Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need?
59:14 Share

This podcast is supported by FX's Shogun. Set in the year 1600, Lord Yoshitoronaga is fighting for his life as his enemies unite against him. With 26 Emmy nominations including Outstanding Drama Series, Shogun is the most Emmy-nominated series of the year. Starring Emmy nominees Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Soai, Tadanobu Asano, Takahiro Hira, and Nestor Carbonell. Shogun is available for your Emmy consideration

at fxnetworks.com slash FYC. From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. I've watched a lot of presidential campaigns, and I can't remember one where the contest for who is going to be the next Democratic vice presidential nominee has played out quite so publicly.

You've watched these Midwestern and Southern white male Democratic governors and possibilities, cabinet members in the case of Pete Buttigieg, fanning out across the media to make their case. And that's allowed for some voices and figures to break through who you might not have imagined before. And foremost among them is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

I don't think anybody else in the party has shot as rapidly from somebody who fairly few people had heard of. I mean, you know, if you follow who's the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, you might have known him to somebody that all of a sudden is on the shortlist. All of a sudden has a loud, proud, excited online fan base. And not just that, but somebody who has changed the entire rest of the Democratic Party's messaging.

And what began it, the core of Waltz's slingshot to national prominence, was one interview on Morning Joe. I think this is going back to the bread and butter, getting away from this division. We do not like what has happened where we can't even go to Thanksgiving dinner with our uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary.

And I think bringing back people together. Well, it's true. These guys are just weird. And, you know, they're running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something. That's what they go at. That's not what people are interested in. That was the interview heard around the Democratic Party. I remember it hit me on social media. I saw that and thought, oh, that really connects.

And then all of a sudden it was all you heard from Democrats, right? Weird, weird, weird. These guys are weird. They're weird and creepy. You ever see this guy, like when he's on the stage, he like kind of meanders over, you know, can't really walk well. And he goes over to the flag and he like hugs the flag. I love the flag, but it's a weird thing he does. Some of what he and his running mate are saying, well, it's just plain weird. J.D. Vance is awfully weird. A

Super weird idea from JD Vance. They're just weird. I mean, they really are. It's weird and it's, I don't know what to say, it's just bananas. It's not just a weird style that he brings. It's that this leads to weird policies. Well, that was a weird comment. That definitely is weird. And some of the different things and positions they've taken seems fairly weird to me. What is his role? Why did this connect this way?

Part of it, I think, is that weird got at something Democrats have had trouble walking the line on, which is on the one hand, there's real threat from Donald Trump and the Republicans.

And on the other hand, to endlessly talking about them in these existential terms to make them this sort of mythic global right-wing populist bogeyman also gives a power to people that maybe they don't deserve. Maybe they don't even really hold, right? Maybe this is all built a little bit on sand. On the other hand, this is a tricky argument to make.

because it's very easy for it to fall into something that does bedevil Democrats, which is moving from a critique of Republican politicians to a critique of the people who vote for Republicans, right? You can imagine this overstepping and becoming a little bit more like Hillary Clinton's deplorables comment. But Waltz makes this argument from a very different place. He makes it with a very different record. He has won repeatedly in a congressional district that was quite red, a congressional district that heavily favored Donald Trump.

He is the popular and highly accomplished governor of a Midwestern state. He comes from himself a very small town. And he's very careful about this boundary, you'll hear that here, between what he is talking about in Republican politicians and the way Democrats should be talking to Republicans and voters who support Republicans. So I've been curious to hear Walt's go a little bit deeper on all this. And I invited him on the show. He was kind enough to accept. As always, my email, EzraKleinShow at NYTimes.com.

Governor Walz, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Ezra. So you told my old friend, the Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, that you don't win elections to bank political capital. You win elections to burn the capital to improve lives. Talk to me about that theory of politics. Yeah, and I think it's a Minnesota mantra, too. I think that's, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't. Those that came before Paul Wellstone talked about that a lot. The idea of why you're in this is,

is to collectively try and make sure that you can improve folks' lives, that you can give them opportunities. And I think too often we get into this that there's a cautiousness around, I got elected. If I get a little too aggressive on certain things, it'll make it more difficult to get reelected, which the whole point is you got there to, whether it was school lunches or paid family medical leave, you're

You're there now. Why don't you get that done now? And I made the case that if we can get everything done in one session, then I won't have to do this again and I can move on. And I think that attitude inspires people to get going, to find solutions and to move because there's a frustration amongst folks that you're there. Now, what are we going to see with it and get it done? So not to get reelected, it's to get the work done. If you can get it done fast, do it.

You all passed so much after you got that governing trifecta. Yeah. And did so fast. I don't think we can cover it all here, but I did want to try to pull together one thread, which is I've heard you talk about an ambition to make Minnesota the best place to raise a kid. Yeah.

Yeah. Obviously, families and support for families is something that the J.D. Vance and the Republicans want to put at the center of the election. But there's a question of what that nets out to. And best place to raise a kid, I think, is a good way of thinking about it. So tell me about that dimension of it. What did you pass?

that made Minnesota a better place to raise a child? Yeah. When I talk about making sure it's the best place to raise a child, that means that everybody has health care, especially women. They've got access to prenatal care. It makes sure that affordable housing is at a foundational piece. It makes sure that food security is at a piece. And then you can start moving into the things around children, all-day kindergarten, making sure that daycare is affordable and we're getting more daycare providers.

We passed the most generous child tax credit, $1,750 for every child you have up until they're age 18. Those are things that we know during the pandemic, the federal government did that, and we reduced childhood poverty during the pandemic because of those accelerated child tax credit. It expired in

Minnesota picked it up and grew it. And so what you end up getting is, is you get stability around housing. You get stability around healthcare. You get stability around food security. And then you make sure that parents are given those options around childcare. And once that starts to happen, you start to see things take off. And lo and behold, and I mean, this is ideologically, you know,

J.D. Vance would vote against all those things. He would, and I don't think he would deny that. The difference there is that this makes it so much easier to actually have children. It's super expensive now. It's super hard if you're not going to. It really is. Yeah, people aren't sitting around in the bar talking about banning animal farm. They're sitting in the bar talking about how expensive child care is and how we're going to get it. Let's come back to the workforce question in a second, but I don't want to beat up on J.D. Vance here too much.

But you mentioned the child tax credit. And one of the things that I found very strange in the way Vance and some Republicans behind him, a clearly sort of online Republican world he's coming out of,

have been talking about this. He had some comments where he said, look, we want to disincentivize bad things. And so if you are single and childless, you should pay higher taxes. And on the one hand, that's one way to describe what the child tax credit is. And I'm a big fan of the child tax credit. And it's also...

