Latest / Pod Save America / Ezra Klein on Where Democrats Go From Here

Transcript

Ezra Klein on Where Democrats Go From Here · Pod Save America

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: If you nerd out about all things science, I'm excited
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: to tell you about Radiolab, a podcast from WNYC. Hosted
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser, Radiolab's goal with each
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: episode is to make you think, how did I live
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: this long and not know that? Whether it's chemistry, politics,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: new technologies, ancient beliefs, even sex of bugs, Radiolab's rigorous
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: curiosity gets you the answers so you can see the
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what you
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: think you know. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. And my guest
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: host for today is a friend and fellow podcaster who,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: like me and Nancy Pelosi, is probably not getting an
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: invite to this year's White House Christmas party. The New
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: York Times' Ezra Klein, host of The Ezra Klein Show.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Good to be here, man. Here at the end or
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: maybe the beginning of all things. Yes.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we'll see. We're going to talk all about
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: what happened last week, what's next, and where Democrats go
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: from here. But first, I'm just curious how, on a
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: personal level, you've been processing the election results and the
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: new reality of In which we find ourselves again.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: We're starting in the therapy space.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: This is why Democrats will lose elections. We're all about
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: trauma and not about the middle class.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Look, I.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: Am a professional political journalist. I will feel my feelings
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: in three months. Right now, there's a lot to do.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I sort of feel the same way, and I'm not
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: a professional political journalist.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: You just play one on a podcast.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, right. No, but I kind of feel the same way.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: I see you're back on Twitter, which is always a
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: signal to me that we are indeed in a bad place.
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: I like that I've become, like, my deciding to tweet
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: for a couple days has become like a harbinger of doom.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: It's like a horseman. I come back to Twitter. Yeah.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: I mean, look, I'm staying on... I've already said, I'm
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: staying on Twitter until it's over. I'm not.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: Twitter is good for.
• 2:24
  Speaker 3: Twitter is bad for many things, most things, people's minds,
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: American politics in general. But it's good for factionalism. And
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: I think this is a factional moment, right? There are
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: debates that have to happen inside the Democratic Party, inside
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: the liberal coalition. And I think some of them are
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: going to happen there, or at least I... I am
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: trying to push some of them forward there. I try
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: to use Twitter very instrumentally rather than having it use me.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: And this is a moment when I want to try
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: to use it.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: That is the way to do it. All right, let's
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: talk about the news. There's been a flurry of Trump
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: personnel news and rumored policy moves over the last few days.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: Marco Rubio for Secretary of State is a little more
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: neocon than I expected. Fox News host Pete Hegseth for
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: Secretary of Defense.
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: That's the energy I was looking for in a second
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: Trump term here. Like for a couple of days, all
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: of the announcements were pretty normal people. And then I
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: woke up today, I'm like, ah, here we go. This
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: guy's president again.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: That's real crazy.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security. John Ratcliffe at CIA.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Mike Huckabee as U.S. Ambassador to Israel. And then we've
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: got Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead something called
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOJ, where they will, quote,
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: provide advice and guidance from outside of government to The
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: next administration is also gearing up for mass deportations, new tariffs,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: and reportedly drafting an executive order to fast track the
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: removal of generals Trump doesn't care for. In fairness, these
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: are all things that he promised to do during the campaign.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: I don't think it's especially useful to predict or even
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: speculate about what the next Trump administration will or won't do.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: But this time around, I'm trying to avoid reacting to
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: every personnel and policy announcement with outrage or alarm, both
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: because Trump was quite clear in the campaign what he
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: intends to do. And because I do think that most
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: people start to tune out all the hysteria.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: After a while.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: But what do you think? What's your general reaction been
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: to this last week of announcements?
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: I have a lot of reactions.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: You know, I had Vivek Ramaswamy on my show a
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: couple of weeks before the election. And we had a
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: long and I thought really interesting conversation. But one of
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: the foundations of the conversation for me, one of the
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: reasons I wanted to have him on was he had
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: just released this book, which was in many ways an
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: odd book, which sort of felt like a holdover of
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: his campaign. But it was framed in this much more
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: distinctive way, where he was saying inside what he calls
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: the America First movement, the Trump movement, there's a schism
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: between what he called the national libertarians, which he was
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: presenting himself as a leader of. And I'd say you
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: want to think about this as more traditional republicanism blended with,
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: you know, more anti-immigration sentiment, um, more nationalistic sentiment, more
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: skepticism of China, right? You know, sort of a mix
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: between Paul Ryan and Donald Trump. And the national patronage side,
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: which was, you know, sort of implicitly J.D. Vance, you know,
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: and that was much more about shutting down trade, right?
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: Ramaswamy wanted more trade with our friends. The, you know,
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: the national conservative side or national patronage side wanted less.
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: And one of the things over the course of that
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: conversation I came to realize, because there was this question of, well,
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: is this a live schism? Is this something real that
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: we're looking at? But as he spoke and as we spoke,
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: I was like, oh, you see Elon Musk as your patron, right?
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: The person who you're describing who might be influential in
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: the Trump administration who has these ideas more or less
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: is Musk, who at that point had sort of emerged
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: as Trump's most heavyweight donor advisor buddy. And I think
• 6:04
  Speaker 3: that has only become true with Musk since. And now
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: you see Musk and Ramaswamy here. So I don't think
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: actually Vivek had that.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Wrong at all.
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: And the reason I bring all this up is that
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: I think there's been a view that compared to the
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: first Trump term, this Trump term, to reuse a word
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: I just talked about with Twitter, is not going to
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: be highly factional. That in Trump 1, you had Jared
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: Kushner and Ivanka and the sort of globalists. You had
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and, you know, the nationalists or
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: the America First crowd. You had a sort of national
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: security establishment around H.R. McMasters and people like that. You
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: had sort of Gary Cohn, who was, again, more with Kushner.
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: And you can sort of name like three or four
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: of these that kept the White House quite split. And
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: the view was they've gotten over that. They knew that
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: they had lots of people working. And they knew there
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: were a traditional Republican Party of Mike Pence and a
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: lot of people in the staffing levels of the administration.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: And the view was they've gone past that now, right?
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: The Republican Party is Trump's party.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: He owns it.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: Laura Trump is the co-chair of the RNC. You can
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: have a much more united Trump administration if he wins again, which,
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: of course, he did.
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: And I don't think you are.
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: I think you're actually going to have much more factional
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: infighting than people are prepared for. Because one thing you
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: don't have now are all the parts of the Trump
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: administration who don't like Donald Trump. Everybody is much better
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: at appealing to him, supporting him, proving their loyalty to him.
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: It's not Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn.
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: It's all these people who are fully bought in and
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: are trying to win the king's favor. So I think
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: you're from the very beginning here. You know, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance,
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: these are all very different people. seeing the beginnings of
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: an administration that has not decided what its ideology is
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: and is, in fact, putting people in different spots who
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: have very, very different views on questions that, you know,
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: were thought to be maybe settled.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think you also have just a
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: less homogeneous coalition that.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: Brought him to power. Yeah, RFK Jr.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: Right, RFK Jr. And then, like, you know, you got
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Elon Musk and the all-in guys and that whole crew.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: And I do think that the Like just watching, it's
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: early days, but like Elon Musk follow Donald Trump around
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: everywhere and him just like showing up at White House
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: or wanting to go to the White House meetings and
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: showing up in Washington and everything. Like it's fine for now.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: I think there are both personality reasons and policy reasons
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: why that's not going to last.
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: And I don't think Trump's going to like that all
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: that much either.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: I think that's right. I hesitate to predict too much
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: about Donald Trump. And these things can always settle into
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: a middle ground, right? I think for both Donald Trump
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: and Elon Musk, the other one is their newest toy, right?
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: It's exciting to have a new toy. It's exciting to
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: have a new friend. Exciting to have a new kind
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: of power center allied with you. I sometimes find it
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: hard to know what to think. Or even how to
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: predict where the Musk thing goes for two reasons. I mean,
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: one is that, I don't know, compared to some of
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: the yahoos around Donald Trump, Elon Musk actually has built,
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: to me, very impressive things in the real world, right?
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: His politics are obviously not mine, but SpaceX, Tesla. This
• 9:09
  Speaker 3: is a person who knows a lot about how to
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: get some pretty important things done. The way he's run Twitter,
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: you know, not great from a lot of perspectives, but
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: he clearly ran it well to his own ends. Elon
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: Musk is a quite effective person. And compared to some
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: of the dunces Donald Trump sometimes surrounds himself with, maybe
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: that's for the good, right? And at least Elon Musk
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: has a view about emerging technologies in the future that
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: I think it is important for people around the president
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: to be thinking a lot about. On the other hand,
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: Elon Musk is also the democracy nightmare scenario in a way, right?
