 To be here today at Think Tech Hawaii to interview Steve Phillips, we're going to be talking about the 2016 election and where do we go from here after the surprising results, especially in the presidential election. Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color. He's a national political leader, civil rights lawyer, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He has written columns in the New York Times and other places, and he is the author of The Bell's Selling, Brown is the New White. I have interviewed Steve last year just before the book actually came out about Brown as the New White. So we'll be following up with some questions relating to some of the demographics and statistics that Steve had in that book. So welcome, Steve. It's great to have you here again. Great. Thanks for having me back. And so I thought first we'd start talking about what happened. I mean, why did, okay, Donald Trump, why did Donald Trump win the Electoral College after all the polls showed that Hillary Clinton was going to win, you know, by quite a bit. So what happened? Well, it's what is important to appreciate is how close the election was, and that there's like this notion that the whole country has gone crazy and, you know, you could argue whether a big chunk of it has, but that 77,000 votes in three different states Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is the difference between Trump being president and Clinton being president. And so an election of 130 million people, that's 77,000 margin. So we can't figure out not to overreact, but the consequences are so profound that it's, you know, natural to see it in this context. So I think my analysis is that big part of the problem is that the Democrats and progressives allowed Trump to get normalized, to become an acceptable choice. And so some for their number of people who would not have supported him, gravitated, and for the clearest, the most extreme examples after that video tape came out, came out about him, talking, bragging about sexual assault. You had different members of Congress, unendorsing him on Friday when he came out, watching the debate on Sunday saying, oh, he still seems to be standing, and then re-endorsing him back on Monday. And so the Democrats failed to define him and keep him as an unacceptable choice. So just enough people were able to say, well, it's okay to actually vote for him. He was able to actually squeak through in those three different states. So that, I think, was the fundamental issue, was that no longer became a question of are you gonna be with the racist, xenophobic, misogynistic candidacy, it's like, oh, it's Republican nominee and he says someone, you know, controversial things, but overall, he's okay. And that he was really issuing this call to arms to whites who felt great amount of racial resentment by the country's changing demographics. And unapologetically, appealing to those sentiments, and the Democrats were saying, well, he doesn't have the temperament to be president. And it was just the wrong approach. He did not draw a line in the sand, did not force people to take a stand, did not tell people that you have to respond to this threat in a countervailing fashion that is on the scale of what he was proposing. Okay, so you're saying that there were, that really, if there had been 77,000 votes the other way, that he would not be president? Exactly. And so what states were those in? Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Okay, so what should the Democrats have done in those three states? So they somewhat got caught because the demographic shift in the country is to the south and southwest in terms of more democratic leaning voters, particularly voters of color. And it's a wave, and the overall population trends, and away from the, they were called the Rust Belt in industrial Midwest. And so they didn't go deep enough and hard enough and fast enough into the south and southwest. So they lost Arizona by about 90,000 votes, 600,000 Latinos didn't vote in Arizona. And then they neglected their, your rear flank around those different states. We've lost Michigan by 10,000 votes, Wisconsin by 22,000 votes, and about 40 or so in Pennsylvania. So, and each of those are a little bit different. And so, but it was, I think somewhat with the lack of attention to those areas, you have to hold your base. And the, like in Wisconsin, it actually was a lot of the progressives and progressive whites who voted third party. It wasn't that everybody defected over to Trump. The people who voted for Obama said, well, I don't really like Clinton, I'm gonna vote third party. And there was a large number of, it's like 150,000 people voted third party in Wisconsin. So you saw that type of situation. And then in Pennsylvania, African-Americans were not sufficiently inspired and organized and motivated to turn out. So you had a drop in African-American vote. That counts for a lot of that failure there. And then in Michigan, it does seem like there was switching. And I think that people have to go more deeply in Michigan. Michigan was the biggest surprise in the primary season, where they thought the polls were off. So clearly something was going on there that was not spoken to. And there were a number of white defections from people who had voted for Democrats in the past, switching over to Trump in Michigan. So it's a little bit different in each area. So just enough things went wrong so that they could slide in through that sliver of a window that actually was created. Well, I've read some other political commentators, and it seems like perhaps they're not really agreeing with you. Like, this is named Nate Silver at the New York Times. Nate Cohn. Yeah, he, well, before the election, he was definitely predicting a landslide for Hillary Clinton. And then it seemed like after the election, now he's taken up this new theme, which is that there are more white voters. And that that was what led to the results of the election. What do you think about his analysis? Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate. He's invested a lot of time, energy, and resources in staking out a position. And then now he's trying, either he tries to like defend that position as the core analysis. And I wrote a piece on our website, Democracy in Color, basically refuting the big picture conclusions he's saying. And I was saying, he's saying there are more white voters than you think. But at the same time, the Pew Research Center has come out saying that this is the, there are more people of color else would have voted than ever possible. So how do you reconcile these two types of things? And so what he's looking at is different particular data sets and all of the data about how people of color vote is rough at best. And so he's picking from that. And then so you look at, he thinks the exit polls undercount the number of white voters that there were, or white working class voters in 2012. But at the same time, as he looks over at the census data. And the census data is good, but census data shows more people saying they voted than actual votes were reported. And so there's problems with that data set as well. So you have to kind of reconcile it all and try to harmonize it all. And he's taking advantage of those discrepancies to say, oh, well, there's more white voters. That's actually not the fundamental conclusion of what actually happened, certainly at the national level. And that Clinton lost a million white voters from what Obama had. Trump only picked up 300,000 of those. The other 700,000 went third party. So it's not like there's this huge infusion. But in some particular places, there was a surge. In Florida, Pennsylvania, a lot more white voters did come out than people expected. And that did account for those particular results. And what about voters of color? I mean, how many voters of color did Barack Obama get? And how many do we think that Hillary Clinton got? So it's both the number and the share. And so the Latino vote was about the same and not actually increased somewhat. But the African-American vote was down by like six percentage points in terms of what the total black turnout was. But equally important was the share. And so Obama got 94% of the black vote. Clinton got 88% of the black vote. And then there's lots of dispute around the Latino numbers, but it certainly seems that Obama had 73% and Clinton got 67. Some people were saying she got more than that, but still there was some level drop off of the share. So Trump was able, and the third parties as well. So there was a fair amount of alienation or lack of enthusiasm that led people to take these other routes. And then just the, it's almost like this, the perfect storm combination, just enough places, just enough things went wrong that he was able to slide through. Do you think that the Democratic Party sort of took for granted that people of color were gonna vote for a Democrat? Well, absolutely. And so when the, and that's just the Democratic Party. It's really the whole progressive movement including the super PACs, the outside allied groups. So when the first $150 million was laid articulator, what the progressive side was gonna do on the independent side, not the campaign, there was $0 allocated for Black voter mobilization. There's a little bit for Black radio and digital, some Latino media, but zero for Black voter mobilization. I just wrote a piece in The Nation on that or Black Voters Invisible, the Democratic Party. And then similarly on the vice presidential pick, I mean that was a political calculation around how would the politics of it play? And so there's a piece in the New York Times article that they wanted to try to appeal to the white male voters in the Midwest and in the border southern states. And that's why they went with Tim King. But that, the only time we have actually won, now in every single national election since 2008 was when there's been a Black person on the ticket. And so they could have gone with Cory Booker, they could have gone with Tom Perez, a number of other people, but they didn't. And so that played a role in terms of the taking for granted or the doing the calculation that the way to win actually was to more heavily invest in that shrinking sector, which is the moderate conservative white swing voter. Okay, well this is a perfect opportunity for us to take a break and we're going to hear from our sponsor, Think Tech Hawaii. It is a perfect opportunity because when we get back, we're going to talk about where do we go from here. So I think some of the things that you've just mentioned, Steve, about how to get the people of color more mobilized to get out and vote and to vote for Democrats will be what we'll be talking about in our next sector. So thank you. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of Lackable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. to discover what is likable about science. We bring on scientists of all ilk, astronomers, physicists, chemists, biologists, ecologists and they talk about their work and more importantly they talk about why you should talk about their work, why you should think about their work, why you should like their work. I help them bring out why their work is understandable, why it's meaningful, why people should care about it, why people should support science. We have a good time, we talk about current events of interest, we talk about historical events sometimes, we dig deep into their research, why they do what the joys and delights and frustrations of their work are and in all we show a real world of science, a real world of likable science. I hope you'll join us