Ten years ago this week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) ended his first presidential run and endorsed Hillary Clinton. Now, his chief strategist says the primary process was rigged.
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota sits down with Tad Devine, longtime political consultant and chief strategist for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Devine reveals why he believes the Democratic National Committee tilted the scales against Sanders, why his populist message has staying power, and why the biggest obstacle in future elections is the Democratic Party itself.
TRANSCRIPT
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[00:00:00] David Sirota: From The Lever's reader-supported newsroom, it's Lever Time. I'm David Sirota.
[00:00:03] Bernie Sanders: Our campaign won the primaries and caucuses in 22 states.
[00:00:10] David Sirota: Ten years ago, on July 12th, 2016, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary and endorsed Hillary Clinton. It was one of the most pivotal presidential primaries in recent American history.
[00:00:22] Bernie Sanders: But it is not enough to win the nomination.
[00:00:27] David Sirota: I remember the 2016 election for all the huge things that it was. It was the final year of Barack Obama's presidency. Bernie Sanders won those huge upset wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton's emails somehow became international headlines. And Donald Trump's victory, of course, left many liberals totally stunned. I also remember the 2016 election for what it was not.
It was not a Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders general election face-off. In the 10 years since the 2016 election, there have been more what happened in 2016 think pieces than I can count. But Bernie Sanders hasn't stopped beating the drum for overcoming corporate greed and fighting economic inequality, despite him falling short of the presidential nomination twice.
And now, ahead of the midterm elections this fall, we're seeing a rise of Democratic primary candidates campaigning on Bernie's same populist anti-oligarch platform, and many of those candidates have received Bernie's backing.
It may be 2026 right now, but politics inside the Democratic Party still feel very much like 2016. It feels like 2016 has never ended. And so I've been wondering, is there anything we can learn from what happened in that pivotal 2016 Democratic presidential primary that created this whole political era that we're still living through?
To try to answer that question, I'm talking today on Lever Time with Tad Devine.
[00:01:56] Tad Devine: My name is Tad Devine. I'm a political consultant. I've, uh, done this for over 30 years, I was chief strategist of Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign.
[00:02:05] David Sirota: Tad spent decades working within the Democratic Party establishment and then took a leap of faith to work with Bernie, an outsider presidential candidate.
Just this month, Tad Devine published a book about his whole experience in that 2016 election. It's called "How the Democrats Screwed Bernie." In this new book, Tad writes about how working for Bernie Sanders showed him just how far the establishment would go to try to stop a popular insurgent candidate, and how those tactics are still being used in 2026.
Tad and I discuss everything from the big Senate races now happening in Michigan and Maine to the new wave of DSA candidates, to what all of this midterm election mayhem means for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.
And we hone in on how the fractured Democratic Party's corporate establishment is still fighting so hard to retain its power amid a populist uprising. That's all coming up on today's episode of Lever Time.
Welcome back to Lever Time. I'm talking to longtime political consultant and Bernie Sanders' former chief campaign strategist, Tad Devine.
You have this new book out that looks back on the 2016 campaign that you worked on, the Bernie Sanders campaign. Uh, a- and I think the first question that comes to mind, and the first question I think a lot of people will ask when they see the cover of your book is, well, it's 2026, why are we still talking about 2016?
Why should we still talk about 2016?
[00:03:39] Tad Devine: I think, uh, we should talk about it because it's pertinent to today and tomorrow. Uh, what happened in 2016, which was a primary system organized by the Democratic Party, supported by the Democratic establishment, and controlled by the Clinton for President campaign, was rigged. That pr- that system gave unjust, undue advantage to one of the candidates, Hillary Clinton, and a system like that, uh, does not help the Democratic Party.
It hurts it. It hurts it because the Democratic Party is no longer responsive to the voters who participated in the process and wanted to participate and couldn't. And if we have a process today and tomorrow that is more responsive to those voters, the likelihood that we could win elections, I think, is immeasurably enhanced
[00:04:22] David Sirota: That word rigged, uh, I think people in the Trump era hear that word and they feel like that's Donald Trump-ish or Trumpy to-- Uh, It's the insinuation being that, that the elections are rigged, uh, the political process is rigged, uh, a- and the idea being that Trump says that because Trump doesn't like the outcomes, uh, of, uh, of various electoral, uh, situations.
Wanna push you on that question. When you say the, the, the system was rigged back in 2016, what specifically are we talking about, and how does it differ from when Donald Trump says the election system or the political system is rigged?
Sure.
[00:05:07] Tad Devine: Well, listen, I think Trump does use the word rigged a lot, and I think it's because he heard Bernie using it, not in reference to the political system, within the Democratic Party so much. He did refer to it that way sometimes, but really in reference to our economy. The central message of his campaign in 2016 was that America has a rigged economy, which is held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance, and I think that's where rigged came from.
And I think Trump picked up a lot of the things that Bernie said about the economy, about what Trump labeled the swamp later on, about insider politics, about billionaires, all that stuff. He picked a lot of that up from Bernie. I think it's different in that, Trump is rigging a system for himself and the people around him.
That's the rig that's going on in America right now. He, describes it in different ways. He says he stands up for people, hardworking people patriots and others who, support this country. But really he only stands for himself in everything that he does and all the actions that he takes.
So I think we can't get away from the truth and the reality of what's happening in America today. America's economy is rigged, and that rigged economy is held in place by this corrupt system of campaign finance. And until we do something about it, we won't be able to get out of the bind that we're in today
[00:06:15] David Sirota: Okay, so we're gonna talk about how you argue that the, the primary system in 2016 was rigged in just a second. But before we do, I just wanna set the stage here. So Bernie Sanders, who I've known since the late 1990s, uh, roughly around when you first got to know him. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, I was working for him as a press secretary on Capitol Hill, uh, back in the late 1990s.
Uh, he reaches out to you about a potential presidential run in 2014. Um, you had nearly four decades of political consulting experience at this point, multiple presidential campaigns under your belt.
Just set the stage for us about what stood out to you about Bernie specifically at that moment in time as a presidential candidate, and perhaps what doubts you may have had about his potential run.
[00:07:05] Tad Devine: Well, first I knew him since 1996 when I worked on his House race 10 years later on a very tough Senate campaign that he won overwhelmingly, by the way. It was tough because they dumped all, you know, $7.5 million, mostly negative ads on him. But, what stood out for me, when we talked about this in 2014, when he approached me and said, "Listen, I'm thinking about running for president," I mean, I was really...
