Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Are Democrats Whistling Past the Graveyard? About this episode A New York Times and Siena College poll released Nov. 5 showed Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in five of the six key swing states, with a notable jump in support among nonwhite and young voters. In response, Democrats freaked out.
But then two days later, voters across the country actually went to the polls, and Democrats and Democratic-associated policy did pretty well. In Kentucky, Andy Beshear held the governorship. Democrats took back the House of Delegates in Virginia. And Ohio voted for an amendment protecting abortion rights.
I asked Mike Podhorzer, a longtime poll skeptic, to help me understand the apparent gap between the polls and the ballot box. Podhorzer was the longtime political director of the A. F. L.-C. I. O. And as the founder of the Analyst Institute, he was the godfather of the data-driven turn in Democratic campaign strategy. He also writes a newsletter on these topics called “Weekend Reading.”
We discuss the underlying assumptions behind polling methodologies and what that says about their results; how to square Biden’s unpopularity with the Democrats’ recent wins; why he thinks an anti-MAGA majority is Biden’s best bet to the White House and how that coalition doesn’t always map cleanly onto demographic data; what a newly energized labor movement might means for Biden; and much more.
Mentioned:
“We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.” by Nate Cohn
Book Recommendations:
“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell
Tyranny, Inc. by Sohrab Ahmari
Crashed by Adam Tooze
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 and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Carole Sabouraud.
Transcript 10,448 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:24 Ezra Klein? On November 5th, the New York Times and Siena College released this poll that freaked Democrats out like nothing I've seen this cycle. The poll showed Trump up in five of the six key battleground states, showing benefiting from a huge shift in non-white and young voters in his favor. And it set off a complete round of Democratic panic. Biden, it seems, was just uniquely weak. Then, on November 7th, we had this big bunch of elections. And Democrats did really well. In Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear held the governor's mansion. In Virginia, Democrats took back the House of Delegates. In Ohio, they got a constitutional amendment protecting abortion. It felt a lot like 2022, when Biden was polling poorly and everybody predicted a Democratic wipeout. But Democrats did far better in the midterms than anybody expected.
1:09 Ezra Klein? Well, they did better, I guess I should say, than almost anybody expected. But Michael Podhoretz, he did expect it. Podhoretz was a longtime political director of the AFL-CIO. He's kind of a legend in Democratic campaign circles. He founded this thing called the Analyst Institute, which was the nerve center of the data-driven empirical turn in Democratic campaign strategies. Now, he writes a Substack on these topics called Weekend Reading, which is a descendant of an influential email he used to send out to top campaign strategists. And he'd never thought 2022 was going to be a wipeout for Democrats. He doesn't think Biden's bad polls are revealing much right now. He thinks the whole way the media thinks about polling is wrong. He calls it "mad poll disease," and it drives him a little nuts.
1:51 Ezra Klein? He often invents that frustration to me—I'm a nearby member of the media to him. So I invited him on the show to get his take on how Biden looks going into 2024, whether Democrats are making a huge mistake by sidestepping a primary, and what it will take to reconstitute the anti-MAGA coalition we saw in 2020 and 2022. As always, my email, [email protected] .
2:16 Ezra Klein? Michael Pedhorsor, welcome to the show.
2:18 Speaker 01 Hi, Les, really glad to be here.
2:21 Ezra Klein? So I want to begin chronologically. I asked you to come on the show after this big New York Times/Siena poll showing Trump beating Biden in five of the six key swing states. That poll set off a huge panic among Democrats. You think, or thought, I think it is fair to say, that panic was stupid?
2:38 Ezra Klein? Why?
2:39 Speaker 01 For several reasons. The most important one is that a poll taken today, especially in 2023, really doesn't tell us anything about November 2024 that we don't already know. The national election is going to be really close. No poll, even on the day of the election, after millions of people have voted, gets that right reliably. Over and over again, whether it's the midterms or some of the elections that just happened, the media looking at the poll doesn't understand what Americans do, that it's different when they cast the ballot than when they answer a survey.
3:20 Speaker 01 That when they answer a survey, it's an opportunity to express their frustration, their disappointment, which is obviously the case about how people feel about this administration. And it comes out in lots of other polls. But then, when they actually have to go and vote and actually look at the choice, it doesn't match. But that isn't really how it gets interpreted and written up.
3:44 Ezra Klein? Let me try to defend poll panic here for a minute.
3:46 Speaker 01 Okay.
3:46 Ezra Klein? Not my natural position, but I want to give advice.
3:49 Speaker 01 Sure.
3:50 Ezra Klein? So the thing people say is, look, fair enough, the polls are predictive. We actually know that polls a year out from an election are not predictive. They have no better than a monkey throwing a dart accuracy. But it is a snapshot. And it's telling us things that need to be taken seriously. And the thing specifically it is telling us is Joe Biden is a uniquely weak candidate. According to the 538 polling average, his favorability rating is 38.5. It's not great. If you look at the New York Times/Siena poll, he's seeing, and I think this is both the most striking and to me, the most questionable aspect of the poll, double-digit erosion among young voters and among black voters. I mean, if that happens, he is toast. And so there's some unique Joe Biden problem.
4:33 Ezra Klein? The poll is a snapshot, but the snapshot should make Democrats panic and dump Joe Biden. That would be my case for polling panic.
4:43 Speaker 01 Well, there's nothing in the New York Times survey that people who can do anything about whether Joe Biden is on the ticket don't already know. There's a massive amount of polling always going on in the Democratic Party, in the Republican Party, in the groups that work with them. There's no news in that survey that is a surprise to people who are doing this professionally. This is known.
5:13 Ezra Klein? But I think the concern people have, the concern I hear from Democrats, and including from some elite Democrats, is that the Democratic Party is whistling past the graveyard. You believe, and we're going to talk about this at some length, that Donald Trump poses a unique threat to American democracy, that Donald Trump getting reelected in 2024 is a cataclysm of genuinely historic dimensions. And if that's true, if you believe that's true, then you really want to go into 2024 with your strongest candidate. And if Democrats, for elite Democrats, informed Democrats, the people with the power to make decisions in this space, people who you've been in these circles forever, if they're
5:56 Ezra Klein? refusing to admit what is right in front of their face because maybe it's bad for their career, maybe it's socially awkward, maybe they don't want to be the first one to stick their head up, although some have, I mean, David Axelrod, who is Obama's chief strategist, has kind of said pretty clearly he thinks Biden should step down and not run again, not step down from the presidency, but from the campaign. Are those Democratic elites who are talking about making a terrible mistake right now that is being revealed in this and other polls?