every Friday at 2 p.m. Aloha, welcome back to our very interesting discussion about the election in 2016. I mean, yes, and what happened? What did happen? Okay, so that was then and what do we have to do next? We have to look to the future. So, Steve, I'd like to talk to you about where do we go from here? What are we gonna do? I mean, these presidential elections are very expensive and we know the DNC alone spent a billion dollars on advertising and other activities and Donald Trump didn't spend anywhere near that amount. So it sort of looks like, I mean, the investment made wasn't prioritized in the right kind of way and people didn't really have the kind of game plan that they needed to address society as we find it today. So what do you think, Steve? What do we need to do? Yeah, now definitely the money was not spent well in the aggregate and I had a chapter in my book called Invest Wisely and I'm looking at investing in growing markets, which is the communities of color population, investing in effective, improving techniques and there's very little data that the exorbitant amount expanded on television ads is actually effective in this election if it proved nothing else proved that. So we spent over a billion dollars and lost to a guy on Twitter, right? And so you have that reality. So we have to have leadership of the Democratic Party which is going to look at how to spend that money more effectively and that's gonna invest in the communities which are most democratic and fastest growing and so we need to have significant on the ground presence, sinking roots in the communities, partnering with community organizations, faith leaders and they're doing that particularly in the areas that are the growing areas, the swing states and the areas that are gonna be coming into competitiveness, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and even Texas in that we lost this Texas election by about 600,000 votes, there are four million eligible non-voting people of color in Texas and so what are we doing to solve those problems? That's the wave of the future and then I feel like we have to be moving on multiple fronts and that there has to be as much resistance as possible to the bad things that may come and likely will come from this administration but we also have to have more of a longer term plan and program. How do we build building blocks in the local and state level? Look at mayor's races and district attorneys races in Arizona and Georgia and North Carolina and Florida use those as underpinnings to build capacity to turn out voters and then look at the governor's races in those different states. There can be exciting candidates of color running for governor likely in Florida and Georgia and Arizona and can we get behind those in 2018 and get behind those candidacies and that can all provide the underpinnings for them being able to contest and take back the White House and Congress in 2020 so those are kind of the steps we have to move along the way and we look at the policy agenda is that are we gonna actually put forward a compelling policy agenda which more targets Wall Street and the 1% around being able to move money to have like a new GI bill that can hopefully peel back some of the white working class vote in those key states that we did lose? Well I mean some people say that part of the fault of what happened was Barack Obama's that he ignored the white working class voters. What do you think about that? Well it's so funny because people keep saying that and they skip over the reality that Trump won the white non-working class voters and so what's the analysis of that and what's their economic pain that wasn't actually being spoken to? So people don't appreciate the centrality and the pervasiveness of racism in our society and it's infused in the fabric of the country and the culture and it influences that no Democrat for a president has won the white vote since LBJ signed the Immigration Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And so we have to come to terms with the fact that there is a ceiling in the context of this country's racial history around what is even possible. You can't just blame Barack Obama for not appealing to this grouping when in fact he provided healthcare to millions of people within that grouping, right? So that's an unfounded and inaccurate analysis. Well if you know the threat to change Medicare is followed through, the Republicans might find that they've lost a lot of middle class white voters. Well let's go to Florida just for a minute. You know I kept reading that and hearing that Hillary Clinton had like such a terrific on the ground program going in Florida and that Trump had basically nothing going on. So that seems to be a little bit different than what you're saying when you say, well we gotta really get on the ground in Florida's one of those states where we gotta do that. So what was wrong with the program that the DNC and Hillary Clinton did have going on in Florida? So well first of all Florida's always been close and so Bush v. Gore, 537 votes when in fact there were what 5,000 votes thrown out in Palm Beach. So going back to the 2000 race, Obama won Florida, it was a single closest state Obama won in 2012, he won my 74,000 votes. So it's always been close. Hillary actually did improve on Obama's numbers and so you had a combination of some level of defection towards third party voters and then at the bottom line I think people don't appreciate it. People did respond to Trump's appeal which the words were make America great again, a lot of people were hearing make America white again and that people responded to that appeal that in some level of larger numbers then we actually appreciate it. But the Hillary operation actually did hit its numbers but there was actually was even more support came out for