I Watched the Republican Convention. The Democrats Can Still Win.
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. It is Friday, July 19th. It is the morning after the final night of the Republican National Convention. And there is a lot to say about who the Republicans are showing themselves to be or showing themselves to want to be. A lot to say about what is about to happen potentially with the Democrats and Joe Biden. And I'm going to be talking about the Republican National Convention.

And so I'm joined by my great showrunner and senior editor, Claire Gordon, who is going to turn the tables on me a bit and ask the questions today. So, Claire, thank you so much for being here. It is my pleasure. And I'll just start right there with what stands out to you as different about Trump and the Republican Party's sales pitch in 2024 compared to last time.

What was interesting to me across the Republican convention and something I see some of my liberal friends honestly grappling with and some of them still trying to deny is that the Republican Party itself is changing. It is coming into line behind the thing that it thinks Donald Trump is.

Whether that's a thing Donald Trump actually is is something we should talk about because I am unconvinced. And I think you saw this on the final night of the convention. For all the talk in the nights leading up to it of economic populism, for all that you had a union president speaking on the first night, for all of J.D. Vance's attacks on Wall Street and in his speech, the night of Donald Trump was not a night of full-throated economic populism. It was a night of full-throated showmanship and entertainment.

He was introduced by Dana White, the head of the UFC. Hulk Hogan gave, I think undoubtedly, the night's best speech. It was campy and it was strange and it was entertaining. But it understood that the root of Donald Trump's politics are as a showman, as a reality television star, as a WWE Hall of Famer.

There was a lot of talk about Donald Trump's golf game. If you didn't tune in for the early speeches, I think you'd be surprised how much talk there was about Donald Trump's golf game. The fact that he loves music. I thought it was very funny that Tucker Carlson ended up opening up for the general manager of Donald Trump's golf club. Kid Rock gave a performance. A friend of mine said to me that it felt like watching Donald Trump's Vegas residency. And I think that's right.

Once Trump got into his own speech, after he moved through the period of talking about the assassination attempt, which was, I would say, an interesting, in some cases, bizarre way that he opened it up. He sort of spoke about himself like he was like a bard from the future telling the story of Donald Trump and the sort of, you know, it was a warm day.

I would say the way Trump spoke about it, it felt to me like a shift had happened in him, not towards serenity, not towards an expansive perspective or a calmness. But so many people in Trump's base have told him that he is godly, that he is godsent, that he is here on a mission of God.

And I think Trump enjoyed that support. And now I think Trump shares that perspective. I think his sense of being chosen has settled into him in a different way, which you can imagine that playing out in many ways, some of them dangerous. When he got into his own speech, it was just Trump. It wasn't even a very good Donald Trump. It wasn't like one of his better rallies. But it was just him. It was rambly. It was long. It was just truly full of bullshit.

so much that it feels like it overwhelms the capacity of the fact checker. There's so much emphasis, for instance, on energy production, but America is currently producing more crude oil than any country ever has in the history of the entire world. That includes the United States under Donald Trump. And it didn't feel to me like a speech where they said to themselves, people are tuning in here who are uncertain about Donald Trump, but giving him a second chance. And we've got to convince them.

Across quite a bit of the RNC, this felt like base turnout. It felt like an effort to solidify an ideological change that we can talk about that is happening. But it didn't feel like an effort to persuade, to present a face that somebody who is, you

modestly pro-choice, but doesn't really like Democrats and is upset about inflation and lives in Pennsylvania. It wasn't aimed at them. It felt to me for them like a pretty profound missed opportunity. A lot for Democrats I'm talking to, a lot of the sense of Trump's inevitability that had begun to take hold among some in the party shattered and they watched him and they remembered, oh, this guy is completely beatable and has actually never won the popular vote in an election ever.

That's interesting to hear you say that. And I just want to spend a moment on the divine intervention messianic piece of this and just play a moment so folks can hear a taste of it. I'm not supposed to be here tonight. Not supposed to be here. Thank you. But I'm not. And I'll tell you, I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.

So in the first part of that speech, you also, the camera pans and people have tears streaming down their face as he's like describing events of that day. America is a religious country. Do you not think that there is power to that message? I don't think for an election there is power to that message. I'm a little bit uncomfortable talking about that message in terms of whether or not it will win Trump a point and a half in Michigan. Yeah.

