Ezra Klein on Where Democrats Go From Here
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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. And my guest host for today is a friend and fellow podcaster who, like me and Nancy Pelosi, is probably not getting an invite to this year's White House Christmas party. The New York Times' Ezra Klein, host of The Ezra Klein Show. Good to be here, man.

Here at the end or maybe the beginning of all things. Yes. Yeah, well, we'll see. We're going to talk all about what happened last week, what's next, and where Democrats go from here. But first, I'm just curious how, on a personal level, you've been processing the election results and the new reality in which we find ourselves again. We're starting in the therapy space. This is why Democrats will lose elections. We're all about trauma and not about the middle class. Yeah.

Look, I am a professional political journalist. I will feel my feelings in three months. Right now, there's a lot to do.

I sort of feel the same way. And I'm not a professional political journalist. You just play one on a podcast. Yeah, right. Yeah. So no, but I kind of feel the same way. I see you're back on Twitter, which is always a signal to me that we are indeed in a bad place. I like that I've become like my deciding to tweet for a couple of days has become like a harbinger of doom.

Yeah. It happened after the Biden debate. I'm like a horseman. I come back to Twitter. People are like, uh-oh. I mean, look, I'm staying on... I've already said, I'm staying on Twitter until it's over. I'm not... Twitter is good for... Twitter is bad for many things, most things, people's minds, American politics in general.

But it's good for factionalism. And I think this is a factional moment, right? There are debates that have to happen inside the Democratic Party, inside the liberal coalition. And I think some of them are going to happen there, or at least I am trying to push some of them forward there. I try to use Twitter very instrumentally rather than having it use me. And this is a moment when I want to try to use it.

That is the way to do it. All right, let's talk about the news. There's been a flurry of Trump personnel news and rumored policy moves over the last few days. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State is a little more neocon than I expected. Fox News host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. That's the energy I was looking for in a second Trump term. Like for a couple of days, all of the announcements were pretty normal people. And then I woke up today. I'm like, ah, here we go. That's this guy's real crazy. Yeah.

Uh, Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, John Ratcliffe at CIA, Mike Huckabee as U.S. Ambassador to Israel. And then we've got Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, uh, will lead something called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOJ. Uh,

where they will, quote, provide advice and guidance from outside of government. The next administration is also gearing up for mass deportations, new tariffs and reportedly drafting an executive order to fast track the removal of generals Trump doesn't care for. In fairness, these are all things that he promised to do during the campaign. I don't think it's especially useful to predict or even speculate about what the next Trump administration will or won't do.

But this time around, I'm trying to avoid reacting to every personnel and policy announcement with outrage or alarm, both because Trump was quite clear in the campaign what he intends to do. And because I do think that most people start to tune out all the hysteria after a while. But what do you think? What's what's your general reaction been to this last week of announcements? I have a lot of reactions. You know, I had Vivek Ramaswamy on my show a couple of weeks before the election.

And we had a long and I thought really interesting conversation. But one of the foundations of the conversation for me, one of the reasons I wanted to have him on was he had just released this book, which was in many ways an odd book, but it sort of felt like a holdover of his campaign. But it was framed in this much more distinctive way where he was saying inside what he calls the America First movement, the Trump movement.

There's a schism between what he called the national libertarians, which he was presenting himself as a leader of. And I'd say you want to think about this as more traditional republicanism blended with, you know, more anti-immigration sentiment, more nationalistic sentiment, more skepticism of China. Right. You know, sort of a mix between Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.

And the national patronage side, which was, you know, sort of implicitly J.D. Vance, you know, and that was much more about shutting down trade, right? Ramaswamy wanted more trade with our friends. The, you know, the national conservative side or national patronage side wanted less. And one of the things over the course of that conversation I came to realize, because there was this question of, well, is this a live schism, right? Is this something real that we're looking at? But as he spoke and as we spoke, I was like, oh, you see Elon Musk as your patron, right?

Right. The person who you're describing, who might be influential in the Trump administration, who has these ideas more or less is Musk, who at that point had sort of emerged as Trump's most heavyweight donor advisor buddy. And I think that has only become true with Musk since. And now you see Musk and Ramaswamy here. So I don't think actually Vivek had that wrong at all. And the reason I bring all this up is that

I think there's been a view that compared to the first Trump term, this Trump term, to reuse a word I just talked about with Twitter, is not going to be highly factional. That in Trump 1, you had Jared Kushner and Ivanka and the sort of globalists. You had Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and, you know, the nationalists or the America First crowd. You had a sort of national security establishment around H.R. McMasters and people like that. You had sort of Gary Cohn, who is, again, more with

with Kushner. And you can sort of name like three or four of these that kept the White House quite split. And the view was they've gotten over that. They knew that they had lots of people working and they knew there were traditional Republican Party of Mike Pence and a lot of people in the staffing levels of the administration. And the view was they've gone past that now. Right. The Republican Party is Trump's party. He owns it. Laura Trump is the co-chair of the RNC. You can have a much more united Trump administration if he wins again, which, of course, he did.

And I don't think you are. I think you're actually going to have much more factional infighting than people are prepared for. Because one thing you don't have now are all the parts of the Trump administration who don't like Donald Trump. Everybody is much better at appealing to him, supporting him, proving their loyalty to him. It's not Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn. It's all these people who are fully bought in and are trying to win the king's favor. So I think you're from the very beginning here. You know, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, these are all very different people.

seeing the beginnings of an administration that has not decided what its ideology is and is, in fact, putting people in different spots who have very, very different views on questions that, you know, were thought to be maybe settled. Yeah, I mean, I think you also have just a less homogeneous coalition that brought him into power. Yeah, R.K. Jr.,

Right, RFK Jr. And then you got Elon Musk and the all-in guys and that whole crew. And I do think that just watching...

it's early days, but like Elon Musk follow Donald Trump around everywhere and him just like showing up at White House or wanting to go to the White House meetings and showing up in Washington and everything like it's fine for now. I think there are both personality reasons and policy reasons why that's not going to last. And I don't think Trump's going to going to like that all that much either. I think that's right. I

I hesitate to predict too much about Donald Trump. And these things can always settle into a middle ground, right? I think for both Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the other one is their newest toy, right? It's exciting to have a new toy. It's exciting to have a new friend. Exciting to have a new kind of power center allied with you. I sometimes find it hard to know what to think or even how to predict where the Musk thing goes for two reasons. I mean, one is that

I don't know, compared to some of the yahoos around Donald Trump, Elon Musk actually has built, to me, very impressive things in the real world, right? His politics are obviously not mine, but SpaceX, Tesla. This is a person who knows a lot about how to get some pretty important things done. The way he's run Twitter, you know, not great from a lot of perspectives, but he clearly ran it well to his own ends. Elon Musk is a quite effective person.

And compared to some of the dunces Donald Trump sometimes surrounds himself with, maybe that's for the good, right? And at least Elon Musk has a view about emerging technologies in the future that I think it is important for people around the president to be thinking a lot about. On the other hand, Elon Musk is also the democracy nightmare scenario in a way, right? The thing that not the January 6th nightmare scenario, but the more banal and long predicted nightmare scenario of a policy

polity that has this much role for money in politics, what happens if the person with the most money decides to buy the politics of the country, right? And it's not that there weren't many big donors on the Kamala Harris side, but the rumor or the reporting I was seeing today was that Elon Musk is making it clear that if you're a House Republican and you oppose Donald Trump's agenda, he will fund a primary challenge to you.

