Eric Adelstein
Subject: Harris almost won
Bio: Partner at AL Media, worked on Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics and politics.
Today’s topic is Harris Almost Won.
Our speaker is Eric Adelstein who is a partner at AL Media. Eric and his firm worked on the Harris Campaign as part of its media team. I want to hear firsthand about what the challenges were of running a 100-day presidential campaign with a $1.5 billion budget. What were the headwinds that Harris faced? What were the lessons learned? And what does Trump's victory mean for running future presidential campaigns?
Eric and I grew up down the street from each other in Glencoe Illinois and our friendship continues to this day.
Eric, please begin with your opening six-minute remarks.
Eric Adelstein:
Well first, Larry, let’s stipulate that you and I are no longer in sixth grade social studies class at North School in Glencoe, Illinois. One of the casualties of presidential races is this rush to instant analysis. Everyone wants a grand theory that distills the decisions of 150 million diverse Americans into one factor, one issue, one deciding moment. Spoiler alert, it does not work that way. They are always multifactorial. Yet, in this instant analysis all the pundits in the last two weeks have told us this is the one reason, and the 10 that have been listed have been inflation, the economy, immigration, the desire for change, anti-incumbency, race and gender, Democrats being out of step and elitist to many Americans, Biden's approval rating, 70% of the country believing that the US is going in the wrong direction, that things were better in a Trump presidency, and the educational attainment divide.
And I kid you not, I have seen different analysis since the election that has focused on one of these 10 and said, that is the single reason Trump won, and Harris lost. The answer is it is all the above. And yet that is not enough. They are all relevant and important, but what happened does not explain the why. No governing party in any democracy where 3/4s of the country disapprove of the direction is going to win. There are just laws of gravity in politics, and they have played out post-COVID this way in England, Germany and France, and now in the US where the incumbent party has lost the last three US presidential elections.
And yet, when all said and done, Harris will come within 1.4% of pulling this thing off. So, despite all the talk of the Trump mandate and the decisive win, it is hardly a Reaganesque 500 plus electoral vote blowout.
Why do people feel so negative about the country? Part of it is for the last 50 years, the path to political offices is to criticize government that whoever is in office must be tossed out.
Consider this from 1915 to 2024. The average inflation rate in the United States was 3.3% in the fall of 2024, inflation is 2.4%. From 1948 to 2015, the average unemployment rate was 5.8%. In the fall of 2024, it is 4.1%. And the violent crime rate, well, it rose under Trump and fell under Biden.
By historical standards, the country's not in terrible shape. So why do people feel so negative? To me, the most under-reported explanation is the conservative media ecosystem. The media narrative in this country is not set by the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC or CNN. It is set by Fox News, conservative radio, Newsmax, Sinclair Broadcasting, iHeartmedia, Elon Musk’s X, and dozens of podcasts. Joe Rogan has 14 million Spotify subscribers. The average audience for a primetime segment on CNN is under 1 million.
Rogan’s interview with Trump, was viewed 40 million times on YouTube, Harris's interview on the View on ABC less than 3 million views. So, should she have gone on Rogan? Sure, but that misses the point. One three-hour segment does not undo three years of 24/7 coverage of a specific point of view.
There are 393 local TV stations in the United States. Sinclair Broadcasting owns 200 of those and has a very conservative scripts on national stories and insists their anchors read them verbatim. If you receive your information through these mediums, you will think this country is in terrible shape. You would be told over and over that Democrats are evil, treasonous, anti-American communists who have destroyed the economy, led to American cities being overrun with crime and international gangs, and that Trump has been the victim of a vicious, illegal, political persecution campaign. Two thirds of Americans receive most of their news from these sources.
None of this is to suggest that inflation is not real or that wage inequality isn't real, or that Democrats have alienated certain classes of Americans or that Biden shouldn't have run and dropped out a year ago. Or that using tax dollars for transgender surgeries of inmates may be not the best idea in a national campaign. It is to say you cannot analyze the what of a campaign outcome with also partly understanding the why.
So, what did I learn from the 2024 election? I don't mean to be flippant, but if you're going to be a convicted felon with a history of sexually assaulting women who incited a mob to violently prevent the peaceful transfer of power, you praise Hitler and you call for the termination of the Constitution and you still want to be elected president to keep your butt out of prison, you better have the largest propaganda machine in the history of the world working on your behalf. Not to mention state sponsored disinformation campaigns from America's sworn enemies.