Because I think there is an authenticity to what he is going through here. People who go through near-death experiences of that nature do emerge changed. They do emerge with a sense sometimes of destiny, a sense of needing to focus on other things in their life. I don't want to comment or pretend that I know what that has meant to Donald Trump or how he feels about it.

But I wouldn't frame it really as a political message. I mean, we'll see. I think the iconography of the image of him with his fist up is obviously going to be a huge dimension of the Trump campaign this year. I'm sure we will see it on a lot of merch and signs and stickers and so on.

To the degree it does reflect a message that they are trying to push, you heard this from other speakers, which is that, and this is an odd mythologizing of him to me, but nevertheless, that Donald Trump doesn't need to be doing any of this. That Donald Trump was rich, he was happy, he was a celebrity, and for your sins and on your behalf, he entered the grime world.

and the difficulty and the challenge of politics, and he was slandered, and he was persecuted, and he was mocked, and he had an election stolen from him, and then he had the Justice Department and the New York prosecutors and the Georgia prosecutors go after him, and they've tried to throw him in jail, and they've tried to impoverish him, and then they tried to kill him. Possibly some shadowy day is sending lone shooters now. That sense of

paranoia, that sense that this is a movement that is under genuine persecution and if Donald Trump cannot win the election, it might be stamped out.

It was odd because it permeated a convention that at the same time was completely convinced of its victory, of how many votes it would get, of the fact that it was actually the dominant now force in American politics. But that, I think, is their real message, right? The message is not so much about the shooting. The message is more about actually the court cases against Donald Trump and the sense that he has been persecuted, they have been persecuted, but they've withstood it.

And that strength shows something fundamental about him, about them, about the way they would govern, about what this movement is made of, and also the threat in their minds that it represents to a corrupt status quo, ruling class, regime, whatever you want to call it.

And at the same time, they're trying to be more inclusive and very explicitly reaching out to parts of what's traditionally been the Democrats coalition, like black voters. So here's Vivek Ramaswamy. Our message to black Americans is this. The media has tried to convince you for decades that Republicans don't care about your communities, but we do.

We want for you what we want for every American: safe neighborhoods, clean streets, good jobs, a better life for your children, and a justice system that treats everyone equally, regardless of your skin color and regardless of your political beliefs.

I mean, so you heard themes like that over and over again, people talking about this is a big tent party and it doesn't matter what race you are. What's going on here? Why is it that Trump of all recent Republican presidential nominees, Trump with like his record of racist statements, why does it seem like he can make this play for Black voters?

Let me say a couple things about this, and not just about Black voters, but about something happening across the RNC that I am sincerely in favor of. Across the Republican National Convention, you saw the Republican Party making a genuine effort to appeal to union voters, to Black voters, to Hispanic voters. And I have studied political polarization in incredibly detailed

deep detail. I wrote a book on it that came out in 2020, Why We're Polarized. And one of the points of that book is that to say a country is polarized doesn't actually give you that much information. The question is, what is it polarized over? And one thing we were seeing at this convention is the nature, the locus of American polarization is changing. So if you go back to the 2012 convention, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, the sort of voter in Mitt Romney's mind, he

at that convention, I think, is like a small business owner, an entrepreneur, the sort of winners of American life who the rest of us are supposed to look at aspirationally. And the voter in mind at this convention was very different, was not wealthy, I think, was not necessarily white, maybe even joined a union. I think it is good for the politics around organized labor, around race to depolarize.

And I do think there was an effort being made in that direction here. Does that take away from the fact that Donald Trump had a deeply anti-union National Labor Relations Board in his first term? No. But maybe it'd be somewhat different in a second term. I think it is good what the Team Service president, Sean O'Brien, did. If I were a union president and my job was to help my members, I would want there to be entry for me

in a Republican administration, right? That is the job. I don't think the fact that organized labor is simply a kind of arm of the Democratic coalition has actually been good for it. Democrats don't hold power in enough places enough of the time.

And Trump splits politics on different lines than it was split under someone like Romney or Ryan. His appeal, the way he shows up to people, it's a very cultural appeal. He frontloads issues like immigration. He frontloads a way of talking and speaking and a kind of antagonism and sense of resentment.

that is very class-oriented, very, you know, depending on how you frame class, not just about wealth, right? There are many, many wealthy Donald Trump supporters, and it should not go without notice that the scion of the MAGA movement now is a Yale Law graduate who went to work immediately in venture capital. J.D. Vance, whatever else you want to say about him, is a convert to the class war.

