The Changing Face of Politics: A Conversation with Mike Madrid

David Wheeler: 00:00:00

Hey folks, David Wheeler here with MUCK YOU! Hope you're having a great week.

I'm here with my co host and co founder of American Muckrakers, my good friend Moe Davis, who is lucky to have married Lisa. Take it away, Moe.

Col Moe Davis: 00:00:15

You remind me that every week, don't you?

David Wheeler: 00:00:17

Every week, my friend. I want to stay on her good side.

Col Moe Davis: 00:00:20

She's got to be paying you or something.

David Wheeler: 00:00:22

Well, we'll see about. I'll tell you about it later.

Col Moe Davis: 00:00:25

All right. Welcome back, folks. It's good to be with you again if you're here with us in western North Carolina.

Just another beautiful day here as new fall is set in. So thanks for joining us.

We again got another great guest today, Mike Madrid, who's a co founder of the Lincoln Project, also co founder of Grassroots Lab, which is a California based political consulting firm.

He's the co host of a podcast called the Latino Vote with Chuck Roca and his latest book is the Latino How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy. So Mike, thanks for taking time to join us guys.

Mike Madrid: 00:01:03

Thanks for extending the opportunity. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

David Wheeler: 00:01:06

Great.

Col Moe Davis: 00:01:07

Listen, let's, you know, you were a lifelong Republican that worked in Republican administrations and you know, we've had a number of folks on Adam Kinzinger and Joe Walsh and others who were lifelong Republicans at, you know, said that the party today is not the party that they grew up in. So what's been your evolution over the last number of years?

Mike Madrid: 00:01:30

Well, I mean, in many ways the party, you know, has always exemplified some of these characteristics. They've certainly never been dominant.

And it's important for me to kind of iterate to people that even in this times of, of hyper, hyper partisanship that political parties are just political parties. We've kind of elevated them to kind of these identity status where they're as important as religion or national origin.

They're not that the fact that we have has made them both very dangerous. Both. Now I'm not going to say they're both equally dangerous.

I'm clearly somebody who's spoken out against my party and working against my party, the Republican Party, because it has been consumed entirely by this populist nationalist wing. And it's not really the wing, it's the whole party now. And we get into kind of the who's what, whys, where's whens.

But you know, this is some something that I've been was opposing before Trump came along. And it's something that, you know, I love Adam and Joe. They're both Good friends. I'm a little bit different than that.

I was always opposed to Trump and Trumpism, and I spoke out against the Tea Party movement. It was coming because they were signs of this coming danger. They're both patriots, they're both champions, they're both dear friends.

But people have their own red lines and kind of come to this realization that it's. This is dangerous for the country, it's bad for humanity, and. And the more people that come across that line, the better.

Col Moe Davis: 00:02:51

Yeah. Yeah, you know, you're right.

You mentioned the Tea Party, and that does kind of seem like the beginnings of where we are now, you know, with the hyper partisanship and the, you know, one side's good, the other side's bad, depending on, you know, which side you're on. But it's good to hear you say that. You know, you. You were opposed from, From.

From day one, where, you know, a lot of others have been more recent converts.

But, you know, I was, you know, doing some research before we came on, and I saw where you spoke recently, and you're talking about you're optimistic for the future. You know, it seems like right now it's hard to find optimism. So what gives you hope?

Mike Madrid: 00:03:27

Well, look, we're going through something that is a very natural part of the course of things. It's really impossible not to have a society struggle to define itself. And it can be more difficult or less difficult.

But we have to understand if you. If you really dial back and look at America as we enter this 250th year of our existence.

The past 30 years have been a time of relative prosperity, I should say unprecedented prosperity, relative peace, global US Hegemony. There's just not been much challenging the American idea, the American experiment. Francis Fukuyama, you know, called this the end of history. Right?

We became the victor, the first global victor in terms of our own belief systems, ideologies, and democracy. We believed erroneously was the natural course of evolution. Any. Any student of history knows that's not true.

And a lot of what is afflicting us today, I think, has been a result of that luxury, as a result of that. That lack of. Of. Of struggle to define ourselves.

People, People are defined in their lives by the character that emanates from difficult times, not from the good times. And that's what we're going through as a nation. And I, I'm. I'm grateful for this moment.

I know that may strike a lot of people as odd, but I'm very grateful that we as a generation have the ability to. To fight for freedom, to fight for democracy, to fight for constitutionalism in a way that every generation of Americans before us has had to.

I'm grateful that we're not storming the beaches at Normandy to do it, and young men aren't dying in places like the Mekong Delta or Guadalcanal or the beaches of Normandy or, you know, wherever. But, but. But it's a fight nonetheless, and that's required in order to hand over this torch to the next generation.

So I think we need to be grateful for the moment, and I have no doubt that we're going to prevail. We will be forever altered. We will be changed, but we are also Americans, and we will emerge from this better and a stronger people for it.

Col Moe Davis: 00:05:29

Yeah, I hope you're right.

