Mike Nellis

Same, same.

I was telling you off stream, I'm a huge fan of your YouTube page.

You do really good work.

So I'm speculating because some folks know I was a senior advisor to Harris for about five years.

I was on her first presidential campaign, oversaw all the digital.

I did not work on the last one.

So you can't get mad at me.

So I tell people when I meet them at the grocery store and they ask me what I do.

I'm like, can't be mad at me for what happened.

But so if I had to speculate here, my guess is that they were flying by the seat of their pants with very little information in the beginning.

So they were playing to an audience that was largely us, right?

There was a reason that we liked everything that we saw.

Brad Summer, the content was for Democratic activists and Democratic donors to create that enthusiasm that they needed to raise all the money that they did to get the party to come together so she could secure the nomination and start building the operation she needed in 107 days.

And if I had to guess, then they got polling information of what the

general electorate looked like, how independents were feeling, how people who were on the sidelines were feeling, and they started to make strategic decisions.

And this is always one of the hardest things on a campaign is you have to make tough choices.

And I've tried to be as generous as I can to the Harris folks.

There's plenty of things that I would say like they did, they made a mistake, but that's with hindsight.

And it's without the information that they had.

Like, I don't know what information they had in front of them.

that made them decide not to do Rogan, for example, because I feel like that's an obvious one.

They should have done that.

And I would have kept going with the weird stuff.

I like the weird stuff.

But sometimes it's like the things that I like and resonate with me are not the same things that are going to resonate with the median voter.

And what I remind people all the time is the median voter in American politics is like a single parent working like two jobs.

And they're lucky if at the end of the day, they can put their kids to bed and drink a beer and enjoy their lives.

They're not thinking about the world the same way that we are.

So they had a lot more information.

I know a lot of folks on the left are mad.

That they went, you know, deep with the like Liz Cheney, bring everybody together, go after like, you know, independent, you know, conservative voters who were on the fence about Trump.

That strategy may have been right.

I don't know.

I think there's always people like, well, she lost, so it didn't work.

But it's possible that they were looking at a five to ten point loss and they closed that to a hundred eighty thousand votes in three states lost.

I don't know.

So that's the hard thing to kind of gear up for.

But I've been in that position where you got to make tough calls and it sucks.

I don't know, because I don't have the information.

It's the truest answer to it.

It's easy to say you lost, but she may have maximized her vote.

I think the thing to keep in mind is,

the inflationary crisis that we went through dragged down every major political party and every major political leader in the West for the last, you know, three, four years.

Like everybody lost and there's no ideological consistency to it.

She actually, before the Canadian elections, she overperformed better than any other incumbent party than anybody else had.

Now you can quibble and like, to me, it's,

I think the bigger issue that you can kind of pinpoint is they got really risk averse in the media appearances and what they were allowing her to do.

And so if she had gone on Rogan for three hours, could that have flipped 180,000 voters in three battleground states?

I don't know.

But I know that Trump reached like 10 million people on Rogan's YouTube page alone.

not to mention the economy of scale that exists below Rogan that pushes things out.

That's probably like 100 million impressions that she didn't get.

You'd have to do MSNBC every day, every hour for like 100 days to get any kind of exposure even similar to that, and certainly not with the same audience.

And there were plenty of times that she went on a long-form podcast, did a great job.

She went out with Brene Brown.

It was great.

She did Call Her Daddy, and that was really, really good with Alex.

I forget what her last name is, but that episode was really good.

Yeah, I thought it was... I mean, it was a while ago, so we're talking almost a year now, so I haven't listened to it in a while.

But I remember feeling like, this is fine, this is good, there's nothing to complain about.

I don't remember people complaining about it very much, but...

Again, I think even with Call Her Daddy is like you're already preaching to the choir with Alex's audience would be my guess.

You're trying to get disaffected people that are going to stay home to vote for you that are probably values aligned but skeptical about your work.

