Is it Perry Meade's time?

Yes, he's only 26. But when it comes to overtaking Young Kim in CA-40, there's a strong argument to be made he's our best shot.

Perry Meade inside High Ground Coffee in Mission Viejo.

So I met Perry Meade for java last week.

We sat down inside High Ground Coffee in Mission Viejo. He arrived first. I was a couple of minutes late.

To be totally honest, I didn’t know what to expect. Perry is the latest Democrat to enter the CA-40 race to beat Republican Young Kim and restore some sanity to a universe that has been poisoned by the orange taint of Donald Trump’s douchery. Perry is 26—half my age and wet behind the ears. Lives at home with his folks. Has a resume overflowing with political activism. I sorta figured he’d be the genre of run-for-office species I loathe: The opportunist. The egoist. The kid who dreams of being president. The ambitious asswipe who sees himself as an inevitability. Always smiling. Always on. That grotesque-yet-unavoidable political bubble wrapped around his body.

I was wrong.

Perry and I hung for about an hour. We talked sports (he’s a Clippers diehard who loves LeBron—go figure), burritos and lasagna, hopes of America and nightmares of America. And when we were done, I left, called a friend and said, “This may well be the guy.”

“The guy for what?” she asked.

“The guy to be the CA-40 nominee.”

She paused.

“What about Esther?” she said.

“I think it probably comes down to the two of them,” I replied.

And, indeed, at this moment that’s how I feel. Esther Kim Varet, who has been in the race for a greater duration of time, has a significant money advantage—no small thing. She dropped some new ads that, I think, are quite good. Perry, on the other hand, brings a geographical authenticity that Esther can’t match—he’s from here, she’s a recent transfer. Plus, even though he’s but a cub, Perry boasts a wealth of political experience Esther simply does not possess. That seems like a plus. But, in 2025, who the hell knows? Maybe it’s not.

Anyhow, here’s my interview with Perry Meade. Win or lose, he seems to be a real dude …

JEFF PEARLMAN: “Perry, why would anyone want this job?”

PERRY MEADE: “Can I tell you my personal story about why this all happened?”

J.P.: “Hit me.”

P.M.: “I was born and raised in Rancho San Margarita. My dad worked, my mom raised me and my three siblings. Their names are Kevin and Kristen. Dad is actually, like you, from New York. He lived in Chicago until he was 11, New York until he was 19. He would watch the Rose Bowl Parade every year while he was in a blizzard in New York, and say, ‘I’m moving to California.’ So he dropped out of college and moved to Southern California.”

J.P.: “I can identify with that.”

P.M.: “He waited tables and was in a band and has always been super cool. And that's when he met met my mom. Anyways, my parents raised me and my three siblings. My mom and my dad worked. I grew up watching Colbert, Jon Stewart … thankfully I had a little bit of decent politics growing up. But everything sort changed when I was 12. My older sibling was diagnosed with a life-altering disability. They're still disabled now and on Medicaid.”

** Interview note: Perry and I spoke off the record about the specifics of his sibling’s disability. But he requested some privacy on the specifics out of respect for his family. Which I, obviously, agreed to.

P.M.: “Over the course of the campaign, I've had a lot of talks about the complications of running now, because I help caretake for my sibling. That's why I live at home. So I came back home after I transferred [from Saddleback College] to Berkeley, graduated, and I help caretake for my sibling. And I saw my family struggle financially, emotionally. I'm figuring out how to tell this entire story about my family—because it's my story too.”

J.P.: “I understand that.”

P.M.: So … everything changed. My older sibling was diagnosed with a life-altering disability. I saw my family struggle financially, emotionally, trying to care for my sibling, and that was sort of my political …”

J.P.: “How old were you?”

P.M.: “I was 12 and sibling was 14. And that was my political awakening into how low-key the structures and systems are, and why I became very interested in politics and policy and changing government systems. When I was a teenager, the first campaign I did was, a high schooler, I helped get the capstone to provide the school district solar panels.”

