Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and the New Rules of Political Attention

Attention is working in really unusual ways this election cycle. Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, ended up dominating his Senate primary against Maine’s sitting governor – even as his campaign was rocked by a series of scandals. James Talarico also seemed to come out of nowhere to become the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas. Jon Ossoff has ginned up a ton of excitement as a potential 2028 presidential contender, in part because of his viral videos. Meanwhile, the former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt became a political star on X during his bid to become mayor of Los Angeles and yet failed to make the runoff. All of this has a lot of lessons for how attention is working right now in American politics. So I wanted to have on my favorite person to talk to on this topic. Chris Hayes is the host of “All In With Chris Hayes” on MS NOW and the author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” Mentioned: “Donald Trump is going to win the election and democracy will be just fine” by Jared Golden “We Took AOC to a Deep Red Data Center Town” by More Perfect Union “America Dissected” by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed “Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?” with James Talarico, The Ezra Klein Show “Joe Rogan Experience #2352 - James Talarico” with James Talarico, The Joe Rogan Experience “Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President” by Michelle Goldberg “Obama Suddenly Panicked After Gazing Too Far Into Future” by The Onion Book Recommendations: Transcription by Ben Lerner The Godfather by Mario Puzo Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum 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 with Julie Beer and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. 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 Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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

• 0:30Ezra Klein?

  How did Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, come from nowhere to so thoroughly dominate the primary that Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, dropped out, or suspended her campaign, I should say, and didn't even come back in? As Platner was rocked by even more scandals.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Now, the national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by. But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all. This is a movement about us.

• 1:16Ezra Klein?

  The answer is that he had the most important political resource right now, and she was not able to grab any of it. That resource is attention. It's a constant theme now for me on the show, that you need to see attention as its own substrate of American politics. And attention is working in really unusual ways this year. In the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate, where Bill Al-Sayed is now in the lead.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Who here believes in Medicare for All?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  And who believes it's time to abolish ICE?

• 1:49Speaker 02

  And who believes we gotta get money out of politics and in your pocket?

• 1:54Ezra Klein?

  In Texas, where James Talarico, another person people hadn't really heard of a couple of years ago, is now the Democratic nominee for Senate.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  One thing is clear today. We're about to take back Texas.

• 2:09Ezra Klein?

  In Los Angeles, where we actually saw it fail in the mayoral candidacy of Spencer Pratt.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Reality TV star Spencer Pratt's insurgent campaign for LA mayor has officially run its course.

• 2:19Speaker 05

  These corrupt crooks really do look out for each other, don't they?

• 2:22Ezra Klein?

  What's happening with Jon Ossoff and the sudden rise in interest in what he's doing? All of it has a lot of lessons, I think, for how attention is working right now in American politics. To help me unpack them, I want to have on my favorite person to talk about this particular topic with. My friend Chris Hayes, host of All In with Chris Hayes, and author of the great book on attention in the modern moment, The Silence Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. As always, my email if you need our attention, [email protected].

• 3:04Ezra Klein?

  Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show. Always great to be back. So I wanted to have you here for one of our every-so-often check-ins on how attention is working in American politics. And I want to start with a Wall Street Journal interview that was with the people who recruited Graham Platner. How did you find Graham Platner?

• 3:23Speaker 06

  Well, so, I mean, we went through thousands and thousands of prospects. We, you know, through a number of means, you know, assessed just a huge amount of people. Then, you know, Leanne pulled up this video of this guy with an oyster farm. My name is Graham Platner, and I live in Sullivan, Maine, the owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company. And then she pulled up his FEC history and saw, you know, the money he'd given to Bernie Sanders and, you know, some other people. That was enough information to know that we had the best prospect that we'd maybe ever seen.

• 3:59Ezra Klein?

  Okay, I want to flush this out because I've been told this story by multiple people how this played out. This group, like, they were like, who could run in Maine?

• 4:06Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 4:07Ezra Klein?

  Like lobster farmer, oyster farmer, some kind of fisherman.

• 4:10Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Ezra Klein?

  And so when he says, we looked at thousands of people, like, the computer looked through occupational and other forms of records.

• 4:17Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 4:18Ezra Klein?

  It was like, which lobster farmers, like, who's donated to a populist candidate? Which is to say that, you know, we normally think of candidates as being recruited because they're important in their communities, or a lawyer, they run a hospital, something like that. A lot of people grow up wanting to run for office. But Graham Platner was cast, right? It was like Hollywood looking for somebody to fill a role.

• 4:46Chris Hayes?

  There's a long history there. I mean, the Democrats are running someone in Tom Keen's district who's a helicopter pilot. Mikey Sherrill was a helicopter pilot. They like, you know, that's a bio that's very-

• 4:58Ezra Klein?

  Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer.

• 5:00Chris Hayes?

  Exactly. So like, that part of it is an interesting version of a sort of grassroots, lefty populist group doing what the D-triple do, or the DSCC. But the reason this worked was because of the charisma. And charisma, at one level, it's like, I do think there's a kind of full circle thing happening in politics, which is like, of course charisma is important to politics. But I think particularly at the level of scale, there was a period where the formula really didn't take into account charisma.

• 5:28Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Chris Hayes?

  It was like bio, social capital, connections, ability to raise money, all that stuff. And then like, whatever, we'll cut some ads for them, we'll get them a good team, and they'll be fine. I think charisma matters much more now because attention matters more, and charisma is the talent for grabbing and holding attention.

• 5:46Ezra Klein?

  So I want to hold on what you just said about the D-triple C, because I think we both know a fair amount about the way they recruit.

• 5:51Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Ezra Klein?

  And one of the grim realities of how they recruit is they very heavily emphasize how much money you can raise. One, they will force you to sit on the phone-

• 6:02Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 6:02Ezra Klein?

  -six hours a day.

• 6:03Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 6:04Ezra Klein?

  Six hours a day. And they will punish you if you don't, right? You want to be on things like their red to blue lists.

• 6:09Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 6:09Ezra Klein?

  And so I know candidates who are just brow beaten into being on the phone, raising money for hours and hours and hours a day. And the DCCC, which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, isn't doing that because they're cynics.

• 6:25Chris Hayes?

  Right, or they have a fetish for it.

• 6:26Ezra Klein?

  Or they love money. You need money.

• 6:28Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 6:28Ezra Klein?

  But the thing money is buying largely is attention. I mean, it also buys field and organizing and other things.

• 6:35Chris Hayes?

  But the biggest thing is it buys TV.

• 6:37Ezra Klein?

  And so what this group is doing when they cast Platner, he's not a person who you go to and think, can you raise the money to buy attention? He's a person you go to and think, can you unleash the charisma to earn attention?

• 6:55Chris Hayes?

  Yes, exactly.

• 6:55Ezra Klein?

  Which then will bring in money.

• 6:58Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 6:58Ezra Klein?

  But even if it doesn't, attention.

• 7:01Chris Hayes?

  And this is the point is that you have to, I think, you have to have a theory of attention for a successful campaign right now in a way that when that formula was as dead set as it was in the kind of, you know, high point of broadcast TV ads, right? Like, raise as much money as possible, hit the airways with a ton of broadcast TV, and that's the recipe. That's 90% of a campaign. As broadcast TV particularly, and as broadcast TV ads decline in their salience, right? You have to have some alternate theory of how you're going to get to people. In some places, like in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, like, everyone in the state knows who Roy Cooper is, right? He doesn't have the same problem.

• 7:46Chris Hayes?

  The guy's been elected statewide, I think, five times at this point, something like that. So he doesn't have to do that. But if you're running another race, you do have to come up with some theory of how you're going to do it. In this case, it was casting, and then it was finding a person who genuinely has real, obvious, raw political talent and charisma.

• 8:05Ezra Klein?

  Okay, but we're underselling here the accomplishment of Platner. Because they are running in that race ultimately against a Roy Cooper-like figure.

• 8:17Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 8:17Ezra Klein?

  In Janet Mills.

• 8:18Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 8:18Ezra Klein?

  This is not a situation where there is an open primary of nobodies. It's not a situation where they're going into a place like Nebraska where they recruited Dan Osborne, the independent who ran, you know, a cycle ago and is running again this cycle. This is a situation where Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee had a candidate in mind, right? They have a Democratic governor of Maine, and they're going to run the Democratic governor of Maine against Mills to pick up that seat. And what happens just very, very, very quickly is that Platner squeezes Mills out attentionally. She, just the charisma gap between them.

• 8:57Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 8:57Ezra Klein?

  And the ability that he has to command attention, particularly online, but that then translates into all other forms of attention.

• 9:04Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Ezra Klein?

  Because like the newspapers follow it, the cable news follows it, he's on your show.

• 9:08Chris Hayes?

  He also.

• 9:08Ezra Klein?

  But he knocks out a sitting governor.

• 9:10Chris Hayes?

  Right, but he also, I mean, this is the other part of it, is he out campaigns her in that state on the ground. Like, it's not just the online part of it. I mean, and again, this is part of attention, too. Maine is a small state, right? I mean, Maine is a state where, you know, Susan Collins, at this point, knows, like, literally knows, a shockingly high percentage of Mainers, right?

• 9:31Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Chris Hayes?

  It's just the way it works when you're an institution like her. It's the kind of state where you can make inroads in retail politics in a way that you can't in the California governor's race, right? So, part of it, too, is that he just outworks her, but I think that.

• 9:46Ezra Klein?

  Much younger than she is. I mean, Mills is a 78-year-old candidate.

• 9:49Chris Hayes?

