The morning after the election, James Zogby — a stalwart member of the Democratic National Committee for more than three decades — called Rolling Stone to unload. Zogby had been one of the Democratic Party’s few, openly dissenting voices during the campaign. He spoke at length with Rolling Stone about how President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza was demobilizing key components of the Obama coalition that Kamala Harris needed to win.
Zogby is determined to see Democrats learn from the myriad mistakes that defined the 2024 loss to Donald Trump. And he wants accountability for a consulting class he believes did the party dirty — by stripping the Harris campaign of necessary boldness, and by undermining her ability to connect with core Democratic constituencies and convince voters she could improve their lives.
The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s on your mind this morning after?
I’m so upset with these people [top Democrats and consultants] — because they blame the people that they let down. “It’s white people.” “It’s young African-American males.” If you don’t have a message to offer people, don’t blame them for you letting them down!
Was a different outcome possible?
They started this march towards self-destruction a year-and-a half ago, when they forced us to get rid of Iowa and New Hampshire, and to keep the coast clear for Biden so there wouldn’t be any interruption.
Candidates that should have been in the mix couldn’t get in, because it was going to start in South Carolina, the state that Biden had a lock on. I’ve been doing Iowa and New Hampshire since the ‘80s, and found that they were just brilliant places for candidates to test and see: How would they deal with questions, up close and personal with folks?
And then as we became increasingly aware that Biden wasn’t up for it [after the first debate], I tried raising the issue that he ought to withdraw, and we ought to have a mini primary. They didn’t like that at all. I was a “turncoat.”
The consultants certainly didn’t like the idea, because for them, it was: “Oh my God, nobody else can do this. We’re running against Donald Trump, and Biden has working-class roots; he’s Joey from Scranton.” They were determined. I don’t think it was Joe Biden’s ego as much as it was this sense of being risk averse. He beat Trump once. He could do it again.
How would a mini-primary have worked?
We could have shown off our bench: a Cory Booker, a Kristen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro. It would have given Democrats a whole new life. Give people a chance to be a part of a process, which would have been exciting. Take that month between the Republican convention and our convention — stage town halls, debates, have campaigning in different states. People would have felt an ownership for the decision, and Harris would have entered the general having conquered all.
When Biden withdrew at the very last minute, we couldn’t show what she was made of — instead of having it literally thrust upon her. There was no time for her to be introduced to voters.
What was the downside of that to your view?
It became like a celebrity campaign — like Obama’s campaign at the end of the process, when he was getting audiences of crowds of like 50,000 people. But who met Kamala Harris? Which leaders could go back to their constituents and say, “I talked with her. She really does understand us.” The absence of that kind of personal interaction meant she was an unknown commodity. Which opened the door for the Trump people to define her.
The campaign seemed to keep her at a remove from media and even average voters.
The consultants didn’t want to have her sit down with groups of 40 or 50 people — they were concerned about that. And so the messaging was macro messaging. There was no sense of how would she deal with [specific issues].
And then this whole thing about making the white-working class the enemy — they’re racist, they’re garbage. We wrote them off! And I don’t know who decided that bringing Liz Cheney around was going to actually bring people in. That ended up losing us some support.
Your ire for the consultant class is palpable.
The consultants don’t care. They made a bundle. They do all this advertising — social media, direct mail, and TV spots. They get kickbacks on the ads that they place. And voters have a sense of detachment. They’re watching a drama play out in which they have no personal part. They become a commodity. They’re not the customer — they’re the commodity to be sold.
That sense of detachment aligned with a zeitgeist about Washington not getting it.
Voters already were already feeling like, “I’ve lost control of culture that’s changing. I’ve lost control of the economy that’s changing. I’ve lost control of politics.” And then in the middle of that, Donald Trump comes along and says, “I hear your pain. I’m with you, and I’ll be your voice.”
That direct appeal made sense in a way that the Democrats not speaking directly to them didn’t. When [Republicans] can say, “We’ve become the party of the working class and Democrats are the party of elites,” we should take a hard, a long, hard look at ourselves.
How did we get to this point where the Democratic Party — that was the party of the working class, that promised a better economic future for people, that promised the dream of the middle class, that said we will be the helping hand to lift you up when you’re down — how did we lose that for a whole swath of voters?
And then turn around and blame them for not voting for our candidate, when, in fact, we never went to them in that personal, direct way.
Trump put cultural issues front and center.
How did we allow Republicans to define the turf using these scary little campaign ideas, of trans bathrooms and illegal immigrants? And why did we buy into that? They dug the hole — and we got in the hole! Instead of dodging that and saying, “Yes, of course, we care about these issues. But our fundamental concern is for you — for all voters.”
I said back in 2014 we can both message around cultural issues that we care about, but at the same time, we’ve got to go back to our roots of speaking for the working class. Speaking for these white ethnic voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. I grew up in those areas of Pennsylvania and in upstate New York that were solid Democrat — and now are solid Republican.
Yes, racism is a part of it. But it’s racism that is masking other issues: of feeling left out, and left behind. Of feeling abandoned by the powers that be. And we create an open field for a tyrant like Donald Trump to come along and say, “I hear you. They don’t.”
So having Bruce Springsteen open up a rally for you doesn’t fix that?
This whole thing of celebrity politics — where instead of doing stuff with people who mattered and had constituencies, we were doing stuff with musicians, with entertainers, and with Hollywood stars. It plays into that whole elite, celebrity mindset. That that’s who we are, and that’s who we appeal to. The folks who think it’s a good idea are out of touch with where average voters are.
I wonder if the Liz Cheney stuff doesn’t play right into that. The Democratic Party for much of my adult life defined itself in opposition to the Cheney brand. But Harris spent weeks trying to bring it on board. As though that’s the end-all-be-all: Look we got our enemy to agree with us.