Like Trump, she invited Trump on.

I said at the time I thought it was a mistake for Trump not to do Call Her Daddy.

Yes, Trump would have alienated 90% of the people who listen to that.

but you're angling for the 10% of people that are going to listen to you.

And the same thing with Rogan, like 90, maybe not 90%, but a huge chunk of Rogan's audience was not going to like Kamala Harris.

They were not going to agree with her.

But if she could reach 10, 15, 20%, it makes a big difference.

Like one of the things I try to remind my clients all the time is in every election cycle, we're bleeding white male voters.

That's just a reality of what it is.

And this last election, we bled young male voters, period, regardless of race.

But white men are the ones that are steering away from us.

We don't talk to them.

We don't go into their spaces.

We don't build up surrogates.

We don't offer policy solutions specifically to the problems that they're facing.

Now, to be clear, some people are going to like in the comments get mad at me and they're going to go, well, but the world is run by white men, Michael.

We don't need to do that.

And you're right.

The world is run by white men.

It's built for white men, to be clear.

But if we're bleeding votes...

with this constituency, even if we could get a fraction of a fraction of them back, you make it a lot harder for somebody like Donald Trump to win.

And if you want to bring back, let's say, like protections for Roe v. Wade, if you want to pass sensible gun control legislation, if you want to get this country back into a good position, you're going to need some of those folks to come back so that they can't elect the Marjorie Taylor Greene's, the Donald Trump's, the Tucker Carlson's of the world.

You need to get a lot of those folks back.

And we don't talk to them.

So I think not going on Theo Vaughn and Rogan, those things matter.

You'll see Democrats do a better job of that in the next election, I think.

I buy that that happens.

And I buy it for a few different reasons.

The first one is like, remember, Kamala Harris did not build the team of her own.

Like she inherited and adopted Joe Biden's team.

And a ton has been written about how that relationship was not perfect.

And one of the things is like, I don't agree with everything in Jake Tapper's book.

I've often described it as the most frustrating book I've ever read because I don't believe half of it.

And the half that I do believe really pisses me off.

So it's like she was robbed of the opportunity to run in a Democratic primary and become a better candidate with a better team.

Like she either would have risen to the occasion and

and been in a better position to win the race, or somebody else would have usurped that position, which is exactly what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Like Democrats had a actual landslide election in 2008 because we ran Barack Obama.

And now I think in hindsight, like Hillary Clinton may not have performed as well in that scenario against John McCain.

I think it's something to be mindful of.

We have to let Democratic primary voters decide, but it also gives them a chance to build their campaign and get their opportunity to be a better candidate.

So that's number one.

Number two, if you're running for president of the United States, you are doing one of the hardest things that you will ever do in your life period.

You kind of have to, on a certain level, delude yourself into believing that it's fate that you are going to win, that you are going to be president of the United States.

Like Kamala Harris, I don't think had ever lost an election before that, really.

because ultimately she didn't make it to the 2020 primary, so you can argue she didn't lose, but maybe she did.

But she had never lost.

She'd gotten a chance to be on the vice presidential ticket.

They had defeated Trump and Pence four years ago.

To me, I can understand going, I'm going to win.

And if you believe what's written in those books, like Tapper's book, it's in there, I think, and then...

There's just a couple of other anecdotes that exist that they were closing really strong, that they found themselves like way, way back a couple months before the election and they were closing so strong.

And sometimes the candidate with the higher favorables is the one who converts the most.

And I think people don't understand, like, it's unusual for candidates

Kamala Harris to have been the candidate that people liked personally more, but choose to pull the lever for Donald Trump in that election.

And again, 180,000 votes, three states.

It's very close.

But I can see her just believing that.

I mean, the same thing happened to Mitt Romney, too.

I mean, that race was closer than people remember it being.

And Romney believed that he was going to win.

And you always get kind of insulated.

Like, you're out there doing the campaign.