• 9:43
  Speaker 3: The thing that not the January 6th nightmare scenario, but
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: the more banal and long predicted nightmare scenario of a
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: polity that has this much role for money in politics?
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: What happens if the person with the most money decides
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: to buy the politics of the country, right? And it's
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: not that there weren't many big donors on the Kamala
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: Harris side, but the rumor or the reporting I was
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: seeing today was that Elon Musk is making it clear
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: that if you're a House Republican and you oppose Donald
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: Trump's agenda, he will fund a primary challenge to you. And,
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: you know, he was just pumping money in a wild
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: way into the campaign. So sort of Musk is going
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: to Trump basically and saying, you know, you keep me
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: near you. You listen to me. You will never worry
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: about money again. There is no amount of money the
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: Democrats can, you know, their billion dollars was impressive, but
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: Musk spent $ 44 billion to buy Twitter so he could
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: just like play around with it and increase his influence.
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: Like there is no amount of money the Democrats can
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: spend that is like what Elon Musk can spend just
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: out of his own pocket. And so this thing that
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: has always been predicted is, what if you have one
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: of these guys who is truly rich, and he's the
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: richest man in the world, decide that what they want
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: to buy is all of politics? We're about to see
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: that theory tested. And from any kind of democratic representativeness theory,
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: it's like a pretty scary one to watch playing out.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: It certainly is. It also, I think, leaves Trump and
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Musk open. There's a vulnerability there, which is like oligarchs
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: in control of the government. If the government is not
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: delivering sort of effective governance and people's lives are getting better.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: And they see Elon Musk there, you know, all the
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: time promising a lot of shit that doesn't come true.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: I do think that could be a vulnerability, but we'll
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: have to see. Let's talk about what the Democratic Party
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: can learn from 2024 and what the best path forward
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: might look like. I know you've been thinking and talking
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: and writing a lot about this. And I thought the
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: way that you frame the challenge in your Twitter thread
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: from this week is a good place for us to start.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: You wrote, The hard question isn't the two points that
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: would have decided the election. It's how to build a
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Democratic Party that isn't always two points away from losing
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: to Donald Trump or worse. You wrote an entire book
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: about political polarization. It seems like in order to move
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: beyond a situation where we're always only two points away
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: from losing will also require us to move beyond a polarized,
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: closely divided political environment. How do you think about breaking
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: out of that?
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a good question. One thing I will say
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: is that polarization does not imply competitiveness. I always find
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: it fascinating, the political scientists, even the ones who study
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: why this is, this is a very unusually competitive era
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: in American politics. It used to be a truism that
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: American politics had a sun and a moon party. So
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: in the post-Civil War era, the Republican Party is the
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: sun party and the Democratic Party is the moon. The
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: Republican Party is very, very dominant for a long time.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: In the post-New.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: Deal era, the Democratic Party becomes much more potent. And
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: it sort of dominates politics until you could call it
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: maybe the 70s, you know, the 80s with the rise
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: of Reagan. And then in sort of the post-Reagan era,
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: things begin to get very competitive. And they begin to
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: trade back and forth. And we've never had a period
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: in American politics at the congressional, Senate, and White House
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: levels this competitive. The last three presidential elections have just
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: switched back and forth, right?
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Usually not what we see.
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: A pretty simple model of elections is incumbents win.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: If you make that your model, you will usually be right.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: And recently hasn't been right, at least at the presidential level.
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: So one thing is, why are we so close? And
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: there's not people theories about this. It's actually really not
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: well understood. Then you have this sort of other thing,
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: which is about 2024 and realignments. I think a pretty
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: easy way to think about the electorates right now is
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: that the natural split for American politics over the past
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: couple of years has been 52-48 Democrats. And in 2020,
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: where the coalitions look very much like they did in 2024,
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: you have Donald Trump as the incumbent. You have a
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: bad year for an incumbent. It's the pandemic. He's shitty
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: at being the president. So the incumbent suffers a negative
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: three-point people-are-mad-at-you penalty.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: And that brings the coalitions down to Democrats winning a
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: popular vote victory of about four and a half points. Right.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: Fast forward four years. Biden and Harris are the incumbents.
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: It's a terrible year worldwide for incumbents, post-pandemic inflation, etc.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: Say you have another incumbent penalty of two to three points.
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: That is Donald Trump winning by one to two points,
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: which is exactly where we are. Right. So it doesn't
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: look to me for all of the grand pronouncements that
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: Republicans have assembled this completely dominant electoral majority. But two
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: things do seem true, which is one, you have three
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: elections now that Donald Trump either has won or could
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: have won very, very easily, at least in the electoral college.
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: And the other is that even putting aside competitiveness, Democrats
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: are losing the working class.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: They just are.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: They're losing the working class and they are increasingly losing
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: the multiracial working class. That's not gone yet, but it
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: is following the same trend as the white working class.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: And if you are a party... that your.
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: Reason for being at some fundamental, characterological, philosophical level is
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: you want to represent the interests of the working class,
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: you feel that American life is economically unfair, and you
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: feel that people are born without the same shot, and
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: that we do not have, as it got called a
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: lot in the campaign, an opportunity economy, then it actually,
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: whether you're winning elections or not, to have the people
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: you are supposed to represent not voting for you should
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: be taken as a kind of spiritual crisis for a party, right?
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: Not like, well, if we can win the suburbs, we
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: can still win. Like, no, you want to build a
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: coalition that includes the people you say your politics are
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: on behalf of, and not just like come up with
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: a lot of excuses for why they're not voting for you,
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: even though you are certain that you best represent their interests.
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: That's like a very condescending, like an anti-politics form of politics,
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: like an anti-representational politics. that I think it's very important
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: that the Democrats don't lapse into.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: This to me is the crux of the problem. And
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: I've been, I mean, look, I'm biased here. My college
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: thesis was about white working class defection from the Democratic Party.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: This was in 2002. How to create it?
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: You're plotting out the next decade or two of destroying
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: the Democratic Party.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: And we can get into this. Didn't really expect that
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: in 2008, the answer would be Barack.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: Obama from Chicago, right? Isn't that a thing?
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: I know. But so the difficult question, I think, is
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: why and what to do about it. And it's made
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: more difficult now that it is not just white working
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: class defection. I think after 16, a lot of the
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: analysis was, well, it was racial resentment that drove white
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: voters to vote for Donald Trump. And that's why we
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: have Trump. And obviously, you know, we could get into
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: a whole thing about it's complicated. There is some racial resentment.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: But clearly, we have now moved beyond just racial resentment
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: as a reason for voting for Donald Trump, as we see,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: you know, Latino voters, some black men, Asian American voters,
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: all starting to move towards Trump and Republicans. Bernie Sanders
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: said after the election that Democrats have abandoned working class people.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: Others have noted the Biden administration, Democrats in Congress have
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: actually done quite a bit for working class, middle class voters.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: What do you think about, like, how the party thinks
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: about sort of winning back these voters? Is it, you know,
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: there's pure economics, there's policy, there's attitude, there's branding? Like,
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: what do you think?
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: I think the thing that one can say without it
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: even being questionable is Democrats have lost touch with working
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: class voters. Working class voter, like Democrats have had, I think,
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: for a very long time, a simple and pretty materialist
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: view of voters, particularly working class voters, which is if
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: Your policies are sufficiently redistributionist, right? If they are sufficiently
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: oriented in terms of you can run a tax policy
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: table and see where the money is going towards the
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: voters you think of as a working class, they should
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: support you. And if they don't, that requires some kind
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: of extraordinary explanation, right? Maybe they are being turned against
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: you on cultural issues. Maybe there is misinformation or media
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: ecosystems you don't know how to penetrate or that are
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: lying to people about you.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: Maybe they're mad about a war. Maybe they just don't
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: like your candidate.
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: But if voters are not following the money, basically, then
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: something is wrong and you just got to figure out
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: the thing that is wrong. You have to unkink the
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: system so voters know that you were giving them more
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: money and support you. I think that's fundamentally on some
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: level what Bernie Sanders is saying there when he says
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: Democrats have abandoned the working class. He means that their
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: policies are not sufficiently big and redistributionist enough in favor
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: of the working class. Now, as you note, the first
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: thing to say about this is Joe Biden has been
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: the most left presidency on economics of my lifetime. He's
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: been the most pro-union president by far, even though Democrats
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: have lost or are losing union voters by larger and
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: larger numbers. He has been kind of big on industrial policy,
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: all these things people used to say as explanations of.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: It, right?
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Trade, right?
