Can Economic Populism Save the Democratic Party?

The “Democratic penalty” should scare the hell out of Democrats. The Democratic Party brand has become toxic in certain parts of the country, especially with working- class voters. The Center for Working-Class Politics has actually measured this so-called “Democratic penalty,” and found it’s in the double digits in some Rust Belt states. So what should Democrats do about it? One theory says that Democrats were once economic populists and just need to be again. Another theory says that the working class feels left behind and looked down on by a Democratic Party that has moved sharply left on culture, on climate, on guns, on immigration. Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, which has done a lot of research and polling on working- class voters. So I asked him on the show to talk through these theories and what it would take for Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. Mentioned: “Compensate the Losers?” Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US “Representation Gaps: Changes in Popular Preferences and the Structure of Partisan Competition in the Developed Democracies” by Peter A. Hall and Georgina Evans Book Recommendations: Rust Belt Union Blues by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol We’re Still Here by Jennifer M. Silva America, América by Greg Grandin 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 Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and 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.

• 0:29Ezra Klein?

  The Democratic Party sees itself as a party of the working class. To the extent it has any shared self-identity at all, it is that. But the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class. Doesn't matter if you define the working class by income, by education, or both. Democrats have been losing ground among these voters for years now. In 2024, Donald Trump won both voters making less than $50,000 a year, and he won voters without a college degree. And the way Trump won these voters wasn't just to rack up a giant majority among the white working class. First in 2020, and then even more so in 2024, Trump made huge gains among working-class Hispanic voters, significant gains among black voters.

• 1:13Ezra Klein?

  Republicans are building the multiracial working-class coalition that Democrats imagine themselves as speaking for. There are two theories of how Democrats lost the working class and what it might take to win them back. One theory says Democrats were once economic populace, and they just need to be that again. The other theory says that the working class knows perfectly well the Republicans cut taxes for the rich and Democrats expand healthcare for the poor. But the working class feels unrepresented by Democrats in a broader way, left behind and looked down upon by a party that's moved sharply left on culture, on climate, on guns, on immigration, a party that doesn't talk like them and doesn't like the way they talk.

• 1:57Ezra Klein?

  Jared Abbott is a director of the Center for Working Class Politics. His group has done a huge amount of polling and research on what working-class voters believe and what they want to see in their politicians. Among their findings is what they call the Democratic penalty, which is a force that should scare the hell out of Democrats. So I asked him on the show to describe what he's found and what it would take for Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:39Ezra Klein?

  Jared Abbott, welcome to the show.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Thanks, appreciate the invitation.

• 2:42Ezra Klein?

  So I want to begin in a recent study you all did where you found something called the Democratic penalty. What was the Democratic penalty and how did you find it?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  So, you know, we were sort of interested in this idea that Sherrod Brown couldn't win in Ohio, right? It's like, oh, my God, if we're economic populists and the greatest economic populist holding on in a red state couldn't continue holding on, what's going on there? And so we, we thought, and we had good reason to think that that was probably a brand identity problem. And we just kind of wanted to look at that in a more scientific way. So what we did was we had these hypothetical candidates that we gave to Rust Belt voters in this survey. We had some of the candidates be Democrats, say this is a Democratic candidate, and some say that they were independents. They were all economic populists. And the exact same candidates that had an I versus a D did 10 points better in Michigan,

• 3:35Speaker 01

  did 15 points better in Ohio. Interestingly, in Pennsylvania, we didn't see much of a Democratic penalty, and that's something that we're kind of trying to think more about. But in the other three states, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, we see these massive penalties just because of the D next to their name. And so we were just trying to quantify how bad actually is it just to have the albatross of the D around your neck? And it's pretty bad, especially in those working-class-heavy Rust Belt states.

• 4:00Ezra Klein?

  Was your study able to figure out what it is about the Democratic Party label that is dragging these candidates so far down?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Well, we did kind of like an open-ended, blue-sky question about, you know, what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the Democratic Party? You know, you could work somebody up enough to get them to really freak out about the culture war stuff, but is that really top of mind? And so, we had these open-ended questions that we asked, you know, all the 3,000 people in the survey, and we found that, you know, there was a lot of that, of course, that some people felt the Democrats were out of touch and focused on the wrong priorities and were, you know, woke idiots and all that stuff. There was a good amount of that, but it was completely dominated by concerns about the performance of the Democratic Party and having ideas that they don't follow through on and not being a party that actually is the party of the working class.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  And so, that tells me that while there's a huge mix of things going on, and while we can't ignore the sort of cultural resonance or lack thereof of the Democratic Party in all kinds of different ways, not just policies, but in affectation and in style, a big part of the story here is also people just don't believe that the Democrats are going to deliver on the things that they talk about, and that's a huge problem.

• 5:08Ezra Klein?

  I was looking into Sher Brown's campaign for a bunch of reasons, but partly for this podcast, and I was looking into the attack ads that his opponent, Bernie Moreno, ran against him.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Brown backed Biden, voting to let transgender biological men participate in women's sports, and supported allowing puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries for minor children.

• 5:31Ezra Klein?

  And Brown... That attack ad was pure culture war.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:35Ezra Klein?

  But it seemed to move voters enough that Brown had to put a counter-ad on the air.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  What if I told you all of this was a lie? A complete lie, and Bernie Moreno knows it.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  We can verify. The claim that Brown voted to let transgender biological men participate in women's sports is false.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  I'm sure Brown and I approve this message.

• 5:56Ezra Klein?

  So, how do you think about the, on the one hand, what you find in the study is a more diffuse sense the Democratic Party is ineffective, it's out of touch, it's corrupt. But then when you look at how Moreno, a car dealer-owner who had to settle a bunch of wage theft lawsuits, is actually running against Brown...

• 6:14Ezra Klein?

  It's on the cultural side.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, I always go back to Tim Ryan in 2022 and, you know, he was like one of the strongest.

• 6:20Ezra Klein?

  Also in Ohio, running against J D Vance.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Running against Vance and he didn't just run like a kind of counter like Sherrod Brown did. He like went full bore and he had, there was this one funny ad he had where he was like throwing, I don't know if it was basketballs or baseballs at these little TV screens. And one said, defund the police. He's like, I'm not doing that. The point being that even when Democrats go against the culture war stuff, it doesn't necessarily help them that much because the Democratic brand is so shot. But yeah, is it an issue that Republicans are weaponizing culture war against Democrats? And, and we need to allow our candidates in difficult contexts to understand their voters and what they need to do in order to relate to their own specific electorate. And if that means, you know, they need to take positions that progressives would get upset about,

• 7:04Speaker 01

  so be it, because we need to win way more seats to stop the Republicans. And this is not a time for our side to mess around, you know, we need to not just win a majority, but if we want to actually do anything that's going to turn things around for working class people, we need to have a super majority, which is, you know, unimaginable right now. And so the reality is that, yes, are these candidates in swing districts going to have to work hard to push back against these caricatures and, you know, which are often based on actual things that Democrats, maybe not them, but other Democrats have done. Yeah, many of them are going to have to do that and we need to give them the room to do that so that we can experiment with all kinds of different populisms out there and figure out which ones work and in which contexts. And it's always going to be a case by case basis.

