Where Does This Leave Democrats?

The coalition the Democratic Party built in the Obama years has crumbled. But Democrats can choose how to respond. Mentioned: “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” 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 by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Jack McCordick and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Elias Isquith. Original music by Pat McCusker. 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.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

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

• 0:30Ezra Klein?

  I find I'm thinking a lot about the 2004 election. That was, in my lifetime, until today, the most absolute rejection liberals have experienced. In 2000, George W. Bush, he was this accidental president. He'd lost the popular vote, he'd won the Electoral College by a few hundred votes in Florida, maybe, depending on how you look at it. But by 2004, he'd become this other thing. 9/11 had changed him, changed his presidency. He went from advocating this humble foreign policy to being an invader, a nation builder. And the lies and the failures and the travesties of his administration were clear.

• 1:14Ezra Klein?

  The disaster that was the Iraq War was clear. And Bush went, in that election, from accidental president to unquestioned victor. He won the popular vote cleanly. On the electoral maps, the center of the country was just this sea of red. And what made that loss hurt so much for liberals was that by then, Americans knew what George W. Bush was. They knew what he had done, and they chose him anyway.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  The voters turned out in record numbers and delivered an historic victory.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  We congratulated someone who lied to the American people. And as a result, not only is our health care and our economy in the pits, but our kids have died in a war that shouldn't have to be fought.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  And I am pretty much terrified because I'm not sure what's going to be the outcome in the next four years.

• 2:05Ezra Klein?

  That is roughly what happened on Tuesday. Donald Trump's victory was not one of the grand landslides of American politics. As I write this on Wednesday, the estimates suggest he is on track for a one and a half point margin in the popular vote. If that holds, and it may not, it may change as California is fully counted, it is smaller than Barack Obama's win in 2012 or 2008, it is smaller than George W. Bush's win in 2004, or Bill Clinton's wins in 1996 and 1992. It may prove even smaller than Hillary Clinton's 2.1% popular vote margin in 2016. But it is a huge gain for Trump compared to 2020.

• 2:47Ezra Klein?

  In 2020, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly five points. And yes, I know presidential elections in America, they are not decided by the popular vote. But it matters where the mood of America is moving, and the popular vote tells us more about that than the few hundred thousand voters who could have swung this thing in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. So what is behind Trump's gain here? One theory is that this is the post-pandemic, post-inflation, anti-incumbent backlash that we've been seeing in country after country after country. Whoever was in power in 2021 and 2022 is getting annihilated in elections.

• 3:31Ezra Klein?

  This is true for parties on the right and parties on the left. In the UK, the Tories had their worst election ever. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party, which confusingly for us is a conservative party, had one of their worst elections ever. Left-of-center governments have fallen in Sweden and Finland and Portugal. Look a little bit north and Canada's Justin Trudeau is hideously unpopular. As Matt Iglesias wrote, "If you look at this internationally, the interesting question might be, why didn't Trump win this in a landslide? If Nikki Haley had been running, she probably would have." There's a lot to that, but it is incomplete, because Trump didn't just win this election. Democrats lost it.

• 4:17Ezra Klein?

  Joe Biden, at 80 years old and hovering beneath 40% favorability in most polls, should never have run for reelection. But for months and months and months, the Democratic Party, with very few exceptions, shout out here, I guess, to Dean Phillips, refused to say that. As poll after poll showed super majorities of voters thought Biden too old for this job, the party continued to suppress any serious challenge to him, or even really dissent about him. It suppressed its own doubts. It ignored its own voters, to say nothing of ignoring the voters it was going to need to win in 2024. I was one of the people arguing, since back in February, for some kind of competitive

• 5:00Ezra Klein?

  process, a mini-primary or primary, leading to an open convention. Those processes, what they do is create information. Yes, they can bring argument and dissension and conflict and fracture, but it is through argument and dissension and conflict and fracture that you discover what you do not yet know. It is through the bruising process of primaries and debates and speeches and interviews that you see what candidates are made of. You see how and whether they are able to connect to the mood and the moment of the country. But Biden stepped aside mere weeks before the Democratic convention. The hour was so late. The party was so scared. It had wasted so much time.

