No to Biden, No to Trump: Insights From Swing-State Voters

A recent Gallup poll found that 29 percent of respondents said neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden are fit for the job. To unpack how voters are feeling about the two candidates, this week on Deconstructed, Ryan Grim is joined by Anat Shenker-Osorio, a returning guest, messaging expert, and host of the podcast “Words to Win By.” Together they dig into what she’s been hearing from voters in swing states disillusioned by both parties and the whole electoral process.

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

The last two presidential elections have been decided not by the traditional swing voters we’ve come to think of in politics, but what political consultants now refer to as “double haters.” A double hater hates both candidates running, and is faced with a choice of picking between them, sitting it out, or voting third party. In the last two elections, the double haters who showed up to vote swung the election.

In 2016, double haters broke for Trump; it turned out they hated Hillary Clinton a bit more. In 2020, they had some regrets, and less hostility toward the Democratic candidate. The double haters that election broke for Joe Biden. But voters are stunned to find themselves facing the same stale choice yet again. As Bo Burnham puts it:

Bo Burnham: [sung] They’re really going to make me vote for Joe Biden.

RG: A recent Gallup poll found that 29 percent said that neither Trump nor Biden are fit for the job.

Today, we’re going to get into the heads of the double haters, and we’ll be guided on that tour by Anat Shenker-Osorio, a return guest on the program. She’s been part of a team running focus groups in key swing states. Here’s how a group of Latino voters in Nevada, for instance, responded to a question about Biden:

Focus Group Lead: Joe Biden. First thing that’s popping into your mind. Joe Biden.

Focus Group Speakers: Senile.

Focus Group Lead: Senile?

Focus Group Speakers: A puppet.

Focus Group Speakers: Yeah, a puppet. That’s a good word.

Focus Group Speakers: For the “they.”

Focus Group Lead: Joe Biden, but— Joe Biden, who is he a puppet for?

Focus Group Speakers: The “they.”

Focus Group Speakers: Yeah, the “they.” It’s like, they tell him what to do, and he’s just like, OK, this is what I’ve got to do, this is what I’ve got to say.

Focus Group Lead: I’ve used the “they.” Do you know who the “they” is? Or, who would you say is the “they?”

Focus Group Speakers: Well, the people above him.

Focus Group Speakers: Uh-huh. And the elites.

RG: Anat — a researcher, campaign advisor, and host of the podcast, Words to Win By — joins me now to unpack how voters are feeling about the two candidates before us this November. Welcome back to Deconstructed, Anat.

AS: Thanks for having me back.

RG: So, it’s been a while since you’ve been on, a lot has happened since then. We don’t do a ton of horse race focus here on Deconstructed, but I also don’t want to completely ignore the fact that there is a horse race between these two tired horses that are galloping toward an inevitable finish line in November, and wanted to get your sense of what you’ve been seeing out there in the world of polling and focus grouping and electioneering.

So, thanks for coming back on.

AS: Galloping is very generous, that’s very kind of you.

RG: Yes.

AS: So, I think your lead in is a very apt one. These are known horses. So, this is a redo election, which you would expect would mean that people have their opinions pretty firmly cemented. A lot of opinions are firmly cemented in any election because most of voting behavior is just reflexive partisan identity. People are team blue or they are team red, and that’s what they’re going to do, and that’s what they’re always going to do.

So, an interesting — and I would go farther and say a surprising — dynamic in this election, given that these candidates were the exact same candidates in 2020, is that, in a recent battleground state’s poll that we conducted for the research collaborative, what we found is that, while 6 in 10 voters across the six battleground states are cemented — they are going to vote for Trump or they are going to vote for Biden, and that’s that — 4 in 10 are still some form of up-for-grabs or undecided. And that’s a lot of people, even in March, which was the time that we did that poll. 

So, 4 in 10, these folks, what they appear to be doing— There are some authentically drawn towards RFK, that is a decided magnet, but that is the minority, by a lot. Mostly what we see, both in this survey and in qualitative, is that these double-no’s — I call them the no-no’s, they’re commonly called the double haters — they’re kind of cycling through what am I going to do when I don’t want to do Biden or Trump. And sometimes they say “I’m going to sit it out,” and sometimes they say, “I’m going to vote third party.” And, sometimes, the newer permutation that they’re offering, if they are higher-information is, “I’m going to skip the top of the ticket. I’ll vote, but I just won’t vote this one line at the top,” which is a pretty sophisticated political calculus out of people who are different to the kind of people who are, like, “I’ll just sit it out, I just won’t do anything at all.”