6:23 Speaker 01 I think that this is the kind of original sin mistake, which happened after Sanders won the Nevada caucus. And suddenly Biden wins everywhere, he's the nominee, even though about 10 minutes before he looked really weak. And the things that made him look weak in early 2020, to a certain extent, haven't gone. But once you've been president for three years, and there's a whole infrastructure around you, and there really isn't time, and this is why I think it's really unrealistic, to figure out who the next one is. And so while I wish we weren't in a position where we are right now, I think that it's
7:08 Speaker 01 the least bad place.
7:10 Ezra Klein? So something you suggest there is that democratic elites just don't really have time, or didn't have time, to do something else here. And that doesn't feel really true. I mean, it's still possible for your Gavin Newsom's of the world to go onto the ballot. It does seem, and I mean, people in the party have said this, that there has been a push to close ranks behind Joe Biden. And I guess the question I have for you is, has that been the right strategy? There was a lot of time. This was not, nobody like, lost time on the watch. They made a choice. And people are scared they made the wrong choice. Do you think they made the wrong choice?
7:48 Speaker 01 I feel like that's something I have, no one could really have an idea on. I don't offer that kind of advice. I think it's, it's a gamble. And without knowing what the odds on the gamble were, how do you sort of answer that question?
8:05 Ezra Klein? I do think that is a little bit underplayed in this sometimes, that going with Biden is dangerous. I mean, going with an 80-year-old candidate has risks, who's not very popular. And starting up a primary either against the incumbent president, or having him step down when his vice president is not that politically strong, also could fracture the party. And so I also don't, I've felt that other people seem more certain on what Democrats should have done here than I am, but I could see it going wrong both ways. But the fact that it goes wrong one way doesn't mean it also wouldn't have gone wrong in the other. Now, let me flip the role I'm taking in this, because I've looked at polling at about this
8:44 Ezra Klein? state in the race, about the state in the presidency, for Trump, for Obama, for Clinton, for George W. Bush, for, and the thing that strikes me about it, is that if all I knew were the polls, nothing I'm seeing with Joe Biden looks that weird. I made a mistake and didn't bring these numbers in with me, but- Mitt Romney was leading Barack Obama in polling in 2011. Hillary Clinton was dominating, absolutely stomping Donald Trump and Jeb Bush in polling. You can go back to Reagan's first term, you go back to Obama's first term, you look at their approval ratings in the third year, they're not great. You know, depending on when you're looking, they're a little bit higher. You can argue Biden is underperforming them by a point or two, but they now look like
9:29 Ezra Klein? incredibly successful politicians, but in year three, they didn't seem that way. In fact, Barack Obama in year three so didn't seem that way that his campaign polled, taking Joe Biden off of the ticket and replacing him with the electoral juggernaut of Hillary Clinton. And so I think the thing here that is sometimes hard for me to tell is whether incumbents in their third year just kind of look a little rough before the whole artillery of the campaign comes into play, or there's something distinctive about Joe Biden, maybe related to his age and doubts voters have about that, or something else about him that puts him in a weaker position such that the rebound we have seen with other presidents is not as likely for him.
10:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm glad you brought that in because that sounds a little bit self-serving coming from me, but it's true. Right now, a lot of people taking those surveys are expressing their disappointment with the way the world is, not thinking about what the world might look like in 2025. And that was true in all of the third years you're talking about. It's in the DNA to have higher expectations for the person you're going to elect then gets met. And so I think there was a lot of unrealistic expectations generated.
10:42 Ezra Klein? But why are people so disappointed right now? I mean, Biden's bad polling, his sort of drop to the low 40s, high 30s, it predates both Russia's invasion of Ukraine and very much predates the Hamas's attacks and the war in Gaza. And if you look around, for a while, the explanation was inflation, but inflation's been coming down. The labor market is actually pretty damn strong and has been that way for a while. Wages are pretty good. You wouldn't think people would be so pissed at the system. I mean, COVID has calmed. Compared to where we were just a couple of years ago, this feels like recovery. This feels like, I don't want to say feels like, because clearly it doesn't feel like. But if you looked at the numbers, you could really make a case for mourning in America. So why are people so pissed?
11:25 Speaker 01 Because they're not the right numbers to be looking at. There's just the collapsing confidence in American institutions generally, and that has been happening for the last 20 years at least. Whoever is president is actually the head of one of those institutions that people have lost faith in, which is why for three quarters of the time for Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, their approval ratings have been underwater, except during the 9/11 bump and in the first couple of months after they get elected. That is just the permanent state of presidential approval in the 21st century. And so we're not seeing a different thing, really.
12:09 Speaker 01 On the numbers, I think that this is one of those situations where there's sort of zombie heuristics. Things like GDP growth, that used to be a really good number because prosperity was shared. So if GDP was going up, then you could be reasonably sure most people were feeling it. But the less that that prosperity shared, the less good indicator it is. Also, in this period, the kinds of things that really matter to working people have gotten a lot worse in terms of how much more precarious their employment is.
12:50 Speaker 01 So if you make, say, 10% or 15% more, but you don't know what your hours are going to be next week, you don't know whether you'll have a job in seven months, you don't feel like someone telling you you just got a 15% raise is the whole story. And similarly, if you have a family, if you don't feel like you're going to be able to help your kids get a better life, that's just not going to be overcome by this month's unemployment numbers. And I think inflation is another area where there's this kind of data mismatch. Inflation coming down is still rising prices. And if you're in the like bottom three quarters, that's an immense burden.
13:34 Speaker 01 That's, I think, hard for people in this bubble to really appreciate, that unlike a lot of other problems, inflation is one that is in your head all the time because you don't know whether you're going to have enough money for the prices that are going to be next month. And so you just spend all this time in mental overhead that's unlike a more abstract problem.