J.P.: “I read about that. Why would a high school kid give a shit about that?”

P.M.: “I was watching the election happening, Trump talking about the Paris Climate Accords and how he didn’t care about anything environmental. This was before he'd gotten elected. And also, me just thinking common sense. We live in Southern California. I wanted to have clean air and clean water in the future for myself. And Trump says he’ll pull out the Paris Climate Accords. We need to be doing what we can. Be the change we want to see in the world. So as a politically awakened high schooler, I helped lead that campaign.”

J.P.: “Wait, time out. I just want to focus on it for a minute. You're in high school. Most high schoolers are concerned about whatever, the Clippers, or dating, or I don't know, whatever, Candy Crush, who the hell knows, right? Why was young Perry... What actually, besides like, oh it's an interesting... Why?”

P.M.: “It was my family. Seeing my family struggle with ... this is how I view politics, I guess, is that my family did everything right. My dad worked hard. He got a good job. My mom … they bought a home. They were living what was supposed to be the Orange County dream, the suburban family where my mom raised me and my three siblings …”

J.P.: “Where was your dad working as?”

P.M.: “He's an attorney, and not a super big partner, law firm attorney. And you're one emergency away from losing potentially everything, especially as the middle class continued to dwindle until it's basically non-existent. And so, that was my awakening, as I saw my family struggle, through no fault of their own, trying to care for a sick and disabled child. And I thought that was unfair, and I do not think that people should be punished because there's an emergency or someone gets sick.

“And that was my big awakening, and just the broken political system that we have … I was clocked in with being able to identify and wanting to do something that I could do to help my community, which was originally started as the solar campaign. So that's why I cared so much in high school about this, because at a young age, I saw my family struggle and was questioning why this is the case within this country, and just happened to become more, I guess, aware because of my family's situation at a young age.”

J.P.: “So did having the early political experiences make you more jaded or less jaded?”

P.M.: “I wouldn't say... I don't know. I try to always have hope, because we are the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We have had great success at so many points in this country. One job used to be enough to be able to buy a home, raise a family, buy a TV in the '50s, right? Buy a car, have an American dream life. And we can get there again, it's just there are a lot of things broken right now. But I'm not going to give up. What am I going to do? Move to another country? I can't do that. This is my home. This is my community. And so, I have hope that things will be better. It's really hard right now and things might not look like hopeful, but I am not going to ever lose that. I don't know what the alternative is. To give up? So, it's just a fire inside me that will always fuel me.

“And so, did that when I was 16. I continued staying in policy work. And so I went to Saddleback College to be at home and help care for my sibling …”

J.P.: “You were there two years?”

P.M.: “Yeah. And so, when I got started there, I was working on a climate action plan to get solar for the college and other colleges. And while I was there, I saw a lot of my classmates struggling. And community college is amazing. The California college system is the absolute crown jewel in the country. It's so good. Saddleback College has 26,000 students. There's a lot of veterans from Pendleton, a lot of returning students …”

Meade, second from right, alongside fellow candidates Joe Kerr, Dr. Paula Swift, Christina Gagnier and Nina Linh, foreground, at a recent event.

J.P.: “My least favorite thing in California is when you ask someone where the kid goes to college and they go, ‘Oh, just Saddleback.’ I'm like, why are you ashamed of going to Saddleback? It's freaking awesome …”

P.M.: “It's amazing. It's so good. You can get so many different programs for non-bachelor degree jobs. Great nursing program. You can transfer, you have UC tags …”

J.P.: “I’m with you.”

P.M.: “I saw a lot of my classmates struggling with being able to afford living, because not everyone has the luxury of living at home. And so, I saw a lot of students struggling, especially at a community college, where older students, returning students, veterans struggling with being able to go afford living in Orange County and finish getting their college education. And in my mind, it's the job of the institution to be able to make it easier for students to get an education. So I proposed this idea that we should build on-campus affordable housing. I got laughed out of the room. I was 18.”

