Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show A Republican Pollster on Trump’s Undimmed Appeal About this episode The fact that Donald Trump is the front-runner for the G. O. P. nomination in 2024 has created a chasm in our politics. In the past, Democrats and Republicans at least understood why members of the other party liked their chosen candidates. Most conservatives weren’t confused why liberals liked Barack Obama, and vice versa for George W. Bush. But for a lot of Democrats, it feels impossible to imagine why anyone would cast a vote for Trump. And as a result, the two parties don’t just feel hostile toward each other; they feel increasingly unknowable.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a veteran Republican pollster, a founding partner of the opinion research firm Echelon Insights and a CNN contributor. She spends her days trying to understand the thinking of Republican voters, including hosting focus groups for New York Times Opinion. So I wanted to get her insights on why Republicans like Trump so much — even after his 2020 electoral loss, the Jan. 6 insurrection and over 90 criminal charges. What really explains Trump’s enduring appeal?
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Party of the People by Patrick Ruffini
Welcome to the O. C. by Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage and Alan Sepinwall
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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 Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Rollin Hu. 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.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Ezra Klein? Do you mind turning your headphone down?
0:03 Speaker 01 Hmm, okay. Um, is it good now? Okay.
0:07 Ezra Klein? For all I'm saying. All right. Fun times in an election year. My least favorite year in politics, all the time.
0:14 Speaker 01 Why is it your least favorite?
0:15 Ezra Klein? Elections are too high stakes.
0:17 Speaker 01 You don't like the stakes?
0:18 Ezra Klein? No. I just want everything to go well.
0:23 Ezra Klein? I don't want the chance of everything going not well. The entirety, the fate of the world resting on a bunch of completely contingent factors. I mean, it's terrifying. It's a crazy way to run things.
0:34 Speaker 01 Well, this is probably not the year for you, then.
0:36 Ezra Klein? No.
0:53 Ezra Klein? So the Iowa caucus, as you've no doubt heard, was yesterday. I am speaking to you from a place of temporal ignorance. I don't know what happened because I'm recording this a couple of days before. But here's what almost certainly happened. Donald Trump won. He won by probably a lot. Maybe less, maybe more than predicted, but plenty. He is ahead in New Hampshire, ahead in South Carolina, ahead by a huge margin in the Republican primary, neck and neck in the general. And so rather than have a conversation about Iowa, I want to have a conversation about Republicans. What is it that they want? What is it that still connects them so deeply to Donald Trump that has made it so impossible for another candidate to fully break through? We look so often at what Trump is doing and saying.
1:38 Ezra Klein? We sort of treat politics as if it comes from the candidate. But politics comes just as much from the voters. There is the supply, right? The supply side, what the candidates do. And the demand side, there's what the voters want. And the thing is that what they want is what Trump gives them. So what do they want? What is it that Republicans see that keeps them connected to this candidate, who has so much other baggage and so many other flaws, and yet maintains this almost mystical, unbreakable connection with so much of the Republican base? Kristin Soltis Anderson is a Republican pollster. She's a founding partner of the opinion research firm Echelon Insights and a political contributor on air at CNN. She's been working with the New York Times on some of our focus groups.
2:20 Ezra Klein? So she's done a huge amount of work over years, understanding how Republicans think politically and trying to translate that to more general audiences. I'm grateful she could be here today. As always, my email is [email protected] . Kristin Soltis Anderson, welcome to the show.
2:39 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me.
2:40 Ezra Klein? So you had this poll that asked Republicans, are you primarily a supporter of the Republican Party? Are you primarily a supporter of Donald Trump? And 51% said they were there for the party and 46% said they were there for Trump. What do you make of that?
2:54 Speaker 01 I think that this is a party that is a little bit divided about whether it ought to be oriented around a man or oriented around some bigger set of ideas. In the lead up to the 2020 election, Republicans were very much, we are the Trump Party. They really saw their identity through the lens of, I'm a supporter of Donald Trump. And very shortly after that election, you had January 6th, and suddenly there really was a bit of a break away from that. It has rebounded since, but I think it's very valuable to note that his opposition has not really taken a bite out of him. You had, in the Republican primary, Chris Christie making the sort of forceful case
3:39 Speaker 01 against Donald Trump, but he did not find that there was a huge market for a candidate whose primary message was Donald Trump is unfit to serve. So he hasn't really had anybody with a ton of credibility with the Republican base taking serious shots at him.
3:57 Ezra Klein? I think that we look too much at the supply in politics, like what candidates are supplying, and not enough at the demand. And it seems to me the reason you didn't have more credible Republicans taking a bigger bite out of Donald Trump is that as people wanted to win an election, they knew it wasn't a good idea. Right? I mean, people tried different things. Every time Haley or DeSantis tipped up to more frontal attacks on Trump, It didn't move their numbers. They didn't get a reaction from that, from the crowd, in the polls, from the donors, whatever, right? These are sensitive politicians that said there was appetite for it. And I think that's my question, right? Why didn't Republicans want something like that? I think there's a feeling, maybe a hope, that people had
4:42 Ezra Klein? that Republicans were looking for an alternative. And maybe they were open to an alternative. But what I think is clear here is they weren't looking for one.
