Is there a sane way to follow this election?
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Okay, are we recording? We're recording. Yes. Ezra, I'm going to read you an intro. You ready? I'm always ready. Okay. Way, way, way back last January, there was a search engine question I wanted us to try to ask but never did, which was, how long am I allowed to just ignore the presidential election? I felt like very sure that there was going to be a moment where I was going to completely seize my attention, but I wondered how long I could reasonably fend that moment off.

Anyway, we didn't do that story. July happened. Mid-July was where, for me, I think for most people, this election season entered into a completely insane series of news cycles. You probably shouldn't compare these things to TV shows, but it really was like every week was another finale. The stunningly bad Biden debate, the Trump assassination attempt, Biden's withdrawal from the race, Kamala's rise, the Democrats' veep stakes—

My nervous system has been fully plugged back into the social media internet in a way it hasn't since maybe the Trump presidency. Every Nate Silver election model update, every incremental piece of news, each new line of attack, I am monitoring this election as if I am running in it, which does not seem totally optimal, either as a human being or even just as a citizen trying to understand the arguments that Harris and Trump are making for what America is or where it should go next. And I wondered...

Is there a sane way to follow this election? I thought I would bring that question to Search Engine's outside sanity consultant, Ezra Klein. Ezra is the host of the Ezra Klein Show and a columnist at the New York Times. He has followed more than one presidential election. Ezra, welcome back to Search Engine. Hey, Paige. It's good to be here. It's good to have you. So I'm just going to tell you the plan. It's going to be like part one, sort of your evolution as a person following elections and like how your approach has evolved over the years.

Part two is going to be about, like, this thing you did in February. Part three is going to be, like, specifically this crazy election. Like, how do you follow it? Does that make sense? Great. Okay. So part one, you have watched many elections. Um...

Were you, like, were you as this attentive to, like, your student body election in high school? Like, when did you decide you wanted to pay more attention to this than the median person? I think I got into politics in my own memory of it through this mixture of 9-11 happened when I was in high school. And all of a sudden, politics seemed very important. It seemed like it cared about me, whether I cared about it or not.

And my older brother was, is very into politics in Los Angeles and was, is a very big influence on me. And those two things together started pulling me in. I'm not sure I initially got into it in terms of following elections and I've never really thought of myself as somebody who's primarily in politics because...

I find the horse race interesting, but elections decide who has power. Power decides who can make policy, and policy is a thing that I am in this to follow and to hopefully influence. And so, you know, you got to care about the elections. But wait, so do election years to you feel like January at the gym for a gym rat, where you're like, oh, everybody shows up now, but like they're kind of showing up at the wrong part or in the wrong way? No. No.

What do they feel like to me? So, I like romantic comedies. Uh-huh. And I always sort of wish the movie would stay in like the first 35 minutes where nothing has gone wrong and there are no stakes and everybody is bantering back and forth. Before they fall into some gentle confusion that makes them fight with each other. I find it always not that gentle. I mean, watching people's anxiety on screen makes me very anxious, which says a lot about me.

And all of it accurate, like whatever you took from that is a correct vision of who I am. But elections are stressful to me. I remember I was in Iowa in 2008, and a very senior political reporter was at the bar.

And he was saying to me, like, don't you just love this? And I was like, no. Like, why would you love this? I mean, we need to have elections. It's an important way of running political decisions in a democracy. But I just want them to turn out well. I don't find the machinations of them fun. I don't enjoy covering them. Like, what I want to cover is the legislative process by which a

a universal childcare bill gets built and then passed into law. I like the positive some nature of policymaking, particularly when it is happening in a more sensible political system than we often inhabit. Elections are like a thing that you have to survive. Yeah. So terrible things don't happen, and so good things do happen, and you do so knowing, like having the visceral felt knowledge that terrible things might happen.

It feels like having a doctor's visit in the future that gets more and more tense. I don't enjoy them either. I'm sometimes slightly confused by people who do. I'm like, do you really like excitement? But how have you, over the years, how has the way you follow elections evolved? I mean, this is a hard question for me to answer because I cover elections professionally. I'm an electoral actor in a way. What do you mean when you say an electoral actor? I don't follow elections professionally.

with the intention just of knowing about them. I am looking for stories. I am trying to understand what's going on in a way that gives me some predictive power over the election, right? Has a sense of where things are going and what I think is happening.

And so how I cover them depends a lot on what I'm doing. My coverage of this election has been very different than my coverage of other elections because I have been, you know, very involved in questions like whether Joe Biden should step aside and have been interviewing vice presidential candidates on my show and interviewing people there that I think would be, you know, useful voices. We had Tim Walz on and then he became the vice presidential pick for Kamala Harris, presumably.

Presumably there was a direct relationship between those two things. But so the way I will fall in an election has to do with the work I'm trying to do, right? So I was, you know, following a lot about Tim Walz and Gretchen Whitmer in advance of having them on my show. Or I was doing a lot of reporting about the internal machinations and sentiment of the Democratic Party around the, you know, the pressure being applied in a kind of escalatory way to Joe Biden.