• 5:45Ezra Klein?

  And in wasting that time, it had refused to face up to a core problem. Biden wasn't just too old. People were deeply unhappy with his administration, with the wars abroad, with the prices at home, with the absence of a story or a sense of leadership that made them confident that the people in charge knew what they were doing. The line in the Democratic Party was and is that Biden is one of the greatest presidents since FDR. It is just a shame he's not 15 years younger. But Americans did not and do not believe that. Democrats never reckoned with that fact. They never came up with an answer for it. And that, more than any other reason, is why Kamala Harris lost.

• 6:29Ezra Klein?

  Harris was dealt a bad hand. She had no time to set up her own campaign. She had no time to work out its themes and core policies. And she was running inevitably as the champion or the inheritor, or frankly, just a member of an administration people were angry at. She could not separate herself out from Joe Biden without being accused of disloyalty.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?

• 6:58Speaker 05

  There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I've been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact. The work that we have done, for example, capping the cost of insulin at $35 a month for our seniors is something I care deeply about.

• 7:15Ezra Klein?

  But I'm not sure there was any answer she could have given there that would have worked. It's just not credible to run as a vice president disowning the record of the administration in which you served, of the ticket you were part of. I think she ran a pretty good campaign, given how little time and how little room she had to build and design it. But at the core of that campaign was this very difficult problem. An incumbent can run on their record if the record is popular. A challenger can promise change. Harris could do neither. There is, for me, this what if. What if Biden hadn't run again? What if Democrats had given themselves the gift of a real primary? The party has plenty of talent, and Harris had real weaknesses.

• 8:00Ezra Klein?

  She can be amazing on the stump. She's a killer in debates. But one thing Harris was not able to do, not in 2020, not in 2024, was define what her campaign was about, at least aside from keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. She ran as the guardian of the institutions, a candidate with Liz Cheney on one side and Liz Warren on the other. But she took for granted the worth and health of those institutions. Was the endorsement of the Cheneys and the enthusiasm with which it was embraced a sign of the Democrats' big tent or a sign of its internal confusion? And Harris was not unburdened by all that had come before her. There were ways in which she wanted to build a bigger tent.

• 8:43Ezra Klein?

  But the Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent. I just went and I listened to some of the appearance Elon Musk made on Joe Rogan's podcast on Monday. It's gotten really deeply weird and right wing and conspiratorial over there.

• 8:58Speaker 06

  If the Dems won this election, they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states and everywhere will be like California. There will be no escape.

• 9:07Speaker 07

  That is so insane.

• 9:08Speaker 06

  This is the final. This is it. This is the last chance.

• 9:14Speaker 07

  Has anybody tried to push back?

• 9:16Speaker 06

  And I just want to like, go out and vote. Vote like your life depends on it. Vote like your future depends on it because it does. This is the last chance, man.

• 9:27Ezra Klein?

  But it wasn't always like that on Rogan's podcast. It wasn't that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview. And then Rogan kind of sort of endorsed him.

• 9:38Speaker 07

  I think I'll probably vote for Bernie. Him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him and I believe in him. I like him. I like him a lot. He's been insanely consistent his entire life. He's basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life.

• 9:54Ezra Klein?

  And you know what happened after that? Many liberals were furious at Bernie Sanders for going on Rogan in the first place. I was still on Twitter back then and I wrote about how of course Bernie Sanders was right to be there, that the fact that Sanders could attract people like Rogan was one of the very best arguments for his campaign, one of the reasons he might be able to beat someone like Donald Trump. This was 2020. If you wanted to beat Trump, of course you try to win over Rogan and his voters. But online liberals got so pissed at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic on Twitter. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not the kind of person you wanted to talk to.

• 10:38Ezra Klein?

