Democrats Don’t Think They Have This Election Won

I’m reporting from the Democratic National Convention this week, so we’re going to try something a little different on the show — a daily audio report of what I’m seeing and hearing here in Chicago. For our first installment, I’m joined by my producer, Rollin Hu, to discuss what the convention’s opening night revealed about the Democratic Party after a tumultuous couple of months. We talk about how Joe Biden transformed the party over the past four years, the behind-the-scenes efforts to shape the party under Kamala Harris, the impact of the Gaza protests and why many Democrats — despite Harris’s recent momentum — feel cautious about their odds in November. Mentioned: “Trump Turned the Democratic Party Into a Pitiless Machine” by Ezra Klein Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Full Speech at Democratic National Convention 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. 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 and hosted by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer 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.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  So it is Tuesday morning, August 20th. I am recording this from beautiful sunny Chicago. I'm here covering the 2024 Democratic National Convention. And we're going to do something a bit different on the show this week. I'm going to be doing a daily audio diary, a daily audio report on what I'm hearing and seeing here in Chicago. I'm joined today by my producer, Roland Hu, who is going to help me out on the other side of the microphone here today. Roland, welcome to the show.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Happy to be here, Ezra. So let's get started. You're at the convention now. The parties already selected a nominee in Kamala Harris. So what's there left to do?

• 1:05Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, what are conventions for is a wonderful question in the modern era. So conventions used to be where you pick the nominee. That is still true technically most years, but it is not technically true this year. There was a virtual roll call where Kamala Harris was selected. So the part of the convention where officially the nominee gets selected, that has also already happened. So why are so many people here in Chicago? The way I would think about the modern convention is that it is a place where political parties gather to define themselves. And they do that in a number of ways. They do that through creating their platforms.

• 1:47Ezra Klein?

  They do that through choosing who gets speaking slots and when, right? Who is featured and on what night? And at what time at political conventions is a party telling you a lot about who the people now in charge of it think that it is and want it to be seen as? And they do that through meeting and talking in the hallways. I mean, there are so many people here from every faction of the Democratic Party. And they're having delicate breakfasts and they're having caucuses and they're talking to each other and they're making connections. And that too is sort of how a party structures itself and builds the interstitial web that allows it to operate in the off years.

• 2:30Ezra Klein?

  So a lot of what I'm trying to do here is try to understand what the Democratic Party is right now, who holds power within it, how it wants to be perceived by the public, and also what it's sort of learned, having just done this remarkable, this genuinely historic collective action of persuading its incumbent president to step aside and then coalescing around Kamala Harris, the vice president. I mean, this is the Democratic Party coming to Chicago to celebrate a party action of a type that there's no precedent for in the modern era.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  So let's get more specific into that. You're in those hallways, you're going to dinners and breakfasts. Like, what are you hearing? Like, how are you seeing the Democratic Party define itself now?

• 3:13Ezra Klein?

  So, a couple of things. And we're going to see the Democratic Party's definition emerge and unfold over the course of the week. So I wouldn't say anything too firm yet. But one thing that was very notable about the first night to me was that there were seven union presidents up there.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  On behalf of 1 million active and retired members of the UAW, I am honored to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be our next president and vice president. And I want to say thank you to Joe Biden for making history by walking the picket line with the UAW.

• 3:55Ezra Klein?

  The display of closeness between the Democratic Party and organized labor, which was, I think, emphasized even more this year because Republicans have at least been fainting at making a play to break that, although Donald Trump giving an interview with Elon Musk where he compliments Elon Musk on how good he is at firing striking workers, I think was probably not helpful for the Republican Party's efforts on that score. But you really saw the Democratic Party emphasizing its relationship to labor. Look, I came up in Democratic Party politics, covering Democratic Party politics, at a time when, I mean, organized labor has been a Democratic constituency.

• 4:35Ezra Klein?

  But it has been treated, I don't want to say with, at an arm's length, but not with this ferocious level of embrace. And it speaks to something else you saw up there last night, which is there's just a lot more populism in the party right now. There is a sense that the populism of Donald Trump needs to be blunted. But I thought the strongest speech of the night was AOC, and that was a very, very populist speech.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  And I, for one, am tired about hearing about how a two-bit union buster thinks of himself as more of a patriot than the woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed, straddling on our way of life. The truth is done. You cannot love this country if you only fight for the wealthy and big business.

