Patrick Gaspard

speaker

119 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 18 Dec

Patrick Gaspard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Bulwark Daily · S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption · 10 Apr 2025 podcast

Well, but Tim, you know, primary audiences are polled as well. And if a group is asking you to fill out a form that you think puts you at cross purposes with your primary audience that you've polled, you're not going to fill out the thing. You just won't. You just don't do it. But if you're reading polling that says, you know what?

There's a constituency for this, and that constituency is animated around this in ways that could be to my benefit or to my detriment as a political actor. But yeah, I may check the box in this thing. So let's not make a distinction between the blob of the groups and the instinct that politicians have around survival, around their own success. That's heavy.

overwhelmingly driven by polling and the information they get from their consultants on these things. That's the first thing that I will say to you. We also had these moments where the Overton window gets blown open in a particular way as it did on criminal justice reform, for instance, in America following George Floyd and politicians and other civil society actors and the media itself.

then make a set of decisions about what they are going to invest in, cover, lift up based on that Overton window. That Overton window can blow shut in a hurry on you. And in American history, there's always the backlash to the backlash. And some politicians are nimble enough to be out in front of that and others aren't.

And given how little power and little authority the groups actually have in America and how most of them are like, under budgeted, they can barely like hold their staff together.

Uh, I am, I am challenged to accept a story, this overly simplified story that these powerful political actors who are usually dismissive of groups where they're in meetings with them, et cetera, or somehow like just completely surrendering their political fates to the groups. And that's why they're in the pickle that they're in.

Tim, the single most important election that's happened in America in the last 30 years outside of a presidential election was the 2014 midterm loss of Eric Cantor, who was the majority leader in the House, who was to the right of Attila the Hun, last I checked. But he was defeated. He was defeated by someone who was to the right of him, who had significantly less resources than he had.

And it was because of the attacks from right-wing groups. Right-wing group.

But let's be clear that Eric Cantor, and this is the punchline here, Eric Cantor was using his resources to move in the direction of of the group view, because that was the direction of the primary audience that he had in his state. That's the punchline there. It's the important thing.

That election is important because it conditioned a particular kind of behavior amongst institutional Republicans who then surrendered to the Frankenstein monster that they had built in their basement and let loose in the world. That's what leads to the Trump moment, et cetera, et cetera. But let's not forget that Eric Cantor was actually moving in the direction of his primary audience.

And where the groups were just not quickly and nimbly enough.

The politicians move to the extremes if they feel that that's where their bases are. The groups are important in creating accountability and a sense of civil society in our country that we can't lose sight of, even though you are right to have a critique about how strategic they are and whether or not there are some extremes there. Your critique, I take as right, but I'm a Thomas Paine guy.

So I'm always going to believe in the need and the necessity of civil society organism that can build accountability and that can, in a way, help to localize our national politics.

First thing we got to do is lose the mythology of what the workforce actually looks like and what the growing parts of the economy are. When you talk about working class Black and brown folk, they are overwhelmingly people who are in the service economy, people who are in spaces like healthcare, which is the fastest growing part of our economy in cities and states around this country.

And being able to speak directly and pointedly about those types of jobs instead of constantly mythologizing hard hat jobs as a working class job, which are, you know, very few and far between, and that's not the going parts of the economy.

Got to recognize that, you know, the folks who are working in Amazon warehouses for us, for instance, those are not hard hat jobs in the way that they are like taken up in the popular political narrative. Those are part of the service economy. That's not becoming the information economy. Got to recognize that and speak to that and got to speak directly to

We spend a lot of time right now talking about cost of living. We actually don't spend any time at all talking about the bottoming out of wages in America. I don't want you to talk about the price of eggs. I want you to help figure out how I'm going to have dignity in the workplace that's going to enable me to earn enough to buy a home. Or to create community.

So we're actually not talking about the shocking income disparities, the downward pressure on wages, the fact that wages have not grown really in any meaningful way in the last 25 years in our country, and figuring out how

We are pushing into this notion of collective organizing, collective bargaining that's working out for not just union members, but non-union workers in the service economy is a thing that is lacking in our politics that we have to find simple and organic ways to introduce to our political platform work.

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