The Great Reshuffling - Populist Capture

Gabe Fleisher, "Bernie-Trump voters are back: Are they poised to play an undetected role in the election?"

In 2016, Donald Trump’s transition team was led by Chris Christie, who had been the first Republican governor to endorse his campaign. At the time, the appointment was seen as an olive branch to the Republican establishment (which Christie was then a major cog of, even if he isn’t really now).

The partnership didn’t last long: soon after Trump was elected, Christie was unceremoniously dumped by Jared Kushner, a move that was more personal than ideological (Christie had prosecuted Kushner’s father), although it nevertheless ushered in a wave of appointees detached from Republican Party orthodoxy, more in Kushner’s mold than Christie’s.

By the time Trump took office, his administration was essentially a Frankensteined power-sharing agreement between several different factions: moderate business types (Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Steve Mnuchin); the Republican professional class (Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway); conservative evangelicals (Mike Pence); military hawks (James Mattis, John Kelly); and populist nationalists (Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller).

Flash forward eight years, and Trump announced the honorary co-chairs of his 2024 transition team on Tuesday: Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr., both onetime Democratic presidential candidates. If his 2016 transition lead was meant as a signal to the GOP establishment, this new iteration should be seen as outreach to a very different — and rarely discussed — demographic: the Bernie-Trump voter.

Remember them, from 2016 — the outsider, “burn it all down” populists who voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and then Trump in the general election? We don’t talk much about these voters now, but in 2016, they were all the rage (and often literally raging). Post-election studies suggested their votes may even have been decisive for Trump: data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study showed that 12% of Sanders’ primary voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016 — including critical segments in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that were more than enough to swing the election.

Neither Kennedy nor Gabbard were part of this crossover demographic in 2016; their transformations have taken place over a longer gestation period. Further complicating matters, Kennedy has claimed that he did not endorse Sanders’ 2016 campaign, even though the podcast that he co-hosted at the time did, in a statement invoking Kennedy’s name that cited Hillary Clinton’s “close relationship with Corporate America” and support for “virtually every American military invasion, including Iraq.” (Thus, the age-old question: if a podcast endorses a political candidate, have its hosts not also?) Kennedy also interviewed Sanders on the podcast at around the same time, lavishing praise on the Vermonter.

Gabbard, on the other hand, very publicly and pointedly endorsed Sanders in ’16, resigning her post as DNC vice chair to do so. “There is a clear contrast between our two candidates with regard to my strong belief that we must end the interventionist, regime change policies that have cost us so much,” Gabbard said on “Meet the Press,” embracing Sanders.

There are a few core principles that define Bernie-Trump voters as a group, many of which can be heard from Kennedy and Gabbard: Skepticism of institutions. Skepticism of Big Business. Opposition to foreign military intervention. Distrust of the “establishment.” Use of words like “Uniparty.” It isn’t hard to understand why figures who were drawn to Sanders for those reasons might drift to Trump today.

In many ways, the appointment of Kennedy and Gabbard to Trump’s transition effort is the fulfillment of Steve Bannon’s long-held dream of a populist Republican Party that united anti-establishment voices on both sides of the aisle. Bannon, a disaffected Democrat himself,1 cultivated both Kennedy and Gabbard during his time in Trump’s inner circle, bringing both in for Trump Tower meetings during the transition. “He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves her,” a source familiar with Bannon’s thinking told The Hill in 2016. “Wants to work with her on everything.” (She was reportedly considered for posts including UN ambassador and Secretary of State or Defense; all three posts went to more “globalist,” not populist, voices.)

Bannon has also praised Sanders in the past (“I like Bernie,” he told Bill Maher in 2020) — and explicitly targeted his voters. “Either don’t vote or vote for Trump,” Bannon urged Sanders supporters in the same interview. “The Bernie people helped make Trump president and they’re gonna help make Trump president again, because he’s been screwed by the Democratic Party.”

The populist mastermind is now unavailable for interview (he’s about halfway through a prison sentence), so I dialed up the next best source: Raheem Kassam, a top lieutenant who worked for Bannon first as an editor at Breitbart and more recently as co-host of his “War Room” podcast.

I asked him if I was right to sense Bannon’s fingerprints on all this, if the embrace of Kennedy and Gabbard was Trump’s belated effort to stitch together an anti-war, anti-corporate coalition. He agreed it was — but said my litany of policy points was missing one key factor: “The lifestyle thing.”

The Kennedy-Gabbard faction goes by many names, depending who you ask: Contrarians. Cranks. Doves. Independents. Kassam, for his part, calls these voters the “crunchy-ish” demographic. “These are people who think about what their clothes are made of,” he explained. “They don’t want to wear polyester. They don’t want to eat seed oils. They prefer all-natural, no sulfites in their wines.”

They are also, of course, the original anti-vaxxers, and Covid has helped engineer some of these shifts: members of this demographic tend to side with Trump on the pandemic-era culture wars, in addition to sharing his stated opposition to actual wars. “Our children are now the unhealthiest, sickest children in the world,” Kennedy, the nation’s leading vaccine skeptic, said in Phoenix last week as he offered Trump his endorsement. “Don’t you want healthy children? And don’t you want the chemicals out of our food? And don’t you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption?”

Kassam told me that this focus on health was the missing piece to understand what drives the Bernie-Trump voter — and that Trump, for the first time, was paying attention to it. “Probably more than any other point in his life, Trump is on a learning trajectory right now,” said Kassam, who has ties to the campaign. “I think he probably looked at it originally from, like, ‘Okay, I’m for no war. Are you for no war?’ And they go, ‘yeah, we’re for no war.’ ‘Okay, so what else are you into?’ And they start talking about all this health stuff and everything else and he goes, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea.’”

Kassam said that Trump acknowledges that he is a less-than-ideal messenger for these arguments (“He’s still eating his quarter pounders and flying on planes every day”), which is why he has recruited surrogates like Kennedy and Gabbard to reach these voters. His campaign now has “six people who could credibly talk to anti-establishment podcasters with more viewers than nightly network news: Trump himself, his eldest sons, Vance, Kennedy, and Gabbard,” one strategist told Semafor.2

Indeed, Trump has been making the rounds on these podcasts lately — another clear play for this vast audience who doesn’t traditionally vote Republican and gets their news from off-beat sources. Most recently, he sat for an unusually personal interview with comedian Theo Von, including a long discussion on the health lobby, cocaine, and alcohol. Von’s previous political guest, in a episode he recorded one week before while sporting a tie-dye Grateful Dead shirt? You guessed it: Bernie Sanders.

The ur-podcaster of this demographic is Joe Rogan; as The Atlantic put it, Rogan and Von’s shows “plow the great crunchy intersection at the middle of American politics, where the Supplement Bros of the right find communion with the Wellness Vegetarians of the left. (Just don’t let them talk to each other about vaccines.)” Von and Rogan both have “a weakness” for Sanders and RFK Jr., as The Atlantic reported; Rogan hosted Sanders for an interview in 2019, and endorsed him the next year.

Looking ahead, Kassam told me that he expects Trump to sit for a Rogan interview in the last week of October — the ultimate “October Surprise” for Bernie-Trump voters.