I, I mean, literally I was shocked. I had no expectation that Bernie Sanders, the person I knew from, you know, the House and the Senate races, was going to seek the Democratic nomination for president. And I asked him to clarify that at the be- beginning. Was he going to run for president like Ralph Nader or another third-party candidate outside?
Because if he had told me he wanted to do that, I would say, "Listen, Bernie, I love you, but I can't work for you in that capacity." I had worked for him as an independent in Vermont in both a House race and a Senate race, but I saw him as an ally and, a member of, frankly, the Democratic caucus, both in the House and the Senate, and someone who would support the Democratic leadership of those bodies.
So I had no problem doing that. And, f- and frankly, in the first one, when Dick Gephardt was the minority leader then, and also a client of my firm, you know, we checked it out with them before we even went to work for Bernie. But when he said he wanted to run for the Democratic Party nomination, that changed it for me.
And, and, you know, what's, what stood out too was my belief that his message, what he was talking about in terms of issues, issues like whether or not people should earn a living wage in this country, whether or not Social Security should be strengthened and not diminished, whether or not Medicare and Medicaid should be protected from vicious government cuts, and the list goes on.
Climate change, housing, uh, education, and the ability for people to afford college education by having free tuition in public colleges and universities. All of these issues to me, I thought, were really important for the American people to hear about, and also as policy to pursue. And so I thought his candidacy was very important for the Democratic Party and for the nation, that talking about these issues, raising these issues, could provoke the needed change that would come from the adoption of them.
So, you know, I wanted to help him to do what he wanted to do. I spent a weekend with, uh, Bernie and Jane in Burlington, Vermont, the whole weekend, basically just the three of us at their home talking about this.
And I did not go there to try to talk him into running for president. I think I went there to talk him out of running for president, and I've done that with other candidates who, you know, wanted to seek the presidency, and I just basically laid it out to them and said, "Listen, I don't think this is realistic, and here's why it's not good for you to do this."
And with him, I made that same argument. I talked about 800 superdelegates being there and how that would affect the outcome. I talked about proportional representation, something I knew a lot about because I led the negotiations when the party adopted that in 1988 on behalf of Governor Dukakis. I talked about the money and the outside money that comes into these campaigns and how it finances things, and I talked about a lot of other things, including things in his past which I knew about because I'd seen all the opposition research on him when he ran for the Senate.
So I wasn't egging him on. You know? I was telling him, "Why are you doing this?" And you know how, you know Bernie, He, you know, he, you know, he, I mean, you know, and he and I, you know, had a lot of exchanges that were very difficult in the campaign, and I was really tough on him. And he finally told me why he was doing it. He was doing it because he was sick and tired of being a backbencher. He, he said it a little more colorfully than that, but that's what he said. And I could see in him- and in what he was saying that this was something really important for America, okay? Not just for Vermont to hear.
That this was something that deserved more than 4:00 in the afternoon at the House of Representatives giving speeches, you know, to C-SPAN. All right? The audience that he had attracted. And by the way, that was a very important audience. You know, when we were doing one of the preliminary meetings at Bill Press's house about the campaign, there was somebody there who had worked for President Obama, and I asked her, "How many email addresses did you have uh, you know, when you started the campaign?"
And she said, "16,000." And I turned to Phil Vermonte, who was there on behalf of Bernie, I said, "How many email addresses do you guys have?" He said, "400,000." You know, and so it was, uh, so that w- groundwork that Bernie had done for year after year of trying to communicate this message to people, had yielded a, a strong foundation to build on, I think.
And we built on that foundation in the campaign and tried to help him get that message out to America. I think he did that, and I think it helped to change the direction of the Democratic Party and American politics.
[00:11:21] David Sirota: Okay.
So, so you've just mentioned in recounting your conversation with Bernie of some of the structural impediments that you foresaw in his 2016 race.
Superdelegates is a good example. Uh, these permanent, party officials who back then got a, a certain percentage of the v- of the, uh, the, the nomination vote, uh, that di- wasn't related to the primary outcomes in the states. That, that's one I think people know about. Um, you mentioned the money, another i- potential impediment.
Your book also delves into a bunch of other ways that the party establishment, uh, was able to use the party bureaucracy and the process to tilt, or arguably rig, , the system against an outsider candidate like Bernie. Give us a couple of other examples that you think maybe people don't know much about, about how that bureaucracy, can put its thumb on the scale for candidates it doesn't like.
And I think I would add on to that question, tell us a little bit about whether you think those impediments still exist.
[00:12:32] Tad Devine: I'll talk about a few of them very quickly, okay? 'Cause I could, 'cause I could talk for the next hour about it, but I'm not going to, okay? Okay. One The debate schedule. You know, when I found out in the, uh, fall of, uh, 2015 via call from a top official of the Democratic National Committee that there would be four debates for president in the 2016 campaign, I was very surprised about it.
And when they told me the dates of one of those debates was the Saturday night before Christmas, I re- you know, I, I, I've been around doing this a long time. I, I knew it was happening. They were rigging this process. And then 20 minutes after they announced it, when I saw Hillary Clinton on Twitter saying, "I accept the invitation to debate," I mean, it was so obvious to me that the fix was in.
So that process of limiting the debates, I think she and Obama had about 20, you know, uh, eight years earlier when they were together. And Hillary demonstrated she was a quite an able debater too. But, you know, nevertheless, they were protecting her from any scrutiny, and they didn't want something to happen like happened in 2008 when Tim Russert asked her about licenses for illegal aliens, he called them, and, you know, and, and that led to, a lot of problems for her.
So, so the debate schedule, which was rigged. And we later found out, because the, the emails of this were leaked in WikiLeaks, that debate schedule was not done by the DNC, but was given to the DNC by the Clinton campaign. They outlined it in some great detail. The second thing was the voter files.
These voter files, and people, you know, probably aren't familiar with voter files, but th- they are very important tools for campaigns. These are the files of every single voter in the state, and these files are enhanced with information, sometimes by the states, sometimes by other entities, private entities, and by the campaigns themself.