  Yes, and I think there's actually an interesting relation here between attention and risk appetite, because I think the two are so related. I think a lot of the things that have guided Democratic politics around attention have also related to risk aversion.

• 10:08Ezra Klein?

  Hmm.

• 10:09Chris Hayes?

  Don't get negative press. If you're choosing between no press and negative press, minimize downsides, okay? Other people could have run that primary. They knew that Schumer was trying to recruit Mills. She actually got in after Platner officially. Almost all of the big-name politicians in the state of Maine went for the governor's race.

• 10:27Ezra Klein?

  Right.

• 10:28Chris Hayes?

  Which was going to be vacated, it wasn't going to have a sitting incumbent, and you weren't going to take on the electoral colossus of Susan Collins. That's a lower-risk choice. Platner made a high-risk bet. And I do think there's a relationship between risk appetite and attention that's very much part of Democratic politics, which is there is a kind of institutional, low-risk appetite.

• 10:55Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on the word institution there. So Democratic Party, the Republican Party pre-Trump is like this, too. They choose people who succeed in institutions. So I mean, if you think about the candidates after Barack Obama, right? Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, in a different way, Kamala Harris, right? They're all people, they were not electoral juggernauts, right? Clinton lost to Barack Obama, but she was beloved within the Democratic Party at that time. Joe Biden was Barack Obama's vice president, and it kind of goes down like this.

• 11:26Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 11:27Ezra Klein?

  I think that there is an inverse relationship between the personality type.

• 11:33Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 11:33Ezra Klein?

  That succeeds institutionally and the personality type that succeeds attentionally.

• 11:38Chris Hayes?

  That's often true.

• 11:40Ezra Klein?

  And I think it is related to what you're talking about with risk.

• 11:43Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Ezra Klein?

  But I think it has created an almost structural problem in party recruiting. Because parties, as you were noting, they look for all these signals that are fundamentally signals of institutional capacity.

• 11:56Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Ezra Klein?

  Social capital.

• 11:57Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 11:58Ezra Klein?

  Ability to raise money, jobs that tend to have risen through the institutions. I mean, Platner is a downwardly mobile oyster farmer whose oyster farm doesn't really make money and sells to his mom's fancy restaurant, right? He is not, you wouldn't just look at it and think, that guy is the most impressive person in Maine.

• 12:16Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 12:16Ezra Klein?

  Right? It's not like Mikey Sherrill as a Navy pilot, you know? But the people who succeed in institutions are often, do not have personalities that are spiky in the way.

• 12:31Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Ezra Klein?

  The attentional moment currently rewards.

• 12:34Chris Hayes?

  So I think that's true. I think there's a few things going on. One is, we should talk about success in institutions and credentialing, which are sort of two different things, right? You know, it means a lot in the world of democratic progressive politics if someone went to Yale Law. So there's the credential part of it, there's actual success in institutions, there's relationships to those institutions, and then there's the kind of personalities that succeed in those institutions. The old term that you would use in the 50s and 60s, right? In a different era was like a company man, right? And like a company man is someone that gets along well with others in an organizational setting, doesn't make waves, doesn't upset people. And I think the idea of a company man is kind of what has been the template, again, almost necessarily, right?

• 13:18Chris Hayes?

  I mean, if you, like, as you said at the beginning of this part of the conversation, the Democratic Party is an institution.

• 13:25Ezra Klein?

  One thing that Platner is able to carry in a way that feels authentic is a genuine feeling that the system is hollow at its core.

• 13:38Ezra Klein?

  You know, people talk about- Which is not a put on with him, which is the key part of this. I think that's really, yes, I think that's important. I mean, you can say a lot about his life and what he has done or has not done, and we'll talk about some of that too. But he is somebody who believes the institutions have failed because they have failed for him, and he has failed out of them. Yeah. Right? The hostility is authentic. Yes. And when you listen to him on the stump, more than he is carrying a message about single payer healthcare or a Green New Deal, he is carrying a message about, you know, in a very different way than Bernie did, but using similar language about an unspecified political revolution. He is carrying a message about this is all wrong somehow. Yeah.

• 14:22Ezra Klein?

  And what you need is somebody who fundamentally believes it is all wrong somehow.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  The world that we live in today is not natural. We do not live in a political and economic reality that is organic. It is a system that is built by policy decisions, policy that is written by establishment politicians in Washington DC at the behest of their donors and their supporters. And it is a system that was made to make sure that no matter how hard you work, you will never feel like you have power. Power's for these people, and they're up there, they're qualified. They have the pedigree. They have the background. They're the ones that are allowed to make decisions for us. Don't worry ourselves. Let them take care of it.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Well, I'm going to tell you right now, that story is bullshit.

• 15:17Ezra Klein?

  And you can look across a lot of the candidates who are succeeding right now. You know, here, I do think Mamdani, you know, is a, you know, fits in. We'll talk about Abdul Sayed. Donald Trump was obviously like this. A large number of the candidates who have broken through are breaking through with a-

• 15:35Ezra Klein?

  With a message more even than an agenda of like genuine disillusionment.

• 15:42Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 15:43Ezra Klein?

  And anger.

• 15:44Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's a few related questions. So one, I think people use the term populism, which I think gets probably as close as any to what we're describing as a tendency. You know, disillusionment, frustration with a failed status quo, elite failure particularly. So there's a few interesting questions that flow out of that. One is, does that have a specific ideological valence? Can you be a moderate populist?

• 16:08Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 16:08Chris Hayes?

  Right? Can you be a centrist populist is one interesting question. Another is, can you channel the attentional politics when you are suddenly in the incumbent position?

• 16:22Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on something you said about being a moderate populist. You can be a moderate populist. And you know how we know that? Because there was one in Maine.

• 16:29Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 16:29Ezra Klein?

  The Democrat in the House representing the reddest district in the country.

• 16:34Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 16:34Ezra Klein?

  Is Jared Golden. He's a main member of Congress. He's a populist. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter. He is also a moderate. You know, you've kind of famously wrote this op ed about how Donald Trump wouldn't be the end of the world. He supported Donald Trump on tariffs, but he is also very, very pro labor. He's very disgusted with politics. And he has existed in a kind of politically miserable existence.

• 17:01Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 17:02Ezra Klein?

  He's been holding a seat probably no other Democrat could hold.

• 17:04Chris Hayes?

  And in fact, he's leaving now.

• 17:06Ezra Klein?

  And he is this year getting primaried from the left. And he decided, I'm done retiring. You know, you could have imagined a world where Democratic Party, you know, fell in love with this guy, embraced him and elevated him to run against Susan Collins. And in that world, I'd be like, Susan Collins is gone. Like she is gone. But I think the issue you see with Jared Golden and moderate populism is that you become very vulnerable in primaries.

• 17:36Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 17:37Ezra Klein?

  Because on both the right, but now on the left, I mean, the polling on this is really fascinating. If you look at the number of Democrats who said they were very liberal in, say, 1995, right? I mean, most Democrats were not liberal or very liberal in 1995. Like, they self-described as moderate. And now it's like, very liberal. It's very hard to survive. And it's also just very unpleasant.

• 17:57Chris Hayes?

  Yes. That part of it is a big part of it.

• 18:00Ezra Klein?

  Even if you consider the day to day of being yelled at by the advocacy groups on your side, by your own friends, the thing that you cannot seem to do right now is hold that together with being a successful candidate in primaries where you are having to appeal to a high attention electorate with very, very, very sordid political opinions.

• 18:26Chris Hayes?

  Yes. And you have, right, particularly in this sort of nationalized attentional atmosphere. I mean, that's part of it, too. Like, in another universe, people, no one online is paying attention to what Jared Golden's doing. Right? Like, you could be Jared Golden for your district, and like, the local news would cover you. And the, you know, the local TV news, the newspapers, maybe some, you know, some nerds would read about you in Roll Call. Because we're all operating in one attentional sphere, there's little, there's less and less room for that sort of variation. That used to just come about because, like, people just didn't pay attention to what the main two congressional candidate was doing.

• 19:31Ezra Klein?

  I think this brings up some of the flip side of Platner. And one reason I think Platner is such an interesting figure to start with here is he represents both sides of the gamble being made, right? The high risk, high attention charisma on the one hand. On the other hand, the point of getting this high risk candidate with a sort of anti institutional life story is you're not getting somebody who has been watching his step for a long time and you're getting somebody who's maybe misstepped quite a lot. So you've got the Nazi tone cough tattoo on the chest. Yep. And this kind of pulsing question about whether or not he knew about that. Yep. Of, I'm honestly a little skeptical that he did not know about it for as long as he says he didn't. I share that skepticism.

• 20:15Ezra Klein?

  Um, you have him sexting, uh, seems like about a half dozen women during this marriage. Yep. Or at least, you know, texting with them in an effort to, um, set up some kind of relationship. Also, there being some claims from an ex girlfriend, the one who works in Republican politics, that he was borderline abusive when they fought. I've had this trouble with Platner because on the one hand, I'm very charismatic. Much of what he says I like. No particular thing that has come out about him has been, I mean, he's also, he's very politically incorrect Reddit posts, maybe the best way to put it. Nothing that's come out about him on its own has been disqualifying for me. Yeah. I don't think he's anti Semite.

• 20:59Ezra Klein?

