I've never really seen a midterm election like this you have a substantial percentage of the
country disapproving of a Democratic president thinking the country's on the wrong track and yet
so many people in Battleground States rejected Republicans Democrats are going to hold the
Senate if not pick up a seat if Kevin McCarthy becomes speaker and that's an if he'll have the
slimmest of majorities what went wrong for the Republican Party well I I think the biggest issue
that played out in the midterms is something that I've talked about a lot over the course
of the past eight years which is voters generally speaking especially in Battleground States aren't
interested in extremism they just aren't they want people who they believe are going to be
reasonable who are going to be collaborative and who represent sort of the fundamental tentative
democracy that it's supposed to be a distributed decision-making model and you're supposed to be
okay with that and I think in the midterms one of the big lessons that the Republican Party
nationally needs to take away from it is is voters want collaborative elected officials they don't
want extremes you are going to be succeeded by a Democrat Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland he's
also going to be succeeded by a Democrat both of you popular two-term Republican governors in
Democratic states and yet the Republican voters picked Mega extremist candidates that had no
chance of of winning a general election I don't understand what's going on with your party is it
the influence of Donald Trump is it the influence of a movement that doesn't care about winning
general elections well I certainly think there's uh significant influence from the former president
um and I think that influence uh probably hurt the party and and hurt the party's chances on
Election Day not just here in Massachusetts and Maryland but in many of those other Battleground
States what voters want are candidates who are going to and elected officials who are going
to reach out who are going to engage with the so-called other side and uh and who are going
to take seriously this idea that you are supposed to try to represent and hear the voices of all of
the people that you serve when you talk about the Republican Party needing to Heed These lessons I'm
wondering if one of the things you're thinking of is we saw some Republican leaders who are not
election Liars at least not explicitly so Governor young Canada Virginia governor DeSantis of Florida
going and endorsing extremists Carrie Lake in Arizona Doug mastriano in Pennsylvania I'm from
Pennsylvania I've never seen a candidate Statewide like that do you think that the desantises and
youngkins of the world are the kinds of people that need to be thinking about look I can't be
throwing away my credibility on these extremists the big message coming out of Tuesday and I would
argue the big message voters are going to send going forward is you need to demonstrate in
word and deed that you believe this is more but this is always going to be about more than just
your party and your partisans that was the whole point of the lecture I gave at the Kennedy School
a couple of weeks ago where my whole message was that the parties are losing millions of
Voters every year who are giving up on them and becoming Independents Massachusetts 60 percent
of the electorate at this point are registered Independents or unenrolled voters depending upon
what term you like but that's a big statement that people are making about what they think about the
narrowness of the vision and the and the attitude of the parties so let's talk about your speech at
Harvard because in addition to faulting extremism you talked about social media having what you
called a quote profoundly negative consequences for Nations and for our nation and for our
politics you said quote finding people who share your love of gardening is just as easy as finding
people who share your love of hate speech so what can be done so that was um part of the reason
I talked about that was I was so amazed by what David Bowie said in 1999 for those of your viewers
who are not old enough to remember they should just Google Ziggy Stardust but David Bowie was a
very well-known musical artist and artist generally in the 70s 80s and 90s and he gave an
interview at the end of the 90s where he said that what the internet was going to be was unimaginable
and that it would be exhilarating and terrifying and that it would completely change everything
about the relationship between the content producer and the content user and receiver and
um and he was right and he said because of this there will be a duality here the there will be
certain things the internet that will do that will be wonderful and amazing and that's absolutely the
case but he also said it would create tremendous disruption and this capacity for for a very dark
side to find itself and and to leverage it and to and to make it something where truth would be
defined by the users and the producers and I think in some ways he was right you know and and he was
the only one who was talking about this back then I give him huge credit and I think the the
challenge for all of us is to accept and recognize that the internet is there social media is there
um but what does it really stand for and represent and I've said for a long time that I do not
believe the vast majority of the people who get up and go to work every day get up and go to school
every day worry about their families and their communities and their kids and their neighbors
um spend anywhere near as much time on social media caring about politics as people in politics
and people in media think they do and I view it as a as a universe it's a big one it's loud
it's organized it's influential it's noisy but it's not where most people live and I think at
some point we as a society need to accept and understand that those folks are going to work