J.P.: “What does that mean, you proposed? Who did you propose it to?”

P.M.: “The Chancellor's Council. Technically, it's called the President's Consultation Council. I was laughed out of the room. Community colleges aren't in the real estate business. And I said, ‘Well, I'm going to go get elected student body president. Shared governance laws mean I'll be in every single one of these shared governance meetings and have the voice at the table, and over the next year and a half we're going to build a campaign to persuade and work with people to win.’ And then we won. So now, Saddleback College is building on-campus affordable housing for students. It's going to break ground in 2030. Irvine Valley College followed. It's in the same district. And so, it's not as much as I would've liked, but they're going to be creating almost 1,000 units of affordable housing for students across the two college campuses.”

J.P.: “Serious question—how does it feel for you to have started something and to see it actually happen?”

P.M.: “Good. I mean, that's the point of public service. You do this because you're trying to deliver results for the people that you're supposed to be serving. And by being student vice president there, I was singularly focused on how we can make life better for the students here. And now, seeing that through is great, and it's the sort of thing that for so long I've seen so many leaders in government that are too scared. I got laughed out of the room and they thought it was an insane idea.”

J.P.: “It’s only insane until it happens.”

P.M.: “Exactly. And while I was doing that, I was recruiting a bunch of students to run for city council seats in the Orange County swing districts in 2018. Then the school shooting in Parkland, Florida happened. There was that huge nationwide march. They were turning the momentum from that march into organization, and then they brought me on to help build a national organization, organizing team for March For Our Lives.”

J.P.: “How did they know to bring you on?”

P.M.: “There was news coverage of the students and the city council seats. And Orange County was a hot spot in 2018, and so they reached out to me. We all hit it off. I had did lot of work helping March For Our Lives and doing student voter stuff in 2018. And then we built the national organizing team in early 2019, the framework for that. And so, they brought me on. I was doing national organizing strategy, legislation in California.

“We helped build this thing we called the Peace Plan for Safer California. We were inspired by the Green New Deal and the people here in the environmental movement. And so we worked on gun violence, restraining order legislation, voting rights legislation. We helped pass this thing called the Student and Civic Voter Empowerment Act, which was inspired by some of the work we did in 2018, and that made it so every public college, community college, Cal State, UC has to have a vote coordinator on campus that helps to get out the vote and voter registration.

“It's great. We've utilized it in multiple campaigns in Orange County and at UCI and Saddleback and Irvine Valley College. And so, I helped do legislation there, gun violence, restraining orders, gun violence prevention, basically programs at the city level. This is around the time I transferred to Berkeley …”

J.P.: “Wait, when you went to Berkeley, you lived at home because of COVID?”

P.M.: “I lived in Berkeley, then COVID happened, and then I went back to Berkeley for the last year and got my apartment up there. But this is when I started getting a little bit more involved in the labor movement, because having seen March For Our Lives, it's the power of workers together and people working people, it's their own money fighting for their own cause. And it's fighting for the materials, for higher wages, for worker protections, for healthcare. And I think there's a lot of beauty and power in that.

“And so, I got more involved in the labor movement and I came back to Orange County. I moved back with my family because I helped caretake with my siblings. I have two younger siblings.”

J.P.: “How old are they?”

P.M.: “We're all two years apart. So I have a younger brother who's about to finish this firefighter program, and a younger sister who works, lives in LA. She was at Cal State, ran track there.”

J.P.: “OK.”

P.M.: “So I moved back. I help care with my family. And now I'm with United Local 11. I help from the political and policy angles …”

J.P.: “How did that happen? How'd you wind up with 11?”

P.M.: “I wanted to be in the labor movement. I've known a lot of the leaders in the United Local 11 through politics and have been involved for so long. And we met up, we talked about a vision of how we can build a party, a political system and labor system that is putting working people front and center.