• 5:33Ezra Klein?

  And the way she tried to draw Donald Trump outside the circle of patriotism was really interesting. I think a lot of politics is about defining who stands in the center of the American story. And the way AOC pushed Donald Trump out of the center of that story was saying that he stands with big business. He stands with greed, not with ordinary Americans, right? Patriotism in her telling was recast as class, as where you are inside of a class war. You compare how things looked when Mitt Romney had the Republican convention and it was about makers and takers and Democrats were always being accused of waging class warfare and they were trying to say, no, we don't wage class warfare.

• 6:17Ezra Klein?

  So that felt very different to me. The other thing that I would just note is there's a lot of unity. When I saw Gina Raimondo, the former governor of Rhode Island and the current sitting Commerce Secretary, who's very much from the party's moderate wing, up there on the same night as AOC, and Raimondo was attacking corporate monopolies.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  Kamala Harris will give more than 100 middle-class Americans a tax cut.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  She'll build 3 million new homes for the middle class. And she's gonna forge an economy with fair competition, free from monopolies. Monopolies that crush workers and small businesses and startups.

• 7:04Ezra Klein?

  I mean, you really see a party that has bridged huge divides. At another time, and not long ago, the fundamental fight inside the party was between the factions driven by Bernie Sanders and then also later somewhat represented by AOC. And now you have AOC giving keynote speeches on behalf of Kamala Harris.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Let's stay on this factional divide for a second. Do you see this more as the left wing of the party moving toward the center or the center moving towards the left?

• 7:33Ezra Klein?

  I'm not sure. I think there are ways in which it is both. On the one hand, I think Joe Biden has had a much more progressive presidency and he has worked very hard to bring progressives into his presidency. It is notable that when the fight over Biden's future was happening, the faction of the party that stood most strongly behind Joe Biden was its leftward flank, right? It was Bernie Sanders, who wrote the op ed in the New York Times, reiterating his endorsement and telling people to stop challenging Biden. It was AOC who said, "The matter is closed," and, you know, did an hour-long Instagram story defending Joe Biden and saying that, you know, there wasn't a really good other

• 8:18Ezra Klein?

  alternative. And so it speaks to a bridge that Biden himself built from, you know, what was understood as a faction he led, the moderate faction, to the progressive faction. And if anything, now I think Biden is now associated more with the progressive faction. And Harris, to a large degree, also benefits from that. I think there's a sense that that relationship can continue because it's not just a relationship of personal relationships, it's also a staffing relationship. It's also about who is actually serving inside the Biden administration, which is also people we would expect to be serving in a Kamala Harris administration. But that said, there's also a way in which the left has moved towards the center, right? If you think back to 2020, what are the big fights in the party?

• 9:01Ezra Klein?

  It's about Medicare for All. Well, nobody thinks Kamala Harris is going to run on abolishing all private health insurance this year. It's about defunding the police later on in that year. Nobody thinks Kamala Harris is going to run like that, but more than that, there's been an embrace of Kamala Harris's identity and record as a prosecutor. So this sort of big split that existed in 2020, where the left made life really hard for Kamala Harris, saying Kamala Harris is a cop, Kamala Harris is a cop. That was one of the big attacks on her. Now you look at the ads, it's like Kamala Harris, a cop. Doesn't everybody love cops? So there are just ways in which some of the fights have calmed. And then, you know, Donald Trump exerts a unifying pressure on the party. People want

• 9:42Ezra Klein?

  to beat him. And so there is a tendency for the party to converge in a quite powerful way to accomplish that goal.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  One of the big exceptions we've seen to party unity has been over the Biden administration's role in Israel's war in Gaza. How are you seeing this point of division play out in the party?

• 10:02Ezra Klein?

