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

bulwark, and this week we're checking in on the state of the opposition to Donald Trump.

So if you're sick of hearing swing voters bash the Democratic Party, don't worry,

because this week you're going to hear the Democratic base voters bash the Democratic Party.

They're seeing what's going on in the country and Democratic leadership's response to it,

and they are not thrilled. At long last, we're seeing everyday Americans mobilize in response to

what we're seeing from this administration, from the tariffs, to the deportations, to the Elon Musk of

it all. So we're going to talk about what Democratic voters think of our current moment and which party

leaders they think are getting it right and which ones they think are getting it

wrong. My guest today is Lauren Egan, author of the Bullwark's great new newsletter,

The Opposition, which is charting the Democratic Party's path out of the wilderness, or I guess

whatever ends up happening to it. Lauren, thank you for being here. Hey, Sarah. Thanks for

having me. Okay. You wrote in your newsletter that you were skeptical of the hype around the

hands-off protests that drew over a million people around the country last weekend. What did you

hear in advance that made you skeptical of it? And also, why was it called hands off?

Yeah. Well, I think the branding around it maybe was not the best one. But I was skeptical of it because we've talked a lot about the resistance and how it just hasn't really shown up in the way that it did in 2017. And, you know, just this sort of exhaustion from democrats who have just wanted to kind of

tune out from politics for a minute right after the election who have just been pissed off at their

own leadership and so when organizers first started hitting me up about the protest for the weekend

you know they were playing the expectations games they weren't telling me that they thought it was

going to be over a million people that showed up, but I was still just kind of like,

I don't know, guys. Like, what about this weekend is going to make people finally like get out

into the streets and like, why now versus like not, you know, right after the inauguration.

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