And so, in this kind of toggling between, “I’m a double-no, double hater, or whatever. What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?” One thing that we’ve really noticed decidedly is that, when we are engaged in a conversation that starts off by saying Trump is, right? Trump is racist, Trump is a criminal, Trump is under indictment, Trump is a sexist, Trump is a— There are so many ways to fill in that sentence, we could do that all day. It instantly gets the response from people in qualitative that goes, well, but Biden is. Because, basically, the meta message of Trump is, I want you to think of this election in terms of the characteristics of these two individual candidates, and I want you to weigh these characteristics. And even though for Democrats that should seem a no-brainer, it sort of draws top of mind all of these associations that a lot of these double-no’s are not thrilled with Biden about.

When we shift, instead, from “Trump is” to “Trump will do,” away from identity and towards future agenda, that is where we are on much more solid ground. And even more solid ground is when we shift away from the candidates at all toward, this election is really about which country we will be, which future we will have, as opposed to which man — let’s just cut to the chase — we’re going to elect at the helm.

RG: OK, that makes sense because, as you were saying, Trump will do — and I’ve seen some of your analysis of these focus groups — it made me ask, then, OK, doesn’t that raise the question of, well, what will Biden do? You know, in the same way that “Trump is” raises people’s hackles, and they say, well, “Biden is X, Y, Z.”

And Biden, at least in my lifetime, is the only candidate — other than maybe Trump, actually — who is running for another term in office without really telling you what he’s going to do. He recently started to say that he’ll codify Roe v. Wade, but beyond that, if you polled a typical voter —or polled me — and said, what will Biden do if you put him back in, give him four more years? It wouldn’t be at my fingertips what he would do.

Is there an effort to change that? Or do they think that they can just move it to vibes about the kind of country that we want and that we want to be, and that that will get enough of these double haters?

Is this deliberate, or they just haven’t gotten around to telling people what they plan to do if they get reelected?

AS: I’ll answer the question, but I just want to disaggregate between what the main campaign “team Biden” is doing, which is not under my control, is not, like, you know, I’m not in there telling them what to do, so I just want to, like—

RG: Yes. Me neither. So, let’s be clear about that.

AS: Slice that out.

RG: We’re just a couple of people talking.

AS: Yeah. So, as far as the latter part of your question, is that just not what they plan to do? I think — and here I’m offering an informed conjecture, to be clear — I think they would argue that that’s what they’ve tried to do. That they’ve tried to sort of tout their accomplishments as an opening salvo to, this is what we’ve done, and this is what we’ll continue to do.

But I think what you’re hitting upon — and then I’ll answer the other part of your question — is that they ran into a roadblock last year, when they were on the touting-accomplishments train. When they were on the, you know, “here’s what we did,” like, you get a prescription drug, and you get a solar panel, and you get a paved road. And I’m exaggerating; they didn’t get Oprah to come. Maybe if they had, it all would have sunk in better, and that would have been a more solid approach. Maybe she didn’t want to. Don’t know.

But I think that they understand that that, trying to popularize Bidenomics, trying to kind of sell, here’s all the things that we did for you, it buttressed up against people’s lived experience, and their own feeling of precarity, of frustration, of hardship of, you know, WTF. And I think the fundamental problem with saying the economy is good is that you’re saying to people that the economy is good. By which I mean, this system, which the majority of voters we can see in polling know to be vastly unjust, funneling money out of the hands of working people, that you can work super, super, super hard and still not exit hardship.

So, to say to people the economy is good is to say that the status quo is as it should be, and people don’t feel that. So, I think that what team Biden would probably argue is that they have moved toward this, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to continue to tackle drug prices, we’re going to continue to take on corporate price gouging, we’re going to continue to expand these programs. They’ve talked about codifying Roe, as you noted. I think that they sometimes — maybe they will more often — talk about passing the Voting Rights Act, both the Freedom to Vote and the John Lewis Act. So, I think that they think that they’re giving an agenda.

To the previous part of your question: yes. When you shift from Trump is to Trump will do, it does invite the same thought bubble out of the respondent, and they go to, well, Biden will do. And, basically, where that lands them — and I’m speaking sort of in broad strokes, people are individuals — is most often toward a, well, I guess what Biden will do is keep doing what he’s been doing. It will be a maintenance of what we presently have.

And, to be sure, for a lot of people — and by people, I’m now specifically talking about this 4 in 10, these no-no’s, these double haters — they’re like, I don’t love the status quo, I’m not thrilled with how things are, but I am much, much more concerned with this dystopia looming of a group of people, in the form of macro-Republicans, trying to control us and decide our futures for us. And so, they’re weighing a continuation of a present they don’t love with a future that they truly find repugnant.

RG: How is it that it’s so close, if they find this future that repugnant?

