Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the

bulwark, and we are back for the next couple of weeks to do an autopsy on the election results,

an extended autopsy.

We're going to look at how we got here and give you an update on what the newly minted members of Trump's coalition have told us since the election about why they voted for.

But we're not going to Monday morning quarterback every Harris campaign decision.

Every campaign makes mistakes, and I think they, you know, they did an all right job playing

a pretty bad hand.

But what I want to talk about is why the voters found this campaign wanting.

That's the only way we're going to learn anything about this election.

So today's show is the first in a mini-series we're doing before the end of the year.

Today we're going to diagnose where things went wrong over the last few years for Democrats,

and in the coming weeks, we'll walk through where things went right for Donald Trump and where

we're headed from here. My guest today is Astead Herndon, host of the excellent New York Times

podcast, The Run Up, Estead. Thank you for coming back again. Yay. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

I'm so glad you're here because you and me, we talk to voters, man. We listen to voters.

We do. We do. You know, I think this is an election that's really proved the value of that all

around from the double haters to the switch to kind of the things that transpired in the last couple

weeks. I really think that

more than any of the specifics, the hearing people as full voices has really come through. And so I

appreciate your work on that front. Yeah. And I appreciate yours. And I never miss it. In part, one of

one of the things I like is, I think when you do this stuff, you want to make sure, like, right,

what I'm hearing is what other people who listen to people are hearing. I've not created my own kind of weird echo chamber.

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