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: They've not gone back to neoliberal trade economics. They tried
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: to expand the child tax credit, right? Republicans have been
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: quite far right on a bunch of things. So the
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: sort of basic test of the model isn't working. By
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: the way, nor is Bernie Sanders running way ahead of
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: Kamala Harris in Vermont. I mean, I haven't looked at
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: the latest count. But when I last looked, he was
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: running slightly behind her. So the sort of old sense
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: that Bernie Sanders is way outperforming other Democrats is no
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: longer true. Although you do see in some places, right,
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: AOC outperformed Harris quite a bit in her district. I
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: think the problem sometimes with the Sanders wing of the
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: party is that it just has an overly unidimensional sense
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: of working class voters or just voters in general, right?
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: It's a little bit too Marxist in this way. And
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: it sort of believes any departing from that model of
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: politics is just some kind of aberration to be explained
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: or worked out. But even if you're just thinking about economics,
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: when I've been talking to various people practicing politics, I've
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: been talking to Republican pollsters. I did an episode with
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: Patrick Ruffini, whose book very much predicted this election. And
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: one point he'll make to you is that when he
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: has been polling sort of working class Latino voters, they
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: feel the Democratic Party has also touched with them on economics,
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: but not because the social safety net proposals are insufficiently generous,
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: but because there's not like a language of aspiration there.
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: They're sort of being talked about like they need things,
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: not about what they can achieve. The emphasis on work
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: itself was a very big part of both the Clinton
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: and the Obama presidencies. And I'm not saying it's been
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: totally absent in the Biden presidency, but the idea of
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: the worker as an aspirational category is important. I think
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: it's very hard to separate this also, by the way,
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: from Donald Trump and Elon Musk, which is something I
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: said in that thread. And I saw people sort of
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: scratching their head at it, but I think it's very important.
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not just billionaires. They
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: are people's idea of what a billionaire is. Their entire
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: public persona, first Donald Trump for decades in American life
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: and now Elon Musk, they are the public's idea of
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: a rich guy, right? If you like make it more
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: than anyone else has ever made it, you could be
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: Donald Trump or Elon Musk, right? They're not some unknown
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: private equity, you know, plutocrat. These are the guys who
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: play rich.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Guys on TV. They're not Mitt Romney.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: They're not Mitt Romney.
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: And I actually think it's really important. They understand something
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: about how economics is not just a... People have more
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: than just material economic needs. There are economic identities or
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: economic aspirations or economic stories they're telling about themselves and
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: their communities. And these really matter too. So yeah, I
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: do think there are a lot of ways that Democrats
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: have sort of in the Bernie Sanders language, they're abandoned
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: the working class. But again, I would use the term
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: lost touch. I think they They've sort of lost touch
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: with the texture of what the people, again, they say
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: they're representing want. When you are giving people what you
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: say they want and they are not voting for you,
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: which I do think is true of sort of the
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden economic policy. There's a reason Bernie
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: Sanders was defending Joe Biden up until the end, because
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: Biden had been more aligned to Bernie Sanders than any
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: other president. And it is not having the effect you
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: think it will have on the electorate. You have to
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: ask what's wrong with your theory, not just what's wrong
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: with the electorate.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: OK, we're going to take a quick break. But before
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: we do that, in a moment, we could all use
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: a push forward. Stacey Abrams gave a really helpful post-election
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: pep talk on her show, Assembly Required. She talks about
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: leaning in to understand the voters we lost and how
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: we can work together going forward. Stacey is going to
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: have another episode out this Thursday on the election. I
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: highly recommend you check both out and subscribe to Assembly
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: Required wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: There's a couple different challenges here. One is just, and
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: it might just be specific to this election, which is
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: the way that the Biden administration and I think Democratic
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: pundits and others handled the persistence of high prices after
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: sort of inflation has fallen. And Annie Lowry, who you
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: happen to be married to, just wrote a piece in
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: The Atlantic about this, where she pointed out that, you know,
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: people aren't just frustrated about the cost of living because
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: Democrats or the media are you know, failed to adequately
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: convey how wonderful this economy is, but because people are
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: actually struggling with high costs, some due to inflation, high
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: interest rates, and some just, you know, on healthcare, childcare
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: that have been building for years. So I do wonder, like,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: how to tease that out from sort of the more
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: cultural issues with appearing in touch with the electorate. just
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: from a policy level. I don't know if there's anything
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: the Biden administration could have done differently here, but I
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: am thinking a lot about where we go from here
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: in terms of talking about costs and sort of this
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: affordability crisis.
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: Well, this is, yeah, Annie Lowry, America's greatest journalist. This
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: is where I think it's useful to ask this question of,
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: are you explaining the marginal difference between the 2020 and
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: 2024 results?
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Are you explaining....
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: The 2020 coalition we saw, which was largely the same
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: coalition with the incumbent penalty applied to Donald Trump and
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: not to Biden-Harris. Because Democrats were losing the working class
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: in 2020 when inflation was not a problem.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: And I think that's a really important thing to say. Now,
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: we've seen this trend in a lot of wealthy democracies, right?
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: The sort of realignment around education. There's a lot of
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: theorizing about why it is it was happening. It was
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: present in the 2016 election.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: This has been building for a very long time. It
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: is not just like two years ago this began. And
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: so one way I think just like to tease it
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: away from prices, I think prices very likely were the
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: margin in this election, right? From moving Democrats to a
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: plus three in the popular vote to a minus one
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: to two in the popular vote. So if you'd had
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: none of the inflation and the economy is better, I
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: think Democrats probably would have won. But- They were losing
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: the working class before and they would have like the
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: way Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 is that
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: he increased democratic margins, particularly among college educated white voters, right?
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: This was a kind of big point everybody was making
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: about the suburbs. The reason Donald Trump outperformed his polls
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: in 2020 was he surprised heavily to the upside with
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: working class Latino voters in particular, um, black voters to
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: some degree too, um, And so he was beginning to
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: reshuffle the coalitions even then. So I think the way
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: you can tease out, like, is this inflation epiphenomena or
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: is this something broader? It's just like, was it going
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: on before inflation? And the answer is, yeah, it was.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: I do wonder, you talked about sort of losing the
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: idea of like, you know, the aspirational view of what
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: it means to like, you know, achieve the American dream
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: and work. I also wonder if there's like a responsibility
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: part of it that's, We've lost a bit. I mean,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: I think about the child tax credit, right, which we
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: thought Democrats thought was going to be quite popular. I
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: think it's good policy for sure. I believe that that
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: is going to be quite popular. And then after it
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: was extended, you know, people thought, OK, this is going
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: to be popular. And then when you looked at polls
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: like it always pulled towards the bottom of the list.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: And I also thought about this with Kamala Harris's twenty
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: five thousand dollar campaign. down payment on helping people afford
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: a new home, right? It didn't test as well as
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: the building 3 million new homes did. And I do
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: wonder if some of the desire for redistributive economic policies
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: that you hear from Bernie, like it hits people so
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: that like, well, I don't want handouts from the government.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: I don't want people, I don't want the government to
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: just give people money. I don't think that's a good idea.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: I want to make sure that work is rewarded. right?
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: Which is, you know, Biden had said this in his
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: 20 campaign. It was part of Obama's rhetoric. It was
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: Clinton rhetoric. You can go back through successful Democrats. And
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: I don't know that it feels like it has sort
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: of fallen out of the lexicon of Democratic rhetoric, at
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: least on the presidential level.
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think there's something to this. God, sometimes
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: you're like more in a question than you can answer.
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: I think that after the Obama era and the post-financial
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: crisis sort of slow growth turnaround. A bunch of kind
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: of shockwaves, intellectual shockwaves and recriminations hit democratic economic policymaking
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: and political sort of economic thinking. And one of the
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: big ones was that first Democrats were losing the working class.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: And they were losing it because starting with Bill Clinton
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: and continuing into Barack Obama's, you know, what was then
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: called sort of the continuation of neoliberalism, which isn't exactly
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: how I saw it at the time. I'd seen Obama's
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: actually in many ways a pretty big break with Bill
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: Clinton's politics.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: But but there was a sort of view that.
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: We had been in this neoliberal era, which I think
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: there's at least some truth to that stretched across Clinton,
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: across Obama. And in it, Democrats had become overly narrow
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: and targeted and specific in their policies, right? They weren't
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: building these big things like FDR did, Social Security, you know,
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: like they weren't building as the exception, maybe the Affordable
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid, these universalistic programs that, you know,
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: had survived since Great Society and grown since then. And
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: there was sort of a turn in the party on
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: this sort of like the deserving and the undeserving. There
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: was a rise, and this is, I think, actually a
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: quite big thing in the party. The sort of nonprofit
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: groups and foundations, like the intellectual infrastructure of the party
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: became very dominated by a very, very intellectual and quite
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: left class, which I am very comfortable among. And I'm
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: not saying I'm not sort of part of this, you know,
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: what will get called gentry liberals by a guy like
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: Michael Lind, who's been a.