  But if these last years have proven anything, it's that you don't get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on Rogan regularly all these years. They should have been prioritizing it this year. Yes, Harris should have been there and in places like it. Same for Tim Walz. On YouTube alone, Rogan's interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. You're just gonna abandon that? In an election where you think the other side winning means fascism?

• 11:06Ezra Klein?

  In 2016, Democrats were shocked to lose to Trump. But that loss had the consolation of chance. Democrats won the popular vote, and you can make a very good case that if the Comey letter hadn't hit right at the end of the campaign, Hillary Clinton would have won. I believe that case. And so the response was resistance, treating Trump as accidental, sometimes even illegitimate. In 2020, Trump loses the popular vote decisively, but more people voted for him than did in 2016. He still came within a few hundred thousand votes of winning the Electoral College again. And that was true despite all the chaos of his administration, despite the harm he caused during the pandemic.

• 11:50Ezra Klein?

  And it was true in part because he began doing something Democrats didn't expect: winning over Black and Hispanic voters, who Democrats thought they had a lock on. And now we're here. Trump got the win in 2024. He could only see the glimmers of before. He got it despite January 6th, despite the criminal charges and convictions, despite the wild statements, the weaving rants, despite how terribly he performed in the debate with Harris. Democrats did everything they could to convince voters Trump was unfit for office, and voters gave Trump his first-ever popular vote victory.

• 12:29Ezra Klein?

  It is brutal losing an election, particularly one with the stakes that this one carried. And emotionally, there are two ways Democrats can respond right now: contempt or curiosity. And I've seen plenty of contempt already. The sentiment that if Americans are willing to vote for Donald Trump, given all that he has said and all that he has done, then that's on them. There's nothing Democrats or Harris could have done to dissuade them. There will be a desire to retreat back, to hunker down, to draw the boundaries of who is decent and who is a fascist ever more clearly. But Democrats are losing too many people they need. Trump sharply improved his margin in New York City.

• 13:13Ezra Klein?

  So many people I've met since moving here, they just don't like Democrats anymore. They're not that political. They voted for Democrats in the past to the extent they voted. But now they're mad about prices, they're mad about immigration, they're mad about a sense of disorder and failure and confusion and fecklessness. I want to be very careful about relying on exit polls, but one thing we seem to be seeing in polling is that Trump improved a lot with voters making less than $50,000 a year. These are the voters the Democratic Party prides itself on serving. They are losing the voters at the core of their conception of their own party. There has to be curiosity here, curiosity about what these people are experiencing

• 13:56Ezra Klein?

  and why they're seeing Trump so differently than liberals do. Democrats have to be going to places they have not been going and taking seriously opinions and experiences they have not been taking seriously. And I'm not just talking here about a woke/unwoke divide, though I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men, now consume. I don't think Rogan was close to them. I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them, and it was a terrible mistake and one that's going to take a long time to undo. But I'm also talking here about the day-to-day Democratic governance. When voters are this unhappy with the way you've wielded power, particularly if you

• 14:40Ezra Klein?

  think you've wielded it well, you really have to struggle with why. That work has maybe begun in the Democratic Party. I think you see it in the Biden administration's eventual pivot to border enforcement, which Harris very much emphasized in her campaign, but it was clearly too little and too late. There's another part of the 2004 experience and its aftermath that I've been thinking about. So immediately after that election, Democrats became obsessed with winning back the heartland, with their cultural distance from the voters they needed. There was this belief that gay marriage bowel initiatives had cost Democrats the election.

• 15:20Ezra Klein?

  There was a vogue for tough masculine politicians like Brian Schweitzer than the Democratic Governor of Montana. Democrats felt they were considered weak, and if they were ever to be competitive again, they'd have to be seen as strong. They'd have to moderate, both ideologically and culturally. To win again, they would need to become more like what had defeated them. But George W. Bush's win in 2004 was not the beginning of a Republican realignment. It was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. Because what liberals thought of Bush then was true. His administration was a disaster. The Iraq War was a catastrophe built on lies. And all of that would come clearer and come to be more widely believed within a few years.