They become very valuable tools to organize in places like Iowa and New Hampshire. They also were, for our campaign, uniquely valuable in that they provided the basis for the fundraising. 'Cause we were not doing parties with rich people. We were doing direct fundraising from individuals, and the voter files provided the means for us to do that directly with them.
When the voter files were taken away from the campaign because the DNC concocted a scandal that didn't exist and said that we had spied and broken the firewall. Th- this firewall that they talked about was something that prevented one campaign from seeing the other campaign's records, uh, with which were in the same van, the same system, you know?
And when the firewall broke down a few people on the campaign, young people on the campaign, you know, went in for about a half hour, looked around, and unfortunately, that led to, you know, them taking away our voter files. Th- this this had happened two months before, but it happened with the people who were doing our targeting, professional people been around.
As soon as it happened, they notified the DNC that the firewall went down so that the DNC could correct it. But when it happened to us in December... Now, remember, by December, you know, in September, there's one Bernie Sanders campaign. In December, this is a guy beginning to breathe right down her throat, okay?
I mean, we're coming closer and closer every day. We're on TV. They had been on since August. We started in November. This thing is closing up, and the Democratic National Committee decides at that juncture that they're gonna take away the most valuable organizing and fundraising tool that we have - Arbitrarily, capriciously, and do so even though we had paid a quarter of a million dollars for the files in the first four states, and even though the contract that we had with them expressly provided that each side has to give the other side 10 days written notice before they take any action.
Okay? So the voter files to me were proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they were running the DNC and they would do anything to stop us. And the final, uh, bit I'll give to you is what happened to us in Nevada. W- we were t- 25 points or more behind Hillary Clinton before the New Hampshire primary, but as soon as New Hampshire happened, things began to close there.
We were organizing on the ground, and things were getting tighter. Even the Clinton campaign put out a poll saying they were 25 points ahead because inevitability was their message. They didn't really have a message about issues. They had an issue, a message about politics. And when it began to close there, Harry Reid, who said he was neutral, who was...
You know, Bernie was a member of his caucus who voted for him, decided to put his finger on the scales and went in with the hotel owners and other powerful interests in Las Vegas and moved the thing towards Bernie. And don't take my name for it. Jon Ralston is the top political, journalist in Nevada and has been for many years.
And Ralston, or week after the Nevada caucuses, wrote a piece in USA Today explaining how Harry Reid helped them to steal the election from Bernie Sanders in Nevada, because if they didn't, the inevitability message of Hillary Clinton would've been undercut, and she would've been threatened and maybe lose the whole thing.
So, so those are three examples. And l- and trust me, read the book. There's many more,
[00:16:54] David Sirota: on the Harry Reid one, I just have a, a, just a, a detailed question. So
[00:16:58] Tad Devine: Yes ...
[00:16:59] David Sirota: that sounds like Harry Reid helped Hillary Clinton, which each individual politician, individual senator, individual--
[00:17:07] Tad Devine: Yeah
[00:17:07] David Sirota: congressperson is allowed to endorse--
[00:17:09] Tad Devine: Absolutely.
[00:17:09] David Sirota: Not only allowed to endorse, they, they do endorse, they pick sides, et cetera, et cetera.
Right. I think my question is, How would you describe what he did or what role his political machine played as something that goes beyond just Harry Reid siding with, a non-Bernie candidate that Harry Reid wanted to side with? Yeah. Like, like what's untoward about it?
Well, first let me say, and he's deceased now, that I really like Harry Reid, okay? And I thought he was always good to me, and I thought he was a, a, a really good guy, okay? But what is untoward is the way it was done. He never publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton. His actions were surreptitious, okay? He didn't want to show his hand to the public in everything that he did to move the thing towards her because he was afraid that the story of how he helped her get over the finish line would undermine her messaging.
That's what's untoward. It was the secret process that he engaged in that was wrong and, you know, was not exposed at the time to Bernie or to anyone else.
[00:18:08] Speaker: We're gonna take a quick break. We'll be right back.
[00:18:10] David Sirota: Welcome back to Lever Time.
Okay, so I want to zoom back out here. So you've laid out some, some ways in which the thumb was clearly on the scale, uh, a- against Bernie Sanders in 2016. And I want to ask some, uh, if not devil's advocate questions, but sort of counterfactuals.
One question that comes to my mind first and foremost is, did any of this kind of thing get weaponized against Barack Obama when he ran in 2008?
Uh, and if not, why not? Because he was cast as the outsider candidate in that race against Hillary Clinton
[00:18:48] Tad Devine: Well, I think they would have liked to have, you know, weaponized it more. But Obama, I think, and his team were very astute in the way that they approached the process. They understood, for example, in my view, someone who worked very closely on the nominating process for all through the '80s for Carter, for Mondale, for Dukakis, you know, and rose through the ranks of that process and I think understood it well.
You know, the Obama campaign understood the way the process worked. So in 1988, for example, when we adopted proportional representation as the exclusive system of delegate allocation in the Democratic Party, it changed the way that you approached the nominating process. They understood that if they could gain an early lead against Hillary, it would be almost impossible for her to make up the distance.
They also understood that they had to move into the ranks of the superdelegates to prevent her from gaining overwhelming advantage there, and they did so successfully. And in some cases, and John Lewis is an example of this, someone who endorsed Hillary at the front end, but as Obama succeeded, changed his endorsement to Barack Obama.
They played the inside game. They also understood that they needed a financial advantage in order to succeed because Hillary's front-end fundraising would be so significant. They found that advantage by, I would call it, having two wings to the plane. They raised money the traditional way from big donors, and they found out how to raise enormous amounts of money from the grassroots as well.
So, the Obama people, I think, the establishment was against them, but not totally against them. There were parts of the establishment, Tom Daschle comes to mind, for example, Dick Durbin comes to mind. I mean, you know, really significant members of the United States Senate who were willing to stand up and to say, "We're with this guy, not with Hillary."
And that takes a lot. And listen, I remember when, um, Senator Kennedy, who I worked for in 1994 in his, his race against Mitt Romney, stood up very early in the process along with Caroline and Patrick, his, son and his,, niece. You know, they, they stood up publicly in an American university and endorsed Barack Obama.
I mean, that was a really tough thing, I think, to do within the context of President Clinton and the Clinton administration and all that support there. So Obama played an inside game against Hillary. That inside game was not available to Bernie, okay? It simply wasn't gonna happen. He wasn't going to get 200 or 300 superdelegates against her 400 superdelegates.
