In the 1940s, legendary New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s weekly radio broadcast was called “Talk to the People.” His successor 80 years later, Zohran Mamdani, launched a talk show with the same title this year. It’s a great idea, but why do so few politicians do it? The title, not the radio show.
It’s election season, so San Franciscans have been voting early, in person or by mail. We’ll end up with a new governor, a new congressional representative, other office holders, and answers to a slew of ballot measures ranging from proper to preposterous. Locally, we’ll see what a relatively happy voter wants, as opposed to the angry/despondent San Francisco voter of recent years.
Back in January, the CityBeat poll from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and EMC Research offered the latest proof that the city had left the doom loop behind. From a low of 17 percent in 2023 to 64 percent in January 2026, San Franciscans said the city is moving in the right direction. Voters gave higher overall rankings to a range of issues about life in the city, from crime to the economy to Muni service.
Surveys are one way to collect the information needed to understand our democracy. Another is actually talking directly to people. Sarah Longwell, the founder of The Bulwark, has made it her mission to hear directly from voters about their concerns. After Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign, the conservative Longwell teamed up with other non-Trumpy Republicans to see if they could find an opponent to oppose him. So she began holding focus groups with voters to find out what they thought about Trump. She has continued to do that ever since (she even hosts a Bulwark podcast called “The Focus Group,” and she shares a lot of what she learned in her recent book How to Eat an Elephant). She says she starts off each focus group not trying to lead people anywhere, but just asking what they think about how things are going. What she has learned over the years is eye-opening, offering reasons for both hope and fear among people who want a return to a more “normal” politics.
Her focus group participants sometimes are surprisingly ignorant about the news or they might be willfully misinformed about the facts. But they’re the voters. As Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the army you have.” Their votes count as much as those of voters addicted to NPR and volunteering at soup kitchens.
“You won’t change their minds with confrontations or condemnations,” Longwell wrote. ”You have to persuade some of them. That’s the only way to win elections.”
”You have to persuade some of them. That’s the only way to win elections.”
That’s the same advice, by the way, given by someone on the Democratic side of the ledger. As I wrote here in July, Ben Wikler, the former head of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, is credited with bringing that party back from the dead. He did it by having his team go out and talk with voters about what is important to them. He recently told a San Francisco audience, “Start by realizing you know nothing about what’s going on in their life.” He said the voter might be dealing with a dying loved one, or they’re focused on writing a novel, or whatever; it isn’t politics. They’re trying to figure out if a candidate understands them, is on their side, and can be trusted once in office. And to convince them, you have to find out what they care about.
You know where else that advice works, besides direct political work? De-escalation of extremists.
In a 2020 interview with former white supremacist Christian Picciolini, he told me that what has made him successful in talking an estimated 300-plus other skinheads/Nazis/assorted-white-supremacists into leaving that lifestyle wasn’t by arguing with them. “All I’m doing is guiding people to a more positive identity, community, and purpose and ways to fix their potholes. We can all do that. In my book, I actually list the seven steps of what it takes to disengage somebody, and none of them require any knowledge of the ideology. In fact, don’t talk about the ideology. Don’t ever debate. I don’t even tell people that they’re wrong. It starts out with listening. I listen for their potholes, and sometimes they don’t even know they’re telling me. Sometimes words can’t even say it, and I have to just infer it. But ultimately, it’s about figuring out what the motivations are that led somebody there and trying to repair that and offering a positive sense of identity, community purpose, something that we all search for.”
One person I wish I could have interviewed is Franz von Papen. He was the German statesman who has gone down in history as having fatally underestimated the Nazi’s penchant for perfidy and for having worked to bring Adolf Hitler into the chancellorship, thinking he could keep him from going off the deep end. That in itself is a fascinating story, but one for another time. What is appropriate here is how, in his 1952 memoirs, he recounts the campaign he led for his non-Nazi party in the election held after Hitler assumed power.
At that time, he of course had no idea what Hitler’s rule would ultimately devolve to, but he vehemently opposed its violence, hate-mongering, and anti-clericalism, and he hoped to do what he could to hinder the Nazi’s worst tendencies. So what did he do? Did he go out and scrap for every vote, addressing his party to the gut issues driving the Germans, who were exhausted and pauperized by years of postwar economic collapse?
No, he waged a high-minded campaign with an election manifesto that was way over people’s heads. Part of his stump speeches went thus: “Our task is to combat those who, in the name of truth and freedom, have in recent years destroyed the religious conception of human relationships and brought our society to the verge of chaos. The daily interplay of political events cannot be divorced from the overriding problems of our existence. In previous ages, human society was organized within a framework of belief in God and the hereafter. We have had to watch a process of progressive secularization. …. This mechanization of the mind, and this travesty of real truth and freedom can only be countered by a spiritual regeneration.” And on and on. It’s not exactly the stuff that would make the audience break into chants of the German equivalent of “USA! USA!”
There were good reasons for him formulating his pitch that way, and it’s a worthy speech to have given to church or academic groups. Publish it as an article in an obscure political journal. But it’s not what you “take to the streets” when the middle class has been reduced to poverty and the country is groaning under unrelenting international pressure.
Remember James Carville and his sign in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign headquarters, “The economy, stupid”? That kept the candidate focused on the issues that Americans were worried about in their everyday lives. They weren’t electing someone to save their souls, change their minds, or wage a revolution against the patriarchy. They were electing someone they could trust to understand their problems and otherwise get out of their way.
This year, the Democrats are likely to win a lot of races. Some Democrats will tell themselves they won because people stood up for democracy or desired a selection from the Democratic menu of options. Eh, not really. They won because Trump’s blunders in office, domestically and overseas, have hit people’s pocketbooks; the Democrats will win by not being Republicans.
It’s still the economy, stupid.
