Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast.

I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark.

And this week, we're catching up with Democratic voters and their struggles with the Democratic Party.

Now, if you're thinking, come on, Sarah, are you just going to rip on Democrats?

Just hear me out. Hear me out. If you've listened to this show at all, you know Democratic voters

are deeply frustrated and want to see their party push back more effectively against the Trump

administration's agenda. That's true across the universe of Democratic voters, whether people are more moderate,

whether they're more progressive. And from the beginning of Trump's second term, the Democratic

Party has seemed to be on its back foot, deer in headlights. And the feeling among voters is

that the party leaders have gotten out maneuvered and steamrolled by Trump and MAGA again and again. But as much as

Democratic voters want to, and I put this in all caps, fight harder, we've also heard them

wrapped in a constant struggle over how hard and over what they should be playing hardball about.

My guest today is Dan Pfeiffer, co-host of Pod Save America,

and author of the excellent substack newsletter, The Message Box, which I read religiously. Dan,

thanks for being here. Sarah, thanks for having me. Longtime fan of this show, so I'm very excited for this.

You're somebody else who is deeply immersed both in, like like the nitty-gritty politics of it all,

but also the messaging side. And so I love when we get a chance to talk. And also, this is like

very timely, this particular group, because we're in the middle of one of those situations where

Democrats are having this argument with each other about do we shut down the government and, you know, take a stand or do we kind of cave

because we just can't stomach the pain that it's going to cause average people?

It's a tough question.

And before I get your thoughts on the shutdown, you said about a month ago that you hadn't seen

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