available every weekend on c-span3. tonight, the focus is on world war ii. high school from teacher karen cabana about food rationing during the war, and innovation that led to modern-day process food. watch tonight starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span3. host: at our table this morning, lanae erickson, who is the vice president of social policy and politics at the group third way, here to talk about the democratic primary. and i just want to begin with a piece that you wrote recently, and the headline -- "avoiding the fun house mirror effect in the democratic party." what you wrote was, "every person has their story about the morning after the election day, 2016. what ties these experiences together was the collective sense of shock. shock was a product of the fun house effect that distorted our political realities for the preceding year, and it could happen all over in the next 17 months if we are not careful to

inoculate ourselves to it. to do so, democrats will need to look beyond the hyper engaged on twitter, who align their campaigns with the vast majority of democratic voters who are looking for a pragmatic progressive path forward to beat trump." guest: that is right. host: first, what was the fun house mirror effect in 2016, and what do you think it will be in 2020? know, i think a lot of us who are in d.c. get very sucked in by hearing the people around us. we have an echo chamber of friends, people who are on our social media, and we are informed by that and think then everybody in the country feels that way. we know that those feedback loops are not representative. so, for example, i did not have a lot of people on my social media feeds or friends that wanted to support donald trump, but clearly a lot of people in the country did. and we need to make sure that, as we are heading into picking a democratic nominee, that we are not suffering from the same

problem of only listening to the people that we see in front of our faces, only listening to the inside-the-beltway crowd, or even the folks on twitter, because we realize that even in a democratic primary, they are not actually representative of real voters. host: that is what happened in 2016. what do you think is happening in 2020 to also give that fun house mirror effect? guest: when people are looking at the democratic candidates in the field, there are a lot of people who are not engaged yet. they might say joe biden is my pick, because i know his name, or bernie sanders is my pick , because i know his name. and we realize that actually a lot of people have not even tuned in yet. there are a lot of democratic voters who will participate in the primary, who are regular voters, but are saying they are too many people right now, i cannot engage in this, and i need you to wind it down a little before i start weighing the candidates.

proportion of the democratic there is a small proportion of the democratic electorate driving the conversation on twitter, so the twitter audience, i sometimes call them, are driving the conversation. whether it is about immigration or medicare for all, they are saying this is what democrats want, but nine in 10 democrats don't even treat. -- even tweet. and those who do, they look different in their attitudes and what they look for in a nominee. if you are a candidate or candidates that who wakes up every day and tries to feel what people want, you are not getting the real view of voters. host: what is third way and why do you care? guest: we are a center-left think tank, and we specialize in helping people understand democratic voters, voters across the spectrum to try to get to progressive change. we know we have to convince a broad coalition of people in order to bring folks along, and we do not think winning by

50.001% is sufficient to do that and govern and see the change we want to see, particularly right now we care, because donald trump is doing major damage to our country, to our country's values, to a lot of people in this country, and we want to see him gone. we do not want democrats to get distracted by this twitterati and think this is where they need to go when those folks do not represent most democratic voters and most across the country. we want to win, and we think we need to understand voters to do that. host: who are the hyper engaged? guest: what we found is we have been doing quarterly poles of democratic primary voters, and we found one in 10 tweet at least once a day, so about 10% are very engaged on twitter. that same group is more likely to visit a candidate's website, to go to a rally, to engage and watch the debates, and so those

folks are watching with a fine-tooth comb everything that the candidates are saying. they do not even look like the rest of the electorate. they are much younger. they are much more likely to say the democratic party needs to move left to win. 54% of them call themselves democratic-socialist, and that is a term most democrats would not associate themselves with. and they look really different. they are younger, they are whiter, they are more educated than the general population with a different set of priorities. host: what is the percentage? how much of the democratic party of primary voters do they make up, these hyper engaged? guest: there are about 1/10 of the overall primary electorate . we are only looking at likely primary voters. this is not about getting to swing voters in the general election. this is just the primary. it kind of happens in every off year, that the hyper engaged drive the conversation, and then

the primary voters actually come in and vote, and they vote for different candidates. we saw this happen in 2017, before the 2018 midterms, where all of these news reports that the left took over the democratic party, that our revolution were putting up all these candidates. when we came to voting in 2018, a lot of those folks lost their primaries. only 33% of them won their primaries, whereas the folks who are the new dems, the pragmatic progressives, they cleaned up in their primaries, and in the general, the new dems delivered the house. they flipped 33 seats to give nancy pelosi the gavel, and the loo revolutionary justice democrats do not flip a single seat from red to blue. so there is this narrative that forms that the left is taking over, this is who we have to pay attention to, and then democratic primary voters say, i like that person. they sound like they know how to

