The Blue Wave Cometh?

Democrats won big on Tuesday. It looks like the MAGA coalition has started to crack. Ezra is joined by his column editor, Aaron Retica, to discuss the big lessons for Democrats as they eye the midterms next year, and whether an anti-MAGA playbook is coming into focus. This episode contains strong language. NOTE: We're recording an "Ask Me Anything" episode soon. You can send your question to [email protected] with the subject line "AMA." We'll consider any questions submitted on or before the morning of Monday November 11 at 10am ET. Mentioned: “This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism” by Ezra Klein Ordinary Vices by Judith N. Shklar Marc Maron's podcast with Barack Obama “Zohran’s Smile” by Anand Ghiridharadas Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Marie Cascione. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ezra Klein?

  So before we begin today's episode, I'm recording another Ask Me Anything episode for New York Times subscribers soon. You can send your question to [email protected] using the subject line AMA. We'll consider anything in the inbox on or before the morning of Monday, November 10th, so write in soon.

• 0:51Ezra Klein?

  So Democrats had a big night on Tuesday. They won in New York City, where Zora Mhamdani has been the big story of the political year. They won in Virginia, where Abigail Spanberger became the first woman to become governor of Virginia, in that state's history. They won in New Jersey, a state where the polling had showed it unnervingly close for Democrats, but it turned out to not be close at all, and Mikey Sherrill won by double digits. They won in California, where Gavin Newsom's Prop 50, his mid-cycle redistricting to counter Texas, passed with, at last I saw, 65% of the vote. But it's California. We will be counting votes there forever. They won in Pennsylvania, where there were Supreme Court seats up for election.

• 1:36Ezra Klein?

  They won in Georgia, in these very little noticed statewide utility board seats. They just won everywhere. Every kind of voter moved towards Democrats. And where the polling had made it look like this was still a pretty mixed political moment, these results looked much more like the prelude to a wave election in 2026. Now, the counterargument is that these were mostly in states that Kamala Harris had won: New Jersey, Virginia, New York, California. These were not the places where Democrats have been really struggling. But both sides are going to be looking at this election to try to take some big lessons

• 2:16Ezra Klein?

  for 2026 and even, I think, for 2028. So to help me parse hope from Hopium, fact from fiction here, I am joined by my esteemed editor, Aaron Reddick.

• 2:27Aaron Retica?

  Hello.

• 2:27Ezra Klein?

  Aaron, welcome back to the show.

• 2:28Aaron Retica?

  Thanks, Ezra. Let's start where you left off there. So if you're a progressive, there was much to be delighted by. If you are a moderate, there was much to be delighted by. If you were a Democrat, there was much to be delighted by, right? But already, people are starting to say, no, no, no, no, this shows that moderation is the way to go. No, no, no, no, this shows that an aggressive, left-wing agenda will do it, right? A populist agenda. It seems, though, to show actually that simultaneously pushing both in different places.

• 3:02Ezra Klein?

  Are you saying the Democratic Party needs to be more things in more places, Aaron?

• 3:07Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, I mean, there's different versions of this argument, right? Our colleague, Jamelle Booby, makes a different version of this argument, but right, that the party has to be what it needs to be in each of its places, but that the overall coalition has to be pushing one way or the other. But like, what, so what do you draw out of what happened?

• 3:24Ezra Klein?

  I have seen, so I wrote, people can go back and listen to it if they haven't yet, a piece about how Democrats beat Trump and Trumpism. And the core point of that essay is that the problem Democrats have is they are not competitive in enough places right now. They, nationally, are pretty competitive. The presidential popular vote is quite close, election to election. But there are 24 states that Donald Trump won by 10 points or more. And if Democrats want power in the Senate in any significant numbers ever again, they're going to need to be competitive in places where they used to be able to win elections, places like Ohio and Florida and Iowa and Nebraska and South Dakota and North Dakota, Alaska. But they've not really been competitive there for some time. So I don't know how much I think.

• 4:10Ezra Klein?

  This was a positive test of that. I know everybody's saying, well, look, Abigail Spanberger is a moderate in Virginia and Zohar Mamdani is a democratic socialist in New York City. And my view is that is great. But also, by any historical measure of politics, they're actually just not that far apart. Abigail Spanberger is a moderate within the current Democratic Party, but she is not a moderate, you know, from the perspective of 1998. I like Spanberger's politics for focus on affordability. I like Mikey Sherrill, her focus on affordability. I like Zohar Mamdani, his focus on affordability. The thing about all three of these figures is none of them challenged Democrats in any significant way, except maybe Mamdani, actually, from the left. There are, I know some Democrats

• 4:53Ezra Klein?

  who are genuinely uncomfortable with him. The question of what would you need to do to win an election in Ohio and Florida and Iowa is not, I think, yet answered. Matt Iglesias made this point where he says, look, if you look at how Sherrill and Spanberger ran and how Harris ran, they both ran about five points ahead of her. And if you just say, okay, what that tells us is that the off-cycle electorate right now, and this would be a big extrapolation, but just for the sake of argument, that the off-cycle electorate right now is plus-five Democratic compared to 2024. That is almost certainly enough to win you the House. But it is maybe enough to win you Ohio. It is not enough

• 5:36Ezra Klein?

  to win you Iowa, Alaska, you know, places like that. Right, the 10% states that you were. The 10% states. Donald Trump is unpopular. He has been going down in popularity. He, some more recent polls I've seen, take him out of the low 40s and into the high 30s, right? Things are actually looking fairly bad for him. 37, I looked this morning. So in terms of the situation nationally, the mood, the mood is anti-Trump.

• 6:02Ezra Klein?

