The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 29 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
MAGA suddenly seems very, very out of sorts. Donald Trump raged at Fox News on Monday, blasting the network for its supposedly favorable coverage of Democrats. Meanwhile, a number of Trump’s allies suddenly seem very worried about the backlash to Trump’s hate rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend. What gives with Trump and MAGA? Democratic strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio offered an interesting diagnosis on social media, arguing that Trump’s rally at the Garden could provide last-minute motivation to vote against Trump among voters who might be tempted to sit out the election. Anat regularly does research into disaffected Democrats and has worked in Latin American politics, so we’re talking about all of this today with her. Thanks for coming back on, Anat.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you for having me.
Sargent: Trump allies are trying to contain the controversy over the rally speaker who described Puerto Rico as a pile of garbage in the ocean and also made racist cracks about Blacks. Senator Rick Scott said the speech bombed because it’s not funny. Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna bashed Democrats for making an issue out of the “joke” about Puerto Rico. Congressman Byron Donalds blamed the media. A longtime Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, blasted the offending speaker as an asshole. Anat, what do you make of this? Why do MAGA personalities think this requires condemnation while Trump’s other racist outbursts get ignored or defended?
Shenker-Osorio: There’s a consistent pattern that we have seen over time—not just in confronting Trump but, actually, interestingly, in confronting right-wing “authoritarianists” the world over, including in Latin America—which is that there is a certain amount of what a lot of analysts have called “baked-in” tacit acceptance of a certain level of hatefulness, ugliness, vitriol. You hear again and again from analysts, Well, that’s not a new thing; voters are learning and they’ve made their voting calculus on the basis of already knowing that Trump is racist, already knowing that Trump is sexist; that’s not new information. So the hallmark that we have seen is that when we shift away from “Trump is” statements, statements about his character, toward things that are about what Trump will do, his future agenda, it’s no longer baked in. Then it is a what we call voter-facing harm.
What’s interesting about the Puerto Rico remarks [is] on the face of them, they may look like another “Trump is” or “MAGA is” thing, but clearly what it’s evoking—and you can see this in the reaction from the incredibly critical celebrity community, the musical artist community that has come down and rightly lifted this up and condemned it—is a visceral reminder of exactly what Trump did during the devastation of Hurricane Maria, and therefore what a Trump administration portends. The reason why it is so important to make sure we are not just in “Trump is” land but, rather, “Trump will do” land is because those voter-facing harms are what get disaffected voters [to say], This election that I was putting off to the side, it may well be worth my attention.
Sargent: You’re getting at something critical because a lot of these disaffected voters have simply forgotten what they hated about the Trump presidency. The neglect of Puerto Rico and the sneering contempt toward it during the disaster really typified for a lot of people exactly what they hated about that presidency. So this really shoves it back into people’s faces. The basic dynamic here being that this mass forgetting has benefited Trump incredibly well, almost to the degree of like he didn’t even have a real presidency and he’s just a challenger, right?
Shenker-Osorio: It’s a mass forgetting layered on with people understandably feeling that they are struggling, feeling they are having a hard time, and honestly reacting to a lot of what is distasteful in the present moment as the fault of Democrats because they have a pretty cloudy view. We see this a lot. We’re in focus groups, two to four focus groups a week, every single week, and have been since 2020 actually with some pauses for holidays and so forth—what we see over and again is a lot of, Well, I don’t know, but it seems like Democrats are in charge. Therefore, if there’s chaos, if there’s conflict, if there’s confusion, if America is “on the wrong track,” the general gist of it is that must be coming from the people in charge without a lot of knowledge or information about what happens below that. What I see in that Madison Square Garden odiousness is what happens when you drink so much of the poisonous venom of your own misogyny and racism and xenophobia that you genuinely forget, for example, that Puerto Ricans live across these United States and are voters in battleground states. You take it as given that you can say terrible things about them because they are confined to an island. News flash, there are boats and planes and people live all over the place.
The same thing with misogyny. You think you can just keep dishing it out and you don’t recognize that you live within a context in which women vote more than men. So you actually can’t stand to lose that demographic by that much because it turns out there’s more of us.
Sargent: A hundred percent. This brings up something that Trump said about Fox News. He raged on social media that Fox News spends too much time promoting Democrats, which is funny. More revealingly, he claimed that Fox News is showing too much of Michelle Obama’s speech, in which she took him apart pretty effectively. Trump was triggered in part by the backlash to his hate rally when he said all this about Michelle Obama because her speech was directed right at public conduct, like what we saw at that rally, the MAGA hatreds and so forth. Even more critically, Trump knows she has the capacity to bring back some of these nonwhite voters, particularly Hispanics, low-propensity ones, young men maybe. What are the prospects for getting that demographic back? We don’t really know how big it is. The polls are a little mixed. It’s hard to say how reliable they are, but it’s a significant dynamic. Is there really an opening here to get them back?
