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Jessica Tarlov has an analogy for what close to a decade at Fox News has taught her about the Republican Party.
“It’s a bit like when you get the email that there’s a sale, but members can come in the day before,” Tarlov told Mediaite in an exclusive interview. “I am a member, and I can come in the day before and check it out.”
The liberal co-host of The Five has spent years with a front-row seat to the conservative media ecosystem, watching in real time as political arguments take shape, get repackaged, and eventually filter back into the messaging of President Donald Trump and his administration.
But even more than what Fox has taught her about Republicans, Tarlov said her vantage point has shaped how she thinks about her own party — including where Democrats are falling short, even when she believes the attacks coming from the right are unfair or detached from reality.
“You still have to contend with it,” she said.
It is a fitting lesson from the co-host, whose new book, I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends, was released Tuesday. The book is part memoir, part guide to navigating political and personal disagreements without sacrificing either your convictions or your relationships — a skill she has spent years practicing while outnumbered on cable news’s most-watched show.
Tarlov’s interest in how political messages land predates her television career. Before Fox, she earned a Ph.D. in political science from the London School of Economics, worked on Conservative Boris Johnson’s 2012 London mayoral campaign, and for Democratic pollster Doug Schoen.
So after years of being asked what it’s like to be the Democrat at Fox News, Tarlov has emerged with plenty of ideas about what Democrats could learn from her.
One throughline: Show up.
Tarlov pointed to Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s recent 25-minute appearance on Jesse Watters Primetime, where the two battled over everything from healthcare and ICE to gender-affirming care for minors — a clash that culminated in El-Sayed asking Watters, “Are you circumcised?” El-Sayed’s campaign later said online fundraising jumped 30 percent in the three days after the appearance compared with the three days before.
Not to mention, while Watters repeatedly made clear afterward that he still opposed El-Sayed politically, he also admitted, “I like him for some stupid reason,” and invited him back on the show.
Tarlov rejected the idea that simply engaging with a political opponent somehow grants that person credibility, and stressed that avoiding the network altogether is a major “missed opportunity.”
When it comes to Trump, she was more blunt.
“He’s the president of the United States of America, and he was duly elected. People who traditionally vote for Democrats voted for this man,” Tarlov said. “Get over yourself! Like this is the way the world works now! And you’ve got to play by the new rules.”
That philosophy is central to I Disagree. Tarlov calls one of her techniques the “soft start,” signaling that she has genuinely heard and considered someone else’s argument before launching into her own.
On The Five, she regularly clashes with the likes of Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld before spending commercial breaks talking about something else entirely.
After Tarlov told Watters on-air this summer that his dismissal of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “just a female” was “beneath” him, she said she wasn’t actually angry with her friend.
“They don’t take politics as seriously as I do. Conservatives in general don’t vs. liberals,” Tarlov said of her colleagues. “It’s just not the most important thing in their lives.”
So rather than carrying those fights off-air, Tarlov treats disagreements she fails to break through on as an “internal challenge to recalibrate” and figure out another way to make herself understood.
And the stakes are more personal now that Tarlov is raising two young daughters.
“Even if I get interrupted, which I do all the time,” she said, she still wants to model for them “the type of listening and care for an alternative point of view” that she hopes her colleagues will extend to her.
Her father, film producer Mark Tarlov, also remains part of the way she thinks about politics. Tarlov, who grew up in Tribeca, lost him to a 9/11-related cancer in 2021. The signature glasses she wears on television belonged to him.
“My dad always said that it’s the job of electeds to alleviate as much anxiety as possible for the people,” she recalled.
That idea informs Tarlov’s diagnosis of the Democratic Party’s communication problem.
Asked what Democrats could learn from lawmakers like Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), whom she praises for speaking comfortably about patriotism and other subjects Democrats can sometimes treat as belonging to Republicans, Tarlov did not mince words.
“He doesn’t act weird and offended all the time, which is part of the secret sauce to getting normal people to like you,” she said.
“Stop being weird and offended all the time!” she added, arguing Democrats should use “normal language” rather than obsess over terminology and purity tests.
“I’m just a regular person,” she explained, “that can think something that is off-color is actually funny.”
While Tarlov pushed back on the notion that Democrats simply ignored kitchen-table issues in 2024, the problem, in her telling, is communicating those priorities clearly and consistently enough to overcome a far more potent caricature.
Democrats, she insisted, need an “easily digestible and explainable platform” that lets voters immediately understand what the party stands for and what it intends to deliver.
“You need more money in your pocket, and you need a roof over your head,” Tarlov said. “It’s just the basics, and that’s what politicians are supposed to do.”
“Trump is great at the bumper sticker politics,” she admitted. “We need our own ‘No Tax on Tips.’”
Simple, numbers-focused messaging shows “working people that we’re not sitting around, pinkies up, talking about critical race theory or DEI.”
For all the fighting that happens around The Five’s table, Tarlov believes its success — an average of 3.5 million daily viewers — may itself contain a lesson. The show is popular across the political spectrum, in part, she said, because the arguments coexist with real, unfiltered glimpses of the people sitting behind the politics.
As those familiar with the president’s television habits know, that audience stretches all the way to the White House. Tarlov said friends traveling aboard Air Force One have sent her pictures of Trump watching The Five.
“Sometimes he posts himself, and it’s like, ‘I’m watching, and I hate her.’ I get it,” she joked.
But that reach is part of why Tarlov sees little sense in writing off Fox or its audience.
“I don’t know why you would leave money on the table.”
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The post Fox’s Jessica Tarlov Opens Up About Life on ‘The Five’ and Why Democrats Need to ‘Stop Being Weird’ in Wide-Ranging Interview With Mediaite first appeared on Mediaite.
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