  It doesn't feel as divisive here on the ground as I think a lot of people feared. The protests have been quite undersubscribed. There was a protest that was, you know, predicting 30, 40,000 people. It got a small fraction of that. I don't think to a lot of Democrats right now, this feels like a genuine split in the party. Because Kamala Harris is known to be quite to Joe Biden's left on Israel and Gaza. Inside the administration, she has been much more for a ceasefire. She's been for being much tougher on Netanyahu. And she's called now for a ceasefire. The protesters saying an arms embargo too, which

• 10:43Ezra Klein?

  she has not called for. That said, I've heard a lot of Democrats ask in some frustration.

• 10:51Ezra Klein?

  Why are there these protesters here at Harris when Harris is so much better on Palestinian rights than Donald Trump would be? Why are they disrupting at all the Democratic convention when they should be actually allying with Democrats to beat Donald Trump? People who want to see healthcare insurance expanded in this country aren't protesting Kamala Harris. They are working for her to be elected because they know that Donald Trump will take healthcare away from people. And I actually think that reflects a misunderstanding of where the protesters are. I just spent time in Israel, been thinking a lot about the set of questions. And what used to be often a question about a peace process is for many of the protesters

• 11:34Ezra Klein?

  now a question of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state at all. And from that perspective, the more traditionally liberal two-state perspective that Kamala Harris represents is not actually necessarily friendly. In some ways, it actually might be less friendly because there are many people who believe that that's actually a way of papering over, from this, again, not my perspective, but from this perspective, the fundamental immorality of the Israeli or the Zionist project. And one thing I will say, having just been on the ground in the West Bank and Israel,

• 12:19Ezra Klein?

  the degree to which the two-state solution feels quite impossible right now, if you were there, I think people have not connected to fully. Like, to me, right now, there actually is some legitimacy to the view that the Democrats calling for two states, in a world where in the Israeli Knesset, they just adopted a resolution against a two-state solution, and many of Benny Gantz's allies voted for that. That there is something to the argument that the two-state solution is kind of an illusion. Now, at the same time, there's no appetite for a one-state solution either. People have heard me say before that we are not in a solutionary space here. But the division which exists is sort of different than the division that I think people thought about in the past.

• 13:04Ezra Klein?

  The division that exists, which is a more extreme division, is about the question of Israel at all. So I think a lot of energy has drained out of the protests because Harris has ended up being on the side of what you might understand as its more moderate demands, a ceasefire, and certainly a skepticism of whether the Israeli war machine at this point is moral or legitimate. And to some degree, what is left are the people who fundamentally believe that Israel is illegitimate. And that is not where Harris is. But that's also not a deep division inside the Democratic Party.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  So we saw at the RNC that they came in with the impression that they were on the path to victory. The vibes were good then. What are the vibes like at the DNC now?

• 13:49Ezra Klein?

  So I want to be careful in how I answer this because I got here yesterday and I, my, my reporting is not a representative sample of the entire DNC. But I have been a bit surprised by how cautious a lot of the people I am talking to are about the, the makeup of the election, which is to say that if you're on social media or something right now and you're reading the polls, it looks like Kamala Harris has really pulled into the lead here. And that is not the thing people are saying to me. What they're saying to me in a way that feels like they actually feel it is this is a 50-50 election.

• 14:30Ezra Klein?

  I've heard people say here, people I trust and people are very influential inside the party, that it's an uphill election for Harris, that they think that if the election was held today, Trump would win it, or at least have a very, very good shot of winning it. And one of the things influencing that. Is there different polls that are treated in different ways in the parties, right? And a bunch of the polls are public, but they're not all public. And one of the major super PACs that is very well respected among Democrats is Future Forward. And they have done a bunch of battleground state polling. I don't have the exact numbers, but this has been reported on. That polling is showing it closer than a lot of the public polling is. It is showing it to be very much a toss up.

• 15:13Ezra Klein?