And, you know, he was just pumping money in a wild way into the campaign. So sort of Musk is going to Trump basically and saying, you know, you keep me near you. You listen to me. You will never worry about money again. There is no amount of money the Democrats can, you know, their billion dollars was impressive. But Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter so he could just like play around with it and increase his influence. Like there is no amount of money the Democrats can spend that is like what

Elon Musk can spend just out of his own pocket. And so this thing that has always been predicted, what if you have one of these guys who is truly rich and he's the richest man in the world decide that what they want to buy is all of politics? We're about to see that theory tested. And from any kind of democratic representativeness theory, it's like a pretty scary one to watch playing out.

It certainly is. It also, I think, leaves Trump and Musk open. There's a vulnerability there, which is like oligarchs in control of the government. If the government is not delivering sort of effective governance and people's lives are getting better and they see Elon Musk there, you know, all the time promising a lot of shit that doesn't come true. I do think that could be a vulnerability, but we'll have to see. Let's talk about what the Democratic Party can learn from

2024 and what the best path forward might look like. I know you've been thinking and talking and writing a lot about this. And I thought the way that you frame the challenge in your Twitter thread from this week is a good place for us to start. You wrote, the hard question isn't the two points that would have decided the election. It's how to build a Democratic Party that isn't always two points away from losing to Donald Trump or worse. And I thought the way that you framed the challenge in your Twitter thread from this week is a good place for us to start.

You wrote an entire book about political polarization. It seems like in order to move beyond a situation where we're always only two points away from losing will also require us to move beyond a polarized, closely divided political environment. How do you think about breaking out of that? Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah.

One thing I will say is that polarization does not imply competitiveness. I always find it fascinating, the political scientists, even the ones who study why this is, this is a very unusually competitive era in American politics. It used to be a truism that American politics had a sun and a moon party. So in the post-Civil War era, the Republican Party is the sun party and the Democratic Party is the moon. The Republican Party is very, very dominant for a long time.

In the post-New Deal era, the Democratic Party becomes much more potent and it sort of dominates politics until you could call it maybe the 70s, you know, the 80s with the rise of Reagan. And then in sort of the post-Reagan era, things begin to get very competitive and they begin to trade back and forth. And we've never had a period in American politics at the congressional Senate and White House levels this competitive. The last three presidential elections have just switched back and forth, right? Yeah.

Usually not what we see. A pretty simple model of elections is incumbents win, right? If you make that your model, you will usually be right. And recently it hasn't been right, at least at the presidential level. So one thing is why are we so close? And there's not, people have theories about this. It's actually really not well understood.

Then you have this sort of other thing, which is about 2024 and realignments. I think a pretty easy way to think about the electorates right now is that the natural split for American politics over the past couple of years has been 52-48 Democrats, right? And in 2020, where the coalitions look very much like they did in 2024, you have Donald Trump as the incumbent.

You have a bad year for an incumbent. It's the pandemic. He's shitty at being the president. So the incumbent suffers a negative three point people are mad at you penalty, right? And that brings the coalitions down to Democrats winning a popular vote victory of about four and a half points, right? Fast forward four years, Biden and Harris are the incumbents. It's a terrible year worldwide for incumbents, post-pandemic inflation, et cetera. Say you have another incumbent penalty of two to three points. That is Donald Trump winning by one to two points, which is exactly where we are.

So it doesn't look to me for all the grand pronouncements that Republicans have assembled this completely dominant electoral majority. But two things do seem true, which is one, you have three elections now that Donald Trump either has won or could have won very, very easily, at least in the Electoral College. And the other is that

Even putting aside competitiveness, Democrats are losing the working class. They just are. They're losing the working class and they are increasingly losing the multiracial working class. That's not gone yet, but it is following the same trend as the white working class. And if you are a party that your reason for being at some fundamental, characterological, philosophical level is

is you want to represent the interests of the working class, you feel that American life is economically unfair, and you feel that it is that people are born without the same shot, and that we do not have, as it got called a lot in the campaign, an opportunity economy, then it actually, whether you're winning elections or not, to have the people you are supposed to represent not voting for you should be taken as a kind of spiritual crisis for a party, right? Not like, well, if we can win the suburbs, we can still win, right?

Like, no, you want to build a coalition that includes the people you say your politics are on behalf of and not just come up with a lot of excuses for why they're not voting for you, even though you are certain that you best represent their interests. That's like a very condescending, like an anti-politics form of politics, like an anti-representational politics that I think it's very important that the Democrats don't lapse into.

This to me is the crux of the problem. And I've been, I mean, look, I'm biased here. My college thesis was about white working class defection from the Democratic Party. This was in 2002. How to create it? You're plotting out the next decade or two of destroying the Democratic Party. And we can get into this. Didn't really expect that in 2008, the answer would be Barack Obama from Chicago, right? Isn't that a thing?

I know. But so the difficult question, I think, is why and what to do about it. And it's made more difficult now that it is not just white working class defection. I think after 16, a lot of the analysis was, well, it was racial resentment that drove white voters to vote for Donald Trump. And that's why we have Trump. And obviously, you know, we could get into a whole thing about it's complicated. There is some racial resentment. But clearly, we have now moved beyond racialism.

just racial resentment as a reason for voting for Donald Trump. As we see, you know, Latino voters, some black men, Asian American voters, all starting to move towards Trump and Republicans. Bernie Sanders said after the election, the Democrats have abandoned working class people.

Others have noted the Biden administration. Democrats in Congress have actually done quite a bit for working class, middle class voters. What do you think about like how the party thinks about sort of winning back these voters? Is it you know, there's pure economics, there's policy, there's attitude, there's branding. Like what do you think? I think the thing you that.

one can say without it even being questionable is Democrats have lost touch with working class voters. Working class voter like Democrats have had, I think, for a very long time, a simple and pretty materialist view of voters, particularly working class voters, which is

If your policies are sufficiently redistributionist, right, if they are sufficiently oriented in terms of, you know, you can run a tax policy table and see where the money is going towards, you know, the voters you think of as a working class, they should support you. And if they don't, that requires some kind of extraordinary explanation.

Right. Maybe they are being turned against you on cultural issues. Maybe there is misinformation or media ecosystems. You don't know how to penetrate or that are lying to people about you. Maybe they're mad about a war. Maybe they just don't like your candidate. But if if voters are not following like the money, basically.

then something is wrong and you just got to figure out the thing that is wrong. You have to unkink the system so voters know that you were giving them more money and support you. I think that's fundamentally on some level what Bernie Sanders is saying there when he says Democrats have abandoned the working class.

He means that their policies are not sufficiently big and redistributionist enough in favor of the working class. Now, as you note, the first thing to say about this is Joe Biden has been the most left presidency on economics of my lifetime. He's been the most pro-union president by far, even though Democrats have lost or losing union voters by larger and larger numbers.