And more recently, I've been trying to kind of keep in touch with the memetic sentiment around Kamala Harris, which to me has become an interesting and potent and independent force in the election. I've been thinking a lot about the weird internet subcultures J.D. Vance comes out of, and so I've been sort of tracking that in this election.

But I try and do not always succeed to keep my consumption fairly purposeful. Like, I'm not reading a lot about campaign strategy in Arizona and Nevada just because I am not the one right now covering campaign strategy in Arizona and Nevada. One of the ways that I'm following the selection is listening to your show. Oh, thank you. It's a great show, particularly right now. Yeah.

There's a moment, and it would not even count as a moment for you, I think, this week. You were doing a quick episode after the Walls nomination, or the Walls choice, where you were talking to your senior editor, Claire. Claire Gordon, yeah. And she...

There was this moment where you're talking to her and just very quickly and concisely, you laid out, look, here is the argument that I think the Democrats are making about the country right now. Here is the argument that I think the Republicans are making. Here's like which one I find more persuasive and why. And it made me realize like when I watch elections, part of what I miss and what frustrates me

It's like, I'll watch a debate, I'll watch a rally speech. I don't get a coherent argument from it almost ever. Like, what I hear usually, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican, is somebody saying a lot of things that are very general about America. Like, families are good. Like, America is great. And then a bunch of facts that I feel like I need to quickly on my phone go look at a chart and figure out how true or not true it is. Like, I find political messaging, like...

Normally I can understand a story. I find those stories impossible to understand. And I'm curious, like, obviously you are following elections at a level that most people just don't need to. But being able to get to the place where you just hear the argument clearly, whether you agree with it or not, seems valuable. And I'm wondering if you can explain how you learned to do that.

So, this gets, I think, to my core answer to today's search engine question, which is, you have to start by asking yourself a different question, which is, what is your purpose in following the election? Right. I remember you did an episode with Califas Sane about how to find new music. And he's like, well, why do you want new music? And I was like, so shocked by that question. But I have the same question for people following elections, because I actually think it's often for people very...

I think sometimes what they are doing is not what they think they're doing. So, for instance, people who you mentioned in your intro, refreshing Nate Silver's election model. Now, what that election model is supposed to do is give you a sense of uncertainty, right? Nate Silver's model, when it tells you that Kamala Harris right now has a 52% shot of winning the election, which is what it said last I looked,

What it's trying to tell you to do is leave that feeling incredibly uncertain. My experience is that the reason people refresh Nate's model is they want to feel certain. Like, they look at that, they're like, oh, 52%, you know, if you like Kamala Harris, you're winning, right? 60%, they're definitely winning, right? This is why so many people...

We're mad at Nate when, you know, he said that Hillary Clinton had a, you know, 70-ish percent chance of winning in 2016 and Trump won. But Nate was right about that. Trump won, and that was well within the range of possibility. So if what you want, right, if the actual emotional need you are trying to fulfill—

is I want to feel better about this. I want to know who's going to win. People are often using the wrong tool. Like I always describe the way people consume election models as like the way they use Q-tips that it says on the package, please don't stick this in your ear. And I was like, no, I'm sticking this fucking thing in my ear immediately. Yes, yes, yes. And election models are supposed to be about uncertainty and people use them to create an emotional feeling of certainty. And so like, yeah, what do you actually want out of following the election? If you want to know who's going to win,

You should try to quiet that part of yourself and check back in in a couple months. Right. Because you don't know right now. Too much is going to happen. Right.

If you want to know what they're arguing, I can give you good sources for that. Yeah, I do. So, okay, so just to say, part of it is, like, definitely the anxious click, click, click, click, click thing is, like, the same part of my brain that will monitor almost any process on the internet. Like, right now, I ordered some mayonnaise. I wanted to know what is showing up. I've been, like, refreshing the tracking number on internet mayonnaise that I ordered. And, like, the election is perhaps a higher stakes version of finding out when the internet mayonnaise arrives. Yeah.

But I also want to understand their arguments, and I would love to hear the best way to do that. I think the other thing, and maybe this plays into it, is, like, I get frustrated trying to follow the election on social media because I feel like I see people make broad and general statements about what everybody believes that feel really unsupported by evidence and more like what the people on their Twitter feed believe. And...

Besides wanting to understand the arguments, sometimes a story I tell myself is like, okay, maybe an election is a moment where I could understand the country I'm living in better. Like I can understand where people are in all these arguments that we're having all the time and whether people have moved at all, which maybe isn't too far from the first thing that I would want. Do those things seem...

Teachable. Well, let's start on the arguments. And I will say this is a little bit of a tricky election at this juncture to do this well for two reasons. So my normal advice in this is that the sources people use

and dismiss, like campaign books written by candidates and speeches given by candidates are much better than they are given credit for. I have never, not to this day, and I've read a lot of them, I have never read a campaign book, which I think there is actually no more shat upon species of...