One of the worst possible ways I could have possibly imagined to sell the child tax credit. There is, and it's come up in some other clips of him. Did he articulate that, Ezra? Did he articulate that as a reason? He articulated this completely straightforwardly. He said elsewhere that not having kids makes you more deranged and sociopathic. There's a sort of emergent rhetoric there.

about that's not exactly pro-family, it's anti-not having a family or even not having one yet. Yes. And that's just struck me as a very strange shift to make, to take something that is extremely in the mainstream of political rhetoric, invert it.

So you've made it a highly polarizing issue. I'm curious how it's read to you. The word you're looking for is weird, probably. I think it's what you're looking for. Yeah, it's a word. Yeah, that is a strange thing. And I think you're right. But that's the interesting thing behind this guy. I said he was created in the, you know, the Heritage Lab.

That's the ideology of some of these fringe groups behind him, in my opinion. That very well might be right. And it's buried. It is a bit cynical is a way to put it. But I'll have to tell you, this childhood tax credit is really popular, except you're right. There are folks that are saying, well, I didn't get my tax credit at my cut at the top.

These guys got it. You're incentivizing these out of wedlock births. And look, you didn't even put a cap on it, governor. You could claim 10 children on this thing. That's exactly right. You could. And our case on this is you get to make your own choices. And again, I'm not going to shy away from our entire tax system in Minnesota is rated the most fair in the country, which means it's progressive. It is a progressive tax credit.

Does good policy here lead to good politics? And I'm thinking here specifically of the child tax credit. My favorite thing in the American Rescue Plan was the heavily expanded child tax credit. Democrats set that where it could expire after a year. Their thinking federally when they did this was that people would be so excited about the child tax credit, so happy about it, that it would build the political momentum to get it continued or even be permanent after that year. And they're wrong. It expired. Republicans would not renew it, at least at that time.

And I think that's been true for a number of things on the Biden agenda that Democrats are very proud of, the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill, that have not led to self-fulfilling political benefits, right? They've not created their own future constituencies. Why do you think that is? Some of it might be the messaging that they do. They're distracting them with, you know—

crazy stories they're telling and some of it good. I'll accept responsibility. I don't think we do a good enough job of telling what we did. Life's complicated. People don't know. I think a lot of people didn't know they were getting the credit or how it was coming from. You know, I hear people complain that we had a surplus and we went through it. Yeah, that's because we reduced taxes massively on working people. And that's kind of the way it worked. The cousin of the tax credit in Minnesota is the free breakfast and lunch. And what was really interesting about that was

We implemented it. We passed it. We went in this year. And guess what happened? Tons of people used it. So it actually ran that it was going to need some more money into it. The Republicans came right away and said, we're going to be running a deficit in, you know, it's like six years out. We're AAA bond rated. So they look six years out. If this program stays, it's going to be running a deficit at some point in time. We need to cut it. Fundamentally, they believe you're giving away free things to people who don't do it. And we know all those things.

free breakfast and free lunch has massive gains. So I would go back to your original question. I think the child tax credit, maybe it's a little more complex. In Minnesota, we had to go out and work really hard because the people most targeted because of our progressive tax code don't file taxes. If you don't file taxes, you don't get the credit. So we had to go out door to door, get people to sign up, file a tax return to get your credit. So these are folks that, look, they're working, they're busy, they're not as engaged. And if you don't put it in permanently, you're

Where's the constituency to come argue? Those families aren't going to be up at state capital advocating for expansion of the child tax credit unless we're more aggressive and tell the story.

Isn't that fascinating that...

Republicans saying, well, we don't need to give tax cuts to the wealthy. That's how they argued it around that. You shouldn't be giving tax cuts to the wealthy. But at the same hand, they were advocating for an income tax cut on the top bracket. So no hypocrisy. No free stuff to the wealthy, but definitely huge tax cuts to the wealthy. So you argued that it should be universal. The universality made it simpler. How do you think about the tradeoffs of complexity and the means testing that creates complexity and the politics of simplicity and universality?

Yeah, that is a good one. And the purpose of that was as a guy who supervised the high school lunchroom for 20 years, all of us who did that had our own accounts because kids would run out of money and you would put it in. And that lunchroom then became a very clear have and have nots. And in fact, some schools maybe still do it. You had a different colored lunch ticket if you're on free and reduced lunch.

Free and reduced lunch also meant you had to fill out paperwork. And so our point was is that there was not going to be a division in that lunchroom. It was going to be eat, don't worry about it, come in, you don't have to have a ticket, you don't have to do that. And what it did was it started to break down barriers. And what we saw was just very basic things around this. First of all, attendance went up. We saw a huge usage of this and we saw classroom behaviors go down. Well, no surprise there. Science shows us the kids are hungry.

there's going to be more problems. And so I'm not certain that we do think that through. And there's always the balance between protecting these programs. They'll complain about them. They're too expensive.

in trying to make them as easy and as efficient as possible. And we're trying to figure better ways to do that. But I do think you're right. I think Democrats get complex. We think these things through in a way that a lot of times makes sense, but it ends up then becoming very cumbersome or becomes unoperable. So it's a fair critique. And that's why with this one, we didn't do that. And you know, the people who gave me as are the most feedback on this was

families, and it's especially mothers because of the unequal distribution of domestic labor, is still falls heavily upon women. And these were women who said, look, we didn't qualify before, we do now. It's an absolute tax cut for us, but it's an absolute lifesaver for me that I don't have to get up in the morning and either make breakfast or send one to school for this. So it's a double benefit for us. I have less work, my kids eat. So it was actually middle-class folks who

who were most jazzed about this. I will say I am so thrilled whenever my kids are in a situation where lunch is provided for them. Because for me, I'm busy. I get the time with them in the morning. And the question of whether I'm spending the time I could have with them in the morning making everybody lunch or getting to enjoy my children, that's a real question in parenting for me. Yes, one of the partners always has to do that more. That's what came up in this. And that's how I think we get to the middle class. And again, remove yourself from

The moral idea that a kid should have a full belly and in a land of plenty, there's enough to go around. We're going to have healthier kids with better attendance that provide a better workforce at the end of the day. So you can save money. Again, we know this. If you provide preventative care, it's a lot better. You know, you can keep somebody from getting diabetes a lot cheaper than getting them on there where you have to pay for it. And that's the same thing here. Start them out healthy. Get them there. Feed them. Get them an education.