He has been kind of big on industrial policy, all these things people used to say as explanations of it. Right. Trade. Right. They've not gone back to neoliberal trade economics. The you know, they tried to expand the child tax credit. Right. Republicans have been quite far right on a bunch of things.

So, the sort of basic test of the model isn't working. By the way, nor is Bernie Sanders running way ahead of Kamala Harris in Vermont. I mean, I haven't looked at the latest count, but when I last looked, he was running slightly behind her. So, the sort of old sense that Bernie Sanders is way outperforming other Democrats is no longer true. Although you do see in some places, right, AOC outperformed Harris quite a bit in her district. Yeah.

I think the problem sometimes with the Sanders wing of the party is that it just has an overly unidimensional sense of working class voters or just voters in general, right? It's a little bit too Marxist in this way.

And it sort of believes any departing from that model of politics is just some kind of aberration to be explained or worked out. But even if you're just thinking about economics, when I've been talking to various people practicing politics, I've been talking to Republican pollsters. I did an episode with Patrick Ruffini, whose book very much predicted this election.

And, you know, one point he'll make to you is that when he has been polling sort of working class Latino voters, they feel the Democratic Party has also touched with them on economics, but not because the social safety net proposals are insufficiently generous, but because there's not like a language of aspiration.

They're sort of being talked about like they need things, not about what they can achieve. The emphasis on work itself was a very big part of both the Clinton and the Obama presidencies. And I'm not saying it's been totally absent in the Biden presidency, but the idea of the worker as an aspirational category is important. I think it's very hard to separate this also, by the way, from Donald Trump and Elon Musk, which is something I said in that thread. And I saw people sort of scratching their head at it, but I think it's very important.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not just billionaires. They are people's idea of what a billionaire is. Their entire public persona, first Donald Trump for decades in American life and now Elon Musk, they are the public's idea of a rich guy, right? If you like make it more than anyone else has ever made it,

You could be Donald Trump or Elon Musk. They're not some unknown private equity, you know, plutocrat. These are the guys who play rich guys on TV. They're not Mitt Romney. They're not Mitt Romney. And I actually think it's really important. They understand something about how economics is not just a...

People have more than just material economic needs. There are economic identities or economic aspirations or economic stories they're telling about themselves and their communities. And these really matter, too. So, yeah, I do think there are a lot of ways that Democrats have sort of in the Bernie Sanders language, they're abandoned the working class. But again, I would use the term lost touch. I think they they've sort of lost touch with like the taxonomy.

texture of what the people, again, they say they're representing want. When you are giving people what you say they want and they are not voting for you, which I do think is true of sort of the Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden economic policy, there's a reason Bernie Sanders was defending Joe Biden up until the end, because Biden had been more aligned to Bernie Sanders than any other president. And it is not having the effect you think it will have on the electorate. You have to ask what's wrong with your theory, not just what's wrong with the electorate.

OK, we're going to take a quick break. But before we do that, in a moment, we could all use a push forward. Stacey Abrams gave a really helpful post-election pep talk on her show, Assembly Required. She talks about leaning in to understand the voters we lost and how we can work together going forward. Stacey is going to have another episode out this Thursday on the election. I highly recommend you check both out and subscribe to Assembly Required wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back.

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There's a couple different challenges here. One is just, and it might just be specific to this election, which is the way that the Biden administration and I think Democratic pundits and others handled the persistence of high prices after sort of inflation has fallen. And Annie Lowry, who you happen to be married to, just wrote a piece in The Atlantic about this, where she pointed out that, you know, people aren't just frustrated about the cost of living because Democrats or the media have

to adequately convey how wonderful this economy is, but because people are actually struggling with high costs, some due to inflation, high interest rates, and some just, you know, on health care, child care that have been building for years. So I do wonder, like, how to tease that out from sort of the more cultural issues with appearing in

in touch with the electorate, just from a policy level. I don't know if there's anything the Biden administration could have done differently here, but I am thinking a lot about where we go from here in terms of talking about costs and sort of this affordability crisis. Well, this is, yeah, Annie Lowry, America's greatest journalist. This is where I think

It's useful to ask this question of are you explaining the marginal difference between the 2020 and 2024 results? Are you explaining the 2020 coalition we saw, which was largely the same coalition with the incumbent penalty applied to Donald Trump and not to Biden-Harris? Because Democrats were losing the working class in 2020 when inflation was not a problem. Right.

Right. And I think it's a really important thing to say. Now, we've seen this trend in a lot of wealthy democracies, right? The sort of realignment around education. There's a lot of theorizing about why it is it was happening. It was present in the 2016 election, right? This has been building for a very long time. It is not just like two years ago this began. And so one way I think just like to tease it away from prices, I think prices very likely were the margin in this election, right? Yeah.

from moving Democrats to, you know, a plus three in the popular vote to a minus, you know, one to two in the popular vote. So if you'd had none of the inflation and the economy is better, I think Democrats probably would have won. But they were losing the working class before. And they would have like the way Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 is that he increased Democratic margins, particularly among college educated white voters. Right. This was a kind of big point everybody was making about the suburbs. Right.

The reason Donald Trump outperformed his polls in 2020 was he surprised heavily to the upside with working class Latino voters in particular, black voters to some degree, too. And so he was beginning to reshuffle the coalitions even then. So I think the way you can tease out, like, is this inflation epiphenomena or is this something broader? It's just like, was it going on before inflation? And the answer is, yeah, it was.

I do wonder, you talked about sort of losing the idea of like, you know, the aspirational view of what it means to like, you know, achieve the American dream and work. I also wonder if there's like a responsibility part of it that we've lost a bit. I mean, I think about the child tax credit, right? Which we thought, Democrats thought was going to be quite popular. I think it's good policy for sure. I believe that that is going to be quite popular. And then

After it was extended, people thought, okay, this is going to be popular. And then when you looked at polls, it always pulled towards the bottom of the list. And I also thought about this with Kamala Harris's $25,000 down payment on helping people afford a new home. It didn't test as well as the building 3 million new homes down.

And I do wonder if some of the desire for redistributive economic policies that you hear from Bernie, like it hits people so that like, well, I don't want handouts from the government. I don't want people. I don't want the government to just give people money. I don't think that's a good idea. I want to make sure that work is rewarded. Right. Which is, you know, Biden had said this in his 20 campaign. It was part of Obama's rhetoric. It was good.

Clinton rhetoric you can go back through successful Democrats and I don't know that feels like it has sort of fallen out of the lexicon of Democratic rhetoric at least on the presidential level. I mean, I think there's something to this God Sometimes like more more in a question than you can answer. I think that after the Obama era and the post financial crisis sort of slow growth turnaround. I

A bunch of kind of shockwaves, intellectual shockwaves and recriminations hit democratic economic policymaking and political sort of economic thinking.

And one of the big ones was that first Democrats were losing the working class, right? And they were losing it because starting with Bill Clinton and continuing into Barack Obama's, you know, what was then called sort of the continuation of neoliberalism, which isn't exactly how I saw it at the time. I had seen Obama's actually in many ways a pretty big break with Bill Clinton's politics. But there was a sort of view that we had been in this neoliberal era, which I think there's at least some truth to.

that stretched across Clinton, across Obama. And in it, Democrats had become overly narrow and targeted and specific in their policies, right? They weren't building these big things like FDR did, Social Security. They weren't building as, with the exception maybe of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid, these universalistic programs that had survived since Great Society and grown since then.