Textual literature than the candidate-authored campaign book. I've never to this day read a campaign book that I did not benefit enormously from reading. Interesting. Because how – one bias we have in the press, and I think that people have reading the press, is the idea that secret knowledge, insider knowledge, the thing somebody said on the hot mic –

is more valuable than the thing they said in the highly vetted speech they gave in public. And my belief is exactly the opposite. And I've watched this be true over and over and over again. It is what people say in public that matters. What they say in private matters a lot less. People, I don't want to say they lie more in private, although I do think that's actually true, but they shape themselves to their audience much more in private. Whereas a thing they say in public...

reflects coalitionally in terms of their sense of the public, what they think they can actually do.

Because what they're going to do is going to have to be coalitional. It's going to have to be in relationship with public opinion. Now, people change. You know, Barack Obama said he wasn't going to have an individual mandate when he was running for office in 2008. And then he ended up supporting one in office because that's what the sort of congressional Democratic coalition would support. And he got persuaded on it and he ended up doing it.

It's a little harder this year for two reasons. One is that Donald Trump is a huge liar. And so he often says things that are untrue or he doesn't follow through on things that he's otherwise talked about, right? If you had believed Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 when he said he was going to raise taxes on people like himself and give everybody great health care, like you would have been misled.

Although I do think that the Republican agenda, the platform they authored, is actually worth reading and assuming is sort of his intuition about that set of things. And it does have a lot of explanatory value in my view.

And then Harris was not the nominee until very, very recently. And so she has not written a campaign book. She has not gone through a policy process with her advisors releasing what her agenda for the country is. I do think it's actually useful to read her older books. And I just recently read Smart on Crime, her 2009 book, which is a very interesting way of thinking about who Harris was in California politics. Again, like not a great book, but very revealing about her.

But it's hard. Donald Trump is somebody whose words you cannot trust. And Kamala Harris hasn't had as long to shape words in a coalitional process as candidates normally do. So in terms of what this election is about, that makes it a little bit harder. But because Donald Trump has been the leader of the Republican Party for some time now, and Kamala Harris is the vice president of the United States as we speak now,

You can get a much better idea than you could if both candidates were unknown quantities. But again, the thing to look at is what they have already said aloud and to try to look at that in full, like not in the way a newspaper reports it or a cable news clip or a social media clip reports it, but like actually go watch the full speech, actually go read the full speech, actually go read the old book. You really get a lot out of it.

Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. I was watching Tim Walls, like, his first rally speech with Harris last night. We're talking Wednesday, August 7th. And I have not done that that often. Like, I haven't watched rally speeches that often. And it was interesting because had I seen it on social media, there was a seven-second clip where he made a couch joke, which, like, whatever. Like, there's not that much to learn other than, like, the meme button got pressed again. Watching him for 18 minutes, which is as long as he spoke—

Like, I felt a little bit the feeling that I think I'm pursuing, which is, what are they trying to say about America right now? I could kind of see. Like, I could kind of see a person who, to me, and I think this was also your interview with him, where he was trying to find a way to take more recent, more progressive ideas and convert them into a language that felt more traditional and American. And I was like, okay, I get that. Like, I get that argument. I can follow that argument. Yeah.

For the most part, the people who ascend to the top of political parties and become their nominees broadly reflect what that political party has been trying to do, where it has power for some time. Donald Trump was genuinely an exception to this in 2016 to the extent anybody is. And still, for all that...

He came into office. He tried to repeal Obamacare. He passed a bunch of tax cuts for rich people. He did a bunch of deregulation and loosened environmental standards. I mean, a lot of what he did was bog standard, like what Paul Ryan had wanted to do and what Mitch McConnell wanted to do before Donald Trump was on the scene. And that reflects something very real, which is presidents are leaders of coalitions and

And they have to pass legislation through Congress and they can't even write the legislation. I mean, Congress has to write it and introduce it in a technical way and then it gets amended there and you got to, you know, get through the filibuster unless you're using the weird rules to get you around the filibuster. So to understand what they're going to do, it's like this mixture of what are they saying and what is possible and supported there.

by the balance of congressional power they're going to be facing. And those are knowable things. Now, again, this is pretty different than the question of who's going to win the election. It's different than looking for inspiration, which is, I think, another very reasonable thing people go looking for in American politics, different than looking for hope. And so I think this is a tough balance. I think a lot about the 2020 Democratic primary.

where debate after debate after debate after debate began with like 15 to 25 minutes on whether or not the candidates supported Medicare for all and to the extent they did support Medicare for all. Did they really support abolishing all private health insurance the way Bernie Sanders did? Or did they support abolishing only some private health insurance the way Kamala Harris did in what was considered a triangulating gaffe for her campaign?

And this was, to anybody who knew what Congress looked like at that juncture, it was a

it was like what kind of castles they supported building on the moon. It was completely clear that Congress was not going to abolish all private health insurance in any relevant scenario of the election. And I mean, it's fine to talk about that once or twice because it reflects important things about, say, how Bernie Sanders understands the economy. I mean, he means it. And I deeply respect the way he was willing to bite the bullet on that.