I mean, I'm 67 years old, so I remember, I was a teenager, and I remember watching the Watergate hearings, which is right after Vietnam, and then we went into Watergate. I remember watching those hearings as a teenager and thinking, boy, this is really screwed up.

And when my generation gets our turn, we're going to make things better, and here we are. And I'm really disappointed in my generation that. That we've ended up in this place. But.

But like you, I'm hopeful that, you know, we go through the fire and come out stronger on. On the other side. One of the things you've talked about is that in the modern age that we've.

We've had to adapt to living in a digital age, that in the past, information was hierarchical and flowed vertically, and now it's more horizontal and more ubiquitous. So how did that change us in your. In your mind?

Mike Madrid: 00:06:23

Well, I think it starts to explain why there is this lack of confidence in our institutions. And I'm kind of.

I'm glad you brought up the Watergate, you know, hearing, because a lot of people of a certain age who grew up, that was a very formative time. I grew up in a generation slightly behind that. I was born in 71, so, you know, I was right in the middle of that, born into it.

I don't remember it at all. And a lot of people say, well, this is kind of when this all started, the collapse of institutions.

That's a really elementary way of understanding it. To not believe that many presidents were engaged in this type of behavior is. Is really naive. And I'm not justifying what Nixon did.

But what I am saying is this is not new. What is new is our ability to see it and understand it and discuss it. Institutions have Always had some high level of corruptibility.

They're human run. So by definition, these problems were there.

What you were seeing with Watergate was the first time that the American public was actually hearing about it on television and seeing. Seeing it.

And that's really important because the trust that we had in institutions before mass media has really begun to decline as we get more and more information about them.

Before mass media, before television, before radio, you know, whatever the government said was taken as fact because that was the only news source and news information that we had in any meaningful way. And there was. It was easier to have a common set of facts.

It was easier to believe in institutions whether they were corrupt or not, whether they were legitimate or not.

And what we've found in this new digital age, where everybody has a microphone, where everybody's got a podcast, right, where everybody's got, you know, where news is, is fragmenting, it's very hard to find common ground. And when you don't have common ground, by definition, institutions starts to lose trust and confidence.

And it doesn't matter whether it's the media, which it is collapsing there, or church organizations, which it is collapsing there, the government clearly there, higher institution, clearly there, all of these institutions are flattening out. All of the hierarchical systems that we've built as human beings to get along socially, to create civilization are being transformed.

And we don't yet have the ability to understand what that's going to look like in this new era, but we are really, I think, for the first time, eyeballs deep in the digital age. A lot of us, again, of a certain age, will say, oh, it's coming, it's coming.

It's been here for a decade, and we still haven't, I think, developed the imagination to understand what we need to create in terms of institutions to get along as a society, as a people, as a nation, with a common narrative, a common mythology, and a common set of facts.

Col Moe Davis: 00:09:06

What do you think is there, you know, this distrust in institutions? Is there a fix to that? Is there a way to revive? I mean, how do we go about restoring faith in particular, like government?

You know, people have this kind of, you know, generalized notion they don't like government.

But if you ask them about their postman or their park ranger, you know, they like them, but it's that ubiquitous government that they don't like until suddenly it's not there. Like David now, you know, we live here in the mountains of North Carolina where Hurricane Helene hit a little over a year ago, right?

And when you lose things like you know, we didn't have water for 58 days. There are some things you take for granted until you don't have it, and then you realize how important it is.

So is there a way to restore confidence in government and in institutions that are under attack right now?

Mike Madrid: 00:09:57

Well, look, what you saw in North Carolina was a good test case because the disinformation that began running rampant was extraordinary, where people believed it was, you know, their own country coming after them because, you know, you had partisan actors trying to undermine people's faith and trust and confidence even at a time of crisis. Look, that's a great question, and it's a big question. And the way I would address it and the way I think about it is this.

We have to, first of all recognize that kind of fake news and disinformation campaigns have been a part of the American experience since the very beginning. Benjamin Franklin made a small fortune peddling fake news.

You know, Abraham Lincoln himself was writing anonymous letters to the editor, which is kind of a form of trolling back in his day. William Randolph Hearst got us into the Spanish American War through what they called yellow journalism, which was fake news at the time.

He made up fake attacks from the Spanish in order to justify us going into war, which we did. So, look, this has been here before. This is not a new phenomenon.

What is different is the scale of it and the segmentation of who we can algorithmically talk to. And that's important because I'm not as worried about the lack of good information, although that is a concern.

I'm much more concerned about the breakup of community as we have always known it, not just as an American people, but as a human species. And I say that because this is not a US Phenomenon.

It's particularly acute in the US because we have a fair, free, open system of communications where you can tap into whatever media systems you want. Our government is, at least at the moment, very open to allowing us to communicate that the way that we want to.

But this lack of trust and confidence in institutions and in each other is a global phenomenon, which again, tells me it's not a US System. It's a global technological change. And so that long setup.

Apologies for that, but I want you to know how I'm thinking about approaching these questions. How do we answer that? And look, nobody knows. But what I am. What I am certain of is that we will develop that. Because why? Because we always have.