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: Critic of it.
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: But there were very, very strong intellectual currents and all that.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: Welfare reform was sort of looked back on as not
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: good politics, but a policy disaster. I largely agree that
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: it was bad policy, but there was a reason it
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: was important politics at the time. And all that just
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: kind of fell out of favor. And I will also
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: say that I think this is inseparable from Bernie Sanders's
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: 2016 run and the strength that he showed and then
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: the rise of like Red Rose Twitter, right? And Jacobin
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: and the sort of democratic socialist part of the party.
• 29:59
  Speaker 3: Like in 2016 and 2020, those were incredibly live forces.
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: And the sort of traditional Democratic Party or what we
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: might think of as a traditional Democratic Party was trying
• 30:08
  Speaker 3: to figure out, I think not cynically, like actually trying
• 30:11
  Speaker 3: to understand it and sort of absorb more.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: Of that thinking.
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: And again, that thinking was much more big government, right?
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: Much more, you know, Bernie ran on free college and
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: free health care. And of course, he's never free, right?
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: Free college isn't free. It's paid for by taxpayers, right?
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: canceling student loans is not free. Somebody actually does pay
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: for that, right? The money doesn't just go nowhere. Free healthcare, right?
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: You actually do pay for it. I'm a healthcare wonk
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: by training. Single-payer is something you pay for. And if
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: you're going to do it, you end up abolishing private
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: health insurance. And this was the great debate of the
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: 2020 primaries. But I think all this, you cannot unwind
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: this from the center of the Democratic Party trying to
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: figure out, okay, things are moving left. There's all this
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: populist energy all this anti-establishment energy, our old incrementalism is
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: not going to meet the moment, and trying to come
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: up with some new answer to that, when maybe some
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: of the old answers actually still had a lot of
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: life in them. One of the just, I think, difficult
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: truths is that it is very hard to separate politics
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: from candidates. And the right candidate can win with, I think,
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: very different politics than Donald Trump is very different. Bernie
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: Sanders is very different. Barack Obama is very different from
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: Bill Clinton, is very different from George W.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Bush.
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: But things need to be authentic to that candidate and
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: that person. And sort of when you say at the
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: end there, I recognize there are a lot of pieces
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: to this answer, but when you say at the end there,
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: it kind of fell out in Kamala Harris's campaign from
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: where it was in Joe Biden's campaign in 2020 or
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: Barack Obama's campaign. Kamala Harris has a lot of great
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: qualities as a politician, but she never came from a
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: deeply economic wing of the party. That's just not who
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: she was. It's not what her profile was in California.
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: She could have really run as a law and order
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: candidate in some ways, particularly if that hadn't been jettisoned
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: in the 2020 election, by 2019 and 2020, in.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: Her campaign then.
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: But she just wasn't associated with any of these politics.
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: She didn't have Bernie Sanders' authenticity running as fundamentally a
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: burn-the-system-down socialist or AOC's populism. or Joe Biden was associated
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: with the hard work wing of the Democratic Party. I mean,
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: he was a quite different and very moderate figure for
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: much of his life. And Barack Obama was like a
• 32:28
  Speaker 3: kind of master of telling stories about America and about Americans.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: And you just, like, I think a lot of things
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: can work here, but you need the candidate, like policies
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: are a way the candidate communicates about themselves. But if
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: the communication about themselves doesn't feel authentic, then the policy
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: doesn't work at all.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: And I think that sort of happened here.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, she also had the option. I always thought
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: of running as more of a Katie Porter, Elizabeth Warren
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: type populist in the sense of she was attorney general,
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: took on the big banks for the homeowner settlement, right?
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: That was a very popular thing to do. Didn't talk
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: about it a ton. Took on for-profit colleges, right? Towards
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: the end, there were a couple of times where she's
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: talked about like, you know, I'm not from Washington. I
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: haven't spent my career here. So I've been outside Washington.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: I've taken on corporate interests. Like it was maybe an
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: option to her, but it just wasn't her, right? Like that's,
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: you could tell that's not like what she believed in
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: her core. So it probably wouldn't have worked. I have
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: been thinking a lot about like the party's reaction to
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: Trump's first win in 2016 and how that played out
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: specifically in the 2020 primary in which, you know, a
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: lot of the positions that's, Kamala Harris took then, certainly
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: came back to bite her, and a lot of the
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: candidates who ran then. And it was interesting because, like,
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: in 2018, you know, we have these midterms, and a
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: lot of the Democrats who won in the midterms from
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: that class, some of them were quite progressive, some of
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: them were quite moderate. A lot of them just fit
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: their district really well. It was a big, diverse class
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: of House members and senators. And then in the primaries,
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: There was this race, I don't want to just say
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: the left, because some of it was economic, some of
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: it was cultural, some of it was on immigration, like
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: you could name the issue. But, you know, and I
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: think about our part in that too. We had candidates on,
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: we'd push them on all these issues. And it became
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: a bit of a purity test, litmus test on, you
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: had to be the most left possible position on a
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: whole host of issues. And if you weren't, you were
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: insufficiently Democratic or progressive. And, you know, I think that
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: had a real effect on both that primary and, you know,
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: even though Joe Biden got out of that primary, his administration.
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: Kamala Harris's toughest opponent in 2024 was not Donald Trump.
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: It was Kamala Harris in 2019.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: That like when people say she ran a moderate campaign,
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: what they mean is she disavowed her own policies from 2019.
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: But also Kamala Harris in 2019 bore no resemblance to
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: Kamala Harris in 2015.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: I'm from California. You're in California.
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: Kamala Harris was a tough on crime prosecutor. Right.
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: She was part of a sort of black, more moderate
• 35:22
  Speaker 3: politics that you see there. San Francisco is a place
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: that is now and is always very concerned about disorder.
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: It has a lot of disorder.
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: The people who win there are often quite good at
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: running against disorder, as she was. And she then ran
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: against a sort of tough on crime Republican for AG.
• 35:38
  Speaker 3: It was a very, very close race, but she didn't
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: win it by running to his left. She ran it
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: by running in many ways to his right and sort
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: of attacking him for sort of, you know, wanting to
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: double dip on his salary, things like that. I think
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: a culture has emerged in the Democratic Party since the
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: Obama era. I don't think this was true in the
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: Obama era. I think Obama had the strength in the
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: party and the Obama administration had the strength in the
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: party to say no. But since then, I think the
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: Democratic Party has lost a culture of saying no. It
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: has become much more coalitional. So you all, when you
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: were in the White House, used to complain bitterly about
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: what you call the professional left, right? There was always
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: this friction between the Obama administration and the professional left.
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: These groups that were always like trying to push you
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: towards positions you didn't want to take and attack you
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: for the things you were doing to reach out to
• 36:24
  Speaker 3: more moderate voters or even to Republican voters. And then
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: after Obama, as Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden tried
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: to put that coalition back together, I think the ability
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: to say no collapsed. I'm not 100% sure why, but
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: not just among them, right? Bernie Sanders himself was a
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: very different figure in 2016 than he was in 2020
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: or 2024. Bernie Sanders was a very class-based democratic socialist
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: figure who.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: I did an interview with him years ago, and.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: I used to, like, when I do these interviews, I
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: would sort of try to push people on what I
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: thought were sort of like interesting tension points in their politics.
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: And so I asked him in that interview, because the,
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: you know, the Democratic left had become very, very, very pro-immigration. Like,
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: you know, what do you think of open borders, right?
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: What is the, you know, and he said, that's a
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: Koch brothers plot, right? He wasn't sitting there saying that,
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: you know, like borders are kind of immoral, but we
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: have to have them. He's like, that's a plot of
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: the plutocrats, right? And Sanders was pro-gun, right? And he was,
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: in a complicated way, but still is, pro-Israel. You know,
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: sort of famously, one way Hillary Clinton beat him in
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: the primary in 2016 was running to his left on
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: cultural issues. There was this sort of weird but famous, like,
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: breaking up the banks won't end systemic racism exchange. But
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: over time, Sanders also, within his own coalition, started saying
• 37:50
  Speaker 3: yes to much more, right? It wasn't just sort of
• 37:53
  Speaker 3: he was, like, very, very far left on economics. Right. But,
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: you know, on cultural issues, he was this kind of
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: cranky Northeasterner, you know, from a state with a lot
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: of rural areas. He began to open up a much
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: wider left. The squad is a highly coalitional version of
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: the left, right? They are not, they are sort of
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: saying yes on most things, like not on just one thing, right?