• 7:45Ezra Klein?

  I do think it's worth saying that both Ryan in 2022 and then definitely Brown in 2024, they overperformed. If every Democrat in the country had run as far ahead of Kamala Harris, as Sherrod Brown ran ahead of Kamala Harris, the election would have looked very differently, at least congressionally. So something, I mean, the, the connection he had with Ohio, the campaign he ran. It was a strong campaign.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 8:08Ezra Klein?

  It just wasn't enough to get out of the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  And then, you know, even like a Dan Osborne, you know, that's the independent, you know, running, who overperformed even more than Sherrod Brown did. You know, he had to make a lot of the same decisions, right? He's had platforms around immigration that, you know, were completely anathema to progressives, right? He said, I'm with Trump on building the wall, right? He literally said that in his campaign ads.

• 8:30Ezra Klein?

  In fact, why don't we play that ad?

• 8:32Speaker 06

  Across Nebraska, people are tired of a corrupt Washington controlled by corporations and billionaires. Deb Fischer, they love her. Heck, they own her. And that's exactly why they're spending millions lying about me. Social Security to illegals? Who would be for that? I'm where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border. If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I'm pretty handy. Deb and the career politician.

• 8:55Ezra Klein?

  So Osborne, arguably the most overperforming candidate in that whole election.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:59Ezra Klein?

  And runs with neither party and is very economically populist and also runs pretty far right.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:07Ezra Klein?

  On some other issues. What did you make of that campaign? What are the lessons of it? What should people take from it?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it was extremely impressive and encouraging. And it shows that to the extent possible, folks who are opposed to Trump and the Republicans, be they Democrats or independents, they need to be much more experimental in the way that they handle elections, particularly maybe not so much in swing states where it's going to be a hard sell to get Democrats to like not run a candidate in Pennsylvania or something. But like in Nebraska, you know, they were able to get the Democrats to just sort of sit it out and allow Osborne to sort of be a real challenger against Fisher. And if we can find more states where, you know, deep red states like that, we can take on the Republicans on their own, on their own turf. And I think that's going to be a huge part of the path forward, although it's extremely hard to find candidates like Dan Osborne.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  You know, he had a very specific profile, has a very specific profile.

• 9:59Ezra Klein?

  Do you want to describe his profile and where he came from?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  You know, he was a guy that had never really been a Democrat or a Republican. You know, he was sort of a mechanic and he had been a union leader and had taken out his fellow Kellogg workers on strike a few years before the, you know, he ran for office. And he's just this sort of like very humble, plain And spoken guy, he embodies all of the economic populace and working class ideas that he's putting forth. And that's not an easy combination of features. But I think it's not unreasonable and we're seeing a new crop of Democrats mainly, you know, like Nathan Sage in Iowa and Graham Plattner. In Maine and Rebecca Cook, who I think is running a really great campaign in Wisconsin three that are that are all kind of in the similar kind of space of strong economic populace who are

• 10:46Speaker 01

  completely focused on cost of living and on sort of the need to center working class issues and call out, you know, economic elites for screwing us over for decades and they're also taking pragmatic positions to greater or lesser degrees. On issues where, you know, their particular electorates are not with progressives and we need to allow them to do that experimentation or we're not going to be competitive. Uh, at all nationally, and that's obviously not just a problem for Democrats, but that's a problem for the future of our democracy.

• 11:16Ezra Klein?

  So when you look at that Osborne ad, he doesn't just move right on policies. He actually aligns himself with Trump.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:24Ezra Klein?

  And one just reality and a lot of the places that Democrats want to win is that Trump is popular in those places. Politically, if you're just being strategic, does it change how you should talk about Donald Trump? Do they need to be in a different place than most Democrats are on him?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if I were on that campaign, I mean, I would have probably thought that was a smart thing to do, right? Cause you, if you, it's part of the democratic penalty issue, right? To the extent that you're really just vilifying Trump all the time, then you're kind of signaling you're a Democrat, right? And so they were trying to inoculate Osborne against those attacks. Because Trump is overwhelmingly popular among the people they're trying to get to vote for Osborne. Is that going to change now that Trump's in office? And all the stuff he's done are, you know, is, you know, pushing our democracy to the brink and is historically a frightening period that we're now living in. You know, is he going to be able to do the same thing? I don't know. Maybe it's changed now that Trump has had almost a year in office and done some of the damage that he's done, but at least in 2024, yeah, I mean, that was definitely rational.

• 12:25Ezra Klein?

  So one lesson you could take from Osborne is that in states where the Democratic Party is 25 points underwater, to stop running Democrats, try this independent play.

• 12:37Ezra Klein?

  I guess my question about that, because it definitely makes sense, is whether or not that would work for any length of time.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:44Ezra Klein?

  Because if it began to work, but then they're voting in a more democratically-aligned way, once they're in office, does it just begin to be seen as a scam? It's maybe something you can do in one or two places, but ultimately, you need to figure out a way to rehabilitate the Democratic Party's brand.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and either you're successful in doing that, and then the Democratic Party brand somehow incorporates the things that made those independents distinctive, and then we're in good shape, you know, we're now the party of the working class again, or independent candidates need to continue using that tension to differentiate themselves from the party going forward. And that's, I don't know, if I had to guess, I would say that's, that second outcome is probably more likely. But you're absolutely right, that after a certain amount of time, you know, people are gonna like, notice that, wait a minute, these guys are just Democrats, unless they legitimately break with Democrats.

• 13:35Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, unless they're actually not.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so to some degree, they absolutely are gonna have to do that. And the strategy for doing that, that we as sort of like economic populists in my camp would, would wanna see is breaking with Democrats when it comes to, you know, not standing up for workers, but that's not the only way in which they're gonna do it, obviously.

• 13:51Ezra Klein?

  Is there a case for just a worker-oriented third party? People always want to do a third party presidentially, which is very, very hard to do.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:58Ezra Klein?

  But you could absolutely imagine some kind of third party that is just running candidates in a couple of congressional districts or senate races, and if they get in, you know, they begin to be a little voting bloc together.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm a little bit traumatized from like arcane debates on the left about this question that I've had for a long time, so, but nonetheless, I think that that's a very good possibility. Why can't the Teamsters and the Steelworkers get together and have their own sort of mini party structure that's just about union stuff? Or, you know, and, and, you know, like, you already have the Union Caucus in, in the House, where they're not super important in, in the, the politics of the chamber, but nonetheless, like, they have a lot of ideological diversity on many different things, but they can come together around core worker issues. And if you had an organization like that being supported- By some of the bigger, you know, industrial unions, which have a lot of Republican voters in them. Then yeah, I think that would be valid and but I think we need some test cases first, right?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  You need you need to show that an Osborne can actually win. And you need to show that, you know, you can do something like this in more places. And then, once you do, I think it would make a lot of sense for those folks to try to do something like that. To like, not just have independent candidates, but build an independent organization. I just think it's something that should emerge organically rather than I don't see what benefit we get from just sort of saying we're doing this now. And like, let's hope people flock to our banner. I think it goes in the other direction.