You're basically talent at that point.

You're like a...

You know, does Stephen Tyler know what's going on with, you know, anything in his operation?

Like, probably not, because his job is to go out there and sing and party.

Like, that's what it is.

So I just think it's probably somewhat similar to that.

We can try to run.

Yeah.

So what I'll say is like, I have had conversations like that.

I think a lot of political consultants don't have conversations like that because we are incentivized to get you to run.

Like if you're, and I'll tell the people this, like I run one of the largest digital fundraising and advertising firms in the space.

So I've worked on a lot of races that I didn't really believe that we could win.

And then sometimes somehow we pull it out.

Like it has happened before.

Like to be honest, I did Katie Hobbs's race four years ago.

I'm doing a reelection now.

Like it was a hard race.

Like I think even going into it, if you ask the campaign leadership, a lot of people would have been like, I don't know that we can win this.

It's going to be close.

And sure enough, she beat she beat Kari Lake, which was amazing.

There was a lot of people, I think, that were just like a little bit, you know, worried about it.

And we didn't know if we could do it, but we did it, you know.

And so I will tell you that there was a candidate that was thinking about running for Senate in this last election where like a lot of her consultants that I was working with were telling her to run.

And I pulled her aside and went.

I don't, I don't think you should run.

And ultimately she did it.

And I think that was the right call.

And it's a really hard thing to do because I'm incentivized to do that.

Like that was probably like, you know, $10 million I would have gotten for the digital persuasion, the digital advertising that I could have done.

And I would have gotten a hefty commission on that.

But like, for me, I care way more about winning elections than I do about like making the money.

Like we make plenty of money regardless.

Um, so I try to give the best advice that I can.

But the other thing is like sometimes running and losing is also okay.

Like you can run and lose and your star can rise and you can make a point and you can move the ball forward.

Like we need a lot of people who are going to step up in states like Arkansas and Mississippi and Iowa that like are going to have tough go of it if they're going to win, but they're going to have a down ballot effect.

Like Tim Ryan ran for Senate in Ohio against J.D.

Vance, right?

And that race was not as close as we would have liked it to be.

But the coordinated campaign that he ran dragged two House candidates up that helped Democrats flip the House in that election.

So I just think it's just a kind of a different place to be in.

And you kind of have to just take everything into account when you're making those decisions.

Yeah, I've had those conversations before.

I've also told people, it's like, look, it's gonna be hard for you to win this race.

I'm gonna do everything that I can.

But like, you can also, and let's talk about like these midterm elections, right?

We're in a weird scenario where Democrats probably are up by like 8% in the generic ballot, would be my guess if the election were today.

But the economy is teetering on the brink of a recession.

So if you're looking at running in like,

You know, let's say you're... I believe the South Carolina Democratic candidate, her name is Annie Edwards.

I don't work for Annie, but I've heard really great things about her.

Let's say you're Annie Edwards and you're like, it's going to be a hard race to win in South Carolina.

Like, you know, Jamie Harrison didn't do as well as we wanted to six years ago against Lindsey Graham.

But Lindsey Graham is a lot older now.

His approval rating isn't great.

Donald Trump's in the White House again.

The economy's teetering on the edge.

If we run...

the right campaign, if we get raised the right amount of money, if the economy falls off a cliff, you could see it being a state where, you know, could you move 10 points in a more positive electorate in South Carolina?

Probably with the right candidate and stuff like that.

So, again, sometimes it's worth taking the risk to try.

Like, I think with...

the primary between Tallarico and Colin Allred, that's a good race.

Like we should be playing in Texas if for no other reason than for the down ballot effect, but also because Texas isn't that far away from flipping.

And in a race where people are turning against Trump and turning against MAGA, you could see Texas flip and that would be monumental.

I mean, it was unthinkable for Georgia to turn blue and we have two Democratic senators from Georgia right now.

Yeah, it's a big topic and I could spend all day talking about it.