  It is not showing Harris with a lead in all of the battleground states in which she needs to lead, or at least not a safe lead. So there's a real feeling inside the party right now that maybe it's not as good as it looks, right? Maybe some of the polling bounce is a early bounce for Harris because people are excited. There's something in polling called response rate bias. When one side becomes more excited, they have a tendency to respond more often to pollsters. So it is possible that the polling is overstating Harris's strength right now. There's worry that if you look at the internals of polling, that Harris is doing so well with white working class voters that it just doesn't look plausible to people in the Democratic Party

• 15:58Ezra Klein?

  that she's improved that much on where Joe Biden was with white working class voters. Or if she has, that that will probably not sustain until Election Day. So there is a feeling that this election is very far from won. She might even still be somewhat behind and that the party still does need to figure out how to win it. There's also a feeling, and you hear this in the consistent things that the speakers are saying, that it's very unclear who's going to win the House and Senate. And Democrats are particularly very worried about losing the Senate. They're going to lose Joe Manchin's seat. They're worried about losing John Tester's seat. They're worried about losing Sherrod Brown's seat in Ohio.

• 16:38Ezra Klein?

  It is not out of a plausible outcome that they could keep the Senate at 50 or 51, but it would also be very easy to see them going down to 49, going down to 48, going down to 47. And that could be true even in a world where Kamala Harris wins. And if Kamala Harris wins, but Republicans control the Senate, and particularly if she wins and they control the Senate and the House, she's not getting her agenda through.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  You mentioned earlier that people told you that the election is still looking around even odds, 50/50. One of the arguments for getting Biden to step aside was that the new candidate would have better odds. So do you get a sense that there's buyer's remorse now, or a sense of regret?

• 17:22Ezra Klein?

  No. Everybody believes Harris has way better odds, including people who are skeptical of the shift. I'll note that future forward polling, they were giving Biden a chance of victory in the single digits. Like, that is how unlikely they thought a Biden win had become. So that was the level of grimness in the party. So going from a single-digit shot of winning in the eyes of some of these people polling and modeling out the election to functionally a coin toss, that is a huge, huge difference.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  So what are the theories that people have to improve those odds, get it to, I don't know, like 55/45?

• 18:03Ezra Klein?

  So this is an interesting thing about where the party is right now. Usually by this point, the strategic direction of the party has been decided. Typically, when you have a candidate running who is not actually the incumbent, they will have run in a primary. And when they've run in a primary, a primary is a contest of a number of things, but one of the things it is a contest of is theories of how to win the election. Where you think about 2020, Joe Biden is offering a more moderate theory. You have Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders saying, you know, you're gonna juice enthusiasm by running much more significantly to the left. You know, you have Cory Booker arguing for a candidacy about

• 18:46Ezra Klein?

  love and about civic virtues. There's been nothing like that this year. And so Harris, who had the benefit of this instant coalescence around her.

• 18:58Ezra Klein?

  She didn't have to articulate one answer inside the Democratic Party. It has been so new for everybody who is arguing she's light on policy detail. Typically, candidates have an entire primary to work through and roll out their policies. It isn't something you can do overnight. It actually takes time to work with your policy team and work through the numbers and try to figure out what it is you want to do and say and how you conceptualize a problem and which kind of advice you want to take. So she's having to do everything at warp speed. That means a lot is not yet done. She has released a couple of economic policies and functionally, nothing else. I frankly, as a policy person, would not want her to come out with an entire policy platform in three weeks.

• 19:37Ezra Klein?

  If you've come out with an entire policy agenda in three weeks, three weeks when you were also planning a convention, choosing your vice president, figuring out your stump speech and beginning to campaign, then what you have done is rushed your policy agenda. I'm not giving her a pass here. I'm being realistic about the fact that policy is hard and it takes time. And so there's a lot of room for people to influence her. And one thing happening at this convention, happening, you know, from the speaker's podium, but also happening behind the scenes, is people making their cases to each other. People making their cases to her advisors, people doing breakfast where they show polling data supporting the way they see the situation. So there is a faction of the party right now that is saying, we need to moderate on key issues, which he's actually doing some of, right?

• 20:22Ezra Klein?

  Moderate on the border, show that we're a party of tough border security. We're losing on immigration. We need to show that we get it. There's arguments for moderating on economics, for talking more about deficit reduction, for showing their better stewards of the public money, for doing this on crime, you know, et cetera. There are the arguments of the economic populists. You've heard a lot of those, but that you can only blunt Donald Trump's populism with a stronger, more authentic form of populism. Be the real deal of the thing him and J.D. Vance are only claiming to be. They're the people who really understand this is attentional and viral, right?