14:01 Ezra Klein? I want to spend another moment on the Democratic weakness and Biden's weakness among young voters and voters of color. The swing in the Time Standard Poll is huge, and so I get the point that it seems unlikely that would persist through an election. But we've been seeing rising Republican support among non-white voters for a bit. Biden's polling troubles among young voters have also been persistent. Something real is happening here among two of the constituencies Democrats think of as most reliable for them. And it's consistent across enough polls that I think it should be, you know, taken seriously. So what do you make of it?
14:37 Speaker 01 I think that it is less about Trump becoming more popular and about the lack of enthusiasm and disappointment that especially young voters feel for Biden. One thing that I think most people probably can relate to is that often if you age into the electorate at a time that John Kennedy becomes president, or that Ronald Reagan becomes president, or that Barack Obama became president, that age cohort becomes very much attached to that political party.
15:16 Speaker 01 We're in this unusual place where the people coming of age are negatively seeing that. They are coming of age in a way that they are turned off by Trump, but not turned on by Biden or other Democrats.
15:30 Ezra Klein? How about the non-white vote?
15:32 Speaker 01 I think that there's
15:37 Speaker 01 A sort of academic or political observer expectation that whether people vote for Democrats or Republicans is determined by someone's race. And I think it's much more the case that it's determined by whether the campaign is making salient issues that threaten that group identity. And one of the most misunderstood things about the Latino vote between 2016 and 2020, where there was this enormous drop for support between Hillary Clinton and for Joe Biden,
16:16 Speaker 01 is that there wasn't much change in the support for Joe Biden from House Democrats in 2016. But if you remember, in 2016, going after Trump's hostility to Mexican immigrants was something she talked about a lot. It was something that she did advertising on that other Democrats weren't. And then among Latino voters, immigration was one of the top issues in multiple polls. It was in the air. And that activated a Latino identity. Joe Biden had a different strategy, which was to try not to go near that. But there are trade-offs, right?
16:59 Speaker 01 There's a way in which people who comment on politics don't realize almost everything has a trade-off. The trade-off of being quiet about activating group identities is that people in that group start to vote for different reasons. There's a great book called Steadfast Democrats that talks about how the black vote is always so high because that's the only socially acceptable vote in that community, because you always are black in America. But I think Latinos are more like every immigrant group before it. And if you don't feel threatened, then if you were conservative, the reasons you didn't, you voted for the House Republican in 2016, but voted for Clinton, that's a lot of what's going on.
17:44 Ezra Klein? And so in this theory, there would actually be a connection between why Joe Biden did better among white voters in 2020, which was a very important margin in him winning, and why he's doing and did somewhat worse among non-white voters. The media focused on what he lost, but you're actually saying they made it trade.
18:02 Speaker 01 Absolutely. If you look at Obama 12, Clinton 16, and Biden, they all ran about two points ahead of House Democrats. But Obama and Clinton did it by doing much better than House Democrats with Latinos and blacks, and worse with whites. And Biden, it was sort of two points, whichever group you were in. And that may have been part of the success, but it's a problem that the stories are only that there are losses. There are trade-offs here.
18:37 Ezra Klein? So, something that you've said now a few times, that numbers we're seeing here are not that unusual. People are just mad. Presidents are typically now underwater, have been for some time. It's been noted by political scientists that performance of the economy is decoupling from presidential approval. That was true for a bit now, too. And that maybe Biden's age, which I think most of us take is a real potential weakness for him, but I wonder sometimes if it doesn't almost act as cover to make a normal situation look abnormal. Because Biden's age is actually somewhat abnormal for a president, that creates a kind of, maybe this time is different, maybe what we're seeing is more serious. But if you weren't looking at it that way, maybe it all looks normal.
19:19 Ezra Klein? And something else that I think possibly adds into that sense is that if you look internationally, the leaders of peer countries are very unpopular. So my colleague David Brooks had a column where he says, Biden's 40% approval rating may look bad, but in Canada, Justin Trudeau's approval rating is 36. In Germany, Olaf Scholz is a 29. In Britain, Rishi Sunak is a 28. In France, Emmanuel Macron is a 23. And in Japan, Fumio Kishida is also a 23. Now, these other leaders are not 80. So something is happening that leaders, you know, who are in the center-left and center-right across a pretty wide array
20:00 Ezra Klein? of countries are not popular. In fact, Joe Biden is the cleanest shirt and the dirty laundry there.
20:06 Speaker 01 That's absolutely right. And I think that matches what I was trying to express is that there is a sort of baseline dissatisfaction with the way the world's going in all of these places. And polling makes it easy to attach that dissatisfaction to a particular person you ask about and ignore that it's really about everything.
20:33 Ezra Klein? Right.
20:33 Speaker 01 And that you couldn't put someone else in and have people suddenly forget all the things that are making them grumpy about the world today. But the act of making it seem like this could all change if we just had a different person at the top of this is fantasy. It's just fantasy. And that's part of why I think it's a real problem that important media institutions sort of support the idea that our problems are as superficial as who we put on the ballot as sort of different human beings, when we need to solve the underlying institutional problems.
21:42 Ezra Klein? We've been talking about the polling. And this was what was on my mind when I sent the invitation to you. Then there was an election night last Tuesday. And Democrats did pretty damn well, just as they did pretty damn well in 2022, in a way that maybe if you had been looking at least broad national polling, how people feel about Joe Biden, how they feel about the country, you wouldn't think the incumbent party politically, at least the broad incumbent party politically, would be surviving that. So what did you make of the 2023 specials we just saw?
22:16 Speaker 01 Pretty much the same as you did, that people understand, can distinguish what's at stake when they actually are deciding who they want than when they're answering surveys, and there's no real stakes. But when the media takes those answers as a profound truth, it misses what's, there's just evidence piling up over and over and over again, right? It's like the two plus two keeps equalling four, but they keep hoping it's going to equal three. And the problem is that this should be telling us they're not really mathematicians, right?