  But in terms of have Democrats solved the set of problems they will ultimately need to solve in order to become a durable coalition capable sidelining MAGA, I don't think that is answered. What I will say, though, because I do think it's relevant to this, you are seeing the way MAGA is beginning to crack under its own extremely bad political habits and culture. The fact that the right over the last week and a half has been consumed by a debate of what level of white supremacy to welcome into their coalition, of whether or not Tucker Carlson is a hero for having a friendly conversation

• 6:43Ezra Klein?

  with Nick Fuentes, or he should be ejected for it. Let me put it this way, this doesn't look to me like a coalition spending a lot of its time thinking about how to appeal to the median voter. It's definitely not about affordability. And J.D. Vance, by the way, right, the successor to Trump, who does not have Trump's personal charisma and control of the coalition, he has been quiet on this, he has been cowardly on this. I mean, so has Trump, by the way. It's not like Trump has come out and denounced Fuentes, but to the extent Vance has said anything. He had dinner with Fuentes. Yes, but he says he didn't really know who he was. But yes, it would have been very easy for Donald Trump as president to come out and say, this is ridiculous, right? When Tucker Carlson attacked Donald Trump for the Iran bombings, Trump put out a Truth

• 7:28Ezra Klein?

  Social post calling Carlson crazy. Trump has said nothing as of now on Carlson and Fuentes, and Vance's statement was along the lines of can't we all just get along? And so you see ways in which the right is opening up some really profound vulnerabilities for itself. So the Democratic Party can expand its tent and be normal and competent and sane and welcoming. You know, we may not be at the terminus of how anti-Trump this electorate can get, right? If we go into recession...

• 8:02Ezra Klein?

  If there is significant acceleration of the group verification of the right, right, we might go from a Democratic plus five to a Democratic plus eight. If Democrats make some good strategic moves, maybe it becomes plus nine, plus 10. And all of a sudden, politics looks very different. So if I were the Democrats, what I would say is not, hey, look, we got no more work to do here. It's, hey, look, we have an opportunity here. How do we maximize it?

• 8:28Aaron Retica?

  So the really happy chart, can a chart be happy? The thing that

• 8:34Ezra Klein?

  Aaron, you know, I think a chart can be happy.

• 8:36Aaron Retica?

  A chart, read it now.

• 8:37Ezra Klein?

  Of everybody, you could ask that question of me. Come on, man.

• 8:40Aaron Retica?

  The one that was really making liberal hearts beat faster was the chart of counties in New Jersey that have 60, I think it's 60% or more Hispanic residents, because those swung hard towards Sheryl. So swung from Harris to Sheryl. So why is that? Let's focus first on affordability, right? Which is the thing that unites all of these people, right? Whether it's Zora Mondani, or Mike Sheryl, or Abigail Spahnberger. So affordability, obviously, was an albatross for Democrats in 2024. It is very possibly why they lost. And here we are with affordability

• 9:23Aaron Retica?

  being their key issue. How much do you see affordability as the ticket to success in 2026 and maybe even 2028?

• 9:33Ezra Klein?

  So one way of thinking about the 2025 election is that the 2024 election, you had the Biden-Harris incumbency on the ballot. And the Biden-Harris incumbency was blamed for the very high cost of living. And in the 2025 election, you have the Trump administration as the incumbent political force. And in addition to other things people may not like about them, they are being blamed for the high cost of living. Trump has lost his high polling on that. He has used the tariffs to increase prices in a way that people understand. In New Jersey, electricity prices were a huge part of the campaign. Sheryl was very, very

• 10:14Ezra Klein?

  focused there. So in a period of people just angry about the cost of living?

• 10:21Ezra Klein?

  You could see sustained political ricochet against the nationally incumbent party that gets blamed for particularly when that party is doing things that are highly public as a tariff czar. Right now, the Supreme Court is trying to decide if Trump has this tariff power. And you have to imagine that every Republican House member and Senate member is just praying.

• 10:44Aaron Retica?

  Right. They were cheering Gorsuch on.

• 10:46Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, the five members of the Supreme Court. Yeah, the five members of the Supreme Court take the tariff power away from Trump because they don't want to take the, I mean, it's their job, right, the House and the Senate, to take the tariff power away from Trump, who is misusing an authority that is not meant to, say, punish Brazil for prosecuting Bolsonaro. It's not meant for the way he's using tariff power at all. But they don't want to challenge Trump. They won't challenge Trump. So they're hoping the Supreme Court takes his power away from him, which would bring prices down functionally immediately, and that would be good for Republicans. So within that, Democrats have moves they can make, too. And the question is then, how do you persuade voters that you, the party that just a couple of years ago failed to

• 11:30Ezra Klein?

  bring down prices, will now bring down prices? So one answer is Mumdani in New York City, where the thing Mumdani had was, and I know you hate it when I use this term, but a memetic policy agenda on affordability. And what I mean by that is that he had functionally four policy ideas that like fit on an index card, that if you were getting Mumdani mailers and, you know, door hangers, as I was, were always there. And they contained the whole of his, like, idea, right?

• 12:03Aaron Retica?

  Let's rattle them off, because I'm thinking of three. So fast and free, but fast and free, fast is important. This, your disabled friend here says fast is very important.

• 12:11Ezra Klein?

  Freezerent.

• 12:13Aaron Retica?

  Right. Freezerent, universal, oh, the grocery stores, and then, okay, and then the universal.

• 12:18Ezra Klein?

  Free childcare.

• 12:19Aaron Retica?

  Right, which is the understated part.

• 12:21Ezra Klein?

  You could say the grocery stores. I mean, but again, this is why to me, this is why, to me, the grocery stores thing mattered. It was never meant, it's not a big policy, right? It's a pilot program. Of five grocery stores, one in each borough, run by the government. But it was Mumdani saying, I will experiment in ways that at least you feel others haven't to try to bring down your prices. I like, I will do anything and I will do things other people have not been doing. And so Mumdani, of these four elections, right, of Prop 50 in California, Spanberger, Sheryl, Mumdani. When you look at exit polling, the Mumdani election is the only one where a majority of voters said that Trump was not a significant or was not the driving force behind their vote.

• 13:03Ezra Klein?