We have always adapted to and accommodated our very basic human need, our strongest evolutionary trait, which is our need for one another. We are, by our DNA, a political animal. We need to be with one another.

And so you can't just continue down the road of mistrust and segregation and isolation. We are in a time of very extreme loneliness, where people are separating from society.

But if history is any guide, and it's the only guide we have, that will return, that will boomerang to a place where people seek out one another in the real world, not in virtual reality, not in Facebook groups, but in the actual physical town space.

The third place, as it's called, where people do meet in person with people that they know and do not know in their geography to build a sense of community. And I do believe that that will return to us.

David Wheeler: 00:13:08

Well, it's an interesting view, Mike. And, you know, as a guy that grew up in the 60s, I can certainly relate to some of what you're talking about. But let's get down to brass tacks here.

Mo, kind of take things from the macro. I'm more of a micro guy. Where. Where do you think Trump is taking this country?

You know, bearing in mind history, which you seem to be very thoughtful person about, and where do you think Donald Trump is ultimately trying to take this country? And do you think he'll get there?

Mike Madrid: 00:13:41

Well, I think what he's. I'm not too sure that he has a vision for where he's trying to take it.

I think what he's trying to do is just accumulate as much power and money as he possibly can, and I think he's going to do an extraordinary amount of that. The question is, can he bend the American culture, the American story, the American imagination, to that whim, to support that?

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that he's already done a lot of that.

Col Moe Davis: 00:14:07

Right.

Mike Madrid: 00:14:07

And the question, I think really the challenge of the moment is how much is in the American character to push back? And look, we're all hearing tons of evidence about the authoritarian moment that we're in, and we are.

This is an egregious, egregious, dark moment in American history, in my opinion.

But the reason why I am optimistic is because the pushback that you're seeing develop, we are having the largest protests in American history happening at the same time.

And the one data point that I think people are not looking at is that the success of authoritarian regimes almost always require about 70% plus support of the people. We were just getting fresh data out this morning showing that Trump is at historic lows. He's even lower than he was now than in his first term.

Especially on the economy, and it's likely to get worse. So he does not have popular support. He doesn't.

And that the fact that there is such a sizable resistance to what he's doing is as an important an indicator for me, as I'm looking at this, trying to look at this holistically, as the.

Col Moe Davis: 00:15:15

As what.

Mike Madrid: 00:15:16

The damage that he is doing to our institutions now. So. So that. I think the next question obviously leads to yours, which is, what does that mean going forward? Can he accomplish this?

This is the question that I'm most concerned with, because the answer is, no, I don't. I think that there will always be pushback to what he's doing, and I think it's getting bigger and it's getting stronger.

The problem is it's not zero sum. We are already forever changed.

We can't just dial back and, you know, if he doesn't run or if he leaves office peacefully, go, whoa, that was a weird period. Like, let's all go back to pre Trump era and start pretending like things can happen the way that they used to. That is not going to happen.

We are already forever altered. The question is, what have we been altered into? And I think part of that is a keen awareness that we are capable of this as a people.

We are no different than any other society or history or people in history. We do have very strong authoritarian strains in our own American nation that have bubbled up periodically in their history.

But we're on clear display, probably stronger now than ever, that we are a people where racial and racial divides have not only not healed, but maybe we're just papered over, I think, is what we're learning, and that has fallen along the wayside. So I think there are a lot of people who believe that maybe we are going to.

This militarization of our streets is going to be kind of the way that the whole country is going to be run. That's virtually impossible in a country the size of the United States of America.

But what we can unfortunately devolve into is this sort of hybrid where we have sort of these faux democracies that elections only matter when the majority or the people in power, I should say not the majority, but the people in power, want the outcomes to be the way that they want to.

I think what we're losing more than our democracy, though, is our constitutionalism, our constitutional protections, and that's what keeps me most concerned. And so the question is, can he get there? The answer is yes. In many ways, he's already gotten there.

The question I think is now going to be what happens after Trump?

And will the response to this era either make us a new people in Trump's image, or will we return to what has been our, our historical norm, or at least closer to it? My, my firm belief is we will, we will push back towards what we have more likely been in the past than what we were under the Trump regime.

David Wheeler: 00:17:53

Yeah, that's a really interesting way to look at it.

And, and what it's done to me, you know, is it as a knucklehead up in, from Iowa, that's up in the mountains in North Carolina, is, you know, it really has energized me about electing the right people and getting me really narrowly focused on helping to do that. Now I've tried to run myself and I'm a terrible candidate, so I'm not going to do that anymore.

But, you know, it's really focused me and I think that has been one of the good things that's come out of this is, you know, folks that normally, you know, even my ex wife, Puerto Rican, American, you know, she is, she is politically engaged and votes a hell of a lot more than she used to.

And in my kids, 9, 13 and 15, you know, they, they know the issues of the day and they're, they're engaged in a way that God knows I wasn't when I was nine years old. But so there's that positive side of it.