22:59 Speaker 01 But it's like every time you roll out a new number, numbers just do something to people, right? If someone just got up and said, I think Biden won't do well, it has a different effect than when someone says, I think he's going to lose by four points or something, or 4.5. That's, I think-
23:15 Ezra Klein? Well, I think versus I have a representative national sample, or a sample I have turned representative through methodical demographic weighting are, to be fair, different ideas.
23:26 Speaker 01 I don't think so.
23:28 Ezra Klein? Make this argument, because you've made this argument, and there's some truth to it, I think, that polling is a kind of punditry. Why do you say that?
23:34 Speaker 01 Right. It's a different kind of opinion journalism now. There was a time before phone response rates went so down that there was some scientific basis to it. It was just basically probability theory. But now, there's no such thing as an actual random sample anymore.
23:54 Ezra Klein? And just to draw this out, the thing happening here at the end of the game in polling is that the pollsters are making a prediction about who will come out to vote. And so they're taking their interviews and then trying to make the demographics of their interviews. If you think you have half as many Hispanics in your sample as you believe will be in the electorate, then you have to upweight the Hispanics in your sample. But so every pollster is making maybe an informed guess, but a guess about who will show up at the polls in the next election. And without making that guess, those polls don't mean anything.
24:29 Speaker 01 Correct. So to me, one of the best pieces of data journalism ever was in the New York Times.
24:35 Ezra Klein? It's a great paper.
24:36 Speaker 01 It is, sometimes. In September 2016, when there was another Times survey of Clinton versus Trump in Florida, and really genius, the 850 or so interviews were given blind to really respected pollsters, pollsters who don't do spin, people who are serious, some in the middle, some on the left and the right. And the estimates, I think, were Clinton plus four, Clinton plus three, two plus ones, and Trump plus one. Right? These are literally the same 850 interviews. And it's in that arithmetic that everyone should see that, yeah, they're all making
25:21 Speaker 01 a good faith effort to tell you what those 850 interviews mean, but they're not science anymore.
25:28 Ezra Klein? There is a real, and I think reasonable, given what we traditionally think about as a relationship between midterm performance and the president's approval rating belief, that you would have a just gigantic red wave in 2022, that it would be a historic wipeout for Democrats. Inflation was terrible in 2022. I mean, it was really bad, and people blamed Joe Biden for it. And then he just didn't. Democrats did well in the Senate and kept it against many people's expectations. They held losses down quite a bit in the House. They didn't do that badly across governorships. Why?
26:04 Speaker 01 MAGA, because the way politics works in this country now has changed radically since Trump was elected. And coverage is pretty much what you just described, where you just expect that red wave because it's always been that way, right? And so when you do polling, whatever you're doing, you just are subject to a lot of confirmation bias until it's disabused at the polls, right? Voters have been making the choice of MAGA, no MAGA for several cycles now. They know what's at stake.
26:39 Ezra Klein? So when you say MAGA, you mean Trumpist candidates, the kinds of candidates who buy into his lies about 2020, or prior to 2020, the kinds of candidates who align themselves with, say, the Trump faction of the party or his presidency over what you might think of as traditional Republican candidates?
26:55 Speaker 01 Correct. 20 years ago, if Herschel Walker had been on the ballot, he would have been wiped out, right? He had just so many negatives, so many things that people probably wouldn't ever countenance in that state. And yet he almost won. And even though I think John Fetterman is great, right, and an important senator now, imagine 20 years ago, a candidate having a stroke win as comfortably as he did. Because people understood that it wasn't just about who Pennsylvania's junior senator was going to be. They know this is closer to a parliamentary decision than it is weigh the two candidates.
27:35 Speaker 01 Because Trump won, and because of Dobbs, voters now understand that there's more to the difference than rhetoric.
27:43 Ezra Klein? So people hate it when I say this. They hate it. But I'm a party polarization guy, and I believe it. In most elections that are national, right, House, Senate, to some degree presidency, though not only, voters would, in general, have more information if you took the candidates' names off the ballot. Because, in many ways, the...
28:06 Ezra Klein? Candidates' efforts using consultants and polling and ads and whatever to create idiosyncratic personal profiles, built on their biography, built on which kind of dog they have at home, their family's story, et cetera, actually distracts from the fact that the most important vote they cast, specifically House Senate, is for the leaders of the chamber. And I used to say that like 10 years ago, and people just loathed it. But what you're saying is that voters increasingly act that way anyway.
28:36 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Don't count me as a hater here. I mean, I wish that was the case. If that was the case, we would not have had a Republican majority in the House. Because if you think about the way in which every Senate race was covered, as will Democrats, Republicans, control the Senate, then you think about how the House races were covered, where that never came in.
29:00 Ezra Klein? So the states that understood themselves, as in a national election, right, understood themselves as doing something that would really matter for control, treated it that way, and Democrats held on. And the states that didn't, I mean, California, the narrative in California was, it's California, right? Like, who cares? Like, Democrats winning California, people didn't really seem very, to feel very empowered there. And also weren't treated that way in campaign spending.
29:25 Speaker 01 Right. I think, but again-
29:26 Ezra Klein? Pennsylvania got blanketed.
29:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's that. But it's also that the media essentially is one of your haters because they really want to preserve this Democratic folk myth that we should be looking at the two individual candidates and watch how they debate and do all of those kinds of things, rather than contextualizing those House races as leading to Kevin McCarthy and then Mike Johnson. That was in nobody's narrative ahead of the election.
29:59 Ezra Klein? Well, I think that's a little too far. I think the idea that these House races would affect control of the House was not actually a secret the media kept. But I do take your point. People all over the country knew all about John Fetterman and Dr. Oz. And that doesn't really happen in House races, which I think has a real effect. I do think the deterioration of local media and the nationalization of the media lowers the bandwidth for people to kind of see the stakes and the intensity and what matters in their local elections in a way that's a genuine problem.
30:31 Speaker 01 So I 100% that that is true. And that is a very, very big problem. And where it becomes more consequential is in a more subtle way, which is sort of dictating coverage. What's important to cover? So in a lot of the stories about the elections in New York in October of 22, they were about crime and about inflation. But when especially big institutions like the New York Times say, well, this poll says voters are not caring as much about abortion and about inflation as they were because this one poll told us that, you know, that has an effect on every assignment desk in the mainstream media. Oh,
31:16 Speaker 01 we're not going to do another story about election deniers. We're going to do the next one about people at grocery stores or whatever. And it has a ripple effect.