  This was not a Trump resistance election in New York City. This was a Mumdani, anti-Mumdani election in New York City. And Mumdani just absolutely dominated on cost of living. Now, the question of can he deliver on that is going to be very important for both like the future of that form of politics and his political future individually. Childcare in particular is going to be very expensive and very difficult. But what he did was he had a set of policies that he repeated relentlessly, that people could imagine what life might feel like if they were in force and they came to define him. And Sheryl tried to do something sort of similar to this, but in a more complicated way around

• 13:45Ezra Klein?

  utilities and rate setting and electricity in New Jersey, but electricity is going to become a growing issue across the country. It already is because a variety of things are converging, but one of the big ones being AI and data center demand, which is driving electricity prices up very, very, very rapidly. By the way, we're in a shutdown as we speak over health insurance premiums. My sense is this shutdown is probably, I don't want to predict it, but the reporting is that the moderate Democrats in the Senate do not really feel this is worth pushing for all that much longer. The Trump administration does not want a deal. They have not come to the table. But quietly, a lot of Democrats are like, is that the worst thing?

• 14:26Ezra Klein?

  If Donald Trump wants to have health insurance premiums spike for millions and millions and millions of Americans on his watch and be blamed for it in the next election. Is it true the Democrats should take this much ongoing risk in order to protect him from that outcome? So I think the question Democrats have nationally is if they want to make their affordability pitch legible to voters.

• 14:54Ezra Klein?

  What are, if Democrats are going to come up with something like a six for 2026, right, their version of the Contract for America, or their six for 2006?

• 15:02Aaron Retica?

  Six fact for America.

• 15:03Ezra Klein?

  A six fact for America, what's on there, right? What are the three or four or five or six policies? The Democrats want everybody to be able to rattle off as the coherent core of the Democratic agenda, and probably in that world, you want four of them to be affordability and two of them to be anti-Trumpist corruption or authoritarianism.

• 15:28Aaron Retica?

  So we're going to have to take some of this slowly here because there's a lot of different elements in what you just said. But let me just say that as someone whose younger daughter is about to turn 26, the question of the subsidies, right, it's intruding into our lives in a way that-

• 15:44Ezra Klein?

  It's very real.

• 15:45Aaron Retica?

  It's very real. The Mamdani coalition, right? One thing that's so interesting to me is, right, they want, people want to portray it as a bunch of kids in Astoria and Bushwick and elsewhere in New York who are AOC fans and like, the precarious, some people like to put it, high education, low income voters who think they should have a different life. But the truth is, if you're winning half of the vote in the largest electorate since 1969, you are reaching a much broader group of people. And one thing that really fascinated me about all of this is that there are Trump Mamdani

• 16:25Aaron Retica?

  voters, there are voters, I mentioned earlier, who switched from Trump to Sheryl and Trump to Spanberger, but there are also, it looks like Mamdani-Trump voters, they're concentrated in immigrant communities in New York City, right? So the affordability agenda has the ability to cut across that whole problem, right? Oh, you can't win over the center with someone like Mamdani because you won't, right? The policies will be too out there, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, he does seem to have won some people.

• 16:57Ezra Klein?

  I think it's really important to say this about Mamdani. His policies were not too out there for this electorate at all. And I mean that not just in the sense that he won the election, right? I think you could look at Mamdani's win in a number of ways. On the one hand, it's an incredibly impressive political victory for somebody who was in political unknown two years ago. On the other hand, he won last time elected the vote with 50.6% of the vote. It was in the end of Mumdani, anti-Mumdani election. So he both brought out a lot of voters for him and brought out a lot of voters against him. But if you talked to the voters or paid any attention to the ads or watched what the anti-Mumdani coalition and fears were, none of them were about fast and free buses.

• 17:42Ezra Klein?

  The anti-Mumdani energy was about Israel. It was to some degree about crime and safety. And to some degree, a general vibe of socialism. But if you imagine a Mumdani who- And that he was young and couldn't actually do it all. I don't think that's what brought people out, though. Okay. I don't think that was where the energy was. Right, that's the eye rolling, it's not the voting. Right. Okay. If you imagine a Mumdani who just, for whatever reason, his past politics, who he was, you know, I think a lot, there was a lot of Islamophobia in the election and the attacks against him, I don't think that's arguable. But if you just imagine a Mumdani who is the same in every way, but Israel never becomes an issue around him, that actually drains the anti-Mumdani coalition of a fair amount

• 18:27Ezra Klein?

  of its energy. Crime and safety, it probably would have remained there. So the reason I'm saying this is not to say anything actually one way or the other about Mumdani, but his policy agenda was actually, it was amazing to me how little his opponents ran against it. Right, they, you know, there was poo-pooing that say free daycare is not plausible or likely, given the complexity of that policy and the cost of it, and the fact that Mumdani doesn't control tax increases. That's a totally fair critique, but it's actually a very different critique than free daycare would be bad. Right. You actually don't see a lot of people running against free daycare. Taxing the rich is understood to be a popular policy that is maybe not good for New York

• 19:11Ezra Klein?

  City, you know, in the kind of critique of it, because New York and New York City taxes on the rich are fairly high, and you don't want to create capital flight because then you have to raise taxes more on the middle class. People can argue these different ways. I'm not myself that concerned about taxing the rich a little bit more, but I do think- Nor-

• 19:27Aaron Retica?

  Can I just say, nor am I worried that multinational capitalism is going to be slain by the election of Ramon Maldonado.

• 19:34Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, so I just think there's always been this shimmering quality of what's going on around Maldonado, where it's an incredibly exciting election and a collision of things within American politics, like democratic socialism, or Zionism, or the words like globalizing the fatah, that at other times in American politics, they would have been red lines that if a candidate crossed them, that candidate was understood to have no chance. And the fact that Maldonado could cross them and still win, shows you things are changing. And on the other hand, the actual way that he ran the election, the actual policy agenda Maldonado ran on, was neither that activating to his opponents, and by the way, is not that socialist.

• 20:19Aaron Retica?

  No.

• 20:19Ezra Klein?

  Build Back Better had a big effort to make childcare, or at least to expand childcare very dramatically.