• 16:04Ezra Klein?

  By the time of the next presidential election, Democrats had opened the door to a new politics, a politics that seemed almost unimaginable in 2004. Yes, Barack Obama's convention speech that year was startlingly good, but he was still an anti-war black man with a middle name Hussein, whose politics were forged in Chicago. That wasn't what Democrats thought would win them Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Indiana in 2008. But it was. And meanwhile, the Bush administration's overreaches, failures, and scandals left the reputation of the Republican Party's elites so absolutely smashed that the stage was set for Donald Trump's eventual and complete takeover of the party.

• 16:50Ezra Klein?

  I'm not going to sit here and tell you I know how the next Trump administration will go.

• 16:56Ezra Klein?

  Trump is surrounded now by people who are much more relentlessly focused on carrying out his will and their own. Republicans have the Senate and the Supreme Court and will likely win the House. That is just a huge amount of power for a man not known for wielding power carefully or responsibly. And sure, maybe J.D. Vance and Elon Musk and RFK Jr. will bring a judiciousness or coherence to Trump’s governing style that he didn’t have in his first term. I think it is as or more likely that they egg Trump into ideological overreach. And my God, the corruption we are about to see. So is this the beginning of the Trump realignment?

• 17:38Ezra Klein?

  Or will this end with Trump’s name and reputation as tattered as that of the Bush dynasty he destroyed? I don’t know. But Democrats need to admit that they are at the end of their own cycle of politics. The Obama coalition is over. It is defeated. It is exhausted. What comes next needs to be new. That means going to new places and being open to new voices. A politics right for the next era will not be a politics designed to win the last election. It’s not going to be predictable from where we stand right now. Just as Obama’s 2008 landslide would have sounded laughable in 2004, and just like how Donald Trump’s 2016 win would have sounded like a joke in 2012.

• 18:21Ezra Klein?

  Discovering what is next amidst the pain and possibly the horror of what is about to come is going to require Democrats to open themselves to a lot of conflict and a lot of curiosity.

• 18:55Ezra Klein?

  I'm joined now by our supervising editor Claire Gordon to talk a bit more about the election and that essay. Claire?

• 19:02Claire Gordon?

  Hi, great to be here.

• 19:04Ezra Klein?

  Really? Are you thrilled to be here?

• 19:06Claire Gordon?

  Uh, no, I'm in a pretty weird place right now. And it is amazing how quickly Joe Biden can go from a hero to the man who handed the White House to Trump.

• 19:19Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, look, I have a lot of sadness for Joe Biden in this. But it is what it is, right? If your whole point in coming back into politics is to win the fight for the soul of the nation, to vanquish the threat that Donald Trump poses, and in the end, Donald Trump succeeds you with a larger coalition than he's ever had before, then your political mission failed.

• 19:48Claire Gordon?

  Watching the returns with you last night, you were surprised. You thought Harris was going to win. Why were you surprised?

• 19:58Ezra Klein?

  When I looked at the election, the polls were so 50/50, you couldn't just say, well, I'd go with the polls and that shows Harris will win or Trump will win. They were, you know, right on the edge. So the question was, is there a miss in one direction or another? And I looked around at things that looked like signals of enthusiasm to me. How big the rallies were, how much money was being raised, including by small donors.

• 20:22Ezra Klein?

  I do think that what led me and what has continuously been leading people astray is that the voters turning out for Trump are not highly political, right? There was an argument going into this election that the coalitions have flipped such that high turnout is bad for Democrats now. Early on the election day, you saw a lot of Democrats celebrating high turnout. And that was clearly a mistake. High turnout was bad for Democrats. And so one reason I think signals of enthusiasm that reflect people doing highly political things like going to a rally, or going outdoor knocking, or donating money.

• 21:03Ezra Klein?

  Didn't tell me which way the polls were going to be wrong. Is it the way in which the polls were wrong again was that Donald Trump is pretty good at exciting or turning out disaffected voters? And his coalition, they don't do a lot of things that highly political voters do, like turn out in midterms and special elections. But they will turn out in a presidential campaign, given how high the stakes are and how much people hear about it and how much money is invested in turning them out into the polls. And that's what happened here.