really hard to drag as many voices and as many eyeballs onto their platforms as they possibly can
um but they aren't where big chunks of um of the world lives I think about social media and I think
two that we've seen two effects of it in recent years one January 6. that is a president putting
out lies on social media people responding on social media Twitter Facebook all sorts
of others finding each other too finding each other you can't underestimate the power of exactly
being able to find each other and create you know isolated little groups of people who are
um who are bent a certain way with respect to how they think about society and rules and mores and
all the rest as isolated individuals out there that's one thing but when they all find each
other that's different you have always credited your attitude towards politics towards how you
were raised by a liberal Democrat mom and a Conservative Republican dad and I'm wondering
um what lesson specifically you learned from that that made you the politician you are in terms of
uh your the positions you take but also not you you're not um you haven't been an outspoken critic
of Donald Trump you've been critical of him when asked but you haven't been out there criticizing
him and you are the most popular governor in the country in a democratic Commonwealth
so um my mom and dad were happily married for 60 years before my mom passed away and they never
voted for the same person and our dinner table was hilarious um and a lot of my friends would come to
watch but if they've got called on some of them didn't come back for a second time but the point
here was it wasn't a fight it wasn't a contest it wasn't even really a debate it was a discussion
and an inquiry and um and one of the things that was true from the beginning was if my parents
really thought you weren't listening to what somebody else was saying and you were just trying
to jam home your own point you would get penalized and told you know you got to either answer their
question or you know we're going to skip you for the next few rounds here and the biggest message I
took from it was um you learn a lot from listening to people you don't always agree with and
um and that's certainly been true for me in public life I am so much better as a person and as a as
an elected official because of the conversations I've had with people whose life experiences and
whose points of view are different than mine than I ever would have been if I just talked
to people I agreed with can you give me an example of that because I mean you come from a very elite
background your father worked for the Secretary of Transportation during the Nixon years you went
to Harvard you went to Harvard graduate school and you also went to Kellogg at Northwestern so
you come to this job with a set of priors as we all do for everything we do who opened your mind
so um after I lost I ran three times for governor I lost the first time in 2010 to former Governor
Deval Patrick and I went and talked to the media people who covered the race I talked to a lot of
the chattering class I talked to a whole bunch of people I wouldn't talk to my friends and
um it was fairly humiliating everybody told me what I did wrong and what a horrible candidate
it was but one guy in particular said to me you spent way too much time with your customers and
not enough time with your prospects and so when we ran when Lauren my wife and I decided to run
in 14 I spent a lot of time campaigning in places where there weren't any Republicans a lot of cases
where there weren't really even any white people and a lot of those folks were surprised to see
me they'd never seen anybody running for office before at the state level who is a Republican and
um and I just listened I didn't I asked him questions I didn't really talk very much and
I learned a lot and a lot of what I learned from those conversations factored into the way
we appointed people to the way we organized a lot of our programming to where we focused especially
during the pandemic on communities that I knew were going to be in more trouble than others if
we didn't step up and and help them and it changed the way I thought about a lot of things and in a
good way and made me as I said I think a much better public official than I would have been
otherwise a lot of those conversations were really uncomfortable okay but um but the biggest thing I
took from it is that learning especially learning things that um you maybe not want to hear that one
that's a painful process like what um that this country for a very long time made it really hard
through zoning and public housing and mortgage Finance policy for black people or Hispanic people
to own a home rather than that and that is in fact the number one way people in America have built
wealth for decades that's fascinating and that's just something you've learned by going there yeah
I mean I'm sure you've read about it before but actually seeing it there's nothing quite like
talking to people who bring um a real world real life experience to a conversation now
when people yell at each other right they're just yelling past each other nobody's hearing
anything either side is saying all right you got to be willing to go listen and stop walking in
there with a point of view or an attitude that you already know the answer to the questions
it seems like so much of how politicians address these issues is about demonizing the other side uh
on critical race theory on trans students I see a lot of people in the Republican Party doing that
and there's probably a very nuanced view that a lot of people in the center have about a lot of
these issues totally agree with that I think the the whole question about um racism generally I
happen to think there's a nuanced conversation to be had on that too but if you were to ask
me if the Democrats and Republicans are having a nuanced conversation on that my answer would be no