And there was sort of a turn in the party on this sort of like the deserving and the undeserving. There were the rise, and this is I think actually a quite big thing in the party, the sort of nonprofit groups and foundations, like the intellectual infrastructure of the party became very dominated.

by a very, very intellectual and quite left class, which I am very comfortable among. And I'm not saying I'm not sort of part of this, you know, what will get called gentry liberals by a guy like Michael Lind, who's been a critic of it. But there were very, very strong intellectual currents and all that.

welfare reform was sort of looked back on as, you know, not good politics, but a policy disaster. I largely agree that it was bad policy, but there was a reason it was important in politics at the time. And all that just kind of fell out of favor.

And I will also say that I think this is inseparable from Bernie Sanders's 2016 run and the strength that he showed and then the rise of like Red Rose Twitter, right? And Jacobin and the sort of democratic socialist part of the party. Like in 2016 and 2020, those were incredibly live forces, right?

And the sort of traditional Democratic Party or what we might think of as a traditional Democratic Party was trying to figure out, I think not cynically, like actually trying to understand it and sort of absorb more of that thinking. And again, that thinking was much more big government, right? Much more, you know, free college, right? Bernie ran on free college and free health care. And of course, he's never free, right? Free college isn't free. It's paid for by taxpayers, right?

Canceling student loans is not free. Somebody actually does pay for that, right? We don't like the money, it doesn't just go nowhere.

free healthcare, right? Like you actually do pay for it. Like I'm a healthcare wonk by training. Single payer is something you pay for. And if you're going to do it, you end up abolishing private health insurance. And like, this was like the great debate of the 2020 primaries. But I think all this, you cannot unwind this from like the center of the Democratic Party trying to figure out, okay, things are moving left. There's all this populist energy, all this anti-establishment energy. Our old incrementalism is not going to meet the moment.

and trying to come up with some new answer to that, when maybe some of the old answers actually still had a lot of life in them. One of the just, I think, difficult truths is that it is very hard to separate politics from candidates. And candidates can, the right candidate can win with, I think, very different politics, right? Donald Trump is very different from Bernie Sanders, he's very different from Barack Obama, he's very different from Bill Clinton, he's very different from George W. Bush.

But things need to be authentic to that candidate and that person. And sort of when you say at the end there, I recognize there are a lot of pieces to this answer, but when you say at the end there, it kind of fell out in Kamala Harris's campaign from where it was in Joe Biden's campaign in 2020 or Barack Obama's campaign. Kamala Harris has a lot of great qualities as a politician, but she never came from a deeply economic wing of the party, right? That's just like not who she was. It's not what her profile was in California, right? She could have really run as a law and order candidate.

in some ways, particularly if that hadn't been jettisoned in the 2020 election by 2019 and 2020 in her campaign then.

But she just wasn't associated with any of these politics, right? She didn't have Bernie Sanders' authenticity running as, you know, fundamentally burn the system down socialist or AOC's populism or Joe Biden was associated with the hard work wing of the Democratic Party. I mean, he was a quite different and very moderate figure for much of his life. And Barack Obama was like a kind of master of telling stories about America and about Americans. And

And you just like I think a lot of things can work here. But but you need the candidate like policies are a way the candidate communicates about themselves. But if the communication about themselves doesn't feel authentic, then the policy doesn't work at all. And I think that that sort of happened here.

I mean, she also had the option. I always thought of running as more of a Katie Porter, Elizabeth Warren type populist in the sense of she was attorney general, took on the big banks for the homeowner settlement. Right. That was a very popular thing to do. Didn't talk about it a ton. Took on for profit colleges. Right. Like there's that.

Towards the end, there were a couple of times where she talked about like, you know, I'm not from Washington. I haven't spent my career here. So I've been outside Washington. I've taken on corporate interests like it was maybe an option to her, but it just wasn't her. Right. Like that's you could tell that's not like what she believed in her core. So it probably wouldn't have worked. I have been thinking a lot about like the party's reaction to Trump's first win in 2016 and how that played out.

specifically in the 2020 primary in which, you know, a lot of the positions that Kamala Harris took then certainly came back to bite her and a lot of the candidates who ran then.

And it was interesting because like in 2018, you know, we have these midterms and a lot of the Democrats who won in the midterms from that class, some of them were quite progressive. Some of them were quite moderate. A lot of them just fit their district really well. It was a big diverse class of House members and senators.

And then in the primary, there was this race. I don't want to just say the left because some of it was economic. Some of it was cultural. Some of it was on immigration. Like you could name the issue. But, you know, and I think about our part in that, too. We had candidates on. We'd push them on all these issues. And it was a it became a bit of a thing.

purity test litmus test on you had to be the most left possible position on a whole host of issues. And if you weren't, you were insufficiently Democratic or progressive. And, you know, I think that had a real effect on both that primary and, you know, even though Joe Biden got out of that primary, his administration.

Kamala Harris's toughest opponent in 2024 was not Donald Trump. It was Kamala Harris in 2019. Yeah. That like when people say she ran a moderate campaign, what they mean is she disavowed her own policies from 2019. But also Kamala Harris in 2019 bore no resemblance to Kamala Harris in 2015. Right. I'm from California. You're in California. Right. Kamala Harris was a tough on crime prosecutor. Right.

She was part of a sort of black, more moderate politics that you see there. San Francisco is a place that is now and is always very concerned about disorder. It has a lot of disorder. The people who win there are often quite good at running against disorder, as she was. And she then ran against a sort of tough-on-crime Republican for AG. It was a very, very close race, but she didn't win it by running to his left. She ran it by running in many ways to his right.

and sort of attacking him for sort of, you know, wanting to double dip on his salary, things like that. I think a culture has emerged in the Democratic Party since the Obama era. I don't think this was true in the Obama era. I think Obama had the strength in the party and the Obama administration had the strength in the party to say no. But since then, I think the Democratic Party has lost a culture of saying no. It has become much more coalitional. So you all, when you were in the White House...

used to complain bitterly about what you call the professional left, right? There was always this friction between the Obama administration and the professional left. These groups were always trying to push you towards positions you didn't want to take and attack you for the things you were doing to reach out to more moderate voters or even to Republican voters. And then after Obama, as Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden tried to put that coalition back together,

I think the ability to say no collapsed. I'm not 100% sure why, but not just among them, right? Bernie Sanders himself was a very different figure in 2016 than he was in 2020 or 2024. Bernie Sanders was a very class-based democratic socialist figure who... I did a...

interview with him years ago. And I used to like, like when I, when I do these interviews, I would sort of try to push people on what I thought were sort of like interesting tension points in their politics and

And so I asked him in that interview, because the Democratic left had become very, very, very pro-immigration, like, you know, what do you think of open borders? Right. What is the you know, and he said, that's a Koch brothers plot. Right. He wasn't sitting there saying that, you know, like borders are kind of immoral, but we have to have them. He's like, that's a plot of the plutocrats. Right. And Sanders was pro-gun and he was in a complicated way, but still is pro-Israel.

