Crooked Media, the liberal political media company founded by former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, is primarily built around its popular talk-radio-style podcast, Pod Save America. But today, the team is adding another shot to its game with the release of a new podcast documentary called The Wilderness, led and hosted by Favreau, that they’re describing as being about the history and future of the Democratic Party.
“Most political news today is about why Donald Trump is bad, and I don’t think we talk enough about the party that needs to beat him — its strengths, its weaknesses, and how it’s changed over time,” Favreau told Vulture in an email, when asked about the purpose of the project. “What does the Democratic Party stand for in 2018? How did we lose nearly 1,000 seats over the last decade, and how do we make sure that never happens again? I wanted to talk about these questions with as many people as possible in a format that allows for more nuance and reasonableness than Twitter or cable.”
The first four episodes of The Wilderness dropped this morning, and they attend to a big, complicated question: How did the Democratic Party screw up the 2016 presidential election so badly? The opening volleys evoke the Pod Save America team’s mea culpa episode right after the election back when they hosted Keepin’ It 1600, though with the considerably more robust contextual substance that comes with leaning into the documentary format. From the upcoming chapters listed posted on Crooked Media’s website, the series will be laid out across 15 installments, all of which trend towards an even larger question: How, exactly, is the Democratic…