But there are many union members and many Black and Hispanic voters who share this kind of politics, share some of these views on trade, share these views on immigration, right? This is something the Democratic Party, I think, really got wrong for itself. It listened to...

ideological groups claiming to represent Black and Hispanic voters, and it turned out they did not represent nearly the full range of opinion. There's a lot of effort at suppression of support for Republicans, and when suppression breaks, it often kind of breaks all at once. And so Trump, in offering a much more cultural appeal to

replicates itself in non-traditional media. I mean, it's a sort of very pro-Trumpy world, I think, at this point, in like sports talk radio, in a lot of the big YouTube shows.

He's just pulling different people, and he noticed he's pulling different people, right? He is excited about the fact that he's pulling different people, and now he's leaning into the parts of his own movement that he thinks can appeal to them. And for all of the unhealthy things I saw at the RNC, I think that thing is healthy. I think it would be good for the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to both be competing for organized labor, for Black voters, for Hispanic voters, rather than taking them for granted. At the same time, the

The locus of polarization itself is changing. It's not going away. The polarization is over the system itself, right? Are we a democracy? Are American institutions in any way trustworthy, right? J.D. Vance has talked about firing every mid-level bureaucrat and replacing them with, you know, as he sometimes puts it, like their people.

Donald Trump talked about offhandedly, but extremely, extremely bluntly, definitively, how he believes the election was stolen from him. Like, they're going to make it impossible to steal it again. We're never going to let something like that 2020 result happen again.

There was no doubt about that at the Republican Party. So in some ways, we've slipped down into a deeper form of polarization over the fundamentals of the system itself. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were not divided over the question of American institutions, over whether or not election results should be or would be considered legitimate. So when you talk about Democrats and Republicans becoming polarized over democracy, what's

Trump and his supporters think that the Democrats are going to try to steal this election. Democrats fear that Trump is going to try to steal this election. Democrats fear that Trump is going to weaponize the DOJ. And Trump and his supporters feel like the Democrats are weaponizing the DOJ. Is it that they're like polarized and that they have different values on these issues? Or is it just that they are mirror images of each other?

So the thing about Donald Trump is that he acts in ways that force systems to react against him. When you try to fundamentally invalidate elections, a system is going to have to do something about that. And then he says, look, the system is against me. They're treating me in a way no one has ever been treated before. Doesn't this just prove what I've been saying all along? And it doesn't. But there are ways in which it looks like that to people.

I am not personally a fan of the New York case against Donald Trump. On the letter of the law, he did everything he's accused of doing. I think that the sort of bank shot theory of law applied there, where you are taking a business documents misdemeanor and elevating it to a felony by attaching it to a campaign finance violation is

In terms of the explosiveness of prosecuting an ex-president, I think that was not the strongest case. The sort of profusion of cases created a kind of appearance, even though it reflects Donald Trump doing a lot of things wrong and a lot of things lawlessly. It did create an appearance of something unusual happening here that I think a lot of people and certainly people sympathetic to him were, you know, all too willing to buy into.

And it has created then this deeper form of polarization. There's also a thing happening behind Trump himself, which you see in J.D. Vance, you see in a lot of these people, which is that over the sort of last 10-ish years, Republicans, conservatives, particularly sort of populist conservatives, feel that the institutions of American life became...

biased, arrayed, weaponized against them. The universities, but they had been out of power in the universities for a long time. But during the sort of post-Ferguson period, the post-George Floyd period, the Me Too period, a feeling that businesses had become woke, businesses had become an arm of not necessarily the Democratic Party, though they might say that, but I would say more like a liberal, cultural, and institutional dominance of

And it also reflects compositional differences in America. We've had a lot of educational polarization. So it actually is the case that people with college degrees, post-grad degrees, who are at the top of a lot of these institutions are more monolithically liberal than they used to be. Not actually monolithically liberal, and you can certainly find many, many, many rich Republican businessmen, rich Republican, or at least powerful Republican faith leaders, right? You know, churches are still a very powerful institution in American life.

So the extent of this can be overstated.

But the sense that Republicans have lost their representation in a lot of these institutions is very real on the Republican side. And it's much more a feeling of being culturally on the outs, right? It's not a feeling that all these institutions have a strong view about single-payer health care, but that they have strong cultural views about race, about gender, and the things that are more traditionally Christian and conservative views have become almost unsayable, right? I mean, we went in a very short period in American life, right?

from gay marriage being an issue that it would be like a lethal to run on as a national politician. That would have been true in 2000, would have been true in 2004. Barack Obama believed it to be true in 2008.