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: They've not just moved, you know, left here or on that.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: And so what was happening in the center of the
• 38:18
  Speaker 3: Democratic Party where Joe Biden had become much more coalitional,
• 38:21
  Speaker 3: I mean, Joe Biden used to be a political figure
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: who delighted in drawing lines. He supported a balanced budget
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: amendment when Republicans were rising in the 90s, right? Which
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: is terrible policy, right?
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: The worst.
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: But Joe Biden was somebody who was very much like
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: lunch pail Democratic Party and was like trained and grew
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: up in this era where, you know, the fear of
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: being called a liberal was very real. Biden, Hillary, I mean,
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: in a different way, Harris... I think this just became
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: a kind of culture in the party about how it governed.
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: You were trying to assemble the largest possible coalition and
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: you were very worried about being taken down by another faction, right?
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: It became possible to Democrats. Like in 2012, the idea that,
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: you know, a Democrat would lose in a primary to
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: a self-described socialist was ridiculous, right? That wasn't something they
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: feared at all, right? By 2016 and very much by 2020,
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: they were terrified of it. When Kamala Harris, who was
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: very much a top tier contender in 2019- was considering
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: how to build out her campaign, she endorsed Medicare for All.
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: And then with Sanders in the Senate, then when she
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: was actually campaigning, came out with this sort of triangulated
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: plan between Medicare for All and sort of other health
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: care plans, and it became a kind of debacle for her.
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: But she and everybody else was trying to figure out
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: how to not get beaten by the left. At the
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: same time, they're worried about sort of like every group
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: on the board. You have, you know, the sort of
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: post-pandemic era. You have racial reckonings, right? Like a lot
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: is happening. And the party just becomes like a very
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: big tent for But Big Ten in a way that
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: I think it didn't actually realize, like it stretches its
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: tent in a very particular direction, right? It stretches its
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: tent left, but on every left issue simultaneously. And it
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: doesn't really realize.
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: Who it's not building its tent out to.
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: Like, I just have thought a lot after the election
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: about the fact that Democrats at a national level seem
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: more culturally comfortable with the Cheneys than with Joe Rogan
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: and Theo Vaughn. I just think that says something very
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: interesting about what axes are of most importance and are
• 40:22
  Speaker 3: really operating here. Because like, I don't know, I think
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: the Cheney should be accountable for ruining American politics, creating
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: the space that Donald Trump eventually occupied and like launching
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: absolutely catastrophically disastrous wars. And I appreciate that Liz Cheney
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: was willing to risk something to oppose Donald Trump. And
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: I think it's great if she wants to vote for
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: Kamala Harris. But I think the sense that like they
• 40:47
  Speaker 3: would go out of their way to feature Liz Cheney
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: and be campaigning Liz Cheney, but would not go out
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: of their way to be on maybe the biggest media
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: platform in America that's actually culturally quite different from them
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: and is reaching people they do not reach and do
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: not know how to reach a Joe Rogan. I just,
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: you know, whether you believe she should have gone on
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: Rogan or not, that says something about like who the
• 41:08
  Speaker 3: Democrats are comfortable having over for dinner.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: I think it was a strategy born of some kind
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: of necessity in that they, like you said, they thought, okay,
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: we're losing working class voters. We're losing these low propensity
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: voters who don't always show up. And by the way,
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: don't always pay close attention to politics. And what we
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: might be able to do is squeeze more juice out
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: of the suburbs and college educated voters in the suburbs.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: And for those voters, it would make sense to talk
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: about defending democracy and Liz Cheney as a spokesperson for
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: that and bipartisanship and all that. And the bet did
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: not pay off because she did not improve Biden's margins
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: in the suburbs. If anything, in some suburbs, she underperformed him.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: Some she, you know, she maintained the same, but it
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: seemed to be like a more of a slapdash. Okay.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: It's the last couple of months of campaign. We you know,
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: we've got Liz Cheney, we'll go to the suburbs of
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: Milwaukee where she did make some inroads with voters. That's
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: the one place she did overperform Biden. But it wasn't
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: enough because it's more to your point about like the
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: broader challenge of losing touch with the working class. It's
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: like it's harder to repair that with like one interview
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: on Rogan.
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's very important.
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: I'll say two things because one, I think it's it's
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: so easy right now for everybody to second guess every
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: decision that the Harris campaign made. But the Harris campaign,
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: if you look at, I mean, you guys have made
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: this point too, if you look at the battleground states,
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: they seem to have made up a fair amount of ground, right?
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: The battleground states look a lot better than the rest.
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: Of the country.
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: So if you're just sort of, here's how the country
• 42:56
  Speaker 3: felt about the Biden-Harris administration. And here's where we think
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: we can see a campaign effect happening. Where there was
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: a campaign effect happening, they made up ground, right? The
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: battleground states were sort of one to two points. Whereas like,
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: they seem to have lost about 10 points in California, right?
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: They lost more than that, I think, or around that
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: in New York, right? New Jersey, you know, it was
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: a six-point margin in New Jersey, last I looked. So
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: something really bad was happening, by the way, in the
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: places Democrats govern. And all this de-alignment and this sort of,
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: when I say who the Democratic Party will have over dinner,
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: there's a reason I'm not saying who Kamala Harris will
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: have over dinner. Because this sort of disattachment from a
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: lot of these cultures that began to feel unfriendly to
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: Democrats or maybe the opposite, right? Democrats became unfriendly to them.
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: Like that happened earlier, right? That's been going on four
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: years now. And, you know, the loss of a space
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: like Rogan as a friendly space for Democrats, which it
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: used to be quite open to them, right? Rogan was
• 44:00
  Speaker 3: an Andrew Yang fan. He was an RFK Jr. fan
• 44:04
  Speaker 3: when RFK was sort of like in the Democratic primary.
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: He endorsed Bernie Sanders to some degree in 2020. Like
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: this was not an impossible place for Democrats to be.
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: But I do think one thing that happened in the
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: Trump years, and like this is again a part of
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: losing touch, is Democrats developed a sort of specific kind
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: of There are people who that instead of disagreeing with them,
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: they sort of wanted to write them out of the coalition.
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: And the they here is complicated because it's like, I
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: don't exactly mean Joe Biden. I mean, this amorphous mass
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: of culture that is the Democratic Party.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: And I.
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: Think there are a lot of good examples of seeing
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: this happen. But one that I've just been thinking about
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: is a difference between three gaffes. Right. So Barack Obama's
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: bitter comment in, I believe, the 2008 election. the deplorables
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: comment from Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and the
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: garbage voters comment by Joe Biden at the end of
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: this election. And one thing about Obama's 08 comment, which
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: for young listeners is he's caught at a fundraiser saying
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: basically that you have these deindustrialized towns where people have
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: lost their jobs, their communities are frayed, the situation is
• 45:18
  Speaker 3: very bad. And so it shouldn't be surprising that people
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: become bitter and they cling to guns and religion. And
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: this was sort of a hot mic comment, caught, leaked,
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: creates huge problems for him because it's very condescending specifically
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: to religion and gun culture, right?
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: Which people have- Said in San Francisco of all places.
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: Said in San Francisco. So big problem for Barack Obama
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: in 2008. But it is nevertheless, if you listen to
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: that comment, it is Barack Obama telling this like group
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: of rich donors why you don't want to write these
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: places off and write these people off. Like something bad
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: has happened to them. If you feel culturally different from them, Well, remember,
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: you haven't had the experience they've had. And if you're like,
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: why are these people, you know, on the evangelical rights,
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: you know, moving into the politics they're moving? Well, look
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: at what has happened to their communities. Why should they
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: trust us?
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: It is for all the problems of that comment. And
• 46:07
  Speaker 3: it was a problematic comment. It was a it was
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: an argument about pulling closer. Right. And trying to see
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: more clearly the pain people were in and try to
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: find a way through to a politics that could that
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: could bring you bring you and them into some kind
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: of alignment. The deplorables comment from Hillary Clinton is very different. It's,
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: you know, half of the Trump voters are reasonable people
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: and half of them are these people are deplorables, racist, sexist, misogynistic.
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: And we should write them off.
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: Irredeemable was always the worst comment than deplorable.
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: That's not anger or disagreement. That's contempt.
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: Right. That is not politics, really. Like these people are gone.
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: And not only are they not our coalition, we don't
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: want them to be in our coalition. We don't have
• 46:48
  Speaker 3: a conversation to have for that with them. And there's
• 46:51
  Speaker 3: a bit of that, I think, reflected in that Biden
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: garbage comment, though. There was a lot of garbled.
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: Syntax, and that's what's always been a little bit unclear
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: to me what he was saying.
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: But I think these all do reflect something that was
• 47:00
  Speaker 3: actually happening in the Trump years in the Democratic Party,
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: which is, you know, there's Arthur Brooks, the sort of
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: head of the American Enterprise Institute turned happiness columnist.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: I was about to say the happiness guy.