• 15:45Ezra Klein?

  I want to get at the broader question behind this conversation. Democrats have been losing working class voters steadily for some number of years now. It's been a decline, decline, decline, and I see Republicans winning among both non-college and lower income voters.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:00Ezra Klein?

  It didn't used to be like that. This is a change. This gets called class de-alignment, not my favorite term.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  It's very catchy.

• 16:07Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, very catchy. But talk me through class de-alignment. What is it? What's the story behind it?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  The basic story is, you know, in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the vast majority of working class people and Americans in general said, what they think of in the Democratic of the Democratic Party is that's the party of working people. And my version of the story, anyway, is that Democrats started to move away from their focus on working class issues in the 1970s and 80s with, you know, this sort of onset of deregulation. And then eventually leading into the Clinton years when, you know, he signs NAFTA, which has devastating effects on communities in different parts of the country, leading to not just job loss, but community devastation. And the Democrats, you know, there's a great paper called compensate the losers that sort of gets into this and that's basically.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  What they said is you guys got screwed. Okay, but you know, we're gonna do different kinds of redistribution. That's gonna make you whole again. We're not gonna necessarily get you good jobs again. We're not gonna necessarily give you the social status that you used to have when you had high paying jobs that you felt good about and that were meaningful in your community. But we're gonna make sure that, you know, you have something like a decent education. We're gonna get you some kind of better healthcare, whatever. And that wasn't enough, you know, it was not nearly enough to send the tide of stagnating wages and stagnating quality of life. And so working class people generally, many of them started to feel betrayed by the Democratic Party. And it was in fits and starts, but then in 2016, the floodgates opened.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  And obviously that was related to Trump, but you know, he was like cribbing speeches from Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO in 2016, you know, and so if you listen to those speeches, then of course you're gonna hear all the crazy stuff, the xenophobic stuff and all the hate, but you're also gonna hear a lot of stuff that, you know, any like union organizer would probably find to be like right on in terms of the way that both parties have just completely ignored working people. And that really touched a chord and it set off the alignments to a much greater extent in 2016, starting with primarily white working class folks, but then, you know, it moved toward Latinos and some black men in 2020.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  And then to a much greater extent, you know, like half of Latinos roughly voted for Trump in 2024 and quarter of African American men. So now this is a multiracial movement away from the Democratic.

• 18:29Ezra Klein?

  Multiracial working class coalition. I mean, the things Democrats, the thing Democrats wanted to build.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  The hugely ironic aspect of this, right, is that the Republicans now have that multiracial working class coalition that the Democrats promised, you know, was their permanent majority.

• 18:44Ezra Klein?

  So I want to push on a couple of pieces of this story that I always think are complicated. So politics is always a choice. Democrats didn't just lose working class voters. They went somewhere, right? They went to Republicans. You know, this whole period, Democrats are still the party that wants to raise taxes on rich people. Republicans still the party that wants to cut them. Democrats are still the party trying to create universal healthcare. And under Obama, get a hell of a lot closer than we've ever been before. Republicans still the party. Trying to repeal that, trying to cut Medicaid, which they just did in the big beautiful bill. Republicans are voting for these trade bills, right? George W. Bush is very pro free trade. Republicans have proposed a lot of these bills. The Republicans vote for NAFTA in the House and send in very, very high numbers.

• 19:25Ezra Klein?

  There is this story that I hear, the Democrats abandoned all of these economic policies. Biden is, I think, probably the most left president on economics of my lifetime.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:39Ezra Klein?

  More aggressive on antitrust than, you know, any other president since I was born, on labor issues and everything.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:45Ezra Klein?

  It is hard for me to tell the story where working class voters are deciding on economic issues. They want a more populist, pro-worker party, and the party's supporting unions, trying to tax rich people, trying to expand healthcare benefits, trying to protect social security, trying to protect Medicare, right? All the things we know is hemorrhaging them year after year to the party doing the reverse on all those things. How do you make that add up?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things. I mean, one is the nature of our two-party system, and if you're really pissed off with the party you've been voting for for a long time, I guess you could vote for Jill Stein or whatever, the libertarians, but you know, the vast majority of people are just gonna go to the other side. And, you know, if they were in a parliamentary system or a multi-party system, maybe that, you know, they would go somewhere else. But in this case, you know, a protest vote against the Democrats is a vote for Republicans. And so I think that's a part of the story. But I think the much more important part of the story is that economic grievances get picked up on by conservatives, and the way that these economic grievances get transformed into politics is often through culture, right?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Like, it was, you know, economic elites versus the working class, but then, but then they're able to sort of transform it into it's the liberals and it's the cultural elites against the working class. And it's basically the same kind of grievance, and it's touching on the same underlying issues, but it gets transmuted into cultural grievances. And that's very much facilitated by the Democratic Party by, you know, not doing very much to try to actually relate to and be, you know, culturally competent in the way that they talk and think about working-class people. And they are increasingly a party during this period of higher-income people, of well-educated people. And, you know, we have, I'm sure you've probably played the Schumer clip about the Western

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Pennsylvania, you know, for every one of the-

• 21:40Ezra Klein?

  Just talked about it in, I think, the episode one or two before this.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 21:44Ezra Klein?

  Suzanne Metler.

• 21:45Speaker 07

  For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in Western PA- We will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio, in Illinois, in Wisconsin.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  That kind of stuff adds up and, you know, Clinton saying the basket of deplorables.

• 22:05Speaker 08

  You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.

• 22:12Speaker 08

  The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Of course, the context was like more complicated, whatever, but that was the soundbite and she said it. And all the major media institutions and academic institutions of the country used to be kind of nonpartisan. There's a great book by Matt Grossman and Dan Hopkins about this, about the diploma divide and sort of showing the ways in which media and culture came to be completely dominated by progressives. And a lot of working class people just felt really alienated by that. And all of these things are part of the same bundle. It gets wrapped up in sort of animosity toward, toward elites and, and you can't, it's very difficult. And academics have tried to do this in different kinds of ways to separate the cultural and economic aspects of it, but I think the reality is that they're all tied up and together to create this toxic democratic brand that then Trump comes along and, you know,

• 23:04Speaker 01

  his affect is something that's refreshing to a lot of people. He's not bullshitting people. He's not, he's using ordinary language, you know, he's cursing, he's just sort of bombastic. And people are like, well, at least, you know, that seems more authentic to me. And on top of that, he's saying he's going to bring back manufacturing jobs and he's saying he feels our pain. So I don't, it doesn't seem to me like as much of a mystery.