• 20:25Aaron Retica?

  Bloomberg had some free buses.

• 20:26Ezra Klein?

  Bloomberg had some free buses. So, the actual affordability agenda he was running on, was not that activating to his opposition and highly popular. He's going to struggle to deliver parts of it. I think fast and free buses is completely doable. Running a couple pilot groceries is completely doable.

• 20:42Aaron Retica?

  You know, what's interesting about the buses, so I am on the buses constantly, and they have a sign across the front, like one of the lit up parts says, you know, fare required. And I was looking at it last night, thinking like, what will it be like if it says no fare required? You know, that's an interesting thing to think about. First of all, you know, as native New Yorkers know, like 30 to 40% of people have already decided that the buses are free. They're not fast, but they've already, they don't pay as it is now, right? So it'll be interesting to see how that goes.

• 21:13Ezra Klein?

  The places where I am really interested to see what he does, are, one, crime and safety, because that's going to be a complex place for him, to the childcare, because that's just a maniacally hard policy to get right. Childcare is just really expensive. Infant level childcare is really, really expensive, even though we really should figure out a way to do it. And then, freezing the rent is a tricky policy, because I don't particularly have a problem with it for a limited amount of time, but what you're doing is what is functionally saying, we are going to limit.

• 21:49Ezra Klein?

  The future income of building affordable housing, right? Running affordable housing just became dramatically less profitable for anybody doing it. So you then need to say, okay, that is in a mechanical way going to reduce the future construction of affordable housing. And if you talk to people in the affordable housing world, they will tell you this, right? These are not people who are generally making a ton of money. Many of these are nonprofit developers. But if you say that you're, we're just gonna have extended rent freezes, right? Already, there's a lot of worries about whether or not there will be enough upkeep of the affordable housing stock we have. But it is definitely going to reduce how much is built. So Mondani has a plan where he wants to build a lot more public housing. In order to do that quickly, he's going to have to change the way New York City builds public housing.

• 22:32Ezra Klein?

  Will he do that? He has not been nearly as focused as some of the other Democrats were, like Lander, on accelerating the construction of market rate housing. He has been generally positive when he talks about it and talks about how Tokyo builds and other things. But it isn't something where he has focused a lot. It's very easy to freeze the rent. It is much harder and much harder within his coalition to build homes.

• 22:54Aaron Retica?

  Yeah, okay, we could have an entire discussion about rents, and I won't, except to say that, again, as with multinational capitalism, you hear a lot of complaining from developers. I understand that. I really don't think, I mean, first of all, the rent has been frozen a couple of times before, right? And what we're talking about, to be specific, is the percentage increase that the rent stabilization board allows, right?

• 23:20Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 23:20Aaron Retica?

  This is not-

• 23:21Ezra Klein?

  This is for affordable housing.

• 23:23Aaron Retica?

  Right. It's not, you're saying affordable housing, but it's rent stabilized housing, which is a slightly different thing.

• 23:28Ezra Klein?

  That's fair.

• 23:28Aaron Retica?

  And I live in an apartment that is rent stabilized myself. And all I can tell you about it is that when we were much younger, and we were an elementary school teacher and a writer and editor, it made it possible for us to stay in New York, which created, helps create a stable mental class, right? There's a lot of arguments for rent stabilization that have nothing to do with the housing supply and have to do with the, why is New York-

• 23:52Ezra Klein?

  I believe in-

• 23:53Aaron Retica?

  ...better than a lot of other cities.

• 23:55Ezra Klein?

  To be clear, I believe in rent stabilized housing.

• 23:58Aaron Retica?

  I know you do.

• 23:58Ezra Klein?

  No, but I want to put you on this because

• 24:00Aaron Retica?

  I just want to make a distinction between affordable housing and rent stabilization.

• 24:02Ezra Klein?

  But you need to build more of it.

• 24:04Aaron Retica?

  Right. Yes, I know someone who wrote a whole book about that.

• 24:07Ezra Klein?

  Right. You know, like, I want more people to be able to have your living situation.

• 24:11Aaron Retica?

  And so do I.

• 24:12Ezra Klein?

  And if you make rent stabilized housing, I mean, one of the things you really learn when you report on this is that developers, both nonprofit developers, developers for market rate housing, developers of affordable, developers of rent stabilized, they're all trying to make developments pencil out. Like, they actually do have to make the money that is coming into their company and the money that is going out of their company match up. And the number of developments that you watch fall apart because the cost of construction is high, the cost of land is high. It's just harder to get these things off the ground and it's much harder than people think in the non-market rate area because you have a lot more rules and regulations you have to abide by.

• 24:52Ezra Klein?

  So the thing I am saying here is that the worry I have is not that it's a bad thing to do a rent freeze. I think we could do a rent freeze for a while, but it is easy to do a rent freeze. Whereas what it requires to set off a building boom of non-market rate housing such that the people who are not currently in those units can get into them in the future is a lot harder. And I worry that they will get the easy thing done and not the hard thing done.

• 25:22Aaron Retica?

  And most of the, I mean, I don't know about the exact numbers, but a lot of the affordable housing that has been built in New York City over the past 10 years has been built alongside market rate housing, right?

• 25:33Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, as a deal to get the market rate housing built.

• 25:35Aaron Retica?

  There's a specific program we won't get into that that comes and goes. And so people do it. And then, of course, that creates its own controversies because then you have people who are living in these places who are like going through the poor door, as people sometimes say. They're not, you know, full participants in the housing.

• 25:50Ezra Klein?

  But I will say, I actually am a big supporter of that general idea. What I think you want to do is tie the fortunes of the rich and the poor together in any city or in any country. And so this idea that what you can do is, and you know, in the area I live, around Gowanus, which has had a huge building boom. They've really been able to do that. They have been able to put up huge amounts of new housing. But a lot of it is affordable housing. And there's like set asides for artists and there's a lot of different things. And what you're basically creating is a tie up between you're making it easier to build, but if you're going to build, you have to build more of this too.

• 26:56Aaron Retica?

