years, and at a state level before that. So who are we gonna talk to today, Miss Varvaloucas?

Emma Varvaloucas: Today we are talking to Jaime Harrison. He is the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, a position that he held from 2021 until 2025, so very recently. Previous to that, he was the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party and also ran a high profile Senate campaign against Senator Lindsey Graham there in 2020.

Lots to talk to him about, very of the moment right now, and I’m looking forward to it. You ready?

Zachary Karabell: I am.

Emma Varvaloucas: Alright, let’s go do it.

Zachary Karabell: Jaime Harrison, it’s a pleasure to have you as our guest today on What Could Go Right, and I wanna sort of plunge into something. We’re recording this in the middle of May and there are a few books out around now about the 2024 events around Joe Biden’s candidacy and his eventual stepping aside for Kamala Harris. So my question, given that it is much in the news these days, and given that you were at the Democratic National Committee, chairing the Democratic National Committee at the time, to the degree you, you want to pull the curtain aside, like what was the dynamic between the DNC and the White House? To what degree could this have been shaped differently?

Jaime Harrison: Well I’m in the midst of writing a book myself on my life in general, but I’m spending a lot of time talking about my four years as chair of the DNC and that, that perspective is, is a big one about the relationship between the DNC and the White House. I mean in, in most times, and, and even over the four years, you know, the DNC is almost seen as when you have the White House, it becomes an extension of the White House. It’s almost like the political arm of the White House.

And that’s not something unique to the Democratic Party. It’s the same thing right now with the RNC and Donald Trump. Right? It, it is an extension of the president because the president, when it’s a president of your party, is seen as the head of the party.

Yes, functionally, I’m the chair of the party, but Joe Biden, by all intents and purposes, was the head of the Democratic Party as our president. So, you know, we worked very closely with them. I always had a good relationship with, with the president. But you also have to understand, similar to the dynamics that you see with the, the cabinet secretaries, it is staff in the White House that run the, run the agencies, right?

And very similarly it is staff in the White House who dictate what the DNC does and doesn’t do. Right? Uh, that’s where you get your instructions and where you get guidance. You know, there’s some positives about that, but there are also a lot of negatives about that as well, because it does not allow you to do all of the things that you know you need to do and you know, those people are singularly focused on the president, whereas as someone in the DNC, you need to not only be focused on the president, but you need to be focused on the Democratic Party at large. So what’s going on in governor’s races? What’s going on in Senate races, what’s going on in state houses across the country? What are Democrats abroad? What challenges do they have?

And if you are only focused on the president, then all of those other things that could be blaring red signs, you never know, right? You, you never hear them. They aren’t a concern of yours if you’re in the White House, and so that’s a, a fundamental part of the system and I think we have to think about changing, and right now, because we don’t have the White House, this is the best opportunity to make those modifications and changes so that when we get the White House back, some of those things that I think are, are actually negatives are remediated.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think we can definitely come back to that about what, what changes you would like to see. But returning to the, you know, Biden and Harris moments pre the election, looking back on it is, I hear what you’re saying about there being maybe limited action available, but is there anything that you would’ve done differently, certainly given the amount of frustration that I feel like a lot of democratic voters have about Kamala Harris essentially being anointed, right? And they’re not being a choice for people to have a say in like, actually this is who I would like to replace Biden as a candidate.

Jaime Harrison: Well, one of the things is I, I like to pop that anointed balloon because that was not the case, and I’m writing actually a lot about that right now. You know, when Joe Biden decided to decide to get out of the race, in essence, what it did was it reset the clock in some sense.

We knew that we would have to choose our nominee by the first part of August in order to meet the deadlines for, to be on the ballot in certain states, and Ohio was the one that I was particularly focused on. That was the first, the first deadline that I wanted to make sure that our, our candidate would be on ballot for. And so Joe Biden, when he decided to get out, he also decided to endorse Kamala Harris.

His endorsement did not signify that the process was done, that it was over. What happened then is Kamala Harris got on the phone and she worked her ass off. She called folks who would be potential rivals and say, Hey, you know, the president has just gotten out. I want to seek the nomination. Would you support me?

And how do I know that? It’s because immediately after the president got out of the race. Because I knew that we had only a few weeks to set up a process by which our delegates would be voting on who the nominee is. I needed to know whether or not we needed to build in time to have national televised forums, whether or not there was gonna be any national televised debate, so those type of things.

And so I started getting on the phone as well, and I called up people who I thought could be potential Presidential nominees or candidates, folks who had been in the news, who the, journalists had been writing about, governors and senators and all, and to a person with the exception, only one, and I’ll leave that for the book, but to a person, every single one of ’em said to me, Jaime, thank you for calling me. I just got off the phone with the vice president and I’m going to support her.

Now, those people could have made a choice not to support VP Harris and to run themselves, but they chose not to and to support her. So as the momentum just kept building and she kept, you know, striking names off of the list, she in essence became the, the defacto nominee because nobody else decided that they wanted to raise their hand and say, yeah, coach, I want to vie for this as we, as we move forward, and so I I, I’d just like to pop this bubble that people off high anointed Kamala Harris, no, she worked the phones in order to get the support that was necessary in order to secure the nomination.

Emma Varvaloucas: So there was no internal conversation about like, Hey, do we think this is, this is the best and brightest idea?

Jaime Harrison: An internal conversation about what being the best and brightest idea?