  He's, he was so politically incorrect on Reddit. Right. That if he weren't anti Semite, I think we would know. That's a good point. I think that one would have come out pretty clearly. That's a good point. I think, I think he knew what the tattoo was earlier. Yeah. And I think the spirit in which he, this is my view of him, right? This is not based on anything but my Rita situation. The spirit in which he and his friends got it was edgelordy. It was about it as a signal of a kind of vicious badassery, not a signal about Jews or Nazis. That's my view. I don't have, I cannot prove it, but I'm telling you what I think. The thing that worries me about Platner isn't any one thing. It is the sense that there is just bad judgment in the guy.

• 21:42Ezra Klein?

  I mean, the sexting with like the women is like, it's early in a marriage and that's pretty recent.

• 21:49Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Ezra Klein?

  Right. The thing that worries me about Platner isn't kind of any one of these things individually. It's that, you know, one thing about a guy who's failed out of a bunch of institutions and has kind of been downwardly mobile and has made a bunch of weird decisions and had a kind of Nazi tattoo is you might think, yeah, I want the best for him. I hope for all the best for him.

• 22:08Chris Hayes?

  Should he be a US Senator?

• 22:09Ezra Klein?

  Should he be a US Senator is a very different question than that, right?

• 22:13Chris Hayes?

  Yes, I mean.

• 22:14Ezra Klein?

  Would I, if I were appointing people from Maine, would I appoint Graham Platner? Like, I would not, but that's also not how.

• 22:20Chris Hayes?

  Well, right.

• 22:20Ezra Klein?

  Elections work.

• 22:21Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, we have the 17th amendment, right?

• 22:24Ezra Klein?

  Yes, but, but so that I think is, but here's like the thing. He's not running a general election yet. Susan Collins overperforms in polls. He has been.

• 22:35Chris Hayes?

  Totally.

• 22:36Ezra Klein?

  Generating attention and energy among Democrats and among particularly like the online left. And whether or not it creates an attack surface that, you know, you can attack this guy as fundamentally unreliable.

• 22:51Chris Hayes?

  Which is what they will do.

• 22:53Ezra Klein?

  Which is what they are doing.

• 22:54Chris Hayes?

  Are doing.

• 22:54Ezra Klein?

  With a lot of money.

• 22:55Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Ezra Klein?

  If Democrats win that seat, maybe this all looks genius. If they lose that seat, I think there's going to be like a level of factional hell to pay.

• 23:09Chris Hayes?

  So let me say that I basically share, essentially share everything you said. Like, could and have made those arguments. Let me just, for the sake of this conversation, take the other side for a second. One is, they did run someone in 2020 who was the most standard possible. State legislator, no scandal to speak of, raised a ton of money, a woman. And she got her butt kicked. In fact, she lost by like, I think nine points, right?

• 23:40Ezra Klein?

  When she was up in all the polls.

• 23:41Chris Hayes?

  She was up in all the polls.

• 23:42Ezra Klein?

  Which is part of why people are so nervous about this race.

• 23:43Chris Hayes?

  They're nervous about the race, but the other thing is, it's not like that was not tried against Susan Collins. It was tried, it didn't work. The second thing I would say, and this goes back to our risk thing, is there were like five people in that gubernatorial primary. They could have run for senate.

• 23:57Ezra Klein?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:58Chris Hayes?

  Like, the big names of Maine all ran for governor. So part of this is a little like, everyone's sort of wringing their hands. It's like, well, you have to have people running.

• 24:06Ezra Klein?

  Totally.

• 24:06Chris Hayes?

  They didn't run. He ran.

• 24:08Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Chris Hayes?

  Uh, what, what do you want to like, wha- what is the magic wand that makes them run? And they didn't run because that was a harder race. The third thing I would say is, I think there's a theory of the case here, and I'm not saying this is true. I'm just presenting it as a possibility. Is that part of the brand problem for the Democrats? Has been excessive conscientiousness.

• 24:31Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 24:31Chris Hayes?

  That this is the party of essentially kind of like schoolmarm tsk tsking. Now, that's extremely gendered. I want to be very clear about that. Um, and I think a lot of the conversation about platner on both sides of the very intense polarized debate within the democratic coalition is very gendered. That said, I think it's, you know, there is a kind of post-COVID hangover of the sort of idea that the Democrats are just this like, again, this kind of like, quick to cancel, tell you what you can and can't do, kicking people out who talk a little salty, et cetera.

• 25:09Chris Hayes?

  I think there's something to that. I think there's particularly something to that with a certain subset of cross-pressured swing voters.

• 25:17Chris Hayes?

  And maybe this is a kind of antidote to it.

• 25:20Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe none of this is negative for him.

• 25:23Chris Hayes?

  Right. In the sense of like the Reddit posts, people join the joke, the Reddit posts are the median voter, right? That's the joke people make.

• 25:28Ezra Klein?

  When I saw the Reddit post, I was like, that's a asset. Right? I don't have to agree with them or like them to be like, that's a political asset. I mean, this is a line I, I say all the time, but and at some point need to like spin out into an essay, but the personality type of the left is bureaucratic and the personality type of the right is autocratic.

• 25:46Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Ezra Klein?

  And, and those are failures, right? That, that the, the left is another version of it that I use is the left is overformed by institutions and the right is underformed by institutions. But you can imagine a world where platner loses. Or doesn't win by as much as he could have. And the answer is simply you kind of almost got it right with him.

• 26:04Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Ezra Klein?

  You know, you just pick somebody like a little too under formed, right? You don't want the straight A student and you don't want the kid smoking pot in the parking lot. You need something sort of.

• 26:14Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 26:15Ezra Klein?

  You need something sort of in between there. But, uh, but, but, but the question is really, we're going to see a test of whether or not this works in, of whether or not this works in Maine. It's going to be very, very interesting.

• 26:26Chris Hayes?

  Totally.

• 26:26Ezra Klein?

  To see how that plays out.

• 26:28Chris Hayes?

  Can I say two more things about him? So one is, I think the way that, I also think there's something interesting in how he has handled the last few weeks. He has been doing a lot of press. And I, I think this is another thing where you have to, if you're going to do it, you got to be all in, which is you're going to go in your face questions and you're going to talk to people. And that is, I think, one of the lessons of our new era of the dynamics of scandal, whatever they are, is that attention moves very quickly. And if you embrace that and you're like, talk to people, you can move through things in a way that used to be very difficult.

• 27:06Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Chris Hayes?

  And then the last thing I'll say about Plattner, I think this is a really important aspect of his appeal. People have talked about the fact, oh, he went to a private school and his grandfather was this famous architect and his mom has this restaurant.

• 27:18Ezra Klein?

  Dad bought his house.

• 27:19Chris Hayes?

  Dad bought his house. This is a guy who

• 27:23Chris Hayes?

  was enlisted. An enlisted Marine during the global war on terror. In multiple tours, fighting in really brutal circumstances. And here's what, why I think that's politically salient. He has an ability to, for lack of a better word, code switch. I think code switching is actually like one of the superpowers of a successful democratic politician. Because the Democratic Party is so varied and diverse and pluralistic, you have to move between different groups. And it's hard to learn how to do that without some organic experience in different worlds. Graham Plattner really genuinely has that. It gives him that thing where he's able to talk to different audiences. Barack Obama really had it.

• 28:08Ezra Klein?

  Bill Clinton.

• 28:09Chris Hayes?

  Bill Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. All of these people. You know, Bill Clinton was like-

• 28:16Ezra Klein?

  That's interesting. Does Ocasio-Cortez have code switching at that level?

• 28:19Chris Hayes?

  I think she does, actually. And I think one of the things that you see also, you saw this with Obama, you saw it with, you know, they used to call Barack Obama in the right-wing press Barry, because he was Barry in high school at a certain point. The idea being, this guy's inauthentic, he's not really who you think he is, he's pretending to be this thing. The flip side of that is, this is a person who's had many different experiences in radically different life worlds that has given this person an organic ability to connect across difference that proves to be the superpower in democratic politics.

• 28:51Ezra Klein?

  I'm gonna take a beat on Ocasio-Cortez here, because it's something I'm really interested to see with her. I think, nobody knows if she's gonna run for president. I'm not sure she knows if she's gonna run for president. She is a tremendous political talent by any measure. But unlike, say, a Bernie Sanders, or as we're just saying, a Graham Platner, she stays away from disagreement. You do not see her doing what Bernie does, what Ro Khanna does.

• 29:18Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 29:19Ezra Klein?

  She's not on Flagrant.

• 29:21Chris Hayes?

  No.

• 29:21Ezra Klein?

  She's not out there with Lex Friedman.

• 29:22Chris Hayes?

  No.

• 29:23Ezra Klein?

  She, I mean, she just did a thing with More Perfect Union, which is like a lefty content producer, you know, talking to Trump voters, but in a very-

• 29:31Chris Hayes?

  Controlled environment.

• 29:31Ezra Klein?

  Controlled environment, right? She's not on Jubilee, which Ro Khanna, and for that matter, James Talarico went on. And I think one of the biggest questions for her is actually whether she is comfortable.

• 29:43Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 29:44Ezra Klein?

  Either switching into places that are not natural alliances for her, or being herself in those places. Gavin Newsom is doing this everywhere right now, right? He will go anywhere he's asked, and he particularly wants to go to places where it's gonna be unusual to see him there. She runs a very, very, very, very careful operation.

• 30:07Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 30:07Ezra Klein?

  And often when she is in spaces where she's not comfortable, like the Munich Security Conference, it can get hairy for her. She can sort of fumble.

• 30:17Speaker 08

  And Congressman, I'll start with you. Would and should the US actually commit US troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?