I think the downside that's coming post Trump is, you know, they're, the Democrats are going to want some retribution, too, you know, and we're going to get into this cycle of, of retribution that I'm not sure that Democrats will sustain very long, but there's got to be some of that. But, you know, back to your. That's an interesting statistic. You put out 70%.

Where would you put his support today in the United States, just generally? What do you think it is?

Mike Madrid: 00:19:13

Well, with voters, it's sitting in a high 30s range, which is really quite low for the modern environment when we are so polarized. He should be, I shouldn't say he should be. I mean, he could have been sitting in the high 60s if he stopped with the tariff stuff from the beginning.

If he had just let the economy go the way Biden had said it on course, and if he just went golfing, he'd be sitting at 65% support. That's both that, you know, that's good and bad news. The downside of that is it tells us that he's not interested in, in running the economy.

Well, he's interested in accruing power and money. That's what the tariffs are really all about. This is not economic policy.

What this is, is leveraging countries, including our allies and especially our enemies, into giving him money, giving him gifts, whether they're massive $430 million airplanes or God knows what's happening offshore. You know, the Trump kids are awful quiet, as you'll notice. They're not. You know, what's happening in the crypto markets is just extraordinary.

You watch these short sells that are happening right before tariffs are announced. I mean, people making hundreds of millions of dollars in quick plays that are anonymous. All of this is an exertion of raw power.

It's not a focused US Economic policy. Clearly this is all about consolidation of power, influence and money. And so there are good news.

The good news, I think you pointed out, David, just a second ago, was that there is a greater awareness. That's the awareness that we lost during kind of our fat, happy days between the fall of the Wall and the incursion of the Russians into the Donbass.

There was a 30 year period where America was just kind of fat and happy.

And you know, 9, 11 obviously made us keenly aware that we are still a part of the world and that there are people that do not like us and wants to destroy us. But, but that was really more of an aberration in that 30 year period.

And what we're realizing now is we've got to get in shape and get back quickly into understanding what the mission statement of America is, what our values are before we can really kind of fight for them. And that's where the Democrats are very much adrift. The opposition party is not articulating that well.

And so both parties have devolved into tribes where it is just about persecution and prosecution and oppression. And I don't believe that the Democrats will do it as much, but I agree with you that they will absolutely engage in it.

But the Democratic Party has been forever changed in all of this too.

And I don't think people are able to sit back right now and look and listen and realize how much the Democratic Party has transformed ideologically, how much division there is in it and how much there's a lack of consensus against any. There's a lack of consensus for anything other than opposing Trump. That's not healthy. That's really dangerous.

And that's why I believe that what is going to emerge will be look very, very different.

Col Moe Davis: 00:22:03

talked about in the past, by: 2040

So the electorate has changed considerably and is continuing to evolve. So, you know, as you said, the parties aren't the same parties that they used to be in the past, and they've, they've changed.

, Latino voters, you know, in: 2016

How do you, how do you see this trend playing out? Is that going to continue to go in that direction or can it be turned around?

Mike Madrid: 00:22:52

Look, it's a great question and I, in the intro, you know, you mentioned that I was the author of a book that came out last year called the Latino Century, How America's Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy.

And I wrote the book with the plan of it coming out in June of last year because I wanted it to come out before the conventions of both parties, more as a, as a warning than a prediction.

Although the book became very popular after the election because people realized who was this guy that was predicting this and was saying was going to happen to me, to me was very clear what was going to happen.

But I was writing it more as a warning, like I said to both parties, to this country, that what we were witnessing was a very significant transformation in our understanding of race and class and partisanship. And this rightward shift is driven by a lot of things.

The main one is we're witnessing a de alignment where the working class is moving away from the political parties at a rate faster than it ever has before. And again, people of a certain age look at this and say, well, if it's not Republican, it's Democrat. If it's not Democrat, it's Republican.

And that's why I think we're so stuck in trying to find the solutions to our problems that are facing us, because the voters are telling us very clearly the answer is not red or blue. It's not Republicans or Democrat. Democrat. It's something entirely different.

And we also have to understand that one of the reasons why in a de alignment, Democrats are losing so much is because they had so much to lose to begin with.

So, you know, when, when you're witnessing a, a voting bloc moving away from the party system, the party that has most of them is going to suffer the most. And that's an important distinction because I don't believe there's very much data at all.

And I looked at it closer than anybody in the country for longer than anybody in the country. That shows Latinos becoming more conservative or even more Republican. They're becoming less Democratic, they're becoming less partisan overall.

And there's an emergent populism that is characterizing and animating this part of the electorate.

And so when you look at it that way, I think it gives a better understanding of what's happening in this country is as both parties support levels are collapsing, Democrats are collapsing faster. Now we're heading into a midterms where I believe the Latino vote will move back towards the Democrats.