31:25 Ezra Klein? Let's talk about abortion for a second, because I think one way of explaining a fair amount of Democratic performance since 2020, explaining what happened in 2022, explaining to some degree what happened in 2023 on Tuesday, is simply to say Dobbs. And that Dobbs took the salience of abortion and the stakes of what it means for Republicans to be in charge and turned, at least on that issue, which is a very important issue for people, turned that from an abstraction to a tangible, real, lived experience. I mean, people are now living, and I think this is often underplayed, like, people are living in the post-Dobbs world. I mean, women in red states are living in states where abortion
32:07 Ezra Klein? is criminalized. And that fundamentally, it's like, not all this anti-MAGA stuff necessarily, it's Dobbs. And really, the key thing the Democrats are doing is running on abortion.
32:20 Speaker 01 So this is a both and for me. I think that it is about the immediate effects on people's lives because of Roe being reversed. But more broadly than that, it's a kind of shock to the system that all the things that Republicans had been talking about wanting to do wasn't just rhetoric, that given the chance, they would do it. So your issue doesn't have to be abortion to be affected by Dobbs. You're going to hear what a Republican politician says now differently than before Dobbs because now you can't discount it as just appealing to their base.
33:05 Speaker 01 They're going to do it.
33:06 Ezra Klein? So I want to now open up into the broad Michael Betts view of the world and elections and what Democrats should do. And there is a school of thought, sometimes gets called populism, has different names, but it's a long-running school of thought among Democrats that the problem with Democrats is that they are a bit too liberal and specifically don't talk enough about the things that they do that people like, which are usually their more moderate accomplishments and not only. Your view has been that that's missing the point and that there is this anti-MAGA majority out there and that strategy should flow from the question of how you activate that majority, which we know exists because we saw it show up in 2020, saw at least parts of it show up in 2022 unexpectedly. So let me start with this question.
33:51 Ezra Klein? Just demographically, what is the anti-MAGA majority? How is it different than just Democratic voters?
33:57 Speaker 01 Right. I don't think it has a demographic basis. And as you know, I really think thinking about the electorate in demographic terms is one of the biggest liabilities of the current conversation because right now, for the most part, when we look at how demographic X is voting, it's a reflection of how many people who don't like MAGA or love MAGA fall into that demographic. If I say white non-college voter, probably everybody listening to this thinks of like a burly guy, Bob, in a Wisconsin diner who gets interviewed over and over again and seems pretty Trumpy. Bob is the guy that the populists want to win over.
34:42 Speaker 01 But if you pull the camera back from that interview, first you see Charlene, who's reaching over the counter and pouring his coffee. And Charlene is really upset about Dobbs. She'd been an infrequent voter, but now she's going to be out again. And then you pull the camera back further and you see 320-somethings sitting in a booth, who don't trust anything any politician ever tells them. They haven't had a regular job yet. There's an ambient anxiety about all the things that could go wrong. And now one or two of them, because their friend says so, decides to vote. That's the anti-MAGA majority. It's not particularly demographic. They were all white, non-college voters.
35:24 Speaker 01 But they have a different place in the world and they have a different perspective. And other than Bob's, they feel threatened by Trump and by what his allies want to do.
35:37 Ezra Klein? If Donald Trump is truly so unappealing to people, and he is a very known quantity, right? He is not the unknown governor of Missouri, who's got a fast rise in the Republican Party right now. People really do know he's under a bazillion indictments. People really do know that there was this thing that happened on January 6, where he and others tried to execute a coup of the government. And Trump's staying power, the fact that he's risen up in, let's call it snapshot polling, right, polling of just how people are answering today. Yeah, maybe they'd make a different decision if they were really in the ballot booth. But I think a lot of people hope to see Trump polling at 34% now, right, after the last couple of years.
36:22 Ezra Klein? And instead, he's polling ahead of Joe Biden. And that is making them wonder, maybe that anti-MAGA majority isn't there anymore. Maybe some things about Trump have faded into a kind of nostalgia. People like the economy better. They don't really like Joe Biden. And as such, like, if that was there, then he wouldn't be polling so high. And the fact that he's polling so high means that is no longer there. How do you think about that?
36:46 Speaker 01 So one of the things that most accurately predicted Trump's disapproval numbers going down when he was president as if for some reason he was out of the news.
36:56 Ezra Klein? Yes.
36:57 Speaker 01 And right now, he is actually relatively out of the news. The thing that people can't completely accomplish is think about how they will be thinking about this after four trials, after a possible conviction, after in October where he's just on the front of everything all the time.
37:19 Ezra Klein? I would frame that a little bit differently. I think the one thing Donald Trump is not is out of the news. I mean, if you go to the New York Times on any day lately, it's a toss up on whether or not Donald Trump trials or the war in Gaza is leading the page. What I do think is that people are not hearing from him directly anymore that much. In a weird way, one of the best things to happen to Trump was getting banned from every major social media service and then him deciding to stick to Truth Social rather than go back to X now that he is unbanned because I do think when Donald Trump is talking directly to people, that's very exciting for his people, but for a lot of other people, it's very,
38:01 Ezra Klein? very, very upsetting and creates a very powerful backlash effect. And at the same time, to just basically reiterate the question or poke you a little bit more on it, it implies people are very short memoryed to say that after the intensity of the experience that the Donald Trump presidency was and how known a quantity he is, that all of these people who have suddenly started saying, yeah, I would go for that guy again, or I would go for that guy at all, have just forgotten the vibes that Donald Trump creates in them when he actually has access to his phone and a full suite of apps.
38:44 Speaker 01 So I think a really good poke because I think it helps bring another aspect to this out that we were talking about before about this being bigger than individual candidates, right? That they're really, especially over the last dozen years since the 2010 election, half of the country has been going in the opposite direction from the other half of the country in big ways, whether it's you get a higher minimum wage, you don't, you can have abortion, you can't. Up and down the line, state legislates that they've become different worlds to live in. And that's the baseline for it being so close is now it's not just do I think we should go this direction or that direction, it's do I want
39:29 Speaker 01 to keep what I have or lose it because the other party now is in charge nationally? And that's what gets him from 34 to 42 or 43 or whatever it is.