And it inspired many people. And, you know, over time, it might make something like that more likely, right? There are all kinds of reasons that simply asking the question of what is politically possible right now is not the only question you want to ask. But there did emerge an unreality because they were acting as if Congress didn't exist. But Congress does exist. And so you have to, you sort of have to match the rhetoric with the coalition. Welcome to political science class with Ezra Klein here.

You know, it's a pleasure to be here. I feel like what I am learning is I don't need to incrementally follow everything that happens in the election. I don't need to refresh Nate Silver's website every day unless I want to. And like, I do find this idea that secret information, which is always what I'm pursuing because it feels like it has the frisson of what's interesting, is less valuable. Like, look at what they've said, look at what they're saying, look at what they've written, and look at where their party is if you want to understand what might actually happen. Yeah.

Yes. I mean, take the debate over Biden stepping aside. The most consequential thing that happened in that entire fight was it two days after Joe Biden sent a letter to all congressional Democrats saying, I am running.

I have the primary votes to be the nominee. This conversation is over. Thank you for airing your views. We are done talking about this. I am not dropping out. You are trying to defy the will of Democratic primary voters. Enough is enough. If you keep criticizing me, you're empowering Donald Trump because there is no other choice but me here. Nancy Pelosi...

Instead of, like, leaking something anonymously, went on Morning Joe and said, we are all really looking forward to the president making this consequential decision he has before him. We will support whatever he decides on this question of whether or not he should run again for president. We understand that he probably wants to wait on this until after the NATO summit. I mean, it was...

The single most remarkable act of political genius I have ever seen, and we could talk about why, I mean, it was a completely nonlinear intervention into the debate, simply asserting that he had not made the decision he had. But what was crucial about it was that it happened in public. And if none of those people, starting with, I think it was Lloyd Doggett of Texas, a Democratic member of Congress, those people who were publicly saying something,

That Biden should step aside. If they had all done it privately, all those sort of leaks about, oh, Democratic members are very upset in private, none of it would have mattered. What mattered was public. What mattered was what happened in public.

It's also true, by the way, for Donald Trump. Donald Trump says all kinds of things to people in private. Now, he's a little bit unusual because what he says in public often doesn't matter that much either. Right. But it is what happens in public that matters. All those Republicans in 2016 who would privately say Donald Trump should not be the nominee and then publicly say, well, of course I'm voting for Donald Trump as a nominee. It was a public thing that mattered.

I'm not saying there are never instances where private things matter, because of course there are. I am saying that I really advise people who want to follow the election, not just sanely, but predictively, that they actually watch and read.

the things that candidates say and do for their consumption in public. The reason candidate books are important is that the candidate is answering a genuinely important question, which is given their entire life and all of their accomplishments, how do they want the entire public to see them? Given this one opportunity to craft their entire story for public consumption, how did they do it? It doesn't mean it's the honest story. It doesn't mean it's one even they really believe.

But that is such a consequential question to answer as a human being that it really matters. We're going to take a short break, and then I will ask Ezra, a person who finds the conflict in romantic comedies stressful, how it came to pass that at the beginning of this year, in February, he went on the internet and suggested President Joe Biden should no longer be the Democratic nominee, even though it made lots of people yell at him. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight.

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That's 25% off your first month of Seed's DS01 Daily Symbiotic at seed.com slash search. Code 25 search. Okay, I want to transition to asking you about an earlier part in this election cycle. And somewhat relates this idea of what people say in private and in public. In February, you published an episode of your podcast called Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden.

It was a big deal. You were saying something other people in media mostly weren't, which is that the perception, at least, of Joe Biden is too old could be a problem. It could get worse. And it might be worth it for Democrats to consider doing something dramatic. That was a time where I know there were people who felt that privately, but it wasn't something that most people wanted to say publicly. So I just wanted to talk to you about your decision to do that. Like, first of all, how did you even notice that this was a problem? It wasn't about noticing it was a problem. Everybody knew it was a problem.

It was about allowing yourself to know what you were noticing, if that makes sense. My private experience of this was basically all at once. And I happened to be at the White House on the day this happened. Biden had decided not to do the Super Bowl interview. He was not doing interviews in general and definitely not hard interviews.

He was running behind Donald Trump. So running behind in the election and then not doing the Super Bowl interview was just a completely wild political calculation, right? Because the Super Bowl interview, like, typically speaking, whoever's president gives a super, super softball interview during the Super Bowl on television. Yes. So, you know, brands pay God knows how much for 30 seconds at the Super Bowl. The president, by custom and tradition, gets an interview that's like...

Four to seven minutes, call it. So that is, you know, if brands pay $5, $10 million for 30 seconds, you're dealing with something like $80, $90 million in free media. You're going to say no to that when you're behind? Right.

Right.

And then when he answers a question from a reporter, which he just doesn't do that often, he mixes up Egypt and Mexico, which isn't the biggest deal in the world, but said to me that even in these moments where he really has to perform, he's not able to reliably do it, right? Like that press conference had, he barely gave any press conferences that year. That conference had one role, which is to say my memory is fine, right?