But I'm putting that, I'm being very methodical in the way I'm choosing my words here.

ected the Democratic Party in: 2024

Good, because that's what's happening is they're voting against the party in power at a rate far greater than any other race or ethnic group in the country at a time when they're growing faster in the voter rolls than any other racial or racial or ethnic group in the country. So this is a, it's a period of a dealignment. You've heard a lot of Republicans talking about a racial realignment.

That is incorrect, at least from my opinion. That does not mean that, that Latinos are moving towards the Republican Party.

It means they are rejecting the people in power of a failing architecture of government. And whoever is in power is going to be the, the loser in that scenario because they're not addressing the problems we're going to.

gh number of Latino voters in: 2024

So this is really the only one big swing group in the country right now. Everybody else is hyper partisanized. Their feet are locked in cement on either the red side of the battlefield or the blue side of the battlefield.

Latinos are in the middle with the weakest partisan anchors, less affiliated with either party than any group, and basically rejecting the power structures that exist in our governmental system. And it could either be a very good thing or a very bad thing, depending on. We handle that as a country.

Col Moe Davis: 00:26:47

And I think that the trend you mentioned Moving away from the Democratic Party, it unique to Latino voters.

I mean, if you look here in North Carolina over the last 20 years, the Democrats voting groups, most North Carolinians, the majority were registered as Democrats. And now our biggest party affiliation in North Carolina is unaffiliated.

Mike Madrid: 00:27:10

Yeah.

Col Moe Davis: 00:27:11

And if you look at it's 42% of the voters.

And if you look at where those unaffiliated voters came from, the Republicans have held pretty steady at about 30% of the registered voters being Republicans. So they really haven't changed. Right. The loss has come on the Democratic side.

Mike Madrid: 00:27:26

Yes. And that's happening nationwide. And then it's a very important observation.

And I think understanding why is critical to understanding why the Democrats are having a tough time getting back on their feet and what it says about us socially. So let me kind of wax a little bit on this, this topic because North Carolina is a perfect embodiment of what is happening.

You're seeing a consolidation basically of the demographic under the Republican Party, the Republican banner. And you're seeing kind of this splitting of the Democratic coalition.

The main reason is because the Democratic Party is no longer really on the left of the political spectrum and the Republicans on the right of the political spectrum.

The spectrum has really been turned on its head where voters are voting either establishment or anti establishment, insider versus outsider haves and have nots. We haven't had a healthy, normal debate about the role of government in over a decade in this country.

You've never heard the Republican Party extol the virtues of smaller government in a decade. Why? Because it doesn't believe in that anymore. It's perfectly happy being a big statist party.

It will absolutely triple the size of ice, you know, jack boot, thug, masked law enforcement agency, everything it stood against for the last 100 years as long as it suits their purposes. They're very comfortable with big government as long as it advances their aims.

That's profoundly different than what the Republican Party has ever been. And that's part of this tribal characterization that has kind of, you know, captured the Republican Party.

The Democrats have essentially created a coalition that runs from Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Liz Cheney with nothing in common in terms of policy, but a fundamental belief in the institutions that make our democracy work. So in many ways the Democratic Party has become the pro establishment party in a very anti establishment era.

And the Republicans are an anti establishment party, ironically enough, even though we're in power in an anti establishment era.

And that's why there remains this popular support for just bulldozing Literally, in the case of the White House at this moment, the institutions that have made the country work as people don't believe in them anymore. And it's enough to just, just be against everything. Democrats are defending these unpopular institutions.

They're defending higher education when it's not popular. They're defending the government when it's not popular. They're defending the media and the free press when it's not popular.

And they're not offering any alternatives. Back to the earlier part of our conversation without having a vision for how institutions work in the digital age.

You're defending the failures of the last century. And that's what the Democratic Party is doing. And that's why I think they're so flustered. They don't realize it.

They're just trying to yell louder, democracy, you know, free press, you know, and all of these things. The American public is kind of looking at them going, this stuff is just irrelevant to my daily life. It's not working.

We're falling behind farther and farther, faster and faster. And you're offering me last century solutions.

Col Moe Davis: 00:30:30

Yeah, we had.

Paul Pagala was on with us a couple of months back and he said, you know, he felt like the Democrats had become too focused on people that put their pronouns at the end of their emails and had lost sight of people that have their name stitched above their pocket when they go to work in the morning. And I think that that kind of ties. I don't know if you followed Senator Ruben Gallegos was, I think it was on Ezra Klein.

And he said, particularly with Latino men, he called it the, the big ass truck principle, that he felt like with Latino voters, Latino men in particular, or men in particular, that they wanted to feel their family was safe and secure and that economically they were secure, they could go out and buy that big ass truck and not have to worry about, you know, paying the bills. So that economic populism seems to be a thread that the Democrats have lost and how do we.

Mike Madrid: 00:31:25

Yeah, because populism by definition is anti establishment. You can't be both establishment and. Well, I shouldn't, I shouldn't say that because the Republicans are actually doing it quite well.

Look, a lot of people. And first of all, let me just say this. I think, I think both what Paul Bagala and Ruben Gallegos are saying, I'm fans of both of them.