BP added more than $130 billion to the U.S. economy over the past two years by making investments from coast to coast. Investments like building EV charging hubs in Washington state and starting up new infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico. It's and, not or. See what doing both means for energy nationwide at bp.com slash investing in America.

I'm Julian Barnes. I'm an intelligence reporter at The New York Times. I try to find out what the U.S. government is keeping secret. Governments keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. They might be embarrassed by the information. They might think the public can't understand it. But we at The New York Times think that democracy works best when the public is informed.

It takes a lot of time to find people willing to talk about those secrets. Many people with information have a certain agenda or have a certain angle, and that's why it requires talking to a lot of people to make sure that we're not misled and that we give a complete story to our readers. If The New York Times was not reporting these stories, some of them might never come to light. If you want to support this kind of work, you can do that by subscribing to The New York Times.

So you've had a hell of a couple of weeks, and I don't think I've ever seen any single person, including for that matter, President, change an entire party's messaging the way your riff on Morning Joe on the weirdness of Trump and J.D. Vance and sort of Republicans of their ilk did. I mean, now it's all that any Democrat says. I mean, I heard Joe Manchin calling J.D. Vance weird today. I mean, when you've when that messaging's hit Joe Manchin, something's happened. And I think that's

So that connected in a way I almost can't remember anything connecting. But you've been using that word for a while when a lot of other Democrats are using, you know, existential, terrifying, undemocratic. I'm not saying you don't believe those things. But why for you weird?

Yeah. All those things are true about an existential threat to global peace, in my opinion, a threat to women's reproductive. I think that, you know, very clearly a desire to strip constitutional power and division. All of those things are true. What I see is that that kind of stuff is overwhelming for people. It's like other big issues like climate change. If you can't tackle it one piece at a time, it just seems, why should I do anything about it? And for me as a teacher, I

You couldn't make your case why people were in that mindset. When they're in a fear mindset, it's very difficult for them to listen. And they kept hearing that. And again, our Democrats kept making that. Democracy's on the ballot. You have to, yes, we know that's true and we're scared to death. It's the emperor's wearing no clothes is all this story is. The minute you said that, the spell broke.

It dropped down. This guy's weird stories and inability to connect like a human being on any way. And I made the case, see if you're seeing laugh. He doesn't laugh unless he's laughing at someone. And what happened was the minute that spell came down, the minute everybody in the crowd realized the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes, we can sweep in and say, who's asking to ban birth control? Who's asking to ban these books? Who's asking to take veterans benefits away? And then we come in and say, look,

Kamala Harris is talking about making sure that you have expanded health care, making sure there's daycare available, making sure that it's easier to get free school lunches. They're talking about a national level. That's where that came from. And weird is it's specifically to him. I'm certainly not talking about.

Republicans. I'm not talking about the people who are at those rallies. I'm hearing this from my Republican friends because the people at those rallies, they're the ones that can most benefit from the message we're delivering. I looked at him the other night in St. Cloud, Minnesota, young women behind him. We're going to provide reproductive care for them. I saw a group holding Somalis for Trump. We have a large Somali population. We're very proud of that. Donald Trump has said we're going to have a Muslim ban. And he talked about

Congresswoman Omar and the Somali community as being so detrimental rather than an asset to this. So we're going to take care of those people, too. Look, I get riffed up and stuff and I've called him worse things. I don't think that works then. And certainly if you attack the followers, those are my relatives. Those are my neighbors. And whether they vote for me or not, I'm still going to deliver free meals. We're still going to do these things. He's not going to do that.

He's not going to do that because the people behind him, look, there's somebody wants to increase the price of insulin. It's simply not anybody in those rally crowds. So I think what happened is, and I think this is where Trump and his people get so excited. What do they have if they don't have that fear? What do they have if there's not a dystopian society? What do they have if only dear leader can come in and fix it? If people are saying, actually, I'd like to have cheaper daycare.

I'd actually like them to quit talking about this. And I really don't care who somebody's married to because I believe the vast majority of people really don't want to be in other people's bedrooms. And I use the thing of small town. This is where J.D. Vance doesn't get it. You survive best by just mind your own damn business. Just stay out of people's business. I want to get at this distinction you're making between Trump or Vance or the leaders or the policymakers and the crowds because it's

One of the most dangerous emotions that Democrats sometimes let slip, the sort of negative side of, I think, the liberal personality, can be a very, very dangerous emotion.

can be a kind of contempt, a kind of smugness. This is why Hillary Clinton's comment on deplorables was so damaging. There is a sense among many people that these educated liberals look down on them. They think they're retrograde. They think they're stupid. Republicans have a lot of negative personality traits too. Rage, anger, conspiratorial thinking. But condescension and smugness can be pretty lethal for Democrats. Agreed. Yeah.

One of the things I have heard some Democrats worry about as the sort of whole party has taken up weird all at once was you have a very calibrated way of talking about this. Not everybody does. And it becoming a thing that it sounds like Democrats are saying about all these people who support Donald Trump and who do like him, all these people who feel left behind and left out of the Democratic coalition. Yeah. How do you police that boundary? Yeah.

This is where I take offense to J.D. Vance and Hillbilly Elegy. Those are my people. I come from a town of 424 kids in a class, 12 cousins farming, those types of things that that is there. And I know they're not that. I know they're not weird. I know they're not Donald Trump. The thing is, we have to get them away from what he's trying to sell because that's not who they are. I mentioned just picture in your mind Donald Trump coming home after a day of work and

picking up a Frisbee and throwing it and his dog catches it and the dog runs over and he gives him a good belly rub because he's a good boy. That's what I do. And that's what those rally goers do. That is exactly who they are. And they're going through the same things all of our families are. He's captured some of this because I think you're right. You people have forgotten me or the entertainment value of whatever he's done. And fear is scary. I mean, the world is

changing. We're seeing, you know, conflict in the Middle East. We saw a global pandemic, which he did nothing to fix, but seized upon. So yeah, I would encourage anybody who's out there talking. I'm very specific. Those people at those rallies are not weird. That's not the point at all. His message to them is, and then I think it's kind of breaking that spell again of saying, look, he's not offering you anything. And then we dang sure better be ready to offer something. If we can't offer something that impacts their lives, like these policies, that's why I say Republicans,

They may not admit it. They love the free school meals and lunch. I guarantee you a lot of them like paid family and medical leave. Small employers who couldn't afford to compete against a best buy and target who offered paid family medical leave now could offer and recruit employees. So now they're saying, look, I'm paying a little bit into this program works. My employees are loyal to me and boy, they can go home and be with their kids and keep them healthy. It's just we

We have to show them that there's nothing strange about this. You know, they'll try and say this ultra liberal. That's where we need to be more specific. Oh, do you mean the free school lunches? Is that what you are? Are the roads and bridges we built in this town? Is that what you're speaking about? Governor, you spent a surplus money on this. Yeah. You mean when we eliminated Social Security tax for most of seniors? Is that that's the one that most bothers you? There's never a specific. They don't give you a specific reason.

on what the liberal agenda is. And we have to do a better job of saying this is what it is. This is the things that you're getting. You ever read Hillbillyology? I did. I did years ago. I read it years ago and I've been rereading it this week. And I'm going to say more about this in a future episode, but it's a little bit of a shocking reread.