This report was a partisan hack job, and he managed to create the very problem he was looking to avoid. And so my view after that, I had sort of gone into that day around the Super Bowl thing being like, is he really up for this? And come out of it saying he's not. He's not up for this. He's not able to reliably perform at the level you would need to do to campaign aggressively to make up a gap in the polls here. Okay.

I don't think I was that unusual in saying that Biden probably shouldn't run again. I think that the thing that I added to the conversation was taking what were the alternatives seriously. So when I would talk to people in the Democratic Party, they would basically say, look, maybe we should have had a primary. Maybe it would be good if we had a primary. Then we would have sort of known how he runs. But it's over. There wasn't a primary, right? As Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, he's the nominee. There's nothing that can be done.

And my view is that that wasn't true, right? Democrats have a convention. And if Biden could be persuaded to step aside, one of two things could happen. Either the nomination could be sort of given to Kamala Harris, the vice president, or there could be some kind of open process that would be then decided at the convention. Right.

And the series of pieces I did were about fleshing that out, right? Both fleshing out my view that Kamala Harris was underrated as a political talent. I didn't know by how much. Turns out by a whole lot, it would be my current view. But that people should view Harris as a better bet than Joe Biden. And that even if they did not view Harris as a better bet than Biden, which at that point many in the party did not...

an open convention process with this sort of contest leading up to it would reveal who in the party was a better bet than Biden. And I think in the sort of competition we've seen for the vice presidency, where you saw sort of Waltz and Shapiro and Buttigieg and to some degree Mark Kelly, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Beshear of Kentucky, you saw there was actually a tremendous amount of political talent in the party. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom,

If there had been an open process, like that talent would have revealed itself. And so I was trying to say that February was not a time when people should have fatalism about this, that there wasn't now a primary process, but there still could be a party process. And the party had the power to persuade Joe Biden not to run. And if Joe Biden could be persuaded not to run, the party had a series of options it could decide between.

And all of them were better than the thing it was currently barreling towards, which was a situation where Biden, for reasons of his age, had a collapse at a key moment or a series of key moments, which I think is more or less what happened at the debate. When you publish that, like...

You're sort of saying like, hey, everybody might be like not saying something because they think there are no options, but there are options, which is fundamentally an optimistic message. What were you expecting the reaction to be? I don't know. That's the honest truth of it. I am. It's funny. Nobody's asked me that exactly. I felt after that 24 hour period, he had had a kind of internal cognitive reshuffling of

Where I'd been sort of pushing away all this stuff about Biden's age, and then I wasn't. And the moment I wasn't, the internal experience was like, oh, no, like, this is actually really bad. Donald Trump is going to win this election. Like, that was how I felt. And I, like, my job is to say things I think are true, like, in an analytically rigorous way and in a well-reported way, but to say things I think are true.

And when I stopped pushing away what I thought was going to happen here, like when I stopped ignoring, like the videos going around of Joe Biden calling a world leader by a dead world leader's name. Or Joe Biden having these moments where he'd sort of trail off in the middle of a sentence. When instead of saying to myself, Republicans are sending around all these, you know, badly edited videos saying Joe Biden's senile and he's not senile and I don't believe he's senile now.

But instead of asking that question, if I just like looked at the polling, OK, 60, 70, 80 percent of people, depending on the poll, say Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president. I knew that most Democrats had opposed him running for reelection in polling.

And these videos are going around. He's getting murdered among young people in polling, right? Because they're seeing all these videos of him looking ancient on TikTok. What's he going to do about this? Nothing is the answer. He cannot do anything about it because fundamentally, it is not true in the way Republicans are saying it is true, but it is true in the way the voters already believe it is true. And having had an opportunity to rebut that, he's not taking it. He's

He's either failing to rebut it or he's not even taking the opportunities to be seen in a way that would rebut it. There's a real problem here. Then he gave this sort of strong State of the Union and everybody's like, Ezra's an idiot. But I don't know what I thought would happen. It's not like I thought I would release a podcast into the world and all of a sudden Joe Biden would be the nominee anymore. What I thought I was doing when I really sat down to sort of map out those episodes was I understood my role as...

getting people used to the idea of alternatives because I thought there was going to come a point where they had to break glass and take one of them. And so, again, the two alternatives to me were getting people over this idea that Kamala Harris is such a weak candidate, that she's a weaker candidate than a Joe Biden suffering from this level of age-related diminishment.

And getting people over the idea that an open convention was unthinkable if Harris wasn't, in your view, a strong enough candidate. And it's very hard, I think, now to overstate how pervasive the belief in Harris' weakness was inside the Democratic Party. That was the single biggest thing I faced when reporting this out, right? Everybody would say, fine, like what you're saying about Biden is true, but Harris is probably the other candidate if he steps aside and she cannot win, right?

And the estimations of her were very, very low. I thought and argued back then that they were too low, but I didn't know how high they should really be. But to me, I thought people had to get used to the idea that there were other options because it seemed not 100%, but it seemed very plausible to me that at some point over the next three or four or five months before the convention, something was going to happen that was going to lead to Joe Biden being down five points in the polls and people realizing he was not going to make up that gap.