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: Used to make this argument to me that there's this
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: big difference between the emotions of anger and contempt. And
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: anger is an emotion that brings you closer to people, right?
• 47:22
  Speaker 3: When you're angry with somebody, you sort of want to
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: have a fight with them, argue it out, but find resolution, right?
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: Anger is something that pulls you into relationship. And contempt
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: is something that pulls you out of relationship, right? Contempt is,
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: you don't need to have an argument with them, right?
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: There's nothing to say here. That's what contempt is. Contempt
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: is a kind of writing off. And I think a
• 47:41
  Speaker 3: lot of these spaces and people and cultures got treated
• 47:44
  Speaker 3: with some contempt, which was just a very big, to me,
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: shift in politics. Obama's sort of like at his core,
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: his great grace as a politician is his deep commitment
• 47:58
  Speaker 3: to pluralism in his politics, right? You could disagree with
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: him about him and he still wanted to talk to you.
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: And what came sort of after was more of something
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: that where a lot of people felt in the end,
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: not even like they didn't like the Democrats, so that
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: was true too, but that the Democrats didn't like them.
• 48:18
  Speaker 3: And like that's the most lethal emotion in politics, right?
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: When you don't feel these people like you, you're not
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: going to vote for them no matter what fucking policies
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: they promise you, because you can't trust people who don't
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: like you.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, I also think that that contempt helps shape
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: a lot of democratic rhetoric and policy position if you're
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: a candidate, right? Because if the groups or folks on
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: Twitter or whoever it may be come after you, it's
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: not like, hey, we disagree with your policy and let's
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: have it out. It's like you are bad because you
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: said X or proposed Y. And you're just like, you're
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: morally bad and you're not part, you're not a good
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: Democrat anymore. I keep thinking about immigration on this, which
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: is like, I wrote I don't know how many speeches,
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: immigration speeches for Barack Obama. And he would say, we're
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: a nation of immigrants. We're also a nation of laws.
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: And there are millions of undocumented people in this country.
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: And most of them are here just because they want
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: to make it and work hard and contribute to this country.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: But it's also true that illegal immigrants, and he would
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: say illegal immigrants back then, make a mockery of the
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: people who are here legally or trying to come here
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: legally through the legal immigration system. And while we want
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: a path to citizenship, if you are here, we want
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: you to come out of the shadows if you're undocumented
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: and then pay a fine, learn English, get to the
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: back of the line behind people who are trying to
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: come here legally and et cetera, et cetera, right? So
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: that's Later on, everyone was like, OK, Obama's did so
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: many deportations and focused on security and had that kind
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: of rhetoric because he was trying to get Republicans on
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: board for comprehensive immigration reform. Right. And I always thought
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: that was wrong. I thought that the reason that he
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: talked like that about immigration is because that's where the
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: country was. That's where most people in the country were.
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: Fast forward to the 2020 primary. Joe Biden. in one
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: of the debates, says something about how, you know, raise
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: your hand if you're for, you know, decriminalizing border crossings, right?
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: That was a question to all the candidates. I believe Castro,
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: Representative Castro at the time, he proposed decriminalizing border crossings, right?
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: And Biden says, well, I think if you're here, you
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: have to like get to the back of the line, right?
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: If you're undocumented before you get a path to citizenship.
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: There was like a multi-day blow up about Biden's comments,
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: about getting to the back of the line. He had
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: to hold a roundtable in San Diego with immigration leaders, activists,
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: Latino leaders. He was criticized for it by other candidates.
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: It became this whole thing that like, how dare he
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: say this? and it's bad, and there was a sit-in
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: in his campaign office. There were people protesting him, right? Now,
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: this is all in the context of, like, Donald Trump
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: had just carried out a family separation policy, right? Which is, like,
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: the most xenophobic, anti-immigrant president we've ever had. And the
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: focus was on Joe Biden using terminology that Barack Obama
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: had used for eight years and no one had complained about.
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: And I always think about that, and I'm like, that's...
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: I think that's where things went off the rails a bit.
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: I wonder if it's true, though, that nobody complained about it, right?
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: Because I used to hear a lot of complaints from
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: immigration groups about Barack Obama. And one of my theories
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: about the Democratic Party is that, not even my theories,
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: I think this is just true. The party, particularly, again,
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: like in the post-Obama period, there were these politicians who
• 52:03
  Speaker 3: were trying to build out what the Obama coalition seemed
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: like it was possibly eventually going to be, which was
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: a dominant majority coalition for an extended period of time
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: of an American politics.
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: And to do that, you needed these young voters. You
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: needed to keep getting these huge numbers among Hispanic voters,
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: black voters, Asian-American voters.
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: You know, union voters are important to the party, working
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: class voters. And you might you have this question then.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: Well, how do you appeal to these voters? What do
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: they want?
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: And the answer the Democratic Party settled on in practice,
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: if not in theory, although maybe in theory, too, was
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: that you listen to the groups that purport to represent them.
• 52:41
  Speaker 3: If you want to win Hispanic voters, you listen to
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: the immigration groups. They're going to tell you what these
• 52:46
  Speaker 3: voters care about. If you want to win Black voters,
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: you listen to the groups that say they represent them
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: in different respects, ranging from like the NAACP to environmental
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: justice groups. Unions, you listen to the unions, right? Like
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: it's sort of down the line. They didn't do it
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: for no reason, right? They thought that they were trying
• 53:03
  Speaker 3: to win the allegiance of these voters. And it just
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: didn't work because these groups actually didn't represent their voters
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: very well. And different ones are different. The unions, I think,
• 53:11
  Speaker 3: in many ways are better than some of the other
• 53:13
  Speaker 3: groups because they do have memberships. But a lot of
• 53:16
  Speaker 3: these groups actually believed things, particularly like immigration being a
• 53:20
  Speaker 3: great example because the Hispanic shift has been huge on this.
• 53:23
  Speaker 3: You know, if you poll Hispanic voters, particularly near the border,
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: they just don't have super far left views on immigration.
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: Like they don't. I don't know what to tell you.
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: Like it just is not what the groups told you
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: it was. And so a big part of the thing
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: that happened, I think, is that the role that the
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: groups played in the Democratic Party changed. I think it
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: used to be understood that the role of these sort
• 53:52
  Speaker 3: of highly ideological interest groups is to push politics in
• 53:56
  Speaker 3: the direction that they believe is right and just. And
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: there's nothing wrong with that. Groups do not need to
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: stay within the Overton window. And the role of the
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: politicians was to say when no meant no for them, right?
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: When the politics didn't reflect that, the politics couldn't support that, right?
• 54:13
  Speaker 3: It is the job of the politician to be in
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: touch with the constituency and say, uh-uh, sorry, like this
• 54:18
  Speaker 3: is where my people are. And I hear you and
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: you make a lot of good arguments, but we're not
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: going there either because I actually don't agree with you
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: or because I think the politics of this.
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: Are not doable.
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: In 08... I don't think any of us believe that
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: Barack Obama was against gay marriage. I don't currently believe
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: that in 2008, Barack Obama in his heart of hearts
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: was against gay marriage. But what Barack Obama was against
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: was losing the election. And so I was in roundtables
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: when he was a candidate. And without going into them exactly,
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: the impression I definitely got was somebody who saw that
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: he was going to wait until the politics of that
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: were right, because he also thought he could do more
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: for non-discrimination and other things if he worked through where
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: the country was and got it further along to where
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: even he would like it to be. And so that
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: used to be the sort of relationship. The groups pushed,
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: and sometimes they pushed and won. But a lot of
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: the time, the politicians said no. And I think that
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: just kind of stopped being the case, particularly during elections.
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: And I think it actually has to do weirdly with
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: Twitter and sort of the dynamics of social media. where
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: the role of everybody collapsed and they were all in
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: public arguing with each other, doing the same thing all
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: the time.
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: That is my take on this. And I listened to
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: your episode that's out today with Michael Lind about this.
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: And I think it gives the groups, it imbues them
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: with too much power that I don't think they have.
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: Because I think what happened is, you're right, there would
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: always be this tension between the, you know, electeds and
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: the groups in quotation marks. Let's talk to the groups
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: about this. And there would always be disagreements and the
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: groups would always be pushing. And you'd have these disagreements
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: and you'd have them in meetings. And, you know, sometimes
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: the groups would go public, but they do like a
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: press release here and there, you know, and social media
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: and especially Twitter, just all of this spilled out into
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: the open. And because everyone on Twitter and everyone in
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: the Democratic Party are all talking to each other. And
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: most of the rest of the electorate that might not
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: have these same views paid less and less attention to
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: politics and is participating less in politics than Democratic elected officials.
