Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast.

I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark.

And this week, we're turning away from Donald Trump's chaos because we have four years to talk about that.

And we're going to focus on the Democrats.

Now, we've spent a lot of time on this show talking about where swing voters have found

Democrats lacking in the last election. But we want this to be a forward-looking discussion

about where Democratic voters think the party should go and whether that

helps them win elections in the future. My guest today has had some thoughts about how Democrats

need to shape up Adam Gentleson, like Gentleman, former chief of staff to Senator John Federman,

and Deputy Chief of Staff to Harry Reid. He's also the author of Kill Switch, the rise of the modern

Senate and the crippling of American democracy. Adam, thanks for being here.

It's great to be here, Sarah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Okay. So your main thesis since the election

has been that Democrats need to spend less time listening to, quote, unquote, the groups,

meaning progressive special interest groups. You said they, quote, imposed the rigid mores and vocabulary of college

educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats' appeal and fatally wounding them in the places

they need to win, end quote. Man, do I agree with that sentence? So we're going to explore

where we go from here during this episode, but do you want to tell us a little bit about how you think we

got here? Yeah, I think how we got here, there's sort of the short version and the long version,

right? We can probably tease out the long version over the course of the show, but I think the

short version is that over the last 10 the show. But I think the short

version is that over the last 10 years or so, Democrats have sort of become captive to a network

of special interest groups that impose this very rigid orthodoxy on them. And they're

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