• 23:23Ezra Klein?

  So you've done a lot of work over the years on how different issue attitudes, different ideas have changed for the working class, for other social classes in the country. Give me the high level of that. What's happened over the past 20 years in people's views?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's a, there's a perception among at least a lot of progressives that the working class has gotten so conservative on cultural issues, da, da, da, da, da. But that's not true. You know, working class people have gotten more progressive on virtually everything over the last 20 or 30 years. There are some exceptions to that starting to show, especially among. Republican men, you know, who are kind of moving away from some progressive positions around, you know, gender rights and family issues and LGBTQ issues. But generally, yeah, you're seeing a clear progressive movement among working class people. But the issue is that middle class people and professionals have just gone way farther in a progressive

• 24:23Speaker 01

  direction on social and cultural issues over the last few decades than working class people have. And so that's creating this representation gap where Democrats feel they need to really cater to the more progressive positions of the of the middle class and of the upper middle class. And that creates this perception that somehow the working class is reactionary. But no, they've actually been moving in the same direction, just not to the same degree. And when it comes to economic issues, here's actually a coalitional story that's really positive, potentially for Democrats, right? Which is that working class people are quite progressive on many, many, many economic issues, particularly, like I said, the so-called pre-distributive issues around things like union rights.

• 25:05Ezra Klein?

  Can you describe this pre-distributive redistributive divide here for a minute?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So predistribution is things that sort of affect your bargaining power or your place in the labor market. That's things like, you know, your wage structure, that's things like, you know, your capacity to get benefits or better working conditions. And it's things like, you know, pensions and it's, you know, things like that provide jobs for people of different kinds. And then redistribution is like, okay, well, after the labor market process has occurred, we're going to take some money from those that are, you know, doing really well. And we're going to give it to other people in the form of healthcare benefits or in the form of education or in the form of, you know, welfare or social insurance.

• 25:43Ezra Klein?

  A $15 minimum wage is predistributive.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 25:46Ezra Klein?

  A earned income tax credit.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Would be.

• 25:48Ezra Klein?

  Is redistributive.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. And working class people tend to like those predistributive policies a lot because they kind of tap into values of like respect and dignity and status, right? It's like, I actually care about having a job. You can say that I'm going to get, I lose my job to AI or to, you know, automation or whatever. And then I, you know, I'm going to get. A universal basic income, even a high one. Many people would say, that's okay, but like, what am I gonna do? You know, like, I've lost my status in society. I don't have a job. That's where I found my respect, and that's where I found my sense of meaning, or at least an important part of meaning in my life. And predistribution sort of taps into that of maintaining your social status, maintaining your means of providing for your family.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Whereas redistribution, you know, is often perceived as something that is sort of like a handout. It's putting people in a vulnerable position where in which they kind of feel like they're the victim of something rather than, you know, the agent of their own futures.

• 26:46Ezra Klein?

  So what would a more full-throated economic platform oriented towards what you found around working-class attitudes look like versus a full-throated, leftward economic platform that is more the college-educated elite version of that?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it would be the full-throated, you know, sort of working-class-oriented platform would be something along the lines of strong support for enhanced worker protections and, you know, getting, you know, stronger union rights. It would be for increasing the minimum wage. Maybe working-class people wouldn't be as jazzed about, say, you know, a $20 minimum wage as middle-class people might be. So maybe it's also a matter of sort of

• 27:34Ezra Klein?

  Because working-class people might be more likely to lose jobs.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they might be more concerned about inflation. It would be for potentially even programs that would guarantee a job for people that need one from the government. Although the way that you present that, you know, has huge impacts on the way in which people perceive it.

• 27:52Ezra Klein?

  The way you do it would also have pretty big impacts on that.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely, hugely. And then in addition to that, you know, things that kind of go beyond where Democrats have been at in terms of exerting control over, you know, nobody wants to attack small businesses, nobody wants to attack, you know, people that are creating good jobs and communities, but there are big corporations that are really, really out of control. And instituting policies, or at least attempting to, that are gonna try to rein in some of these excesses in terms of, say, involuntary layoffs of of workers, right, to say, we are gonna not give federal contracts to companies that don't make a commitment to some kind of voluntary package if they if they're gonna lay off workers like they do in Germany, say. That would be really, really important and valuable for working people.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  And it wouldn't be something that necessarily costs the government a ton of money. It wouldn't be something that would be perceived as, oh, my God, like, we're gonna have this terrible problem with debt if if this comes in, like, maybe something like Medicare for All would, which, by the way, is also pretty popular, but it's also highly polarized, right? Like, that's and so.

• 28:55Ezra Klein?

  Well, the how you describe it begins to be, I've done a huge amount of work on on healthcare over the years and which part of Medicare for All you're describing, like, you start talking about abolishing private health insurance, you start talking about raising middle-class taxes. They couldn't get single payer done in Vermont.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then, of course, there's a whole bunch of, like, more specific things related to the constituencies within districts, like, if you're more of a rural district, then you're gonna be thinking about subsidies of different kinds to help farmers, smaller farmers succeed and and have more leverage over, you know, the big agribusiness firms. You're gonna wanna see different sorts of ways of incentivizing job creation of different kinds and job training programs, et cetera, et cetera. And then also, you're gonna wanna defend and expand the most popular and most sort of organically, like, American social insurance programs, like, you know, Social Security and Medicare, which are wildly popular among working-class people and everybody else. And we can build on those and we can use those as a foundation for a kind of really

• 29:54Speaker 01

  robust progressive economic populism. On the other hand, a more redistributive populism would be one that's sort of focused on universal basic income, say, or on some version of a Green New Deal, which is much more focused around spending, you know, lots of money on programs that working-class people may be sort of skeptical or actually gonna come back and benefit them in any way, or on, you know, certain types of, you know, means-tested social insurance or things like that, which are much easier to vilify and to demonize by Republicans.

• 30:24Ezra Klein?

  So then, let me get at something else you just touched on quickly. You said, look, maybe if this were a different kind of system, parliamentary, multi-party. Well, those systems exist.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:34Ezra Klein?

  And in every other rich Western country I know of, and they have different political parties, different political systems, their leaders made different decisions, you know, Germany was better at protecting manufacturing jobs than we were by a lot.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:49Ezra Klein?

  They have all seen the same class dealignment. They have all seen that class dealignment go forward with the working class moving to the right.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:59Ezra Klein?

  It's not like the German Greens are on top.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:02Ezra Klein?

  And so in all these other systems where you had different political leaders, different political parties, different political systems, functionally, the same thing happened.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:12Ezra Klein?