  Okay, so let's go east coast, west coast for a second, since you will not cop to being from the east.

• 27:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm not from the east.

• 27:05Aaron Retica?

  I know, you're not from, you're not a part of the east. All right, fair, fair. I lived in California for a long time. I really loved it. Not a long time. I lived in California for a while and I really loved it. Gavin Newsom, there is someone who makes eyes roll everywhere. And yet he is the leading contender right now for the 2028 nomination, in part because of what he's been doing. So how do you, as a Southern California, Southland native, see what's happening with him?

• 27:33Ezra Klein?

  So Newsom has put himself in a stronger position than I would have thought at all plausible a year ago. And I think there's a lesson in what he is doing for other Democrats, which is you can make decisions to try new things and see if they work. So you think of what are the four-ish big ways that Newsom has acted since the 2024 election, which remember, Newsom was a very, very, very prominent Biden surrogate in that election, very, very close to Joe Biden personally. And so not an obvious candidate for a big rethinking, but right after the election, he launches his podcast where his first guest is Charlie Kirk.

• 28:18Ezra Klein?

  And Newsom sort of ends up agreeing with Kirk on trans kids in sports, making a lot of Democrats very, very angry. He goes on to have Steve Bannon on that podcast. He goes on to have Dr. Phil on that podcast. He goes on to have a lot of figures on the right, Michael Savage on that podcast. So on the one hand, you see Newsom doing one thing, which is

• 28:41Ezra Klein?

  Seemingly to choose the lane of reaching out to MAGA and trying to hear them out and learn from them. But basically, at the same time, he begins to do a few other things, too, which is to first shift his own policy positioning in a way that somewhat delights me because he moves very far towards abundance and signs of very, very big housing bills, much more ambitious than any of the housing bills he had signed at any other point in his governorship, and sort of accepts the critique that the way California has been working is not good enough, right? That the Democrats really do need to figure out how to build again. He also steps into this role as an attention-grabbing resistance leader, you know, having this all-caps

• 29:26Ezra Klein?

  trolling on social media of Donald Trump. But he actually found a fight that he could pick. There was an unusual fight to pick, a ballot initiative for a mid-cycle redistricting. And he could deliver on. And that he could deliver on. And by the way, initially, the polling on it was bad because people in California don't like redistricting. We, you know, are partisan redistricting. We created nonpartisan redistricting under Schwarzenegger for a reason. And so what I'd say is interesting about Newsom is that you might have said before the election, well, there are two obvious pathways for Democrats. You can try to reach out to MAGA and listen, or you can retrench into resistance. And Newsom's answer to that was, yes, there are. Right. And he's going to do both.

• 30:11Ezra Klein?

  The other thing that I like about Newsom, and in many ways, he has a very tricky profile for Democrats nationally. He has done a lot of things in California that would be very unpopular if they became national ad campaigns. California actually does give, in some contexts, health care to illegal immigrants. California, you know, did get pretty far along the way of phasing out, in the future, you know, gas combustion engine cars. And I mean, there's a lot that makes Newsom a very difficult contender if what you want to do is win back states where Democrats have become sort of uncompetitive. But just talking about his political positioning right now, that what is interesting to me is that Newsom does things that are high risk. And he does not seem afraid.

• 30:54Ezra Klein?

  And in part, he does not seem afraid of making people mad on his own side in order to try new things out. And so, you know, some things he's done have made people happy on his own side. Right. Like trolling Trump on social media. Democrats enjoyed that. But other things, you know.

• 31:10Aaron Retica?

  I don't enjoy the old caps, but.

• 31:12Ezra Klein?

  Well, other things like the podcasting and, you know, some of his policy movements. He just, I think one of the really damaging things for Democrats and national Democrats is they seem afraid.

• 31:26Aaron Retica?

  Timidity.

• 31:27Ezra Klein?

  Timidity. That's not true for all of them. Bernie Sanders, famously not exactly a Democrat, but nevertheless a Democratic leader, does not seem afraid. AOC largely does not seem afraid, but a lot of the others seem afraid. It radiates off of them. You can feel them checking what they're about to say to make sure nobody on their side is going to get mad at them. And not seeming afraid is actually quite powerful in politics because not being afraid allows you to try new things politically and to see how they work out. And if they don't work, you can do something else.

• 32:01Aaron Retica?

  Right. It's the, right. See what sticks.

• 32:03Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but it's a politics of experimentation.

• 32:06Aaron Retica?

  Politics of throwing spaghetti against the wall, but it's real. It's a real issue.

• 32:09Ezra Klein?

  That was FDR.

• 32:10Aaron Retica?

  Right. Absolutely. And Johnson, all the high points of left liberal democratic governance were spaghetti that sticks policies. And not all of them worked, but some did, right? Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, right? These are all things that emerged from throwing spaghetti against the wall.

• 32:34Ezra Klein?

  Well, there's that, but there's also just the way some of them did their politics in their moment. I mean, FDR moved all around. Sometimes he was worried about budget deficits. Sometimes he was, you know, everybody knows, like his famous, I welcome your hatred speech, but at other times he was much more solicitous of business interests. He made all kinds of weird compromises. My point is not that Gavin Newsom is an FDR or that he's a Lyndon Johnson. My point is that in a way that actually relatively few of his contemporaries are, he seems like a politician. And this is the flip side of what people don't like about him. To your point about eyes rolling. Newsom reads to many people as a politician, and that's always been a big weakness for him. He has a slick affect.

• 33:15Ezra Klein?

  But you're seeing right now the positive side of that, which is Newsom is acting like a politician who is looking at the landscape and making moves to put himself in a stronger political position, even when those moves are a little bit difficult. And by the way, he was doing this before too. I remember him going on Fox News to debate Ron DeSantis with Sean Hannity moderating. Newsom, like what a politician is supposed to do.

• 33:41Aaron Retica?

  The seventh circle of hell embodies.

• 33:42Ezra Klein?

