Zogby had been one of the Democratic Partys few, openly dissenting voices during the campaign.
Zogby is determined to seeDemocratslearn from the myriad mistakes that defined the 2024 loss toDonald Trump.
The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally in Wisconsin.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Whats on your mind this morning after?
Its young African American males.
If you dont have a message to offer people, dont blame them for you letting them down!
Was a different outcome possible?
Were running against Donald Trump, and Biden has working-class roots; hes Joey from Scranton.
I dont think it was Joe Bidens 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?
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.
There was no time for her to be introduced to voters.
What was the downside of that to your view?
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.
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 theyre racist, theyre garbage.
We wrote them off!
And I dont know who decided that bringingLiz Cheneyaround was going to actually bring people in.
That ended up losing us some support.
Your ire for the consultant class is palpable.
The consultants dont 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.
Theyre watching a drama play out in which they have no personal part.
They become a commodity.
Theyre not the customer theyre the commodity to be sold.
That sense of detachment aligned with a zeitgeist about Washington not getting it.
Voters already were already feeling like, Ive lost control of culture thats changing.
Ive lost control of the economy thats changing.
Ive lost control of politics.
And then in the middle of that, Donald Trump comes along and says, I hear your pain.
Im with you, and Ill be your voice.
That direct appeal made sense in a way that the Democrats not speaking directly to them didnt.
Trump put cultural issues front and center.
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.
Speaking for these white ethnic voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Yes, racism is a part of it.
But its racism that is masking other issues: of feeling left out, and left behind.
Of feeling abandoned by the powers that be.
So having Bruce Springsteen open up a rally for you doesnt fix that?
It plays into that whole elite, celebrity mindset.
That thats who we are, and thats who we appeal to.
The folks who think its a good idea are out of touch with where average voters are.
I wonder if the Liz Cheney stuff doesnt 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 thats 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?
We let Donald Trump pick up our issues.
He has no intention of doing anything about them.
But people remember the Cheneys.
I debated her on CNN a few times.
Once we were commenting on the Obama speech in Cairo, and sheaccused himof being a traitor.
Because he criticized torture which was her fathers thing.
At what point does this person become somebody whos going to win votes for us?
Who came up with the great idea of taking her to places around Pennsylvania?
Were not going back became some mishmash about going forward.
They dropped Tim Walzs attack line about MAGA being weird whichhad them on the defensive.
Its consultants saying, Dont say this.
You gotta watch out for this.
Be careful about that.
Because to his crowd, they listen to him and say, He speaks his mind.
Nobodys got a bumper sticker that says, Im a non-college-educated white.
Youre saying that polling classification is prejudicial, just in the description?
And weve told them.
But they [the consultants] dont like to use working class because it smacks of Marxism.
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.
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.
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.
And he did it before a non-Arab audience, which was important.
Harris finally didmake a speechof 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, OK, he cares; she doesnt.
I dont 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 didnt.
And whos going to hold the consultants accountable for it?
Instead, what theyre saying is the Arab voters didnt turn out.
Of course they didnt 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.
Weve 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 couldnt mention a critical word.
I do know that it took a toll.
She never made the break with Joe Biden, and it was always too late.
It should have been done early on.
When she didnt do it, it lost support.
Progressives needed outreach from her more directly.
What is your sense of what Democrats need to do to recover?
There needs to be an evaluation of, what does it mean to be a Democrat?
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?
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!