AS: So, multiple reasons. The first I stated earlier: a lot of political behavior just really comes down to partisan identity, and it is not dissimilar to people’s fanatical attachment to a sports team, and that’s just how it is. So, that’s a big chunk of people that have decided, before there is a named candidate, who they will be for, because of the team.

The other reason why it’s extraordinarily close — and there’s multiple — is because of the features of our supremely undemocratic system, wherein the election gets decided by a handful of people in a handful of states. And people who live in the most populous states — like my own, California — kind of don’t matter at the presidential level. So, that’s part of the dynamic as well.

And then, the other part of the dynamic — and this is where I will frequently quip, I’d rather win elections than polls — we do see a systematic difference of behavior when it comes to surveys than when it comes to voting. It seems that voters know the difference between answering online or, on the phone, someone asking them, hey, what are you going to do right now? Whether that be back in October, November, December of last year, more recently now. That that question, to some degree, registers as, how do you feel about things right now? Are you happy with Joe Biden or not? And that people treat that survey question differently to how they treat the actual act of going into a polling booth and filling out the form, or whatever. Pushing the levers in times gone by.

RG: Got it. As I think about it — and tell me if you think I’m wrong here — I think about five threads running through this election, and I’m curious if that’s what you see showing up in your focus groups and in the polling.

Like, three issues: abortion, the genocide in Gaza, and immigration/the border. And then kind of overlaid over all of that, you’ve got Biden’s age, and then you’ve got just Trump as a phenomenon, what people think of him, and just Trumpism and MAGA-ism.

Is that right? I have spent so much time the last five months reporting on what’s going on Gaza. I wonder sometimes if I’m in something of a bubble of people who care about this ongoing genocide. Because I can’t tell, if I walk outside of it, how much it’s resonating with a typical voter.

So, first of all, I’m curious: how much of an actually-caring-about-this-genocide bubble am I in? How much do you see it among the voting public?

AS: It is a bit of a bubble. You’re right to ask that question, in terms of, for whom is this not meaningful, I would say, but salient. By which I mean, not that people don’t feel that this is, to use the lightest possible term, distasteful, horrific, horrible, not OK, all those things. But, rather, whether or not it rises to the level of their daily thought patterns, their electoral calculus, etc. So, that’s what I mean by saliency. That is a bit of a bubble. You are sort of existing among outliers, if we’re just looking at statistics.

We even purposely did focus groups in Dearborn, Michigan among young disaffected voters of color, because we wanted to sort of go into where we thought the bubble would be most highly concentrated, because we wanted precisely to look at that. I mean, a focus group is an idiosyncratic thing, and it’s anecdotal, especially when I’m talking about that one single focus group. We were surprised to not get more of that coming at us initially, in terms of people volunteering that as being core to their calculus. Definitely aware of it, but there’s a difference between aware and core to the calculus.

I think the thing to say about the bubble that is really important is that we tend to forget — or political campaigns, to their peril, tend to forget — that it’s not just about how many people, it’s about which people this upsets. And why I say that is because the people that it upsets — and rightly so — are, in many places like Michigan, an important part of the choir. They are, if you will, the lead tenor, lead alto, etc.

And so, if the people that you rely upon to knock on doors, to drive voters out, to speak about this, to get their friends and family to be paying attention to this election, and to be wanting to participate, even if it’s relatively few in numbers, it’s not just the how many, it’s the who. And that’s where it does matter as a political calculus, not to mention that it matters just as a moral question, which I would argue is more important.

RG: Yes. And I want to underline that, that this is ultimately, first and foremost and lastly, a moral question. But here we’re talking about the election, and so, we’ll just have to muscle through the discomfort associated with talking about it in those terms.

But I think you’re right, in my experience. That the types of people who are going to go out and vote uncommitted or uninstructed are also the types of people who, in their friend group, are the ones — and in their family — are the ones that people are going to for advice. Now, that might be more relevant on a congressional or senatorial level than on a presidential level, where everybody kind of has their own opinion of Trump and Biden, but it does seem like those are your workers, those are your messengers. If the messengers aren’t just not unwilling to canvas, but actively hostile to you, that’s a significant problem.

This week, in Wisconsin, roughly 50,000 people voted uninstructed, with a very tiny budget for a campaign, one that’s not intuitive at all, yet still managed to get one-and-a-half times the margin between Biden and Trump in 2020; I think Biden won it by about 20,000 votes.

So, to see 50,000 Democrats voting uninstructed does seem concerning, but what is your sense of what the Democratic Party’s plan is for this? It doesn’t seem like any policy change is on the horizon. And, absent that, I can’t imagine that there’s any— Messaging has its limits, I would imagine.