It feels like he's predicting himself now when you read it. I mean, he talks about one of the big points in early in the book is he says, this is a story about people in a hard situation responding to it. And I'm paraphrasing in the worst possible way with anger, with resentment, with sort of scapegoating of others without sort of personal responsibility. I took that very personally that he was wrong, like putting us into that mix. Yeah. Tell me about that because then there's also this thing where Vance is separating himself from that in that book and

And then in a strange way, in his own political evolution, becomes more like the thing he is describing negatively in the book. His whole politics becomes this—

The read of this book psychologically changes so much from who he was and to who he is now. But also how he's talking about people is really – a liberal would never talk about people and the places he's from like that.

No, that's why I take offense to it whenever, you know, that's taking offense to that. That's not my people. And then I'm making the case that there is something and it's not about putting blame. Look, societal changes, practices in agriculture that, you know, use 40 acres and now, you know, you need 400 acres and more mechanization. And you're going to see a migration of population patterns, but you're also going to see those that accelerated that, those that took advantage of that, those like you.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance who are telling you we need to do school vouchers. How are you going to get a private school in a town of 400?

That's not where the private school is going to be. The private school is going to be where it already is giving tax breaks to the wealthiest. And it undermines what's the core is the two things that are core, small communities, school and hospital. Both of those things are going to be in. So I don't know the irony or the masterful design of this. It's guys just like him and telling you that these people are just angry, bitter. That's not who we are. That's not who they are. But I'll tell you what, there are concerns. Economies have shifted. Young people leave those communities. You see my community, my,

felt thriving when I was there. Two grocery stores, couple bars downtown and all that. Now it's empty main streets. That vision of Hillbill Elegy was true, but he doesn't tell you the story why and the bitterness, the cultural bitterness, whatever. That's just not true. They're just looking for what are things to rejuvenate us? How do we get back? How do we make this? I wouldn't trade anything from where I grew up and grew up with those kids. I'm still friends with them. And I think about this

A town that small had services like that and had a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be setting where I'm at today. Those are real stories in small towns. These guys, they talk about how evil the public schools are. For many of us,

Public schools were everything. That was our path. That's the great American contribution. You say there's not a cultural bitterness, but there is a cultural frustration with the Democrats. And one way you see it is, I mean, you come from a state with some of the most storied liberals in American political history. Paul Wellstone was a very important influence for me at a key moment. He was out in California stumbling for Bill Bradley. Right.

My brother was working with Bill Bradley. I drove around with Paul Wellstone for a whole day. He couldn't have been kinder to me. I was a high school wrestler and you just want to talk all day. It was one of the things that got me into politics. But Hubert Humphrey, others. But if you look at the liberals of that Democratic Party.

Their coalition was built, that sort of post-New Deal Democrats, on a coalition that was poorer. Like if you looked at where people who didn't go to college voted, they voted for Democrats. Over the past couple decades now, Democrats win college-educated voters nationally, lose non-college voters. Those numbers are particularly stark among white voters.

What do you make of that? What has happened in the sort of relationship between the party and the voters who were once its base and now feel, even if they would benefit from all the policies you're talking about, left behind by it and in many cases angry at it?

Look, I represented Southern Minnesota, which was from all across Northern Iowa, South Dakota on the West, Wisconsin on the East, farm country, most productive farm country in the country. Not a lot of Democrats over the years. I was the second one. And to try and understand how that shift has happened. And then the suburbs that were solidly red, of course, went the other way. And I think some of it is the alignment of economics. We've seen a migration to, uh,

tech jobs, healthcare jobs in the cities. And then the cultural pieces, you have firearms start to get into that. You have long traditions that felt like they were being crushed, but it was functionally what was happening and how did these people see themselves? And I think for us, one of the things, us being, I don't know if I just use Democrats, those of us that would like to see policies that actually work and less of this, what we're in right now,

have got to figure out and see if we're to some of the blame that we haven't made the message clear enough. We haven't delivered on those promises that people wanted to see. ACA being one of those does a lot of great things, but people now have kind of forgotten that if we take away ACA, you're back to preexisting conditions. And I don't know if we've built that into people's thinking right now. So when Donald Trump says he's going to get rid of the ACA, all right, that sounds good. I guarantee you those people at those rallies don't want the ACA to go away.

So look, I don't know the answer, Ezra, other than the school teacher in me keeps thinking this. Look, if I give a test and 90% of the kids fail, I

I can guarantee you it's because the kids aren't smart. There's something wrong with the test or the way I'm teaching it. I'm not getting it to them. So I keep coming back to this. If they're not voting for us, there's not something wrong with them. There's something that's not quite clicking of where it's at. So don't assume they're just not clever enough to understand what you're selling them. Yeah, and I wonder, because look, I'm a policy guy. My background is as a policy reporter. Like the way I want American politics to work is one long policy argument where if my chart really shows that it's going to help more people, I win the argument. I know.

But I do think that people don't vote on policy as much as policy wonks would like to believe. That's one. That's right. But the other is that we always think about whether or not voters like politicians. But my experience of voters is they're more sensitive to whether they think politicians like them. Yeah. And that sense of does somebody see you and like you? Yeah. That's a heuristic I think voters use a lot. Like if you feel that a politician would like you, they're probably going to look out for you.

If you feel they would look past you, that they will look down on you, they're probably not. How do you explain Trump in that? You think they feel that he sees them, knows them? I do. I have, look, I'm sure you have Trump voters in your family. I have Trump voters in my family. I do. And I think a lot about how unappealing he is to me and how appealing he is to people I love. Yeah, me too. I spend a lot of time on that. Well, what's your theory of it?