• 21:36Claire Gordon?

  I want to go back to something you said early on in your piece about how, based off of the macro conditions in the world, the anti-incumbent sentiment that Trump really should have won by more and that Nikki Haley would have won in a landslide. That feels very different from the narratives you hear now about Trump being this specifically transformative political figure. He's speaking to this anti-elite sentiment that Nikki Haley has no place in the Republican Party anymore, that Nikki Haley is not the kind of figure that would win this kind of election. So is it wrong to interpret Trump's win that way?

• 22:12Ezra Klein?

  I think both things can be true. Trump is triggering a realignment of the parties, which is a really remarkable thing to trigger in American politics. It's not an easy thing to do, where the nature of the Republican coalition really has changed. And if you had told Democrats in 2016 the margins Donald Trump would be getting with Black and Hispanic voters in 2024, they would have laughed in your face. At the same time, that realignment is not coming along with historic success for this new Republican coalition. It's not weird for the out-of-power party to win an election. Not weird for them to win the popular vote by a point or two, which, again, right now looks to be where Donald Trump will end up.

• 22:57Ezra Klein?

  There's not like a 2008 landslide, and it's not like the Tories' loss in the UK. This is a still fairly close election that could have been flipped by a couple hundred thousand votes in the swing states. There's not been a down-ballot red wave this year either. I think they're going to win the Senate and the House, but it looks like a lot of endangered Democrats in swing states are going to hold on. And I think something that shows you is that this wasn't just broad anti-incumbent sentiment. Plenty of incumbents did just fine. And it wasn't even broad anti-democratic sentiment. If you look at a lot of these Senate races and House races, plenty of Democrats did just fine. There was specific anger at the Biden administration.

• 23:42Ezra Klein?

  And that was what Trump was able to take advantage of, not just support for him, but a genuine disappointment people had in what the Biden-Harris administration has wrought.

• 23:54Claire Gordon?

  How do you understand specifically that anger? Because there was a theory too, when Biden was still in the race and his approval ratings were in the toilet where they have stayed, that it was because he couldn't communicate well enough. He couldn't sell these amazing legislative accomplishments. He couldn't do the dance of selling how actually the economy in America is great if you compare it to other countries in the world. But Harris couldn't sell that either.

• 24:21Ezra Klein?

  I still think that's true, actually. It's so hard because we're all a little too patterned on the elections we've lived through. But I talked a lot about 2004 in the essay, but think about 2012. Barack Obama is running for reelection. Unemployment, at least as of the middle of that election cycle, was above 8%. It was so high. The economy was so much worse than it is now. And Obama ends up winning by quite a bit. And one of the ways he wins is that Obama and the Democratic Party united around him are able to really tell a story about the economic recovery. They're able to take how people feel about the objective facts that are around them and give them this different gloss.

• 25:06Ezra Klein?

  Yes, this is hard and it is grueling and it is grinding, but America is coming back faster than other countries. This is a mess. It was left for Obama and the Obama administration. And Mitt Romney, given who he serves and what he has proposed and what his intuitions in politics are, is not going to lead to a kinder, gentler economy for the people currently left out, and that works. And if Joe Biden were 65, maybe he could have pulled that off. But instead, there's this late baton handoff to Kamala Harris, who has to decide between trying to sell the Biden administration's record, when it is quite unpopular, and trying to create her own separated identity, and kind of ends up in between the two things.

• 25:51Ezra Klein?