And if it happened before the convention, they could do something about it. It was also, by the way, possible that something would happen where Biden just had to step aside for health-related reasons, and they should know what the options were in that case, too. But I sort of saw myself as socializing and thinking through how these different things might actually work. Why was Harris seen the way she was in the party? Did that actually make sense? And how did this thing that used to be very normal in American politics but wasn't normal anymore, an open convention, actually function?

And then the Biden team scheduled the early debate, which whoever did that, I think, is accidentally an American hero. And that created the moment in time for the party to act. I mean, it's funny, though, it's sort of evidence of the thing you were saying in the first part of this interview, which is like, when you made that call, like, my feeling listening to that piece back in February was like,

it made me feel relieved because I felt like there was this thing that people didn't want to entirely address. Like in my own mind, like I would see clips of Biden not looking great and think,

Oh, those Republican video editors, they're doing it again. And it made me understand, like anybody else, I can be captured by ideology and miss things and convince myself of things and whatever. I saw my own bias and my own shortcomings. And then having someone just say something that on some level I think I understood and on another level I didn't want to, I found to be sane-making. But it's interesting when you describe the process by which you arrived at the understanding of what you wanted to say, it's not like...

You were walking down a sidewalk in Brooklyn and a shadowy Democratic operative leaned over and said, like, hey, Joe Biden's not doing so good. It's like you looked at public statements and you looked at the choices you would expect a candidate to be making publicly versus the ones he was making. And you had enough information to know something. Yeah. And I guess the other thing that you'll hear in my thinking across this whole episode, which connects in a way I wouldn't have expected, is that the way I think about politics is in terms of institutions and coalitions, first and foremost. Right.

I am not candidate-centric in the way some people are. I have done a lot of work trying to get people over the idea that American politics is all about the president. The president is very important, but not the only actor in the system.

And I think one place that I just really disagreed with people for an extremely long period here was I felt the Democratic Party was a stronger institution than they did. And by the way, that went for people who are official Democrats, like the chair of the Democratic Party, for instance. And, you know, people would tell me all the time that the Democratic Party didn't have the capability to do something like this. We're in the age of hollow parties, not strong parties.

After the debate, there was all this talk about how, you know, this was a decision only Joe Biden and his family could and would make, right? This is for them. You know, nobody else has influence. And I thought that was crazy. The piece I did right after, which was another audio essay, the piece I did right after the debate was called, What is the Democratic Party for? Right.

And parties are informal networks in the way they're constructed in American political life, but they are still important. And they had all kinds of leverage. I mean, if Biden was losing support among members of Congress, that would be an important signal to him. If donors were fleeing him, then he wouldn't have the money to actually run the election in the way he wanted to. If media elites who he read or who other people read, right? Parties are informal structures of influence, of actual leverage, right?

And I thought there was more power in the Democratic Party, more institutional strength than a lot of people did. And I thought that because I had watched the Democratic Party over a series of elections make highly strategic decisions going back to when in 2020 it has a sort of

overnight coalescence around Biden, where Pete Buttigieg, who is a candidate who won Iowa, Joe Biden didn't win Iowa, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out at the same time and endorsed Biden after South Carolina. And

In, you know, 2018, there had been very good candidate recruitment and selection in the Democratic Party, and they often had not gone with a candidate in a primary they wanted, right? They went with the candidate they thought could win. And I watched then a similar thing happen in 2020, and they did a really good job in 2022. And there's this idea like, oh, the Democratic Party can't possibly make hard decisions to choose its most competitive candidate. I was like, what?

Who says it can't do that? It now had the governorships in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, in Arizona, right, in North Carolina. Like, you're telling me this party can't make strategic decisions? This party, when faced with a choice between doing the thing it needed to do to win an election against a MAGA candidate and falling completely apart, it was just going to fall completely apart? Like, why would you believe that? Like, that was not what the party had been doing.

But that was about thinking about politics institutionally, about seeing it not as, you know, just one person. The Republican Party is trickier. I mean, it does still have very coalitional dynamics, but it really is under the thumb of Donald Trump to the point that the co-chair of the RNC is Donald Trump's entirely unqualified daughter-in-law, Laura Trump. Yeah.

The Republican Party is just a personality cult, but the Democratic Party isn't that, and that's not who Joe Biden is or was. And so there's just, yeah, you could look at that, I thought, and see it had options, and if it decided to act, it could act. And it did.

I mean, the other reason, though, it's like you're saying, okay, part of the reason you saw what you saw and said what you said is because you're an institutionalist who still believes in parties. The other thing you're describing, though, is that there was this huge conventional wisdom, and you were choosing to say something that was at least against the public online conventional wisdom, whatever the voters thought. You know, when we spoke last year, you were talking about how you think it is good to avoid social media, both because it...

it sort of like has a way of infiltrating the way you think about the world. And,

After your February piece, I peaked on social media. I saw someone saying that your eyes should be scooped out with a spoon. Really? Yes. Seems a little extreme. I thought it was a little extreme. I saw a lot of people across the political spectrum expressing a lot of anger. Do you think your ability to say the thing you saw or see the thing you saw was also influenced by the fact that you were not reading comments from people saying that your eyeballs should be scooped out?