4:51 Speaker 01 The analogy that I have used to describe this is, think about somebody who has a favorite comfort food dish that they order at the restaurant down the street from their house. Let's say it's meatloaf, something that they know not everybody loves, but it's the thing that they like and it makes them feel comfortable. And they know if they go down to that diner and they order that meatloaf, that they're going to like what they get. They know it's maybe not good for them. They know it's not for everybody. And so now the server comes along and says, well, hey, we've actually got an interesting special or two today. Do you want to hear the specials? I think it's the case that you had more than half of Republicans say, I'm open to hearing the specials. But at the end of the day, they really wanted meatloaf. They're hungry. They want to know what they're getting.
5:36 Speaker 01 And they feel like with Donald Trump, they know what they're getting, the good and the bad. They don't think he's perfect, but they have decided that the bad is worth it for the good they would get from him. And as a result, without sort of coming to the conclusion that, hey, maybe I should stop eating meatloaf because I might have a heart attack. There just wasn't really an interest in trying something new and different.
6:01 Ezra Klein? We are speaking the day after Chris Christie suspended his campaign. Good for him. It was time to do that. I'd like to just get your sense of how DeSantis and Haley have performed and if either of them have any path. And DeSantis is the interesting one, I think, to start with. After the 2022 election, DeSantis seemed like this juggernaut. I mean, he won Florida by a huge margin, seemed to have big coattails in Florida. When 2023 begins, Trump and DeSantis look like they're converging. They're not that far off from each other. But he has dropped further faster than I would have anticipated. What proved so weak there? Why has he had such a rough 2023?
6:43 Speaker 01 His goal was to say, I am Trump, but the new formula. And it turned out, a lot of people who liked Donald Trump, wanted the old formula. They didn't want to roll the dice on somebody who, even though they thought maybe he had done an impressive job in Florida, was nevertheless someone that they didn't know exactly what they were getting, in the way that they felt like they knew what they were getting with Donald Trump, for good or for ill. I think that was problem number one. And so as a result, it wasn't clear, who's the DeSantis voter? And his campaign seemed to settle on the idea that the DeSantis voter is someone who is to the right of Donald Trump, who views Donald Trump as insufficiently conservative.
7:24 Speaker 01 And the problem for them was, that was a real worry for the Trump campaign in 2016. It's why they picked Mike Pence, it's why he put out that list of, here's all the people I'll appoint to the Supreme Court. Back in 2016, the far right did have some concerns about, is Donald Trump credibly one of us? Those concerns do not exist. So every time Ron DeSantis now tries to hit Trump from the right and say, you can't trust this guy, he's not actually going to put up points on the board for conservatives, conservatives go, what are you talking about, my guy? Did you not see the Dobbs decision? Did you not, you know? And so, he had an argument that just didn't fly with the type of voters that he thought
8:06 Speaker 01 he was going for, and those voters were not necessarily looking for an alternative to Trump anyways.
8:13 Ezra Klein? I think that makes a lot of sense about DeSantis, but I want to bring in one other dimension, which is, one of the ways I try to like, discipline my thinking about Donald Trump, is look internationally. Because there are Trump-like political coalitions and Trump-like political figures, all over the world now. I mean, you think of Bolsonaro, I think Boris Johnson and Sylvia Brusconi in certain ways are important forerunners to Trump, you can look at Javier Milei in Argentina, and there are a bunch of others. And one thing, I think you see, in most of them?
8:45 Ezra Klein? Is the entertainer. If you're thinking almost in terms of mythic archetypes, they're trickster gods. They're not boring. They're not plotting. They're not serious. A lot of them come out of some kind of direct entertainment. And one thing that always struck me that DeSantis didn't understand about Trump and about Trumpism is this was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be the greatest show on earth. In a way, it's like what Vivek Ramaswamy did understand. I don't think he's good at it, but he understood he was supposed to be interesting to watch. And DeSantis didn't.
9:23 Ezra Klein? He was like the straight A student who was promising to do a better job at class president than the class clown quarterback who he was running against.
9:37 Speaker 01 I think there's something to that, and I think it's part of why the second piece of DeSantis's argument failed, which was I am more electable than Donald Trump. And whether it is because of Trump's magnetic pull on Republican voters, they like watching him. They think he's funny. They think he's fun. They would rather sit next to him on an airplane than somebody else. And therefore, when Ron DeSantis goes, no, no, no, you should pick me because I'm going to be better against Joe Biden, that falls apart if those Republican voters think, no, I don't know that you're actually charismatic. But I also think that DeSantis's electability argument was undercut by some of the choices
10:19 Speaker 01 he made in Florida after the midterms in trying to solve that first problem, which was persuade the very conservative wing of the party that I'm one of you. Whether it was the six-week abortion ban in Florida, for instance, that was the sort of thing DeSantis did, thinking, oh, I'm going to prove my conservative creds to these voters and prove that Donald Trump is a phony. And instead, all it did was make those voters who prioritized electability go, actually, this makes me a little bit nervous. Maybe you're not the person who's going to be able to beat Joe Biden. And then in a way, I can see it backfiring.