get things done, and they are focused on the right issues. host: where do they differ on priorities? guest: a big place where we have seen a difference is health care. when you look at the twitter folks, they are very interested in single-payer, they are interested in abolishing private insurance, and even when you tell them about the concerns that folks might have about that kind of a system, and that people might have their health care taken away or that taxes would be raised and all these other concerns, they still stick with single-payer. when you look at the democratic electorate, they do not support single-payer. they support health care for all and the bumper sticker of medicare for all, but when you get into the details, they are like, oh, actually, i really want to build on the aca, provide more coverage to people , but really reduce costs is what they are focused on. health care is a big piece. the other is immigration.

we see 64% of the twitter-engaged folks want to abolish i.c.e. that is under one-third in the democratic electorate. there is this anti-immigration enforcement arm that is really pushing candidates to go further than, frankly, the democratic voters really want to go on some of these immigration issues as a reaction to kind of the cruelty and some of the horrible things that donald trump has been doing. most democratic primary voters want to see comprehensive immigration reform. they do not want to abolish i.c.e. or open borders. they want to see our country secure and also treating people humanely. host: we want to invite our viewers to call in and join this conversation. republicans, (202)-748-8001. democrats, (202)-748-8000. independents, 202-748-8002.

npr reports that the word electability is used as a fear tactic, but many of the activists who gathered over the weekend at the conference insisted that is a foolish strategy. biden, who has consistently led early polling, is potentially the worst option for the party, they say, warning democrats could repeat the mistakes of 2016. guest: i think -- donald trump concentrates the mind -- and we all want to beat him, and we know that has to be our first priority -- that is true among the twitter folks. they say beating donald trump is more important than picking a nominee who agrees with them on everything. host: so that is what unites them? guest: that unites everyone. we want to beat donald trump, but there are questions on how best to do that. we did a deep dive on some open-ended qualitative research with a firm called avalanche, and they helped us really figure out what to primary voters mean by electability? they do not really mean ideology. they don't even mean demographics.

what they are really looking for is someone who can be strong, show their values and stand up to donald trump, someone compassionate, and somebody who is kind of a truth teller and can engage with trump when necessary, but also push back on other parts of the party when need be. so i do think electability sometimes gets used in a pejorative way against women or people of color, and that is really silly, because what we saw 2018 was people of color and women were the fantastically successful candidates that brought us nancy pelosi's speakership. so i think like that, when you are using it to say, "we only need an old white guy," that is not the right way to think about it, and that is not how democratic voters think about electability. host: when you ask people, are they confident in a candidates 's ability to beat the

president, this is a one to 10 scale, the former vice president comes out on top with a little over seven. sanders follows that, reaching six points. and beto o'rourke almost six, kamala harris at 5.57, and cory booker, the senator, at 5.55. guest: most of the folks do not have name recognition. everybody knows joe biden and they say, that sounds like a good option, but also they have not taken a look at a lot of these other candidates. those candidates have room to grow. the one person who does not is bernie sanders. everybody knows who bernie sanders is and what he stands for. i think we have seen in the polls a lot of his supporters have seen other options that they are interested in this year, even though last time around they were behind him. host: how does third way get

involved, and you are supporting some candidates and not others, you are out there with the grassroots effort, how do you get involved in the 2020 campaign? guest: we are helping presidential candidates and folks who are trying to keep the house and win the senate to understand what voters in the middle want. also, democratic primary voters. we do public opinion research, policy development of proposals we think will resonate with the broad coalition of people, things like economic ideas that will help a broad swath of people have an opportunity to earn a good life. we are not going to pick a horse. we are going to help whoever it is that can help donald trump, and we would be excited to see that. host: who are your backers? who funds you to make this research happened? guest: we are like in a nonprofit in d.c. we are funded by a mix of individuals on our board and listed on our website, and also big foundations to fund a lot of policy work. for example, i do a lot of work on higher education, we have a big climate team, and we have foundations that come to support that and the idea that there should be more pragmatism in

d.c. and folks who are thinking about -- what do we actually do to move things forward instead of just fighting the extreme? host: we will go to call. bryan is first in hamilton, indiana. caller: good morning. host: good morning. caller: there are so many people who have announced that they are running for president. it is confusing. you cannot listen to them. it dominates the news media, regardless of which network you listen to. i wish they would enact election reform and mandate that no one can announce or raise money more than 12 months before the elections they want to run in. all of these people, well, not -- journal" live every day at 7:00 a.m. we leave the remainder of this section. the houses gaveling in