AS: True story. Messaging does have its limits. You cannot solve a policy problem with a message.

So, I’m going to answer in two ways. The first is, what do I think from my own perch is their plan. And then, what do I think, as a messaging answer, as opposed to a policy answer, because I’m in full agreement. The answer is that the policy has to change. That’s the answer, period, the end.

I think that probably their calculus is that one of two or both things will happen. And, to be honest, I certainly hope for moral reasons that there is a leadership spill within Israel. It’s poised to happen. I don’t know how closely you observe politics happening there. I’m actually Israeli. There are growing demonstrations, over the last weekend there were the largest demonstrations, I believe, to date. And it was a merging of a demonstration movement that’s been led by a group called Omdim Beyachad — Standing Together — which is co-led by Palestinians and Jews.

RG: Oh, yeah. I saw the Standing Together duo when they came to D.C., actually. A really, really interesting organization.

AS: Yeah. I am not objective, because they are friends. So.

RG: Oh, actually, I noticed some of your rhetoric on their website, now that I think about it. Some of your messaging.

AS: Oh. That’s very kind.

RG: Yes, your kind of Anat approach to, they’re highlighting our differences so that they can enrich themselves and dominate.

AS: Yeah. Basically ascribing motivation to the villains in order to explain how they use this divide and conquer strategy that’s actually bad for all of us. Yes. They’re great.

So, big protests, and a merging of ceasefire protests within Israel, with the hostage families very much in the lead, as they’ve always been, and rightly so. And protest to demand that Netanyahu step down, or that there be a sort of reconfiguration of what we already know to be a very precarious coalition. I know this is hard for a lot of American listeners to understand, because we don’t have a parliamentary system and, so, if you’re not used to it, it sort of seems like gobbledygook. But there can be leadership change without an election within a parliamentary system. 

So, I think that part of the hope — and like I said, my very naked hope — is that Netanyahu begone, for reasons that I think would just be beneficial to humanity, not to the U.S. election. And that change, and a change in policy, because I think the person poised to kind of lead a new coalition — I’m not saying he’s a shining star of humanity, but he is much, much better than Netanyahu, which is a low bar — that there will just be a change within Israel, and that will sort of reflect, and it will help the situation, and so on. So, that is, perhaps, calculation number one.

I think calculation number two is something that you’ve already intuited, which is that November is a long way away. Most people are not paying attention to politics, and that is actually the bigger divide than even partisanship that I’ve spoken about before. It’s really a divide between people who are following all the machinations and the news and what’s going on, and people who are like, huh, there’s an election in November? And, believe it or not, there are many people who are, huh, there’s an election in November. I know if you’re listening to this podcast, that sounds like I made that up, but trust, that’s most people.

So, I think that the calculation is probably that something will change internally with time in the region, and this just isn’t going to be what people are focused on. I’m happy to talk about what feels like an interim-for-right-now sort of message in the absence of policy change; which, again, I’m intentionally repeating is actually what’s required here.

RG: Right. Yeah, what is the interim message shift that you’re noticing?

AS: So, not noticing, but experimenting with, and seeing has promise; I’m not saying it’s actually being undertaken.

So, what we find is that with these higher information folks that we’re talking about, that are contemplating things like skipping the top of the ticket, or who are engaged in the effort that you just detailed, coming from Wisconsin — and previously in Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc. — of uncommitted, or whatever it’s called in their own state.

When we talk to folks about how progressive change happens in this country, how it has happened in our past, and we give examples, like the civil rights movement, women voting, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the eight-hour workday, child labor laws, whatever. Stuff that we as progressives agree were good things, a good thing that happened, and we say to people, not a single one of those things happened electorally. Not a single one of those things were a consequence of voting.

And, in fact, if you try to kind of get your brain around the idea of civil rights heroes of our past, sitting around and thinking, you know what, the way we’re going to end Jim Crow, and end segregation, and change the laws that are here, is by canvassing to vote, picking a different leader. They never would have thought that, because that wouldn’t have worked.

And so, when we remind folks that every bit of progressive change that we’ve had in this country has come through agitation outside the electoral system, then what we can say to them is, voting is really about setting the preconditions for who will be in power to respond when you want to go on strike, when you want to protest, when you want to yell in the face of the person, the policymaker, the leader. And the question before us is, really, will we have the freedom to protest, to strike for better wages, to tell the President of the United States that we don’t agree, or will we be thrown in the gulag for doing so?

That seems to help contextualize what this voting decision is, and that it is part of the toolbox. It is one of the tools in the toolbox, but it’s certainly not the only one.

RG: It’s a statement of what a difficult position Democrats are in, that the best they can do is say, OK, yes, Joe Biden might be committing a genocide, but you can protest him for it and not be thrown in the gulag. But I guess you work with what you’ve got.