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of times saw the conversation on
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: social media and Twitter and that is represented by the
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: groups as like indicative of where the larger electorate was
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: and they are not there. And so we ended up
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: having all these fights amongst ourselves in public, but the
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: public that we were having the fights with is like
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: a small, unrepresentative portion of the larger American electorate.
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: I think that's right.
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: I also think when we talk about the groups, right,
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: it can sound like this very separate thing, but you
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: want to talk about where the revolving door in the
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: Democratic Party is. It's between the groups and the administrations
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: and the staffs, right? People go from you know, serving
• 57:12
  Speaker 3: in politics to, you know, being in the think tanks,
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: being in the interest groups, et cetera. So I've been
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: thinking a lot, like, what in God's name was the
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: ACLU doing? Giving Democratic candidates in 2020 a written exam asking,
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: among other things, are you supportive of providing gender reassignment
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: surgery to undocumented immigrants in prison, right? Like, writing this
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: edge case mad lib, basically, about the most unpopular policy
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: one could possibly imagine. Did they, I mean, there's another
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: question of what were the Democrats doing answering it?
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: Right. Which Joe Biden, to his credit, doesn't. Just like
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: leaves a big blank. But one thing that we're saying
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: is that a lot of people working for these campaigns
• 57:58
  Speaker 3: and Harris in particular comes out of the legal wing
• 58:01
  Speaker 3: of the Democratic Party, right?
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: She's a lawyer.
• 58:04
  Speaker 3: The ACLU, a bunch of them have worked in the ACLU.
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: If you look at the legal establishment in the Democratic Party,
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: the connections to the ACLU are very deep. Many of
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: them have worked there. They go back and forth from there.
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: So having your friends at the ACLU mad at you
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: doesn't feel good. Aside from anything else you might think
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: about them, these are social networks. These are people you see.
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: These are people you are in communication with. They're people
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: you go to for feedback on your proposals. They're places
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: you might want to work after the administration, particularly now
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: that it's become You know, verboten to work on Wall
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: Street and other things and tech became, you know, like
• 58:37
  Speaker 3: less of a good thing to have on your resume.
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: So there's a deep social dimension to this. But did
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: the ACLU think it was helping trans people when it
• 58:47
  Speaker 3: did this? Because it wasn't, right? Like helping to raise
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: this up as an issue that helped defeat Kamala Harris
• 58:53
  Speaker 3: in 2024 and helped elect Donald Trump. Like what was
• 58:56
  Speaker 3: the ACLU doing here, right? What role did it think
• 59:00
  Speaker 3: it was playing here? by coming up with like this
• 59:02
  Speaker 3: edge case and trying to get all the Democrats to
• 59:05
  Speaker 3: say on the record they were for it as a
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: way of getting you know more AC support of something
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: in the primary so they could outflank each other. Now,
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: that's not the only thing that happened, right? The sort
• 59:15
  Speaker 3: of TV ad on this was Kamala Harris bringing up
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: basically unprompted in a sort of forum about transgender issues. So,
• 59:23
  Speaker 3: you know, that was also her kind of sense of
• 59:25
  Speaker 3: the politics and how to differentiate herself. But there just
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: was something happening in this period where I just think
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: like all the, like the lines, like everybody's role in
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: this was sort of getting erased. And yeah, like if
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: the groups want you to take a position you shouldn't take,
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: like the politicians need to know that their role is
• 59:44
  Speaker 3: to represent the public and also to think about what
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: is good politics because losing, I mean, American politics turns on,
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: you know, the head of a pin now, losing all of.
• 59:55
  Speaker 2: The power of the federal government.
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: Doesn't just mean there aren't going to be gender reassignment
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison. It means terrible things
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: are going to happen to trans people in this country, right?
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: Where the politics might've been on your side, right? Where
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: people actually do have much better views about non-discrimination and
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: they don't want people, they don't want kids bullied for
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: no reason, right? And they understand these are difficult issues
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: in families. Instead of like pushing all the way to
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 3: where like the ladder of public support collapses under you,
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 3: There actually is so much to do, right? It's not
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: like we've like solved every other problem. So the only
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: things we have to worry about are like NCAA swimming
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: competitions and like immigrant detention centers, right? There's a lot
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 3: to do here, but somehow you had this, yeah, like
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: just like collapsing of the roles, but also I think
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: really strange culture emerge of just differentiation, you know, among
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: the groups, among the candidates and always, always, always to
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 3: the most extreme position. Which Joe Biden wins in 2020
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: in the primary, in part because he doesn't do that,
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: because he still has the old instincts of a politician
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: who has seen more than one cycle in front of
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: him before. The fact that he was, you know, been
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: in his 80s to run for re-election was a separate problem,
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: but his instincts were very good in 2020.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: It was a bit of a misread of, like, why
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: Trump won as well, which was, there was this feeling
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: after 2016, like, well, if Donald Trump can become president...
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: then politics maybe doesn't matter as much or at least
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: politics as we traditionally thought. And if someone that far
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: to the right or that extreme can be elected, then
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: maybe it's just time for us to say what we
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: really believe and we're the majority of the country. And
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: it's the fact that we have anti-majoritarian institutions that is
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: the only real problem. And if we had all just
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: vote and the majority would be in favor of this
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: and et cetera, et cetera. And I think it was
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: just a complete misread of how and why he won
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: in the first place that sort of let everyone just say, okay,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: let's just, let's say whatever we have to now. Say
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: whatever we've wanted to say all this time and it'll
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: somehow work. I do wonder, like, to me, like, the
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: big elephant in the room here is this divide between,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: that you and I have talked about before, that you've
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: talked about on your podcast, but between the, like, high
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: propensity professional class and that pays a lot of attention
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: to political news and these working class voters, low propensity voters,
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: who also happen to be people who pay least attention
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: to the news and consume the least political news. And,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: you know, we've talked to Yana Krupnikov, both on our
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: respective pods. She has this book, The Other Divide, about
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: how like that is maybe the most salient divide in
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: politics right now between the like 20% of people in
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: the country who pay a lot of attention to the
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: news and like the 80% who do not, even though
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: a lot of that 80%, most of that 80% votes. Um,
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: and I do, I do wonder like if sometimes we're
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: having all these debates with each other and no one
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: is really figuring out like how to reach all of
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: everyone else in the country, how to actually communicate with them,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: how to build relationships with these voters on a year
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: round basis, which is again, going to require more than
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: just like going on Joe Rogan a couple of times.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: And I don't know, sometimes I just wonder like all
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: these debates we're having, like if no one's hearing anything,
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: if no one's listening to anything. Like, how do we govern?
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: I think the way I understand these ecosystems is not
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: that people hear nothing. It's that what they hear is
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: sort of muffled and episodic. And they tune into some
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: things and not others. And so the consistency of what
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: they're hearing matters. And then the condition they see around
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 3: them matters. So I was just thinking about this as
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: we wrapped up that conversation about the ACLU and that
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: particular ad and the sort of.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: Trans stuff.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: I also, at the same time, think trans issues are
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 3: getting too much attention in the postmortems. Because if you
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: look at where Democratic vote share dropped the most, it
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: is where the cost of living is highest.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: It is not where they're the most gender reassigned in
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: surgeries or something else. There are these things that are
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 3: unbelievably hot button issues, and I'm not saying they don't matter.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: But if I said this in this thread, if you
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 3: ask me, what do Democrats need to sister soldier? Right.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 3: It's not like the most weak and vulnerable members of
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: their coalition, although they need to like not take a
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: bunch of stupid positions for no reason. It's the parts
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 3: of their coalition that made it very hard for them
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 3: to govern well. I come from outside Los Angeles. I
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 3: lived in San Francisco until, you know, 18 months ago.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: And I live in New York City.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 3: The thing that surprised me least about the election was
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 3: the sharp red shift in these big cities. Because if
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: you just talk to anybody who lives.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 2: In them, they are furious.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 3: And this idea that like, oh no, the economy is
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 3: actually good or crime is actually down. This is all
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 3: just Fox News. Like, shut the fuck up with that. Like,
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: talk to some people who live near you. The rage
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 3: I just hear from people in New York, this is
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: partially Greg Abbott busing huge amounts of migrants here. But
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 3: that does mean, by the way, there were enough migrants
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: that Greg Abbott could bus actual human bodies to New
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 3: York City. And it was a big enough problem that
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 3: New York City was not able to effectively deal with it, right?
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: It does show that What was going on on the
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 3: border was much worse. I think the Democrats were letting
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: themselves accept. That was not, for all the cruelty of
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 3: what Abbott did there, that was not like an ad campaign.
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 3: Those were like actual people who would come into the
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 3: country who were overwhelming border states. The sense of disorder rising, right?