If you had to describe what would make Trump appealing, right? If you had to sort of empathically put yourself in that place, describe what it'd be like to like Donald Trump. I do think he's entertaining to some. I think, you know, that feels that he may not be laughing like I want to see.

I think there is a sense, especially if you're a little frustrated, that he pokes the bear on other people. He's not afraid to poke the bear. It feels like it's empowering. Good. Somebody can do that. It's not like these are small, petty people who want to make other people's lives miserable, but there's a sense that he's standing up to it. And look, I think the world is complex.

And if you don't understand something, there's a tendency that you might turn to the unexplainable, the conspiracy theories that caught on and things. These aren't stupid people. These are smart people. But there's a frustration of why aren't things working? Why are they so complex? So I don't know. I mean, it's just I'm just theorizing on it. But I look that district that I represented in 2016. I snuck by with a win in there again. I won that district six times. There'd been one other Democrat since 1890. But I I won it in 2008 by 32 points.

I sneak by in 2016, he wins by 17 points in that same district. They never see him. They knew me. I coached their kids. I was there. I delivered in Congress. I was a ranking member on the VA committee. I was, you know, just six, eight years before nearly 70% of them voted for me. I didn't do any scandal or do anything to lose their support. But this guy came in and he

Even though I was of them or felt I was of them, that this was me, I was truly their representative, they identified with him. So I still try and I don't know, I'm open for why this is. So that meant though there were Trump waltz voters for you to win and for him to win that big. So when you talk to them, what do they tell you? They like me, they trusted me. They said, Tim, I think you're trying to do it right. And they told me they didn't like the status quo, which is an easy thing to do. Like, yeah, we need to change that. Well, if we change that, it's a problem. You know, sometimes it feels to me like,

This switch has been up too long. I'm going to turn it down. Well, that switch keeps your house warm, you know, or whatever it might be. And you turn the switch just because you wanted to turn the switch. And there was a little of that, that the same old thing, maybe we hadn't delivered the way we had, but those people stuck with me. They believed it, but they just thought he offered something else. Now,

It's less and less of that. And it used to be a lot of that. As you know, you understand, a lot of split ticket voting. And I ended up being one of the last four districts in 2016 that Trump won by 15 points or more and the Democrat won. Three of them were in Minnesota. One was in Pennsylvania. Not surprising, swing states, traditional blue states, now more in the red. So, yeah.

I don't know what it is. I just think my take is, is that I think at the very end of this, especially now, I think the Democrats' way out of this was with optimism and a sense of grace towards folks. I want to be very careful. Like I said, those folks at those rallies, you insult them at great peril. Your neighbors find the flag, you insult them at great peril because you just said it. They're my relatives. They truly are. And I know them. I think that idea of grace in politics is interesting because

How do you show that, right? I mean, one of the things that feels difficult in politics, specifically since Donald Trump rose, is that—and I wrote a whole book about political polarization. It's sort of about this dynamic. Is it the more different the other side becomes to you, the more threatening they become to you?

The more you begin rationally to act like their enemy, the fewer swing voters there are, right? I always sort of say like the choice between a donkey and a horse is less obvious than between a horse and an elephant. The more Trump and the Democrats in reaction to some degree shifted politics to a place it felt to many people existential. And he does this as a matter of strategy, right? You know,

degrading trust in elections. It's all over the system. And then, of course, you have to then treat him as more of a threat because he is actually more of a threat to this system. Like, once you start trying to overturn elections, you've moved into a different place in what you represent in politics. But then it feels disappointed or even more against them that...

You know, Joe Biden wanted to run and turn the temperature down when he talked about why he wanted to run again, as opposed to just sort of being that one term bridge. He sort of implied in this BT interview, he said, it's just more divided than I had even imagined. I think there is this hope, this fantasy of turning the temperature down. It doesn't feel likely in this specific election, right?

But, you know, you've been around politics a long time and you govern in a place that is a winnable state for Republicans. What does suggest that grace to people? What does suggest to people that even if you may not agree with them, you don't hate them? Yeah, I'll take this through because this gets, I think, can end up very dangerous. I think many of us know where it goes. The Southern Minnesota District had 22 counties. There's 87 in Minnesota, 22 counties. I won them all. In my first election, I don't know the exact number. In 2018, I think I maybe won...

28 or 30 counties out of the 87. And in the last one, I think I won 11 or so. And I think you understand the demographics, what happened there. It started to collapse back to more urban areas and that you could win with sheer volume. My one Minnesota theme was on this is, is you might be able to win that election, but it's very difficult to govern if folks are out there. And I, what I won't forgive Donald Trump for is, and we can't fall into this because what you're saying is that disdain, that contempt or whatever is,

He did that. He didn't make us just a Democrat with bad ideas. He made me the enemy.

And once he did that, it became harder to come back. And I don't want to be overly dramatic, but it's so stuck with me. Elie Wiesel talked about if you're going to commit some of these atrocities, you've got to make somebody the other. You've got to make the other. And that's the whole thing. And shrink their world and make it so clear that they are the other. And that's what scares me most about what's happened here, that we're not just Democrats who have really horrible ideas about social safety nets or whatever it might be.

We don't love this country. And in some cases where, you know, we don't share any of their common values. He's been masterful at that because that's the whole thing. I think at heart, I'm a geographer, not an anthropologist. We're very tribal by nature. I think it's still genetic that we will go back to those who look like us and sound like us and are part of this because otherwise you're competing for my food source. And we regress back, you know,

20,000 years and and there we are and I think that thin veil of society that some of these guys figured that out strip that away from us so I think that you cannot make someone the other you cannot because then you get into very close you see some of this it becomes dehumanizing you hear it in the language and once you've got another in a dehumanized you can do about whatever what you want and of course the world sees that every single day let me ask you about political geography

One reason I think that your line on this and the way you framed it, right, when in that original Morning Joe interview, you sort of talk about being from a town of 400, graduating a small class, right? This isn't what we're like there. Like, these guys are weird. They're ruining Thanksgiving. I think one reason a lot of Democrats thrilled to that is

is that they actually feel liberals, coastal liberals, right? I'm a Californian liberal. Like the other, right? There's been a lot of movement in politics to make that true, right? When George W. Bush was winning in 2004, right? Democrats were losing the heartland.

Right. You know, if you're in California, you're not in the you're not in the heartland. There's a sense of pretty the Midwest as that's where people are normal. Then they get sort of weirder on the coast. They get different in the South, real America. And you come out, you know, you're a former Army guy. Right. You're a former football coach. You got this very you got real good Midwestern dad vibes, I think, to just be blunt about it.