Emma Varvaloucas: About Kamala Harris being the, the candidate, or is, or is essentially just no one else wanted to to do it, so that was it?

Jaime Harrison: For me, it is, I’m the facilitator, right? It, it is not me making decision. All of the primaries had already been exhausted. Every single primary that we had was already done, and then we had a two week, two and a half week window in order to find a nominee.

And since primaries were done, delegates were already selected. You are now in a next phase of the process. Like you can’t just make up, the rules, don’t say, you know, if this happens and you, you start all over again and you just pop up with primaries, that’s not what the rules say. So you gotta follow the rules that we have at the DNC about how you handle situations like this.

One, this is unprecedented, but two, the rules did dictate the, the process that we needed to go about in order to determine who the nominee was. And so what we did was we followed the rules that we have Now, if people don’t like the rules, that’s fine. You can change them now. Right, but, but you can’t just make stuff up and, and, and say, oh, we’re going to open up and have a bunch of primaries.

Well, who’s gonna pay for them? How are 50 states going to come up with 50 different new primaries in a matter of two weeks? Anybody who knows election stuff or follow election stuff knows that it takes states themselves to come up with a primary months to do all of the things, to hire all of the staff to do, to open up precincts, to do all other things to, and, and so who’s gonna pay for all of that?

Is the DNC supposed to pay for that, or is the states gonna pay for all of that? Like, these are the legitimate questions, and I know there’s a lot of pontificating for, for like some journalists and everybody, well, they could have held primaries. Well, tell me how, please, please educate me on how that it’s actually gonna happen.

We did what we, what we could do within the rules that we have at the DNC. RNC has similar style rules, right? And so this is not one of those things where you can just, just make it all up in order for fairness and fairness sake. You gotta follow the rules that we have established and the charter that we have at the DNC about how you handle these types of situations.

Zachary Karabell: I think the larger question, which is not, you know, certainly the responsibility or lead to not the structural power of the DNC is just the question of Joe Biden staying in the race in the first place.

I don’t think there’s any precedent. There’s certainly no modern precedent for like the party internally forcing out a sitting president. I mean, that just doesn’t happen. There’s no mechanism for that. And nor can, I mean, I guess I don’t, I don’t know that you could.

Jaime Harrison: And you can’t, once the primaries are done, right, the primaries are already done. Joe Biden won the primaries. So there is no legal grounds, there’s no rules or structural grounds that anybody could have forced him out. And I said this early on, that once the primaries are done, the decision to stay in the race or to get or to get outta the race is solely up to Joe Biden.

I don’t care who said anything. It could have been Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, everybody else, every single person on the globe. But once the primary process is done, legally Joe Biden owned the nomination. He could decide whether or not he wanted to accept that nomination or not, but legally, that that nomination was his, because he had earned it through that process.

And so now you know the question of whether or not he should have run or not, I mean, that’s, that’s something that the, you know, you got, they ask the president, but I also tell people, I, I tell people to step, to step back. Why do you elect a president? You elect a president to get things done right, to pass legislation, to have a vision, to move the country forward, yada, yada, yada.

When you objectively look at Joe Biden, right, and his legislative record, what president has gotten more done legislatively than Joe Biden? Probably, I can’t think of one, since probably LBJ. And so then now, if a president with a legislative record of Joe Biden, and now you’re gonna say to that president now, and, and I think we need to be real and human here, you’re gonna say to this president who’s gotten all of this stuff done with 50 50 Senate on a good day, less than a five seat majority in the house, and you’re gonna say, and now, Mr. President, we want you, even though you’ve gotten all this stuff done, we want you to give that up. You should just give that up.

But like, let, let’s be real. What, what human is going to do that?

Emma Varvaloucas: He did come into the presidency saying he was gonna be a one term president though, I mean there, there are ways also like even human to human that you can speak to someone and just say hey.

Jaime Harrison: He said he was gonna be a transition and, and this again, we, let’s not put words in the, in the man’s mouth. He said he would be a transitionary figure. Does that say I’m gonna be a one term president? He did not say, I’m going to be a one term president.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, what transition was he referring to?

Jaime Harrison: I have no idea. Maybe he meant by bringing in like, all that’s up to interpretation, but we gotta be real with what he actually said.

He did not say, I’m only gonna serve one term. Right. He did not say that. I say to everybody else, if you wanted somebody different, then somebody different should have run. Now I give Dean Phillips credit, he raised his hand and said, I’m gonna run, but people didn’t choose Dean Phillips, right? They didn’t choose Maryanne Williamson.

They chose Joe Biden.

Zachary Karabell: That would’ve been interesting.

Jaime Harrison: What?

Zachary Karabell: If they had chosen Maryanne Williamson.

Jaime Harrison: Oh God. I, but all, all I’m I’m saying is like, yes, rose colored glasses after the fact. We can say all of these things, but I think you, you gotta be real in, in this situation. You gotta be real in the moment. And the base of the party is also very different from the talking heads that we have in Washington, DC. This is not to disparage you guys, ’cause I wanna be a podcast person too, right?

But the, you know, the, the whole podcast universe of people debating all these things, when Joe Biden went to places like here in South Carolina, right? These are people, African Americans, when he went to Mother Emanuel, the Mother Emanuel Church here in Charleston, South Carolina. Those folks wanted Joe Biden to continue to move forward.