So, to make the numbers small enough so that he could gain advantage if he succeeded with voters. Uh, and they understood the process well. I don't think the Clinton people, frankly, in 2008 understood the impact of proportional representation and how difficult it would be for them to make up a loss.
See, after he won in South Carolina Which by the way, he was behind in South Carolina until Iowa, and then suddenly two days after the Iowa caucus, South Carolina, you know, moved very quickly towards him.
You know, Barack Obama was getting support in unprecedented numbers from young people, you know, from uh, highly educated white voters and from minorities. Hillary Clinton was finding strength with women, was finding fence with some Latinos, and with fi- finding strength in some blue collar communities as well.
And so that's kind of the Democratic Party. They both had found their place in the Democratic Party. What Obama was able to do, and the reason I think he won both the primary and the general election, was he was able to change the composition of the electorate. The Clinton, theory of the case, and it still remains the theory, I think, of the third-wave Democrats, is that, "Oh, no, we must tack to the middle.
We must talk to these voters in their language, with their issues, and persuade them to vote for, you know, Republican Lite," basically. Obama's theory of the case was, "We must motivate, we must pull people in, inspire them, lead them to a future that they can believe in," you know, which was Bernie's slogan.
And, you know, I think that's what, you know, we tried to do as well. We tried to change the composition of the electorate because that was the way to win not only the primary, but the general election as well.
[00:22:32] David Sirota: So I think the, the follow-up question then is, if Obama was able to crack the same potentially rigged system, uh, by doing the various things you just outlined, what do you say to those who'd say, "Well, what you're really arguing is, is that Obama was a better politician than Bernie Sanders, and Bernie just needed to be a better politician"?
That if Obama could overcome a rigged system, then Bernie could have overcome a rigged system if he was just a better politician
[00:23:03] Tad Devine: Well, first I would say no one should invite themself to comparison with Barack Obama, one of the unique political talents, not just of our generation, but of our times, okay? I mean, he, this was a guy who fit the moment, you know? Yes, he was able to overcome it because of the support that he had within the ranks of the establishment and also because of the resource advantage that he was able to gain, you know?
But, I don't think what Bernie did, you know, should be diminished by comparison to Obama. It should be understood in respect to it. You know, h- Bernie was, as he described himself, very much a backbencher, you know. Barack Obama was a star from the moment he gave the speech in 2004. And I, you know, I was working for John Kerry in that convention, and I was one of the top people on the campaign, so I had, like, a podium pass.
I could go wherever I want. I decided to go to the podium to watch the speech, and what I saw in that speech in him was not only him giving that speech, which anybody could see on TV or if you were sitting in the stands, but I saw the crowd, and I saw the reaction of those thousands of Democrats who were sitting there.
And I could see the connection that he was making with people at a visceral level. So, yeah, Bernie, we were not able to do what we wanted to. And by the way, when I mentioned, you know, I was with Bernie and Jane in Burlington in April of 2015, I said to him, I said, "Listen, the only way for you to win," after I described the system to him and basically how rigged it was against him, I said, "We're gonna have to win Iowa, we're gonna have to win New Hampshire, we're gonna have to win Nevada, and somehow figure out how to win South Carolina."
And not just because there were so many African American voters in South Carolina. That's the way I think the stereotype sees this. The South Carolina primary in 2016 wa- was on a different day than the Republican primary. That's not what happened in New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, in Michigan, in, Wisconsin, independents had to make a decision: Do I wanna go vote for Bernie?
Do I wanna go vote for Trump? Okay. In South Carolina, there was a big primary three weeks earlier. It attracted a lot of independent voters, and they were ineligible to vote in the Democratic primary three weeks later. And it's one of the big reasons, frankly, we-- certainly why we lost by so much in, in South Carolina, and second, why we didn't have a really good chance to win, was the different date of those primaries.
So, you know, the process in 2016 was a little different, but I think Bernie's, what he did within that process, given where he started, okay? I know Obama worked his way up, but I'll tell you, Bernie was was 50 points behind nationally when he announced.
He was 50 points behind in Iowa when he announced. He was 40 points behind in New Hampshire when he announced. And when, when I talked to Bernie and Jane about, "Listen, we gotta win these three, and then we gotta figure out how to, to win South Carolina," I also said, "And then you will face a second front from the entire establishment," okay?
And by the way, that's what we saw in 2020 when he ran, okay? The entire establishment put up a second front. Everybody got out. They handed it to Biden, and they walked away. Okay? And I'm arguing that, listen, we should have a nominating process that really gives that power to voters and not to insiders, period.
That's the end of the story, and that's all I'm trying to tell people, and that's why I wrote the book, and that's why I think it's relevant to today
[00:25:58] David Sirota: So the, the question that you just brought up about, about the African American vote in South Carolina and in the South generally,
[00:26:06] Tad Devine: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:06] David Sirota: Bernie Sanders was never, either in 2016 or in 2020, never able to win that very important segment of the Democratic vote. And I wonder, why you think that is, why that was difficult for him to crack, especially when you look, by the way, at the man's history, right?
I mean, this, Right ...this is a guy who was, arrested in the civil rights movement, Mm-hmm ...et cetera, et cetera, right? I mean, a record of fighting for civil rights, et cetera, et cetera, and he was never able to really win that, that segment of, of the vote. I wonder why you think that is.
Uh, what's your takeaway from that?
[00:26:46] Tad Devine: Well, you said a very important word in your question, and I wanna repeat it. In the South. That's, what, three words, Mm-hmm. you know? but, uh, Right ...you know, in the South he was not able to break through. But first I wanna say, at least in 2016 when I was there You know, in the North, okay?
In places like Michigan and other places. And in demographic standing, not just looking at the African American vote monolithically, but understanding it from within, with young African American voters, for example. Bernie was able to make tremendous progress in a lot of places. Illinois is another place, you know, where we w- You know, we didn't win every one of these primaries, but we took tremendous strides with those voters.
Now, we did not early in the South. I think in 2016 that was due to a number of factors. Number one, you had Hillary Clinton, who was married to Bill Clinton, a Southern politician who was very much in touch with that electorate, particularly the African American electorate. The support of African American members of Congress were one of the reasons that President Clinton, was not ultimately impeached, okay?