10:56 Ezra Klein? So it's a little bit hard to see what the path is for him. I think there are people who hold a candle still for Nikki Haley. Right. And I understand the theories being something like she does better in Iowa than people think. She wins New Hampshire. Winning a primary practically in an unexpected way against somebody with the political might of Donald Trump is a huge media moment. Right. It's one of those disruptive moments where the entire narrative can change, at least for a minute. And then something, something, there's an actual race here. How likely do you think an actual race is? And even in a New Hampshire win scenario, an actual Nikki Haley victory is?
11:35 Speaker 01 I think it is very unlikely. She is uniquely positioned in terms of people who win New Hampshire, which has this much more highly educated, much less evangelical electorate than you find in your kind of median Republican primary electorate. So she's very suited to do well in New Hampshire. South Carolina, yes, she is from there. And that's kind of the only reason that I'm even entertaining the possibility that this is really a race at this point. You also have to remember, once you get past South Carolina, there are a lot of other states, and many of them have changed their rules over the last couple of years to be quite favorable toward Donald Trump, amassing a lot of delegates. So the-
12:18 Ezra Klein? What kind of rule changes are you thinking about there?
12:20 Speaker 01 So something like California, for instance. So if you are a state, I believe, that is before middle of March, you are theoretically not supposed to be able to do winner take all. You're supposed to be proportional. But early on, a state like California was able to change its rules to say, if somebody crosses the 50% threshold here, they can get all of our delegates. And it is some massive total of the delegates you need to secure the nomination at the convention. Maybe Nikki Haley can pull it off, but California Republicans, weirdly, for all your stereotypes about California, are actually a pretty Trumpy bunch. So right now, there are just enough states where Trump's team has been quite professional
13:03 Speaker 01 this time around and has sort of taken the reins in state parties, et cetera, and has set it up so that the odds of somebody coming on late as an insurgent or what have you are just diminished. It's just a much harder hill to climb.
13:17 Ezra Klein? So I think back to Democrats in 2020, and I think back to the obsession with electability and their fear of Trump and their sort of single-minded obsession on getting him out of there. And what that process ends in is Joe Biden, who is, I think it is fair to say that was Democrats sticking with their head and not their heart. Joe Biden does not inspire glittering loyalty among liberals, but there was a sense that he was going to be acceptable to the widest number of people and to be able to build the largest anti-Trump coalition, which I think largely proved out to be true. But if you made me bet, I say Joe Biden beats Donald Trump. If you made me bet on Joe Biden versus Nikki Haley, I say Nikki Haley crushes Joe Biden.
14:02 Ezra Klein? Even Ron DeSantis, I'd have some worries about Joe Biden, just in things that you'd want to create a matchup in, like age, energy, Nikki Haley, you know, has a certain number of firsts that would be sort of important and would blunt certain things Joe Biden might want to say during the campaign. Those matchups are worse for Biden than Trump is. Joe Biden is not built to beat a candidate like Nikki Haley, he's built to beat Donald Trump. Am I missing something here, or are Republicans missing something here?
14:30 Speaker 01 After the CNN debate, they had a focus group of a handful of Iowa voters that they've been tracking across the debates. These folks have been coming back month after month to come on air and talk about their views. None of them changed their mind. They said, from the start of this process to now, we haven't really changed our mind. And none of them really thought that Donald Trump was going to lose to Joe Biden. They all just felt like, oh yeah, of course Donald Trump will win. So you're right that there is a disconnect. Republicans think Trump is more electable than I think the data suggests. I think your analysis is right, that Trump puts Republicans in a more vulnerable position than someone like Nikki Haley. But here's what I think is missing.
15:15 Speaker 01 Republicans are still scarred by the dueling narratives about why they lost in 2012. On the one hand, you have the autopsy crew, right, that says, you lost because you lost the middle, you lost America's rising ascendant coalition, et cetera. And then you had, on the other hand, no, no, you lost because you didn't turn out your base. Now, that has been amended in the ensuing decade, because actually Donald Trump does a surprisingly good job of winning over and turning out.
15:46 Speaker 01 Low propensity voters, frankly, voters of color, voters who are working class, you know, the exact types of voters who, you know, Mitt Romney did not do a great job with. So Donald Trump does have some segment of the American electorate that really just cares about him and might stay home if Republicans nominate a Nikki Haley. But the other problem that I think someone like a Nikki Haley has is that her message is, I am a new generational leader. I'm going to be the future of the party. And a lot of Republicans, and you've, you've heard DeSantis and Ramaswamy and others kind of try to make this argument, is actually she's the past. She's a blast from the past. She's not the future. She is, you know, the policies of George W.