Shenker-Osorio: When we’re looking at these voters that we desperately want to turn out and we’re not sure what they’re going to do, what we can see—not just in our own data but in a huge body of social science research—is that they’re extraordinarily moved by their social context, more so than habitual voters, who are like, Here’s what I’m doing, I do it every two years, I do it every four years.
So when artists like Bad Bunny, artists like Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez—folks who are Puerto Rican, proudly so, and [are] trusted messengers in this community—come out in full force condemning these remarks, making them extraordinarily visible on their various social platforms, which they’ve all done in English, in Spanish, combo of both, what that is telling these voters is, Hey, this election is worth paying attention to. And it’s coming from a trusted messenger who vitally doesn’t read as that’s another politician telling me what I should do about politics. It sits in very different spot.
Sargent: Right. These voters are just simply not going to even hear it when Democrats tell them what they should think of a Trump rally, right?
Shenker-Osorio: Sure, because it’s basically like Domino’s telling you their pizza’s delicious. Maybe that’s true, maybe that’s untrue, that’s literally your job. That’s not a statement I can credit.
Sargent: Right. They hate politics, and when cultural icons tell them that this is the time they should pay attention, then they actually do pay attention.
Shenker-Osorio: Right, and when they do it, cultural icons who rightly are very proud of their own cultural identity.... And what is at stake here isn’t some abstraction. What is at stake is a direct affront, first of all, to cultural identity, but second of all, to the actual well-being and existence of these communities, both on the island and in the diaspora.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about swing voters for a second as well. I wanted to bring up a point you made on X, which is that Republicans calculated that they could get away with this rally because they figured perceptions of Trump’s racism and the party’s racism are already, as you said, “baked in” for voters. It seems like Republicans really do think they can skate by without paying a price for this. They think they can do these huge spectacles that energize the MAGA base, but without swing voters really seeing any of it. And they’re not really wrong about that. Our information environment is really a disaster, and this stuff rarely does punch through to swing voters. Is this one a little different? We already talked about low-propensity voters who aren’t exactly swing voters, they’re probably Democratic. What about your typical pools of swing voters that are still out there? Will they hear this?
Shenker-Osorio: Again, outside of hard-core partisans who are both habitual voters and absolutely dedicated normally not due to positive partisanship but rather hatred of the other side, negative partisanship, what happens is when people in your information environment are condemning something or appear to dislike something or appear to have turned against something, suddenly that becomes “common sense” and what everyone thinks and the way the world works. [It’s] as opposed to—and we see this in swing groups all the time, it’s maddening; it’s lucky I have so much hair, I would have pulled it all out by now.... We hear folks tell us in one breath, Well, you know, that’s just how he talks. You can’t really take him seriously. And then in the next breath say, If he said it, then it must really be true. And nary a beat is lost between those two contradictory statements. That happens over and over again.
So the name of the game is really, What does my social circle, what does my identity group—that could be suburban women, that could be baseball card aficionados, however you self-identify—what is the prevailing kind of logic of my social sphere? Once something tips on over into, No, that’s just unacceptable, then it becomes embarrassing for you to feel that way and you have to reconsider.
Sargent: You’re thinking this is the thing that could activate these organic discussions in these social bubbles?
Shenker-Osorio: Among swing voters there, I think it’s possible. I don’t have, at my fingertips, data to rely upon. The reason why I know about the disaffected is because we’re doing field canvases every single moment. So I can already hear back even from yesterday what’s going on at doors. Right now, the name of the game on the doors is getting out folks who maybe are considering staying home. It’s a little bit late to still trying to ... I’m not saying no one’s doing swing persuasion. What I’m saying is: There’s basically 12 swing voters left in America and they all had to quit their jobs to be full-time focus group participants. There’s just not that many of them.
Sargent: It seems like that, but we’re talking about 1 or 2 percent in each state at this point. There is still a very small but a very influential pool out there, isn’t there?
Shenker-Osorio: Yes. But in terms of bang for the buck, there are so many more folks who are deciding between the couch and Harris than between Trump and Harris.
Sargent: To shift gears, we just learned from The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo that the Trump campaign did vet the comic speech beforehand and took out a line describing Harris with a vulgarity. That seems to mean the campaign didn’t catch the “joke” about Puerto Rico and was maybe OK with it. You’ve worked on campaigns. How could the campaign have been this dumb? Is it just that they’ve really lost touch with what’s going to create a controversy outside MAGA and what isn’t?
Shenker-Osorio: The name of MAGA’s game is keep your base engaged and enraged. They pursue a strategy wherein you need to keep feeding “red meat” to the choir because the choir is, according to their theory of change, what actually converts the conflicted. It’s not unlike what I just described where people are products of what they think is acceptable and true and common sense and so forth within their own social milieu. And this is what fascism and authoritarianism is. It’s a constant checking where the boundary is, and each time a boundary is transgressed anew, and really nothing ever happens, what that tells you is, Turns out that wasn’t the boundary.