Trump. And so that gets back to the point around does the party leadership both reflect the diversity of the Democratic voters, 46% of whom are people of color but also are they experienced in explicitly doing the racial issues and that's really what happens. We don't have the almost all the top organizations were won by whites and very few of them have any experience dealing with things racially explicitly. And so when Trump is putting that right on the table they froze and didn't know what to say. That's one of the interesting things about Hawaii is that there's such multiple racial groups in the history here in this state of really having to think about how do all the different groups fit together and what is the policy and the politics that relate to that. And it's very much on the table whereas the rest of the country doesn't have that comfort and familiarity and in that context they were caught flat footed when there was the kind of appeal that Trump put out. Right, well here of course our Senate is all Democrat. We don't even have one Republican in our Senate so along those lines. Well, let's take a few examples of how you have implemented the ideas that you're talking about of really getting on the ground and getting people of color out to vote. I know that you worked very hard on Barack Obama's campaign and you also worked on Kamala Harris's campaign and Cory Booker. So what did you do? What was your magic formula that was well thought out but and led to success? So the building blocks are to have local community-based organizations and leaders who have credibility in their community and who understand how to organize and then translate that energy and activism into electoral participation, voter registration, voter mobilization. And so that's really the core of this and this is the things we had done when we did the Obama work in O.A. and we worked with Cory Booker. We found the local leaders and the local groups and connected with them who already have pre-existing sets of relationships and we moved resources to them and that's where I think the party has to make this shift. There should be partnerships with all of these different faith-based leaders, community-based leaders who have networks and there should be like an old-fashioned precinct system where you have people taking responsibilities. There's a professor at Berkeley, Lisa Garcia-Badoia, I think she's literally written a book on Latino politics, it's called Latino Politics, and she talks about this concept of the civic web and so I have a piece of describing that on our democracy and color site where you have teams of people who are responsible for working with like 150, 200 people day in and day out, year around. So we need to fund that kind of operation where it exists and then where it doesn't exist, need to create it. So in places like Texas, Texas Organizing Project works in that type of a fashion. Georgia, the New Georgia Project works in that type of fashion doing voter registration, voter mobilization, getting people out to the polls. That's not what the Democratic Party's been about. It's been about running 30-second television ads in the final weeks of the campaign rather than investing in those types of groups and leaders and that's the main strategic shift that we have to make. So you were talking earlier about how all the people in charge of making these kinds of decisions of where we're gonna spend a billion dollars within the DNC and then the other billion and a half that was spent by allied organizations and everything that those decisions on how to spend the money basically were made by people who, you know, aren't, is experienced in dealing with racism and other things like that. So I know that you have an effort going right now with the DNC and could you just tell us about that? Right, so we're participating with different groups and activists around democracy and color campaign, such as at demyersoncolor.org, around trying to push the Democratic Party entities to hire and promote people who are more expert in functioning in a multi-racial society. And so we were very active around pushing around making sure that the House Democrats, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee continued to keep the young Latino Ben Ray Lujan from New Mexico in a leadership position that are displacing him with, you know, somebody who could appeal to the way working class men. And then so we've had number of discussions around the Senate side and then we're gonna do a forum with the candidates for Democratic, the DNC chair to really hear from all of them. We're gonna try to broadcast this nationally, probably do it on Facebook live, partner with different organizations. We're talking like Daily Coast site around partnering up around this so that the grassroots can participate in engaging with the people who want to be leadership of the party and ask them what is their plan? Are they gonna be mainly about television ads and targeting the swing voter or are they gonna move resources, build capacity in the community, promote pushing for an inspiring agenda which will get people activated and mobilized and try to get whoever is elected chair committed to that agenda. And so that forum will be in mid-January and so that's how we'll continue to try to help restructure the party and how to rebuild out of the ashes of this election. Well, thank you very much, Steve. Mahalo Nui Loa, that was really a great analysis of the 2016 election. And I'm especially pleased to hear some of your ideas for going forward which are very much needed. And I'll be watching very closely to see what happens at the DNC and who gets elected. I hope we can also include some younger people in the lineup. Okay, thank you very much everybody. This was an incredibly interesting interview and Loa from Think Tech Hawaii.