16:30 Speaker 01 Bush with a dash of Jeb Bush and maybe some AEI policy papers. But that is not where the right is headed. And so that's, I think, a reason why there are a lot of Republicans who may not view her as significantly more electable than Donald Trump, is they worry they're going to wind up just rerunning 2012 all over again.
16:54 Ezra Klein? See, I buy the argument that Trump turns out his base in a unique way. I think we've seen a lot of evidence of that. I just think that he also turns out the Democratic base in a unique way. And that the key thing for me about Joe Biden's political success, because for all that he keeps looking weak, he keeps winning. Wins in 2020, wins in 2022, Democrats have a great midterm, Democrats have had good 2023 special elections. I mean, so the actual electoral data, if you never could see a poll, right? The electoral data for Democrats over this period is pretty good. And if you then add it in, you could see presidential approval polls and inflation, it's shockingly good. It's so much better than I expected it would be.
17:34 Ezra Klein? And the core thing behind it, I think, is that Joe Biden is a candidate of negative polarization. I don't think you have to like Joe Biden to vote for him. I don't think that's the sort of case they make to Democrats. I think that Barack Obama largely was a candidate of positive polarization. Right? Democrats liked Barack Obama, and so they voted for Barack Obama. Republicans like Donald Trump, and so they vote for Donald Trump. And Joe Biden leaves this gigantic vessel to be filled by Donald Trump. Joe Biden is not out there that much. He does not give a lot of interviews. In that way, I think he's actually been less able to turn the page on Donald Trump than a Bernie Sanders might have been. Right? I think if you imagine Bernie Sanders winning in 2020,
18:15 Ezra Klein? I think the locus of American politics changes, and we're arguing about Bernie Sanders. Instead, here we are in 2024, arguing about Donald Trump. Like, it's not even clear how to argue about Joe Biden in some ways. He's changed what politics is about to make it about him. But what he does really well is he creates space for Donald Trump to mobilize the Democratic electorate. And the reason, to me, Haley is more electable is that she could potentially exploit what Israel weaknesses, which is that he personally does not mobilize the Democratic electorate. Trump eliminates that problem. Haley, for him, creates that problem. And that's a little bit what I mean by being strategic. It feels like Republicans look internally. Who do I like?
19:00 Ezra Klein? Who would I vote for? Not a sort of imagining the Democrats, to use a kind of media cliche, the Democrats in the diner.
19:08 Speaker 01 So you're completely correct that when voters are asked, who are you voting for? And then, is your vote more for this candidate or against the other side? That there's a real asymmetry there, that voters who pick Biden are much more likely to say, my vote is mostly against Trump, where those who pick Trump, there are actually quite a few of them. They're like, no, I just like the guy. I'm just, I'm in for him. But the thing that I think is a driver of these Democratic overperformances or strong turnouts that you've seen in some of these other elections is partially that the Democratic coalition has been remade to include the sorts of very reliable, what a political consultant call like a 4-4 voter. You look at the voter file, the list of elections they've put
19:53 Speaker 01 Participated in for the last four, they checked that box. That Democrats have absorbed a lot of those voters as Donald Trump has shed them and driven them away from the GOP. And so Republicans now are more able to turn out low propensity voters, but they're also more dependent on them. And so that is why there is this worry that if you nominate what Ron DeSantis kept calling sort of a corporatist pale pastels, you know, type candidate, does that actually fail to turn out the guy with the lunch pail in a way that Donald Trump could turn him out? Where the suburban mom who's in a book club with her friends and, you know, they're talking
20:38 Speaker 01 about this election a lot, she's turning out no matter what.
21:03 Ezra Klein? So I think one of the better cases for Donald Trump's electability is that there is evidence of some important traditionally Democratic voter groups moving towards Republicans, specifically, I think, moving towards him. And let's begin here with voters of color. We saw some evidence of that in 2020. Democrats did not make all that ground back in 2022. When you look at polling right now, you would know this better than me, but it seems to be continuing. What's happening there?
21:30 Speaker 01 Donald Trump wound up remaking the Republican coalition a little bit by doing things that seemed very counterintuitive, by taking a hard line on issues like crime or immigration. Part of that was an appeal of his economic message. Part of it, I think, is that many of the people who are the most affected by things like large numbers of border crossings or a rising crime are people in communities of color. I think that's also a piece of it. But you also have, I think, there's a parallel dissatisfaction with Joe Biden. I look at some cross tabs that are, would be very mind blowing to me five, six years ago, where you see young voters, voters of color.