And if we want to give Democrats the most optimistic slant on the election, let’s take abortion. That continues to seem to break through in every special election as a decisive issue in ways that we haven’t seen in electoral politics in forever. What are you seeing among voters when it comes to their willingness to continue to come out for Democrats this next cycle, despite everything else, simply because of abortion rights? And how much has the IVF Alabama debacle played into that?

AS: It not only continues to break through, but it continues to be a giant surprise to centrist Democratic mostly-male pundits, that women are not done being pissed off. I’m not sure if they’ve ever spoken to a woman, and why it is they think that women are done being pissed off. And not just women, but obviously, principally, that is who is the most pissed off in this situation.

So, yes, what we are finding is both that abortion and IVF as an add-on, what we call the freedom to decide for yourself whether and when you have kids, that’s sort of the encompassing freedom-ized version of what all that package— You know, because it also includes — eventually, if you read Project 2025 — ending no-fault divorce, right? Ending adoption for certain kinds of people, sex education, contraception. I mean, they have their sights set on a big set of ways of controlling us and deciding our futures for us.

And so, what we find is that, not only is abortion — and then, newly, IVF — really, really motivating and energizing, and that people continue to turn out to protect their freedoms in this most bodily-important domain, but that what abortion is, is what we call a salient exemplar. It is the thing that makes Democrats no longer sound like Chicken Little; the sky is falling, sky is falling, they’re going to do this, they’re going to do that, they’re going to do this, they’re going to do that. 

Back before pre-Dobbs, there was a certain amount of hesitancy among voters to hear that as real, as opposed to just, well, that’s what you say. Like, Team Blue says shitty things about Team Red, vice versa, whatever, that’s just you yelling and screaming, right?

Because of the actual decisions made and the consequences of those decisions, it then makes talking about the rest of their agenda no longer seem like, oh, that’s just politics, where you intentionally make the opposition sound really draconian, but that’s not really what’s going to happen. It snaps it into, oh, no, this is what’s going to happen. And so, it has that twofold— I mean, I hesitate to say the word “benefit” because, in terms of real people’s lives and what’s going on with policy, there’s nothing beneficial. But, just in terms of political calculus, yes. People are still very, very angry, and they feel that MAGA Republicans writ large are here to control us. And that’s the word that they use over and over again, that’s what they come to. They want to control us. They want to decide for us. They want to take away our freedoms.

And that brings us back, if I can split back to earlier in the conversation, to why toggling into this frame of these two competing futures seems so much more effective than talking about candidates or even parties. Because people don’t want a future in which the last decision they’re going to make is who do I get to vote for in 2024. That is not the future they want.

RG: How does Biden’s age fit into this? Because everybody that I talked to who previously had voted Democratic but is planning to vote for Trump this time says the same thing. “The guy’s just too old,” and they just don’t think he’s up for it. And there’s no amount of spin or hopped-up performance at the state of the union that’s going to change that.

My sense has always been that people have come to this conclusion organically based on their own assessment of seeing Biden and their understanding of what it is to age. We all know elderly people. This isn’t something that is a mystery to any of us. In D.C. [there] seems to be a sense that, actually, this is a creation of the media that is just looking for clickbait cynical journalism, and it’s a but-her-emails style attack on Democrats by these journalists who just can’t help themselves, and have to go after Democrats so that Republicans don’t call them liberal media. Combined with, you know, nefarious RNC accounts and Republicans attacking him for his age.

What’s your sense of where people are getting the idea that he’s too old?

AS: My sense is that it’s a bit of both-and. That it is a reaction to what you said — real-world viewing of Biden — and that it is also inflated and propped up and fed. 

And the reason why I say the latter thing is multifold. Number one: Trump’s not that much younger than Biden. The difference is, really, pretty minimal. If you watch Trump, he has also [proven] to be generous, unhinged, and illogical. I mean, you’re nodding, I think it’s hard to disagree. What he says just simply doesn’t make sense.

RG: Yeah.

AS: To people.

RG: Period. Yeah.

AS: Period. So, it’s not, like, he’s this shining beacon of lucidity and coherency, and that he’s also 50 years old, or whatever.

RG: He’s not speaking in Obama’s paragraphs.

AS: Exactly. No, he’s not presenting like a young robust guy who will then go on to the basketball court and make a three-pointer, Obama style.

So, the reason why I say that part of it is fed and spread is, number one, like I said, how is it possible that there is this kind of discourse around Biden and not this discourse around Trump, when they’re really not that different in this count? The second reason why is because we absolutely see variance among different subgroups in terms of how much this figures in and factors in for them.

