from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday,

November 12th. Let's focus in on the debate within the Democratic Party or more broadly

the political left in this country over why the Democrats lost the Democratic Party, or more broadly, the political left in this country,

over why the Democrats lost the election and what they need to do to win.

They just lost the presidency and the Senate, and Republicans are probably, though we don't know,

on their way to retaining a slim majority in the House.

You've been hearing some of the theories because every Western

leader who saw a pandemic inflation on their watch has gotten slaughtered in their next election.

Harris only did as well as she did because Donald Trump is so unpopular, because Biden dropped out

too late, leaving Harris too little time to introduce herself to voters, because the racism and sexism tax

on a black and South Asian woman candidate was too steep to overcome, because the Democratic Party

is too identified with censorious and extreme-sounding identity politics, or because the Democrats

failed to offer a true populist economic alternative to Trump's economic populism on the cost of living,

even though Trump's is probably going to make inflation worse, as business and economics reporter Greg David said on yesterday's show.

It's why long-term interest rates have been going up since the election.

Greg told us long-term interest rates have been going up since the election. Greg told us long-term interest

rates rise when Wall Street investors anticipate inflation. But Trump sold the idea that he's

better for working-class wallets than the Democrats, because the Democrats didn't really counter it

with much of substance. That's that theory. And we have a guest today representing

mostly that point of view. It's David Serota, among other things, a former presidential campaign speech

writer for Bernie Sanders. So before we bring him on, let's set this up with a clip of Senator Sanders

discussing his own election postmortem on CNN State of

...