And with that, I will open it up.
Larry Bernstein:
Joe McGinniss wrote a classic political campaign book in 1968 called The Selling of the President. You recommended the book to me, and you told me that you assign it to all your new employees. The book is about the 1968 Presidential Campaign of Nixon vs. Humphrey from Nixon’s campaign’s perspective. In the book, McGinniss explains that they did not discuss much in the way of policies in the campaign. Nixon ran on crime, inflation, and to win the working-class hard hats. They wanted to saddle Vice President Humphrey with LBJ’s unpopular policies.
Nixon’s plan was to run out the clock and only meet with his voters in large, staged events. Does this sound familiar.
Eric Adelstein:
I mean, that is the playbook. They have been running that playbook since 1968. If you look at Nixonland, Rick Perlstein’s book, which is another great one you would love Larry. It lays out this entire strategy as well that is mentioned in the McGinness book.
I think that she ran a great campaign to be candid, given what she had 104 days. We were on the ad team, and I could give you 10 things we could have done different. I'm not sure it changes the outcome. She rose to the occasion and was a tremendous candidate, but she had this headwind, you go back to July in that debate and then the assassination attempt on Trump.
I mean, forget about it. This election is done. The fact that she made it competitive is an amazing accomplishment. The Republicans have run these incredibly effective national campaigns where they make it about one narrative. And I am just being factual on the media ecosystem, which started in the late sixties and early seventies. The Louis Powell memo to the Chamber of Commerce, we got to fight back against the liberals on the campuses against the mainstream media. And they have masterfully created this incredible echo chamber now digital where they speak with one voice across all these platforms.
To your McGinniss question, it is the old joke that Adlei Stevenson, when he ran for president, someone said, well, you are the thinking man's candidate. And he said, yeah, but I need a majority. And that's telling in a lot of ways, right? Because it is arrogant and talking down to a lot of Americans.
What Democrats get wrong is people do not make high leverage decisions on issues or on rationality. We make decisions based on emotion. I have sat through focus groups the last 10 years listening to people talk about Donald Trump and you get everything from he is a clown, but he gives his finger to the system. He does not speak like a politician. He is a strong guy. None of what you hear is his stance on X.
A little bit of he's going to be better on the economy, but you never hear an issue stance on Trump. When you do regression analysis on traits in polling the one thing that indexes highest for any office is the trait of leadership. And that is just a huge advantage that a strong man is going to have in this society against a woman, that is just factual.
Larry Bernstein:
I thought Harris ran a nice campaign. She won the debate, and she did well during that Fox interview. She put the newscaster in his place. Tell us why you think she was a good candidate.
Eric Adelstein:
She is a real person. She is in private who she is in public. She is exceptionally smart. A district attorney, an attorney general, United States senator, a vice president. If we are going by resume markers, one of the most qualified to be president. She has an empathic side. She has got that fearless way that prosecutors can be. The campaign had to quickly introduce her as more than Joe Biden's vice president.
That is why a lot of ads were about the prosecutor who had taken on transnational gangs. We had to counter that double bind that a woman running for office typically has, which is a man is assumed to be competent and does not need to be likable, for a female candidate must be likable but strong and prove their ability to do the job. And she had a hundred days to do that. The initial advertising had to be telling the backstory of her prosecutorial days and her being from a middle-class family who understands the struggles that people were having with costs.
She ran a masterful campaign and to come within a point and a quarter. Everyone said, the country moved right everywhere. But if you look at the seven battleground states where most of the money was spent, it was much less of a movement.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's just define that. The nation went to the right by six, but the battleground states were much less than that. Wisconsin was one, and Michigan was two, and Pennsylvania was four and Nevada and Arizona were more, but the big movements were in California and New York.
Friends of mine who live in Wisconsin told me that they were just inundated with advertising. If you are going to advertise that much, then a hundred days is a long time. Most people do not engage until the last minute anyway. I would have thought a hundred days was more than sufficient.
Eric Adelstein:
That is enough time to advertise, but the infrastructure of a campaign; she inherited this entire Biden operation and didn't have much choice other than to retrofit it. Planning, organizing, and hiring field folks, it's not just the advertising in these seven battleground states. She ran a billion and a half campaign in a hundred days. How you spend that money, where you spend it, where you spend your time, all those decisions.