• 20:58Ezra Klein?

  And sort of, you know, I don't want to say what they want to do is meme their way to victory, but there is a sense that Harris could kind of build a movement without having to choose between these different theories. It is true that the candidate is already chosen at this convention. But it is less true than it normally is that the shape of that candidacy is already chosen. Now, because Harris is vice president, some of it reflects the shape of the Biden presidency, but not all of it. And so there's actually more clay that is being molded here and more strategic arguments being debated than at other conventions I've I've attended or covered.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  You've also told me before that Harris is much stronger at campaigning over over rights. So can you talk a bit more about that?

• 21:41Ezra Klein?

  Different candidates in the party and different figures in the party have different kinds of of expertise and comfort. If you run a general from the military, which is often something that that parties consider doing, although they usually don't do it, that person is probably going to be very comfortable on foreign policy and national defense and not that comfortable talking about healthcare and the economy. A lot of candidates come out of more economic background. That's a very, very normal thing. You know, maybe they've governed in in a state, you know, they're good at talking about the kinds of things governors handle, but they don't really know how to talk about North Korea, about Israel, about NATO, et cetera. Harris, her background is much more around law and rights.

• 22:26Ezra Klein?

  The work she did in California was as a prosecutor, as an attorney general. She's very, very comfortable talking about constitutional rights. She's very, very comfortable talking about law and order, about justice. A lot of her close advisors, if you look at people she's been talking to for a long time in the party, they're lawyers, right? They're people who teach in law schools or people who run legal nonprofits. But Harris is not associated, in the way a lot of candidates are, with an economic faction within the party. She's extremely strong on questions of voting rights, on questions of reproductive rights, on questions of criminal justice. But in terms of which side of the party she sides with on

• 23:09Ezra Klein?

  the economy and on some other matters of domestic policy, I mean, I think you should understand her as a kind of mainstream Democrat. I think you should understand her as not very far from where Joe Biden was. So it's not that I'm predicting a huge break, at least not at first. But yeah, she is coming from a different part of the party than a lot of presidents have recently and has just had less experience on running campaigns based on economics than some of the other candidacies we've seen.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Let's talk about more of the specifics of what we know about Harris's economic platform. She gave a speech last Friday outlining quite a few of them. Can you talk a bit more about that?

• 23:51Ezra Klein?

  Absolutely. So I think the really interesting thing about the set of economic policies Harris released is actually looking at the ordering of them in the fact sheet they put out. Because what comes first? It's build the American dream, lowering the cost of renting and owning a home. I have not seen ever a Democratic Party presidential nominee who puts at the very top of their economic agenda, lowering the cost of housing. Whether her policies will actually do that, I think is a bit of an open question because she's sort of pushing in two directions at once here. She has, on the one hand, number one, calling for the construction of 3 million new housing units to end the housing supply shortage in the next four years.

• 24:36Ezra Klein?

  There's not that much detail on how they would do that. You have to cut a lot of red tape that exists at the local level and change a lot of process at the local and state level to get there. But it does suggest that the Democratic Party has at least developed a theory of the housing problem that is a housing supply problem. In the past, what housing policy meant among Democrats was you subsidized rent. Here, what it means is that you need to build a bunch more homes. On the other side of it, she has an idea to give new home buyers $25,000 in certain conditions. And there's, I think, reasonable concern about that. In a lot of places where what you have is a constraint on how many homes you can build,

• 25:18Ezra Klein?

  if you just give new home buyers a credit, that's just going to increase prices. Sellers are going to pocket that. So whether or not she has the policy exactly right here, I think, is an open question, and I would need to spend more time reporting that out. But I do think the emphasis is interesting. To me, the other major policy in here, which reflects something that both the Biden administration actually did and that Harris was a leader on when she was in the Senate, is proposing a very expanded child tax credit, which would be an up to $6,000 tax credit per child. And that's just good policy. It would do huge amount to cut child poverty. And it's just good to give families with children, particularly poor families with children, help. Like when you talk about wanting to make it easier to have families, like that is a

• 26:01Ezra Klein?

  great way to do it. So I thought the the plan overall, it reflected the right emphases, right? If you ask me what I would prioritize right now in economic policy, housing affordability and an expanded child tax credit would be very much the top couple of things on my list, too. So I was happy to see it.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  All right. And to end the conversation, what did you think of Joe Biden's speech last night?