• 30:27Speaker 09

  You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a-

• 30:39Speaker 09

  This is, of course, a very longstanding policy.

• 30:46Ezra Klein?

  I mean, if I were her advisor, and I'm not, I have a problem. She's not doing enough. So she's not getting the sea legs.

• 30:52Chris Hayes?

  That's interesting.

• 30:53Ezra Klein?

  Not getting comfortable with things going wrong and also not getting the sort of like swiftness to to sort of rescue them when they do. Right. You remember that Gavin knew something a couple of months ago where he's doing a book talk and he's like, I'm just like you to a mostly black audience.

• 31:05Speaker 10

  I'm like you. I know better than you. You know, I'm a 960 SAT guy.

• 31:14Ezra Klein?

  It's like, my SAT sucked.

• 31:16Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, I can barely read.

• 31:17Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. Like, it looked really bad. It was everywhere for a couple of days.

• 31:21Chris Hayes?

  But then you just go do something else.

• 31:22Ezra Klein?

  He just keeps moving forward.

• 31:24Chris Hayes?

  Partly, though, I think all of these calculations about risk reward, control, lack of control, how much you're going in, is is what your own personal position is with respect to attention, right? Because she is so commanding of it. She has the luxury to take much more sort of conservative stances about what press she does. And I think that's a trade off. I agree with you that like, there's probably a degree to which more would be better.

• 31:51Ezra Klein?

  Taylor Swift doesn't need to do a lot of interviews.

• 31:52Chris Hayes?

  Exactly. That's exactly it. That she just doesn't have to go.

• 31:56Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, whereas Rohan is everywhere.

• 31:58Chris Hayes?

  Like.

• 31:58Ezra Klein?

  Rohan is everywhere because he is trying to build.

• 32:01Chris Hayes?

  Exactly.

• 32:01Ezra Klein?

  Like attentional strength. I want to move to Michigan.

• 32:05Ezra Klein?

  Well, let's start here. Do you want to just give a overview of the Michigan Senate Democratic primary?

• 32:12Chris Hayes?

  I mean, you have a situation in which you have a departing incumbent Democratic Senator, Kerry Peters, who's retiring. So you have an open seat. You have a

• 32:22Chris Hayes?

  a very, I would say, from the Republican perspective, high quality recruit for the Republican side, who is Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who is truly out of like normie Republican kind of central casting. Like, if you're trying to win a swing state, he is not, you know, he's not some Peter Thiel weirdo who's going to do an ad with his gun silencer.

• 32:45Speaker 06

  This is designed to kill people. I'm Blake Masters. I'm running for the US Senate in Arizona.

• 32:51Chris Hayes?

  And then on the Democratic side, you've got Abdul El-Sayed, who is a really fascinating dude who was a public health official in Detroit. He's a, he's a Rhodes Scholar.

• 33:02Ezra Klein?

  MD PhD.

• 33:03Chris Hayes?

  MD PhD, incredibly credentialed dude.

• 33:04Ezra Klein?

  Has run statewide and lost for governor.

• 33:07Chris Hayes?

  Exactly. And, but he's very, very charismatic, extremely bright too.

• 33:12Ezra Klein?

  Had a crooked media podcast.

• 33:13Chris Hayes?

  Had a crooked media podcast. I don't know if you've, you know, I've spoken to him at length. He's an incredibly impressive dude.

• 33:19Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, incredible smart guy.

• 33:20Chris Hayes?

  He's a really smart guy who knows a lot of stuff. You have a state senator, Mallory McMorrow, who has been kind of like, I would say like a charismatic up and comer in national politics, even when she was a relatively obscure state rep.

• 33:32Ezra Klein?

  Starting with this big speech she gave after being accused of being a groomer.

• 33:35Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 33:36Speaker 11

  So I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith in service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.

• 33:54Ezra Klein?

  But she also has good, like, good video content.

• 33:56Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, she's very charismatic.

• 33:57Ezra Klein?

  Like a year ago, if I were doing this, I'd be like, Mallory McMorrow, like, one of the big attentional, like, emergent attentional stars.

• 34:03Chris Hayes?

  And then you have the person who I think there's reporting to indicate that I think, and is probably true, that Haley Stevens, who's a sitting Congresswoman, who is, I think, probably the establishment choice to the senator.

• 34:16Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, it seems like she was recruited by the establishment in part.

• 34:19Chris Hayes?

  And what's happened is she has not taken off. And she's not, of the three candidates, whatever you think about Haley Stevens' issue positions for qualifications, whether she be a good senator, like, I think she's the least attentionally gifted of the three. And I think the polling indicates that right now Abdul El-Sayed is probably in the lead. He's gotten a huge amount of benefit from.

• 34:44Chris Hayes?

  Sort of the Bernie faction of the party, streamer Hassan Piker, who did it, came and did a rally with him, which was both controversial, but got a ton of attention. And in a first past the post, again, first past the post, primary, split field, what do you have to get? You got to get 30%, 35% of the vote, 38% of the vote.

• 35:03Ezra Klein?

  So I want to talk about this primary because first, in one way, a Bill Shead is like the opposite candidate from Graham Platner. Right? He is intentionally capable, but he is not a outside the institution, right? Like, he's a guy who taught at Columbia.

• 35:19Chris Hayes?

  The Rhodes Scholar.

• 35:20Ezra Klein?

  Rhodes Scholar.

• 35:21Chris Hayes?

  It's like the ultimate brass ring of credentialing in the American meritocracy is worn on his hand.

• 35:26Ezra Klein?

  Yes. He has run before and lost. When people talk about candidates who have wanted to be in public office for a very long time, he is one of those candidates. And if you look at the polling in this race, you look at Polymark or Kalshi in this race, you can see that he did not walk in and start dominating it. What happened was that he started centering Israel and Gaza. Hassan Piker coming was part of this. And the role Piker played in this, to me, when the way at least I observed it happening, it's not that it was Piker's endorsement or something that mattered. It's that Piker himself was so controversial

• 36:10Ezra Klein?

  that outside groups like Third Way and then the other two candidates attacked.

• 36:15Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 36:16Ezra Klein?

  And in attacking, they centered Israel and Gaza, which turned the, like, Israel and Gaza is like an attentional superconductor.

• 36:26Chris Hayes?

  Yes, it is.

• 36:28Ezra Klein?

  It is like no other issue, with the exception of maybe Donald Trump himself in American life. And for an engaged Democratic primary electorate.

• 36:39Ezra Klein?

  Abdul al-Sayyad is more on the right side of that issue.

• 36:41Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 36:42Ezra Klein?

  And so I think you're saying something that's going to be very important about attentions. Like, there are certain issues in any moment. Like, his background, the way I came to know him as a political figure is Medicare for All.

• 36:52Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, right.

• 36:53Ezra Klein?

  He emerges in politics, you know, Bernie Sanders guy, and like, like, his whole thing is Medicare for All. And like, he still believes in that and like-

• 37:00Chris Hayes?

  From a, and from a healthcare, a public-

• 37:01Ezra Klein?

  Right, from a public health perspective. But what has happened here is that there, like, a lot of attention on Israel and Gaza, and it has become, like, the defining issue, and Michigan, obviously, very big Arab population, right? So-

• 37:16Chris Hayes?

  And also the Haley Stevens component of this, right? Because, I mean, we should, we should give the backstory here, which is that, you know, Haley Stevens primaried Andy Levin. Andy Levin was, was this, you know, labor organizer and very kind of

• 37:33Chris Hayes?

  two-state solution, Israel-critical, Jewish, lefty-

• 37:37Ezra Klein?

  Synagogue?

• 37:38Chris Hayes?

  President-

• 37:39Ezra Klein?

  Synagogue president.

• 37:40Chris Hayes?

  Who was, who had, like, a ton of AIPAC money dumped on his head.

• 37:44Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Chris Hayes?

  Because he was insufficiently loyal to the, essentially, the Netanyahu line. And Stevens knocked him off as part of that effort. And the other thing I would say is, and I think this is incredibly dangerous for the folks who spend their time worrying about America's relationship to Israel and defense of Israel. You have a situation in which you have kind of stacked these different things atop each other, where it's like, money and politics, the establishment, the failed status quo, the pro-Israel lobby, are all stacked atop each other and very hard to disentangle. And so being the populist insurgent against the status quo, your criticism of Israel, your criticism of the war on Gaza,

• 38:29Chris Hayes?

  your views on that, puts you across these incredibly salient divides that sort of reach up and down from the actual issue of Gaza and-

• 38:40Ezra Klein?

  I wrote a piece on this when all the attacks were centering on Piker. And, and one of the points of that piece was that it is going to be very, very, very important to break the effort to conflate-

• 38:53Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 38:54Ezra Klein?

  Anti-Semitism and Zionism. And it is going to only become more important as Israel's actual actions make anti-Zionism a more popular and-

• 39:07Ezra Klein?

  Like morally compelling position.

• 39:10Chris Hayes?

  Among progressively minded people.

• 39:12Ezra Klein?

  I mean, look, you can look at polling of young Jews.

• 39:14Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, right.

• 39:15Ezra Klein?

  Right. How many of them want a one state solution? It's pretty high now. So I will say also, and it's worth playing this. I thought Abdul Sayed himself had a very, very good answer disentangling this.

• 39:28Speaker 12

  What do you say to the Jewish community who you're going to want to vote for you about your positions on Israel, on AIPAC funding, et cetera, and how they shouldn't feel alienated by a candidate like you?