Even his last event, I think before he pulled out it was in Las Vegas at the NAACP. I don’t know if you all remember that, ’cause he ended up getting COVID, I think right in that event, testing positive for COVID. Those folks, these are African American leaders from across the country, NAACP leaders, this is post the disastrous debate, were on their feet chanting Joe, Don’t Go. Right? I think sometimes the worlds are very different from the, the people that we talk to all the time, and the people who are actually in the streets who appreciate the fact that their student loans were waived. I. Who appreciate the fact that their insulin now was $50 a month as opposed to hundreds of dollars a month, who appreciate the fact that they are now getting broadband in their communities when for years they didn’t, who appreciate the fact that the lead pipes that they were drinking water out of and serving up to their kids were now being pulled out. Right?

There’s a very big difference sometimes between the people, the real people in the grassroots and the folks like us who are all paid to be in politics and to observe it and to talk about it.

Emma Varvaloucas: I will say in in defense of podcast hosts, like my partner is a blue, a blue collar welder, right? Like, I can tell you from his perspective, like he’s as ordinary as it gets, no college degree, did not grow up in, in any kind of privilege environment whatsoever. The absolute opposite. Like he would have a lot of frustration about like just how this all went down. I think it might have to do a bit with what we were talking about, pre-interview, about some of the expectations versus reality, but still like I, if you have frustration about how this happens, like where does that go other than to Biden and to Harris and to the Democratic party, right?

Jaime Harrison: That’s where I said then people, if people don’t like how the process happens, because you know, we didn’t do anything outside of what the structure, right? If you’re not happy with the structure, then you have to figure out ways how to change the structure. And so if you’re not happy with how the DNC rules handled that particular situation, then you have to go in and change then how the DNC rules are so that that situation ever happens again.

And that’s the thing that I often tell folks is like, people aren’t just doing these things in a, in a bubble. Like if you, if you’re not happy about the government that you have, then you have to do something in order to change the government and change it to the government that you want. If you’re not happy about how the party is structured at this point, then you have to show up at those county party meetings, go to the state party and become a delegate, be a a delegate to the convention, and move forward proposals in order to change it or support people who, who will do it, right?

But we, we gotta understand how these processes work and it’s just not some magical wand that somebody is pulling all of these strings uptight, and it’s like, poof. You know, it just happens. Right? We got to be, you can’t expect the Avengers to come in and save us. We have to be our own Avengers. And I often say that to folks and, and, and I get the frustration. I get, hell, I get frustrated and, and I was the chair of the party, right? But I’m limited in terms of what I can do and how I can do it. And it’s one of those things when you go out to communities, like I went, I mean I visited over the course of my chairmanship, almost 40 states over the course of the four years. I even went abroad to England and to France to visit Democrats living overseas.

Sometimes the things that we, I would read on Politico, right, that that I would read in access were not always reflective of the things that I would hear on the ground from the people in those communities. And so what I always tried to do is make sure that the things that I heard, I passed along to the White House to say, well, I’m hearing this and I’m hearing that and here’s my thoughts on this and that.

But you know, politics is frustrating and, and Lord knows these last four years, there’s a reason why I don’t have any hair.

Zachary Karabell: Which for those of you who just listening to the podcast, you, I’m sure were, could hear in his voice, the, the lack, the lack of hair.

I wanna ask a bit about the role of the Democratic National Committee. Same thing for the RNC, the Republican National Committee in actually finding and supporting candidates, ’cause you just said you gotta get in the game, but one of the most powerful and significant functions of the Democratic National Committee is to identify candidates.

Jaime Harrison: No, that is not a function of the DNC.

Zachary Karabell: Well, it, it supports candidates and it decides who it’s gonna fund.

Jaime Harrison: Nope. That is not a, see again, again, the reality, and I can tell you what the DNC does, right?

Zachary Karabell: The red, the red to blue? I mean, there’s.

Jaime Harrison: That’s the DCCC, that’s not the DNC. Different organization, right?

Zachary Karabell: okay, so I stand corrected on. It is not the, it is not the titular role of the dance to, to find and support candidates, but it does assess candidates, does it not?

Jaime Harrison: So this is what the DNC does and, and again, this is what I, I think part of my passion of my post DNC chairmanship is to educate people on how these organizations work because it is confusing. I, I, granted, if I were not part of it, I’d be confused as hell too.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and I just totally, and I just totally flubbed the DNC and the DCCC, which my bad.

Jaime Harrison: But that happens all the time because again, people don’t spend as much time to understand the nuances of what the DNC does, the DCCC does, what the DSCC does, what the DGA does, like all of these D organizations out there.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, too many acronyms with Ds.

Jaime Harrison: No, it it, yeah. So people were like, oh my God, it is too frustrating. I don’t wanna know any of it.

So then they just clump it all together and say the DNC is doing this, when in essence, you know, people would, would blame me for not funding Tim Ryan’s race in Ohio.But why is not the DNC sending money in Ohio to fund Tim Ryan’s race? Is it because the DNC does send money to Ohio, but to the Ohio Democratic Party to fund the infrastructure for the Democratic Party in Ohio, who sends money for a Senate campaign in Ohio is the DSCC.

That is Chuck Schumer’s entity over there, and they make determination on which Senate candidates they su support, and which they don’t. The house, the DCCC makes a determination on what, which Red to Blue Frontline and all the other candidates that they support and they don’t. That is not the DNC.