And the voters who resided in states that were electing Democratic senators, too. Hillary had a connection with people that went back, you know, in s- in some cases, a generation, you know, when she was starting out in, in her career. Bernie was this new guy, you know, a Jewish white guy from Vermont, okay?
It's about as far away from i- connection with African Americans. But his story to make that connection was very, very powerful, and we began to tell the story in the election. I was very much interested. In the first video we did, we talked about his civil rights work. Now later, that video and images contained into it came under attack, and I wrote about it in the book.
You know, what happened in terms of the Black Caucus holding a press conference. John Lewis said he, "I never met him, but I met Bill and Hillary," as though, you know, a guy in Atlanta is supposed to know someone in Chicago who's, you know, a youn- uh, in college trying to learn- lead on civil rights.
And in the press as well, I mean, Jonathan Capehart wrote a story about it and, you know, I did an interview with him and I read the c- column, it made me look like I was lying to him, and I wasn't lying. I was telling the truth as I knew it at that moment. We went out and investigated some more, and it turned out that everything we said was 100% true because we had the facts.
Danny Lyon, a famous civil rights photographer, had the original roll of film that had Bernie's picture in it that, you know, uh, Capehart said was, you know, somebody else. It wasn't. was Bernie. So I think we could have, under the right circumstances... Let's imagine another reality, a reality where the Iowa caucuses, which Hillary Clinton won 49.9 to 49.6 for Bernie Sanders, in part because we lost five coin tosses, okay?
For delegate equivalencies in the state. Let's just suppose that in fact the Iowa caucuses first of all reported the number of people who caucused for each candidate, which they refused to do in 2016. They would have s- seen an overwhelming advantage in first preference votes for Bernie Sanders. But they wouldn't release those numbers.
That's part of what I'm talking about when I say everything is suppressed. Secondly, I think we were moving so hard and so fast that if we could have moved just a little bit more and run, you know, won it 52-48 or s- or something like that, or at least had a clean victory so she couldn't even claim the Pyrrhic victory that they claimed, and then won New Hampshire with unprecedented vote.
He won by... He got 150,000 votes. John McCain's record from 2000 was 110,000 votes. He surpassed it, you know, by a mile. And then, Harry Reid didn't put his finger on the thing, and, I... you know. So there was a very real world where we could have won Iowa, New Hampshire, and, um, Nevada. Okay? I think in that world, if we had That kind of success and built the kind of momentum that comes from it.
I think we could have had a shot, particularly if we had worked even harder to persuade African American voters, and if we could have had somebody on the, in the African American community who stood up the way Ted Kennedy did in 2008 for Barack Obama. If we could have had that on our side, you know, and helped voters to make that connection.
You know, I think if we had pulled it off, we would have then been up to facing the second front from the establishment. And I think in 2016, frankly, they had nobody else to run. It wasn't like they had the, former vice president sitting there where they could roll all the cards who had his name on the ballot everywhere.
They would have been sitting there with, you know, maybe Martin O'Malley, who was getting like 1% of the vote in places. The thing would have been over, and they would have been forced to deal with us. And I think given Trump winning the nomination on the other side, they would have said okay. And they w- also would have said okay, and you know about this, David, because you dealt with Bernie, you know, in Congress, because he was one of the most effective legislators in the House of Representative, a guy who passed more amendments in a 10-year period than any member of Congress, Democrat or Republican.
And when he was in the Senate, he and John McCain negotiated together. I hear where there was a lot of screaming in the room for three days when it finally came up. But they negotiated the most important piece of legislation in that session of Congress when they were together, which was to try to, reform the Veterans Administration, which was having so many problems serving healthcare to veterans.
And of course, Bernie, when he joined the Senate, they asked him if he wanted Veterans Committee, and he did because he felt that was a community that he could help a lot, and he wound up helping it enormously. So, If we had been able to pull off the, you know, the, the not the trifecta, but winning the four in a row and knocking them all down, which we came very close to doing, I think the Democrats would have been forced to come our way.
Now, there'd still be some holdouts, and there'll be a lot of people, and we hear it today when they talk about Democratic socialists and get out of the Democratic Party. I say to all my friends, and many of them, like James Carville and others, are friends of mine from going back for many years in campaigns.
I would say to them, "Let's remember what happened to Al Gore in 2000," okay? When, you know, Ralph Nader, you know, I re- I was helping him run that campaign, you know, in 2000. And we spent the weekend before the election sending people into Washington State and Oregon because Bush was eight and nine percent in some of the, uh, polls at the end, and he could have won those states, so we had to to use resources.
We had to use television advertising. I could have used that television advertising in Florida, okay? And maybe we could have found another 600 votes or so to win the thing
[00:32:34] David Sirota: So that moves us into the, the the present moment, yeah, as you alluded to. I wanna start by now 10 years on from, from the story that your book tells, and I wanna start with a question of whether you see the campaign that Bernie Sanders, uh, started in 2016 as continuing now into this era.
Not his campaign specifically, but this idea that i- it's been 2016 now for 10, 10 years, that we're still in this 2016-launched battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. And when you look out at the candidates running, I mean, you mentioned some Democratic Socialist candidates, there are anti-establishment candidates.
I mean, it feels like a very anti-incumbent year even inside of Democratic primaries. Hmm. I wonder if you, you see, like, the 2016 race that you describe as, as sort of the paradigm that it began still now persisting and arguably intensifying here in 2026
[00:33:38] Tad Devine: I do. And this is why Because the message that Bernie delivered to America in that campaign of 2016, that America's economy is rigged and that rigged economy is held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance, is as true and as powerful today as it was in 2016. It is the explanation for the problem.
Now, people haven't really come to it yet in that way. They were coming to it in 2016. I think if we had succeeded and, you know, run against Trump, there isn't a doubt in my mind that Bernie would have won. I know a lot of people have a hard time understanding this, but I don't. I see it very clearly. And I think it is the continuation of that struggle because the struggle has never been resolved.
Okay? And I think it is beginning to resolve itself within the ranks of the Democratic Party, and, perhaps the biggest obstacle we have to making that the central message of the next presidential campaign in 2028 is the Democratic Party itself. And, the way to remedy this problem within the ranks of the party is to empower voters, to let them make the choice.
