Dan Pfeiffer, former senior adviser and White House communications director to former President Barack Obama and co-host of “Pod Save America,” spoke to students about the state of the Democratic Party and other political topics in a Tuesday event hosted by Northwestern University College Democrats.
Political science Prof. Cody Keenan (Weinberg ’02), who previously served as Obama’s director of speechwriting, moderated the discussion in the Technological Institute.
“I’m sure I’m not the only one in the room who can say that the nightmare stories coming out of American politics have been rendered slightly more tolerable by looking forward to what the hosts of ‘Pod Save America’ will have to say,” Weinberg senior and NU College Democrats co-President Adam Durr said while introducing Pfeiffer.
Pfeiffer encouraged students interested in political careers to join campaign staff for Democratic candidates, adding that their early 20s and post-grad years are the ideal time to get involved.
Addressing concerns of how losing an election could affect a student’s career, Pfeiffer said losses he personally experienced as a staffer were valuable.
“I learned more from the campaigns that I lost than the ones I won,” Pfeiffer said. “Because when you win, you think everything you did was right. You could make the case that every decision was correct.”
Pfeiffer said the Democratic Party cannot “fix the brand as it is,” arguing that it should nominate a political outsider in the 2028 presidential election.
If Democrats win upcoming elections, Pfeiffer said, in order to keep swing voters from going back to supporting Republicans, Democrats would need to “do something very real and tangible.”
Pfeiffer also said he believes Democrats need to interact with voters across various forms of media, whether it be podcasts or social media, on top of traditional press.
“My guess is that when the commercials come on, you pick your phone up, and you’re not watching it,” Pfeiffer said. “We’re just literally lighting billions of dollars on fire, so you have to find ways to actually get attention.”
Speaking on the current state of politics, Pfeiffer said President Donald Trump’s recent actions, especially those related to immigration enforcement, have driven away younger voters who initially supported his economic promises.
He said earlier in his political career, Republicans and Democrats were more civil toward each other despite disagreements.
“Donald Trump has made me much more cynical about Republicans in politics and the capacity of compromise actually working,” Pfeiffer said.
He said that throughout American history, backlash often follows progress in civil rights. He pointed to Trump being elected president in 2016 after Obama had served two terms.
For Pfeiffer, processing Trump’s 2016 victory was difficult because he’d been hopeful about progressive change under another Democratic president.
“They would learn their lesson: that the world had changed and they had to change with it,” Pfeiffer said of Republicans at the time. “And instead, the exact opposite of that happened. The worst case scenario was they learned the lesson that the way to win was to be as hateful as possible.”
Pfeiffer said that although many voters fixate on shifting poll numbers, he recommends getting off the “poller-coaster.”
Communication first-year Reeve Green, a long-time listener of ‘Pod Save America,’ said he enjoyed hearing about how Pfeiffer believes young people can enact change through politics.
“The only way to actually change anything, if you’re going to change something, is to go out and do it,” Green said. “He put it in a perspective of one foot in front of the other and getting the work done that you want to see.”
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