That's just very overly kitschy. I think that they're trying to understand something that they don't really understand. It's not about a big ass truck.

It's not, it's not about, you know, the, you know, the 90s way of saying, you know, I signed the front of a check or the back of a check.

Like those are, those are kitschy ways of trying to understand something very profoundly different than what they're, what they're, what they're tuning into. In a populist era. You have to understand, and that's what this is, is, is when Democrats talk about developing an economic populist agenda.

You can't do that when you are also the defenders of, of the establishment and the institutions, the people that run them. They are the upwardly mobile professional class. That is the only constituency that is staying with the Democratic Party.

A lot of people are saying, how can the oligarchs, the Tech Bros. Be in coalition with the working class? The answer to me is very simple. This, by the way, that, that, that has confounded Democrats up until this point. They still can't figure it out.

To me, it's very simple.

There's a revolution going on against the professional class because the only people benefiting from the institutions as they exist are the professional class. They literally exist to perpetuate themselves and they are the economic beneficiaries of that.

The Tech Bros don't like that because they like disruption. They like breaking institutions because they capitalize on it. And they're re envisioning a new way to do things like the cab industry.

We'll just create Uber and reinvent it. We'll bring food to you through doordash. There's an app solution for everything as long as you break it.

The disruption creates a new environment to recreate something new. And that I believe is their project with government. Break it all down and we can make it more efficient and make it more app and platform driven.

The working class is just looking at the professional class and saying this is a racket. The system is rigged because it is, it is right for everything from college admission.

Look, everything from getting into little league and playing club sports this early on, right? The system, system is rigged all the way up and down.

So if you're defending the professional class, if you're a professor at a college or an institution and the chances of you're getting your student or your child into that same institution is extraordinarily high. That's what you do. Use your family leverage to take advantage of the system.

And these systems are being seen, I think, for what they are, which is they're not serving everybody, they're serving the people running them. And that is at this Moment in time. The Democratic. The Democratic Party.

Col Moe Davis: 00:34:20

Yes.

You made an interesting point a while back, talking about, again, going back to Latino voters about America being a melting pot and how Latinos have become more American and Americans have become more Latino, and you actually have bad bunnies in the news right now.

Mike Madrid: 00:34:38

Right.

Col Moe Davis: 00:34:38

But you were talking about Bad Bunny months ago.

Mike Madrid: 00:34:41

Yeah, yeah.

Col Moe Davis: 00:34:42

This is.

Mike Madrid: 00:34:43

This is just another example. Like I said, I wrote the book not to be, you know, to be predicting it, but it's all. To me, this is all very. What's happening is all very obvious.

Yeah. So let's start with that. But because it's important and there's a lot of pushback. Right.

Like the Turning Point USA and Charlie Crook's former organization, his wife's organization now is going to have an alternative to the halftime super bowl, because to them, everything is culture. The Republican Party and for the Democrat, the Democratic Party, incidentally, are animated almost exclusively by culture.

We used to say, you know, there was this insightful, you know, take by Andrew Breitbart that politics is downstream from culture. Guys, we're past that. Politics is culture. It is culture.

There is nothing culturally, whether it's the NBA today with the announcement with the gambling stuff, and some of the response coming from. From.

From pundits, sports, sports, talking heads, or whether it's the super bowl halftime show or whether it's Cracker Barrel or on and on, the color of M&M's, everything is political, which means our culture is political.

And so at a time when we're not talking about right or left in our government anymore, we're not talking about the size and scope and responsibility of government anymore, when we're not talking about specific policy proposals or debating them anymore, literally all we are talking about is culture. And in a time so. So as Latinos become a bigger part of the.

Of the population, that cultural transformation, especially when it's younger, which young people drive culture more than older people do, you are starting to see these chasms between Bad Bunny, who is the world, the globe's largest artist, singing artist, and this country's top seller, bigger than Taylor Swift. So, you know, and all of his music, every one of his songs is in Spanish. The entire halftime show next January will be in Spanish.

And that bothers a lot of people, especially of the Republican Party, who are enmeshed in a. In an effort to stop that from happening.

I was in line for a Las Vegas show when I was with this gentleman who was in his early 80s who was just irate about. I just lost his mind, he was from east coast and he was just like, this is, you know, not America. It's not American.

He needs to go back to where he came from. I'm like, he's from Puerto Rico. He's an American.

You know, and, and of course, you know, don't acknowledge certain people or certain language as being truly American, which is what this comes down to. So much of what is happening, there's all this denial about it. Oh, it's economic anxiety. I mean, that's complete bullshit.

This is about cultural change and people fearing a changing America, changing society. And in their attempt to restore America again, the slogan is right there. Make America great again.

Let's return to what we were is this very Luddite way of trying to stop change, stop progress, stop the forward march of time. And it's not going to happen.

David Wheeler: 00:37:38

So, Mike, shift gears here a little bit. You're out in California and obviously the Governor there is trying to be a front against Trump and responding to his stuff.

How do you think he's doing and has his stock gone up or down or kind of the same with you?

