Now also the mayor of harrisburg. [applause] it is a pleasure to welcome everyone here tonight for bestselling author dan pfeiffer but before we begin we have some guidelines to make us go as smooth as possible. Please take out your phone and join me as a power off our cell phones we want to welcome cspan tonight they will be filming with a want to add any interruptions. So thank you. At this time i went to introduce our speakers but i want to quickly plug one upcoming event. There is a lot of great talks coming up friday march 6 you may be interested driving while black a true story of the green book and its effects. That is at 7 00 oclock. The number one New York Times bestselling author. [cheers and applause] and author of god save america. [cheers and applause] one of Barack Obamas longest running advisers under president obama 2009 through 2014 Senior Advisor to the president and lives in the bay area with his wife and their daughter. Interviewing him this evening. [cheers and applause] civil rights activist focusing on equity justice born and raised in baltimore and from the college of art and the new book the other side of freedom the case for hope. [applause] and god save the people and then to connect individuals to provide citizens and policymakers with policies praising obama for his work as a Community Organizer and continues to provide influences to make and impact so the book now is on trumping america. [cheers and applause] a playbook for how and is a call to bes more aggressive in order to make america add democracy. Now nice welcome to dan pfeiffer and his book untrumping america. [cheers and applause] its good to be here its always good to see other friends lets jump right and how do you feel about this moment in politics . That is the question on the ballot in 2020 the reason i wrote the book there is nothing more important than winning this election but ive never been more convinced that winning this election is not enough because too Many Democrats think that donald trump is an aberration i have come to the solution particularly since barack obama was elected and for donald trump to become president will still be present when he leaves we have to do that but then we have to take a very aggressive effort to fix politics to allow to be present. Talk about the distinction. To have every democrat everyone has been about medicare for all or medicare for some or the Green New Deal or whatever we need to get to 50 percent. Thats great because its progress with that substantive debate but that conversation is a little whistling past the graveyard because our politics institutional politics has a very ruthless strategy to have the those use of the majority of americans and if we dont tackle those reforms it doesnt matter whether you are a revolutionary or want medicare for all or some or one Single Person in america it with the structures of to gerrymander it doesnt matter what politics we have so its as much is how we get things done are doing what we can. One of the things when you talk about trump being the operation is interesting that it seems like racial politics has allowed him to fit in this way so talk about the importance of the racial grievance. The under way to understand politicians to understand the political incentive. The Republican Party is dependent upon a shrinking almost entirely white bass the only way they could win is to get as much as support as humanly possible and what they have discovered is the best way to do that is to scare white people about nonwhite people africanamericans and terrorist and that has been going on for the history of the Republican Party. You can see it is the southern strategy. Ronald reagan given states right speech or george w. Bush that all future racist ads our reefs for one dish referred to as Willie Horton ads. The reason why we have to be this serious is with every passing day the majority of the country becomes younger and more progressive so republicans need more and more out of that white bass so the racial grievance will get war and worse. They dont get away with that because of things they reduce their political power so when intel we address that. Is that the strategy on the left that there is the argument that you address that they should be as aggressive as the other side. What is your take . I refer to this that should we be like trump . And the answer is this because we want to look at the mayor in the morning but also with that strategy the republicans are trying to get a group of people that are likely to turn out democrats we hope we have to get our Standard Base and then also convince them to become voters and people who may be turned off so with the cynical strategies with that we will lose. So in the obama moment no offense but people are worried about the mobilizing strategy. We have to recognize a lot has happened since 2008 and the way i describe it in the book that jfk has to refer to his foreignpolicy. We have to be hopeful in the ideas to be more unified the very clear eyed who those in washington are. It doesnt matter if it was Mitch Mcconnell that will not happen we should try to aspire to Something Better but we have to be strategic about political power. What about the party during the obama years we lost governorships and people in congress it seemed that there was something happening to the infrastructure of the party. And did the Obama Administration just dropped the ball . What happened . All of the above. Those democratic losses were two things. People had the terrible economy the election was a disaster and unemployment coming two years after the bailout of the banks and people forget that Citizens United decision happens in january 2010 the democratic ability to keep up Campaign Spending went away that day and now they were washed away of corporatefunded money. Having said that democrats need to be less obsessed with the white house thats a crazy thing to say as we sit here today but with a focus from us or congress on the races that