And so you can kind of say this in a way that I think a lot of Democrats would not feel they could and also in a way that they're like, oh, right, maybe we're not the weird ones. But I always think this is a very unhealthy dimension of our politics, a sense that there are sort of real Americans here, not real Americans there, you know, beyond the coast. Yes.

Geographic politics, you know, throughout history are more combustible because that's always just a tricky thing. I'm curious how you think about this, both from the perspective of what it's allowed you to say maybe that would not have landed coming from others. And also just what you do about it, because I don't think it's a situation that, from what you were saying a second ago, that you feel is very healthy for the country either. Yeah.

No. And then I think the Republicans would say, I get wound up and I used a word I probably shouldn't have in a little thing last night because I'm angry. I'm angry at the president or whatever. But if I cross that line, then what do I get? I started hearing this in 2006 and 2008 where, you know, people in the cities don't know who we are. We're real American. I would kind of look and I'm like, what are you talking about? And it was a concerted effort. And I don't know, coordinated whoever these thinkers were. You know, at one time that was the famous thing that the

Republicans hired linguists and started to beat us on language or whatever. I never saw it that way. And now it's just something like this. You can't go to Minneapolis. It's, you know, you can't do this. Well, the fact of the matter is when you look at it, you know, you have more population, you have more of these things happening. And there was this desire to just make these undesirable places. They do it to San Francisco. And just to be candid. Which is where I'm taping from right now. Yeah. I mean, I, people come here. They're like, I thought that was going to be a hell scare. Last week was my first time. Last week was my first time in San Francisco.

and stayed down there. I was doing some meetings, woke up, did my five-mile run through the Presidio to the Golden Gate, went back to my hotel, was downtown, and ended up leaving. And I'm like, that is the most beautiful city I've ever been in. And the temperature, and I see the Golden Gate or whatever. What they've done that, look, have there been problems? Yes. Homelessness is an issue across the country. But to see this, the

It was exotic to me. I've seen San Francisco on TV hundreds of times and heard about it. And there I am driving around and I'm like a kid again. I'm like, America is so awesome. San Francisco is just the greatest. And that's the way people would feel. Go out to the boundary waters of Minnesota. Go to northern Minnesota and look where the mining has happened for 100 years. These were the beauty of America and they've demonized these places. They've made them feel that way. And when I say they, I should maybe say us.

You know, people like, I could give you a name, Oklahoma. And all of a sudden you just assume that all of Oklahoma is conservative or whatever. Beautiful places, beautiful people, a tapestry or whatever. My take on this is, is that I think we can get the politics back to that. I'm hopeful, but as my wife says, that's not a plan of trying to bring more engagement back. But our politics now, especially in the House of Representatives where I was and gerrymandering,

just incentivizes the most ridiculous divisions possible. So I'm not hopeful in the House of Representatives, but I will tell you this, and this is true. Governors who have to govern even states that are red or blue, but have areas of each in them are much more bipartisan and much more collegial. And that for me was a breath of fresh air. But this is a place I do think where Democrats have failed a bunch of the people that they were hired to help, so to speak.

Which is, look, you can't be a firefighter who protects San Francisco, as a friend of mine is, and live in San Francisco. No way. Or a teacher. Yeah, no. A teacher. Minneapolis has gotten real issues with high housing prices. There is something here where it's a little bit more of an urban problem and Democrats do better in urban areas. So there might just be, it might not all be causation. But I mean, I'm writing a book on this. I've done a lot of work thinking about this. There is a way in which Democrats have become...

They've not made it easy to build in the places where they govern. And over time, then, you know, people look and they say, oh, you got these huge homelessness problems. People can't afford to live there. You know, people are leaving California for Texas. And you could say a lot about Texas, but in Austin, in Houston, you can build apartments. And that has kept those places not perfectly affordable, but dramatically more affordable than L.A., than San Francisco, than Boston. Fair enough.

And, you know, I know you've done a lot of work on affordable housing, but I also find Democrats typically want to do affordable housing through subsidizing rent. In Minneapolis, they got rid of single family zoning. There was a suit against it in part by environmental groups. How do you think about this politics that's more of a state and local politics about housing?

what you can build and where and what makes things affordable. Yeah, this is real. This is real. And I think we're getting some compromises on this. There was a bill that was opposed by a lot of the suburban, the first ring cities and things for this very reason. Then we got into this on a broader scale of things like energy projects and

We have good environmental laws in Minnesota, and that's the way it should be. We're protectors of 20% of the world's fresh water. But we also have permitting that takes too long and prohibits or makes more expensive doing renewable energy projects, things that we want to get done. I think that same thing applies on housing, that we put up barriers to make it more affordable. I would say you're right on this, Ezra, but there's another thing that I found. It was an interesting phenomenon recently.

that happened, some of the programs that we were doing for housing or some of the programs for tax rebates or things like that, I had proposed in some of these cases a cap where you could receive those up to $200,000.

And the pushback I got from Democrats was that's outrageous. These people don't need it or whatever. With the basic economics of it was, I think there's a big chunk of folks that we look at that these are just rural people that, you know, are lower socioeconomic. That's not it at all. We got a whole bunch of people that are in that sandwich thing that they're not rich enough to not have to worry about the prices. And there's absolutely nothing for them provided in any of the subsidies or any of the programs. And they're right in the middle. That happens on child care, where we give child care grants and we cap

before it hits those families that make a difference. And those folks are squeezed. You just said it. If you think about a cop and nurse, firefighter and teacher, and live in San Francisco, Minneapolis, or wherever, and then the easy fix is it's just tax cuts the Republicans come back with. It's because you're paying too high of taxes. You can keep more of your money. And resentment. I mean, I don't know how much people tracked this, but I found it very striking that

that the longest and most serious policy riff in J.D. Vance's convention speech was this riff on housing. And he says, look, I'm going to tell you how it became unaffordable to buy a house. And he says, we had a housing crisis and it was done by the bankers and then there wasn't enough building because all these builders went bankrupt. And then the Democrats let in all the immigrants. And

And the immigrants bid up that. I thought, that's a wild description of what... Look, it is completely true that if you have a supply-constrained housing market and you have a lot of immigration, that can raise prices. But your problem is you're not building enough houses. But it did show, and he's given this riff at other places before, it did show the way when things are scarce, when people feel there's not enough for them or for their kids...