Larry Bernstein:
I thought that Trump was much more flatfooted than she was initially. Trump was on its heels for a month. He thought he was still running against Biden.
Eric Adelstein:
Trump was on his heels. The Trump campaign was running at a high level at that point. The narrative was, can the Trump campaign get the candidate back on track? And he could not get out of his own way.
70% of the country thinks the country's going the wrong direction. This guy should have won a blowout like a normal Republican candidate in this situation, but he could not get out his own way. Their campaign was ready for Harris to get in the race.
Larry Bernstein:
How was the Trump campaign ready for Harris?
Eric Adelstein:
Well, they had the research. They knew her vulnerabilities. They had tested them, and they went up on the air in five of the seven battleground states as soon as she became the candidate with negative ads. Harris’s campaign recovered quickly and was able to respond with the prosecutor stuff.
Trump was flatfooted, and he thought, Biden’s this gift. How dare you take it away.
If you looked at the media narrative that this was a coup that Biden was forced out and it was undemocratic.
Larry Bernstein:
Trump outperformed all the Republicans running for senate in the battleground states. People say that Trump is such a bad candidate, but is that true? Or do you think the Republican Senate performance can be explained by 2-3 points benefit for being an incumbent senator?
Eric Adelstein:
Trump is such the anti-establishment figure. He is saying it's rigged against you. He's a master at playing to anti-government, anti-elites. And now you are seeing it with these appointments to the cabinet where it's thumbing your nose at the establishment.
Harris was endorsed by all the generals, former Trump officials, the Cheneys, Clintons, Obamas, and the Republican establishment and that is exactly what Trump is running against.
This is a great electoral strategy for Trump, but it is not much for governing because go back to 1980 when Reagan brought in David Stockman, and we are going to slash the federal budget, and they ran into the world.
What scares me about the future is if we keep running these anti-government, everything is wrong in Washington campaigns, which have been the MO since Nixon post-Watergate, everything is corrupt and rigged. And we get lack of trust, we do not believe in government, the media, business, and journalism. How does the country hold together?
Getting back to the senators, many of them were establishment figures. Trump's this anti-establishment figure who is taking on both parties.
AOC the liberal congresswoman from New York did a thought experiment because a lot of people voted in her district for her and for Trump. She put up an Instagram post that said, no judgment. I want to learn why did you vote for me and for Trump? And many of the responses were, you are both anti-establishment. You both stand up to the powers that be. You both say the system's rigged against us. And we like that.
Larry Bernstein:
One of your key points was that the conservative media dominates. Why do the conservatives call it the liberal media? Which is it?
Eric Adelstein:
I could show you the Nielsen ratings. It is classic gaslighting by the right, they created after the Louis Powell memo in 1971 because there was media bias and the universities and that there was no legitimate conservative voice. There is this left-wing bias to everything. But if more than half of the local stations are owned by conservative Sinclair Broadcasting and two thirds of the country are getting most of their news from these sources. ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting. Not so much in the urban areas, not in Chicago, but in smaller markets around the country, they own those TV stations.
Larry Bernstein:
Does anyone watch these stations?
Eric Adelstein:
Oh sure. Older voters get their six o'clock news, 7:00 AM local news. And the people who vote the most are the ones who are watching the most of that local news.
Larry Bernstein:
We didn't see any Republican drift in older voters. The big increases in Republican alignment were among younger men, Black males, Latino males, and Asians. What is happening?
Eric Adelstein:
What is a Latino man? Is it the same as a first-generation Mexican immigrant, as someone who has been in Texas for seven generations? Costa Rica, are those two people the same? There is a gender bias. There is that Latin machismo.
The black male there is that real sense of alienation that what has any party done for me? That voice of anti-establishment that I am going to give my finger to the system resonates. And I think there is a bias in the Black community of male versus female. And there is an element of I do not want my mother, my wife or my sister figure telling me what to do.
We are a firm that has worked for a lot of African American women running for office, some successfully, some not. And African American women are the lowest rung of the caste system in the United States. A black woman has never been elected governor of any state. And yet we were on the verge of electing a black woman President of the United States.
Larry Bernstein:
I think that if the Democrats had picked someone other than Harris 100 days prior to the election that the results would have been similar. How much did it cost her being a black woman? Do you think Whitmer would have won?