You know, sort of famously, one way Hillary Clinton beat him in the primary in 2016 was running to his left on cultural issues. There was this sort of weird but famous, like, breaking up the banks won't end systemic racism exchange. But over time, Sanders also within his own coalition started saying yes to much more, right? It wasn't just sort of he was like very, very far left on economics. But, you know, on cultural issues, he was this kind of cranky Northeasterner, you know, from a state with a lot of rural areas, right?

He began to open up a much wider left. The squad is a highly coalitional version of the left, right? They are not they they are sort of saying yes on most things, like not on not on just one thing, right? They've not just moved left here or on that. And so what was happening in the center of the Democratic Party where Joe Biden had become much more coalitional, I mean, Joe Biden used to be a political figure who delighted in drawing lines. He supported a balanced budget amendment.

When Republicans were rising in the 90s, right, which is terrible policy, right? The worst. But Joe Biden was somebody who was very much like lunch pail Democratic Party and was like trained and grew up in this era where, you know, you like the fear of being called a liberal was very real, right?

Biden, Hillary, I mean, in a different way, Harris. I think this just became a kind of culture in the party about how it governed. You were trying to assemble the largest possible coalition and you were very worried about being taken down by another faction. Right. It became possible to Democrats like in 2012, the idea that, you know, a Democrat would lose in a primary to a self-described socialist was ridiculous. Right. That wasn't something they feared at all.

Right. By 2016 and very much by 2020, they were terrified of it. When Kamala Harris, who was very much a top tier contender in 2019, was considering how to build out her campaign, she endorsed Medicare for all. And then with Sanders in the Senate, then when she was actually campaigning, came out with this sort of triangulated plan between Medicare for all and sort of other health care plans and became a kind of debacle for her. But she and everybody else was trying to figure out how to not get beaten by the left. Right.

At the same time, they're worried about sort of like every group on the board. You have, you know, the sort of post-pandemic era. You have racial reckonings, right? Like a lot is happening. And the party just becomes like very big tent, but big tent in a way that I think it didn't actually realize. Like it stretches its tent in a very particular direction, right? It stretches its tent left, but on every left issue simultaneously. And it doesn't really realize who...

It's not building its tent out to like I just have thought a lot after the election about the fact that Democrats at a national level seem more culturally comfortable with the Cheneys than with Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn.

I just think that says something very interesting about what axes are of most importance and are really operating here. Because, like, I don't know, I think the Cheney should be accountable for ruining American politics, creating the space that Donald Trump eventually occupied and, like, launching absolutely catastrophically disastrous wars. And I appreciate that Liz Cheney was willing to risk something to oppose Donald Trump.

And I think it's great if she wants to vote for Kamala Harris. But I think the sense that like they would go out of their way to feature Liz Cheney and be campaigning Liz Cheney, but would not go out of their way to be on maybe the biggest media platform in America that is actually culturally quite different from them and is reaching people they do not reach and do not know how to reach a Joe Rogan. I just, you know, whether you believe she should have gone on Rogan or not, that says something about like who the Democrats are comfortable having over for dinner.

I think it was a strategy born of some kind of necessity in that they, like you said, they thought, okay, we're losing money.

Working class voters were losing these low propensity voters who don't always show up. And by the way, don't always pay close attention to politics. And what we might be able to do is squeeze more juice out of the the suburbs and college educated voters in the suburbs. And for those voters, you know, it would make sense to talk about defending democracy. And Liz Cheney as a spokesperson for that.

and bipartisanship and all that. And the bet did not pay off because she did not improve Biden's margins in the suburbs. If anything, in some suburbs, she underperformed him. Some she, you know, she maintained the same, but it seemed to be like a more of a slapdash. Okay. It's the last couple of months of campaign. We don't have a long line campaign here. And, uh,

You know, we've got Liz Cheney. We'll go to the suburbs of Milwaukee where she did make some inroads with voters. That's the one place she did overperform Biden. But it wasn't enough because it's more to your point about like the broader challenge of losing touch with the working class. It's like it's harder to repair that with like one interview on Rogan.

Yeah, I think it's very important to I'll say two things. Because one, I think it's it's so easy right now for everybody to second guess every decision that the Harris campaign made. But there is campaign. If you look at I mean, you guys have made this point, too. If you look at the battleground states, they seem to have made up a fair amount of ground. Right. The battleground states look a lot better than the rest of the country. So if you're just kind of here's how the country felt about the Biden Harris administration. And here's where we think we can see a campaign effect happening.

Where there was a campaign effect happening, they made up ground, right? The battleground states were sort of one to two points, whereas like they seem to have lost about 10 points in California, right? They lost more than that, I think, or around that in New York, right? New Jersey, you know, is a six point margin in New Jersey, last I looked. So something really bad was happening, by the way, in the places Democrats govern. And all this de-alignment and this sort of, when I say who the Democratic Party will have over dinner, there's a reason I'm not saying who Kamala Harris will have over dinner.

Because the sort of disattachment from a lot of these cultures that began to feel unfriendly to Democrats or maybe the opposite, right? Democrats became unfriendly to them. Like that happened earlier, right? That's been going on for years now. And...

you know, the loss of a space like Rogan as a friendly space for Democrats, which it used to be quite open to them, right? Rogan was an Andrew Yang fan. He was an RFK Jr. fan when RFK was sort of like in the Democratic primary. He endorsed Bernie Sanders to some degree in 2020. Like this was not an impossible place for Democrats to be. But I do think one thing that happened in the Trump years, and like this is again a part of losing touch,

Is Democrats developed a sort of specific kind of there are people who that instead of disagreeing with them, they sort of wanted to write them out of the coalition. And the they here is complicated because it's like I don't exactly mean Joe Biden. I mean, this amorphous mass of culture that is the Democratic Party. And

I think there are a lot of good examples of seeing this happen. But one that I've just been thinking about is the difference between three gaffes, right? So, Barack Obama's bitter comment in, I believe, the 2008 election, the deplorables comment from Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and the garbage voters comment by Joe Biden at the end of this election.

And one thing about Obama's 08 comment, which for young listeners is he's caught at a fundraiser saying basically that you have these deindustrialized towns where people have lost their jobs, their communities are frayed, the situation is very bad. And so it shouldn't be surprising that people become bitter and they cling to guns and religion.

And this was sort of a hot mic comment, caught, leaked, creates huge problems for him because it's very condescending specifically to religion and gun culture, right? Which people have- Said in San Francisco, of all places. Said in San Francisco. So big problem for Barack Obama in 2008. But it is nevertheless, if you listen to that comment-

It is Barack Obama telling this group of rich donors why you don't want to write these places off and write these people off. Like something bad has happened to them. If you feel culturally different from them, remember, you haven't had the experience they've had. And if you're like, why are these people, you know, on the evangelical rights, you know, moving into the politics they're moving? Well, look at what has happened to their communities. Why should they trust us? Right. It is for all the problems of that comment. And it was a problematic comment. Right.

It was a it was an argument about pulling closer. Right. And trying to see more clearly the pain people were in and try to find a way through to a politics that could that could bring you bring you and them into some kind of alignment.