They're going to close up. And I do think that's part of the immigration politics we see. And then blame somebody. It's the scapegoat thing or whatever. I try and go on this. Look, I reject a lot of the false scarcity. I'm not Pollyannish. There is a scarcity of housing.

But it's because of our policies, in some cases, the ability to get out there. The false scarcity piece then has us all fighting over the small piece of it. And the Republicans do this very well, that they get folks that could benefit from these programs advocating for tax cuts for the wealthiest. We're still back at trickle-down economics with absolutely no proof that any of it works. But you've got folks looking for it. If we're not offering something that's the alternative that actually works for them—

theirs is so much simpler to explain. You know, if we didn't have so many people here, if we didn't have these immigrants here, you know, not taking into consideration, where do you think your protein sources are coming from, from Austin, Minnesota? And this becomes a real issue where we see communities are dealing with this and this demonization, especially around immigration,

The heart of the community is that protein processing plant. They want to build more affordable housing to have the workers who are there who will then spend in the community. And you get community members that don't want to build that housing because they're afraid it'll track the very workers that create the jobs that gets the wealth for them. They might own a grocery store. That's who's shopping there. It becomes this death spiral of an argument around housing.

which we've got to have border control. You've got to know who's coming in. You've got to modernize that. But we have to have, especially a state like Minnesota, we're aging, we're white, same thing's happening in Japan. It's happening in Finland. It's happening in South Korea that we're going to have to think about what does that look like? So,

Resentment is a strong one. Blame somebody else. They're really good at this. But like you said with Vance, what's he offering? What is his plan to fix this housing issue? Just kick out everybody? So what they're going to do is just deport everybody and there'll be these empty houses you'll just move into? I guess that's what they're thinking.

This podcast is supported by Progressive Insurance. Are you driving your car or doing laundry right now? Podcasts go best when they're bundled with another activity. Like Progressive Home and Auto Policies. They're best when bundled too. Having these two policies together makes insurance easier and could help you save. Customers who save by switching their home and car insurance to Progressive save over $775 on average.

Let me make a policy connection. It'll seem weird, but I think it's true. So you mentioned immigration a second ago. We've been talking about housing. We've been talking about San Francisco.

And, you know, I remember I lived in D.C. for 13, 14 years and crime when I lived there was really rough. I mean, I had friends get shot, friends get beat up. I was lucky I didn't. But you really worried walking around. But crime wasn't that toxic a political issue there because while people understood it was bad, they didn't feel it was being tolerated. They just felt it was a hard problem to solve. Yeah.

In San Francisco, crime is way lower than it was in D.C. when I lived there. But it's a much more toxic political issue because people feel or have felt there's a tolerance for disorder. Yeah.

And I think on the border, there's a dimension to this too, that immigration is hard. There are very, very sophisticated smuggling rings and other things now. But I think the reason they get mad at Democrats is a feeling of tolerance for it. Not that Democrats don't want to make the system better, but they're not that upset about it being bad. Yeah, they dismiss it. They dismiss it. When they're asked, is it a crisis? You need to answer, yes, it's a crisis.

and then deal with it. I mean, say what you will about him, but Texas Governor Greg Abbott began busing migrants around the country and creating genuine crises in different cities and doing that. And he did it in a very low way, didn't allow for coordination. But the fact is, like, you know, the fact that these cities went into such a dangerous politics around this when they began getting migrants who actually were in Texas. So just the problem in Texas is pretty bad, right? I mean, the problem on some of these border cities is pretty bad.

I think there's something about this here where people get mad, not because a problem isn't solved, but because they feel a problem is tolerated. And that's been a problem sometimes for Democrats. I wonder if you think that's a reasonable read. No, I think it's a reasonable read. You know, we have the right to control our border. You know, there is no line to come in. And I think when people hear you're—we want to be a place where if you're seeking asylum, but an asylum seeker that comes in and it takes seven years to process their case, that's too long.

The problem that I have is, is that I, we need to talk about that frame and then the solution. And the solution was there. The solution was the Lankford Cinema Bill. The solution was when the last time we did this, it took some courage. It took a Republican Senator, Mike DeWine, to cross over, now the governor of Ohio. And you know what it took? It took a governor in Texas to say, let's work on this together and get reforms, George Bush.

And that's what's missing now. I don't disagree that Governor Abbott is pointing out some of these things, but he treats it in the most cruel, inhumane way instead of saying, and this is where we should reach out and say, the governor's not wrong. They need help. Texas shouldn't by itself absorb or pay for this problem. We should all collectively figure out how to do it. And that was Langford Cinema. And Donald Trump didn't want it. And Trump's idea, look, it's so simple again. Build the wall.

That's just so visceral that that's going to keep people out. It doesn't. You know, how high is the wall? Because if it's 30 foot, I'm going to invest in the 30 foot ladder factory. That's that type of thinking rather than look, we need to make the real fix here is to make sure the electoral system in Venezuela does not create this type of geopolitical crisis that forces people out, making sure the investments in clean energy and look,

You don't think people are going to be immigrating when climate change forces coastal communities, over 20% of them. This is all going to start to happen. Leaving it and saying it's not a problem is a political detriment to Democrats. Just acknowledge it is. You're not denigrating anyone and you're not helping them being the immigrants by saying it's not a problem because they know better than anybody it's a problem because they're stuck at a border community with nowhere to go. There's a maddening dynamic sometimes in politics. I think Democrats have changed on this around immigration, but

sometimes you have these issues where Democrats don't seem to think it's a problem, but they're definitely willing to solve it. And Republicans think it's a huge problem, but they definitely don't want to solve it. I'm afraid you're right. Yes. And you get these weird conversations where it's like, well, Democrats, they don't seem mad about it, but they actually have a plan. And Republicans...

seem mad about fentanyl, but they're not doing anything serious about it. Yes, that's a good observation. And it's frustrating. No, it's true. I agree with you. I think that's right. And that's, look, we need a better and we need a smarter politics. And your example of Governor Abbott is right. I think he handled it poorly, horribly. But I think to dismiss that Texas has a point that we could all work together on is bad politics and bad policy. I mean,

Let me ask you about a piece of this election that I really believe is true, but it is a little tricky to talk about. But you've begun talking about it in ways that I think are resonating, which is the strange way that I would say gender broadly, but actually masculinity in particular is playing. You talked about the Republicans sometimes seeming like they're running for the head of He-Man Women Haters Club. Yeah.