And I think where I would point to — and again, I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, and focus groups are what they are — but in our Latino group in Nevada, it was striking. We had a very, very seasoned moderator who’s done Latino groups forever and ever and ever, and I’ve never seen him shook in a group like he was shook in this group.

The right-wing propaganda that they were able to spout, and made up things about stumbles that had not happened, and made up things beyond what actually occurred in life, that you could just quickly then Google and see that this was clear disinformation that had been spread, particularly among Latinos, particularly through channels like WhatsApp, which are very popular for communication, and just people reciting that to us. Whereas that didn’t happen among white women in Pittsburgh; they were not recreating memes for us.

So, you can actually see in certain groupings of people which ones have had this disinfo treatment served to them more, and that lines up perfectly with the folks who monitor disinfo and say, this is where they’re spreading most of it, this is where they’re concentrating their firepower. We see a match.

And that’s why I say that, of course, it is based on a true story. Biden is 81 years old, he is how he is, that’s not untrue. But some of this feeling about it is absolutely produced.

I think the funniest way of illustrating that is when people tell us in groups that one thing that intrigues them about RFK is how young he is. I’m like, he’s 70.

RG: Yeah. But he’s jacked up, and he goes around with his shirt off, and looks younger than 70. But, yes, it is funny that RFK Jr. counts as the young one.

But, OK, that’s fair. I will amend my assessment to say that you can move the needle, you can move the dial on how decrepit people think Biden is.

AS: Not just how decrepit, to be clear, but it is 100 percent about saliency. People only have so much room in their attention span to toggle through which issues are important, which are not, what they think about, what they don’t, you know? They’ve got to get through a day. And so, it’s not just the ability to take age and turn it into infirmity or senility; that’s one thing. But it is to take that and — to use your but-her-emails analogy — to make that be the top line in people’s brains over and over again. That’s the magic trick being performed.

RG: Got it. What are you seeing when it comes to the border? You’ve seen a lot of political consultants just pulling their hair out at the Biden strategy of trying to out nativist Trump on the border. To say, look, the only thing standing in the way of Democrats and doing an immigration crackdown is Trump, because he’s cynical, and wants to exploit it for his own political perspectives. And Democrats really seem to feel like they had won something there, that they really got one over on Republicans by showing how cynical they are, and showing that, to them, immigration and the border are just election issues that they’re here to exploit.

My read on it is different, though. That it seems to just be playing right into Republican strengths. I mean, what are you seeing?

AS: Yeah. I wish that I could say people are tearing their hair out. I think what I’ve seen is a lot of applauding, and that this was a brilliant gotcha maneuver on the part of Democrats, and I could not disagree more with that assessment.

I very, very much would underscore what you said, and I would put even a finer point on it. When you tell voters, when the meta message that you send to voters is, you should make this electoral decision on the basis of who is going to be the bigger xenophobe, or who is going to be the bigger asshole, or who is going to be the tougher on, whatever, fill in the blank — in this case, border, previously -crime and, I’m sure, -crime again — then what you’re doing is you’re sending them into the arms of Robocop. You’re not going to make them hunger for mall security.

And, regardless of what Democrats actually do and put forward, that is the way people understand the brand. It’s just as simple as, people understand Coke to be classic, and Pepsi to be the next generation. It is sort of cemented into the calculus of who these two groups of people parties are.

And so, it’s not just that you’re doing that, you’re undermining your broader story. If your broader story is, these people are fascists and they are coming for your freedoms, they will decide your future for you, they will take away every decision that you’ve ever wanted to make, from whether or not you can retire in dignity, to whether or not you can go to the picket lines to demand a fair return, to whether or not you decide whether and when you have kids, and what your kids learn in school— And the list just goes on and on and on and on, right? I think project 2025 is 900 pages; they took it away, but it’s archived somewhere.

If that’s your overarching story, you cannot say, on Monday, these people are fascists and, on Tuesday, I promise to work with these fascists. That is a fundamentally contradictory message. It would be as confusing as saying, Putin is this extraordinarily terrible person, and he’s dangerous, and he’s a dictator, and he’s this and he’s that, but he’s got some decent ideas on clean energy policy, so I think we’re going to have a summit and figure out windmills. Like, if you said that to people, they would be like, what, what, huh?

And so, how is it possible that you would call out — and I would argue rightly so — Republicans for the extraordinary danger they present, including calling them out specifically for their Hitlerian, Hitler-like rhetoric when it comes to immigrants, and then say, I’ll meet you, or you meet me, and we’ll work out a deal together? Because what you’re doing is, you are tacitly crediting Trump as a leader, as a person who is in charge. And you’re tacitly crediting Republicans with having decent policy ideas, decent legislative proposals. And that just doesn’t make sense.