You can't even really, at a high level in American life, be against gay marriage, forget running on it or trying to do anything about it. But just to oppose it would put you culturally in a very difficult place. Now, I'm obviously a deep supporter of gay marriage, but that has created a backlash and a sense of persecution. So I think all these things kind of braid together in where Republicans have gone and have also led to this sort of economic populist movement.

pressure there, this sense of free speech being a major issue there, right? When people feel like they are losing their footing and their grip on, you know, the institutions that wield power, that's a frightening thing. And I think as much as I disagree on a lot of the particulars, it is worth taking seriously that it has frightened many on the right. ♪

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Let's talk about J.D. Vance. The convention started off with the announcement that Trump was picking him as his VP. And a lot of the liberal conversation after that was sort of focused on the comments that J.D. Vance had made during Trump's 2016 run for office conversation.

calling him cultural heroine and that maybe he was America's Hitler and just trying to like puzzle over the fact that this was now Trump's running mate. And was this just like crass political opportunism on the part of J.D. Vance that he had this wild Trumpian makeover? You have said that you think that's the wrong way to understand Vance. So what's wrong with it?

I just don't think it's true. I mean, I think the particulars are true in the sense that he did say all those things about Trump. Although, remember, he said he might be America's Hitler. That was one of the possibilities. Look, I interviewed J.D. Vance in his hillbilly elegy period, and he was a very different guy. And he wasn't just a different guy in what he thought.

He was a different guy in temperament, in openness, right? He's a guy who was like believed deeply in civility, who believed deeply in like what you might call sort of political and civic virtues. And what led Vance to his current level of antagonism and contempt and fury is interesting. And I have my theories on it as anybody might.

But I need extraordinary evidence, and a lot of people disagree with me about this, and that's totally fine. People are going to find this unconvincing. I need a lot of evidence before I'll believe somebody is acting in an extended way insincerely. People have a lot of difficulty maintaining high levels of cognitive dissonance for very long. So what happens is people go through these conversions. I think the way they normally go through it is not by first converting to Trump.

It is by converting to a hatred of his enemies. You're not pro-Trump, you're anti-anti-Trump. I think that is where J.D. Vance started. Here's this guy, Donald Trump. The kinds of people Vance grew up with, the kinds of people who he is sort of describing in his book, the kinds of people he understands himself to be politically on the side of, they all love Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the media, the institutions, they hate Donald Trump. They see nothing good in Donald Trump at all. And in fact, they are showering Donald Trump

and maybe even the people who back him, with contempt, with derision. They're deplorables.

And that opens up a wedge, right? Who are you going to side with? And once you kind of fall into the other side of that, I'm with these people. And yeah, Trump has its flaws, but there's some reason all these people are turning to him. And this happens to a lot of people. I mean, a lot of these kind of tech billionaires and VCs have gone through this, right? They've gone through it, I think, for different reasons. But once you start going into a different group of people and hearing different things, then the conversion process can accelerate, right?

And when people convert, I mean, we've all saying about this, the zeal of the convert, the zeal of the newly converted. When people convert, they many times end up going further than the people who were there all along, right? I feel this about some of my never-Trumper friends who were hardcore Republicans just a couple of years ago. And even though I've been a liberal my entire life, I feel they are much more down-the-line Democrats now than I would even think of being.

They sort of have the zeal of the convert. They like, they see fully now the Republican Party's malignancy. They all of a sudden have totally different views on not just Donald Trump, but healthcare, taxation, foreign policy, like all these things they once believed. They're now just like down the line Biden Democrats.

I think this happened to Vance. And I do think that there was opportunism in it. I think that he had political ambitions, and so he became the thing he needed to become to win in Ohio. It is worth noting, by the way, that Vance is not like a political juggernaut in Ohio. He underperformed the state's Republican governor by a very, very, very significant margin. Vance, I think in part because he's a zeal of the convert. In

in part because he is so angry at the people who he once saw as his friends. I mean, Vance said at one point about me and David Brooks, he's like, you know, they just lost their minds. He changed so much in the Trump administration. And I would say I didn't change at all. Everything that I believed when J.D. Vance and I were both talking about the same things and both thought Donald Trump was bad at the same time, I just kept believing and Vance moved. But I take what Vance has happened to him as,

I think the way this happens to people is honest inside of them. And I think it is very hard to understand them if you don't take that seriously. The other thing I will say about Vance is that the place where his conversion is most stark...