So I think the first thing is we lack quality candidates who want to run for office, who want to get shit done and who know what they stand for.

The number of candidates that I talk with, many of whom I don't go to work with, who cannot articulate why they are running outside of it's my turn or somebody told me I'd be a good candidate for something and don't have like a firm grasp of who they are.

It is like – it really drives me crazy.

And that's why like my people will have heard me talk about Mallory McMorrow a thousand times.

Like I –

love Mallory McMorrow because she has a clear compass of who she is and what she cares about and what she's fighting for to the point where I work for her.

I might give her advice and she would go, that's not me.

I don't say that.

And I have lots of candidates that like, I can just like, I have candidates who I write stuff for who just say it and don't care what I wrote.

You know, they just move on.

They're like, oh, that's a good tweet.

Get it up.

And then they don't add their like flavor to it.

So that is, I think the number one thing.

And I think

The second thing is the Democratic Party is super risk averse.

We're afraid of offending anybody.

We got to wait for a poll.

Like, you know, Sarah Lonwell was giving me shit on my show the other day because we were talking about how I was one of the Democratic consultants that was like begging Democrats to talk more about the Epstein files when they first tried to cover it up in the beginning.

And I was telling her, like, I was on conference calls all week going, what are you doing?

Like, this has real energy to it.

Like, get behind it.

This is a window in to start talking about what's going on with corruption and Trump.

And she was like, see, that's the problem right there.

Why are you ever on a conference call having to talk about that?

Like it should be so self-evident that your clients know what they stand for, that it's very easy to like shove the issues through that messaging box.

Right.

And so if you know what you're standing for, what you stand for, it's a lot easier for you to develop a message on what's happening in the news today.

And you see that with the shutdown right now.

The shutdown messaging is good.

It's probably like B minus, maybe B plus.

It's not A plus though.

Go watch AOC and Bernie Sanders video that they put out where they're walking down the street and they're talking about it.

That was not a scripted video.

That was them just shooting the shit.

And it's better than 98% of the things that I've seen put out there because AOC knows exactly what she stands for and Bernie knows exactly what he stands for.

And they can articulate it very clearly.

I don't have a

It was them walking down the street and Bernie being like, hey, look who I ran into.

It's AOC.

AOC, why are we shutting down?

Why are we refusing to help Republicans keep the government open?

She goes, well, because they're trying to raise your health insurance premiums by double.

And they don't want to meet with us and they don't want to talk about it.

And Bernie's like, and you're right that we're doing that.

And our health care system is already a mess, a disaster.

And then Bernie actually talked about something in that video that I hadn't heard any other Democrat talk about that I'm now saying when I do my TV hits is the studies that are out there show if you increase health insurance premiums by the amount of money that Republicans want to right now, 50,000 working class Americans are going to die every single year on average.

I had not heard that from any other Democrat before.

That is a level of moral clarity that is key.

And I don't think it has to be like, you know, a DSA or Bernie wing or moderate or any of that.

I just think like you need to be able to speak to what you stand for and why you're running in a much stronger sense than a lot of the candidates the establishment puts up right now.

They just can't do it.

They got to wait for a poll.

They got to talk to their TV guy.

They got to blah, blah, blah.

And like, I'm just kind of tired of it.

I'd rather you like let it rip.

And the Republicans are better at letting it rip.

Now, the bottom, you know, 50% of the things they say are ridiculous and insane and get them in trouble.

But then they come off as more authentic than we do.

And we come off as very clearly poll tested, reading the same dribble.

That's what you experienced with those three interviews.

The same guys saying the same stuff.

And even if it's like the flavor is a little bit different between Jared Polis and Rahm Emanuel, it's the same shit, different day.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the first thing is like knowing what, what you stand for, right?

Like, and I think like a lot of people I get, I was actually at a wedding this weekend and my, my old shop teacher was there with his kids and he was like, how do you go do that?