  Why?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I think for a lot of the same reasons. I mean, there's this great paper by Peter Hall and Georgina Evans called Representation Gaps, where they sort of look at like, just like the Democrats, the central left parties all throughout Europe moved away from a focus on sort of working class issues, and it sort of leaves this gap of voters in all of these countries, including in the United States, who don't really feel like they have a home on either side. And that opens up the space for populists to come in of the left or the right, but unfortunately for progressives, you know, it's almost always been much more successful on the right to come in and take advantage of that sort of feeling of alienation and sort of like political homelessness.

• 31:52Ezra Klein?

  That implies to me something structural is going on that is upstream of the individual political choices that the parties are making. I mean, you can think of every country as a kind of political market.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 32:05Ezra Klein?

  And it would make sense that in some political markets, that probably in a two-party political market, one of the parties would make some bad decisions about how to do market fit. This is a very neoliberal way to make this argument.

• 32:20Ezra Klein?

  It doesn't make a ton of sense. That in all of these countries simultaneously, none of the parties, no party from center-left to left would realize, oh, if we just stop being a party of professional managerial class cultural elites and start talking about pocketbook issues again, we'll pick up all these voters and become popular in the way we were in much of the 20th century. Somebody would have done it and then the others would have followed along. Either something was pushing them all in this direction, they were all recomposing themselves in the same way. I think when you see that much similarity

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:56Ezra Klein?

  Across a strategy that is not working out very well. You have to assume there is some reason they're all ending up in some version of the same strategy.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's because it was rational to do so, right? I mean, they were winning elections, you know, for a long time. And, you know, that some of the central left parties in Europe, just like the Democrats, you know, like even the German social democrats, kind of held on, you know, longer than I would have expected. I mean, it's not like the Democrats are this like completely weak party that they almost won the last election, right? I mean, they did win 2020, you know, they, you know, it's like they're still a highly competitive party and they've been doing that on this strategy of appealing more to higher educated and higher income voters. And, you know, those voters are a larger and larger segment of the population. They're still a minority and a very significant minority, a smaller minority in a lot of the key swing states. But, you know, they thought we can appeal to this coalition and they were winning elections

• 33:50Speaker 01

  on the basis of that and they, you know, it wasn't crazy to think that you could just give all the working class, you know, what they viewed as the working class reactionaries over to the right and then you wouldn't have to make all these sort of dirty compromises that they felt like Democrats have been making before. And, you know, I don't think that that's a crazy logic. I mean, because it brought them victory time after time.

• 34:08Ezra Klein?

  Is it a logic or is it a sociology or a political economy or a culture?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  It's both.

• 34:14Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned sort of offhandedly the Grossman-Hopkins book, The Diploma Divide, which is great. And one of the parts of it that you were referencing there is So you have this change happening in all these countries. The, the, the party on the left is becoming the more highly educated party. And at the same time, more highly educated people are in control of the media organizations. They're running banks, they're running nonprofits. And so you have a more unified elite culture.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:47Ezra Klein?

  This is a party becomes a party of the institutions. And the kinds of people who run institutions, you know, set the tone of that party. And slowly though, the right wing parties and part of the populist right parties, which are in most cases now eating the right wing parties, become the anti-institutional party.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And these are compounding factors, I would say, you know, that there's a shockingly small percentage of congresspeople have a working class background. Shockingly small percentage of candidates have a working class background of any kind. And those things reinforce each other. And, you know, the perception of the party as being elite and out of touch is reinforced by both of those things simultaneously compounding upon each other.

• 35:25Ezra Klein?

  There's also this question of affect. One thing human beings are just very good at sussing out almost instantly is whether this person is like me.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:36Ezra Klein?

  In some fuzzy way that defines like me to me. And that is how we dress, it's how we talk, it's how we look, it's our haircut, it's who else we're around. You mentioned that the floodgates on this open up with Trump, who despite being a billionaire, who fires people on television, has a very different affect.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:01Ezra Klein?

  Than Mitt Romney, than George W. Bush. And there is something here that I think is actually pretty tricky for Democrats. I mean, you talked about how few now have working class backgrounds. And I find that people are much more comfortable talking about the issue positions. Like, yeah, if we just need to talk more about capping prescription drug prices, we're happy to do that. Then this other piece, which is, I think, better understood as fundamentally representation.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:28Ezra Klein?

  Do I see myself in you? How do you think about that? What have your studies and surveys shown on that?

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's hugely important. People that are able to be relatable in meaningful ways and talk in terms that, you know, working class people understand and don't find off-putting. You know, talking about hard work, talking about family, talking about tradition, talking about patriotism. All these things are things that Democrats just don't like to talk about. But they're things that most Americans find central to their identity. And to the extent that Democrats are able to talk in those terms and are able to talk like a normal person in their district, it's hugely important. And we do have some great examples of people who talk like that, you know, who are Democrats in the House right now. And like a Marie Glusenkamp Perez, or a Gabe Vasquez, or a Jared Golden, you know.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  The policy stuff is a separate question, but just their affect is one of using more profanity, using more self-deprecation, talking in a way that's just sort of straightforward. And something that, you know, if they went to a PTA meeting at their school, they wouldn't be viewed as like a snooty, you know, middle-class parent, right? And I think that's hugely important. I mean, then you have somebody like an Elizabeth Warren or something, you know, had all this great stuff, you know, but doesn't have that kind of affect. And I think it's.

• 37:44Ezra Klein?

  It's worth zooming in on Warren for a minute. As a college-educated liberal, I'm a big Elizabeth Warren fan and have been for a long time. And in the way we think about American politics, we group Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders together.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:57Ezra Klein?

  They are the left wing of the Senate Democratic Party.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:00Ezra Klein?

  And if you look over the years at how they performed in their respective states, Bernie Sanders, for a very long time, has overperformed the Democratic Party. And Warren underperformed the Democratic Party. And she was very, very strong among college-educated liberals and weaker among working-class voters. And this, I think, shows up a lot, that you can have a form of left candidate.

• 38:23Ezra Klein?

  Who is very populist across a lot of measures.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:26Ezra Klein?

  And doesn't read as working class voters to these voters, right? I mean, I think if you poll the Harvard faculty on their preferred economic policies, they are extremely far left. In fact, I suspect they're to the left of the median working class voter.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:42Ezra Klein?

  But they would not do very well in elections in Ohio.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:46Ezra Klein?