is cultural, temperamental, the contemptuous way he speaks to the people he disagrees with, you know, that the Democratic Party is just ruled by childless cat ladies who hate their lives. There's an ugliness that has emerged in him that genuinely saddens me, right? It's a way of trading away important parts of your soul, right?

to be part of the movement you want to be part of, right? When I say it's sincere, it doesn't mean I don't think it worse than depressing. I think it in a way cowardly. Like, it is hard to maintain a certain level of political virtue in a time when that has been lost. And there are people in Vance's movement who do it, and he doesn't. But that has happened to a lot of people who have bent the knee to Donald Trump only to find that they actually like being on the floor.

So I want to play a clip of J.D. Vance's speech at the convention. And in this speech, he did something which I don't think you hear Trump do very often. Like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Now, that's Kentucky coal country, one of the 10. Now, it's one of the 10 poorest counties in the entire United States of America.

They are very hardworking people, and they're very good people. They're the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can't afford enough to eat. And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them. But they love this country not only because it's a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children's home, and they would die fighting to protect it.

What he was doing there, and he was talking before that about how America isn't just an idea. It was this clear articulation of just like what it means to be an American, which I think Trump, his vibes do that a lot. But I don't think he does it as clearly and explicitly as Vance did in that speech. And I'm curious what you make of that. One thing to understand about Vance is that he's not just a convert to Trumpism. He's a convert to something that's called national conservatism.

And that whole back part of the speech, which if you listen to it, he talks about when he proposed to his wife, he had law school debt and a cemetery plot in Kentucky. And in this town he's talking about, who are also buried in this plot he's talking about, is it to them, America is not a creedal nation that asks for the whole world's, you know, huddled, hungry, tired, and poor. America is a land. They are its people. It is their land. They own it.

And they will die to defend it. The National Conservatism Conference, I believe it was in Washington, D.C. And one of the things I did before the convention was I listened to J.D. Vance's speech at that conference. And that speech is hard-edged and it's ideological. And that whole riff he gives, he gives there. This is his riff. And this is the whole point of national conservatism.

J.D. Vance, in a thing that I think is a somewhat unresolved contradiction in his thought, both the National Conservative speech he gives and then briefly in the speech he gives here, he talks about how his wife, whose parents are immigrants, how they've given so much to the country. But in the speech he gives at the conservative conference, he talks about how it's indisputable that immigrants make countries poorer. They harm countries. So the sense of how Vance navigates this is complicated and I think reflects a

later in life conversion to the view that immigrants weaken nations and the way they weaken nations is because they weaken the fundamental identity of the nation. Right now, he wants to talk about how immigrants harm housing prices, how the reason housing prices have gone up is the competition from, as he put it in the speech, illegal aliens to

I think as somebody who is currently writing a book heavily about housing prices and what has happened to them, the idea that immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, are the reason housing prices have done what they have done is...

actually. Like, it's just, like, not the right way to think about it and also just reflects a complete absence of taking seriously. We could just build as many homes as we want. We know how to build apartment buildings. If we're not building them, like, the supply is constrained. And the fact that that's not J.D. Vance's view, right, that he wants to say, oh, like, all these problems are really the immigrants is because what he wants to do is use the problems to have fewer immigrants and to deport people who are here now. But what

What Vance is is a national conservative. What national conservatives are are conservatives who are much more focused on

on the question of the nation, not as an idea, but the people who exist here now and what their perceived cultural and material needs are and the way those and the national identity are threatened by people coming in. And that is the factional fight he is in in the Republican Party because the Republican Party traditionally has been very pro-immigrant. They've believed in a lot of integration for America all around the world. They've

believed in a lot of integration of American labor. Some of that did not go well at all, right? That's some of the Donald Trump trade critique and the J.D. Vance trade critique. But you have to understand there is being something cohesive at the bottom of this. It's not just like a random assortment of policies. And

And the thing at the bottom of it is a very different idea of what America is and who it is for. And it's a movement from the idea that, you know, if you think about the 2004 Republican convention with George W. Bush, America as this nation of ideas, and it wants to spread those ideas around the world to a much more confined vision of America as the people who are here now. And by the way, only really some of them, right? When Hulk Hogan in some ways had the most honest line of the night,

When he said all the real Americans will be called Trumpites and there'll be all these Trumpites running around. And I was like, wow, you just took the whole subtext of this entire convention and made a text in one line. But this is the ideological movement.

that Vance has made his name in, that he has come out of. And that I think before he was even fully a convert to Donald Trump, given all he'd said about him, he was a convert to this way of thinking. And this way of thinking has come to understand Donald Trump as like their mystic leader.

