Democrats’ former chair tries to become the left’s Joe Rogan

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

David Weigel: How did this podcast come together? What was the germ of the idea?

Jaime Harrison: Listen, I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. When I was DNC chair, I had this whole idea about a channel on YouTube called DTV. I would anchor a podcast, and then we would have a number of other shows with Democratic elected officials and activists. The only thing we ended up doing was Welcome to the Party, my DNC podcast.

Very quickly, our folks said we don’t have the bandwidth to do that, so we abandoned that effort. But as we saw from the 2024 elections, more and more people are getting their news from social media channels. This was something I knew that we needed, but we weren’t able to do.

Now, I don’t have anybody that I have to send anything to for approval. I can do whatever the hell I want to do!

You’re bringing Hunter Biden on as one of your first guests. What was the thinking there?

Well, I got a chance to get to know Hunter a lot over the last four years. I don’t know if you remember, but back in the day, when I was the South Carolina Democratic Party chair, I had this little series called “chair chats.” In chair chats, we talked about moving past caricatures. And in many ways, I think Hunter Biden has become a caricature in politics.

A lot of people don’t know how smart he is, don’t know his background, don’t know the stuff that he’s worked on. They only know what either his allies or his enemies have put out there, and he’s been defined by that.

I thought it would be really interesting to pull back the curtain so that people got a chance to understand who he is, and for him to get an opportunity to talk about some of the things that maybe he’s only been able to talk to his family members about. It’s a really, really interesting conversation. We had everything from laughter and joy to tears to anger to frustration.

That’s what a good family conversation is all about, right? It’s about having that range of emotions and being able to be vulnerable — and to really share what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling about some of the most important things going on in your life.

One thing Hunter Biden says in the interview is that Democrats “lost the election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party. That’s my position.” Is that your position?

You’ll hear some of my feedback on that, but I would say this now: Things may have been somewhat different, had the loyalty that we saw Republicans have for Donald Trump, when Trump got convicted 34 times, and you didn’t hear a peep from the Republican Party … I would love to see a little more of that from Democrats.

Democrats are very quick, man, to take our knives out and go after our folks at the first sign of any problem. And I don’t think that’s always in the best interest of the party. I heard this a lot on the campaign trail.

That lack of loyalty, I think, is part of the reason why you see some wavering within the base of our party, because they don’t feel as though that the party will stand up for them.

Democrats now seem to agree that they were too reluctant to go on podcasts that might last for hours, and that Trump was smart to do it. Maybe he has more ability to do that than some other candidates. But from your perspective, running the DNC during that campaign, what was their reluctance?

I agree with Tim Walz. There’s this hypersensitivity not to mess up in the Democratic Party. I saw this at the DNC sometimes. I had the pushback even sometimes with my own comms people, sometimes even with the comms folks over at the White House.

You saw this with President Biden. Sometimes, the president is allowed to be who he is, and he lets loose, and there might be a gaffe once or twice. Hell, Donald Trump gaffes every time he opens his mouth, but he keeps going. It shows that he’s real.

The part that many of us loved about Joe Biden is that he’s real. He might mess up or say something that might not be the most PC here or there, but it just showed the humanity of the man. That was part of the charm of Joe Biden and why people loved him.

But we Democrats put ourselves in straitjackets, and we sanitize every damn thing that comes out of our mouths. So what does come out comes out without any soul. Republicans understand the power of emotion. It could be fear or it could be joy, but it’s emotion, and they use it.

Is there anyone you blame in the Harris campaign for her not doing more of these podcasts?

To be quite honest, I don’t know whose ultimate decision it was. I don’t know if it was Jen [O’Malley Dillon] or anybody else. But we had two weeks of — I mean, this just unnerved me in some ways – two weeks of, why isn’t Kamala doing interviews? Prior to that, she was knocking interviews out of the box.

So I never understood: Why wouldn’t you let her just go and do the interview? Once she did one, the commentary was about why she took so long.

It was not something that I would have done. I also felt that, in the end, they put a muzzle on both her and on Tim Walz. And I asked Gov. Walz about that. He was so loose during the whole veepstakes. He was great on TV. And I just don’t know what happened afterwards. That was my biggest frustration. But you know, hell, they put restrictor plates on me, too.

What questions are you asking these Democrats that nobody else has been asking?

At the end of every episode, I ask them who they’d give a special award to, and we call it the Sit Your Ass Down Award. Who in politics would you like to give the Sit Your Ass Down Award? And it really is enlightening to hear. Jim Clyburn was very diplomatic, and he told me: Jaime, I’m not going to answer that. Tim Walz was very game.