  And there's something to that.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that you put your finger on it. I mean, in terms of this affectation. And then also, I mean, there's also a policy aspect to this as well, which is that it's really important to remember that working class people are in favor of a lot of progressive economic policies by overwhelming majorities. But they also care about things that Democrats are more progressives anyway, are more squishy on, like, you know, not having a giant deficit or debt. They care a lot about inflation because working class people got hit a lot harder by inflation than middle class people did, right? And they care about economic opportunity and they care about small businesses thriving. And so just putting out this giant platter of progressive economic policies that are going

• 39:32Speaker 01

  to signal to voters that you want to dramatically increase government spending in ways that, you know, many of them who are extremely skeptical about government in general and haven't felt much positive coming out of government programs in their lives beyond maybe social security or Medicare, they are going to be skeptical of a lot of those programs. And so you need to also think about what are the types of progressive economic policies that really tap into working class voters' sense of like, we need good, stable jobs. We need to have a chance at a middle class lifestyle that our parents had and that we feel slipping away for us. And what are the ways in which government can help to provide opportunities that enable middle class and working class families to really thrive?

• 40:14Speaker 01

  As opposed to the framing of, we need to have equality for all different people and we need to, you know, spend all kinds of different money to address different sorts of inequities in society. Those are, those are valid goals and very important from a progressive standpoint, but they don't connect as well with working class people. So I think it is partly affect, but it's also partly the suite of policies that you're, that you're giving to working class voters. And you'd notice that a guy like Dan Osborne or Platten, you know, they're not going out there and promoting them all like the suite of trillions and trillions of dollars of, you know, the progressive wish list. They're doing some of that.

• 40:47Ezra Klein?

  They're not Green New Deal candidates.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. Yeah.

• 40:50Ezra Klein?

  Which. To say nothing, it's a green new deal, but I mean, it gets something else interesting that I've been thinking about a bit because I think it's pretty clear that in 2028, if AOC runs, which I think she's certainly considering, you know, she's very likely to inherit the Bernie Sanders lane.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:06Ezra Klein?

  And if you look at Sanders and AOC polling, they look actually quite different. You know, Sanders' last poll I saw was something like plus 11 in his net favorabilities and AOC was negative four, negative five. So it's like they have like a 15-point-ish gap between them. And their policies are not very different at this point. They're very unified, right? They're doing the anti-oligarchy tour together. But what they have come to represent in American politics, like Bernie Sanders with his mittens, AOC at the Met Gala, it reads very differently, completely separate from how unified they are on issues.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. Although, you know, she does have, you know, I don't know exactly, but she has a huge amount of working-class people in her own district, so we shouldn't understate that degree.

• 41:52Ezra Klein?

  I think these things overlap with an urban rural divide that I think is really important. And I think Sanders comes from a, not I think, he does come from a state.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:00Ezra Klein?

  That is heavily rural.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:01Ezra Klein?

  And he codes around that. And he's like an old cranky white guy, right? These things all overlap on each other in weird ways.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  But I think it's also kind of interesting that Bernie has this positive perception among a lot of working-class people, which, you know, again, we shouldn't overstate because, you know, he's taken a lot of positions that are very unpopular among a lot of people who are Republicans or independents. But that said, I think it's always kind of interesting that, I think he kind of has this popularity despite the fact that he's such a wonk, you know? Like, he talks, you know, he's always talking about like these specific numbers and he's talking about like facts and figures and stuff. And he doesn't do any of the stuff that I would say would make a lot of sense. He's talking about anecdotes and like just really trying to relate to people on an emotional level, you know? He's very much like a machine. And yet, he's very popular just because he's very authentic. And I think that's something that's really hard to capture.

• 42:48Ezra Klein?

  Well, I think there's also a dimension with Bernie that is somewhat unique to him, which is that he's an anti-party politician.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 42:55Ezra Klein?

  He has traditionally not been a member of the Democratic Party. He caucuses with them, but has made a point of running as an independent. And the narrative people have of him, I always, I have always thought this is very overblown, but nevertheless, is that the Democratic Party organized to screw him.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:11Ezra Klein?

  So there is a way in which, going back to the conversation we were having about the Democratic penalty and Dan Osborne running as an independent, I mean, Bernie Sanders was functionally doing that in a much more left-wing guise before it was cool.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:25Ezra Klein?

  And he maintains, I think, some separation from the broader parties, continuously seen as an insurgent, challenging and trying to change Democratic Party as opposed to a part of it.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we need a lot more people, you know, who are doing that. Joe Manchin was doing that, right? There's no reason why you couldn't have a progressive version of that, like, within the Democratic Party, right? You don't have to be a blue dog and also say, I'm running as a Democrat and also, like, I'm very upset with what the Democratic Party has become and what they've represented. And so, you know, we need more people like that that are out there, sort of tapping into this populist anger and anger, not just at economic at least, but also at both parties. And I think you can do that as a Democrat to some degree, because we have all these examples of people doing it and connecting effectively with people in their districts. And I think we need to see a lot more of that if we're going to do anything to address the Democratic penalty in a lot of these competitive districts.

• 44:43Ezra Klein?

  There are a lot of ways of running against the Democratic Party. And I think people only imagine that the choices are traveling along a line from democratic socialist to Joe Manchin.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:55Ezra Klein?

  Right? Or farther than Joe Manchin, right? There's only moderating, there's moving left and there's moving right.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:00Ezra Klein?

  So first, there's no one line. There is a left, right line on economics, on cultural issues, on the system itself.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:09Ezra Klein?

  Bernie Sanders is an anti-system figure in a way that other people who share his belief in Medicare for all and share his beliefs on taxation are often not anti-system figures. Bernie Sanders radiates

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:25Ezra Klein?

  dislike for, contempt for capitalism and the way it functions and the American government and the way it functions, where he really believes it's corrupt, where some people just don't. You see in Iowa, Rob Sand is running for governor and he's running as a Democrat who just doesn't like parties, doesn't really think we should have parties.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:41Ezra Klein?

  Right, he's a moderate and he's running against the Democratic brand in a very different way than Bernie Sanders does. I mean, you mentioned Jared Golden in Maine, who is pro tariffs and you can run against the Democratic Party from the left, you can run against it from the right, you can run against it as corrupt, you can run against parties as out of touch, right? There's a million ways to do it. But Joe Biden, who had moved quite to the left, was a fundamentally pro-system politician. Right? And Kamala Harris coming after him was also a very pro-system politician, even as her voting record is very, very liberal.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:14Ezra Klein?