Like, how can you do that?

And I go, well, it's a lot easier when you're not full of shit.

Like it just is.

And so like when I go on and I, like I was on with Jesse Waters and Jesse Waters, I don't know if you've seen this clip, but Jesse Waters screamed at me.

screamed at me about some woman that he knew who died on the streets of Chicago and was, like, trying to rattle me.

And, like, I took a deep breath and I went, Jesse, I'm very sorry for what happened to your friend, but when I walk my kid to school in the morning, I don't want to have to walk past the tank.

I want there to be real community solutions.

I want to know my police officer.

I want to keep my streets safe.

And I want to do it the right way, not sending in the military to do it.

And, like...

To me, it's just that's what I believe.

And so, again, there's a lot of people out there that like they can't go do a TV hit because they need their like perfect talking points.

They've got to have their comms person like feed it to them.

They have to get it out.

And there's a lot of really brutal clips of like older Democrats not able to like handle the pivot.

When you're on right wing media, you won.

I think like my dad, my dad's a three time Trump voting Republican.

And right before I went on waters the first time he called me like 15 minutes before and he goes, I just want you to remember you're the bad guy.

You're the bad guy.

And almost like playing professional wrestling for a second, me embracing that I'm the heel when I'm on Fox makes me feel more free.

Who cares if I fuck up?

And I apologize if I'm not supposed to be cursing on your channel.

I apologize.

You can believe me.

I should have asked beforehand.

But it's okay if I make a mistake because I'm the bad guy.

They want me to make a mistake anyway.

I'm here for the 10% of people that know that what's happening in this country is wrong and want to be reminded or want to know that somebody cares about them.

And they want to create a perception of you and I as Democrats.

They want to say that we're weak, that we're a feat, that we have blue hair, that we have piercings, that we're weirdos, blah, blah, blah.

And that's what Charlie Kirk was great at.

Like Charlie Kirk was great at going to, and I say great in the context of what he was great at, what good at, but he would go to a college campus.

He would get into a debate with a 18 year old young woman who doesn't really know who she is yet.

Cause you're 18.

You don't know who you are.

Um, she'd have blue hair and she'd be talking about transgender issues or abortion or whatever.

And then he would crop that up to make her look like she was an idiot when in reality, her argument was probably fine.

It was just a disagreement, but that was his thing.

And then he was beloved by 50, 60, 70 year old Republicans who love seeing him do that.

So they do that.

I think for you, it's like, you're going to know what the topics are coming in.

I have a hit tonight on News Nation.

We're talking about Kamala's book tonight at 8.15.

And like, I know roughly what he's going to ask me because it's going to be like, why is Kamala Harris selling so many books?

Is Kamala going to run for president, et cetera?

And like, I have my answers to that that I know.

But I also know that I'm going to work in certain things that I want people to know about Trump.

Like, why is the book selling so much right now?

Well, it's probably because Kamala wrote an interesting book.

And it's probably because a lot of Americans have buyer's remorse right now.

The last

Last 10 months have been really difficult.

Look at the tariffs.

Everything's more expensive.

That's exactly what Kamala Harris predicted.

She said that within Trump's first year, we'd be teetering on the edge of a recession.

That's what I see right now.

And you get that in.

And what they'll try to do is they'll come back to you and go, well, Mike, but Joe Biden made inflation like 40,000% or whatever.

And I'll go, Joe Biden isn't president right now.

And so I just kind of like try to logic it out a little bit.

But I'll also say it's not for everybody either.

Like I have...

I don't want to like toot my own horn.

It's just it's like I'm like a good bullshitter.

So like I can do that kind of debate.

I used to do it in high school and in college.

So I just kind of like I'm used to that.

I also grew up with a dad who is massively conservative and a giant troll.

Like he's just a giant troll.

So like when I'm arguing with Piers Morgan, I'm arguing with like a less talented version of my father.

Like that's all it is.