What we do at the DNC, we are the infrastructure for the Democratic Party. We support state parties and try to make sure the state parties are alive and well and thriving and have the infrastructure to do voter registration, to knock on doors, to, to do some of the basic functions there. We also work with in coordination with our sister committees, right? So I, under my chairmanship, we sent more money than ever in the history of the party to support the DS and DCCC.

We sent, I think it was $27 million between the two entities to support them and, and they determined how they were gonna spend the money. They said that they needed some additional resources, and that’s what we did at the DNC to support them. But it, it’s really important for folks to understand that, like the difference I had, as DNC chair, I had no control over candidates running for the house or the Senate.

I, I did not recruit those folks. That’s not our function, but our function is the infrastructure and to support our sister committees in their efforts to get more Democrats elected.

Zachary Karabell: We’re making a choice for me not to edit out my naive confusion between these various D letter groups because, you know, it does get very confusing to figure out how the hell a party actually functions at a national level. And even those of us who like to think clearly, in my case, falsely that I have some understanding of the process. It, it, it does remain. And look, I’ve met a lot of candidates. I mean, I supported your candidate Jaime, as when you were running against Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, but the actual mechanism of how people get to the point of being a candidate, and I know, look, anybody can kind of hang out a shingle. I know people running for mayor of New York City right now, a bunch of ’em are just doing it because they’ve decided to run for mayor of New York City.

And there’s a way of doing that. You can do that as a congressional race as well, but that your, your chance of getting any attention or traction without the support of the local party is de minimus at best. I mean, it used to be the parties had a lot of power, right? They really did kind of select the candidate for that district. A bunch of people, you know, the famous smoke filled room that people got together and kind of said, well, you’re, you’re running Jaime, or you’re not running Jaime, right? One of the two. But there has been a lot of questions I think people have had over the past years of, you know, is the Democratic party running the right candidates? Right? Because it’s, it’s not just ideas, it’s also people.

What do you make of that? And obviously there’s progressives who feel like there should be more progressives and fewer, like Elissa Slotkin, just using, using her as a icon of a more centrist, she would identify herself that way, centrist Democrat just won in the state of Michigan as senator, as Senate, a state that Trump won, the Republican won at the top of the ticket, but she won as senator. Are Democrats finding the right candidates?

Jaime Harrison: I was a state party chair at one time and, and a state party vice chair as well. Recruitment really happens on the state and local level because you don’t want Washington, DC to make to, you know, how the hell I’m gonna know the best candidate to run in Alaska or in Iowa, right? I’m, I’m at the DNC in, in Washington, DC and folks are like, well, yeah, you, you need to choose the, I, I don’t know what, what the best, what the issues that are popping there locally.

And so recruitment is best done on a local level because you know who will resonate with the people in your communities. You understand the culture of, of your state in the communities that they’re running. So state parties really are at the core of the candidate recruitment process. Now, candidate recruitment really is the most difficult job that a state party chair has, or that a state party has, particularly if you are in a red state.

That is because you are trying to convince somebody to run in an R plus 20 district, right? Because it’s been gerrymandered to hell. And to say yes, run, knowing full well that if Jesus Christ would come back and run as a Democrat in that district, he would lose. Right? Right?

So your job as a chair, you’re in a red state, you have very few Democrats in your, your state, you probably have very few resources. Your job as a chair is to go out every cycle and find somebody to run in that R plus 20 district.

Zachary Karabell: That’s ’cause they would claim that he was a carpet bagger. They would say, well, he wasn’t, he’s not from here. Jesus man, that guy, Jesus. I mean, he may be great and all, but he wasn’t, he wasn’t born in the district.

Jaime Harrison: It’s very, very hard to do that and to do that consistently every two years to find somebody to run in a district that odds are you’re just not gonna win it. Like nobody could because it’s gerrymandered so badly. I. So, you know, a lot of people say, well, we need more progressives to run. Well then run, if you’re progressive then run. There is.

Jim Clyburn tells a story that I just absolutely love, and this was sort of a motivator for me when I ran against Lindsey Graham because my wife sort of did something very similar to Clyburn’s dad In the story. Clyburn tells a story about when he was a young boy, probably about 12 years old, he and his dad are riding in the pickup truck along this old dirt road and there is a tree branch that fell across the road after a storm. And so his dad just kind of drove the car, the pickup truck around the, the branch and Clyburn turns to his dad and he said, you know, somebody needs to go move that branch. And Clyburn’s dad stops the the truck and says, and looks at him and says, well, Jim, aren’t you somebody? And so, and his, his dad got outta the pickup truck and moved the branch and Clyburn said he never forgot that.

Well, I very similar during the Kavanaugh hearings, I was on the couch with my wife. My wife’s a law professor. Probably one of the smartest lawyers I know. And we were both frustrated at the Kavanaugh hearings. And when Lindsey Graham got on there and got all red face and was, my God, Democrats, if you want the power, and then all that other stuff. And I turned to her and I said, you know what we, we gotta get somebody to run against this guy.

She paused and she asked, well, Jaime, aren’t you somebody? I am, I’m so tired of folks like wishing that somebody else would go out there and do something. You can do it. There, there’s no magic in this thing that, that you can’t run for office or you can’t find somebody that you know that can run. So if you want more progressives to run, hell go out there and get more progressives to run. If you want more moderates to run because you think the party’s gone too far left, then hell find more moderates. But don’t sit back and think that somebody else’s responsibility to do all of that for what you want. Right? If it’s not working the way that you want it to work, then you gotta do something in order to help move it in the right direction. Stop looking for somebody else to solve your problems for you.