The deplorables comment from Hillary Clinton is very different. It's, you know, half of the Trump voters are reasonable people and half of them are these people are deplorables, racist, sexist, misogynistic, and we should write them off. Right. Irredeemable was always the worst. Irredeemable. Right. Like then deplorable. That's not anger or disagreement. That's contempt. Right. That is not politics, really. Like these people are gone. Right.

And not only are they not in our coalition, we don't want them to be in our coalition. We don't have a conversation to have with them. And there's a bit of that, I think, reflected in that Biden garbage comment, though. There was a lot of garbled syntax, and that's what's always been a little bit unclear to me what he was saying. But I think these all do reflect something that was actually happening in the Trump years in the Democratic Party, which is, you know, there's Arthur Brooks, the sort of head

head of the American Enterprise Institute turned happiness columnist. I was about to say the happiness guy. Used to make this argument to me that there's this big difference between the emotions of anger and contempt.

And anger is an emotion that brings you closer to people, right? When you're angry with somebody, you sort of want to have a fight with them, argue it out, but find resolution, right? Anger is something that pulls you into relationship. And contempt is something that pulls you out of relationship, right? Contempt is you don't need to have an argument with them, right? There's nothing to say here. That's what contempt is. Contempt is a kind of writing off. And I think a lot of these spaces and people and cultures got treated with some contempt, right?

Which was just a very big, to me, shift in politics. Obama's sort of a, like at his core, his great grace as a politician is his deep commitment to pluralism in his politics, right? You could disagree with him about him and he still wanted to talk to you. And what came sort of after was more of a, something that where a lot of people felt in the end, not even like they didn't like the Democrats, but that was true too.

but that the Democrats didn't like them. And like, that's the most lethal emotion in politics, right? When you don't feel these people like you, you're not going to vote for them no matter what fucking policies they promise you because you can't trust people who don't like you.

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I mean, I also think that that contempt

help shape a lot of democratic rhetoric and policy position if you're a candidate, right? Because if the groups or folks on Twitter or whoever it may be come after you, it's not like, hey, we disagree with your policy and let's have it out. It's like you are bad because you said X or proposed Y and you're just like you're morally bad and you're not part, you're not a good Democrat anymore. I keep thinking about immigration and

on this, which is like, I wrote, I don't know how many speeches, immigration speeches for Barack Obama. And he would say, we're a nation of immigrants. We're also a nation of laws. And there are millions of undocumented people in this country. And most of them are here just because they want to make it and work hard and contribute to this country. But it's also true that

illegal immigrants and he would say illegal immigrants back then um were are make a mockery of uh the people who are here legally or trying to come here legally through the legal immigration system and while we want a path to citizenship if you are here we want you to come out of the shadows if you're undocumented and then pay a fine learn english get to the back of the line behind people who are trying to come here legally and and etc etc right so that's

Later on, everyone was like, OK, Obama's did so many deportations and focused on security and had that kind of rhetoric because he was trying to get Republicans on board for comprehensive immigration reform. Right. And I always thought that was wrong. I thought that the reason that he talked like that about immigration is because that's where the country was. That's where most people in the country were. Fast forward to the 2020 primary.

Joe Biden, in one of the debates, says something about how, you know, raise your hand if you're for, you know, decriminalizing border crossings. Right. That was a question to all the all the candidates. I believe Castro, Representative Castro at the time, he proposed decriminalizing border crossings. Right. And Biden says, well, I think if you're here, you have to get to the back of the line. Right. If you're undocumented before you get a path to citizenship.

There was like a multi-day blow up about Biden's comments about getting to the back of the line. He had to hold a roundtable in San Diego with immigration leaders, activists, Latino leaders. He was criticized for it by other candidates. It became this whole thing that like, how dare he say this? And it's, you know, it's bad. And this is just and he had there was a sit in in his campaign office. There are people protesting him. Right. Right.

Now, this is all in the context of like Donald Trump had just carried out a family separation policy. Right. Just like the most xenophobic anti-immigrant president we've ever had. And the focus was on Joe Biden using terminology that Barack Obama had used for eight years and no one had complained about. And I always think about that. And I'm like, that's I think that's where things went off the rails a bit. I wonder if it's true, though, that nobody complained about it. Right. Because I used to hear a lot of complaints from immigration groups about Barack Obama. Yeah.

Yeah. And one of my theories about the Democratic Party is that not in my theories. I think I think this is just true. The party, particularly, again, like in the post Obama period, there were these politicians who were trying to build out what the Obama coalition seemed like it was possibly eventually going to be, which was a dominant majority coalition for an extended period of time of an American politics.

Right. And to do that, you needed these young voters. You needed to keep getting these huge numbers among Hispanic voters, black voters, Asian-American voters. You know, union voters are important to the party, working class voters. And you might you have this question then. Right. Well, how do you appeal to these voters? What do they want? And the answer the Democratic Party settled on in practice, if not in theory, although maybe in theory, too, was that you listen to the groups that purport to represent them.

If you want to win Hispanic voters, you listen to the immigration groups. They're going to tell you what these voters care about. If you want to win Black voters, you listen to the groups that say they represent them in different respects, ranging from like the NAACP to environmental justice groups. Unions, you listen to the unions, right? Like it's sort of down the line. They didn't do it for no reason, right? They thought that they were trying to win the allegiance of these voters, right?

And it just didn't work because these groups actually didn't represent their voters very well. And different ones are different. The unions, I think, in many ways are better than some of the other groups because they do have memberships. But a lot of these groups actually believed things, particularly like immigration being a great example because the Hispanic shift has been huge on this. You know, if you poll Hispanic voters particularly near the border, they just don't have super far left views on immigration. Right.

Like, they don't. I don't know what to tell you. Like, it just is not what the groups told you it was. And so a big part of the thing that happened, I think, is that the, like, the role that the groups played in the Democratic Party changed. They went from, like, I think it used to be understood that, like, the role of these sort of highly ideological interest groups is to push politics in the direction that they believe is, you know, right and just. Right.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Groups do not need to stay within the Overton window. And the role of the politicians was to say when no meant no for them, right? When the politics didn't reflect that, the politics couldn't support that, right? It is the job of the politician to be in touch with the constituency and say, uh-uh, sorry, like this is where my people are. And I hear you and you make a lot of good arguments, but we're not going there either because I actually don't agree with you or because I think the politics of this are wrong.

Not doable in 08. I don't I don't think any of us believe that Barack Obama was against gay marriage. Like, I don't currently believe that in 2008, Barack Obama in his heart of hearts was against gay marriage. But what Barack Obama was against was losing the election.

And so he, I was like in roundtables, like when he was a candidate and, you know, like without going into them exactly, like the impression I definitely got was somebody who saw that, you know, he was going to wait until the politics of that were right, because he also thought he could do more for non-discrimination and other things if he, if he like worked through where the country was and got it, you know, further along to where even he would like it to be. And so that used to be the sort of relationship the groups pushed, right?

And sometimes they pushed and won. But a lot of the time, the politicians said no. And I think that just kind of stopped being the case, particularly during elections. And I think it actually has to do weirdly with Twitter and sort of the dynamics of social media, where like the role of everybody collapsed and they were all like in public arguing with each other, like doing the same thing all the time. That is my take on this. And I listened to your episode that's out today with Michael Lind about this. And I think it

It gives the groups...