  What a politician is supposed to do is try to figure out the way to put together a winning coalition so they can wield political power in a way that accords with their values. And a lot of people want to wield political power in a way that accords with their values, but not that many people seem to want to do what it takes to put together a winning political coalition. And so in a way, I guess what I'm praising in Newsom right now is the flip side of the coin of the thing that some people read on him and they don't like, which is I think Newsom is practicing politics. And man, are the other Democrats in 2028 going to give him an open lane if they're too afraid to do the same thing.

• 34:24Aaron Retica?

  Okay, this gives me an opportunity to talk about something. I don't know if it's bigger or smaller, but it's definitely harder. In the essay that we were working on over the past few weeks, part of the point of it was to talk about politics as an activity that improves lives, but also politics is an activity that improves everything, right? And so I want to just read you two things and sort of have you react to them. One is the famous line of Henry Adams, from The Education of Henry Adams. Politics is a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. And then I want to quote from Bernard Crick, who was a linchpin of the essay that you wrote,

• 35:08Aaron Retica?

  but this is something that we did not get in. Political activity is a type of moral activity. It does not claim to settle every problem or to make every sad heart glad, but it can help in some way in nearly everything. And where it is strong, it can prevent the vast cruelties and deceits of ideological rule.

• 35:30Aaron Retica?

  So where do you see political activity now, politics now? How we should be participating in it with some look at the election, but like, what? What is it? What is acting in politics now? Is it participating in the system of organized hatred and cruelty, which we've certainly seen plenty of between the election and now, right? There was a like an arrest in Chicago where they went into a preschool with ICE did with its masks on, right? Kids are inside of school, right? Really crazy cruel stuff, right? And it's also a theater of cruelty as well as a actually cruel, right?

• 36:11Aaron Retica?

  Because they'd love to make those videos and write, oh, it's just, it's nuts. So what is politics for?

• 36:19Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 36:20Aaron Retica?

  Now?

• 36:21Ezra Klein?

  It is, it is those things. But I mean it, right? Politics is a wide field of human endeavor. And I do believe Donald Trump uses politics as an organizing of hatreds. I do believe Donald Trump is a master at creating us's and them's and summoning people's fury and their resentment against a them. And I think one reason he is a master at that, and this is always true, is because it is authentic to him, because that is how he is. He's able to do it for you because he's able to do it for him.

• 37:03Ezra Klein?

  And to just set this up maybe as one of the contrasts, I think that Barack Obama did not try to engage in politics as an organizing of hatreds. I think he sought to use it as a bridging of divides, like going all the way back to his red and blue speech in Boston in 2004. And it doesn't mean that it calmed every hatred. It didn't. Just like it doesn't mean that what Donald Trump does, it doesn't destroy every bond between us. But you can use politics to destroy and you can use it to build. And similarly to Trump, the reason I think that was true for Obama's politics is that was authentic to who Obama is.

• 37:43Ezra Klein?

  And I think one argument I am making in that essay over the weekend on politics and that beautiful line from Bernard Crick that politics involves the genuine relationships between people who are genuinely other people, not tasks for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy. I think I switched a few words.

• 38:04Aaron Retica?

  That was pretty good.

• 38:05Ezra Klein?

  But it's pretty close. And what I think I'm saying when I argue, when I talk about that and about the sort of liberalism's old virtue of liberality, this emphasis on the virtues of the citizen, the ethic of mutual connectedness, is that one thing I would like to see, and that I think that there's actual political power in, one thing I would like to see the Democratic Party doing in this era when the Trump administration is organizing hatreds, right, and is getting consumed in some ways by

• 38:35Aaron Retica?

  To your point earlier, right.

• 38:37Ezra Klein?

  By its own organization of hatreds, right?

• 38:38Aaron Retica?

  Divergent debates about how much hatred is okay.

• 38:41Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, they wanted to do it, you know, in this way, but now Nick Fuentes says, no, no, no, we need more hatred. And it's like, well, we did say we need some hatred. So who are we to tell Nick Fuentes it's too much hatred? You know, now they're, now you have, you know, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, you know, going to war with each other, right? I don't think the organizing of hatreds is a strong politics in the long run, but it actually

• 39:01Aaron Retica?

  Though it has worked for many.

• 39:02Ezra Klein?

  But it has to be beaten by its opposite, not by something mirroring it. And so one of the things I'm saying in that piece is that I think the Democratic Party needs people who are genuine, like it is authentic to them, that politics for them is an act of love and fellowship, including when it includes critique and disagreement and opposition. There are many people in my life who I disagree with on political issues profoundly, people in my family who I disagree with on political issues profoundly, and our conversations are still part of our connectedness.

• 39:42Ezra Klein?

  And that that seems obvious to me, right? You know, I actually find it appalling, the idea that you had cut off members of your family for their politics, maybe for their treatment of you. That's something different. But just for their politics, I really disagree with that. Something that I thought a lot about the election in New York City, to go back to here, is Mumdani spent so much of the election reaching out to people who were unnerved by him. He went to synagogues. He went to business leaders. Mumdani didn't say, hey, look, you don't like me, I welcome your hatred. Mumdani, he was a left pluralist. Anand Giridharadas, in his newsletter, The Ink, has a really great essay on Mumdani's smile as an act of rhetoric. Right?

• 40:26Ezra Klein?

  He was always smiling at you. For him, the politics of friendliness were so fundamental, in a way I thought was very, very powerful. Cuomo, for all that he was supposed to be the real politician in the race, he often seemed very powered by resentment to me. Mumdani seemed like he liked you. Cuomo didn't seem like he liked you. If you can go back and listen to Cuomo's interview with Barry Weiss, which is fairly early in the campaign, and I found it very telling. Cuomo felt like he was running to get revenge on the Democratic Party that had rejected him and forced him to resign. Is it really such a surprise that the man running for revenge on the Democratic Party did not win the Democratic primary? And then it seemed like Cuomo was running just like not to be humiliated and beaten.

• 41:11Ezra Klein?