Eric Adelstein:
Probably not. I'm saying it was just another obstacle. I think you are right. The Democrats lost this battle by Biden staying in. The only path to a win here would have been Biden not running again and having a real open, vigorous primary where you would have vetted candidates and had a battle tested nominee emerge. Maybe it would have been Harris, maybe it would have been someone else that was the only chance. You end up being the underdogs given the dynamics of where the country was at that time.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think the campaign matters?
Eric Adelstein:
That is a great, great question. It matters less in a presidential race than at any other level of the ballot. When we are doing a Senate, governor, or congressional race, people are low information voters. They are getting their information through advertising. In a presidential race that is covered this deeply, where people are living it every day. I say this as an ad maker, the ads have some impact at the margins, but that the narrative is set. What does matter, is how the candidates conduct themselves in high leverage moments like a debate, like a speech they do daily on the stump. But the campaign is less impactful given how things are covered these days than on the down ballot races.
Larry Bernstein:
In the McGinniss book about the 1968 campaign that I reference earlier, he said that some days that Cronkite would have 60 seconds on the campaign in each broadcast. Compare that with MSNBC or Fox that run 24/7 and everything is analyzed.
Watergate was the longest segment in the history of Cronkite. It was 15 minutes on a single day. Can you imagine Watergate on Fox or MSNBC? It would be chaos.
Eric Adelstein:
Every morning we would get the ad testing report for everything, TV ads, digital, social media. 30 pieces of creative that were tested overnight, because you did not have to just win the day or the news cycle, you had to win the hour. It is exhausting.
Larry Bernstein:
I'm glad you took that week off after the election and went to Mexico. You look fresh.
Eric Adelstein:
Thanks.
Larry Bernstein:
In my recent podcast with Patrick Ruffini on whether presidential polling was flawed, he mentioned that only 1 in 1000 people respond to requests for surveys and that to get a thousand people in your survey, you need to text one million people!
Eric Adelstein:
In the 1970s when Gallup was the dominant pollster doing polling with a combination of landlines and door to door, they had response rates 70 to 80%. They were starting to drop to about 50%, and they said, when we get below 50%, how do we know that the people we are talking to represent the rest? And now we are below 1%? The numbers you just cited.
Larry Bernstein:
They're freaks who fill out the surveys.
Eric Adelstein:
When the phone rings in my mother's house, she thinks a guest is arriving and she goes to answer it. Our generation is like this must be an intruder. I do not want to talk to you. This notion that we are polling the people and their representative of the rest of us is nonsense. Here is the other thing that happens is they do not reach the actual people they need to reach. So, they model them. If I need 10 black males and I only get three, I then extrapolate from those three, ludicrous as a statistical outcome.
Larry Bernstein:
Does the campaign have better polling?
Eric Adelstein:
Nobody knows shit!
I promise you at the higher echelons of the Harris or the Trump campaign nobody knows. It is like a sporting event where you do not know the outcome until it happens.
Larry Bernstein:
What was the best Harris advertisement?
Eric Adelstein:
I am a little biased in that we made probably made a third to a half of the ads. There were a few ads where she talked direct to camera about her life, where she came from, why she was running. When a candidate is talking to you and it is real and it is authentic, our brains fire up. And if you go back to the beginning of political advertising, which McGinniss and Roger Ailes in that book were really students of which was Marshall McLuhan and Tony Schwartz who made the famous Daisy ad for Lyndon Johnson.
Larry Bernstein:
Tony Schwartz wrote a good book too.
Eric Adelstein:
The Responsive Chord which is a bible for advertising. And it is even more true today in the digital age. And what McLuhan would talk about is the medium is the message. Schwartz took that to is you must communicate in the way that the medium interacts with the viewer.
These candidates rushing down hallways, looking at papers or orating from big stages with lots of people around is not how someone wants to be talked to. They want to have a conversation. The best advertising is the most direct and authentic. There were a couple of Harris ads where she did that in a compelling way.
Larry Bernstein:
What were Trump’s best ads?
Eric Adelstein:
Trump never ran a positive ad except for that two-minute he did at the very end. I am not saying that was wrong, he won. That transgender had one good line at the end She is for they/them, he is for you. And that kept coming back in focus groups that people would remember. And I think that did real damage.
Larry Bernstein:
How could you counter that transgender campaign ad?