If the voters in 2028 say, "Well, we're really looking for somebody," like they were in 1992, a, you know, a moderate Southern governor who could win votes, you know, up and down the Mississippi River with states that adjoin it. Okay. You know, I accept that, and I would ... I'm very happy they elected Bill Clinton instead of a second term of the first George Bush because President Clinton, and there are many issues involved with him, I understand that, but there were also 26 million jobs that were created in eight years when he presided over this country.
There was progress on a number of issues which are of core importance to, to the Democratic Party and the American people. And I think we can do that again if we turn it over to the voters, empower them, design a nominating process that isn't set up to, you know, accomplish the goal before it starts. You know, when they changed the primary process in 2024 for Joe Biden, who ultimately was not the nominee of the party, and put South Carolina as the first event, that's not a way to elect somebody president.
I love South Carolina. I think, I think the old nominating process ... I mean, Iowa, okay, there's some questions about, uh, can they run a caucus, and I think those are legitimate questions. New Hampshire has for over a century run great primaries, true primaries, and the people there really care. They come out, they listen to everybody, and in the end, the independents decide who wins.
Okay? And I think that's a great process. Nevada I think is a great place to represent the Latino vote in the Democratic Party, which is so big. And South Carolina is a great place to hear the voice of African American voters, and it is, you know, and that, and they certainly did in 2008 with Barack Obama.
But Barack Obama's success in t- in South Carolina I would argue was not just due to his race but due his, his success in an an almost all white state in Iowa. Okay? People need to understand this nominating process a little more deeply to understand how it can be fruitful. So if we could get back to a front end like that, maybe there's one or two of those states that change the route, but something where we have some small states at the beginning, we have some bigger states as we go, and then all the states can do what they want after they come in that.
I think we have a nominating process that can nominate somebody who can win, okay? That's really what the ultimate goal here. We want someone who shares and reflects our values, but we want somebody who could take those values to the Oval Office, and I hope the first thing they do is tear down all the gold leaf everywhere and even knock down whatever Trump builds of his ballroom in between, okay?
'Cause we have to get rid of the stain of the Trump presidency in order for America to move ahead.
[00:37:02] Speaker: We're gonna take one more quick break. Before we continue, I just want to tell you about The Lever's weekly newsletter, Midterm Madness.
Every week, our newsroom brings you the elections worth watching, the money trails worth following, the numbers that cut through the spin, and the campaign moments that reveal more than the official talking points ever will. You can check out Midterm Madness at levernews.com/midtermmadness. We'll be right back
[00:37:27] David Sirota: Welcome back to Lever Time.
So looking at, at at the 2028, uh, election for a moment, the argument that I hear you making is that Democratic nominating system, uh, is potentially, when it is weaponized, can be rigged against genuine, full on anti-establishment candidates. Mm-hmm. The idea that Obama wasn't fully anti-establishment would account for part of how he navigated Mm-hmm ...around that rigging.
Bernie Sanders, a full on anti-establishment Right ...candidate w- was essentially stopped by that. That's your argument. I think the question then is, in 2028 Will that be mitigated by the fact that presumably there will be more candidates? In other words, the Bernie Sanders one-on-one with Hillary Clinton in 2016, I think benefited him in o- in one sense in that he was the, the major alternative. Yes. If you didn't like Hillary Clinton, he was the major alternative. Right. That works for him. What, what works against him is that it makes it easier for the, uh, establishment to use all of its tricks and all of its rigging Mm-hmm against that one opposition. If it's fractured in 2028, if there's a bunch of candidates competing for that anti-establishment lane, does it make it harder for the party, to do the rigging that you illustrate, uh, from back in 2016?
- Yes. I think it does. And I don't think, you know, the thing will be nearly as rigged in 2028 as it was in 2016. First of all, Bernie worked very hard after 2016 to take away the first ballot vote from the superdelegates, okay? So that immediately changes the system because Hillary was running on inevitability before the first vote was cast, and the press was repeating it and running with her message of, "Well, he, she, you know, there's no way he can win.
She's already got, you know, 250 superdelegates, and she's gonna get the rest of them, too," you know? So, I do think w- with a large field, there's an opportunity For the party to really reestablish more of a connection with voters, you know? And hopefully it will begin to do that in the midterm elections, you know.
I think we can certainly win the House. I think we can win the Senate too, because I've seen wave elections. I've seen them in presidential years. I mean, I worked for Walter Mondale in, in 1984, and trust me, Gary Hart was riding a wave that would have swept everything away. And one of the reasons we were able to come back, and I've been on, so I've been on both sides of this, is that we went into the process and used it to our advantage, you know?
And we did everything that we possibly could within the rules to make sure that Gary Hart did not have as many delegates as he would have earned if he had, followed the process the right way. I'll just give you a quick example so people understand this. You know, he came out of New Hampshire, he had so much momentum.
We went into Super Tuesday. He was winning everything in sight, and he won big states like, uh, Florida. But because in those days it was what we called a direct election primary or winner take all primary by congressional district, you could cast a, a vote for a candidate, but that vote didn't count and we called it a beauty contest.
But the count for the delegates counted. But Gary Hart's campaign had failed to slate delegates in most of the congressional districts. Now, that seems like, you know, okay, it must be really hard because you gotta go around and get hundreds of signatures or thousands of signatures to get people on the ballot.
But in t- 1984, if you wanted to get on a ballot, all a person had to do was send a letter of intent to the Democratic Party at the state saying you wanted to run as a Gary Hart delegate. And as long as they met the standards, it had to be equally divided between gender and things like that, and there were affirmative action, goals that we, you know, they attempted to reach with the delegate slates.
As long as you did that, those letters in themself would have allowed Hart to win an enormous number of delegates. You know? They just didn't have enough apparatus after they won New Hampshire. They were putting everything into New Hampshire and they just didn't have enough to even get people to send in those letters.
And so in those, uh, congressional districts in Florida, even though Mondale got a lot less votes in the congressional district, his slate of delegates, since they were on the ballot, got more votes, and we were able to win in a lot of places. You know, the only big sta- states we won were Alabama and Georgia on Super Tuesday, but we had the audacity to go out there and hold a press conference the day after Super Tuesday and declare our victory.
You know? And, and the press was like, "Well, okay. Well, we'll s- see what happens." But, you know, I saw firsthand Hart's momentum. I saw it 'cause I was on the ground in New Hampshire the last few days, and I could, just feel how the thing was moving towards him. So, you know, I think that process is one that can be replicated again.