  And I think people mix all this up as one thing, but there are many things and you can choose to be pointing in different directions on them at the same time.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, without a doubt. And also, it's not, you know, this idea of like, being an authentic, working-class person who like, kind of reads working class, like, that also doesn't necessarily tap into this sort of genuinely populist, anti-system mentality, right? Like, I think Tim Walz is an interesting example of that, you know, where he's like this guy who seems like created in a lab to be like the liberals' version of like a working-class dude. And he kinda is, you know, he got the plaid shirts like me and he's got the, you know, he was the coach and everything and, you know, he's plain spoken, but he doesn't have that, like, listening to his speeches, I mean, and, you know, he's a great politician and everything, but listening to his speeches, he doesn't have that fire, that sort of like anger, that sort of like, just like Bernie level, like, this system is just out of control,

• 47:08Speaker 01

  it's corrupt, it needs a fundamental reckoning. And until we have more Democrats that have that kind of feeling about the system, then I don't think many people are gonna take seriously that they really care about making fundamental or really significant changes to the status quo. Like Kamala Harris talked about, you know, corporations generally play by the rules, you know, but you know, some are doing price gouging pharmaceutical companies and you know, we need to calm down on that. That's what we call like populist light, you know, the populist, strong populism, which we try to test is sort of like corporations have been screwing over workers for decades. American workers, the backbone of this society, and we need to do everything we can, focus like a laser on making their quality of life better.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  And for giving them the American dream that they deserve, and we need to stop these rapacious corporations from running roughshod over our politics and our economics. And that kind of messaging that taps into that sense of just like complete disillusionment with political and economic elites in this country. I think really resonates with working class people, and I think more Democrats should be doing it. We're talking, obviously, in New York City right now. What have you thought of Zohar Moudani? Well, I think, you know, he's an exciting candidate for New York City, you know, and to the extent that, you know, I've been on the on the left for a long time. And I think he represents a maturation of the US, or at least the New York City left in terms of, you know, just a couple of years ago, you wouldn't really imagine a

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Democrat socialist candidate like him, like just being so focused on on bread and butter economic issues, you know, he might have gotten critiqued for not focusing enough on all the other issues that that people in his base would have cared about. So to that extent, I think it's positive growth and, you know, it shows at least the charisma that he has and the ability to be super relatable. Those aspects of his campaign are things that Democrats can learn from, but of course, there's other areas in terms of the context specific nature of his own political views and the types of economic policies he's focusing on that, you know, you wouldn't want to generalize beyond places where it would be appropriate to do so. And the extent that people say, oh, well, Moudani won in New York, and so that shows that you can go to

• 49:12Speaker 01

  whichever other place in the country and have whatever views you have, however progressive they may be on, you know, social and cultural issues and have whatever positions you've ever taken is not going to be an issue. Of course, that's not true.

• 49:25Ezra Klein?

  I've been thinking a lot about how generalizable his media campaign is.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:29Ezra Klein?

  Because the thing about New York City is it is soaked in media.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:34Ezra Klein?

  It is very, very digital.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:36Ezra Klein?

  It is very easy for candidates to go viral here because they also get attention from outside.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:41Ezra Klein?

  So the signal that the algorithms are getting is that everybody is interested in Zohar Mhamdani. I mean, the number of people who are watching Zohar Mhamdani videos is often, you know, if you add a couple of them up, just significantly more than the number of people who are in New York City. Like, and so there is a dimension where New York City has a tendency to have very, very media savvy mayors. Right? Eric Adams, say what you will about him, the guy's a showman.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:07Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, I think it's a little bit less true for de Blasio, but it was true for Giuliani. Donald Trump, who comes out of New York City, is a showman.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:15Ezra Klein?

  And so New York City is, you know, you look at the people it produces, they are great at attention. And it's not possible to get that much attention in the same way in rural districts in Ohio or in Oklahoma. And so you have to do other things and you have to rely more on paid media, right? And it's not to say that these things have no relevancy. They actually have a lot of relevancy for a national campaign, right? Presidential candidates are working in that attentional space, too.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, without a doubt. So, but of course, he's going to get vilified like crazy in every swing district. And so his face and everything he said is going to be on TV as the face of everything that's wrong with the Democratic Party. So we're going to have to deal with that as well.

• 51:00Ezra Klein?

  Well, I think that's a place for the Democratic Party is going to have to get better at being a big tent.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:04Ezra Klein?

  And knowing how to describe itself.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:06Ezra Klein?

  As a party that has many different types of candidates and people in it.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:10Ezra Klein?

  In a way, it has a lot of trouble doing right now.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 51:13Ezra Klein?

  And that goes in both directions, right? It goes for Zohar Mhamdani on the left, and then it goes for allowing candidates to moderate in places like a Nebraska or a Kansas or an Ohio in a different direction. And it, you know, the parties did not used to be nearly as nationally unified as they are now. This is a historical aberration from where we've been. And I think this is going to become more important. Can you actually treat that as a strength, not something you're always explaining away?

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to have to. Just like you said, that's gonna have to go in both directions. The degree to which progressives in the coalition are willing to say, okay, we have folks here that we don't agree with on everything, but we recognize that they're helping to build our bench. And many of them are also great economic populists. So we have things that are commonalities with them. But some of them are not, and that's okay, too. We need to have the broadest bench we can possibly have. And then, on the other hand, the more blue dog or centrist Democrats, the different kinds, need to be amenable to the fact that the Democratic Party, especially in urban areas, is just very, very different than it is in the rest of the country. So, yeah, absolutely.

• 52:21Ezra Klein?

  How much do you think about the way that the problem of the Democratic Party's bench becomes, it feeds on itself, right? The weaker the Democratic Party gets among working class voters, the weaker it gets in rural areas, the weaker it gets among voters without a college education, it just becomes harder for the Democratic Party to find candidates in those groups because there are just fewer of them.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:46Ezra Klein?

  And they're more unusual when you do find them.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:49Ezra Klein?

  And it is often felt to me that the Democratic Party should spend a lot more money on recruitment and talent discovery than it seems to.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 52:59Ezra Klein?

  But I also know that one of the ways that the DCCC, which runs House Recruitment and the DSCC, they look out for which candidates can fund their campaigns.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:09Ezra Klein?

  And when you start...

• 53:10Speaker 01

  That's why you don't have so many working class candidates.

• 53:11Ezra Klein?

  Right. When you begin with a question of where you're gonna get the money for the candidacy, then that's obviously gonna point you towards more moneyed candidates.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  But this is a deeper problem than just candidate recruitment, which, by the way, I completely agree that... And there are some states where, say, the AFL-CIO or sometimes even Democrats have candidate training programs directly targeted toward working class candidates. Like, New Jersey is a great example of that, where they have, the unions there have a huge amount of working class and union candidates, like hundreds of them all around the state, because they've had this super-concentrated effort to get union and working-class people into office and running for office. And there's no reason why you can't have programs like that in other states. And that's not gonna be... Having working-class candidates is not the... Be all and all, but it's an important part of the story. But I think the deeper issue is just the presence of organization in rural and small town areas.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  There's just not, there's nothing there like, you know, my dad's family comes from a small town in rural Indiana. And like, there's just literally no infrastructure of any kind for, you know, progressive candidates of, you know, to emerge. Because there's no unions anymore, you know, there's no organizations like civic associations that people can join. And so I actually think that's a big part of the story is, is let's take some of this billions of dollars that the Democrats spend on paid media every time. And let's put 10% of it into building grassroots year round grassroots organizations in red and purple states to try to, not even the Democratic Party itself, but in just civic associations that are doing good work to try to, you know, solve community problems.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  And that's where some of these candidates can bubble up. And that's not a short term project, obviously. But the hollowing out of civic institutions and of, you know, the, the presence of any kind of associational mechanism that could identify and sort of shepherd those sorts of people toward running for office is, I think, a gigantic problem. That we just need to invest, well, we're hardly investing anything in that. And it's not, the Democratic Party needs to do that, unions need to do that. And it's a longer term project, but otherwise, you know, we're literally seeding the vast geographic majority of the country to conservatives and their associations, right? And we don't need to do that. That's not inevitable. And that problem and the problem of authentic and strong candidate recruitment, I think, go hand in hand.