And that is the mentality that we gotta get out of, not, not only in the party, but I think in the country that we’re always looking for somebody else to address the issue. We are all somebody, right? And we can play a part. You may not go out and recruit somebody, but maybe you will go to the state party office and say, Hey, listen, I don’t know if you’re having problems with recruiting, but I’ll volunteer an hour to make some recruitment calls, or I’ll do this and that in order to support somebody who decides to run. But we can all play a part in this thing and that it’s just not this thing that is happening. I mean, most of these state parties are run by volunteers.

The vast majority of state party chairs don’t get paid anything. Zero. $0 that they get paid. They are volunteer chairs. We really have to break outta this mold that there’s all this money and this and that and, and everybody’s corrupt and this and that before you start putting a label on these things. Go look under the hood. Actually see if you can find the corruption yourself. Right?

Don’t, don’t just look at what people tweet out and this and that, or some little meme or whatever. Do the research yourself to figure out whether or not that is actually right. And that’s something that, that sometimes I even find myself falling guilty for it. Like you, you just see something and it’s quick and you can just put it out.

But sometimes it’s about pausing and be like, is that really true? Maybe I should pick up the phone and figure it out.

Zachary Karabell: One thing, we do a lot on this podcast and we do with the Progress Network is, is kind of express that message of, if you want to create positive change, create positive change. You know, in the sense of it’s kind of incumbent upon all of us to write that story of society of the future, the way we want to see it be written, rather than having others either write it for us or succumb to a fatalism that it’s all pre-written as it were.

You just alluded to, to why you decided to run against Lindsey Graham, and there was a heady moment in the middle of 2020 where you and your candidacy became, I think it’s fair to say, a media darling, meaning you were seized upon as this great hope and was, was there finally gonna be some sort of sea change?

There was a feeling of Trump and that whole movement becoming more deflated, COVID certainly didn’t, didn’t help the situation and there was like this moment where people started talking about you winning in South Carolina. Did you believe you were gonna win in South Carolina?

Jaime Harrison: I did and Lindsey thought that I had a good chance of winning too. You know, the month of October, Mitch McConnell dropped $20 million into South Carolina, saying, you know, Mitch McConnell’s only gonna put $20 million in a month in in your state unless he thought that there’s a possibility as well. This is when the momentum for us changed and when it, I was on the offense for most of 2020 going into 2020.

Lindsey’s COVID response was just anemic. It was awful. It was tone deaf. We were surging in terms of money, in terms of energy on the ground and the polls, not just my polls. Even national polls were shown that the race was neck and neck, and I know even some of Lindsey’s polls were shown that was neck and neck and some of the NRSC’s polls were shown that is neck and neck.

When did all of that shift and change? It was at the death of Justice RBG. That was my October surprise because instead of going from being on offense because you all, you all remember Lindsey was getting on, on, on Fox News, near tears. Oh, they’re killing me down here. Like, I really need your help and this and that.

They were running all kinds of ads against me that I, you know, that I was a Chinese communist that, you know, I supported, even though my grandfather was a police officer for 30 years in the Detroit Police Department that I was for defunding the police. They had local sheriffs running with images of my face and AOC and Nancy Pelosi in the back of a police cruiser, like all kind, they even darkened the color of my skin. You only get that desperate for stuff when you feel as though you have to be, you have to dredge down everything else. Like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, everybody the, the governor, they were all campaigning around the state with Lindsey Graham. Again, if they didn’t think that I was, I had a shot, then they wouldn’t have done all of that.

But when RBG passed away and Lindsey Graham got the opportunity, because remember he was the chair of the Judiciary Committee. When he had the opportunity to chair those judicial hearings, then instead of me being on the offense, then it put me on the defense because now the questions on the, all of the media and every, and Lindsey now is getting all this free publicity, all the hearings and all, all the month of October, he got all of that, and now I’m asked 15 million times do you support Amy Coney Barrett, right? Who is for many of the Republicans, and knowing that we’re in a still Republican state in South Carolina, many of these Republicans see this as an opportunity to get rid of Roe, to, to do all of these, all of these things. And so then Lindsey, Lindsey was having problems with the far right, and they were not very supportive of of him, and so they were almost anemic to his candidacy.

And so that was part of why the, the polls were so tight because they weren’t coming back to him. But then when he got the opportunity to bring this darling of the right to put on the Supreme Court and the opportunity of, of eventually getting rid of Roe. It just, it, it was like going 75 miles per hour and hitting a brick wall. And we started seeing the slippage in our polls internally, and then that’s when Lindsey also regained some of his bravado and everything else. COVID hurt because we weren’t able to do the door knocks. The DSCC had told all of the Senate campaigns in 2020 to not knock doors. So none of our campaigns knocked doors.

The Biden campaign didn’t have a grassroots door knocking campaign, ’cause remember there was no COVID vaccine at that point in time. But the Republicans continued to do all of their in-person rallies, all of the door knockings, they were still canvassing and all of that stuff. And we weren’t doing that.