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 3: Not just crime, but homeless encampments, trash on the streets,
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: people jumping turnstiles in subways, right? You just like crazy
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 3: people on the streets. You just talk to people and
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: they're mad about it. They feel it's different than it
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 3: used to be. I mean, in San Francisco, like the
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 3: fury is overwhelming and you see that it's not just
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 3: the presidential level. London Breed, the SF mayor, just lost reelection.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: In Oakland, they recalled the mayor. A bunch of the
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 3: progressive DAs across the country were recalled or beaten in
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: reelection campaigns. If Eric Adams has a lot of problems,
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 3: but if he were obviously on the ballot, he would
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 3: almost certainly, it seems to me, lose. You have to
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 3: be able to govern well. People don't follow politics, but
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: they live in the place they live. They see if
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: prices have gone way up and a bunch of economists
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 3: telling them, no, no, no, no, don't worry about the
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: price of everything. At least for some people and maybe
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: net net, a slight majority of people, real wages have
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: modestly outpaced inflation is like not going to do it
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 3: because people feel when they get a raise, that's them.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: And when prices are going up, that's you, the government, right? You,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 3: the government, screwed something up. When governance is good, we
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: can't build enough houses and people can't afford homes, right?
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 3: The much broader affordability crisis, which, again, Annie Lowry named
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: some years ago in 2020, right before the pandemic. Like
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 3: one of my big theories of politics is that the
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 3: inflationary period we went through was sort of a portal
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: of economic politics, right? And it changed what was salient
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: to people. For a very long time, jobs and wages
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: had been the thing people talked about the most, right?
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: Coming out of the financial crisis, where we had very
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 3: high joblessness and very low wage increases. You had demand
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: side problems. Inflation made prices very salient. And that was
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 3: prices on sort of normal things, right?
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 2: Eggs and gas.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: But it also focused attention on the prices of things
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 3: that had been building in the background for a very
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: long time. Homes, healthcare, childcare. elder care, higher education, things
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 3: people need, like they absolutely need them. And they've gotten,
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: you know, way out of where people can afford them.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: Like the fact that California and New York are losing
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: people by droves to Texas and Arizona and Florida isn't
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 3: just like an interesting fact about America. If you're like
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 3: losing people because of the cost of living in blue states,
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: like talk about losing touch with the working class. You've
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 3: made it unaffordable to live there. Right. Like you can't
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: really be a firefighter who protects San Francisco and like
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 3: buy a house in.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 2: San Francisco, the city you protect.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 2: It's just not possible.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 3: The average house goes for I think it's 1.7 or 1.9,
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 3: the average sale price now. Like unless you have money
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 3: coming from somewhere else, it's not possible. Like these are
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: huge failures of governance. And so in terms of like
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: what I would like to see Democratic politicians repudiate and
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 3: like whatever, I'm literally talking my book. I have a
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: book coming out on this in March.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: Called abundance.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 3: What I would like to see Democratic politicians repudiate is
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 3: what has made it hard for them to govern in
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 3: a way where in the places they are in charge,
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 3: people can afford to live there, or there's enough clean
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 3: energy that we can meet our climate goals. Or in California,
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 3: that high-speed rail we're supposedly building that was supposed to
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 3: be operational by 2020 at a cost of $ 33 billion
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 3: is Instead, maybe at some point soon in the next
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 3: couple of years, maybe 2028, 2030, we'll have a Merced
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 3: to Bakersfield line that will cost as much as the
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 3: entire thing was supposed to cost and to finish. the
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: rest of it, which they have no line on the
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 3: money for, will be over $ 100 billion, right? And nobody
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 3: knows how they're going to get that money. And they're
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 3: probably not going to get that money. Like this inability
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 3: to govern well, where you actually hold power, I do
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: think that matters. And when you talk about what matters to,
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 3: you know, voters who aren't paying that close attention to politics,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 3: like the sense that things are doing well. I just
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 3: talked to Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado. Colorado had
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 3: one of the smallest red shifts of any blue state
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 3: in the country. It's very, very modest, like a point
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 3: or two.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: Some blue shifts in Colorado, too.
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 2: And some blue shifts, right?
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 3: And Colorado is a place that is growing in population.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 3: Where do people from Texas go? They go to Colorado first.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 3: And we're talking about why. And he's just like, he's like,
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 3: I'm paraphrasing him here, but he basically said, our governing
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: philosophy is just like, everything we do, the message is
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 3: we want to save you money. Like, we want to
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 3: make things affordable and save you money. Like, that's the
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 3: whole thing. He was saying that he's an abundance politician.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: And like, that's a theory I'm associated with. I'm like, okay, well,
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 3: what is it? What is your definition of it? And
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 3: he's like, you know, prosperity and saving you money, basically, right?
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: We're releasing supply of things people need to buy so
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 3: they're cheaper. And we're making people prosperous so they can
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 3: afford things. He was bragging about income tax cuts, right?
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 3: So why, like, those voters in Colorado, there's plenty of
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 3: voters who don't pay close attention to politics, right? But
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 3: I don't know, things in Colorado are working pretty well.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: It's a well-run blue state, so they're not that unhappy.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 3: And I do still think that matters in politics. That
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 3: is how you reach people. Their lives are pretty good.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 3: And on the margin, people who don't really know what
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 3: to think about politics, if things are going well, they'll
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 3: vote for the people they think are making it go well.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've come to think that it's less about the
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: need for Democratic politicians to move to the center or
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: moderate their positions than But it's not really about the
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: position you hold. It's about what you're focusing on. It's
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: like when people tune in and they see you, what
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: are you talking about? What are you focused on? And
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: if you're someone who is relentlessly focused on making sure
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: that a decent life is affordable, then if they see
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: the inevitable ad from Republicans that actually, you know, you're
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: for they, them and whatever the hot button cultural issue
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: is of the moment, it changes like every year. it's
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: not going to work as well because they're gonna be like, well,
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: I know that person. They're just, they're out there fighting
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: every day to make sure that my life's better. And
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: they're like maniacally focused on costs. And so, yeah, I can,
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: maybe I don't agree with them on X position or
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: Y position, but that's okay because they're trying to help me.
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 3: I was asking Polis, what's the one policy you've done
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 3: that is broken through the most? And I thought his
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 3: answer was interesting because usually politicians, they're so excited to
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 3: tell you that answer, right? Like here's my trademark policy.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 3: He's like, I don't think that's how politics works. we've
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 3: done like 30 or 40 things. We have cut the
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 3: income tax rate like time and time and time again.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 3: We have taken the sales tax off of diapers and
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: baby wipes. We have passed all these housing bills, right?
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: He just sort of has this huge list. It's like
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: every time people tune in, if they tune in, that
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: is what they hear. Like the only thing they hear
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: me doing basically is trying to bring the cost of
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: living down or trying to put more money in their pocket.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 3: And so it is like that relentless repetition of, different
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: people hear about different things, or maybe they never hear
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 3: it about anything, but they just sort of know things
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 3: are working pretty well. Like we're, you know, building houses and,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: you know, he's like, the first thing I did was
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 3: create a commission to save money in healthcare. And so
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: it's not all like moving to the right on things, right?
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 3: They created a public option in Colorado, right? That the
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: Colorado government runs. Or separately, they created free, a certain
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: amount of free childcare and pre-K, right? It's not like
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: a full, super expansive program as I understand it. but
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: it now exists and people can use it. And those
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 3: things matter, right? So it's like, you can move left.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 3: He's like, he had this kind of funny line to me.
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: He's like, I think as a politician, if you say
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 3: something a lot, it's probably the thing you believe. And
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 3: the thing I say a lot in speeches, which was
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 3: just a funny preamble to this, was we'll take a
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 3: good idea from the left or the right as long
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 3: as it saves you money.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's good. Well, you know what? We're going to
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: end on that note. Fairly hopeful, though. We're all going
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: to move to Colorado. Ezra Klein, thank you so much
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: for joining Pod Save America. And, you know, let's go
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: keep fixing the Democratic Party before it's too late.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: Thank you, man. Fun as always.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: That's our show for today. Ezra, thank you so much
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: for joining us. Everyone listen and subscribe to The Ezra
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: Klein Show. It is essential. Dan and I will be
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: back with a new episode on Friday. If you want
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: our Friends of the Pod subscription community at cricket.com slash friends.
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: And if you're already doom-scrolling, don't forget to follow us
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: at Pod Save America on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube for
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: access to full episodes, bonus content, and more. Plus, if
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: review to help boost this episode or spice up the
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: group chat by sharing it with friends, family, or randos
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: you want in on this conversation. Pod Save America is
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: a Cricket Media production. Our producers are David Toledo and
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Reid Cherlin
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer.
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Kiefer. Madeline
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroat
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford,
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelleviv,
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: and David Toles.