39:40 Ezra Klein? Let me give you my personal explanation for some of this. You do a lot of media criticism on your Substack in your conversations with me. You're not always a fan of our reporting. But one of my views is that the single biggest divide in media and politics is not left, right, it's interested, uninterested. And that the people who are not that interested in politics are have actually become functionally unimaginable to the people who are. Like, how much you can really not know about politics, not care, how distant it can really be from your life if you never read the news, which is true for a whole lot of people, even a whole lot of people who vote really, really rarely come into contact, much less choose
40:24 Ezra Klein? to come into contact with political news. I think a lot of when I read you, a lot of things come down to the media should cover this thing differently. But the experience of being in the media is that for a lot of the people who you might care, if they read that we were covering a thing differently, like they are persuadable, they are soft in their views. We're not reaching them. They're not coming to the homepage. They're not looking for editorials to see what we think about things and like what the level of stridency is. And the big unsolved question, actually, for everybody, whether you're a populist, whether you're an anti-MAGA, you know, how do you reach people you're not reaching? Like, how does a message get to somebody who like hates politics and hates the news and doesn't
41:07 Ezra Klein? care what any of us are saying and weirdly doesn't even listen to this podcast as hard
41:11 Speaker 01 I can imagine a book.
41:12 Ezra Klein? As hard as it is to believe.
41:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that is a really, really important question. And I agree that most people really would rather not hear the news at all and do not go searching it out. And this is also, just to sweep it back in, part of what was my critique of populism is it it depends on the belief that if a politician says something, someone will hear it and believe it. And that just is not the world we live in. But what does happen is that the media, especially an institution as big as the New York Times, has a ripple effect. You're not reaching that person that is not paying attention to you directly, but you're
41:58 Speaker 01 creating the information reality environment that maybe one or two steps removed, the people they trust about what's going on in the world, that's how they organize their thinking. And part of the reason that even right as Dobbs was about to be overturned, polling wasn't showing people were going to care about it anywhere near as much as they ended up caring about it, is that when you take a survey and they say, well, if it's overturned, what will you do? They can't factor in, what'll I do when my two best friends go crazy over it and are telling me all the time, we've got to go to this rally, or that candidate
42:42 Speaker 01 is going to mean this. It's not a direct pipeline from the New York Times to that person in the diner, but there will be someone in those people's lives who's influenced. And that's the same thing for Fox. Not that many people actually watch the literal Fox, but that reality bubble goes through all the different social networks and creates a reality.
43:07 Ezra Klein? I do think this is a pretty important point. I've been thinking a lot about this with world events over the past year and a half, two years. For a while, it was very plausible and began to seem clearer and clearer that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. And one of the things that I observed in that, as somebody who was part of the world who'd begun to realize this was going to happen, was even knowing that and following the news on it closely, I had trouble projecting myself correctly forward into the structure of emotion, the structure of feeling that would follow that event. Right? I knew it would be a big deal. I knew we would have to cover it.
43:51 Ezra Klein? But when it happened, it was so seismic and the experience people had watching it on social media was so intense that just knowing that Russia was going to invade Ukraine and we were not going to like it did not describe the reality was going to happen at all. I think that if you described to people that there would be a huge Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and then a huge Israeli air bombing and siege and then invasion of Gaza, that people would correctly have told you, I would be very upset about that. Like, that would make me, you know, I would not like that world event to happen and it would have been much better if it had not happened. But the level of intense feeling for a lot of people after they see their friends weeping in Instagram stories and their Jewish friends posting about antisemitism, that it was not
44:33 Ezra Klein? really, people are not capable of like throwing themselves forward into different emotional realities than they inhabit. It's actually something I've learned about programming this show. Sometimes you just have to let the emotional hit happen. And this is just something we don't know how to work with. And it's a reason that I don't buy the argument exactly, that because the polls were right about the 2023 elections, they're also right about Biden because campaigns create a different emotional reality for people. They're so overwhelmed with anger and emotion and intensity and outrage and coverage for like a year, that by the end of that, they feel differently and feeling matters in politics.
45:08 Speaker 01 Yes, that's what I'm trying to say is that why--
45:10 Ezra Klein? I'm just agreeing with you.
45:12 Speaker 01 Okay. No, that's why, but you haven't heard me really ever criticize a particular poll, right? Because my point is that the things they say they're trying to tell us can't be told. Buy it. It's a methodological limitation, right? Just like you just described, you cannot expect human beings to understand and project forward what they're going to think when something happens.
45:40 Ezra Klein? I'll ask you about another piece of this, which is, I think that we are still a little bit trapped in an older version of politics, which is defined by who we like, when modern politics is defined by who we hate and who we fear. And like, the political science term for this is positive polarization versus negative polarization, right? Am I, do I like Joe Biden? That's one reason to vote for Joe Biden. Do I hate Donald Trump? That's a reason to vote for Joe Biden, too. And I often think of Joe Biden and the Democrats in this era as working with negative polarization very effectively and positive polarization very ineffectively. Like, they're not very good at getting people to like them, but they're good at channeling the fear and anger people have at the Republican Party.
46:23 Ezra Klein? And it very much strikes me that your kind of anti-MAGA theory is basically negative polarization as a full-on campaign theory. Just like, take seriously that the strongest motivator for anti-Trump voters is negative. They don't have to like Joe Biden, they have to fear Donald Trump. And that might be a much more achievable goal for not just Democrats to achieve, but Donald Trump himself to achieve. Because like, nobody's better at making people fear Donald Trump than Donald Trump.
46:50 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I think that's exactly right. I think that the perspective I bring to this is not as a party partisan. It's about preserving what will be taken away if they win. And so I see this as sort of separate from traditional electoral politics. It's about civil society, wherever you are on an ideological spectrum. So I'm not really offering advice to the Democratic Party. I'm offering advice to people who want a Democratic small-day future, that we shouldn't have to rely on a political party to defeat this kind of movement.