• 26:25Ezra Klein?

  I thought it was quite moving. I thought a couple of pieces that were very moving in particular, the thing where people kept chanting, "Thank you, Joe."

• 26:38Ezra Klein?

  And he would say, "Thank you, Kamala."

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Thank you, Kamala.

• 26:44Ezra Klein?

  It really spoke to a decency in him. The long applause for him, that he was dabbing tears from his eyes as he hugged his daughter when he came out. All of that, it was very moving. I did not, myself, find Biden's speech that effective, I guess. It was a reminder of how grim and existential the tone of his campaign often was, which is not to say it was wrong. But it was actually, in this era of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and Republicans are weird, the shift back to the tone of the Biden campaign, that dark, democracy is

• 27:25Ezra Klein?

  on the line tone we saw at the campaign reelect kickoff, it was jarring to go back there. And it felt to me less effective. Like, it really did feel like Democrats have come into a kind of joy in their campaign, that when I saw a primetime speech that lacked it, you're like, oh, this move has been good for the party. Biden's defense of his own record and description of his own record, I thought that was quite strong and true, right? He's done a tremendous amount. He's been a very strong president. But in many ways, to me, what was the real evidence of what Joe Biden has done was the whole night of the convention itself. This is the party that Joe Biden built.

• 28:10Ezra Klein?

  These connections between the moderate wings of Joe Biden and Gina Raimondo and Bernie Sanders and AOC, that is Joe Biden's legacy. He actually did that. No one else did that. He did that. And the passing of the torch to Kamala Harris, he did that. Yes, there was pressure, but he did that. He chose Kamala Harris. He is the one who signaled to the party, when there's genuine doubt about whether it should do this, that it should unite around her. It is true that before that, people around him had seeded a lot of doubt about her and used views about her weakness to sort of bolster his position. But when he stepped down, he ended that and

• 28:50Ezra Klein?

  set a different tone around her. Now it is seen as like a remarkable decision. And Joe Biden could step out on that stage and in a way people would cheer for, say, the first decision I made on getting the nomination and the best decision I made as president, or I think actually said in his political career, was to choose Kamala Harris as his vice president, right? So we are looking right now, not at the Democratic Party that Kamala Harris built. We're looking at the Democratic Party that Joe Biden built. And it's also worth noting that past Democratic Presidents have not left the Democratic Party in good shape. The Democratic Party, in terms of its down ballot strength, was wrecked at the

• 29:34Ezra Klein?

  end of, not only Obama's second term, it was in pretty bad shape at the end of Obama's first term, too. And Joe Biden, and this is not necessarily all due to him, it had to do with Dobbs and other things, but the 2022 midterm was a much better election for Democrats than the 2010 midterm or the 1994 midterm. They're doing really well in governor's mansions, right? They have a lot more state legislatures right now than they've had at some points. So there is a strength in the Democratic Party, a unity in the Democratic Party. The sort of deeply restored connection to unions, the fact that Biden actually marched on a picket line, that is a connection that Joe Biden has rebuilt and put unions back

• 30:16Ezra Klein?

  at the center of democratic identity. Biden was a party builder, and he built a party. And if Democrats win this year, if they win with his vice president atop the party coalition he built, that really is his legacy. It's not just his record as president, it is his record as leader of the party. And that wasn't said explicitly last night, but I think if you watched the night, it was really reflected. Like, the whole night was a celebration in a way, but also a demonstration of the Democratic Party Joe Biden redesigned. And I found that actually quite moving to see.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  All right, we'll leave it at that. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

• 31:01Ezra Klein?

  Thank you, Roland.

• 31:16Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klein Show is produced and hosted by Roland Hu, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Sianuski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rose Strasser.