“And so, I think the core of that is we have to put the economic affordability issue front and center, because it is the greatest area of inequality that we're experiencing now since the Gilded Age, and people are struggling, and if we don't, if we're not clear in our contrast with Republicans, if we we sit back and watch them give the biggest tax breaks to billionaires and let them fear-monger on immigrants and trans people, then we're not going to build the majority coalition to beat Trumpism.

“And so, me and the Union talked about this, and they brought me on and I started doing political policy with the Union, where we work on living wage and worker protection ordinances in the cities and counties around the area, and I'm in the political program as well. We did a huge program to help get Dave Min and Derek Tran elected. And it worked really, really well. Low propensity voters care about the economic issue. That's what we focussed upon.

“So, I am now on leave while I run for office. I just launched the campaign last week and now we're off to the races.”

J.P.: “When you were doing this all along … the different movements and developments, were you ever thinking, one day I'm going to run for Congress? One day I'm going to run for something? Was your goal growing up, I want to run for blank?”

P.M.: “No, definitely not. As a young person who's doing all this, everyone asks that all the time. ‘Oh my gosh, when are you going to run for office? Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.’ I didn't want to. I've seen how hard it is. It is hard. It's such a broken system, and it's so expensive to run. You have to be raising money instead of talking to people. It's really unfortunate how broken it is. And I don't think anyone wants to actually do this … to be a candidate …”

J.P.: “It seems like the worst.”

P.M.: “It's not good. It's really not good, and it's part of the reason why things are so bad. The money in politics. I can't believe, one week of me doing this and I can't believe that every member of Congress isn't making the first bill they fight for to get rid of Citizens United, because it's just so bad. But no, there was no real plan to do this. There was no plan to do that this cycle. And I did this because a lot of people in my community asked me to, and that's why I'm running.”

J.P.: “So when you post, I saw on your Instagram feed you raised $250,000, which I totally understand. Does that in a way pain you, that this is the world we live in …”

P.M.: “Yeah, it does. Yeah. Well, especially for someone like me who's 26, trying to run, to flip a red to blue seat. I think I am the best candidate to do so. I'm doing it because I deeply care about my community and this is personal to me. But there's always going to be viability questions, and it's part of what you asked me too, about being 26-years old, right? I think that for me, I'm very proud of the experience I've had since I started a young age, and all different types of policy and political work. And the other big part is money. So, being able to have that much support from the community and raising that sort of money as a 26-year-old was very important for showing viability, which is unfortunate. That shouldn't be the case in politics. It shouldn't matter how much money you have, but it is gross that you have to show that. It is what it is.”

J.P.: “Do you get used to asking for money, or does it always kind of suck?”

P.M.: “I guess I'll find out, but... If you get used to it, it's probably not. I don't know what that says. We'll find out. It seems cold and strange.”

J.P.: “I hate asking for anything in life.”

P.M.: “I know. I know. I'm hoping it'll become easier, because part of why I'm running too is, this is my community. I have been doing this for nearly 10 years now, and I don't want my campaign to just be about me, me, me, too. This is supposed to be a vehicle of work we've been doing in Orange County for so long, and the fact that I do think we need a new generation of leaders in Congress, too. I want this to be a community movement, and so you're not just giving me, Perry, money to the campaign. I want to use it to help us down ballot. I want this to be a community-rooted campaign that's uplifting us at all levels of politics and government. And so, I think that will maybe make it easier to get money, because I'm not just saying, ‘Give it to me.’ Give it to the cause and the campaign movement that we're building, not just me, the individual. But I don't know if that will make it easier.”

J.P.: “Do you look at this campaign as more of a local campaign or a national campaign?”

P.M.: “I think it's definitely local for me, but I think there are a couple things here. I do think we need a new generation of leaders in Congress, that are rooted in the problems that are affecting why the Democratic Party is so unpopular right now. And by the core of it, I think it's local. Young Kim has gutted Medicaid to give a tax break to the richest people, and there are thousands of families just like my own in this district that are going to be hurt because of this.