Like it imbues them with too much power that I don't think they have, because I think what happened is you're right. There would always be this tension between the, you know, electeds and the groups in quotation marks. Let's talk to the groups about this. And there would always be disagreements and the groups would always be pushing. And you'd have these disagreements and you'd have them in meetings. And, you know, sometimes the groups would go public, but they do like a press release here and there, you know, and social media and especially Twitter, just all of this spilled out into the open.

And because everyone on Twitter and everyone in the Democratic Party are all talking to each other and most of the rest of the electorate that might not have these same views paid less and less attention to politics and is participating less in politics than Democratic elected officials. I think a lot of times saw the conversation on social media and Twitter and that is represented by the groups as like,

indicative of where the larger electorate was, and they are not there. And so we ended up having all these fights amongst ourselves in public, but the public that we were having the fights with is like a small, unrepresentative portion of the larger American electorate. I think that's right. I also think when we talk about the groups, right, it can sound like this very separate thing.

But you want to talk about where the revolving door in the Democratic Party is. It's between the groups and the administrations and the staffs, right? People go from, you know, serving in politics to, you know, being in the think tanks, being in the interest groups, et cetera. So I've been thinking a lot, like, what in God's name was the ACLU doing? Giving Democratic candidates in 2020 a written exam, asking, among other things, are you supportive of

of providing gender reassignment surgery to undocumented immigrants in prison, right? Like writing this edge case mad lib basically about the most unpopular policy one could possibly imagine. Did they, I mean, there's another question of what were the Democrats doing answering it? Right. Right. Which Joe Biden, to his credit, doesn't. Just like leaves a thing blank.

But one thing that we're saying is that a lot of people working for these campaigns and Harris in particular comes out of the legal wing of the Democratic Party. Right. She's a lawyer. The ACLU, like all their friends, they like a bunch of them have worked in the ACLU. Right. Their friend, you know, like if you if you look at the legal establishment, the Democratic Party, the connections to the ACLU are very deep. Right. Many of them have worked there. They go back and forth from there. So having your friends at the ACLU mad at you doesn't feel good. Right. Aside from anything else, you might think about them.

These are social networks, right? These are people you see. These are people you are in communication with, right? The people you go to for feedback on your proposals. There are places you might want to work after the administration, particularly now that it's become, you know, verboten to work on Wall Street and other things and tech became, you know, like less of a good thing to have on your resume. So there's a deep social dimension to this. But

Did the ACLU think it was helping trans people when it did this? Because it wasn't, right? Like helping to raise this up as an issue that helped defeat Kamala Harris in 2024 and helped elect Donald Trump. Like what was the ACLU doing here, right? What role did it think it was playing by coming up with like this edge case and trying to get all the Democrats to say on the record they were for it?

as a way of getting, you know, more acl support of something in the primary so they can outflank each other. Now, that's not the only thing that happened, right? The sort of TV ad on this was Kamala Harris bringing up basically unprompted in a sort of forum about transgender issues. So, you know, that was also her kind of sense of the politics and how to differentiate herself. But there just was something happening in this period where I just think like all the, like the lines, like everybody's role in this was sort of getting erased. Yeah.

And, yeah, like if the groups want you to take a position you shouldn't take, like the politicians need to know that their role is to represent the public and also to think about what is good politics because losing – I mean, American politics turns on, you know, the head of a pin now. Losing all of the power of the federal government doesn't just mean there aren't going to be gender reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison. Right.

It means terrible things are going to happen to trans people in this country, right? Where the politics might have been on your side, right? Where people actually do have much better views about non-discrimination and they don't want people, they don't want kids bullied for no reason, right? And they understand these are difficult issues in families. Instead of like pushing all the way

to where, like, the ladder of public support collapses under you, there actually is so much to do, right? It's not like we've, like, solved every other problem, so the only things we have to worry about are, like, NCAA swimming competitions and, like, immigrant detention centers, right? There's a lot to do here. But somehow you had this...

Yeah, like just like collapsing of the roles, but also I think really strange culture emerge of just differentiation, you know, among the groups, among the candidates and always, always, always to the most extreme position, which Joe Biden wins in 2020 in the primary in part because he doesn't do that because he still has the old instincts of a politician who has seen more than one cycle in front of him before.

The fact that he was, you know, been in his 80s to run for reelection was a separate problem, but his instincts were very good in 2020. It was a bit of a misread of like why Trump won as well, which was there was this feeling after 2016, like, well, if Donald Trump can win,

can become president, then politics maybe doesn't matter as much or at least politics as we traditionally thought. And if someone that far to the right or that extreme can be elected, then maybe it's just time for us to say what we really believe and we're the majority of the country. And it's the fact that we have anti-majoritarian institutions that is the only real problem. And left to our left, you know, if we had all just vote and, you know, the majority would be in favor of this and et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's

It was just a complete misread of how and why he won in the first place that sort of let everyone just say, okay, let's just say whatever we have to now. Say whatever we've wanted to say all this time, and it'll somehow work. I do wonder, to me, the big elephant in the room here is

is this divide between that you and I have talked about before that you've talked about on your podcast, but between the like high propensity professional class that pays a lot of attention to political news and, um,

these working class voters, low propensity voters, who also happen to be people who pay least attention to the news and consume the least political news. And, you know, we've talked to Yana Krupnikov, both on our respective pods. She has this book, The Other Divide, about how like that is maybe the most salient divide in politics right now between the like 20% of people in the country who pay a lot of attention to the news and like the 80% who do not, even though a lot of that 80%, most of that 80% votes. And I do...

I do wonder like if sometimes we're having all these debates with each other and no one is really figuring out like how to reach people.

all of everyone else in the country, how to actually communicate with them, how to build relationships with these voters on a year round basis, which is, again, going to require more than just like going on Joe Rogan a couple of times. And I don't know. Sometimes I just wonder, like all these debates we're having, like if no one's hearing anything, if no one's listening to anything, like what are we how do we govern? I think the way I understand these these ecosystems is not that people hear nothing. It's what they hear is sort of

muffled and episodic and they tune into some things and not others. And so the consistency of what they're hearing matters and then the condition they see around them matters. So we were just, I was just thinking about this as we wrapped up that conversation about the ACLU and that particular ad and the sort of trans stuff. I also at the same time think trans issues are getting too much attention in the postmortems.

Because if you look at where Democratic vote share dropped the most, it is where the cost of living is highest. Right. Right. It is not where they're the most gender reassigned in surgeries or something else. There are these things that are unbelievably hot button issues and I'm not saying they don't matter. But if I said this in this thread, if you ask me, what do Democrats need to sister soldier? Right. Right.

It's not like the most weak and vulnerable members of their coalition, although they need to like not take a bunch of stupid positions for no reason. It's the parts of their coalition that made it very hard for them to govern well. I come from outside Los Angeles. I lived in San Francisco until, you know, 18 months ago. And I live in New York City. The thing that surprised me least about the election was the sharp red shift in these big cities. Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. Yeah.