47:33 Speaker 01 It's up to us ourselves to go out and defeat it.
47:37 Ezra Klein? Let me ask you about another narrative you've been, I think it is fair to say, cranky and annoyed by, which is, there's been a move to say in recent years, like, the dominant and rising form of polarization is educational polarization. The Democratic Party has begun doing much better among college-educated voters than it used to, Republican Party much worse, Republicans are doing much better among working-class voters than they used to, Democratic Party quite a bit worse. This has also led, in the telling of some, to shifting dynamics around racial voting. Republicans have been doing better with Hispanic and Black voters, even in the Trump era, than people expected. Democrats have been making gains among white voters. Like, that's a big violation of the narratives, I think, as they were cohering in 2016.
48:21 Ezra Klein? And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is you believe this is actually misguided, and the thing to focus on is religious polarization. So tell me why.
48:28 Speaker 01 The conversation we've had so far describes the actual dominant polarization in this country, which is between a kind of MAGA future and not that future. That is actually what's polarizing us. And 50 years ago, you would not be talking about education polarization. You would just be talking about the actual divide happening in the world, which is really clear to see. And I do think that in a lot of ways, whether or not you have a degree in this country is devastating in terms of your economic prospects and many other things. It's really important, but it's not what's making this big rip.
49:13 Speaker 01 And the recent thing you raised, the religious, is that within, let's just stick with white voters for a minute, within white voters, do you call someone who is a political evangelical?
49:29 Speaker 01 A non-college voter or a religious evangelical when you're trying to explain their voting behavior. I think, obviously, as a religious evangelical, they're part of an actual movement. They go to church every week. They listen to Christian broadcasting. There's no, like, non-college broadcasting network. And if you pull that out, if you divide white voters, which I don't think is the best way to do it, but you get a way better result than education, if you divide it into those who, on a survey, say they're Christian, and those who don't, the partisan voting gap is much bigger. Right? That's what's much more clarifying.
50:12 Speaker 01 And a white, non-college voter in a blue state actually supported Biden at a higher level than a white college voter in a red state.
50:21 Ezra Klein? I want you to go a bit deeper on this, though, because I think you're underselling how strident the charts I am receiving from you on this topic have been. One of the cases you've been making, I think this is a reasonable description, is that Trumpism is fundamentally, at this point, powered by religious evangelical voters. And not just Trumpism, but Mike Johnson becoming Speaker. That one way to describe what's happening is MAGA. But when you ask, how is MAGA happening? The answer is that it has developed an extraordinarily potent base among one of the few truly organized voter groups in America, which is religious evangelicals.
51:05 Ezra Klein? So make that case to me, that something distinctive is happening there, that you cannot understand American politics without understanding.
51:11 Speaker 01 The case I'm trying to make is that the backlash against Obama, what got reported as the Tea Party, was anti-Republicans who are willing to accept the legitimacy of Obama as president. When McCain, like every other losing president before him, and did a gracious speech immediately after, and even noted what a step forward it was that Obama was, it was kind of a breaking point within the Republican coalition, where the sort of business interests had been in the driver's seat, the religious interests had been going along and delivering their votes for them. Just flipped.
51:54 Speaker 01 They're clustered in congressional districts. It only took about 55,000 votes to defeat Rhino incumbents in those districts. So that now about three-fourths of the caucus, Republican caucus, is from the most evangelical districts in the country. That political potential was activated.
52:16 Ezra Klein? And so one thing arguing here is that there's been an important base inside the Republican Party, right? Evangelicals have been important there for a long time, but they stopped going along and instead began to use their concentration in certain areas to functionally take over the party. I mean, your argument, again, particularly around Mike Johnson, is that he represents the successful takeover of this party, not because most Republican voters are from this faction, but because it actually didn't need that many Republican, you know, House members, for instance, who just would refuse to go along with anybody who wasn't of their faction in order to bring the entire House to a halt, in order to destroy Speaker McCarthy. So give me a bit more on that.
52:58 Ezra Klein? Like, how was this group behind McCarthy's downfall and Johnson's rise?
53:03 Speaker 01 So what happens is that partly a result of geographic sorting, partly a result of gerrymandering, right? Out of the 435 districts, 390 of them are just safe. Okay? And so the only competition happens in primaries, which are very low turnout and never covered by the national media, right? This has all been happening in plain sight. No one has paid attention to it. But what it means is that if, say, a third or 40%, even that little, in a congressional district are evangelical voters and the turnout in primaries is very low, they're most certain
53:48 Speaker 01 to be a majority of the people voting. And if they are going even 80/20 for your primary challenger to the incumbent, that's pretty unstoppable, right? Such a sort of hackable part of our election system if you have clustered concentrated strength in safe districts.
54:30 Ezra Klein? So now I want to ask you about another faction that has been traditionally very important in politics now on the Democratic side, which you have very specific experience with, which is labor. So you're the longtime political director, as you've mentioned, of the AFLCIO. You retired from that fairly recently. I'd say around the same time, labor has gone through a huge resurgence in a lot of the country. I'm not saying those two events are related.
54:51 Speaker 01 I would have left earlier.
54:53 Ezra Klein? Yeah, sure. But, but there is something happening. There's very big strikes being threatened and won. Joe Biden is a very pro-labor president. What do you understand to be happening?
55:05 Speaker 01 For quite a while, there was a feeling of fairly helplessness that working people felt.
55:16 Speaker 01 And part of it was a result of either the outright hostility of Republican administrations or the consequences of the kind of lukewarm support and often bigger policy problems of Democratic administrations. And the combination of COVID and the disruptions and Biden being more clearly and assertively on the side of working people, those are all pieces of a realization that maybe
55:57 Speaker 01 there's a lot of latent power in working people that no one had been exercising. And one of the things about a resurgence is that they're almost always historically contagious. I'm sure you've seen, people have seen how 70% of people now support unions in this country and 10% are in them. It's not because they don't like unions. It's because of all the things that have been done to keep people from being in unions. And those are very real things. You are afraid of losing your job, you're afraid of retaliation, you're afraid of all of these things. And so there are upsurges in union success when working people see other working people
56:42 Speaker 01 succeed.