“And I think it's local to the core in that, because Orange County is a community, I know this, I know the people I've grown up with here, and I think that to beat someone like Young Kim, who has positioned herself as this moderate her entire time, it's going to have to be community rooted in calling her out for basically just caving into her national special interests, instead of actually caring about what people are feeling in the community. She's not doing town halls. If she had any care about the people in the community, she would be listening to stories from family like my own, my sibling on Medicaid. And instead, she's not doing any of that. And so, it's going to be calling her out for her giving into the national Republican Party and special interests, Donald Trump, and losing sight on the community.

J.P.: “Are ICE raids something to run on?”

P.M.: “It is absolutely disgusting what they're doing. They made a promise and they lied about it, of course, that they were only going after violent criminals and gang members, and instead they're going after farm workers and hotel workers, and parents and veterans, and day laborers, and it is disgusting, and we absolutely have to be opposed to it. That's what I would say.

“And if it's something to run on … I don't know what the politics of necessarily everything is, because I think what the Democratic Party should be doing is making the cost of living part of a global crisis first, while not compromising on our values when it comes to immigration or other issues. When people think of the Democratic Party, the image of what I want people to talk about is affordability, fairness, dignity and work, housing, healthcare, and included in that is defending our immigrant brothers and sisters. Whether that should be the number one thing we'd run on, I just don't think any issue, you know what I mean, should be the number one thing we'd run on, unless it's affordability.”

J.P.: “Have you met Young Kim?”

P.M.: “I've never met Young Kim. No.”

J.P.: “Would you debate her?”

P.M.: “Of course.”

J.P.: “So let's say you win, right? Congress is basically like, you serve two years, you're asking for money a week after you're elected. Besides the fact that you have good intentions, you want to represent Orange County, blah, blah, blah. It just seems like a horrible job filled with nonsense, bullshit, people trying to corrupt you. What could you possibly hope to accomplish? I saw a video you did the other day, which I found admirable, about, ‘I'm going to fight for an assault weapons ban.’ But the odds of that actually happening are almost zero, just because of the corrupt nature of this country. What can one actually do in Congress?”

P.M.: “That's a good question. I think so much of it depends on what we see happen around the rest of the country with who gets elected this cycle, where the national party responds to the base of the party, how they feel about things. But we win in '26, let's say we take the House back, and I'm the nominee, part of that wing that gets elected, sworn into Congress in January, 2027. Well, we're still going to be under a Trump presidency. We'll see what happens with the Senate. And we're not going to actually be legislating anything. Nothing will initially get done if we democratize the House. It's going to be trying to make sure Trump isn't doing terrible things again. Which is, I don't think anyone wants to be doing that. That's a horrible job is, to be having to use every lever of the House of Representatives to fight back from Trump. I mean, ripping healthcare, just ripping families away from each other by putting ICE on everyone.

“So, that is going to suck. I'm still going to be steadfast in pushing for the issues, for universal child care, for a universal healthcare system. And we won't get any of that legislation done, likely, in '27, in the next term. But I think what we need is more people that are absolutely, unapologetically locked in on fighting on affordability, and when we hopefully get the chance to have the White House back and Democratic control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, then we need more people that are going to be unapologetically fighting for that and pushing the party toward making that the center of its platform, which it hasn't done.

“So, what I would do in Congress, it's unclear what it would be in the Trump term, other than pushing back against Trump and trying to center the issues of affordability that I care about and want to push forward in this community. How much of that legislation will get done that first term? Probably nothing. And then we fight to get majorities in the White House back, and then we push for those affordability issues.”

J.P.: “When I go to a lot of these events, local political events … I'm 53. I’m one of the younger people there. I'm not even being mean, but the average age is probably 70. Do people your age give a shit? Has hope been lost and they're just like, fuck it, I'm just going to go on TikTok?”