I think we, if we put together a front end where there's few states and then let the other states fall in behind, somebody can go out and if they have the right message, okay, this is really about having the right message that connects with voters in that election cycle, okay? The right message in 2028 may not be exactly as it was in 2016, but from my perspective right now and as we sit here in 2026, that Bernie message is as alive and as powerful today as it was back then
[00:42:17] David Sirota: Looking at some of the races that are happening right now, you've got Senate races in Michigan, Maine, uh, Minnesota. You've got House races in... There was a House race in, uh, Philadelphia. There were the trio of House races in, in the Democratic primaries in New York City. There really does seem to be a replication of the divide that we saw in 2016, the Clinton sort of corporate friendly- Mm-hmm establishment wing versus the insurgent populist anti-establishment wing, Bernie.
That seems to be replicating up and down the ballot here's what I see, and you can tell me if you think I'm wrong. What I see is that in the smaller versions of these elections that are high profile enough, the House races, that the insurgent wing has been able to win, um, incredible victories against, Mm in, in many cases, against, uh, sitting incumbent Democrats, so the, the Bernie wing winning those races.
[00:43:12] Tad Devine: Mm-hmm.
[00:43:13] David Sirota: At the Senate level, we've seen, the Graham Platner campaign.
Mm-hmm. Uh, everyone who's listening probably knows that, there was all sorts of scandals. Platner dropped out. Peggy Flanagan in the Sanders wing, I think, uh, she is, uh, in a neck-and-neck race in Minnesota. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, Abdul El-Sayed, who we've interviewed on this show, uh, aligned with the Bernie wing, Medicare for All candidate, uh, he is being grossly outspent in Michigan.
Is there a ceiling at this point for the Bernie populist wing, a, a ceiling that you can win a House race now, but a, Senate race, a statewide race that requires so much money, uh, and so much raw political power that that threshold still hasn't necessarily, been breached by the populist anti-establishment insurgent wing yet?
What do you make of that? Do you think, uh, i- is that a threshold that hasn't been crossed? And, and what's the takeaway from that if, if it hasn't been?
[00:44:09] Tad Devine: Well, I don't think there is a ceiling. I think there is a floor though. Okay, so let me, let me explain what I mean by that. Uh, Platner demonstrated that you could beat an incumbent governor in a Senate race, okay? I mean, it w- you know, for all the problems with him, and by the way, I think we're extremely lucky that he got out of the race before we couldn't get him out, okay?
And I think Maine has a great chance of getting rid of Susan Collins, who by the way, is with Donald Trump 100% of the time when he needs her, okay? If they needed her for the Supreme Court, if they need... And if they didn't need her for the big beautiful bill, fine, we'll give her a pass. But whenever they need her, she is with them.
Now, when I say we need a floor and not a ceiling, this is what I mean. Yes, the massive money, the outside money, the, in many cases, dark money is going to come in and support the corporate interests which are advancing, you know, candidates in some of these races. But they can still be beaten if you have a campaign which is not only grassroots, and I believe in grassroots and voter contact.
I mean, I was a field director for Mike Dukakis before I became the, you know, just the delegate director of the campaign and believed in campaigning, close to people and being in touch with people. But we have to have a floor of communication that we achieve through mass media, okay?
And I'm biased in this. I make television ads, you know, for campaigns for a living, okay? And I believe in television advertising, and I think it was a big part of Bernie's success in 2016. We had a great ad campaign, and that's, I think, an objective evaluation by people who measured the effect of the advertising.
In New York City, people point to Mamdani and they say, "Oh, you know, all the money came in It was all on the other side.
Mamdani was going door to door, walking through, having his videos, talking to people, and that's why he..." And, and he was smiling and talking about affordability, you know. He had the right message.
But he also had something else when I say we need a floor and not just a ceiling. New York had a, uh, has a generous program of campaign finance. I think it's a five-to-one match, okay? And he was able to buy enough advertising on TV to get his message across to people. I remember Julian Mulvey, who works on the team that did Mamdani's campaign; it was part of that, uh, firm, sent me the first ad 'cause, you know, he's been... a-- He was a student of mine before we were business partners for many years, so, you know, we keep in close touch. And he said, "Here's the first ad that we're putting out. Tell me what you think of it." And I called him back, and this was very early on before the first ad ran. I said, "I think he's gonna win." He said, "Well, you, you know, there's not a lot of people who share your view in America today."
And I said, "Well, I can see it in him because the, w- you know, the way he smiles and connects with people. He's talking about affordability, which is really the issue that people want addressed." And I think if you have enough to get that message through to people, that's the floor. Television advertising, you know, I think people don't understand.
You have to reach a certain level of advertising with television in order for people to see it. You can't come in there with a few, you know, gross rating points and they see an ad a couple of times. It's not like the online stuff. It really is you have to have numbing repetition in the delivery of message through that medium in order to get it across to people.
They had enough to achieve that floor of advertising. And if Democrats who are challenging, you know, the big money super PACs out there have enough on TV and then do all the other things, I'm not saying take all the digital money away and run a TV ad. Raise enough, and, and because of public funding, I think in New York they could do that.
And that should be our next fight, I think, too. We should try to create a system that allows people to come in and have enough money so they can get their message out. Yes, the other side will continue to have money because the Republicans have set up a system that, you know, allows people to spend massive amounts of dark money, you know, b- and it's ruining the country.
But in the meantime, we can get people elected if they have enough, you know, to get the TV through, and they can use the techniques of organizing and talking to people. But most importantly, they need the right message, okay? You've gotta connect on the base of message, and you also have to connect on the base of candidate.
One of the reasons Bernie did so well is that he was authentic, that he was his real self, that he talked the way he talked, and he walked the way he walked. And, you know, if we can have candidates like that who connect with voters, if we can have enough money so that we can get a message out from mass media to those voters, and we can have the right message, you can win any election, primary or general election, in this country.
I firmly believe that.
[00:48:21] David Sirota: I wanna echo your point about public financing. I mean, to my mind, public financing of elections is the single most important campaign finance cause Right ...that there is in this country. Mamdani proves that.
Mamdani, I don't think would've had a campaign without public financing of elections. Yes. And, and your point about you don't have to outspend your opponent, you just have to have enough money to let voters know who you are and what you're campaigning on.