Mike Madrid: 00:38:01

That's a great question. I mean, look, I have been very publicly supportive and complimentary of Gavin Newsom at times. I've been very publicly critical of him at this time.

I do believe he has a generational talent in the Democratic Party, in the country. Politically, I think he is far more viable as a candidate than anybody gives him credit for at this point.

I think he's got a lot of weaknesses that will absolutely be exploited. I think that the Republican Party has some very strong institutional advantages.

But for the moment, I think he has uniquely cracked the code on how to fight against Donald Trump. And I think he's doing a very good job of an exceptional job of it. In full disclosure.

I mean, I'm very close to a lot of his advisors and people he works with. And I've been pushing him to kind of take a more of a Lincoln Project style approach for a long time, long before he started.

I think that, you know, if you really want to understand Gavin Newsom's education, you have to look back at the fires earlier this year in Los Angeles when the new president basically barreled over him, deluge the state with, in the country with misinformation of very sophisticated, orchestrated disinformation campaign about why the fires were happening. Just lying about people at their worst, weakest moments when their houses were on fire, attacking the governor.

And he responded with fact checks and websites and completely got bowled over.

And you compare that to a few months later with the ICE raids, when they ran on offense and started mocking him, mocking the president on social media and using humor as their lead. And I think people loved it, couldn't get enough of it.

I think that that's still where it's at, but that that trajectory from the beginning of this year to the end of this year has been an extraordinary transformation in a man whose flexibility, I think, has defined his political career. And I think he's going to, I think he's a leader of the republic, of the Democratic Party at this moment, in every sense of the word.

I don't think that Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries are up to the moment. I think that they're, they're very D.C. focused. They're not articulating a message. They don't understand how to fight on these terms.

And I think that Gavin Newsom has seized that mantle, and I think he's probably the front runner of the Democratic.

David Wheeler: 00:40:16

And do you have faith in his team around him, or is he going to have to supplement himself with additional folks?

Mike Madrid: 00:40:24

He's got really bright minds around him that have really stepped up to meet the moment. I think the question is going to kind of come down to him. He's certainly going to have to expand it. I think he will.

I think there's, I know there's a lot of interest in his campaign nationally from Democrats.

I also believe, incidentally, though, if it's, if it's going to come from a governor or a senator to be the nominee, I think Gavin Newsom is probably the most likely nominee.

Not just because where he's at this moment, it's very, very early, but because he, he understands the way to communicate and to practice politics in this digital age in a way no Democrat I've ever seen seen has.

p did with the Republicans in: 2016

David Wheeler: 00:41:21

Yeah, I think, I think most Democrats are pretty wide open at this point. I think he's impressed a lot of people. He's impressed me. I mean, I was kind of, you know, anti hair gel is too California for me.

And that's from a guy that loves California and would live there in a Heartbeat. But who else on the Democratic side do you see that is maybe having some effect in a positive way, if any?

Mike Madrid: 00:41:50

They're definitely there. I think they're going to emerge and I think they will emerge after the midterm terms.

I think Ruben Gallego is doing something really important for the party at this moment. We've had that conversation.

I'm a very big supporter because I think he understands, I think, where the party needs to be if it's going to be a competitive party. I think one of the things that people don't really.

It's a very DC east coast frame of mind for Democrats to believe that the blue wall states, the white working class is somehow going to be in the Rust Belt. Those days are over. The new power base of the Democratic Party is going to have to be Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada. It has to be the Southwest.

It's going to have to be the Latino working class just because of math. And they've already lost those voters. Those Rust Belt voters are not coming back.

And so I think Gallego is somebody to keep an eye on, at least from, from, from the political class. I think Ossoff is a real comer. But again, I really don't, don't sleep on an outsider.

I think that the Democratic Party needs to be so remade in a new image. It's going to have to come from the outside.

David Wheeler: 00:42:59

And what do you think is going to happen in the referendum coming up in California?

Mike Madrid: 00:43:02

I think it will pass pretty overwhelmingly.

David Wheeler: 00:43:05

Yeah. And what about the governor's race? Who do you see emerging there on either side?

Mike Madrid: 00:43:10

It's so wide open. It's so wide open. One of the really.

And again, just as a, as an observer of kind of both parties and a critic of both parties, it is really extraordinary that there isn't three future presidential candidates running in a California primary for governor. Like, that's, that's just shocking to, should be shocked. It should be a huge wake up call to the national Democratic Party.

Like, what is so wrong with the bluest of blue estate that they're running, never has been and never will be. Like, what is going on here? So there's nobody who's captured the imagination of anybody that focuses on politics here.

Nobody is articulating where people clearly know the state needs to go. And there's no lane that is discernible enough to define where the party needs to go. So. Yeah.

David Wheeler: 00:43:57

Okay, well, let me throw it back to Mo for one more question and then maybe we'll talk about our favorite bourbon.

Col Moe Davis: 00:44:06

Yeah, I'm just curious, guys, as a political consultant, what would be your advice now to, you know, to Democrats that are looking at running? What would you, what would you be advising them to be championing if they want to be competitive?