And so, you know, I had TV saturated. I watched Saturday Night Live one night. I had six ads on Saturday Night Live. An hour and a half, six of my ads, you go to the gas station and pump your gas. I had ads of my head on gas station pumps. Like we totally had to stay saturated, but we could not do that grassroots stuff that Democrats do, right, to really get us over the hump. And, and, and that was part of, part of the challenge that we had. And I, the last thing I would say, after I lost, I called up Jon Ossoff and Warnock. I told them, I said, guys, I don’t give a damn what the DSCC says. You have to knock doors. You gotta find some way to knock doors, ’cause remember, they then went into the runoff and both of them were behind going into the runoff. You know, they were behind their Republicans going into the runoff, but they changed their tactics. They started door knocking and doing all those things and that really helped them get over the hump because you know, had we not, Democrats, we have to do that. That is how we connect with our voters and we weren’t able to do that. I think that’s part of the reason why Biden didn’t have the coattails in 20, even though 80 million people went to vote, we didn’t have the coattails that he could and should have had, and I think it’s because we didn’t have that grassroots on the ground operation that Democrats have always had.

Emma Varvaloucas: So that’s a good segue into, you know, hearing all your points about not having magic wands and you’re not chair anymore, but just a guy with an opinion. Right? And a guy well saturated in, in Democratic politics. What would be your like dream campaign strategy and messaging for the Democrats going into 26 and 28?

Jaime Harrison: One of the things that I wanted to do as DNC chair and, and we incorporated before COVID, we incorporated some of this into my campaign, and the reason why we didn’t do it as chair is because every major expenditure at the DNC would have to get approval from folks at the White House. Again, most people don’t know that, right? But that’s the case.

And this was, this was not something that, that got the a OK on. I fundamentally believe that if the party shifts this way, we will be in the majority for years to come. I wanted to institute at the DNC a program called Democrats Care, and it’s because I believe that the DNC or the Democratic Party can’t just be a political organization. We gotta be a community organization.

And that’s a different lens in which to look at the world and how we interact with it. And what do I mean by that? Instead of just dropping into communities three and four months before an election, instead of just focusing on, oh, can you come out and vote for us? If we get back to the constituent services that we used to do in the past, right? You all remember reading in history about the times that if you lost your job or you lost your house, you call your city council person or your mayor or somebody else, and guess what? They help you. They help you get a job. Or they help you find housing.

Well, we’ve sort of lost that. You know, we, we now rely, it’s about mail and TV ads and digital ads and those type of things, and we really don’t really interact with folks in the way that we should in terms of helping them address the issues and the barriers that they’re facing.

I tried to get the president and he really liked this idea, but I tried to get some of his team to create what I call Biden Empowerment Centers. These would be, imagine community centers in our battleground states where people could come and just get help. So if you know, you heard about all of the student loan debt stuff, but you didn’t know how to fill out the forms on the Department of Ed website, you could go to the Biden Empowerment Center and guess what? They help you fill out those forms.

Or if you had a small business and you didn’t know anything about the grants that Biden gave in terms of small business grants or you know, during PPP and and you didn’t get a PPP loan or all these other things, and you just didn’t have the sophistication to figure it out. You go to Biden Empowerment Center and they actually help you.

It’s about bridging all the legislative good stuff that we did with the people, because many times that’s part of the problem. In this last election, the people didn’t feel the things that we actually got done because they couldn’t connect to it. They didn’t understand how to tap into it.

And so I believe that the party has to go into these communities and, and establish roots. Help people write resumes, help people figure out how to get their first home, help people figure out how to start their own small businesses, fill out the FAFSA forms for first generation college kids.

Basically be there and help folks, right? Because when you help people, people never forget it. And they are the best messengers. They’re better than a TV ad, they’re better than a radio spot because they’re gonna tell their cousin and their mama and their daddy and their uncle and everybody else, and that word of mouth is powerful.

And so what I want the party to do is to go back to those roots, go back to helping people in rural communities, in urban communities, in all communities, even when we are not in power. We can do it right now. We can create these spots right now where we go and help folks because then when people go to the ballot box, they are not just thinking, oh yeah, you know, it’s the same old, same old. Then they say, well, you know, this person, my cousin told me about how this, this person helped them at a job fair or helped them do this and that. That is how we fundamentally start to change politics. We go back to what worked for us in the past, and that is what I would love to see us do.

I did that in my campaign, early on in my campaign. We, we called it Harrison Helps. I partnered with the Boys and Girls Club in August. And in essence, I had my donors. I asked the Boys and Girls Club, I said, I wanna do a back to school supplies drive. And they were like, we would love to do that. I said, well, give me all of the supplies that we need. And so we filled out an Amazon form. And then I sent that to all of my donors and, and supporters and they went online and they bought all this stuff. They sent it to the Boys and Girls Club and we, we gave out 400 backpacks. 400 backpacks to folks who did not have the resources to give those supplies to their kids, and I can’t tell you how powerful that was and, and the impact that some of the families had.

If we do more of that, I know that we will win elections time and time again because people will see us as an agent of, of change and, and people who are helping them in their greatest time of need.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. As a community actor, I mean, something else you said too in our pre-taping about this topic was you said less mail, more billboards. So what was that all about?

Jaime Harrison: There are a lot of consultants who get paid a lot of money and commission off of some of these things, right? In the end of the day, we just gotta communicate to people where they are and communicate to them in the manners in which they receive information. You know, if you live in rural America, you know billboards are, you know, there’s so much. You see billboards all the time. You’re riding back and forth on the, on that road to get to work or to go to the grocery store, and that’s something that’s gonna stay there. And it could be sources of, of communication. Folks are talking about it, oh, did you see that, that billboard off of 26?