Yeah, I only speak here for my personality type, which other people have other experiences with social media and being on there than I do. I don't think I would have written that piece if I was...

a ongoing participant in online liberal social media. It's funny because I ended up joining Twitter or X or whatever, again, for like three-ish weeks, I think. Yeah. At the height of, was Joe Biden going to step down? Because there was a weird moment where sentiment was shifting in such a minute-to-minute way that I thought that was the place where that conversation, one of the places at least, was going to happen.

where that conversation was actually playing out and people were being influenced. And then there are people like, ha, I see you've proven that X is really where the influence is, and I'm back off of it now. And yeah, my view was it was useful to me in that couple of weeks, but I never would have done the initial pieces had I been on it. And why? Just because it would have felt more like you were stepping off a ledge or stepping away from people

who you're supposed to agree with? I don't think it would have been consciously, oh, I believe this and I can't say it. I don't think that's typically how human beings work. I mean, it is sometimes. But I do think what we allow ourselves to see has to do with what is good for us to see. And I think there's a lot of psychological evidence in favor of this point. And so the sorts of arguments we find compelling are,

I think there's almost an automatic self-protective device coming in from the community. And, you know, we are very social creatures and we don't want to be at odds with our communities. And so for me as somebody who, there are people who are on social media and they like being at odds with other people.

I am not like that. Me neither. I just want everybody to like me and for everything to be copacetic. The first 30 minutes of a good rom-com. Yeah, exactly. And so to think independently, I can't be connected to that many people. We're going to take a short break and then, okay, fine. We have some guidelines for how to pay attention to a normal election.

But what if, for some reason, there was a super compressed 90-day hyper campaign where all caps news headlines were happening every week? How would you sanely follow that? Plus, Ezra Klein gives me permission to do something real bad for me. That's after the break. Surge Engine is brought to you by SpotPet.

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Okay, so generally speaking, social media, not a great information gathering tool. Generally speaking, looking at what the candidates are saying or have said publicly is helpful. Generally speaking, like looking at where their party is will tell you a lot more than sort of like some incremental piece of gossip that came out.

for the specific moment we're in, which is that there's three months of this election. It is like, I mean, you would know better than me, but to my view, it's,

a historically unprecedented, it just feels like a very over-plotted election. A lot of stuff has been happening a lot. Everything's compressed. It's very exciting. I find that my ability to disconnect seems to be very bad. How would you stay sane in this last stretch? What would you recommend to a more normal person for the next 90-ish days? First, I think the question is, is the thing you want actually to stay sane?

Because it might not be. I don't think, look, I think that you could have a sane view on this election that would be, if anything, more telling by just reading the New York Times once a day.

I think that would be plenty. It's plenty of election information. Add in Politico if you want or the Washington Post, and you're going to know plenty. And you'll know actually a lot of deep things that you won't get on Twitter. And you know things that are contrary to what people in your circle find interesting that you won't find on Twitter.

or whatever. But it's not going to be in a way like the most fun and exciting way to follow the election. I mean, there's a lot of memes happening right now and people are excited and there's, you know, weird intellectual currents. And so maybe you do want to plug into that. When I say I'm not on some of these things, it doesn't mean I'm not looking at them. And I'm probably looking at them right now more than I want to. And I know that doesn't make me a saner person.

But it is interesting, and there are things that are happening there right now that are important.

And so I do think it goes back to this question of, well, what do you want? I wouldn't pretend that you're being informed in the best possible way about American politics by checking in constantly, like 42 times a day on the election. There's not that much information happening on any given day that is meaningful. And if you want to know more about American politics, you should actually be looking at like the coverage of house races and local media and, you know,

thinking a lot about the economy and reading the forecast reports from, you know, good economic forecasters because whether there's a recession in the fourth quarter is actually going to matter more than what the memes are saying today. But if...

you know, if you just want to be plugged into the election, if you want that thing jacked into your vein, because it's important and that just feels like where you got to be right now. I don't have a moral case against people doing that. I don't think elections, high stakes elections are built for sanity. I think they actually are deranging people.

And one thing that is true is that you can have perfectly good information about them, but also miss the structure of feeling around them if you don't allow yourself to become a little bit deranged. I think you can't understand, for instance, the role J.D. Vance is playing in this election and what is happening around him on the Republican ticket.

unless you jack yourself into an information feed that is deranging wild and like will make you a little bit of a worse person. But if you're not willing to do that, you are not going to understand what is happening there. Like the way he's become a liability for Donald Trump. Like if you don't know anything about J.D. Vance and couches, whether or not that is fair to J.D. Vance, you don't understand what has happened, which is that J.D. Vance has become a soft target for

that every faction in the Democratic Party and the sort of broad, sprawling, informal Democratic coalition smells blood around. Because he is like Donald Trump has chosen the most off-putting kid in school because that kid was the most sycophantic to Donald Trump himself.