Donald Trump might not have every policy view they have. He might not be good at running things in the way they would want him to be. He might not be like the deep religious figure they want him to be, but they sort of see him as like the Ayatollah of national conservatism, right? He has this kind of mystical understanding of the common man, the land, the country, its identity, and he has all the right enemies.

And so he is their leader. And like then they'll do the work coming up behind him with like the notepad and the abacus to sort of turn his poetry into the prose of governance. I mean, you call this a factional fight, but watching the convention, one thing that a person can't understate is that immigration was the big theme and a lot of emotion, a lot of rage about it. Hasn't that faction won? Isn't that the defining factor?

It has definitely won on immigration. There's no doubt about that. It hasn't won on everything, though. J.D. Vance is up there talking about how America has been serving Wall Street in the banking class. And Donald Trump is telling Bloomberg, where he very happily sat for an extended interview, about how he thinks Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, is great and how he'd really like to consider him for treasury secretary. And he's like, well, I don't know.

And noting that Donald Trump, again, the Ayatollah of national conservatism, who did he make his National Economics Council director when he came in in 2017? Gary Cohn, the former head of Goldman Sachs.

There are a lot of places here in terms of what this sort of intuitions and ideological decisions of this group are that Donald Trump doesn't agree with. One of the big fights that is coming in the Republican Party, you know, maybe it has already been decided, but a lot of Republicans just don't believe what Donald Trump and J.D. Vance seem to believe about Ukraine and about the world more broadly.

they both emerge out of an isolationist strain in the Republican Party. Like, why spend money elsewhere in the world when we could be spending it here to rebuild our industrial base, to help our people? Like, what are we doing in all these, you know, these external fights?

But a lot of Republicans do want to support Ukraine. They believe that strongly. A lot of Republicans do want a more confrontational and interventionist posture. Like that fight has not been won in the Republican Party, though the naming Vance has certainly given the more isolationist, restrained, whatever you want to call it, faction, an upper hand that they maybe weren't totally expecting. So on immigration, I think on rhetoric, I mean, there's no doubt who is winning.

But note, too, that Nikki Haley, who is, I think, the Republican, was the Republican running in the 2024 primaries, who most represented the sort of pre-Trump Republican Party. Aside from Trump, she did the best. And I think, like, if Trump and Vance lose, would be considered a very potentially significant frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2028. Right.

So I wouldn't be sure that this is done, but I would say that the older version of the Republican Party is very much back on its heels at the moment. In some respects, I will say they are not on their heels at all in taxes, where Donald Trump is still just saying he's going to use whatever money he can raise from tariffs, not just to extend his own tax cuts, but to cut corporate taxation even more deeply. ♪

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Okay, Ezra, while I have you, in order to beat this, the Democrats need to figure out who their nominee is going to be. You've been doing a lot of reporting on this, I know. What can you tell us? We're talking again on Friday. This has been an enormously fluid situation. The consensus among people I have spoken to who are high up in the Democratic Party and the kinds of people putting pressure on and who are around Joe Biden is

The feeling is Biden is starting to recognize that his position may not be recoverable. The key thing here is that over a compressed period of time, Speaker Jeffries went to him and said, the Democratic House members believe you should step aside, that that would be the best thing for the party in the country. Chuck Schumer went to him and said the same thing. Nancy Pelosi went to him and said the same thing.

It leaked from around Obama into the press that Obama is telling people that Biden's path has really narrowed to a very, very, very narrow path to reelection. Biden is angry. He feels abandoned by people he felt were his friends. He's not entirely wrong with that, though I would say this is partially because he's put them all in a very bad position. The idea that he holds no agency here, I think, is not reasonable.

And so we're in a very tricky spot here. There's been a lot of rumors and thought that he might drop out as early as very early in this coming week. But everything is a rumor. Everything is an anonymous source. Everything right now is also dependent on the decisions he ends up making.

Other things I would say is that for all that I've been a proponent of an open convention in my talks with the kinds of Democrats who are very involved here, I don't think there's appetite or time for that in their view. I will say Kamala Harris has been extremely impressive every day since the debate. She has not misplaced a foot. And if you watch some of the speeches she's been giving, which I've been doing, she's been extremely good on the stump. And so in the sense that there is a kind of quiet audition happening behind the scenes here, I

She is showing everybody in the party that like she seems good enough for the bet. You know, maybe she's not who they would draft out of an open field at this exact moment, but they don't really have an open draft. If Biden drops out sometime over the following week, the time period until the convention is very, very, very short.