22:13 Speaker 01 Being among the least likely to give Joe Biden really strong ratings. So I think this isn't just a factor of liking Republicans or liking Donald Trump so much as perhaps feeling like the differences between the two parties are reduced. A question that I'm following very closely through this election is not asking people, who are you going to vote for or not? But actually, do you think that there will be a meaningful difference in your life personally, whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins? And I typically find that younger voters and voters of color are more likely to say they actually don't think there's going to be a big difference who wins that election. That's a real blinking warning sign for Democrats because that's big pieces of their
22:57 Speaker 01 coalition who they need to say, this stakes are real and you have to turn out. I do think there is sometimes a tendency to think of voters as computers that take in a whole bunch of different data points and then process them and then all make a rational decision about, well, would I be better off with person X or person Y? And for lack of a better term, the vibes matter. How people sort of emotionally feel about their leaders and about whether those leaders are living up to a variety of maybe more esoteric characteristics really, really, really does matter. I don't think that is a coincidence that in the aggregate, in the Real Clear Politics
23:41 Speaker 01 averages, Joe Biden's job approval dips below 50% the day that Kabul falls and never returns. I don't think that's a coincidence. That was the first time that for many voters, they said, wait a minute, I thought we were sending the competent folks back and this looks chaotic. This looks like no one's in charge.
24:00 Ezra Klein? This gets to a provocative argument you've been making. So you had this piece in The Times where you said, quote, "In my assessment of the dynamics of this election, what I see and hear is an electorate that seems to be craving stability." And you go on to say that that is why Donald Trump is ahead. And I think to a lot of my audience, I was trying to think of what is the analogy strong enough here to say you're going to vote for Donald Trump because you want order and stability is like saying you're gonna find peace and calm in your life by bungee jumping into Burning Man, right? I mean, it's that you cannot come up, I think, for a lot of people with more opposed concepts. So why do you is Donald Trump acting as a stability candidate?
24:40 Speaker 01 I think you began to see some flickers of him trying to drive this message in the town hall that he did on Fox News in the week leading up to these caucuses, where he tried to push back a little bit against some of his more inflammatory past remarks. Oh, no, I don't really want to be a dictator. Oh, no, I don't really want my administration to be about retribution. And I suspect it's because his very smart advisors who are around him sat him down and told him exactly this, that in 2016, Donald Trump ran as a wrecking ball and voters wanted a wrecking ball, or at least enough voters in enough key swing states wanted a wrecking ball, right? Then you get to 2020, Donald Trump is still running
25:25 Speaker 01 as I'm the bull in the china shop. I am going to be your disruptor. And at that point, voters have said, no, thank you. I would like off this ride. It is too much for me. Please give me calm. Give me stability. Give me the sleepy guy in the basement. You know, Trump was sort of setting it up as disruption versus stability, and he lost that argument pretty big. And I frankly think that this is why you saw outlandish candidates in 2022 fail as well. Voters want normal. And so you may think, well, as we get to 2024, how is Donald Trump normal? Nothing about Donald Trump is normal. But I think his push for
26:05 Speaker 01 order, I am going to be the one who secures the border. I'm going to be the one that cracks down on crime. I'm going to be the one that tries to stabilize your prices. It is as though there are two different Donald Trumps at war with themselves. And this is even how Republican voters talk about him. We did a focus group here with the New York Times. And we talked to Iowa voters who often said, there's two Trumps. There's the old Trump, who was a good president, whereby prices felt stable. It felt like crime was low. It felt like the border was secure. And now there's new Trump, who's attacking judges on Truth Social. And I wish we could have old Trump. So even Republicans sort of get that there are two components to Donald Trump, right?
26:50 Speaker 01 He's not Mr. Calm, Mr. Serenity. But being someone who says, I'm gonna kind of rule with an iron fist a little bit, that can lead to order instability. And that may be what voters want.
27:04 Ezra Klein? I want to get at this question of an electorate that feels there is not order instability. Because I see this argument that people have nostalgia for what I think is 2019, fundamentally, right? This sort of pre-pandemic year. But I've looked this up. I did some reporting. Donald Trump was still president in 2020. He was in the White House then.
27:26 Ezra Klein? How do you match those up?
27:29 Speaker 01 I do think that you're right, that there is a bit of nostalgia or rose colored glasses, or however you want to think about it, for the Trump presidency. And you see this pop up in a number from a recent poll where people were asked, do you believe that you have been sort of better off or worse off as a result of Joe Biden's policies? And by about a 30-point margin, voters said worse off. But then you asked about Donald Trump. Were you better off or worse off as a result of his policies? And I believe it's a 12-point margin. People said better off. Now, if that had been people's mindset in 2020, he would have been reelected. So clearly, that's not where people were at at the end of his administration and have sort of swung to that point of view with the passage of time
28:14 Speaker 01 and reflecting on the last couple of years. But I also think Donald Trump gets a bit of a pass for things that happened in 2020 because of the pandemic. You've even seen this with Ron DeSantis trying Trying to sort of prosecute the case against Donald Trump. Look, the disorder that we saw in the streets in the summer of 2020, that happened on Trump's watch. He allowed that to happen. But Republican voters just don't really blame him for that. They don't say, oh, wow, he was president when that was happening. And therefore, he can't be trusted to bring about order and stability. Instead, they just think back and they go, I think things were better then. Or they give him a pass on stuff that happened during the pandemic.
28:54 Ezra Klein? One of the really striking statistics I've seen is Paul Waldman has made this point that if you look at the polls of consumer sentiment, the University of Michigan does a very big one. And it goes back a long time and you can break it down by party. Republicans felt better about the economy, the current conditions of the economy in December of 2008, when it was just literally collapsing, right? The housing crisis, the stock market. I mean, we were in a scenario that was spiraling towards the Great Depression than they do now.