56:43 Ezra Klein? So that implies you're actually giving Biden quite a bit of credit here. That in being as pro-union as he is, you're saying that in addition to, I think, sort of other factors like, you know, a tight employment market and so on, that that really has been emboldening, even without Democrats passing major union law reform.
57:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. Without getting too much in the weeds, the standard operating procedure for a corporation when confronted with a potential strike had been to basically just drag their feet, to count on public attention going away quickly, to count on the regulators giving them delays on unfair labor practices and things like that. And by simply agreeing to enforce the law the way it was written is a big pushback right now, right? It's not enough to undo all the reasons certain sectors of the economy can't be organized and a lot of other important things.
57:43 Speaker 01 But it's really maybe the first time since the 60s that the playing field is as level.
57:49 Ezra Klein? Yeah, I was going to ask this. Is it sufficient for an actual resurgence? Because on the one hand, there are very high-profile fights being won, but they're primarily being won by already-unionized workforces. I mean, when you look at the UAW strike, I mean, that is an existing union. When you look at what's happening with UPS, with the screenwriters and the actors, those are existing unions. So we haven't seen anything like the unionization of the Las Vegas hotel workers under Unite here, right? There hasn't been a big new industry, a big new corporate chain, unionized, to my knowledge. So is that kind of new unionization surge, right? Something that would actually change in a positive way, the percentage of Americans who belong to a union?
58:33 Ezra Klein? Is that possible under the current legal regime, even with a friendly Democratic president?
58:38 Speaker 01 I think the most straightforward answer is to return to the kind of union density that existed in the 1930s and 40s and 50s and 60s. The rules have to be as good. I think one of the most thrown off phrases whenever this topic comes up is the decline of the union movement or declining union membership, which is really a misdirection. Because really, from the mid 40s, right after the war, there's been a relentless campaign by business to make sure that there aren't more union members, and it keeps succeeding. I think there's a way in which people say, boy, when are we going to get those good manufacturing jobs back? In the 1930s, they were as bad as the service sector jobs.
59:23 Speaker 01 What made them, in our memory, good was that union representation got what was needed. And so then you get to gig workers. And this is where the Democratic Party's been complicit in passing things that prevent them from organizing because they're, quote, "independent contractors." But if you think about the Writers Guild strike, there's a group of people who you would really think would see themselves as independent contractors. The idea that people who are Uber drivers want to be individuals and the writers of hit TV series don't is nuts. But it can't happen because we now have rules and laws that prevent them from organizing.
1:00:07 Ezra Klein? So what are the electoral effects of this rising, at least in public opinion and political salience, labor movement? Does this actually affect the election, or is this a sort of separate thing happening in American life?
1:00:22 Speaker 01 I think that it will definitely have an effect. People have commented on Trump doing better in 2016 with union members than Obama had. Part of it was because of union members feeling like they just hadn't gotten enough. I mean, this is something I was actually very in the middle of. And...
1:00:50 Speaker 01 For many of those conservative unions that where that was always a risk, business has been great in the construction trades. And having been to local meetings and others, it's a completely different dynamic in the room, right? It used to be if someone wanted to talk politics, a guy with a MAGA hat would get up and be belligerent. Much harder for that person to do that right now because like work is great. So I think that's one possible impact.
1:01:20 Ezra Klein? If you're going to get any labor law reform, you're going to need Joe Biden or some other Democrat reelected or elected in 2024. I think Donald Trump is not going to do it. Joe Biden and his campaign, the Democrats have a certain amount of running room. They have strategic decisions to make. You are a relentless and pissed off critic of a lot of the people who have ideas there. You don't like the idea that Democrats should moderate. You don't like the idea that the thing they should do is try to poll what their most popular ideas are and just talk about that. So give me your positive perspective. You're chief strategist on these campaigns. What do you tell them Democrats to do?
1:01:55 Speaker 01 One of the most important things that Democrats can do, which they did do in 2022, is do what they were elected to do. The fact that the House Democrats were able to pull together and do such important January 6 hearings, it's both giving people the information they need and it's showing that they're actually responsible in doing their job. Right now, we see a similar kind of thing happening with the corruption stuff at the Supreme Court. It may not seem like it's exactly what you're asking, but it really is.
1:02:36 Speaker 01 Because it really is the job of the Senate Democrats to make sure that voters understand what's going on properly. And then they'll be doing their job in a way that isn't partisan political and absolutely necessary. And I think beyond that, I think it's just running as responsible public officials. Basically, make no unforced errors.
1:03:04 Ezra Klein? Thank you. This is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
1:03:10 Speaker 01 My first recommendation is an essay that you can get online. It's by George Orwell, and it's called Politics and the English Language. I think that the way we talk about all these things makes us less able to solve all problems, and we'd just be better to have honest conversation. Second one will be kind of maybe unusual. There's a new book called Tyranny, Inc., by someone who endorsed Trump before, but actually looked at the modern American labor situation and sees clearly what someone in the labor movement or someone who's actually paying attention to what work life is like, how it's basically a dictatorship. You have no rights. It's just really surprising.
1:03:55 Ezra Klein? This is Saurav Amari's book?
1:03:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:57 Ezra Klein? Michael Budhoretz, political director of the AFL-CIO, recommending a Saurav Amari book. I'd never have expected it.
1:04:03 Speaker 01 That's exactly what I did. But because it's built on some work by an academic, Elizabeth Anderson, who really brought attention to how we like have a First Amendment in the public square and no right whatsoever in the work, all of those things. I think it's really surprising and important that it's coming not from someone, the AFL-CIO. And the third is one actually that you brought to my attention, which is the book Crash by Adam Tooze, which I think should open the aperture for people about how our economy, all of these decisions are connected to the world in a way that makes everything make a lot more sense.
1:04:46 Ezra Klein? Michael Budhoretz, thank you very much.
1:04:47 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:04:59 Ezra Klein? This episode of the Ezra Klein Show was produced by Roland Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Emma Fugawu and Kristin Lynn. We have original music by Isaac Jones. We have audience strategy by Christina Semeluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rose Strasser. And special thanks here to Sonia Herrero.
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