Next Up with Mark Halperin
Dems in More Trouble Than They Think, Biden Still in Denial on The View, Inside the Trump Cabinet
08 May 2025
Mark Halperin lays out why the Democratic party is in even worse shape than you - and they - think, the truth about polling on the Dems, the weak presidential field for 2028, and more. Then VA Sec. Doug Collins joins to discuss how the left and media are falsely spinning DOGE cuts at his department, the truth about what the Trump cabinet is really like, and more. Then Batya Ungar-Sargon joins to discuss Joe and Jill Biden on The View, the denial the former president is still displaying, and more.
Full Episode
Hey everybody, Mark Calperin here. Welcome to NextUp, our brand new show. We're just getting started and glad to have you be part of it. If you haven't yet, please like, subscribe, download, watch us. You can see us on YouTube. Every Tuesday and Thursday, you can also listen to us wherever you get your finer podcasts.
We want to grow big and fast, so please, if you haven't done those things, do it. Today, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I'm going to tell you what smart Democrats and some disaffected former Democrats tell me is the real explanation of why the party might be in big trouble.
I'll also have a conversation with the Secretary of the Veterans Department, Doug Collins, the gentleman from Georgia. We'll talk about his pledge that he's made about making sure veterans are taken care of, even as Doge tries to make the department more efficient. All of that plus a look at Joe Biden here on this episode. Again, grateful to have you with us.
So I'm going to start by telling you the honest truth that I've heard from conversations with people across the country. Smart Democrats, some still Democrats, some disaffected Democrats who say that the party has to address some really tough questions. I haven't heard anybody with a list like this.
And it's a list that I put together getting kind of the consensus view of a number of very smart people.
some of whom have left the party as i said but some of whom really want the democrats to be able to not just win the white house back but to build the kind of a sustained coalition or kind of movement that donald trump has built to try to figure out how things have gone the real problem that these democrats see is not that the party is weak in every way we'll talk about that the real problem they see is the party has its head in the sand enabled by the people in what i call the dominant media
who are not wanting to ask the hard questions because they're hard and they're embarrassing in some cases, they're difficult. Instead of doing that, they just have their masks and their shields on, their Trump derangement syndrome inside their blue bubble. And they're not even asking the right questions, let alone trying to figure out what the answers to those questions are.
So again, these aren't my questions. These are the questions that really smart people who have been involved in democratic politics at the highest levels, at the grassroots level are saying, the party has to face. It's a fact the Democratic Party has moved to the far left, farther left than it's been in our lifetimes.
And that is a big part of the challenge the party faces to figure out what does it mean now to be a Democrat and how they can compete with Donald Trump. Donald Trump's poll numbers are down, but the Democrats' numbers are not good either. The state of the Democratic Party is not good.
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