29:25 Ezra Klein? And when I look at that, there's some part of me, it's like, you can't explain that economically. Growth is extremely strong, almost, it's quite unusually strong. The labor market is strong. Inflation has come back down. Crime is down. Violent crime is way down. Pandemic deaths are of course way down. There aren't huge protests in the streets. There isn't a mob storming the Capitol. If you look at almost any measure you can come up with in American society, maybe the exception of border crossing, they are calmer, more orderly. And yet there is a sense of disorder, of fracture, of like Biden presiding over chaos. You're dealing with motivated reason, right?
30:07 Ezra Klein? You're dealing with the seeing the world through party colored glasses.
30:13 Speaker 01 Partisanship rules everything around me.
30:15 Ezra Klein? I used to tweet that all the time.
30:16 Speaker 01 Is absolutely a way to view these data points. As soon as the new administration takes over, everybody's viewpoint on the economy seems to flip, even though it's only been maybe a week that you've had the new president. I mean, you see this pretty consistently in data, but it's gotten worse as we've become more polarized. You see this now with even things like presidential job approval, where it used to be that at least new presidents got. A couple of months, maybe even a couple of weeks of runway of a little bit of, "Okay, well, we'll see how this guy does." And now you just don't have that. People have already concluded by the time someone takes the oath of office, they're a bad president. The economy is bad. Everything is worse.
31:00 Speaker 01 America's going to hell in a handbasket. And so I do think you're right that that's a huge driver of how people are seeing things. But it doesn't explain why so many voters in the political center, who maybe aren't as closely tethered to partisanship, nevertheless feel like things are unraveling. And I think that's Joe Biden's biggest challenge heading into November is this is not just the hardcore MAGA Republicans who are consuming conservative news that is showing them what's going on at the border, stories about crimes, stories about expensive fast food, all of that. It is also voters in the center who are reluctant to hear an argument that says, "You know what? I know you feel like things are chaotic, but actually, things are great."
31:45 Speaker 01 And that then becomes the pickle that any politician who's an incumbent is in. How do you tell people who feel bad, "Stop feeling bad. I'm doing a much better job than you're giving me credit for." That's a tough message to swallow.
31:58 Ezra Klein? You mentioned a minute ago that you have these partisan reversals on the economy when somebody new comes in. But I've seen research. It says they're 2.5 times bigger among Republicans than Democrats. And I think there's a kind of obvious reason for that. You're a CNN contributor. I work at the New York Times. Democrats watch CNN. They read the New York Times. But CNN and the New York Times don't like to think of themselves as for Democrats. And so they do a lot of kind of mixed coverage of the economy, right? "Well, you know, the labor market is good, but inflation is really bad." And da, da, da, da. And I think a lot of the media outlets that Republicans attach to have less incentive to see themselves as trans partisan. Democrats are attached to media that does not want to be media for Democrats.
32:43 Ezra Klein? And Republicans are attached to media that wants to be media for Republicans. And that has created an asymmetry in the system. Do you think that's an unfair way to look at it?
32:51 Speaker 01 I don't think that that's a complete explanation. And I also wonder to what extent it is that for Republicans, a very big piece of how they think of themselves and the identity of their own party is, we're good at running the economy. We're the folks that are good at this. Where for Democrats, just sort of raw GDP growth may not be as tied to how Democrats sort of are viewing, are we as a party succeeding or failing as it is for Republicans? Now, I'll be interested to see, what does this look like 10 years from now? Because you have begun to see this pivot away from being like, we're the party of
33:35 Speaker 01 business, certainly the party of big business. But I wonder to what extent that will still be an important part of how Republicans see themselves with the assumption, well, when we're in charge, obviously, the economy is getting better because that's what we do a decade from now.
33:54 Ezra Klein? So, one thing I try to do to keep myself honest is compare Biden to Obama. I like to use the Gallup Historical Presidential Tracker a lot, where you can line up all these presidents by the same point in their in their presidencies. And, you know, right when we are talking, right, right at the beginning of December, Biden is at 39, according to Gallup, and Obama was at 43. And 43 is better than 39, right? If you asked me to choose between them, I'd want 43. But neither is good. And what Obama was able to do in 2012 was mobilize the artillery of the entire Democratic Party. You know, Bill Clinton explaining his economic record at the convention and everybody going
34:35 Ezra Klein? everywhere and a million ads and to try to tell a story that says, yeah, look, unemployment is still higher than you want it to be. Things aren't perfect, but they're actually getting better. We've done a better job than you think. We're recovering faster than Europe. And it worked, right? He had a pretty comfortable victory over Mitt Romney. And one thing I wonder about Biden and the Democrats, and this is what you hear from the Biden administration, or at least from the Biden campaign, I should say, is, look. Everybody should chill out. The campaign hasn't started yet. We haven't started making our case. We haven't really started running our ads. They just kind of had their kickoff speech about democracy. How do you take that theory on their part? Do you think there is truth to it?