You know, as opposed to the mail that you, you get, you probably don’t even look at, you just put in the file 13 and you throw it away. I just think we got, we gotta go back to the way that we’ve always communicated to folks and to go to where people are, and I just think instead of just doing things that help to line the pockets of consultants and get them so that they can buy their second and third homes.

Zachary Karabell: It’s interesting. We’ve had this entire conversation about the nature of politics, the nature of the Democratic party, your own experience, and we haven’t talked about Trump.

Jaime Harrison: No.

Zachary Karabell: And I have been struck over the past years meeting with a lot of candidates that the really successful Democratic candidates locally largely run on what they perceive, rightly are their constituents’ concerns, which rarely are as focused on Donald Trump as a human or as a president than the media slash social media ecosystem is, like that there’s a disconnect between the amount of airtime and sort of collective attention that Donald Trump seems brilliant at aggregating to himself and how important he, as both a person and as a focus is to most people in local and even state level politics, which has also led me to feel like we’re kind of overstating how much in many people’s lives and experience, you know, the president per se, in this case, Trump, matters in how people think about politics and government. I mean, does that resonate with you or am I?

Jaime Harrison: I think you’re spot on. I mean, it totally resonates with me and, and again, I think we win more if we talk about the things that are important to the people. The guys that I talk to at the barbershop, you know, can’t stand Trump. But in the end of the day, the thing that’s most important to them is, is you know, whether or not they can put food on the table, whether or not they can close their clothe, their, their kids, whether or not, you know, they’re breathing toxic fumes or whether or not, you know, that pothole that is big as me is actually ever filled, right?

Those are the things that are really important to them and I think you can, you can still talk about Trump, like if you wanna talk about Trump, you can talk about Trump and the fact that he’s not addressing those things. You can talk about the Trump acolytes in the legislature and in Congress who rather kiss Trump’s ass rather than deal with those issues that are important. You have to bring it back to the things that are really important to the people. I think sometimes we get caught up in that Trump stuff and spend more time on him and less time on the things that are actually important to people.

I think you’re spot on with that and I, I hope, as you know, Trump’s is not gonna be on the ballot in 26. And I actually think for Republicans, that’s a, that should be a scary thing. Whenever he is not on the ballot, they don’t do well. Right? Look at, look at the 2022 midterms. We had the best midterms election for an incumbent president since the 1930s. Right? No other incumbent president had had as good of a midterms as Joe Biden had, and Democrats had in 2022.

Why? Well, Trump wasn’t on the ballot so that that magic that he has to bring more people into electorate. And I think Trump and, and O, Obama are very similar in that way, right? Obama had a magic with the electorate that’s also very different, right? That, that he could, he cannot just hand over to somebody like he can’t just wish it onto somebody.

Trump is the same way. He can’t just wish his magnetism to a sector of the electorate to anybody, and so then it becomes much more of the traditional Democrat versus Republican, right versus left dynamic. And on those fronts, I think the American electorate align more with where Democrats are than they do Republicans.

And so when it, it’s a normal, normal playing field. And you don’t have this larger than life figure who’s the, you know, the running back, right? And is running, just keep running, running through the defensive line every time, then you can win. So Trump’s not on that ballot. And I think Democrats are well poised. I told Ken Martin when he became chair, I said, you, you are one lucky man because you’re gonna go down as one of the greatest chairs in history, ’cause you’re gonna get back the House of Representatives and hell, you may even get the Senate back if we do the recruitment stuff right? Right? In some of these other areas, because I believe we will win seats that we probably should have no reason to win.

And that is because the Republicans right now are overplaying their hands. And in the end of the day, people are gonna go back to that. They go back to the norm and they’re gonna make a decision. It becomes a referendum on the people who are in power on whether or not these, this year and next year have actually moved the ball forward for American people.

If it doesn’t move the ball forward, which I don’t believe it will, and looking at the Medicaid proposal that House Dems are talking about right now, looking at what they’re talking about, Social Security and Medicare, looking at these tax breaks they’re trying to give millionaires. They are overplaying their, their hand and overusing their power and as a result, the American people are gonna snap back and they’re gonna readjust what’s going on. And in the end, I think Democrats are gonna have a good, a great night, probably akin to where we were in 2006 in terms of taking back the House. And we may even surprise people about getting either very close in the Senate or taking that back too.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, that was a positive end note. I mean, if you’re a Democrat, I suppose if you’re not, it was not positive at all, but.

Zachary Karabell: Well, Jaime, maybe we’ll have you on again in a year, right before the election.

Jaime Harrison: I love it. I absolutely love it.

Zachary Karabell: You’ll have your podcast up and running. You’ll be prognosticating from there and maybe your book will be wrapped up.

So I want to thank you for your insights today. We did get a little bit in the weeds, but I think in some sense, you know, politics is a little bit about the weeds and we, we treat politics as all about big ideas, fighting, contesting the grand philosophies. But as you point out, you know, for a lot of people, retail politics is, is government providing a series of needed services and is it doing it efficiently? Is it doing it well? Whole other conversation about government efficiency, which we can have on a whole other conversation, but I wanna thank you for your time and thank you for the, as you said, Why not you? You stepped up.