P.M.: “That's a good question. They do give a shit. I think what it is, is that no one is speaking to the issues they care about. I think a lot of people view me in Orange County politics as the designated youth expert …”

J.P.: “Which probably gets exhausting after a while.”

P.M.: “It's hilarious too, because they're like, ‘Perry, young people didn't vote. What happened?’ And as someone who's done work in environmental issues with solar campaigns, did gun violence prevention, people are like, ‘The Democrats are so good on guns, on the environment.’ But what a lot of young people are voting on is, they can't afford rent. We can't start a family. JD Vance and shit talking about, ‘Oh, the fertility crisis.’ We can't afford to have kids! We can't afford to do these things!

“Young people aren't overwhelmingly voting Republican now. It's not like they've been persuaded. It's a lot of them don't vote. They don't care, because they don't think either party is fighting for them. And so, I think what we have to do is unapologetically fight on the economic stuff, and that will get young people to vote for us. We've seen that before in elections, where you have a younger candidate that is fighting on an economic platform, or even an older candidate that fights for an economic thing, and it gets young people motivated, and they turn out at higher rates. And young people are crucial to the Democratic Party's platform. It's what gave Obama, it was a huge part of his campaign, rise to power. And we're not doing that. Instead, we're giving in to billionaire and big corporations' special interests, and we're not fighting things young people care about.

“And if we were unapologetically fighting to make rents lower, to raise people's wages, to make it so people can actually think of a future they can afford, they can buy a home in Orange County, I think we will see young people turn out at a rate that, even if it isn't a blue wave here, gives us the potential to flip this sort of seat, and it's the exact sort of majority coalition we need to keep the seat in '28 or 2030.”

J.P.: “Did you think Harris was going to win?”

P.M.: “No.”

J.P.: “No?”

P.M.: “I did not, initially. Well, OK I'll be clear about that. Biden, I did not think was going to win. I was at the event with Biden in LA with George Clooney …”

J.P.: “Oh, you were there?”

P.M.: “So I was an elected DNC delegate. And so, I was at that event. As soon as Biden was done, I looked at my friend and I said, ‘We’re screwed.”

J.P.: “What made you feel that way?”

P.M.: “His state of... His condition. He couldn't communicate. I knew we were in trouble. And so, after everything happened, he sat down, Kamala was the nominee, I had hope. There was a moment of hope. And then I saw over the course of the campaign … we've seen in the current way that we do politics at the National Democratic Party … when Musk did his stupid jump on stage, we then countered with Mark Cuban and we said, ‘Look, we have good billionaires of our own!’

“What we should have done is immediately counter Musk with the factory workers from Fremont that Musk fired for trying to form a union at Tesla. That's the sort of contrast we need. It's like, ‘Great, they have the richest person in the history of the world jumping on stage talking about how they're going to destroy benefits and programs for working people.’ Our counter needs to be, ‘Here are the workers that he fired for trying to get living wages and working productions.’”

J.P.: “I can’t argue.”

P.M.: And instead we were like, ‘We have good billionaires, too, right?’ And we're then playing on their platform, and they have this idea of the American dream, which is the richest people own everything, and maybe you'll be as rich as them one day too if you work hard, even though they don't make it possible for people to even pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's not even possible anymore for so many people. And so, we don't provide a true alternative vision of our American dream, which for me is the idea that one job is enough. If you work a job, you should get paid enough and housing's affordable enough that you can pay your rent and be able to save up money to afford a home in Orange County one day. That if you have a medical emergency, you're not going to go bankrupt for it. We don't provide that true contrast. Instead, we roll out Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban and we go milquetoast Republican, instead of being fighting for what our actual values are supposed to be. And then we wonder why working people or young people say, ‘Ah, but none of these parties actually speak for me.’ And so, that's what I think. So when I started seeing that, I was getting really worried about winning.

J.P.: “So on election night, did you think Trump was going to win?”