What’s going on is what I said earlier, which is that they’ve so thoroughly imbibed their own hatred and ugliness that they can’t even recognize that that is actually out of step, that is actually repugnant to the majority of people. And what they were relying upon is that they need to keep this base really energized because, actually, the base has been pretty unenergetic for them. They’re not even staying through der Führer’s entire rally. That means that you’ve really got to amp it up and whip it up harder. That’s probably what they were calculating and going for.
Sargent: That idea that the noise of the choir convinces the conflicted is fascinating. It really gets at a very deep aspect of how right-wing politics works in the Trump era. It’s something maybe Democrats don’t instinctually understand as well and are less comfortable with as a concept. If I understand you correctly, it’s basically that noisemaking is an actually powerful thing, right? One thing that really struck me was ... a while ago when MAGA just invented this fake controversy about Biden supposedly channeling baby food to migrant babies. Do you remember that one? It was just absolutely invented. But the thing is: Once it had been invented, every single MAGA politician and influencer raged about it, in unison, on Twitter, in every forum. They just made a lot of noise. What I thought was, My God, what they really seem to understand is the noise level is the thing, not the content. Is that right?
Shenker-Osorio: Absolutely. Again, this is a hallmark of right-wing authoritarianism, not just within the U.S., but outside of it. A really disturbing example: Bolsonaro, during his reign, he very famously accused the Labor Party, the P.T., of making baby bottle nipples, the little thing you put on the top to feed your baby, in penis shapes. And they released all of these billboards. It was all over WhatsApp, these penis-shaped—I’m sorry to put this image into your head, but I feel like if I had to be exposed to it, then everyone has to know about it—
Sargent: Fair enough.
Shenker-Osorio: The P.T. tried to push back at this really inadvisably by showing pictures of this purportedly nonexistent baby nipple and saying, We do not, with a big X through it. And it really is about just maintaining this bloodlust and this “red meat,” as I have called it, because that is what continues to feed this sense of righteous anger and indignation. On the other side, and I say this to people all the time, this is what is so frustrating with a lot of political analysis, voters’ opinions of Democrats is not made out of what Democrats say. If it were, I’d be on vacation all of the time. It’s made out of what is said about them, what is repeated over and over.
Sargent: It’s the noise.
Shenker-Osorio: It’s the noise.
Sargent: To your point about how MAGA was really caught flat-footed by the outcry about this, there was an interesting … separation between two very senior MAGA figures or top MAGA figures in the spin that ensued. Senator Rick Scott, as we mentioned earlier, said the joke bombed, but then Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Fox and Friends that the crowd didn’t mind the joke, as a way to spin it away as something not serious. Now Rick Scott knows that it’s terrible politics if swing voters understand that MAGA thrills to this racist talk. Florida’s a reddish state, but he’s got to win over people, non-MAGA voters. There’s a lot of them. But Leavitt doesn’t get this, apparently. What I want to ask is: To what degree do you think swing voters really understand MAGA as a thing, as a movement, to be feared?
Shenker-Osorio: Voters are far more favorable, and swing voters in particular, to Trump than they are to MAGA. If you do a cascade, it’s Trump at the top, Republicans, and then MAGA Republicans at the bottom. Clearly, there is something specific to him, and at least insofar as they tell it to us in focus groups [as] sometimes things mask other things. There is social desirability in answers, but it has to do with their perception of economic well-being and a lot of, I don’t know, but it seems like when Trump was president, I got a check or I got a couple checks. That is the visceral memory that they will recite back to us. This broader category, they understand that Trump is in charge of [MAGA], but somehow he gets accepted, or he’s his own figure because he’s the singular force, if you will. They don’t like the movement itself, or they at least like it less than Trump.
When it comes down to this question of “What are the voter-facing harms of this thing?” it’s one thing when it’s, Oh, they say nasty, terrible, horrible things about all sorts of people, whether they be LGBTQ people, women, disabled people, Latinos, Black; I don’t love it, but whatever; he doesn’t mean it; he says lots of things—but when it comes down to, This is the way that they are going to govern, being exposed to the visceral hatred of the rally [makes a big difference]. They really miscalculated. Their idea with Madison Square Garden was obviously this mighty show of, Look how popular we are; New York, New York, if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere—the cultural capital of the U.S., certainly, the Americans would argue, the world. Instead, what that does is just really shine a spotlight on how much your movement is made out of ugly and is made out of hate. The reality is, most people don’t want that.
Sargent: Well, I sure hope you’re right about that. Anat Shenker-Osorio, thanks so much for coming on with us today.
Shenker-Osorio: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.