  And so I don't think we know what this looks like with a more capable incumbent who could have run an actual reelection campaign, which is what you normally would have seen in this scenario, or a non-incumbent who is not tied to the current administration's record. As I say, I think she was dealt a very difficult hand. I think in many ways, she played it very well, moderated on key policies, really did some excellent speeches and some, did an excellent debate and had some really, really strong set pieces. The place where I do fault her and where I faulted that campaign is I don't think they came up with a message that connected policy, critique, and vision in a way that really said, this is what Kamala Harris is about,

• 26:37Ezra Klein?

  and this is the way the country will change if she is elected. And I think that's always been a weakness of hers. She has other strengths, but you would have needed a really, really, really strong candidate to do that at that speed, and she wasn't able to do that.

• 26:52Claire Gordon?

  Was it possibly an impossible job? You wrote a piece back in February about the Democratic Party's identity crisis and how basically it was trying to represent now many contradictory things, that it was now the party of normalcy in contrast to Trump, but also was the party of progress and change, that it was the party of the working class, but actually it's a core constituency or college-educated voters. Was Harris just like trying to speak to and unite all these different positions and groups? And it turns out you can't do that?

• 27:31Ezra Klein?

  I don't think so. Democrats have won too many elections, including in this election cycle, for me to believe Democrats cannot win in the states they need to win. Arizona has a Democratic governor, and it has a Democratic senator in Mark Kelly, and now looks to have another Democratic senator in Ruben Gallego. And so the idea that Democrats cannot win in these places, I just don't think it's true. There are Democrats who choose to run as the institutionalists, the guardians, right? That's much more how Joe Biden ran in 2020. And Democrats who choose to run more as outsiders, more as people making a critique, more as candidates angry at the way things are. I mean, you can see that in Bernie Sanders, but in other candidates

• 28:14Ezra Klein?

  too. And what I think was very hard for Harris here was there wasn't a lot of time to build out either of those pathways. And again, as the sitting vice president, she did not have that much maneuverability. So, look, her task was very hard. I'm not sure if it was impossible, but I don't think the Democratic Party's task was impossible. And I think from a standing start with a full primary to work out her campaign, or in which Democrats could have figured out which candidate was building a campaign that resonated most strongly right now in this environment, I think they could have won.

• 28:52Claire Gordon?

  You said the Democratic Party hasn't been listening enough to their voters. Harris presented a very different figure than who she cut in 2020. She basically abandoned all her more progressive positions from that year. She leaned into the fact that she's a former prosecutor. She led with housing policy. Is it just that she couldn't tie everything together into a coherent story?

• 29:19Ezra Klein?

  Maybe the thing I'm saying there is the Democratic Party didn't really listen to the voters until it was too late. The Biden administration has been extraordinary at managing the Democratic coalition and passing things inside the Democratic coalition that were thrilling to its progressive wing and somewhere between acceptable and exciting to its moderate wing. And so you had real support and love for Joe Biden and real admiration of him. And many of these policies are things that I think are really strong policies. And over time, they're going to show their worth, like the investments from the Inflation Reduction Act. At the same time, the party never answered, I think, because it didn't really want to face up to the fact that voters disagreed. They didn't like the way things

• 30:03Ezra Klein?

  felt, looked. They didn't think Joe Biden was up to it. And I do think Harris, when she took the reins, immediately began to pivot and try to emphasize things that reflected a sense of what people are upset about, right, emphasizing the bipartisan border bill. Housing, I think it was really an important thing that she put it so centrally in her proposals. It's not a thing I ever found that she spoke that effectively or passionately about. I think sometimes people can feel when a policy is really your policy. I would say that Harris really felt when she talked about Roe, when she talked about Dobbs, when she talked about reproductive rights, you could feel this was her issue. On others, you couldn't.

• 30:46Ezra Klein?

  When Donald Trump talks about immigration, you can feel it is his issue. Voters are pretty good at that. Always this critique that Harris needed more policies, I never bought it. I always said she needed two or three policies, the two or three that really defined her and that she cared the most about. Voters do not hold a large policy agenda in their heads. They sense what is fundamentally important. But Harris was listening and she was trying to build a campaign quickly that reflected where she thought the electorate was.

• 31:16Ezra Klein?