• 39:42Speaker 13

  Okay, I'll tell you this. Nobody understands what it's like to be discriminated against for how you pray, like someone who gets discriminated against for how we pray. And most of the time, we don't ask how we pray. Most people are asking, what do you pray for? And I pray for peace and dignity and basic goodness for all of our kids, whether they're Jewish kids who are neighboring a couple of houses down from me, or my kids who are Muslim. And I'll tell you that it's really important for us to be able to differentiate between Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish contributions to this country, which are vast, and AIPAC and Israel. Those are two different things. I, when I'm elected, will be the chief opposition to what the Egyptian government does. Now, my family immigrated from Egypt. That doesn't make me anti Egyptian.

• 40:24Speaker 13

  That just means that I want my tax dollars to be spent here rather than sent over there to cement the chokehold of a military dictatorship on its own people. And I apply the same exact principles to Israel. I don't want my tax dollars being spent to backstop apartheid and genocide when they could be used to provide things like glasses or healthcare or schools for our own kids. And I worry that a lot of times people want to use the word antisemitism to spread, to defend a foreign government. And I think it's just really important for us to differentiate between those two because I don't want to be held accountable to what another government does simply because I share ethnicity with the people who live there. And I know the same for my Jewish sisters and brothers.

• 41:02Ezra Klein?

  I remember a sign that was put up in Los Angeles. I saw a picture of in 2008.

• 41:08Chris Hayes?

  It was on a lamppost and it was during the Hillary Iraq primary. And the sign was a campaign sign. And it had one sentence and it said, she voted for the war. And it was like, that's all you need to know. Like that vote for the Iraq war, that was the thing. That was the reason Hillary Clinton lost that primary ultimately. There's a million reasons and she came very close and talk, relitigate it. But that was the thing.

• 41:35Ezra Klein?

  I know a lot of pretty old Jews who will say to me, I, I don't understand why they will get so much attention.

• 41:41Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 41:42Ezra Klein?

  You know, look at what China's doing to the Uyghurs or. And one of the things I say, I'm, is that they are making themselves the center of attention. Right. They, they really pushed hard to have America join them in a war. They've expanded the scope of that war. They have allowed just constant, you know, in addition to Netanyahu saying he wants now 70% of Gaza. They have like allowed and enabled and protected and caused like a constant stream of atrocities out of the West Bank. You can, it is, you can support what Israel is doing. But I don't think you can deny that it's going to come with a tremendous cost.

• 42:25Ezra Klein?

  And if you are not willing to have Israel pay the cost of its actual actions, I don't think you should be supporting its actions.

• 42:33Chris Hayes?

  I mean, let's, let's talk about what happened in the Israel Day Parade here in New York. In terms of attention. So you've got this, you've got the Israel Day Parade, it's happened every year. And in, in the context of New York, it has been a kind of, you know, cross ideological day of Jewish unity and solidarity. Now this year, it's controversial for reasons. The mayor's not going to attend for the first time in a long time. Other politicians will be there. What happens in that parade? Bezos Smotrich, the most, one of the most far-right ministers who's in the Israeli government, who is, you know, pushed for, along with Ben Gavir, the law to execute people

• 43:15Chris Hayes?

  by hanging, who has been, you know, proponent of the settlers and excuse-

• 43:20Ezra Klein?

  More than that, has put out a functional plan for the expulsion of Palestinians.

• 43:24Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 43:25Ezra Klein?

  What I think it is reasonable to call the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

• 43:27Chris Hayes?

  Yes. He shows up at the Israel parade with a bunch of like, also hardcore extremist right-wingers, and they do-

• 43:34Ezra Klein?

  His attentional politics.

• 43:35Chris Hayes?

  His attentional politics, and they do a bunch of interviews, and he even says to one of the interviewers, "I love this parade, it reminds me of Jerusalem Day," which of course is like, the far-right parade that happens every year in Jerusalem, where like, all very extremist, right-wing Israelis march through Jerusalem in an act of like, very clear provocation.

• 43:54Ezra Klein?

  Yes, like chanting horrifying things.

• 43:55Chris Hayes?

  Yes, death to Arabs.

• 43:56Ezra Klein?

  Jerusalem Day Parade is a-

• 43:58Chris Hayes?

  But Smotrich says this because he's playing his own attentional politics. But you can't, it's like, so then after that, it's like, well, whose fault is it? That people are paying attention to the parade?

• 44:09Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 44:09Chris Hayes?

  You know, and, and you could say, "Well, he's an extremist, he doesn't represent, he's in the Israeli government."

• 44:15Ezra Klein?

  He's got authority over the West Bank.

• 44:17Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Ezra Klein?

  It, it actually drives me completely insane, and it happens all the time in conversations I'm in, but it, it drives me insane, the effort to say that what the sitting cabinet ministers in Israel are doing is irrelevant, or they're controversial, or it is what it is.

• 44:38Chris Hayes?

  There is-

• 44:38Ezra Klein?

  They're in power.

• 44:39Chris Hayes?

  They're in power. There's also, there's a southern expression I love, that's throwing rocks and hiding hands, which I love, and there's just also, I feel like, this, this isn't the Israeli government, but AIPAC and, and sort of groups around them and associated super PACs, there's a lot of throwing rocks and hiding hands. You've just played in a succession of the most expensive congressional races in history, like, a set of record-setting ones, where you have spent the money that have made them the most expensive. That's fine. It's America. In the post Citizens United era, people get to do that. What you can't do is be like, why is everyone focused on us? It's like you spent tens of millions of dollars to knock people out. Like, you could do one or the other. You know, you play in these races, you play in these races, but then you get to be criticized for it.

• 45:45Ezra Klein?

  All right, I want to move to Texas. And I want to move to-

• 45:48Chris Hayes?

  Texas is so interesting right now.

• 45:49Ezra Klein?

  James Talarico, because I think he reflects maybe something different than what we've been talking about. He is the one case in which I think you can really see an attentional superstar who rose during this cycle, but did not rise because he was so far left or so far right. He has, I mean, I had him here on the show. It's a great interview. People should go check it out. He has bog standard progressive politics. Now, it is connected to a beautifully articulated Christian moral framework. But he's somebody who has broken through attentionally, not by being very far left-

• 46:29Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Ezra Klein?

  -or very far right, not by choosing a highly controversial issue, but actually by front-loading a religiously rooted decency that in part got him on Joe Rogan's podcast and became this signal that maybe he could do something other Democrats couldn't and win Texas. So I'm curious what you've made of him.

• 46:56Chris Hayes?

  Again, I would start with the thing that we've been saying about a number of these people, including Platner, and I think I'll just say it, is that he's charismatic. And again, in the ancient Greek sense. And I think, obviously, the sort of pastoral tradition that he's coming out of means that he's both naturally charismatic and also has access to a set of rhetorical tools that have been developed literally over thousands of years to grab and hold people's attention. Right? So I think that's a huge part of what's going on. And again- I think that connects to this back to the future theme that we keep coming back to, which is like, you can't just raise money and run ads, right? If you want to be successful, you gotta have something going on about how you grab people.

• 47:40Chris Hayes?

  And he clearly has that. I think you're totally right that he's a unicorn in that it's not connected to that kind of populist message in the same way. He is, I think, a populist, and I think he's very much framing himself as a sort of insurgent outside the status quo. But he's not, he's really not relying on any kind of us versus them framework. Um, I mean, he does billionaires.

• 48:04Ezra Klein?

  A little bit of billionaires, but, but it's rhetorical flourishing.

• 48:07Chris Hayes?

  It's, it's not the core in the way that Platner, and Platner is like, that is Platner's thing. It's what comes out of his chest.

• 48:13Ezra Klein?

  This guy is a former president of his college Democrats.

• 48:15Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:16Ezra Klein?

  Like, he is a different type. He is a person who has wanted to run for, he's a Teach for America kid.

• 48:21Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Ezra Klein?

  Right? He's not a person who has been failed by American institutions. He is not a person who you feel harbors a great anger.

• 48:32Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 48:33Ezra Klein?

  At the Democratic establishment, you know, he's a state representative.

• 48:36Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 48:37Ezra Klein?

  And, and I think that's an interesting dimension of him, but he also has a quality that Platner does in a different way, which is that, well, I don't, I'm not saying he was cast in the sense that somebody came out and found him the way they came out and found Platner. He does look like what he is. And the same way that Platner looks like what he is, I mean, a lot of people are oyster farmers or lobster men, but they don't, like, you wouldn't see them on the street and think, well, you definitely spend all your time on the water.

• 49:02Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 49:03Ezra Klein?

  And like, you know, Platner looks like a seaman.

• 49:05Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 49:06Ezra Klein?

  And Talarico, like, you would cast him.

• 49:10Chris Hayes?

  As a pastor.

• 49:11Ezra Klein?

  To play the idealistic young pastor.

• 49:12Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 49:13Ezra Klein?

  Like, rooting out corruption.

• 49:15Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 49:16Ezra Klein?

  In a complicated church.

• 49:17Chris Hayes?

  Yes, exactly.

• 49:18Ezra Klein?

  Um, he just has the whole.

• 49:19Chris Hayes?

  You could put him in a scene and there will be blood.

• 49:21Ezra Klein?

  And he, right, exactly. And he rises, you know, by.

• 49:27Ezra Klein?

  Running his social media strategy, which, you know, eventually gets him on Rogan. And I think that he also reflects this yearning people that I think is really powerful and now is underplayed, which is not just for populism or radicalism or even inspiration, but in the Trump era for decency.