I owe it all to my dad, really.

Yeah.

So my take is that everybody who wants to run should run, including Kamala Harris.

If she thinks that she's the right candidate, she should go stand in front of the voters, build an operation, show that people can do it.

The thing that I care about the most is not so much who the nominee is.

It's that Democratic primary voters choose them, that there is a trial by fire here to build a better campaign and develop a better candidate.

And listen, Kamala Harris had 107 days, which is not enough time to become the candidate that you want.

She was not set up well by the Biden White House over the last four years.

Maybe she can gain and grow and get to the point where I believe her ceiling is, which is becoming president of the United States.

Maybe she can't.

I don't know.

Maybe it's Gretchen Whitmer.

Maybe it's Gavin Newsom.

Maybe it's Josh Pierre.

Maybe it's somebody that nobody's talking about right now.

I want that fight, and I want it for a number of different reasons.

One, it's the best Democratic way to decide the future of the Democratic Party, period.

Two, you're going to develop so much talent inside the Democratic Party from 20 Democratic campaigns.

I don't think people know that, like, when Wes Clark ran for president in 2004, he didn't win, but so much of the leadership that would go on to help Democrats flip the House two years later came off of Wes Clark's campaign, went on Barack Obama's campaign.

Same thing with Howard Dean.

The people who built the online fundraising mechanism, a lot of the people who built the online fundraising program for Barack Obama in 2008 had done it for Howard Dean four years earlier.

You develop new techniques, new style, new technology.

And part of the reason the Democratic Party is struggling right now in this last election is we didn't have 10 well-funded presidential campaigns to develop technology.

new leaders, new junior staff, new technology, new tactics.

And that's killing us right now.

And Republicans didn't have that either, to be clear.

But they had a massive presidential campaign that just had a ton of money from day one with Trump.

And so they were able to do that.

And so I don't care who runs relative.

I mean, I have my candidates that I prefer privately and some of which some of them might work for.

But everybody should run big, messy primary.

Let it play out.

We'll be a better party for it, just like we were in 2008.

is the best suited for the general election?

I think it's definitely possible.

But here's my thing is a lot of people on the Internet talk with great certainty about things that can happen or won't happen.

And then things those things happen, like unlikely things happen all the time.

If a guy like Bernie Sanders was going to win in twenty sixteen, it would have been because a lot of like unlikely voters turned out for him.

Now, a lot of unlikely voters turned out for Donald Trump in twenty sixteen and in twenty twenty and helped him win those elections.

It may have been that Bernie would have been better to peel off in twenty four.

Excuse me.

Sorry.

Let me be clear.

Donald Trump absolutely lost in 2020.

I don't want to get anybody mixed up on that.

But I don't know.

Like people ask me all the time if like I think AOC can win and like AOC can win in the same way that Mamdani can win and did win the primary.

It's because he brought in a lot of people who aren't normally part of the process like that.

I might have my policy disagreements with the two of them because I'm much more of a like.

you know, center left Democrat.

I would probably consider myself like a normie Democrat, not so much DSA, but I'm pretty like flexible if you have a good idea.

I just, I don't know.

People talk with certainty about things and I'm not always sure.

Now, the candidate that people talk about that right now is like Gavin Newsom.

They say Gavin Newsom might be able to win a Democratic primary right now, but he'd be DOA in a general election.

I don't know if that's true, but I do think like a California liberal who talks and looks the way that Gavin Newsom is, I've often joked that he was built in a laboratory for Republicans to run against him.

I like what he's doing right now.

If you were asking me to just like pluck a candidate, I would not pick Gavin Newsom.

I would probably pick like a Gretchen Whitmer or something like that, a Midwest Democrat that's much more appealing to the broader audience with a good sound record to run on.

But again, I don't know that I'm right.

I don't know what the mood of the electorate looks like.

Absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

Talk to you soon.

Thanks, David.

Bye.