Your, y- public financing system, uh, is not gonna let candidates outspend super PACs, but when they work, they give the candidates enough money to at least let voters know that they're in the race and what they represent. And I just cannot underscore how important a reform that is, which by the way, is probably why it hasn't yet happened, because the people who control politics right now know that if that happens, then candidates who they can still outspend, candidates who are...
And by the way, especially down the ballot, who can't celebritize their races 'cause they're running in local, and, and, and and they can't access a national grassroots fundraising base. The powers that be know that public financing would change the game up and down Right ...the ballot. And, and so I Yeah, I- ...totally agree with you
[00:49:37] Tad Devine: uh, I, I 100% agree with everything you just said, David. And I would also say that I think the Democratic Party should explore the idea of trying to create a system of public financing for elections, which gives taxpayers all across this country tax credits. So every dollar you send in, $100 you send in, $100 off my taxes on the bottom line that will go into a fund to be distributed within states so that candidates can have money to run campaigns.
That, you know, if we can pass legislation like that with a Democratic House and Senate and do it with a Democratic president... Now, of course, if that happens after 2028, and we have all those tools in place and able to do it, we're gonna have to fight within our own party to make it happen, okay? We're gonna-- Because it's gonna put the Wall Street guys out of business, okay?
And that's something they don't like at all.
[00:50:18] David Sirota: So I wanna end with a question about, what you would say to those who hear this conversation and say that it is proof that the system can never work. And the argument goes something like this: "Okay, Tad, Mm ...I st- I stipulate that everything you said about the Democratic Party nominating process being rigged, everything you're saying about, uh, money, working on top of the structural rigging, money, uh, rigging outcomes, all of that is true, and that therefore it's proof that the Democratic Party itself can never be a vehicle of the kind of change that people want."
That, uh, that the argument goes that the Democratic Party exists to take the righteous anger of people and put it into a process that is essentially performative, but not a real-- It can never now, because it's so rotted through with rigging and Hmm ...money, that it can never in the modern age be an agent, uh, of change.
What do you say to those who hear all of this and come to that conclusion?
[00:51:26] Tad Devine: I say we have to give it a chance. I say that we have to run candidates in primaries like they did in New York, for example, and in other places are doing as well. I say that we can win these elections if people understand The way the process works better, and they understand the way it worked in the past.
It's one of the reasons I'm glad I wrote the book because I think it sheds a lot of light on what happened and why it shouldn't happen again. And I think we can achieve this. And the biggest reason I think we can achieve this, whether it's a constitutional amendment on campaign financing, for example, or other, uh, ideas like public funding, you know, uh, if we can explain to people in a way that connects with them on these issues, they will come to those issues.
Right now in America, there's support amongst Republicans, Independents, and Democrats, sometimes in the 80, 85 percentile amongst all those three groups to get rid of Citizens United and to get rid of the system of campaign finance. The hard part of the thing is persuading people to a viewpoint on an issue or agenda.
It's already happened. Now what we have to do is we have to figure out how to get those people who are already there on our side in elections where they're being outgunned massively by the money and interest, okay? That's what's happening right now. And we have to somehow convince, uh, you know, portions of the media, much of which is controlled by, you know, the cor- you know, we see, we see what's happening to, to, you know, s- 60 Minutes and, you know, I mean, the, the, you know, CBS was a, a revered institution.
I got to work for CBS in 1992 at the Democratic National Convention. I was the spotter and I worked with Dan Rather and all those people for a week, and before I could work for them I had to read a 56-page ethics statement about journalism and everything else. I wasn't a journalist. Read it all and sign my name to it that I would abide by all those rules, you know. So the corporate media needs to be accountable and aware of their responsibilities in this process, whether it's the vetting of candidates or other things that they need to do, you know, and not the agenda of the people who own the corporations who own their corporation, okay? That's what, that's what's happening today.
I think we can make this happen because voters are ready for it. They are already there. They understand that there's a huge problem with campaign finance. What we've got to do right now is develop messages. And, along those lines, I'll just be... I'll s- I'll end with this, in 2016, 2016, when we were... First of all, Bernie didn't wanna do any polling, okay? You know Bernie. He's like, you know, Tad, uh, go with your gut. That's what I do." You know, and it's like, you know, "Bernie, that's why people love you, because you do that, but I've got a different job and I'm not gonna make TV ads when I don't know who the target voters are, because we're gonna waste the money that all those people gave you if we don't know who, you know, who to, who to talk to." Finally, he let us poll, 'cause I basically said, "I'm not making ads without the research." Okay? So we had some, so we had some research. And, and I suggested to him that to take two paragraph messages he had. He had a message about the economy's rig. He had a message about a corrupt system of campaign finance. And I said, "You know, I think we can put these together." And we did. And it turned out that a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance, one sentence, you know- uh, spelled out as a paragraph, was the top testing message in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary.
Okay, so we knew we had something that we could take, not just to one place, but to both of the opening events in that process. And as it turned out, throughout the process, it was moving people. And that's what we've gotta do today. We have to develop a message like that. It may be different words, but it will be about the same thing that explains to people that until we fix the campaign finance system, we cannot fix the problems in America, all the economic and social problems too, I would argue, until we fix that problem.
and I think Bernie understood it then. I know he understood it because I did a video with him at the beginning of the campaign where that's how it ended, where he talked about that. You know, he, you know, he said this country has enormous problems. They are solvable problems, you know? And what we've gotta do is fix the campaign finance system to get the economy unrigged to help people live the lives they deserve to live.
[00:55:16] David Sirota: Tad Devine is a longtime Democratic strategist, including, uh, serving as the top strategist for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. His new book is called "How the Democrats Screwed Bernie." I encourage everybody to, to read it, and we're gonna link to it in the show notes. Tad, as always, it's great to see you.
Thank you so much for taking time with us today.
[00:55:35] Tad Devine: Thank you, David. Great to be with you.
[00:55:36] Speaker: Thanks for listening to another episode of Lever Time. Lever Time is a production of The Lever. This episode was produced by Natalie Bettendorf and mixed by Steven Becker. Our theme music is by Nick Byron Campbell. Marketing support from the Podglomerate. Our director of podcast production is Ron Doyle. You can subscribe to Lever Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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