And this idea that like, oh, no, the economy is actually good or crime is actually down. This is all just Fox News. Like, shut the fuck up with that. Like, talk to some people who live near you.

The rage I just hear from people in New York, this is partially Greg Abbott busing huge amounts of migrants here. But that does mean, by the way, there are enough migrants that Greg Abbott could bus actual human bodies to New York City. And it was a big enough problem that New York City was not able to effectively deal with it. Right. It does show that what was going on on the border was much worse. I think the Democrats were letting themselves accept that was not

For all the cruelty of what Abbott did there, that was not like an ad campaign. Those were like actual people who had come into the country who were overwhelming border states.

The sense of disorder rising, right? Not just crime, but homeless encampments, trash on the streets, people jumping turnstiles in subways, right? You just like crazy people on the streets. You just talk to people and they're mad about it. They feel it's different than it used to be. I mean, in San Francisco, like the fury is overwhelming and you see that it's not just the presidential level. London Breed, the SF mayor, just lost reelection. In Oakland, they recalled the mayor.

A bunch of the progressive DAs across the country were recalled or beaten in reelection campaigns. If Eric Adams has a lot of problems, but if he were obviously on the ballot, he would almost certainly, it seems to me, lose. You have to be able to govern well. People don't follow politics, but they live in the place they live.

They see if prices have gone way up and a bunch of economists telling them, no, no, no, no. Don't worry about the price of everything, at least for some people and maybe net net a slight majority of people. Real wages have modestly outpaced inflation is like not going to do it because people feel when they get a raise, that's them. And when prices are going up, that's you, the government. Right. You, the government screwed something up.

When governance is good, we can't build enough houses and people can't afford homes. Right. The much broader affordability crisis, which, again, Annie Lowry named some years ago in 2020, right before the pandemic. Like one of my big theories of politics is that the inflationary period we went through.

was sort of a portal of economic politics. And it changed what was salient to people. For a very long time, jobs and wages had been the thing people talked about the most, right? Coming out of the financial crisis, where we had very high joblessness and very low wage increases. You had demand side problems. Inflation made prices very salient. And that was prices on sort of normal things, right? Eggs and gas. But it

But it also focused attention on the prices of things that had been building in the background for a very long time. Homes, health care, child care, elder care, higher education, things people need. Like, they absolutely need them. And they've gotten, you know, way out of where people can afford them. Like, the fact that California and New York are losing people by droves to Texas and Arizona and Florida isn't just, like, an interesting fact about America, right?

If you are losing people because of the cost of living in blue states, talk about losing touch with the working class. You've made it unaffordable to live there, right? You can't really be a firefighter who protects San Francisco and buy a house in San Francisco, the city you protect, right? It's just not possible. The average house goes for, I think it's 1.7 or 1.9, the average sale price now.

Like unless you have money coming from somewhere else, it's not possible. Like these are huge failures of governance. And so in terms of like what I would like to see democratic politicians repudiate and like whatever, I'm literally talking my book. I have a book coming out on this in March called Abundance. What I would like to see democratic politicians repudiate is what has made it hard for them to govern.

in a way where in the places they are in charge, people can afford to live there, or there's enough clean energy that we can meet our climate goals. Or in California, that high-speed rail we're supposedly building that was supposed to be operational by 2020 at a cost of $33 billion,

Instead, maybe at some point soon in the next couple of years, maybe 2028, 2030, we'll have a Merced to Bakersfield line that will cost as much as the entire thing was supposed to cost. And to finish the rest of it, which they have no line on the money for, will be over $100 billion. Right. And nobody knows how they're going to get that money. And they're probably not going to get that money. Right.

Like, this inability to govern well where you actually hold power, I do think that matters. And when you talk about what matters to, you know, voters who aren't paying that close attention to politics, like, the sense that things are doing well. I just talked to Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado. Colorado had one of the smallest red shifts of any blue state in the country. It's very, very modest, like a point or two. Some blue shifts in Colorado, too. And some blue shifts, right. And Colorado is a place that is growing in population. Right.

Where do people from Texas go? They go to Colorado first. And we're talking about why. And he's just like, he's like, I'm paraphrasing him here. We basically said our governing philosophy is just like everything we do. The message is we want to save you money. Like we want to make things affordable and save you money. Like that's the whole thing. He was saying that he's an abundance politician and like that's a theory I'm associated with. I'm like, okay, well, what is it? What is your definition of it?

And he's like, you know, prosperity and saving money, basically. Right. We're releasing supply of things people need to buy. So they're cheaper and we're making people prosperous so they can afford things. He was bragging about income tax cuts. Right. So why like those voters in Colorado is plenty of voters who don't pay close attention to politics. Right.

But I don't know, things in Colorado are working pretty well. It's a well-run blue state, so they're not that unhappy. And like, I do still think like that matters in politics. Like that is how you reach people. Like their lives are pretty good. And on the margin, like, you know, people who don't really know what to think about politics, if things are going well, they'll vote, you know, they'll vote for the people they think are making it go well.

Yeah, I've come to think that it's less about the need for Democratic politicians to move to the center or moderate their positions. But it's not really about the position you hold. It's about what you're focusing on. It's like when people tune in,

And they see you. What are you talking about? What are you focused on? And if you're someone who is relentlessly focused on making sure that a decent life is affordable, then if they see the inevitable ad from Republicans that actually, you know, you're for they them and whatever the hot button cultural issue is of the moment, it changes like every year.

It's not going to work as well because they're gonna be like, well, I know that person. They're just, they're out there fighting every day to make sure that my life's better. And they're like maniacally focused on costs. And so, yeah, I can, maybe I don't agree with them on X position or Y position, but that's okay because they're trying to help me. I was asking Polis, what's the one policy you've done that is broken through the most? And I thought his answer was interesting because usually politicians, they're so excited to tell you that answer, right? Like here's my trademark policy.

He's like, "I don't think that's how politics works. We've done like 30 or 40 things. We have cut the income tax rate like time and time and time again. We have taken the sales tax off of diapers and baby wipes. We have passed all these housing bills." Right? He just sort of has this huge list. It's like every time people tune in, if they tune in, that is what they hear. Like the only thing they hear me doing basically is trying to bring the cost of living down or trying to put more money in their pocket.

And so it is like that relentless repetition. Different people hear about different things or maybe they never hear it about anything, but they just sort of know things are working pretty well. Like we're, you know, building houses and, you know, he's like, the first thing I did was create a commission to save money in health care. And so it's not all like moving to the right on things. Right. They created a public option in Colorado. Right. The Colorado government runs that.

Or separately, they created a certain amount of free childcare and pre-K, right? It's not like a full, super expansive program as I understand it. But it now exists and people can use it. And those things matter, right? So it's like you can move left. He had this kind of funny line to me. He's like, I think as a politician, if you say something a lot, it's probably the thing you believe. And the thing I say a lot in speeches, which was just a funny preamble to this, was...

We'll take a good idea from the left or the right as long as it saves you money. Yeah, it's good. Well, you know what? We're going to end on that fairly hopeful note. We're all going to move to Colorado. Ezra Klein, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America. And, you know, let's go keep fixing the Democratic Party before it's too late. Thank you, man. Fun as always.

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