happened down south because political power comes from down south if you control the governorship republicans to go over the state legislature after 2010 the very first thing they did was voter id laws very specifically getting rid of the days on the calendar and then theys randomly picked that out so its also policy when peoples lives were saved and with the republican legislatures did not and raise the minimum wage. So to restructure the party the makes it easier for the party to focus on those things so what we have begun to see since 2016 and the successes in virginia is a product of that. What happened to obama in the sense he has disappeared from the public landscape . I think the role he is planning to play will be two rolls. I have not talked to him directly but i feel confident. [laughter] so first is he is a person uniquely and may be the only person in a party with a capacity to unify the party at the end of the primary whatever that is. That is the reason he is not endorsing or putting his thumb on the scale whether there is division what we have to unify. So he can contribute to that. I know he is planning to spend a lot of time on the campaign trail in the fall. So silence is a product right now of preserving his ability to unify the party at the end of this process. So how does that deal with messaging it seems like Mainstream Media is not as important as it used to be. I am deeply concerned that too many in the party are still adhering to the old way of thinking of communications of this model that a politician says something to the press and then it suppresses job to tell the public and the problem with that is with facebook driven disaggregated smart phone media world it does not have the credibility used to have not just for conservative voters for fake news its all democratic voters that are more skeptical and then to play the role as recently as eight or nine years ago so they are worried more how to get the message out for content strategy and how do i get the information i know matters to the voters to win the governorship. But the lesson of this with all media comes in to have a true a true vibrant infrastructure because in the world of facebook everything trump says is not just trump and his 15 million followers that trump says it and fox news says it and then what happens on fox news or what sean hannity says and to be a tiny fraction of what really matters of what fox does on facebook there is huge propaganda feet pumping into facebook so the conversation automatically tilts right so those that are more likely to be exposed to rightwing because people in the network are sharing it so we have that infrastructure on the left but is happening way too slow that will have to continue long after the 2020 election if we have a democratic president and then can communicate to their supporters he or she will be governing with one hand behind their back because there was so much more firepower it was just very hard to break through to have folks. So my hope we can do that. Do twitter and facebook have the same effect . No. They are impactful but the impact is different. Facebook is the largest of money in the world overwhelmingly more impactful to people individually and the way americans get their news and the news they are getting is conservative. But you have a different impact with Twitter Twitter shapes the conversation but 100 percent of reporters and politicians have the incentives what they have on twitter is different from what it they are actually connected and they focus on things that are either really disconnected or counterproductive to that. So i say every day i should get off twitter but yet i cannot stop myself. But if more people spend less time i will not describe the impact that twitter has on media as forcing reporters to be at the craziest convention of the world. In operation 2020 you outline the things candidates should be doing to push back on trump. Acknowledging his failures. Is there anybody that are doing these right now . I know youre not here to endorse a candidate tonight. [laughter] yes. Yes and no. It is hard to know because what works in a primary, particularly this primary is very different than the general election. They are going after committed democratic voters who are politically engaged. So talk about the best way to reach people is very effective if youre trying to win the iowa caucus to be on cnn and then to be seen by a lot of people that you care about so then to change their behavior they know but a couple of candidates have economic messaging if we win that economic battle with trump Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have economic messages that work very well for them Elizabeth Warren and mayor pete have the most sophisticated understanding of how the media works they have helped to incubate and work with the progressive media structure Pete Buttigieg understands inherently those who is creating content and shaping the content is how he went from being unknown to a very small town to a front runner because he knows how to use the media like trump other candidates have done other things but thats why this primary is so hard because you have to get that data set of who will do the best job in that environment. Bloomberg seems to be running for president just because he can afford it. It is very hard because he is the only person that can do what he is doing. So is spending half a Million Dollars on advertising effective . Yes. And an amazing statistic he has spent more money in three months then barack obama did the entire 2012 election. So again that works. Also there is a theory of the media that he was trying to dominate the conversation thereby to buy the conversation but that today his campaign bought these billboards in vegas where trump was. And that it would be the route that trump had to drive by. And it would say hillary won the popular vote. [laughter] another one said trump eats burnt steak. [laughter] i off it is effective or not but he has the