The definition of the election for Democrats became: Are you afraid of Donald Trump? And the definition should have been: Do you want a better future for your families, for your children? We let Donald Trump pick up our issues. He has no intention of doing anything about them.
But people remember the Cheneys. There aren’t moderate Republicans that she was going to win over, because she never was a moderate Republican to begin with. I debated her on CNN a few times. Once we were commenting on the Obama speech in Cairo, and she accused him of being a traitor. Why? Because he criticized torture — which was her father’s thing. At what point does this person become somebody who’s going to win votes for us?
Who came up with the great idea of taking her to places around Pennsylvania?
From the outside, you could see some behind-the-scenes forces cutting away from the organic messages that were really breaking through for the campaign. “We’re not going back” became some mish-mash about going forward. They dropped Tim Walz’ attack line about MAGA being “weird” — which had them on the defensive.
It’s consultants saying, ‘Don’t say this. Do say that. You gotta watch out for this. Be careful about that.’ Meanwhile, Donald Trump, unscripted as can be — crazy, very probably crazy — but unscripted, comes off better. Because to his crowd, they listen to him and say, “He speaks his mind.” We need more candidates who speak their mind and have a connection with real working-class voters and care about them and don’t feel detached from them.
Maybe it starts with not calling them “non-college-educated whites,” because that by itself becomes descriptive of an entire group of people, and indicates how out of touch we are with them. Nobody’s got a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a non-college-educated white.” And yet that’s how we talked about them, like they’re deplorable, like they’re racist, like they’re ignorant. Like they’re garbage.
You’re saying that polling classification is prejudicial, just in the description?
It absolutely is. And we’ve told them. We said: “If you go to these communities in Pennsylvania, you can call them ‘working class,’ that’s fine.” But they [the consultants] don’t like to use “working class” — because it smacks of Marxism. I’d say, call them Polish Americans, or call them Hungarian Americans, or call them Irish Americans — call them what they call themselves. And let them know you are speaking to them directly, and care about them directly, which is what we don’t do.
There was a period — it was around the time that they were going around with Liz Cheney — where it seemed like “consultant brain” had totally taken over. You could see the paint-by-numbers in the heads of everyone speaking for the campaign. Like “we need to get our numbers up with fill-in-the-blank.” Even Obama was going out and talking about reaching out to “black men.” They even had Walz go out to some garden store in Pennsylvania, saying something like, “We’ve got to make sure they don’t run up the score out here in the exurbs” — as opposed to making a genuine outreach.
Steve Kornacki can speak that way. Not the guy who was going to be vice president — who actually could be a deeply genuine person. But that part was never appreciated. Him hugging his son, who had a disability, on stage and showing himself to be a real family person. Where was the outreach to parents of children with disabilities? That should have been something that would cross over ethnic, racial, party lines.
And I have to keep coming back to my own community. How was J.D. Vance the first one to go say, I’m here in Michigan, the home of Arab Americans, and we want your vote, and I promise you. Donald Trump wants peace. He had nothing to offer but a hollow promise of peace, and yet people were enthralled with the fact that he spoke to them. And he did it before a non-Arab audience, which was important. There was a sense of a genuineness to it, as opposed to I’m doing this just because I’m talking to you guys.
Harris finally did make a speech of the kind you had been calling for.
It was four days out — and by then, Vance had done it a number of times. Trump had personally gone to the Muslim community and to a Lebanese restaurant. And it was like, ‘Okay, he cares; she doesn’t.’ That was unfair. I don’t think he has anything to offer Arabs, and certainly not Muslims. But they ended up buying it because he gave them respect, and they felt she didn’t.
And who’s going to hold the consultants accountable for it? Instead, what they’re saying is the Arab voters didn’t turn out. Of course they didn’t turn out — because you did nothing to encourage them to turn out. I could say the same with other constituent groups as well.
Harris seemed hamstrung by her inability to deal with two “third rails.” One was Gaza. We’ve talked about that at length. But the other one was Biden. It seemed like there was some sort of private agreement with Biden — that she couldn’t mention a critical word.
I don’t know where that came from, whether there was a deal, as you suggest, or whether it was considered bad form. I do know that it took a toll.
It took Hubert Humphrey ‘til the end of September to make the break with LBJ — and it was too late. She never made the break with Joe Biden, and it was always too late. It should have been done early on. She had to translate her compassion, which was clear, into a policy that was compassionate and showed herself to actually want to do something about it. When she didn’t do it, it lost support.
We saw it in polling with Arab Americans, with young blacks, with young Asians, young Latinos, young people of color, and progressives. Progressives needed outreach from her more directly. Yet there was always a skittishness — that they would be more inclined to go around with Liz Cheney than with Nina Turner.
What is your sense of what Democrats need to do to recover?
All the things I have raised with the party — about accountability and transparency and democratic decision-making, and then the consultants and the money they rake in, and the lack of accountability on their performance — it all comes to a head.
There needs to be an evaluation of, what does it mean to be a Democrat? What does it mean to be a member of the party — and do we actually even have members, other than donors?
More important, there has to be accountability. I would do what governments should do. We never had a commission of inquiry after our humiliating defeat in Iraq. We never sat down and said, how did we get into this? Why did we get into it? Whose idea was torture?
The idea of “We’ll look forward, not backward” is nonsense. Same here: How did we get this mess? How did things fall apart for us? How did we lose the white-working class? How did we lose men? How did we lose Latino voters? And what are the fundamental differences between Puerto Rican Americans, and Mexican American, and now Venezuelans, and Guatemalans, and Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans.
How do we understand these communities and what their needs are? We need to sit and talk with them. We need to have — not focus groups — but town halls that enable people to voice their concerns.
And we need to listen to them!