RG: And what’s crazy is that this has actually been tried over and over and over in Europe. I wonder if you’ve worked with any of these parties, but the center-left parties in Europe, particularly in response to the Syrian migration crisis, began embracing xenophobic rhetoric to try to outflank the rise of the far right in country after country. And the results are in, that voters, whenever that was a salient issue, went with the right-wing party, rather than the center-left party claiming to be a right-wing party. 

I saw — and maybe you’ve seen this — an analysis of some focus groups that the Obama 2012 campaign did, where they talked to voters about immigration. And even when they could get voters to kind of agree with their take on immigration versus Mitt Romney’s — who, at the time, was doing this hardline immigration thing — just talking about immigration moved voters towards Republicans, no matter what they said about it. And so, they concluded: let’s just not talk about this, there is no winning argument for us here.

So, have you worked with any of those European parties? And how does it that an entire continent can undergo this experiment for the last 10, 15 years, and our own political class just ignores it?

AS: Luckily, listeners can’t see my face, but every wrinkle on this face is made out of the consternation I have from, like, let’s just try to out-centrist them again, surely this time it will work! And, literally, it never works. And even in the places that they would point to it working — i.e. the election of Bill Clinton — to some extent — they would maybe argue, it depends on the day — the election of Barack Obama. Clinton presided over the greatest midterm shellacking of any president ever in a hollowing out of Democratic elected leaders all the way down to the dogcatcher level, and it was because he made the Republican’s case.

For me, what crystallizes this entire ethos is the famous quotation by Margaret Thatcher. She was asked what her greatest political accomplishment was. Do you know what she said?

RG: No, what’d she say?

AS: She said, “Tony Blair and New Labor.”

RG: Yeah, there you go.

AS: We forced our opponents to adopt our position. I mean, I think there is no greater crystallization than that for this phenomenon.

I have worked in the European context, especially at the European Union at the parliamentary level, and then on specific issues. And I think that the illustrative counter-case, the positive case, is looking at Germany very recently. And what happened when intrepid journalists, as they should, leaked that the center-right party met with pretty nakedly white nationalist folks. And, instead of the center-left party genuflecting to the altar of, “we will also bash on immigrants, don’t worry, you can have your immigrant hatred with us too, you can just have it with a side of politesse, we’ll just do it more nicely,” they had huge demonstrations that were led by center-left parties and more left wing parties, basically saying, no, absolutely no, this is not who we are, this is not what we want.

For these uncommitted, these conflicted, these whatever-voters you want to call them, a lot of what we see out of them, there’s this conditioned idea that they are moderates, that they want a center-of-the-road thing. And so, center-left parties around the world are like, OK, well, we should approach politics vis a vis the hot dog vendor problem in game theory, and we will just position ourselves in the middle of this ideological beach, presuming that voters are rational actors, and they will go to the politician that is closest to them, because all politicians are exactly the same. They’re serving an identical product and, really, it’s just kind of ideological proximity on a unidimensional plane, as if people are not thinking of multiple issues, and have different issues, and different saliencies. I mean, the whole thing is built out of nonsense, because people are not rational actors to begin with. So, that thinking just is silly.

But that dominant thinking, that if you position yourself in this kind of quote-unquote “middle position,” or closer to what people in polls report wanting, then you will get more people, that just fundamentally goes against the ways that people come to political judgments. And what we actually know about these middle-of-the-road, uncommitted, swing voter, whatever they’re called in different geographies, is that they are especially prone to what we call in psychology anchoring effects. That is, changing their mind about what is true, and the way the world works, and what is common sense, on the basis of what is repeated over and over again in their environment. And so, they don’t have a fixed ideological position, they are not decidedly pro-migrant or anti-migrant. They kind of don’t know.

But, if what they hear repeated over and over and over and over and over again is, basically, everyone hates immigrants, everyone is against this, everyone is upset by this then, of course, they’re like, OK, well, I guess that’s what people think. And that includes me.

RG: So then, the final one, Trump himself. One reason that, despite the polling, despite everything, it seems to me that Biden still has a fighting chance to win this election, is Trump. And that the more Trump becomes salient, gets in people’s faces in the election, my guess is, the worse he’s going to do.

I think one of the best things that liberals did for Trump was kick him off of social media and give him distance from people. Like, the closer he gets to people, the more they seem to recoil. He gets further away, and they can kind of just think back to, inflation was low, wages were high. Yeah, he was maybe causing an international incident every other day but, you know, we didn’t actually nuke North Korea, and now we have two wars under Biden. So, let’s go back to the growing wages and the low inflation.