  But Cuomo was not running as a pluralist. It did not feel that way to me. Right? He did not feel like he liked you. And Seawat was a whole different situation, running because he liked cats. But I really think these dynamics are important. As you say, like, there is a tremendous amount of cruelty emanating and being organized from the Trump administration. I mean, you look at Stephen Miller giving an interview, you look at him talk, and it radiates off of him. Right? It's a person where, like, the function has become the form in a very strange way. He really seems like he hates people. And, you know, when Trump was up there with Erica Kirk at the Chuck Kirk Memorial, and he said, you know, I hate my opponents, I, you know, I'm not here.

• 41:56Ezra Klein?

  I think there's a lot of power, a lot of political power. And as weak as it sounds to people to say, a politics of love. But, but I remember when Cory Booker ran on a politics of love in 2020. And I did an interview with him right around the time he dropped out. And we were talking about how it's very hard to make clear what a politics of love meant. But one thing it means, love is only politically interesting when it's difficult. And pluralism is only politically interesting when it's difficult. And I think one way that you can sideline Trumpism is like, yeah, that Henry Adams quote does describe them. And when you hear it, your stomach tenses up. I don't want to be part of an organization of hatred. Right? That's not what I want my work in civic life to be.

• 42:41Ezra Klein?

  If this is all about organizing our hatreds, count me out. And so, running people for whom that does not feel like what they are doing, and it does feel like what they're doing because it is not who they are, I actually think is a very big part right now of candidate recruitment for the Democratic Party.

• 43:15Aaron Retica?

  The Democratic Party has to be, right? The American society for the prevention of cruelty to humans, right? It's that's what it has to be that. And then you can't talk about anti-cruelty without bringing in Judith Schkler, whose name I could never say, great political philosopher. Here's what she said, it's better just to listen to her. "It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank devices, put cruelty first. Intuitively, they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do."

• 43:49Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, anti-cruelty is the politics and affordability is the policy.

• 43:53Aaron Retica?

  Right. I don't know that love is going to be the way you reconcile those two things.

• 43:57Ezra Klein?

  Might be respect. Respect might be the word.

• 44:00Aaron Retica?

  There's some, I mean dignity is a boring word, but I think it's also that, right? Captured in the Crick quote is the idea that other people are actually. Humans, right? They're actually other people.

• 44:11Ezra Klein?

  I just don't believe it is an accident. I don't believe it is a coincidence. As the Democratic Party has become the party of the institutions, the party of the educated, the party increasingly of wealthier people, that the people who have been most open to Donald Trump's burn-it-all-down approach are the people whom are being failed by this country, right? People who are poor, people who don't have college educations, people who live in areas of the country that don't have as much economic opportunity, and also people who, you know, are not acculturated into saying all the right things and having all the right opinions by going to college. And they have become, they have felt culturally alienated from the Democratic Party, and also they have not been well-served by the Democratic Party.

• 44:54Ezra Klein?

  And the Democratic Party has felt rejected by them and feels endangered by them in some ways right now. And I really think you have to see an absolutely central part of this moment in politics as not leaning into that divide and trying to eke out the percentage point or two that will allow you to just win the election in 2028, but beginning to erode that divide. You're not going to get rid of all of it. Not everybody in MAGA is a plausible political recruit for liberalism. But you have to act like many, you have to act like more of them are. You need to re-knit people's connection to liberal democracy for the people who felt failed by it.

• 45:37Aaron Retica?

  For the people who don't think that a renewed liberalism is necessary for a renewed Democratic Party, I always go back to, like, quote machine today, but like, to the very famous Heine thing where he says, you know, "Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder," right?

• 45:58Ezra Klein?

  I think that's true, obviously, and you can hear, for anybody listening, and that you can hear how much Aaron's depth of political philosophy influences my work these days, but, um...

• 46:09Aaron Retica?

  It's too bad for you.

• 46:12Ezra Klein?

  But I want to read, I had never actually connected with, so this Judith Sklar essay, Sklar essay that you're mentioning, I want to read another part that you had sent me because I think it gets at this conversation we're having in an interesting way and gets at, I think, something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult act but worthwhile. Like virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. If they were easy, they wouldn't be virtues. And so she writes that courage is to be prized since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats, both physical and moral. This

• 46:53Ezra Klein?

  is, to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative, then set and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism

• 47:34Ezra Klein?

  is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining, far too much so for those of us who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom. And I do find something very inspiring in that, that- I hoped you would. Not just that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear, about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it takes, it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening, a muscle you are strengthening. There's something Obama has been saying, as he's been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks, that I found interesting. He said

• 48:17Ezra Klein?

  it too in his interview with Marc Maron, if you want to go listen to that, where he says- For a lot of us, none of what we believed has been hard. We didn't grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any of it, not really. There have been at other times in our history, you know, you go to Jim Crow, you go to the Red Scare, you go to World War II. I mean, but he said, you know, it has not asked that much of us to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism, and all of a sudden it does. And right now, we're seeing who is willing to have that asked of them, right? Who is willing to believe some of these things when it's hard?

• 48:59Ezra Klein?

  And his point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They, particularly compared to the first era of Trumpism, they've bent the knee, they go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House. They are very much willing to pay to play, and not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people's freedoms, pay out in terms of other people's safety, pay out in the kind of society that if you had explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that, right? They've not wanted to stand in the way, right? You know, universities that have been more worried about federal funding in the near term and are not willing to use their endowments in ways that they probably could. Law firms like Paul Weiss, right? We really, probably at the beginning of this Trump era, watched a tremendous amount

• 49:44Ezra Klein?

  of cowardice taking hold in civil society. And it's true, like, when you are dealing with an illiberalism operating at the highest levels of political power, it takes some amount of courage, not as much courage as it would take to do the same thing in other countries right now, like Russia, but some amount of courage to tape the masked ICE agents, to stand with the immigrants, to, you know, make yourself a target for Stephen Miller and his Blue Scare, right? All of it. And yet, that's, I think, what's asked, but that's not the only thing that is asked.