P.M.: “I wasn't sure if he was going to get a majority. The majority was surprising. Now on election night too, I want to be clear, I was doing a big program for Dave and Derek, and so I was getting notified. People were like, ‘Perry, look at what's happening in Georgia.’ I said, ‘I don't care if we have three hours to polls close here, we need to go make sure Dave and Derek win.’ But when I saw the results come in, I guess we can say I wasn't shocked. I was surprised how early they were calling it. And he actually won a majority, unlike 2016, where he'd won with the Electoral College. But that he won the popular vote was a little bit of surprise, but I wasn't shocked. This was the result of 10 years of not giving something for people to vote for and a clear message, and relying on the anti-Trump sentiment enough. Like, hello, that's all we've been doing.”

J.P.: “I went to the University of Delaware. Joe Biden went to Delaware. I was a big Joe Biden fan for a long time. I think him running again did more damage to this party than... I think the damage was unimaginable.”

P.M.: “He never should have ran again. I mean, part of what he said when he first ran was he wanted to be a transitional candidate …”

J.P.: “And that's what I hate about politics. If there's anything that sums up what I hate about politics, there's people around him telling him, ‘No, you should run, you should run.’ And the ego of a guy who should not run, running, drives me ...”

P.M.: “And the fact that if he didn't run originally, and we had a robust primary, he would've been in a way better position. I still don't know, because I'm so let down by the current way of politics and Democratic Party's lack of willing to fight on the affordability issue, if it would have worked out differently. But yeah, him running was a disaster.”

J.P.: “Are you cool with the Democrats making Epstein as big an issue as possible?”

P.M.: “I think they should make a big issue. I think they should. They should make it a big issue because it shows the hypocrisy that is Trump and them, the Republicans. But again, if that's all we are, there's a chance it's going to fade, right? And a year from now, who knows if Trump's going to release an Epstein list in which he's removed from it, and he'll put ‘Sleepy Joe’ on it. It'll be scribbled in with his terrible handwriting, additional names. And a year from now when we actually are getting into the elections, it might be old news. Trump is really good at driving media narratives and creating spectacle.

“We have a long ways to go. Who knows how much it will matter. We should 100 percent be hitting them, because first off, it's fucking horrible. We should not have pedophiles in the White House, and we should be calling them out on that. But if we're relying on that to win in 2026, it's the exact same trap we've fallen into before. Everyone thought it was be the same thing with the Access Hollywood tapes that came out of Trump. We need more. We need to show what we’re doing.”

J.P.: “Okay, so you look at America right now and it's rough. I'm actually being serious. Give me some reason for optimism …”

P.M.: “I think the reason for optimism is what, the exact point I was trying to say to you, is that young people, they're not fascists, they're not all being absorbed into Trump's ideology. They are disillusioned, and a lot of working people are disillusioned. There is a whole group, it's the party of non-voters, the people that are checked out of our political system, that are the ones most affected by the affordability crisis that we have, that are the most upset with the broken political system. They don't feel anyone's fighting for them.

“I think we can get a lot of these people if we run on unapologetically fighting for issues they care about. I think we will be able to build the majority coalition to get us out of this mess. And that is the hope I have. And it's not like we can't do it. We're the wealthiest country in the world. We could be funding universal child care and no one's taxes on the middle class would be raised. We could be funding all sorts of trade schools and building a new economy that isn't just based around the idea that you either go to a four-year university or you work at McDonald's the rest of your life, and then have no chance of ever buying a home. If you go to university, then you're going to be paying off school the rest of your life. We don't have to do things this way. We can make life better for people, and not have to raise the taxes on every middle class family or working class family.

“There's so much wealth in this country that is just at the top, and I think if we are actually giving our positive vision of the future and running authentic candidates and campaigning on this, we can help change politics and get good governing again. That is my hope. If I'm wrong, I will learn that, I guess, over this campaign the next few years, as democracy continues to collapse. But I don't think I am. I think that people are just looking for authentic hope in something that, when you close your eyes, you can see the type of country we all want.” #