But he can’t stay out of people’s faces throughout the entire election. How significant an issue do you think Trump ends up being? Will it be like everything throughout his life, that the whole planet just orbits around him?

AS: I want to draw a distinction in how Trump plays out. In your narration, Trump’s increased presence and people’s increased exposure to this toxin will sort of fix this memory hole problem that we have— Which we absolutely do [have], where people have blacked out the onset of the pandemic and lots of other things, and they kind of intentionally, I think, for human survival, we have these mechanisms that let us block out certain things, or at least background them very, very deeply, because they’re painful and hard.

It’s not so much that Trump’s presence will change people’s calculus who were, like, maybe I’ll vote for him. It’s that it changes the calculus for people around whether or not participating in the first place matters. This election will be won or lost in the battleground states on the basis of differential turnout. Yeah, there are some swing voters, but there are very, very few. Because not only have people already cemented their partisan identity, like I said at the outset, they’ve actually made this specific electoral choice before. They have decided [on] Biden or Trump. 

What Trump’s presence has the ability to do is remind the people who are thinking of just sitting out, not paying any attention right now at all, thinking of skipping the top of the ticket, making salient for them why those are not options. Why they’ve got to turn out, they’ve got to vote all the way, up and down, and they’ve got to vote for Biden in order to stop Trump from taking power. That’s actually the name of the game. So, it’s what you’re saying, but it’s a tiny bit distinct.

I think that the main thing is the reminder that — I mean, this is what we see over and over again, and it’s one of the most widely replicated findings — is that when it comes to the various trials— And it’s hard to keep track, and I’m speaking not of the civil trials that have to do with financial matters, but of the criminal trials. The one that’s about to start up in New York, the commonly referred to Bragg case, what I would name as the OG, the original voter deception case. Obviously, the machinations going through the Supreme Court with the January 6th case, the Georgia case—

When people See Trump on trial, or hear more about Trump on trial, we are a very courtroom-trial-obsessed culture. There’s a reason why legal procedurals have always dominated as one of the top TV shows in every generation. I know it sounds like I’m being silly, but it’s a big part of our popular culture, this kind of obsession with trial, and law, and crime, and true crime, and blah-blah-blah.

And so, what we see is that it’s not just exposure to Trump, but it’s Trump within the context of being judged by a jury — I refuse to call them a jury of his peers, because I don’t know them like that to hate on them — a jury of Americans. When that is the context in which Trump sits, it does absolutely change people’s view and calculus around whether or not this election is worth paying attention to. Whether or not they’re tuned in, whether or not they’re watching, and whether or not they’re going to recreate what they did in 2020, and what they did in key states — not all states — in 2022.

RG: Out in the wild, I have met a decent number of people who voted for Biden in 2020, but are now leaning towards Trump. Is that unusual, that I’m running into them? Are you seeing that, or no?

AS: That’s very unusual.

RG: You’re seeing mostly fixed. And the question is whether they vote or not.

AS: Yeah. We’re seeing what I said at the top. We’re seeing 6 and 10 fixed doing what they’re going to do. I’m speaking of battleground voters. I don’t spend time hanging out with other state voters, except when I’m working on other kinds of races. So, you and I have been talking at the presidential level, and that is why I’m so fixated on the voters in these six states.

So, in these battleground states, when we’re talking about presidential [elections], we find that most of them are going to do what they’re going to do. But, 4 in 10 — that is a lot of people — are toggling between, I don’t know what to do, I’m unhappy with these two choices. But not, oh, I did vote for Biden and now I’m contemplating Trump. That’s a pretty rare person.

RG: Any guesses? I’m sure you get asked that a lot. What do you tell people?

AS: Oh. Well, I have a very clear answer. I’m a pathological optimist. I don’t have guesses, I have the necessary certainty until it’s disproven. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so frequently disappointed, because I believe so much better of voters than I often get.

I believe that, based on the only poll that matters, which is elections, between when Trump came into office and now, basically, Democrats have been doing much, much, much, much better than Republicans, and much better than polls, and much better than would be expected based on the conditions on the ground. And I believe that once voters are fully aware of not just Trump as the architect and lead of a criminal conspiracy in which MAGA Republicans are happy, willing, eager, and able to act as accomplices, but that the future that they contemplate for us is one that is anathema to the majority of Americans. They’re going to turn out, and they’re going to turn out for Democrats.

So, yeah. I mean, I have to believe that. That’s how I do my job.

RG: Well, Anat, thanks so much for joining me. Really appreciate it.

AS: Thanks for having me.

RG: That was Anat Shenker-Osorio, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal Review by Shawn Musgrave and Elizabeth Sanchez. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw.

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