And so the pressure to unite around Harris and have her pick a vice presidential nominee is going to be very, very, very strong. That's what I would now kind of expect to happen would be my modal case. I think the things the Democrats are weighing and Biden is weighing himself is Biden's outside hope. Like, I think the thing he believes might be possible here is if he just holds on and goes to the Democratic convention and the party really has no choice, then

it will unite behind him. It just can't do anything else. And then he'll have the party and he believes he can win and he'll take on Donald Trump and he'll win this thing. Promise his polling is really, really bad. Right now, Donald Trump needs to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Those are the only states in play that he really needs to win.

Biden, given the polling we have, needs to worry about winning not just those, but Minnesota, New Mexico, Maine. There are a series of states that Biden should not have to think about as competitive, that his position is degraded in, Virginia being another, so significantly that, I mean, he could get electorally wiped out. I mean, Arizona, Georgia, out of reach now. Nobody thinks he's going to win them. North Carolina, out of reach.

So, this is a problem. He doesn't, like, the money is dried up. His map is actually huge. He needs to play not in three states, but in, like, a very significant number of quite expensive media markets. And, I mean, he also doesn't want to lose, right? And so, there's a question of how much he understands that he is probably headed for a loss.

But there are strange things happening in the party right now. Who have been Biden's most ardent backers? Bernie Sanders and AOC. And Sanders gave a very damaging, I think, for Biden interview to The New Yorker to Isaac Chotner, where he basically says to Chotner on being pressed, like, look, yeah, Biden keeps forgetting names. He can't always string three sentences together, but at least his agenda is good.

And like, that's not a very strong defense. AOC's defense is interesting. And I've invited her on the show. I haven't heard back from her people. But AOC went to Instagram and gave this long defense and basically said, look, there's peril if we do anything here. There isn't unity on how to replace Biden. If it'd be Harris, if it'd be an open convention, we could fall into chaos. I genuinely found AOC's perspective here surprising, in part because she's somebody who is typically very comfortable with high levels of risk.

She's somebody who wants to do a very rapid, complete reindustrialization of the entire energetic base of the American, even global economy. She supports health care plans and would abolish all private insurance. I mean, she's somebody who in a lot of her politics is willing to court a certain level of political chaos.

But people feel different ways about different political questions. The thing I did not hear her make a good argument for that I would like to hear her make a good argument for is that Biden can win. So I think to Democrats, they looked at Trump's kind of rambling speech. They see Trump as beatable. They look at Vance. Vance is very, very, very anti-abortion. He's talked about wanting a national abortion ban. They see Vance as beatable. They see Vance as a politically weak pacifist.

pick for Trump, right? If Trump had picked Doug Burgum or Marco Rubio, that would have scared Democrats a lot more. And the worry is simply that Biden cannot prosecute the case such that he can beat Trump. But Biden also looked at Trump and probably thought he was beatable and wants to be the one to do it. So it's tough. The other thing I will say is that if Biden does not drop out early in the week, I think you should expect a lot more Democrats to begin going public. The feeling right now is that they are trying to talk to him privately.

But if he does not react to that, they're turning up the pressure publicly because that is what he appears to actually be reacting to. Even Morning Joe has started talking about maybe he needs to drop out and they've been his strongest supporters. So it's a pretty ugly and difficult moment in the Democratic Party that I think would cohere into a lot of unity if he stepped aside. He would be treated as like a hero and a patriot who did the kind of country first thing.

thing Donald Trump would never do. And I think there'd be a lot of relief, you know, uniting around a Harris-Whitmer, Harris-Shapiro, Harris-Beshear, Harris-Cooper ticket. But the Democrats have to get there first. And whether, how likely that is, I mean, at this point, I think it is reasonably, you know, like above 50%. But it definitely changes by the hour and by which anonymous sources you're hearing quoted in which outlet.

You just said that the Republicans look beatable. You started the conversation this way. But also, you know, the Republicans have this incredibly strong, emotional, potent message on immigration and voters say that they trust the Republicans to handle that issue. Republicans have been making gains in these nontraditional voters for them. Do you think that the Democrats really

really have a message, a clear message that can beat what the Republicans are offering.