• 49:47Chris Hayes?

  Totally. And there's a yearning for public virtue, which I think is a sort of funny inversion of some of the politics of our, you know, our youth.

• 49:54Ezra Klein?

  I'm starting to talk a lot about virtue on this show.

• 49:55Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, and I'm thinking about a lot about virtue. I think that's partly the experience of Trump. It's partly that I'm a middle aged dad with three kids and I think a lot about moral instruction. And particularly a moral instruction in a world in which like the most powerful and famous figure in the country is a moral generate. The other thing I would say is there's these different. There's different kind of vibratory levels that different coalitions play on. And I do think that like the appeal for connection, brother and sisterhood, solidarity, unity, you know, that was the thing that Barack Obama was able to marshal.

• 50:39Chris Hayes?

  And that's still deep in the progressive soul. I think, I think it's deep in the American soul. It's the not what Donald Trump, Donald Trump is totally incapable of playing in that register. I think the Republican Party increasingly in his era is incapable of playing that register. And then the last thing I'll say, and I think this, this applies to John Ossoff as well.

• 51:01Ezra Klein?

  Where we're going next.

• 51:02Chris Hayes?

  Oh, good. In, when you think about like, what's the opposite of Trump? One typology of the opposite of Trump is a nice young man. Like, what's the opposite of Trump is like, a nice young man.

• 51:15Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me hold.

• 51:16Chris Hayes?

  And Janelle Rico is a nice young man.

• 51:17Ezra Klein?

  Let me hold before we go to John Ossoff and the different Obama registers. The nice young man, the what it means to be nice, the weakness of being nice has been the main form of attack. The Paxton campaign has decided to unleash.

• 51:31Chris Hayes?

  It's so crazy.

• 51:32Ezra Klein?

  Like low T Talarico, tofu Talarico, Tala Frico, which now the Talarico campaign has Tala Frico shirts. I think that one was a Paxton mistake. But, but the, the weakness they think they have sensed is that people want strength.

• 51:47Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Ezra Klein?

  And a nice young man who wants you to like him.

• 51:53Ezra Klein?

  And speaks often of his own humility and has a vegan girlfriend is not strong enough for Texas.

• 52:01Chris Hayes?

  I mean, that's a charitable version. They're calling him the F slur is what they're doing. I mean, I mean, that you're giving a charitable version of what the actual.

• 52:08Ezra Klein?

  Well, and I mean, and actually quite literally, like, you know, you have Stephen Miller saying the first transgender candidate, right? You know, he's a queer.

• 52:15Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 52:16Ezra Klein?

  It's very schoolyard, all of it.

• 52:17Chris Hayes?

  Yes. Um, when we take a step back.

• 52:19Ezra Klein?

  It's true, just like cruelty versus kindness.

• 52:21Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 52:21Ezra Klein?

  They're really, they're really playing into the campaign Talarico wanted to set up. I, I once heard somebody around the, the Mom Donnie Cuomo campaign be like, they both got the exact antagonists they wanted.

• 52:33Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, that's a great point.

• 52:34Ezra Klein?

  Right? And it just turned out Mom Donnie was right about which antagonist he wanted and Cuomo wasn't.

• 52:38Chris Hayes?

  In terms of that race and who's making the right tactical calls, we should just take a step back and say, you know, Texas is Texas for a reason. And if you run a moderately competent campaign with a moderately competent candidate, you will win by five points.

• 52:51Ezra Klein?

  Like. As a Republican.

• 52:54Chris Hayes?

  As a Republican, it's just structurally there. So you really got to screw things up.

• 52:58Ezra Klein?

  If not more than five points.

• 52:59Chris Hayes?

  Yes. I mean, 10, 10 to five, right? You run a bad campaign, it's five. You run a miserable campaign like Ted Cruz did in 2018, in a really, really good year for Democrats, you win by two. What I would say is about Paxton is that he's kind of the worst of all worlds in this way, which is that Ken Paxton is someone with a lot of baggage. He was impeached by a, you know, super majority Republican state legislature for corruption. He was indicted for securities crimes, although not convicted. He was also not convicted on his impeachment. His wife recently divorced him for what she called were biblical reasons. There were a number of his ex staffers who came out with a, a statement where they talked about just how awful he was as a boss and in his public positions.

• 53:42Chris Hayes?

  I've covered Ken Paxton a ton in my journalism career. You don't hear him talk that much. This is not a super charismatic guy.

• 53:48Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Chris Hayes?

  He's got all the baggage and none of the charisma. It's a weird combination of things. But he's, there's, it's not like there's some amazing magnetism on the other side of it. So.

• 54:01Chris Hayes?

  If you were setting up the worst kind of candidate in this era, who's got the kind of all the negatives of sort of high risk attentional strategies and none of the positives, it kind of is Ken Paxton.

• 54:11Ezra Klein?

  Yes, but this is where I think there's like just something genuinely interesting about Teller Rico, because he to me shows that there's actually a lot of pathways in to breaking out attentionally. It's generally interesting that Teller Rico is able to beat Jasmine Crockett, who is also like big MSNBC figure, Jasmine Crockett.

• 54:32Chris Hayes?

  Yes, and big on viral video and is not super guarded and talky pointsy, you know, that, and I think that's a good attribute and it, you know, he beat her in that primer.

• 54:43Ezra Klein?

  But it goes to show, I think, that there's probably a lot of different angles.

• 54:47Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 54:47Ezra Klein?

  That you can play here. I think one thing that these platforms sniff out, and I don't know why, but podcasting, video, etc., I think they sniff out inauthenticity, that in a way that was not true when you were giving quotes in newspapers or going on Meet the Press or being on the nightly news. I think actually inauthentic figures could do perfectly well there. Somehow institutions, to go back to what we're talking about, institutions don't care about authenticity. They actually want you to change who you are to conform to what they need.

• 55:19Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 55:20Ezra Klein?

  But these sort of anti-institutional spaces.

• 55:23Chris Hayes?

  They do, yeah.

• 55:24Ezra Klein?

  There's something about them where people, I always feel some people on the show, the first thing the audience can sense is inauthenticity. The first thing they can sense is you not telling them what you really think.

• 55:33Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, and you gotta be, I think that's such a good point, that you have to be, you have to be some version of your actual self to figure it out and to do, and to do it right.

• 55:45Ezra Klein?

  Rahm Emanuel is not, in my view, likely to be the Democrats 2028 nominee, but his Somewhat unlikely presidential campaign is going to do better than I think people realize it's going to do in being a sort of force in the primary.

• 55:59Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, because he's

• 56:00Ezra Klein?

  Because he is fundamentally himself.

• 56:01Chris Hayes?

  Totally. Yes.

• 56:02Ezra Klein?

  In all places.

• 56:03Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 56:03Ezra Klein?

  And so that allows him to just sort of attack and run plays and be compelling.

• 56:09Chris Hayes?

  And also, he's got the, to go back to the risk calculation, he's got nothing to lose. He can say yes to everything.

• 56:14Ezra Klein?

  And he's a high-risk personality.

• 56:15Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, he's got a high-risk personality.

• 56:16Ezra Klein?

  He's an unusual, highly institutional figure.

• 56:18Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 56:18Ezra Klein?

  Who's

• 56:19Chris Hayes?

  Very high-risk.

• 56:19Ezra Klein?

  Has very, very, very high-risk appetites. Um, speaking of 2028, uh, I, we talked about AOC a little bit ago, and I think she's one of the big figures here. But what have you made of John Ossoff's emergence as, uh, like a, a cross ideological 2028 dark horse? A person who I've been talking about for a while.

• 56:40Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Ezra Klein?

  But Hassan Piker is talking about.

• 56:42Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 56:42Ezra Klein?

  You know, the, yeah, Matt Iglesias is talking, right? Like, you know, Michelle Goldberg just did a great piece on him. There's something interesting in, in what people are projecting onto John Ossoff.

• 56:52Chris Hayes?

  I have been jokingly calling him in our team Slack, the Lee San Algaib, uh, which is, which is a Dune reference to, to the like, the, the, you know, the, the Chalamet figure, who is essentially the kind of chosen one, right? The, the foretold prophet. This is a joke, just to be clear. And the reason that I use that is

• 57:11Ezra Klein?

  Jewish Kennedy, man.

• 57:13Chris Hayes?

  There is something about the, the way that he is performing his candidacy, the social media videos of putting out, the fact that he is very conventionally handsome and young and could be in a movie. Like AOC, he's very controlled in his media.

• 57:34Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, he's not playing a volume game.

• 57:36Chris Hayes?

  Not playing

• 57:36Ezra Klein?

  You don't see him on podcast interviews right now.

• 57:38Chris Hayes?

  No, that not playing a volume game. I think that he has figured out a way in a broadly palatable ideological fashion to leverage a populist moral critique of the rot of Trump that can appeal across the different Democratic factions, which is important. But also, he's running for reelection in a swing state and is right now polling.

• 58:06Chris Hayes?

  Very well. We'll see what happens.

• 58:08Ezra Klein?

  But if you back up a couple of years, if I said to you in 2024, which of the, or 2022, or whatever, which of Georgia's Democratic senators is everybody going to be talking about in 2026 as a 2028 savior? I think the answer would have been Raphael Warnock.

• 58:32Chris Hayes?

  Hundred percent.

• 58:33Ezra Klein?