• 55:34Ezra Klein?

  As American politics has nationalized.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:37Ezra Klein?

  Individual candidates are held much more to account for their entire party.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 55:42Ezra Klein?

  Than used to be the case. So you're running as a Democrat, you're running as a Republican. In 1994, it was easier to run as a very different kind of Democrat or a very different kind of Republican. Then now where people say, yeah, I know you, Sherrod Brown, I've known you forever. But I know what the Democratic Party is too.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:00Ezra Klein?

  And you vote for Chuck Schumer as majority leader.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:03Ezra Klein?

  Right? Or the flip, right? You might run. Moderate Larry Hogan in Maryland, who was governor of Maryland and a popular politician there. But he loses because people know that if he goes to the Senate as Republican, he will vote for John Thune.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:16Ezra Klein?

  And that will empower the Republican Party. People are making a very, very rational calculation there. The D or R next to somebody's name, particularly if we're talking about the House or Senate, is more important than their name by a lot.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:27Ezra Klein?

  But getting the parties to a point where people feel represented by them, right? Lowering for the Democrats, that Democratic penalty in Rust Belt states is really, really, really important.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:38Ezra Klein?

  Because people are weighing the party so heavily in their voting decisions now. The party itself is a brand they kinda like in the places where you actually need to win.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, one question I, you know, I, I think is an open one that I don't really have a great answer to is, you know, what is the most effective means of changing that, that brand? Cause it's certainly not going to come from the party leaders, you know, saying different stuff. Cause nobody really listens to them anyway. I think it's going to come through these politicians, you know, on the ground, trying to, district by district, tell a different story about the Democratic Party until we can find a point at which more working class people in a diverse, more diverse array of contexts are willing to take Democrats seriously. And that means that Democrats need to start winning seats in some of these much more difficult contests. And they need to start learning how to be more effective at messaging.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Is it moderating? Well, sometimes, but it's also sometimes just like taking a progressive position, but talking about it in a way that's resonant with people. So it's like, okay, well, we want to have a reasonable position on immigration. It doesn't mean we need to go to Trump land on this and be, you know, dehumanizing and treating immigrants with disdain and all the things that they're doing. But it means we need to say, you know, people that are playing by the rules, you know, that have been here in the United States and contributing to our economy. They're, they're a meaningful part of our society. And, you know, if they're not criminals, um, you know, they should, you know, have a pathway to citizenship. That's a viewpoint that the vast majority of Americans agree with. And it's not a conservative position. It's a progressive position. And so is that moderation?

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, maybe compared to open borders or something, but it's still a robustly progressive position. And I think there's a lot of things like that that Democrats could do that would both be amenable to people in their coalition that they need to keep on board and also enable them to message more effectively among people that are very skeptical of Democrats currently.

• 58:28Ezra Klein?

  I think people have gotten way too pessimistic about changing party reputations. We've watched it happen over and over and over again in the past couple of decades. Bill Clinton substantially changed the reputation, whether you think that was for better or for worse, of the Democratic Party. Donald Trump substantially changed the reputation of the Republican Party, changed who votes for it. Barack Obama changed the Democratic Party in his era, at least.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  But what's the common denominator in all those cases?

• 58:54Ezra Klein?

  Party leadership.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Right, but it's not going to come from the current party leadership.

• 58:57Ezra Klein?

  So that's what I was about to say. So I think a thing that is a bit distinctive about the Democratic Party in the past couple of years is, I think, in a strange way, it's been leaderless.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 59:07Ezra Klein?

  I think that Biden ran as a consensus candidate in a very strange year, the pandemic year. And he was just sort of, everybody could agree on him in the Democratic Party. And he built this big coalition with the Bernie side of the party, and he was a very coalitional candidate in a way that really decided not to try to reshape what the Democratic Party was. He was trying to bring all the factions in and keep them on board. And by then, he was already very weakened as a communicator and party leader.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:37Ezra Klein?

  And then 2024 is such a strange year with him dropping out and then the nomination being passed to Kamala Harris with no primary at all. There's no time for a party leader to exert control over what the story of the Democratic Party is, where it is going left, where it's going right, where it's just changing its position. And so you've had the Democratic Party, I would say, even as it has been very ambitious on policy, it has been in a state of communicative drift.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:06Ezra Klein?

  At the national level since 2016.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:10Ezra Klein?

  And so then what the next party leader does in 2028 is going to really matter. And what kind of leader the Democrats pick, is it somebody who is understood as trying to change the party, somebody understood as representing its current mainstream? That will really decide what the future of that looks like, at least in the immediate term.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's probably going to depend to some degree on the test cases from 2026, right? So it's partly why, you know, it's really important to sort of get a lot of these folks out there that are, I think, the more promising candidates to provide these models that we could try to push for, you know, in 2028. I don't want to speculate about 2020, I have no idea, but, um, you know, if somebody like these candidates that we're talking about, you know, who are from a Rust Belt state or from a more of a red state and that have this very, very kind of relatable attitude and who are really driving home economic populism and have sort of attitudes that are out of step with like the way Democrats would traditionally talk, like, that's the kind of candidate that that we need. Whether or not we'll get one, who knows?

• 1:01:10Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Um, well, I guess to be nerdy, I'll say a couple that are similar to the, you know, along the lines of what we're talking about today. So one is very similar to the point I was just making. This book by Theda Scotchpole and Lainey Newman called Rust Belt Union Blues, which talks about the hollowing out of associational life and in the Rust Belt and the ways that's affected the move to the right in those areas. Another one is this beautiful book that's a few years old now, um, called We're Still Here by Jennifer Silva, which looks at working class life in Northeast Pennsylvania and just shows the utter disillusionment that working class people have with all institutions and the depth of the problem that we have in trying to rebuild trust in institutions. And then

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  I guess for something different, I just read a fantastic tour de force history of the 500 years of Latin American and US political and economic development by the historian Greg Grandin. It's called America, America. Highly recommended if you want to get a sense of the ways in which Latin America actually shaped the United States in surprising respects.

• 1:02:17Ezra Klein?

  Jared Abbott, thank you very much.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra. I appreciate it.

• 1:02:36Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Zerklan Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. 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 Annie Galvin, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Kristin Lynn, Jack McCordick, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Zemuluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.