  I do think time was just such a problem here. I don't think it's easy to build a campaign. I don't think it's easy to build a message. I don't think it's easy to do the work sometimes as a politician of understanding what you think is the right thing to say and emphasize in that moment. And she did all of it so fast. I mean, the time between taking the reins of the campaign and picking the vice president and having the entire convention is a matter of weeks. That's supposed to happen over months. And so I am not highly critical of Harris here. I think she did a quite extraordinary job under very difficult circumstances. Doing it at that speed was just, you would have needed somebody who basically had the campaign all ready to go

• 31:58Ezra Klein?

  and had been like thinking about how to run as the principal already and had exactly the right critique and message for the moment. And clearly, in the end, she didn't. There are things I think they should have done differently, things in their media strategy. I've mentioned things like Rogan, things in their policy strategy. But I don't know how much any of that would have really mattered. In the end, Harris was a representative of the Biden administration, no matter whether she wanted to be or not. And people did not like the Joe Biden administration and she did not have a long time to build an alternative relationship with the electorate before they actually had to go vote.

• 32:35Claire Gordon?

  You ended your piece with a call for folks to be curious. I imagine a lot of people listening aren't really in the mood to open their hearts and minds in a space of curiosity to Trump and the people who support him. What do you recommend for folks who feel exhausted right now about the idea of living through another four years of Trump? Scared?

• 33:03Claire Gordon?

  Like, what should they do? What should they read?

• 33:07Ezra Klein?

  And people should take a rest, right? It's the end of election. The election was exhausting and anxious for everybody, I think, or at least everybody who was very tuned into it. You don't need to be engaged in politics 24/7. And, look, I'm saying this as much for myself as anybody. I've tried in the last couple of months to have a number of people on from at least some factions of the MAGA right, right? That's been a project I've been trying to pursue on the show, right? To try to be curious about what's happening there before the election, to try to understand it better. And I do think that's helped me understand it better. And with Trump, the empathic gap of getting to, you know, how somebody might support

• 33:49Ezra Klein?

  him is, for a lot of people, is for me, such a tremendous effort. It just takes a lot of work. But I don't think you can watch the way he has dominated politics now, since 2016. I mean, that is an appeal that if you refuse to work on what is driving it, I don't know how you think you're going to defeat it, right? And also, it just requires, like, you should be curious about your country and the other people in it and how they're experiencing things. But, again, my view about curiosity here is not just towards Donald Trump, right? This is not just the sort of canonical going to the diners and talking to his voters.

• 34:35Ezra Klein?

  It is also about just the way politics has changed. As I say at the end, I think this is the end of the Obama era, too. We'll see where the Trump era goes, but Biden was part of the Obama era. He was Barack Obama's vice president. Kamala Harris rose in politics in the Obama era. And a lot of the fundamental assumptions in the Democratic Party, they've been challenged by people like Bernie Sanders and AOC. They've been altered a bit, but this was fundamentally the Obama coalition. And I think that coalition is over now. It's lost too many people to Trump. It has lost elections it shouldn't have lost. I think it's a bit out of ideas and appeal. I don't think, you know, Joe Biden was not able to turn the page on Donald Trump, this battle for the soul of the nation.

• 35:19Ezra Klein?

  There was not a compelling story Democrats told about America, or at least a story that was compelling enough to Americans for them to win this year. They've lost touch with too many people they claim to represent. So something else is going to have to arise. And so when I say that this is going to require a lot of curiosity, you know, being curious about voters doesn't mean, it doesn't mean abandoning your values. It doesn't mean abandoning your moral commitments. And it doesn't mean thinking that any choice that was made was right just because somebody else won an election, right? Terrible people win elections all the time, all over the world. But it does mean, I think, taking seriously the world people are experiencing such that you can think about how to respond to that world.

• 36:03Claire Gordon?

  Well, with that, I'm going to go and take a nap. Thanks, Ezra.

• 36:10Ezra Klein?

  Thank you, Claire.

• 36:33Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klein Show is produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Jeff McCordick and Kristen Lynn. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, and Elias Isquith. We have original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Straus. (music)