advantage for fierce advocates. But he doesnt have to make these decisions where a candidate says that we can run these ads. Literally they are paying people 2500 a month to post on social media about them. Like thats a strategy to be available to democratic nominee like Elizabeth Moran they cannot afford to pay people to post on facebook for them. People confuse the dnc in the party all the time to say i supported and said we have a lot of problems. We can do this but we have to understand what it is when ever anything goes wrong anywhere in the party if someone had is a good idea about an ad to run but to understand the dnc is not sort of superhero headquarters it is completely underfunded primary organization the job is to assist the state parties to help the democratic nominee raise money. The reason it is underfunded because Citizens United happened and the dnc every year can raise the same amount of money with a little bit of an increase over 20 years while the cloak brothers or bloomberg can write a 100 milliondollar check. The dnc has a very limited role. One of the suggestions i make to be part of the problem to be overly focused on the presidency because the dnc chair serves a fouryear term tied to the president ial all cycles of every chair comes in i have a 50 state strategy i will fund all the state parties but also utah and arkansas and alaska. But what happens is they say that but the and the president ial Election Year comes now their job is to get the president elected so as soon as the nominee wins they take over the dnc they put their staff in their and control the Purse Strings so obviously what does the president ial candidate care about . The seven states they need to win so howard dean was the originator of the 50 state strategy when barack obama was running he tried to focus on it we won the nomination and then i recommend we disconnect the chair from the president ial cycle and put them on a sixyear term. The other idea that would help because really thats what we care about sustainable progressive infrastructure all over the country so we can begin flipping states that also houses the voter file which is the repository all over the country and candidates get access to that for free but to use it much higher in a more sophisticated way to pay for that the their ride a big check or they raise money and speak at a giant fundraiser. What we should do if the candidate wants access to the voter files it should be contingent upon adopting a red state thats not competitive to raise x amount of dollars and we also encourage democratic donors to adopt a state were to give people or have people give ten dollars a month they pick wyoming or arkansas because if we ever want to win the election it will take time we have to start working on it right now. What is the advocacy to get them to do those things . It would be pushing the state party chairs because the 435 members of the dnc of the party chairs and those officials elected by the party to push the chair or the rules committee to change the rules. And the easiest way for a democratic president to be elected. Its much harder when you are out of office. And then you address the senate so what do we do about mitch . [laughter] we can start beating him for reelection in kentucky this year. [applause] it is longshot. He is very unpopular in his home state. He has gotten very rich and there is a great candidate running. [applause] but if we dont beat Mitch Mcconnell then we have to understand the senate is biased against democrats california has the same number of senators as wyoming. And those trends now it is actually possible for 18 percent of the population to control the senate seats for a very brief period of Barack Obamas presidency the only time there is a giant path for progression we will not have 57 seats anytime soon barely holding onto 50 at best for very long time so passing common sense legislation like background checks if saving the planet from Climate Change if we cant compromise we are in big trouble so i advocate that there is risk because we may not control the senate. They exist you need 60 votes to do anything so we got rid of the filibuster for president ial appointments like cabinet secretaries because republicans decided barack obama again 51 percent he should not have a labor secretary so we got rid of it for all judges for the Supreme Court and then when trump got elected they got rid of it for the Supreme Court so democrats should get rid of it and make 50 votes there will times republicans will have power and use it against us but i would much rather be in a world where republicans are judged on the things they do versus the democrats are judged on the things that they cant get done. Also immediately they should make washington dc a state. [applause] because the people of puerto rico choose and that should be up to them because it is insane Puerto Ricans are american citizens but cannot vote for president if you establish residency in the their for three weeks so we have to be very clear that it doesnt matter our policies as long as the senate stays the way it is conservatives will control the policy agenda and america for decades to come. The other changes you talk about it should be mandatory voting. I talk a lot about more commonly accepted ideas like same day registration to make voting as easy as possible for eligible voters to be open and as expansive. I read about australia which has compulsory voting. So therefore you have to file it if you do not use pay a small fine they and up with 95 percent turnout in every election. The people of australia love it they have parties on voting day. It is a holiday obviously. Everyone votes and then devoting parties after you should see the youtube videos. It is wild. [laughter] you are required to pay taxes as a private citizen and send your kids for education so why shouldnt voting be a requirement of a citizen in this country . You should be required if you dont want to but i just think that ulti