  And instead, Ossoff

• 58:36Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 58:36Ezra Klein?

  is the one people are talking about. And, and I was looking at Raphael Warnock's YouTube page because he's doing content, but it doesn't have any of the visual grammar. One thing that, you know, you see in a Mamdani, you see in a John Ossoff, you see in a James Talarico, is we, this is not just a, like a, an age of algorithms, it's visual.

• 58:56Chris Hayes?

  Very visual.

• 58:57Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, you'll see Warnock and he's like talking in, you know, the Senate press conference setups and he's just like in front of American flags and, and Ossoff, they have figured out, you, you know, the clip like immediately when you see it. And Ossoff used to be a documentarian who did documentaries on international corruption.

• 59:15Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 59:15Ezra Klein?

  So there's a background here. This guy actually knows how to create TV.

• 59:20Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 59:20Ezra Klein?

  About corruption.

• 59:22Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 59:22Ezra Klein?

  But there's something really interesting to me about, you know, first the scarcity, that the creating want, this who is John Ossoff, this building anticipation. Um, plus this figuring out of a visual grammar.

• 59:38Chris Hayes?

  That's distinct and wholly your own.

• 59:40Ezra Klein?

  And looks like Obama.

• 59:41Chris Hayes?

  Yes, it does look like Obama.

• 59:43Ezra Klein?

  It looks like.

• 59:44Chris Hayes?

  It's also the hero shot.

• 59:45Ezra Klein?

  It's always a hero shot, which was a constant, you remember there was an.

• 59:47Chris Hayes?

  You gotta be skinny for that to work. I just want it for anyone else who's taking notes out there in production. You gotta be pretty thin for that hero shot.

• 59:53Ezra Klein?

  There was a great, the hero shot being this sort of three quarters upwards angle.

• 59:56Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Ezra Klein?

  And otherwise you get a lot of chin.

• 59:58Chris Hayes?

  Yeah, you get a lot of chin.

• 59:59Ezra Klein?

  And there was this great, uh, the article on Obama, uh, something like Obama accidentally stares too far into future.

• 1:00:10Ezra Klein?

  Because he was, he was very good at this.

• 1:00:12Chris Hayes?

  And the Ossoff shot is always.

• 1:00:14Ezra Klein?

  It's always like this, like he doesn't seem like he's looking at a crowd.

• 1:00:17Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Ezra Klein?

  He's looking into.

• 1:00:18Chris Hayes?

  He's going out past the crowd. No, you're right. And I do think it's true. That kind of visual branding is so interesting. There's one other dimension of Ossoff that I think is really worth mentioning in terms of 2028. And which is that he's Jewish.

• 1:00:32Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 1:00:33Chris Hayes?

  And.

• 1:00:34Ezra Klein?

  And a genuine Israel critic.

• 1:00:36Chris Hayes?

  This, see, this is so, I think. To go back to what we were saying about that Michigan race. There's no way of getting around the fractures in the party on Gaza, Israel. Perceptions of antisemitism, perceptions of undue influence by the Israel lobby, like. The coalition contains both elements. And someone's going to have to figure out how to thread that needle. And if I were, if you were asking me what that person might look like, I would say.

• 1:01:14Chris Hayes?

  The first Jewish nominee in history, who is also a critic of Israel, would be one recipe. To thread a very difficult needle for the, the coalition.

• 1:01:25Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. And the point here is that Ossoff has substance on this. So he early on sent on to a Bernie Sanders letter that I think only had 19.

• 1:01:32Chris Hayes?

  Yes, very, like with a small group.

• 1:01:34Ezra Klein?

  It wasn't.

• 1:01:35Chris Hayes?

  Small group.

• 1:01:36Ezra Klein?

  That was against sending more arms.

• 1:01:38Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 1:01:38Ezra Klein?

  To Israel, given the level of humanitarian devastation that was currently being inflicted by Israel upon Gaza. Um, my colleague, Michelle Goldberg, had a great profile of him. And, you know, she, she mentions like a Hararetz piece, which is like the liberal Israeli newspaper saying, well, this position is going to make it much harder for Ossoff to win in, in Georgia. And no, it put Ossoff in position. To actually navigate this in a way the others are gonna have a lot of trouble with.

• 1:02:07Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 1:02:08Ezra Klein?

  Josh Shapiro is gonna have a lot of trouble here, is already having a lot of trouble here. And, you know, but if you go too far to the other side, you're gonna have, right? You're gonna need somebody who can represent both sides of the divide at once. And Asif, who is one, centering on a corruption story, who is two, centering on a, he moves a corruption critique into an argument for liberal pluralism.

• 1:02:34Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 1:02:34Ezra Klein?

  Right? It's sort of a populist critique with a liberal pluralist answer. Right? Talks a lot about values, talks a lot about being rooted in the civil rights movement. And then is able to navigate this dimension of the party's schism.

• 1:02:49Chris Hayes?

  He's also done something on corruption that I have struggled to do, and I don't know if you've felt the same way.

• 1:02:56Chris Hayes?

  The corruption is so overwhelming.

• 1:03:00Chris Hayes?

  And you can hear in my voice right now, like, so.

• 1:03:04Chris Hayes?

  It leaves me speechless. It's so brazen. It's so insane. Every single day I discover some new story that is like, would have been the end of any other politician I've covered. Asif has figured out how to tell that story very, very well.

• 1:03:17Ezra Klein?

  But one reason is that he often, he moves it to be as about Donald Trump, and also about the Democratic Party, also about the existing institutions, right?

• 1:03:29Speaker 14

  See, I get why people voted for him.

• 1:03:33Speaker 14

  Because even before he came on the scene, America had the most corrupt political system in the Western world. It's been running on corporate money, secret money, billionaire money, both sides.

• 1:03:50Speaker 14

  And it's worse than ever now. Citizens United was the worst court decision in modern American history.

• 1:04:07Chris Hayes?

  And when members of Congress aren't begging for money from lobbyists, they're trying to dodge getting carpet bombed by these super PACs. And see, this is why nothing works for ordinary people. It's not because of woke college kids or trans students or because there are interracial couples in cereal commercials. It's because the people's elected representatives don't represent the people. They represent the donors.

• 1:04:35Ezra Klein?

  There's a credibility. He's very careful always to do this, which again is another Obama move. Obama would always include an argument from the other side in the argument he was making.

• 1:04:48Chris Hayes?

  Always.

• 1:04:49Ezra Klein?

  Always.

• 1:04:49Chris Hayes?

  People say...

• 1:04:50Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, right? And he does that, right? You know, both sides. And he's very, very careful to make this a critique of the system itself, of which Donald Trump is taking advantage of it, but it's not its originating costs.

• 1:05:06Chris Hayes?

  Yeah. And I think that's also a part of, again, it does help to... It helps to be getting your reps before the Georgia electorate.

• 1:05:18Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Chris Hayes?

  You know, it's like comedians. Politicians are like comedians. You work the room. You see where your laugh lines are. You work different rooms. You work larger and larger rooms. And the room matters a lot. And what you... The feedback you get from the room is... It matters a lot. It helps to be in a context where the room that you're working is a Georgia electorate. I think this was true of Bernie Sanders in Vermont, where, you know, he only got to where he was after many failures, many electoral failures, many years in the electoral wilderness, by figuring out how to talk to the median Vermont voter, who was not a committed ideological socialist.

• 1:05:54Ezra Klein?

  It's why Barack Obama was as good as he was, because he was a black politician who had to work white rooms.

• 1:05:58Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Ezra Klein?

  You know, and he's talked about that, how much you do in, you know, to win statewide in Illinois, to win in these rural areas where people were very skeptical of a person named Barack Hussein Obama in 2004.

• 1:06:13Ezra Klein?

  The other thing that I think is worth touching here, one thing I see among the Democrats right now is they're all competing to prove they're the fighter. And relatively few are working in the more inspirational side of the tradition. That you look at Newsom, you look at AOC, you look at Pritzker, right? Like, they're all like, I am your brawler. Right? I will rip their throats out for you.

• 1:06:40Ezra Klein?

  And Ossoff, even though we sort of attacking corruption, he is

• 1:06:44Chris Hayes?

  Not in that mode at all.

• 1:06:45Ezra Klein?

  It's a different register. There's a type of Democrat who, even if they've learned to suppress it, their fundamental feeling at all levels is a disbelief.

• 1:06:58Chris Hayes?

  I can't believe this is happening. I literally can't believe this is happening.

• 1:07:01Ezra Klein?

  That anybody could like this guy, that things aren't sinking him. And he is formed in races.

• 1:07:08Chris Hayes?

  Exactly. Where that

• 1:07:09Ezra Klein?

  Where that is not a register that works and you cannot. A lot of Democrats have to kind of abstractly come to the view that there are people in this world who like Donald Trump, but they don't know any of them. And if they do, they maybe cut them out of their lives.

• 1:07:24Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 1:07:25Ezra Klein?

  And that is not John Ossoff's world.

• 1:07:27Chris Hayes?

  That's what I mean. So he's formed fully, he's formed fully in an environment in which the appeal of Trump and Trump's power over the electorate and Trump's power over specific people that are, that he has to win over or whose family members he has to win over is present from the beginning. And I think there's something really useful and powerful about that for just, again, how you train.

• 1:07:49Ezra Klein?

  But if you look at polling, and if you particularly now look at the prediction markets, polling Kamala Harris has a lead. I think people are skeptical that lead will lead to primary dominance, but I guess we'll see if she runs. But if you look at prediction markets, the lead is Gavin Newsom. And we all knew Gavin Newsom wanted to run for president, I would say, six years ago.