• 50:16Aaron Retica?

  You actually have to have the Krik idea, the Sklar idea, right? The obvious example from the American Life is the Whitman idea of like, what is the world? Right? The world is something I am open to. I'm going to walk around in it. I'm going to take it in. I'm going to see it. I'm going to be large, contain multitudes, all that stuff. Right? Which is critical to a conception of liberalism that, by the way, a conception of liberalism enriched by the radicalism to its left, which I think is important to mention. Right? The liberal democracies that defeated fascism were very much enriched by the left that brought policies that were gave suggestions that became policies that made those worlds better.

• 51:01Aaron Retica?

  The liberal democracy that defeated communism, same thing. The left radicals pushed, right? For a world that people then wanted to defend. And it was a capacious, large, big tent, as everyone always says, but like genuinely big tent. And that liberalism is a much more powerful liberalism than, you know, the liberalism of orthodoxy. Right? I mean, it's just going to be by definition more powerful. How to get there, as you say, is very hard. You have to tolerate things you don't like. I don't like to do that. I mean, I

• 51:40Ezra Klein?

  Me neither. I'll say something that has just been interesting for me on this and my team knows this. And actually, you probably know it, but you know, it's a, it's something I always try to do on the show that I always try to make sure the show, basically within every month, has people I really disagree with on it. Right? I try to make that

• 51:58Aaron Retica?

  And that's why I'm here.

• 51:59Ezra Klein?

  Part of our programming. And those conversations cause me a lot more stress beforehand. They require a different form of preparation. I feel much more like I have to be championing ideas and make sure that I don't falter. And I can't just be in the exploratory mode I prefer to be in. But I also leave them more enriched. I think about them more after usually. And this very interesting research that looks at workplaces. And what it basically finds is diversity of different kinds actually makes people less happy, but it makes them more effective because it is hard to be in spaces of disagreement and spaces of difference.

• 52:42Ezra Klein?

  But you really do learn from it. You are enriched by it. And what you were just saying, you know, is true on the left. And but also, we, as I sort of say in the piece over the weekend, the good thing the Democratic Party has done since, say, 2004 is open up its left side. I remember back then, people often talked about how few would even claim the moniker liberal, saying nothing of Democratic Socialist or Socialist. The fact that we are not afraid of that now is, to me, positive. Right? That's a, that's an opening of the tent. But you, you know, we sort of moved as opposed to widened.

• 53:25Ezra Klein?

  And as I say in the piece, you know, we want to be not left, not right, but bigger, right? Left and right, but also just more multi-dimensional. There, I've been having these conversations with the political scientist Henry Farrell, who I think is really brilliant, and just something he has been talking about in terms of representation is just recognizing that people in the sociological sense of the term are very thick and complicated. And what you're trying to do is find ways to take them in that thick complexity. And what the internet does, what much of modest society does, what polling does too, by the way, is it thins them. Right. Now, something like polling is better than nothing because it will help you. Maybe. It is. All right.

• 54:10Ezra Klein?

  Because the thing that you and I both see happen is it in its absence. Right, right. People just make shit up. People make shit up, but they also convince themselves of that what is around them is how everybody feels. Right. And polling, when done well, is a way of disciplining at least some of your intuitions. But it does collapse people down to their answers to questions they actually may not have overly strong feelings on. And so the question of how, how do you have the complexity of people contained inside your relationships to them?

• 54:46Ezra Klein?

  I mean, you have to be in relationship to them. And that in the modern era, in the digital era, in the digitized era. I think one of the worst signs for Democratic Party right now is Jared Golden, who I mentioned in that essay, who is a Democratic representative from Maine, winning Trump plus 10 district, which he's won four times. And he's facing a progressive challenger from the left and maybe is facing the former Maine governor, a Republican who's very Trumpy, LaPage on the right, decided not to run again, just announced his retirement. And I don't know what is in Congressman Golden's heart. You know, he says that the cost of his family has just gotten too high. It's very, very hard to be in an endlessly competitive district, particularly then when you're facing, you know, challenges in the primary and challenges in the general, and you have young kids.

• 55:31Ezra Klein?

  But he was somebody who is good at representing people and good at having relationships then inside the Democratic Party and kept that sort of thickness and a little bit more alive than otherwise would have been. And so it isn't just that losing his seat, if Democrats lose it, will be a loss. But it's that losing the relationships he has and then the relationships other Democrats have with him will be a loss. And one way you can think of some of this politics is you want more real relationships that work across difference, not because you're trying to have those people agree with you or have you agree with them, that that might happen over time in one direction or another, or both.

• 56:16Ezra Klein?

  But because you're trying to contain more of their multitudes inside of you.

• 56:21Aaron Retica?

  Right, and that's not, just to be clear, that's not compromise with the devil, right? We're talking about people communicating with each other inside the tent of the Democratic Party, right? Where there are a bunch of givens. And it's not going to fit on a bumper sticker, but my givens are that the Democratic Party should be a machine to make people's economic lives better and that liberalism should be an anti-cruelty machine, right? And that it has been, and it should be again. And the two things together, by the way, also have practical effect.

• 57:00Aaron Retica?

  Of potentially really swinging a lot of Latino voters that the Democrats desperately need. I don't want to be that practical about it, actually. I want to be more philosophical about it. But those two things together are a very good recipe for not just success in left-wing urban areas, not just success in moderate states that trend Democratic, but also in reclaiming some of the areas that you're talking about, where there are these plus 10 for Trump states, where not that long ago, in our lifetime, there were Democratic senators, there were states that Obama won that are out of reach, right?

• 57:40Ezra Klein?

  I know that this show is meant to be you interviewing me post-election, but I think I'm going to let you have the last word on that because that was quite lovely. Aaron Reddick, thank you very much.

• 57:51Aaron Retica?

  Thanks, Ezra.

• 58:02Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klansh is produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Marie Cassion. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Jack McCordick, Roland Hu, Marina King, Kristin Lynn, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Carol Sabaro and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Semeluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Penning Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.