I mean, I will say that they don't have a clear message. I do think they have a message that can beat what the Republicans are offering. And I mean, this is a sort of case that the Democratic optimists have been making for a long time. Democrats beat Trump. I mean, they beat him in the popular vote in 2016, but he won the Electoral College. They wrecked Republicans under Trump in 2018. They wrecked Republicans in 2020. In 2022, they, by all accounts, should have lost, but won seats in the Senate. They won governorships. They made gains in states.

and they held down their losses in the house in a way nobody really thought likely given how high inflation was.

The message isn't all that different. The Republican Party believes a lot of things that most Americans don't believe. And a lot of people feel that the Republican Party is dangerous. Their views on abortion, their immigration views are not popular. A mass deportation effort, when people think about what that might be, like large internal security forces going house to house. And by the way, like there was a big bipartisan immigration deal that Donald Trump killed. Like there was an effort to make all this better and Donald Trump stopped it. The

The Republicans are extremely vulnerable, and it is telling that Donald Trump running against a man, an incumbent president who has a job approval rating in the 30s, who 80% of Americans in some polls believe doesn't have the cognitive capacity to serve as president again. Donald Trump has been two points ahead nationally and, you know, about two points ahead, depending on the state you're looking at in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and

These two candidates are so weak. They are so weak. They're like the only two people who could beat the other one. Donald Trump is not a strong candidate. And this Republican convention, it was unified, but not unified in a way that was reaching out to swing voters. It was unified in a way that was a factional fight within the Republican Party. J.D. Vance is great on Fox News.

But the sort of contempt he sprays at his political antagonists is a political problem. Like one of my lines on Vance is he understands why Trump won in 2016, but he doesn't understand why he lost in 2020. Somebody like Marco Rubio does. There are other figures in the party who do.

Vance has run a political approach, has run a sort of personal political campaign to become the leader of the MAGA movement. And that worked. That is different than campaigning to win over the people who in Pennsylvania love Governor Josh Shapiro and voted for him overwhelmingly against a MAGA opponent.

The people in Pennsylvania who voted for John Fetterman despite he was deeply incapacitated then by a stroke over Dr. Oz. The people in Michigan who voted for Gretchen Whitmer. The people in Wisconsin who voted for Tony Evers. There is, and we see them in polls because we see Democratic Senate candidates running far ahead of Joe Biden. There is a significant part of the electorate that does not particularly want to vote for Donald Trump again.

is very open to voting for a Democrat, but is not going to vote for Joe Biden because they don't think he's up to the job or they blame him for inflation or something else.

Democrats should put forward a candidate who appeals to this crucial part of the electorate. Give them a candidate for whom when they look at that candidate, they think, yeah, that's a normal, smart, hardworking, decent, compassionate person who is up to the job of the presidency. The Democratic Party has a lot of those people in the party. I think Vice President Harris is one of those people. The Democrats' theory was that Donald Trump was going to lose the election, not that Joe Biden was going to win it.

The thing that they are risking here is that they are going to lose the election, not that Donald Trump is going to win it. It would be nice for them to try to win the election. I just want to play a clip before we end of just Vice President Harris delivering like her line on Trump the other day at a speech.

In recent days, they've been trying to portray themselves as the party of unity. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. If you claim to stand for unity, you need to do more than just use the word. You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are pushing an agenda that deprives whole groups of Americans of basic freedoms, opportunity, and dignity.

You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are intent on taking reproductive freedoms from the people of America and the women of America. Trying to ban abortion nationwide as they do and restrict access to IVF and contraception as their plan calls for. You cannot claim to be for unity

if you try to overturn a free and fair election and threaten to terminate the United States Constitution. And you cannot claim to be for unity when your entire economic agenda is designed to prioritize billionaires and big corporations over the middle class. We're too busy watching what you're doing to hear what you're saying.

Look, if Joe Biden could do that that effectively, I think he could win. The fact that Harris can do that that effectively, I think she can win. The Republican Party has not put forward a popular strong ticket and agenda. They are looking strong because the Democrats are looking weak. But if the Democrats decide to overhaul this and develop a strong ticket and message, and they have still the time to do that,

I think that the overconfidence of the Republican convention and party right now is going to prove to be a real mistake. I think the Vance pick might ultimately prove to be a real mistake. They're acting like they have won this election, but they have not.

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Elias Iskweth, fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker, Jack McCordick, and Kristen Lynn. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin and Roland Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Samieluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.