35:17 Speaker 01 I think there is some truth to it insofar as I don't believe that there's no such thing as a swing voter. It's very fashionable nowadays because we are so polarized to say that there's this vanishingly small slice of voters who are persuadable either way. I don't think it's vanishingly small. I don't think it's enormous, but I think you have a lot of people who are right now still trying to figure out, ugh, I don't really like the options available to me, but I don't yet know which of them feels worse. And so I do think that there are going to be folks who are open-minded. Donald Trump is pretty well-defined in people's minds. I think the question is just, are they right now just remembering quote unquote "good Trump"? And what will it take to remind them of bad Trump?
36:01 Speaker 01 Will Donald Trump do that job for the Biden campaign? That is entirely possible, if not likely.
36:28 Ezra Klein? I recognize there's no one answer to this question, but do you think you can generalize your view on it? What is it Republicans want? What do they want out of their next president, whoever it might be? Like, what is success to them? And what is failure? And is it measured in policy? Or is it measured in representation? And a kind of cultural shift in power?
36:54 Speaker 01 I think that it is a combination of those two things. There were some really interesting Pew polling that came out where they asked people, do you believe that your side is winning more than losing? And actually, during Biden's presidency, Democrats have really never felt like they've been winning. And so now you have Republicans and Democrats alike, both feeling like their side is the losing side. I think that dynamic frankly helped Democrats a lot in the midterms because voters don't turn out to say thank you. They turn out to say, I'm angry and I want to send a message. And if you feel like you're losing, you send a message. And actually, during Trump's presidency, Republicans felt like they were winning.
37:37 Speaker 01 They want that feeling back. And that is why Donald Trump's insistence against all evidence that he did not really lose the 2020 election is so central to all of this. Because the core of his value proposition to his voters is, we're going to win again. I'm going to make you feel like you're a winner again. And so whether that is putting up points on the board in terms of policy, or whether it is owning the libs, making the other side seem like they are on the back foot, I don't think that Republican voters are thinking of those as dramatically different things. It is that they feel that they are on the back foot now and they want to stop feeling that way.
38:21 Ezra Klein? When you look at the polls of the number of Republicans, a percentage of Republicans who believe Donald Trump won in 2020, which is well over a majority, do you believe that position is truly held? Do you believe that is a thing people tell pollsters because they're Republicans and that is what you're supposed to say? Or do you believe that in their heart of hearts, like if I put them and I said, listen, I'm going to hook you up to a polygraph and if you fail and if polygraphs worked, you have to give me $100, they would say Donald Trump won the election?
38:54 Speaker 01 I think that a lot of times when that question gets asked, when Republican voters are saying that they think Donald Trump was the rightful winner. For many of them, they're taking sort of the answer that you actually hear Vivek Ramaswamy given debates from time to time, which was that the playing field wasn't fair. So Donald Trump would have won in this hypothetical world where the playing field was fair, where the Department of Justice doesn't tell tech companies to suppress the story of Hunter Biden, et cetera, et cetera, all of the things that you hear come up. I don't think that it is that a majority of Republicans believe that outright enough
39:36 Speaker 01 ballots were stolen in certain places, but rather that the conduct of the election and the changes in rules related to the pandemic, or the media's treatment of Donald Trump, or what have you, led to an unfair playing field, and that were we in a vacuum? Clearly, wouldn't more voters have preferred Donald Trump? And that's what I think you are hearing them say when they say he was the one that should have won.
40:01 Ezra Klein? If I took, like us in the Wayback Machine, and now we're in 2014, and we're hanging out at a bar, and I described to you this hypothetical scenario where, you know, we're four or 10 years, there was this unpopular, wild, chaotic presidency, mismanaged a pandemic, got beat quite badly in the general election, incited his followers to storm the Capitol, then got investigated for that, ends up with a bunch of criminal trials against him. How do you think he's doing the next year? I don't think you would have told me, absolutely romping to the nomination again, and arguably the favorite to win the presidency.
40:42 Ezra Klein? So what would you have had wrong about what the electorate, certainly the Republican electorate, does and doesn't care about, or will or won't accept? Why have these things not mattered?
40:55 Speaker 01 I think that this goes back to the fact that if you and I were having a drink in 2014 talking about this scenario, the odds that we would have even considered the possibility that the man in question was Donald Trump would have been zero. It would have been zero. And I think it is that strange, personal hold he has that is so different from any other politician or political figure that enables this to be possible. And it's fascinating to me, the way in which he has managed to be the elected president of the United States, for all intents and purposes, the establishment of the Republican
41:40 Speaker 01 Party. And yet, he can stand on a stage at a town hall on Fox News and say, well, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, they're politicians. I'm not a politician. That after a decade of him being a politician, he can still say that. And people go, yep, he's still an outsider. Yep, he's, I think, only someone with his long-term, brand impression, TV skills, whatever you want to call it, strange, personal attributes that make him so different from anyone else. It is hard for me to imagine anyone who even remotely comes close to a conventional politician doing what you just described.
