LEMON DROP | What Should Democrats Do Now?!
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome, everybody. Substack. I'm on a Substack. Don Lemon here with Mike Nellis.
How did Mike Nellis get his start raising over $1 billion for Democrats?
Mike is the former senior advisor to Kamala Harris, the founder and chief strategy officer at Authentic.org. Mike, how did you raise over $1 billion for Democratic candidates, including Adam Schiff, Gretchen Whitmer, and Pat Ryan? That's a lot of money.
It is a lot of money. A lot of time, a lot of time and effort and fundraising emails, better for better, for worse. But I got my start, I dropped out of college to work for Barack Obama 20 years ago and got to be one of the first people to do online fundraising for candidates and found myself pretty good at it. So I got to work for Kamala Harris. Adam Schiff is my oldest client. Gretchen Wimmer is one of my current clients, along with a whole bunch of others. Cory Booker, we raised a ton of money for him around the filibuster and all the other great things that he's doing. So I have a really great team of people around me at my company, Authentic.
So then how are you doing after the election? A lot of people are not doing well still. There's still some people who are wounded and they're, you know, sad and depressed or whatever. Seriously, I'm not kidding.
Yeah, no, I mean, I don't blame anybody for being sad or depressed. I sort of, I take, I think there's nothing sadder than a political consultant licking their wounds post-election. So I'm choosing to be a joyful warrior and I'm trying to find the good in it. So I've got a little six-year-old boy at home and it's summertime in Chicago. So I'm doing fine. I think a lot of other people aren't doing fine, but I'm okay.
So then how do Democrats move forward now? Because you do, you lick your wounds and you move on, right? You've got to. So the question is, there's been a lot of consternation. Everybody's doing a postmortem. Democrats need to do this. Everybody has advice, right? Advice is like opinions. Then you know what? Everybody has one. So how do Democrats move forward, Mike?
Well, I think we start by looking inward and thinking about the things that we did wrong in the last four years. I believe in taking personal responsibility in everything in my life. I think the Democratic Party needs to do that, too. A lot of practitioners in the space spend way too much time blaming everybody else. They want to blame the media. They want to blame Donald Trump, which is fair. There's certain things we can complain about. But what did we do wrong, right? And I think we mishandled a bunch of stuff. First thing is the economy is an obvious one. It's like The economy was in OK shape, but a lot of people weren't feeling it. And then we spent the last four years telling people how great it was.
And people are struggling to put food on the table and pay their rent. We did not handle the situation with Biden's age very well. I think that's well documented and discussed at this point. I wish we had had a full primary so that we could either give Kamala Harris the chance to build out a campaign operation to succeed or elevate another candidate if she didn't win the primary. Um, so like that, that's where we start to move forward. And then if you look at like where we are today, the first thing we need is, can we stop and look at where we are today?
Can we just go back and take us through a little bit? Did you say you, you, did you wish that Joe Biden had dropped out earlier? You said, and you had a little bit more runway. Yeah.
Yeah. I think, I think, I think if, if, if, if president, I love president Biden, I think he's a great man. I think he was a good president on the whole, but if he and his advisors had made the decision to drop out at the beginning of 2023, um, given the Democratic Party an opportunity to have a full nominating contest, I think we would have been in better shape. And it isn't lost on me that the two times we lost to Donald Trump were times that we didn't have full vibrant primaries like we did in 2008 and like we did in 2020. We should have had the best of the best of the Democratic talent run that would have included Kamala Harris.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:05
2
How did Mike Nellis get his start raising over $1 billion for Democrats?
0:05–5:31
3
What went wrong for Democrats in 2024 and how should they take responsibility?
5:31–7:34
4
Could a full primary have improved the Democratic nominee and why?
7:34–25:50
5
What immediate changes should Democrats make on leadership and policy?
25:50–28:13
6
How should Democrats handle cultural issues like trans rights without alienating voters?
28:13–40:15
7
Why must the party move past purity tests and embrace pragmatic candidates?
40:15–42:40
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Don Lemon Show
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