And that's a sharp way to put it. But we're seeing this big gender gap emerge among young people. Young men and young women were voting for Biden in 2020. Young men are supporting Trump by about 14 points in this Wall Street Journal poll, at least when Joe Biden was running in the election. And there is this way that you really feel this sort of strange, wounded masculinity around.

emergent and dominant, not just on the Republican side. I mean, you have Hulk Hogan and Dana White from the UFC, you know, on Trump's night at the convention, right? There's this very performative, you know, masculinity. But there's also this sort of anger that you see with, I think, more represented by the Vance side of it among young Republicans, like this feeling of families breaking down and there's no role for men anymore and you can't say anything anymore.

You know, one of the reasons, again, I think you're resonating is you sort of seem to have a much more comfortable, confident relationship to this than a lot of Democrats do. And that's allowing you to call things out that others are not able to call out. You were just on the white dudes for Kamala call and your remarks from that. I saw them ricocheting around the Internet.

How do you think about this piece of it? Because it is getting at something, the sort of angry, sort of wounded maleness. It is a real politically combustible thing. Agreed. You know, maybe I'm asking as much the high school teacher in you as the politician, but I'm curious how you understand its roots right now and how you think about talking to it.

Yeah, and I think it's been exploited. So, first of all, part of it is, you know, frontal lobe development, where you're at, and things that appeal to your risk takers. Like, look, MMA is very exciting when you're younger. Some of these, you know, contact sports, different types of things. But I watch this, you're right, you know, the white dudes for Harris last night, and right away,

the far right on this. I think Donald Trump Jr. used a very derogatory word towards non-masculine men in their parlance or whatever to try and say, see, look who they are or whatever, you know, and it's that piece of it. Cucks was the word he used. Yeah, you can say, yeah. That has a lot of deep... We're a podcast here. All right, yeah, it's a podcast. It gets a lot of deep meanings in what he's doing. And I found it interesting that Trump is not trying to get...

black votes. He's trying to get black men 18 to 34 to play on their resentment, to play on, you know, where they want to be success, to you're being left behind. And he's very successful at playing to that. But let me ask about the flip side of that. I mean, Democrats and pretty liberals in recent years, they talk so much about toxic masculinity. They don't just talk very much about masculinity, right? They talk about femininity, right? The future is female, right? There's a lot of celebration. And that's for the good. Like, I'm on board with all of that. But one thing I hear is

When I go sort of watch what some of these young men are watching, when I sort of try to look at what's happening in the podcast manosphere, is a sense of a lot of young men that they're not wanted in this moment of politics. Yeah, you're right. And Trump wants them and likes them. You're right. And I think one of the things is I'm a bit disarming. It's your politics.

your uncle or whatever. And I look like them and I can out shoot them and I coach football and things like that. So they're, they don't feel that threat. You won a state championship. It's a big deal. I did win a state championship on this. Your point is well taken. And I'm, Wes Moore mentioned something about this. And we were talking about black men. I asked, I said, explain this to me. Why, what do these guys think Trump's going to offer? And he said, look, Tim,

tell me your policy accomplishments that you talk about when you talk about black men. You know, he goes, he didn't want to put me on the spot. He said, you know what we all do is? We talk about restoring the right to felons. We talk about expunging all that. He goes, I

I'm not a felon. What I'm looking for is where's your capital investment in my business that I've got? What I need is access to capital that's been redlined out for me that allows me to grow this business. And Wes was talking about, we have got to do a better job of talking to them because it's insulting. It's, you know, and they're looking for that. And they're getting this validation from Trump that, you know, welcome in here. We can make money. We can do this. And I

I think we too much lump folks together. I think we're too well. Look, don't get me wrong. Restoration of felon voting rights, you know, expungement of some of these records, those types of things, all critically important because of a system that had over prosecuted those same black men who've had to live with that. But we haven't done anything to move beyond that, to move to, you know, the other side of the equation, if you will, of what are you doing to get us forward and what are you doing to show the respect?

This is tricky. These are hard things to talk about. But we as a country are going to have to figure this out, not just for electoral wins, but for long-term stability of our society and making sure that folks truly can thrive. Tell me how Democrats, or maybe specifically you,

show respect, right? We could talk about policy, right? I think Democrats often want to show they want to help. They want to show what they're going to do. But how do you show respect to people who don't feel respected by you? Particularly when those people are treating you with disrespect, particularly when your side gets excited if you treat them with disrespect. Like, how do you build that sense of respect in politics? Yeah, I think it's making it clear. You have to be present. You know, I'd always go when I go into the Black churches and say, you know,

A couple of things you can always count on, taxes, sun rising, and white politicians over here to see you guys at Ebenezer. And first of all, being there, being in community, and then making the case that these communities don't need a white savior. Many cases, they need us to move the resources and let the community do it themselves. Making sure that in appointments...

If you're going to appoint in your cabinets when you get elected, the housing person usually put a black person in there and then call it good. No, they want to be in the revenue office. They want to be in the education department. These are things you start to show the respect that our society is based on this and it's there. And you let the communities grow and thrive and then figure out ways that in so many of these cases.

That barrier to generational wealth that really moves the needle is the housing one you're talking about. And that doesn't mean just affordable housing that you don't own. It means how do you get to home ownership and then the movement of capital to entrepreneurial businesses. Those are the things that we've not done a good enough job in those communities. When we start to see that in Minnesota, we start to move the needle.

In terms of a policy that people would feel in their lives, that they would appreciate Democrats did for them, forgetting who is president, if a Democrat is president, if you were president in 2025, I know you're not running for the top of the ticket, and there's a governing trifecta. What do you think Democrats should pass first? What would make the biggest difference for people and be visible? Wow.

Well, certainly the vice president will make her decisions on those. But given, I think one of the things is, is that people really see because it empowers their family. It shows that I think the paid family and medical leave, we're the last nation on earth basically to not do this. It is so foundational to just basic decency and financial well-being. I think we should do paid family medical leave across the country. And I think that would start to change both finances, attitude, strengthen the family. This is one, if J.D. Vance is right about this, that we're

We should make it easier for families to be together. Then make sure that after your child's born that you can spend a little time with them. That'd be a great thing. Great way of also seeing who in politics is actually pro-family and who just likes to talk about it. Oh, it separates people quickly. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

I'm reading The Very Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Sarr. Very interesting book. If you don't want to sleep, read Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. It's about the nuclear accident at Damascus. And then maybe it's just me, nostalgic or whatever as a young guy, Razor's Edge. I still go back to Mom's Razor's Edge. Governor Tim Walz, thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra.

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Iskwith, and Kristen Lin. We have 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. And special thanks to Sonia Herrera.