42:22 Ezra Klein? But I want to try to push you closer to the heart of this, because in a way, I think it's the heart of this whole conversation. What is that hold, that appeal? Your poll study, you spend all this time in the data, you're asking people favorability in this question and that question. And I read these polls, and there's a way in which they get at everything but the thing I want to know, which is qualitatively this experience. And I can read people talk about it, but it's like a slippery thing to try to put your hands around. And to me, it's interesting, because I think it's become a sort of chasmic divide in our politics.
42:53 Ezra Klein? Liberals and conservatives, I think, typically could have understood why the other party liked the people they did. But I don't think conservatives were confused about why liberals liked Bill Clinton, or John Kerry, or Barack Obama, or, you know, name your person. You know, liberals could put themselves in the seat of liking, certainly pre-Iraq, George W. Bush, or John McCain, or Bob Dole, or Ronald Reagan, or whatever. And Trump breaks that. I think to liberals, it is actually impossible to imagine being okay with the way that guy acts. And because so many Republicans love him so much, to hate him the way liberals do is actually similarly opaque. And so it creates this unknowability in the two coalitions
43:36 Ezra Klein? to each other. He has made politics less translatable. So you are a Republican pollster who conducts focus groups and all the rest of it. That almost mystical hole you describe, how would you describe it?
43:52 Speaker 01 I would describe it as Donald Trump has told Republican voters, "You're not a bad guy. The world tells you you're a bad guy. They tell you that you're racist. They tell you that you don't like poor people. They tell you that you are backwards. And I'm here to tell you that they're wrong and that you're good people." There is nothing more persuasive than someone giving you a compliment, telling you that they like you, telling you they respect you. And so when you think back to, "Oh, you're the basket of deplorables," no, you're not. "I like you, and I'm gonna fight for you." And that is why, even in the face of growing evidence that Donald Trump is fighting for himself
44:34 Speaker 01 and himself alone, frequently, there is still this belief, "That guy likes me. He likes people like me. He tells me it's okay to be someone like me." And I think that is an incredibly powerful motivator.
44:50 Ezra Klein? I'm going to end it there. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
44:55 Speaker 01 The first one is Subtract by Leidy Klotz. It's a great book that helps people understand why, when we encounter a problem, our first instinct is to add. As a mom of a toddler, I found myself in the early days of motherhood, anytime I encountered a problem, thinking, is there something I can order online to solve this problem?
45:17 Ezra Klein? I have never done more to 3 a.m. Amazon shopping.
45:22 Speaker 01 Yes.
45:23 Ezra Klein? The first time Amazon records you ordering some baby solution at 2 a.m., they must, like, somewhere.
45:29 Speaker 01 We've got them.
45:29 Ezra Klein? We've got them.
45:30 Speaker 01 We've got them.
45:31 Ezra Klein? Not the last time it's gonna happen.
45:33 Speaker 01 And so what this book challenges you to think about is to realize the evolutionary things driving you to believe that addition is always the answer, and to instead consider the ways in which subtraction can actually sometimes solve your problem. Maybe it's not buying that new thing on Amazon. Maybe it's stop doing this thing you were doing that you didn't need to do in the first place. So it's an excellent way to, I think, try to declutter your life. Maybe appropriate for the new year.
45:59 Ezra Klein? I usually stay out of the book recommendations part, but on that note, have you ever read or run into the book Simplicity Parenting?
46:04 Speaker 01 I have not.
46:05 Ezra Klein? It's really beautiful. It's affected my parenting a lot this year. You may like it.
46:09 Speaker 01 Excellent.
46:09 Ezra Klein? And so might the audience.
46:10 Speaker 01 Oh, good to know. The second book I want to recommend is by my partner in crime at Echelon Insights, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, his new book, Party of the People. And it's all about the multiracial coalition of sort of populist views that has been reshaping the Republican coalition. If you want to know why Donald Trump does better in the Rio Grande in 2020 than he did in 2016, this is the book for you. And then last but not least, and I'm not done with this one yet, but Welcome to the OC, The Oral History of the Greatest Television Show of Our Time, written by Alan Sepinwall.
46:44 Ezra Klein? I come from what is now called the OC. I was born in Irvine. And I will just say that before that show, nobody called it the OC. And there was not some county-wide geographic identity. It's like amazing. And now they do. It is amazing to see the way a show changed the identity of like a whole area and created something unified where before it was actually totally fractured. It blows my mind a little bit as somebody who grew up before and knows the place after.
47:15 Speaker 01 Well, I refuse to entertain the idea that this show is not effectively a documentary. So please don't ruin my illusion.
47:21 Ezra Klein? Kristin Soltis Anderson, thank you very much.
47:23 Speaker 01 Thank you.
47:38 Ezra Klein? This episode of The Azurclan Show is produced by Kristin Lynn. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. We had additional mixing by Hefim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin and Roland Hu. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Semiluski and Sheldon Busta. And the executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
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