Eric Adelstein:
It's really hard because it was in her own words in that interview that they played. There are three choices in a situation like that. Number one, you ignore it.
Larry Bernstein:
That is what they did.
Eric Adelstein:
Number two, you go direct to camera like Colin Allred who ran for the Senate in Texas. He said, I do not believe in boys playing girls sports. He took it on directly. The problem with that is the adage in politics when you are defending, you are losing.
The third would be to turn it back on Trump in his own words. I know there is this narrative that abortion did not move people. There were two clips of Trump that when people saw them were incredibly damaging. One where he said, I am responsible for overturning Roe versus Wade, and I am proud that. I did it. And then there was one where Chris Matthews caught him in 2016 where he said, you believe there should be punishment for abortion? And Trump said Yes for the woman. And when you played those two clips, people went from I do not know that Trump's responsible for it. Maybe the judges did this thing. It was like, wait, what?
I would have preferred to have more of Trump's own voice saying this stuff. Would it have changed the outcome? Probably not. But that is how I would have taken on the transgender stuff.
Larry Bernstein:
The Harris campaign ran ads that democracy faced an existential threat. January sixth. Were these ads effective?
Eric Adelstein:
People used to say in a positive way that Obama was a Rorschach's test. You could make him whatever you wanted. Trump is that.
The problem with he is a threat to democracy. The fact that he had been president for four years and people were able to say the country did not fall apart. He did not take away democracy.
Larry Bernstein:
Is Trump a good or bad candidate?
Eric Adelstein:
He is an American phenomenon. Let us give him his due.
This guy has changed America and American politics. He restructured the parties. He has made politicians cower in his presence and he's done it by pure force of personality and his ability to understand the zeitgeist and to divide and spread fear. I think it's an abomination, but it is a true talent.
He has had it his whole life. He knows how to dig the knife in. He knows how to get press and to say the most outrageous things, and you are seeing it with his cabinet appointments.
Larry Bernstein:
How about Trump’s anti-fragility? The guy gets beat up every day, gets up in the morning, and does it again.
Eric Adelstein:
It is remarkable. All the indictments, the investigations, losing the election. And yet he can create his own reality. It is remarkable.
Larry Bernstein:
What did you make of his decision to make French Fries at McDonald's? Why was that successful?
Eric Adelstein:
I don't know that it was.
Larry Bernstein:
Everyone saw it.
Eric Adelstein:
How about driving the garbage truck?
Larry Bernstein:
There was a whole news day cycle for the garbage truck and another for McDonald's.
Eric Adelstein:
He is a brilliant tactician. He can change the subject quicker than anyone. And he got it off the comedian's Puerto Rican jokes.
Larry Bernstein:
Trump never even commented on that.
Eric Adelstein:
The campaign put out a statement that said that comedian does not reflect the views of Trump, but he never said anything.
That is Roy Cohn the never, ever admit you are wrong. Never apologize, never show weakness, attack, attack, attack.
Larry Bernstein:
Direct mail. Did you use it? Is it effective?
Eric Adelstein:
There was a lot of direct mail in the Harris campaign. There is still a lot of direct mail in politics. People have developed a different relationship with the mailbox, because so much of our communication is now electronic. The jury's out on whether it is effective or not. We send way too much mail. In some of these local legislative races, people are getting 30 pieces of mail in one election, and it is please stop. We had a campaign where people were canvassing, and the people at the doors were saying, I am not going to vote for that if they keep sending me mail. You can overdo it, but yes there is an effectiveness.
Where are people's eyeballs? Where is their attention? It is not just to Cronkite watching the 90 seconds to get the summary of what happened that day. You need to hit people on multiple platforms: digital and linear and mail and billboards. There is not one magic bullet.
We did a media consumption study. Despite all the fragmentation, you can still reach about 90% of a target audience in political advertising by just being on YouTube streaming platforms and broadcasting cable television. It is remarkable. You can cobble together your audience.
Larry Bernstein:
As the marketing guy for a presidential campaign, you do not care about the voters who made their decision to vote either for the Democrats or Republicans. Your job is to reach the undecided voters who are likely uninformed. How do you reach these people?
Eric Adelstein:
That guy in a high attention campaign like a presidential, he is probably not voting. They do not want to say they are not voting, but to be undecided at that point. I do not really buy that so much.