• 1:08:11Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Ezra Klein?

  I was pretty dismissive of how that was likely to go. You know, handsome white guy with a bunch of scandals from California was like not the, not what the Democratic Party seemed to be looking for.

• 1:08:23Ezra Klein?

  Who he is in some ways has changed or actually in some ways maybe come closer to a core of him. What do you think about the way Newsom has maneuvered himself into one, attentionally capable in a way he wasn't always, but two into, I think it is the fairly wide consensus right now that he is a Democratic frontrunner for 2028?

• 1:08:47Chris Hayes?

  Um, I think I have complicated feelings. I mean, I think that there's some part of me that just thinks Governor of California is tough, a tough thing to do, to win national, to be the president. Of course, New York real estate developer is also pretty tough too. So what do I know? Um, yes, I think that, I think the, the choice he's made intentionally is the, one of the most interesting, which is he was always a charismatic guy, but he was not, he, he has chosen omnipresence. He's chosen to say yes to everything. He's chosen to go everywhere. He's chosen to host his own podcast. He's chosen to host his own podcast.

• 1:09:26Ezra Klein?

  He just had Ashley Sinclair on it.

• 1:09:28Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Ezra Klein?

  Right? They had Ben Shapiro on not long ago. He's doing things you would not expect.

• 1:09:31Chris Hayes?

  Exactly. And I think it has produced a comfort that is really, really useful in the world that we live in. I think there's a question of both what the Democratic primary electorate wants and what the general electorate wants in relation to Donald Trump. And here's what I mean by this. You were talking about like being a fighter. And I think there's a little bit of, Freddie Hampton said, you don't fight fire with fire, you fight fire with water. And there's a little bit of a question between, do you want to fight fire with fire or do you want to fight fire with water? And the our fighter version, like our brawler, our Trump essentially, which I

• 1:10:15Chris Hayes?

  think is appealing to some people in the Democratic electorate, is sort of the mode that some Democratic politicians have gone and in some almost sort of parodic ways that Newsom has gone by doing the whole like Trump shtick online.

• 1:10:30Ezra Klein?

  Okay. But let me complicate this in one way because it's why I find Newsom really interesting.

• 1:10:33Chris Hayes?

  Because he is doing more than that. I agree. Yes.

• 1:10:35Ezra Klein?

  There are two things. So one is the number of reps he's getting, places he's going. I mean, you and I just saw him at the CAP Ideas Conference. He's just gotten better.

• 1:10:45Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Ezra Klein?

  He's gotten better faster than the others have. Uh, but the other thing.

• 1:10:52Ezra Klein?

  I think a really big problem Democrats have faced since Obama is about describing a kind of unity that we can find as a country, a way of living here together despite our disagreements, despite our history, despite our differences. And Bill Clinton did a lot in this register, right? He, you know, Rhodes Scholar, but poor Arkansas boy, you know, New South.

• 1:11:14Chris Hayes?

  Yep.

• 1:11:15Ezra Klein?

  Obama, I mean, the master of this register.

• 1:11:18Chris Hayes?

  Yes.

• 1:11:18Ezra Klein?

  But because he was a master of this register,

• 1:11:22Ezra Klein?

  he somewhat destroyed the ability of anybody else to use it. Because if he couldn't achieve it.

• 1:11:26Chris Hayes?

  Right. That's a good point.

• 1:11:27Ezra Klein?

  If what the Obama era cashed out into was Donald Trump and the division and dissolution of like the shared moral and democratic framework we had, then to speak like Obama did in 04, to speak like he did in 08, becomes naive. Nobody's going to believe you. Right? But the weird thing Newsom is doing is containing this, these two opposite ideas in himself, which is one, like, I'll be your brawler. But two,

• 1:12:02Ezra Klein?

  we will just disagree honestly and in public.

• 1:12:06Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Ezra Klein?

  And continue the relationship with each other under those terms. You know, he'll talk to Charlie Kirk, you know, before Charlie Kirk was killed, he'll talk to Michael Savage, he'll talk to Ben Shapiro, he'll go to the left. And Newsom is sort of, it almost seems to me, making this argument that is not that we can live here together in some way where our differences dissolve. It's that our fights with each other can be productive.

• 1:12:34Chris Hayes?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that's, I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. It's a very Ezra Kleinist approach. I do wonder whether there's also a kind of incoherence in that.

• 1:12:46Ezra Klein?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:47Chris Hayes?

  Narratively, that makes it a little difficult to pull off.

• 1:12:50Ezra Klein?

  I don't think he's been able to synthesize them yet.

• 1:12:52Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Ezra Klein?

  I'm not sure you can, but it's why I find his campaign very interesting.

• 1:12:55Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 1:12:55Ezra Klein?

  He, he'll often talk about, the, the place right now in his rhetoric that falls the most flat for me is he'll start talking about they need to be a repairer of the breach, right? A repairer of the breach. It's biblical line.

• 1:13:06Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 1:13:07Ezra Klein?

  And you don't feel it like you don't feel how he's going to repair the breach.

• 1:13:12Chris Hayes?

  Right.

• 1:13:13Ezra Klein?

  I want to end here on the big attentional campaign that kind of ended in failure, which was Spencer Pratt.

• 1:13:20Chris Hayes?

  So interesting.

• 1:13:21Ezra Klein?

  Los Angeles, because if you were online, it was like this former reality star is coming out of nowhere. He's got the greatest ads. You can't be on X for five minutes without seeing something from him. You know, he's gonna, you know, maybe win 50% in the runoff, maybe, you know, maybe at least make the runoff. But then it didn't pan out to anything. He underperformed Donald Trump.

• 1:13:40Chris Hayes?

  I think, and I think it's a great counterpoint to many of the theories I've been saying. So I'm glad we're talking about it because it, I mean, it was a very successful campaign, intentionally. I do think there's something going on. We should just say there's something going on with X right now under Elon Musk that is a little distinct to that platform, which is that it's become a kind of hermetically sealed hothouse of insanity that when you enter it, when you're not in it all the time, you enter it, you're like, you guys are nuts.

• 1:14:11Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Chris Hayes?

  And that's exactly the way many people felt about like what we might call kind of peak woke Twitter. So part of it, I think, is a product of how much that was in X candidacy.

• 1:14:21Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, there's also a question of what's real there.

• 1:14:23Chris Hayes?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Ezra Klein?

  Right? What's being clip farmed?

• 1:14:24Chris Hayes?

  Totally.

• 1:14:25Ezra Klein?

  What has a lot of bots pushing it?

• 1:14:27Chris Hayes?

  But the other lesson, I think here, it is never going to be the case that attention is the entire story. There has to be something else happening. And I think with Pratt, there was nothing else happening, really. There was no reason for that man to be mayor, first of all. Why that guy? I do think the Pratt campaign, to me, really is an object lesson in what X is at this point, that I think would be very useful for everyone to internalize, because you and I both remember back in the day when people would say Twitter is not real life. And weirdly, I think that's even more the case now under the algorithmic empire of one Elon Musk.

• 1:15:07Ezra Klein?

  I think one of the greatest advantages Democrats have going into 2028.

• 1:15:11Chris Hayes?

  Is not being there.

• 1:15:12Ezra Klein?

  Is that Elon Musk has control of Twitter. I think people think of this as a problem for Democrats. It's the opposite because Musk is.

• 1:15:21Chris Hayes?

  Something to that.

• 1:15:21Ezra Klein?

  Warping Twitter towards a hard right conspiratorial hermetic nature. And in the way that when Democrats had dominance over Twitter, when liberals and progressives and leftists had dominance over Twitter.

• 1:15:36Chris Hayes?

  And we're talking to each other.

• 1:15:36Ezra Klein?

  They convince themselves of a bunch of ideas that were politically lethal. But they didn't understand that because where they were, it's like to have normie opinions was politically lethal. That's how it is for the right now on Twitter.

• 1:15:50Chris Hayes?

  Exactly what's happening.

• 1:15:50Ezra Klein?

  And JD Vance is there and all of their staffers are there. Whereas like, like the liberals and Democrats and leftists are split and broken across different platforms. And that is genuinely an advantage.

• 1:16:01Chris Hayes?

  I have come to this exact same conclusion.

• 1:16:02Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, like Twitter, it's like, it's a kind of a curse. Right? It makes you feel very powerful and you pay for it. Let's end there. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:16:14Chris Hayes?

  So I'm going to spare you my, all my reading on Italian history, which I think is probably not particularly relevant. I read and loved Ben Lerner's newest transcription. I will say, as someone who went to Brown and he was in my class there and I just went to my 23th reunion with Kate, who I met there, it had a particular potency for me that it may not have to the general audience. I recently read, and I can't believe I had never read this book, but I read The Godfather, the original novel by Mario Puzo. It's a combination of some really weird and truly awfully misogynistic stuff, but it is incredible how good that book is in some ways. And also it kind of makes you understand why the movie is a masterpiece.

• 1:16:56Chris Hayes?

  Like, I didn't quite realize how faithful the movie was to the original source material. And the last one is a new novel that I just am about halfway through, through someone else that I know, Courtney Mom, called Alan Opts Out, which is a great, kind of really insightful, searing comedic look at a Greenwich advertising executive who goes to live in the playhouse in his backyard.

• 1:17:23Ezra Klein?

  Chris Hayes, thank you very much. Thank you.

• 1:17:34Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Esrclan Show is produced by Roland Hoop. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Annie Galvin, Chris Dinlin, Emmet Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Spinning Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.