Jaime Harrison: Thank you. Thank you both and thank you for doing this. It’s really, really important to have these conversations where folks that listen and you know, I always like to learn in in the process, right? To pick up something that I didn’t know. And so I really, really appreciate you both for doing this and keep educating folks and inspiring folks to get out.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you so much for coming on, Jaime.

Zachary Karabell: Well that was a fascinating conversation. Certainly if you’re a political wonk or policy wonk. The kind of nuts and bolts about how these things work. I will now be wiser for the complexity of who funds what and who chooses what. The only challenge, of course, is just like nimbyism, right? For getting things done locally, you can understand the process by which multiple inputs creates suboptimal outcomes. There is a danger though that that leads to, Hey, that wasn’t my responsibility. That was somebody else’s responsibility, or some other institution’s responsibility, when the collective reality is, at least in the part of the Democratic Party for the past X number of years, not having done a great job at the local level. And as we saw in 2024, not doing a great job at the national level.

I mean, yes, it’s a finely divided country. These elections are not slam dunks in either direction, except in districts where, as we know, there’s multiple non-competitive congressional districts where it’s 20% in either direction, ’cause the way these districts have been drawn by Democrats and Republicans, I kind of wanted the conversation to go on.

Obviously we could have had it go on, but then it would’ve been a two hour podcast of, you know, there’s clearly something not really working about the Democratic Party. And I don’t think that’s just a talking head phenomenon or a, you know, an inaccurate read of just ’cause there’s been a few very close elections, it just doesn’t feel like there’s something working about the Democratic Party in a way that you can say that the Republican Party now, even if you are completely against it, is a kind of a, a cohesive force, maybe not a good cohesive force or maybe a great one depending on your perspective. You can’t say the same thing about the Democrats.

Emma Varvaloucas: I always wonder if that’s just like coming from a perspective in which you are leaning more towards the Democrats because like when I listen and read media from a Republican perspective, like there is a lot of the criticism of the, Hey listen, the Democrats have their act together, but like we don’t, you know, you hear that from the other side.

But I like, it’s funny ’cause I agree with you. I feel like there’s something about the Democratic party that’s not gelling. Like it does not seem like a wave. It just seems like a lot of kind of like small actors running around on the beach. I don’t know where this visual metaphor is going, but anyway, it’s not a unified wave crashing upon the shore.

I’m not really sure if the Republicans are either. It might just be, as Jaime was saying, that like magnetic force of Trump the way that we used to have a magnetic force of Obama, and maybe it’s just you kinda have to wait around for that to happen again. Or maybe it’s, it’s like there are so many inputs that actually you don’t know how to fix that, which is a little bit worrisome.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, there was the reality within the Republicans and Trump was in 2016, the reflection of the party no longer speaking for the people.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: You know, that was the time when RINO, Republican in name only, that that whole dynamic within the Republican party was very pronounced and Trump was the anti-establishment. He was kind of the anti-Republican, Republican as it turned out. Eight years on, nine years on. It’s hard to know that there’s any of that Republican establishment that’s cohesively still there. So that’s what I meant, like he really has come to dominate the party, which Jaime talked about before, meaning if your entire sort of electoral strategy hinges on Trump, and it seems to be most Republicans, both at the local and and national level, have increasingly sort of tethered their political fortunes to Donald Trump, that’s a problem, right?

Because he is not gonna, whatever the absurd musings about a third term, like he’s not gonna run for a third term. He is not gonna be elected for a third term. So if that’s your electoral strategy, that’s a problem.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, absolutely. And that, that brings a little pet peeve I have when people on the left say like, oh, but like JD Vance is like Trump, but smarter than Trump. I’m like, JD Vance is not Trump. Like JD Vance is not likable in any kind of way, the way that Trump is likable. Like it’s, it’s, it’s really unclear. I think, I think it’s unclear where the Democrats are going and it may, maybe doesn’t feel like this right now because Trump is, you know, in office for four years, but I’m not sure it’s clear where the Republicans are going either. So I don’t know. Might be on similar kind of ground heading into 2028, if not 2026.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, I do, I do wonder about how much of the, like once Trump is taken outta the picture, we’ll be back on a normal playing field. Like how much of that is true? Like will will have, will we have this feeling of like politics has finally returned to normal, like everyone seems to kind of want, but I’m not sure if it’s gonna be like that. Like I think the Republicans have changed beyond, like, as you were saying before, recognition. The establishment Republican guard isn’t there anymore.

I think the Democrats like what we were talking about before, like they just still haven’t really found their identity. Like I don’t, I don’t really know what they’re all about. I’ll vote for them, but I dunno, I don’t, I can’t really tell you like the, the Democrats of the, you know, 21st century. Like, I don’t know, what are you guys doing?

Zachary Karabell: It’ll be interesting to see if there’s an actual identity in 2026 other than anti-Trump or anti-Republican. And look, that may be enough in a midterm election or just enough, I guess what we’ll see. So, that brings us to the end of our DNC Jaime Harrison Democratic Party discussion for the week. I wanna thank you all for listening to What Could Go Right. Please tune in for our Progress Report, which is our news of the week that you may have missed news of things going well, and not just news of things going catastrophically wrong. Send us your ideas, comments. We value the choice of your time, which is for all of us in a finite 24 7 universe, limited. So we honor that choice and we will be back with you next week.