To your point, how do you reach that low information voter? That is the holy grail.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you get out the vote?
Eric Adelstein:
There were tens of millions of dollars spent on paid field operations, which means a combination of texting, calling and going door-to-door. In these target states. there are voter files like any huge database that compiles all this information on this voter at this address. I cannot confirm who you voted for, but I know what primaries you voted, how often you voted, and how your zip code performs typically. I know that if I can touch 80% of the doors in this zip code, I am going to get X percent to come out. When you are losing the state by three, it is not going to change that outcome. When it is a tight race of one or two points, it can make the difference.
Larry Bernstein:
That is Wisconsin.
Eric Adelstein:
Yeah.
Larry Bernstein:
Did one campaign do a better job of getting out the vote in Wisconsin?
Eric Adelstein:
Baldwin won there and Harris did not, shows you that there was a highly effective ground game, and there were obviously Democrats and swing voters who voted for Baldwin and Trump.
Wisconsin would have been a much bigger spread without what they had on the ground.
Larry Bernstein:
Demographics are destiny.
White percentage of population is declining. Republicans were a white party. And with this concept the Republicans would be toast after this election.
Now that Latinos, Asians, and black males are joining the Republicans, does that mean the demographics are destiny thesis is dead?
Eric Adelstein:
I agree with you. It was overblown. It was based on one demographic study that said by 2050 the United States would be a minority white country. The problem with that is people do not easily fall into these categories. People identify different ways. There is this tendency to want to be defined to be an American.
James Carville has these great lines. I never walked into a community and said, do you live with people of color? Like whatcha talking about? People do not talk like that. Immigrants have a pride in this country that they do not want to be labeled as I am a Latino male voter.
No, I'm an American voter and my values aren't just based on my culture or where my family came from or necessarily even where I grew up.
But to the premise of your question, we would go into focus groups and show people that clip that by 2050 to white voters America will be a white minority country. Oh my God, Larry, the response was visceral. You want to talk about aversion when you say that to people. That is that fear of the other. Are we going to be that true multicultural democracy in a healthy way or is it going to be torn apart by tribes?
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned James Carville. He was quoted recently as saying that Harris would have benefited from town hall meetings a year ago. And that if she was asked, do you disagree with any of Biden's policies? And if she said I cannot think of anything, then at the next town hall she would refine her message.
You had a hundred days. That was a question everyone knew was going to be asked. You botch it once on the TV show the View, it is fine.
Why couldn't you fix it?
Eric Adelstein:
Well, she tried. At the end of the interview, she knew she had made a mistake and then changed her point to be that she was a very different person. I think she was torn between a loyalty to Biden who made her vice president and a belief that a lot of the policy has been constructive. She was caught between those two worlds. She is still the vice president of this administration. She still represents the status quo.
Larry Bernstein:
What can the Democrats do next time to win?
Eric Adelstein:
The Democratic Party has become the party of the elites. If you go back to ‘92, I ran Illinois, which had not voted for a Democratic President since 1964, and Clinton won that election by adopting a lot of Republican economic policy.
And now you have seen this flip where we have become the party of educated college graduates and wealthy people. We must get back to talking to the working class. A lot of the disenchantment and the wealth inequality has been a function of Republican policy: free trade agreements, cutting regulation, getting rid of social programs. Democrats have endorsed because they made this deal with the devil.
Globalization has made the world more equal and the west less so. Trump's been able to take advantage of that with working class and these trade agreements frankly were based on Republican policy that we have adopted.
What do Democrats have to do? One thing is NOT to be outraged by everything Trump does but begin to develop a governing agenda. People are tired of the fighting. They just want people to get stuff done.
Trump is going to sour very quickly. It reflects the times we live in. You take office in this country immediately you are going to go down.
Democrats cannot just be anti-Trump. They must have a governing agenda.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Eric for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast the topic was Cutting Entitlements.
Our speaker was Douglas Holtz-Eakin who is the President of the American Action Forum and the former Director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Douglas discussed the implications of the upcoming surge in entitlement spending and the resulting crowding out of discretionary and defense spending. Economics is about making choices. We cannot have it all. We must choose between more money for seniors or alternatively spending on basic research, education, infrastructure, and armaments.
I would now like to make a plug for our next podcast with Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton who will speak on what to expect with the next administration’s foreign policy.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Cutting Entitlements, here.
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