Mike Madrid: 00:44:21

Well, look, I'm going to say what everybody's been saying and what I wrote a year and a half ago when I was basically saying the Democrats are about to get destroyed here, which is they've lost the working class.

And this is, you know, you can look at the Ezra Klein Abundance Project or you can look at the DSA mom, Donnie, you know, aoc, Bernie Sanders wing, and talk about the working class. Both of them will be effective. But I really think that the Democratic Party as a party is, is kind of a thing of the past.

It's, it's, it's not a party in the traditional sense. It can't be when the Republican Party has ceased to be a party. You can't have one cult tribe and then another healthy political party.

The Democratic Party is defined almost entirely by stopping Republicanism, which it should be at this moment. But the problem is that that's not a party. Like, you can't build a party off of that. It's a, it's a countercultural movement is what it is.

And so you have to, again, there's going to be leaders that are going to emerge that are going to redefine the party and understand the working class in a more populist way. It's, it's again, and I'm not trying to be dismissive, these are friends, it's not Paul Vogala's, you know, pronoun versus embroidery name.

It's not Gallego's Big ass Truck.

They're both trying to articulate something that they feel that has already kind of washed over the entire electorate is people are sick of the system as it exists.

If the Democratic Party wants to get back into the business, if it can, if it's capable, it's going to have to provide a vision of what the whole damn thing looks like anew for people that are not feeling involved, engaged, or a part of their society, their country, their state and their community. That's a very tall order, especially for people who are basically the beneficiaries of the current system.

So I think there's still a long way for the Democratic Party to go before they figure it out if they're going to recover.

ty Party the way Trump did in: 2016

The Democrats are going to have to have the same kind of movement and that's going to require they attack their own institutions because the institutions are failing.

They're not working in the same way that Donald Trump figured that out, that the old Romney way of doing things, the old George W. Bush way of doing things was failing their own constituencies because the people hurting the most right now are Democrats.

Col Moe Davis: 00:46:53

Well, listen, we really do appreciate you taking time to join us and it's really been interesting and we'll see what happens.

We're just about a year away from, from Election Day for the midterm, so fingers crossed that, that we get there and make it through this rough patch that we're in right now.

Mike Madrid: 00:47:10

I appreciate the time, gentlemen. Thanks for the invitation.

David Wheeler: 00:47:12

Hey, Mike, before you go, where do you think midterms are going? If it was today, what would the House look like?

Mike Madrid: 00:47:19

Well, the Democrats are going to win the House. Barring something extraordinary which may happen in these extraordinary times. I look, the Democrats are going to win the House.

ok, Trump's first midterms in: 2018

The Democrats picked up like 40 seats. Big blue wave. We're not quite at that level yet, even though the economy is getting worse. And so just keep that in mind.

If the economy gets worse as Trump keeps driving this into the ground, the political question, pushback that I was referring to earlier is going to get more intense. So even with these gerrymanders that are going on, the likelihood of a lot of these seats turning blue are very, very big.

And in this Texas gerrymander where they've drawn five seats, three of them are Hispanic majority seats, I think three of those seats go back. I don't that's entirely conceivable. I think, in fact, it's more likely than not. So, yes, if we do have elections, I think we will.

If they are fair elections, I think they will be.

If the historical trend continues, I think that will, if the economy continues to sour, which seems evident, the Democrats are going to have a very good strong year because they're not Trump, not because of what they are standing for.

David Wheeler: 00:48:32

Got it. Well, let's hope that, let's hope that happens. And any, any light at the end of the tunnel for the Senate as.

Mike Madrid: 00:48:39

Well, look, I think that's within reach. I mean, there's problem like in Maine right now, right? You've got this battle going on, these candidates kind of blowing up.

But you know, I'm not a Susan Collins fan. We spent I think $15 million against her when I was at the Lincoln Project. Susan Collins is tougher and she's, she's a Mainer.

People know her, they like her. They disagree with her, but they stick with her. She's very gettable this year. It's just a shame that the Democrats can't recruit a good candidate.

But Schumer has done a good job. There are some good candidates and I think it's going to be a strong year. And I would not count the Democrats out of winning the Senate.

David Wheeler: 00:49:10

Well, again, thank you, Mike Madrid from California for joining us. Give folks the name of your book one more time.

Mike Madrid: 00:49:18

It is called the Latino How America's Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy. You can get it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, anywhere books are sold. And yeah, appreciate any feedback. People have. Love to respond to you.

David Wheeler: 00:49:30

Okay, well, as the father of three Latino children, I'm gonna make sure I have it. And and this has been MUCK YOU! with my co host Moe Davis and our guest today has been Mike Madrid. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.

Suzie Muckraker: 00:49:46

This has been MUCK YOU! co hosted by Colonel Moe Davis in Asheville and David Wheeler in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Thanks to Our guest today, Mr. Mike Madrid, one of the founders of the Lincoln Project.

merican Muckrakers. Copyright: 2025

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