to be his running mate. And in doing, Donald Trump has revealed something about himself, has opened up a vulnerability that wouldn't necessarily have been open otherwise, because Donald Trump has reminded you of a certain weirdness, because that is the term that has emerged in him, that he could have covered up with a Doug Burgum, that he could have made less sailing with a Marco Rubio. But J.D. Vance is the kind of MAGA candidate that

who loses. And Trump has made himself into a little bit more of a loser by choosing Vance. He's reminded you that he likes this sort of weird online right subculture that's actually not the thing that he represents or comes out of, but is the thing that has taken shape behind him and beneath him. And it keeps blowing winnable elections for Republicans because these people come off as very strange because actually the culture they come out of is very, very strange. And

You can't feel that in its full texture.

if you're not watching JD Vance get bullied out of American public life on X, which is like not a sentence I love saying. Okay. Well, then maybe this is how I think about it. Okay. Like, like sometimes when you go on vacation, you start vaping, but you know that when you come home, you don't want to vape anymore. And perhaps like if I'm trying to evolve into someone who is more conscientious about where I put my attention and,

Of all the things to pay attention to, a presidential election, even if you're paying attention to it in a somewhat deranged way, isn't the worst. So if I'm going to like

throw some of my better practices out the window for the next few months. I don't mind that. Honestly, saying that I'm going to do anything else is just pretending anyway. What would I text people about all day? I think the thing I am saying here is because I don't exactly want to be the enabler for everybody to lose their minds or search engine nation to completely throw out all their good information habits. I think there is a kind of information happening right now on social media.

that is proving important. And you can choose to be in that information stream or not. You don't need it. Like, if you know how you're going to vote, you can tune the whole fucking thing out. Right. And just go in and cast your ballot in November. You don't need to follow it. If you want to understand the thing that's happening, then you need to follow it, but you also need to recognize that it's partial. So if you are on, like, liberal social media right now,

The structure of sentiment is telling you something real about the joy and enthusiasm and anger and confidence and, like, ruthlessness that has suddenly emerged among Democrats. It was not there three months ago in their grim death march to defeat. But it is not going to tell you very much about why Pennsylvania is a 49-49 state at the moment, you know, in some polls.

And how, like, older white suburbanites in Pennsylvania will vote because they and not, you know, deranged meme makers are probably going to be the crucial, like, swing category for,

in the election. So it's like there's truth and there's untruth. There's what you're seeing and what's obscuring. It's all there at the same time. It's sort of like it's okay to pay attention to these things as long as you understand that it is like a froth around the thing and not the thing itself. It goes back to what are you trying to do here, right? Is what you're trying to do just have election vibes 24-7? Because that's what we're talking about on some level.

Is what you're trying to do to have the most useful information about the election, you're probably getting more of that from more established news sources. Because yes, eventually the couch memes will get talked about, but you're also going to hear about actual campaign strategy, and you're also going to hear about...

who's targeting what how and fundraising and all these other things that really do matter, is what you want to do to be helpful. Like, then you might want to volunteer, you know, to phone bank for house races, right? Where, you know, or actually, like, pay attention to local politics in your town where there's probably elections happening that you could really meaningfully influence. There's a concept that the political scientist Etan Hirsch has called political hobbyism. He's got this book called "Politics is for Power."

And he makes this distinction between hobbyists and people trying to actually affect things in politics. But he says it correctly, that a lot of us, we follow politics like it is a sport. And we are not following it with an eye towards influencing the outcome. We're not even really following it with an eye towards being informed in some accurate sense.

It's just our hobby. And we are connected to it in the way we connect to a lot of hobbies. I mean, people don't follow sports teams obsessively because it matters for the fate of the universe, how the Knicks do. They follow it because they love the Knicks. It's a hobby. And a lot of people are political hobbyists, and that's also a totally fine thing to be.

But if what you want to do is willpower, right, then you need to be sort of thinking more instrumentally about, you know, what is happening locally and is the thing you can do donate money or is the thing you can do to be out there knocking doors or, you know, doing phone banking that connects you to people in another state because you live in a very blue or very red state, right? There are these very different pathways you walk through.

depending on what your actual purpose here is. So I don't want to tell anybody that like being fully jacked in to the political vibe machine, which is what social media is, isn't fun or isn't like the way they want to do it. As you say, like sometimes we take up, you know, bad habits on vacation. You know, when you're in Vegas, you gamble and maybe you don't want to be gambling all the time, but right now you're in Vegas.

Then there's a question of do you want accurate information about things, and then you want to be thoughtful about what you're consuming and from which sources. And then there's a question of do you want to influence things, which is not about endlessly reading or consuming media, but about thinking about what resources you have to put out into the world, be they time, be they energy, be they whatever, money, and choosing where to target them. And those are all just very different roads to walk down. Ezra Klein, he's a columnist at the New York Times.

Ezra, that is very helpful. Thank you. Always a pleasure. If you want to sanely follow this election, you could do worse than tuning into the Ezra Klein Show. They're always great, but they've just been killing it, this election cycle. If you want to insanely follow this election, grab a vape. I'll see you on social media. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamaneni. And it's produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Fact-checking this week by Holly Patton. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarrian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

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