Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won

After the last election, there were all kinds of theories about where Democrats went wrong. But now, four months later, we have a lot more data – and it tells a few clear stories. David Shor is the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a Democratic polling firm, which does an enormous amount of surveying of the electorate. A few weeks ago, Shor was walking me through a deck he made of key charts and numbers that explain the election results. And I thought this would be good to do in public. Because this is information that doesn’t just help explain what went wrong for Democrats in 2024. It’s a set of hard truths they need to keep in mind to mount a comeback in 2026 and 2028. This episode is also a bit of an experiment. It works great in audio. But on YouTube, you can actually see the slides. So if you’re up for a video podcast, this is a good one to start with: https://www.youtube.com/@EzraKleinShow This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: Blue Rose Research slide deck "Donald Trump is the perfect 'moderate'" by Ezra Klein Book Recommendations: The Hollow Parties by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John R. Zaller The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

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

• 0:32Ezra Klein?

  I've been spending some time recently with top Democrats as they think about how to rebuild after the 2024 loss. And I'll say that in the 20-some years I've been covering politics, I have never heard them so confused. Confused about who they are, aside from the opposition to Donald Trump, but confused also about how and why they lost. How could they have possibly lost this election to this person? But also, how is the Democratic Party weakening so much among groups whose strength, whose support it once took for granted? They're losing working-class voters. They're seeing their margins among non-white

• 1:11Ezra Klein?

  voters erode and vanish. They're losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party. And so I think it's important, as this conversation begins to roll forward, that it is grounded on a pretty real understanding of what happened in 2024. Someone whose analysis on this I've come to respect over the years is David Shor. David Shor is the head of data science at Blue Earth Research, which is a big Democratic consulting firm. It does a huge amount of political surveying and interpretation of data and testing of messaging. He works with campaigns and progressive groups. And so he has a sort of perspective from the inside there. But also, over the years, I think he's just a very skilled interpreter

• 1:55Ezra Klein?

  of data. It's a very different skill, I should say. And over years where he's been making some of these arguments, he's gotten a lot of things right before other people did, including that educational polarization was becoming the central fault line for American democracy, and frankly, not just American democracy, but other countries too. And so when I saw Shor recently and he began walking me through some of his slides, some of the ways he was interpreting the 2024 election and trying to help people see what had happened, my first thought was this would be worth doing in public. Rather than this being a thing that Democrats are debating in back rooms with each other, what if we did this in public? Shor was kind enough to come on the show and present this for us.

• 2:38Ezra Klein?

  And so this episode is a bit of an experiment. He's walking me through this presentation and I am interrogating it. It is worth watching if you can. This works in audio. You can listen to it. We describe these charts and graphs and tables. But in video, which you can see if you go to YouTube and search Ezra Klein Show and go to our channel, it has a different flavor. You can follow along visually and I think it's worth trying to do so if you can. But I found this really, really helpful and it helped ground some of my thinking in the data. I don't necessarily have every conclusion David does, but I think it is a good place to begin. And there's then a lot that can follow from having this conversation. As always, my email, ezherkline [email protected].

• 3:28Ezra Klein?

  David Shor, welcome to the show.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Excited to be here.

• 3:31Ezra Klein?

  So what do you do? And why should I trust the daddy you're about to show us here?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  I'm glad, I'm glad you asked. I'm the co-founder of a research firm called Blue Rose Research. We did 26 million interviews last year. You know, we have a team of about 45 people, machine learning engineers, software engineers from companies like Google. And, you know, we've done a lot of work to try to figure out what actually happened last year.

• 3:55Ezra Klein?

  A lot of liberals I know feel really burnt by survey data. There's a sense that nobody picks up the phone. How are you surveying these older people if you're doing it online?

• 4:08Ezra Klein?

  Putting aside the fact that you conducted a lot of surveys, why are you confident those surveys reflect reality?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  The fundamental problem with survey research is just that people who answer surveys are really weird. There's kind of two ways that you can try to fix that. You know, one is that you could try to get a normal representative set of people. That's just impossible in today's day and age. And the other is that you can just try to collect a lot of information so that you can, you know, adjust for how weird they are. You know, the reason I feel fairly confident about this is just, you know, in our work, every time we make any change, you know, to any part of our system, you know, we go back and back test and see how it affects accuracy across, you know, every other election that we've ever surveyed. We can't be fully confident about any particular thing that we say. A lot of the data isn't back yet, but I think that there's enough data to tell a coherent

• 4:58Speaker 01

  story. And, you know, there's the 26 million survey respondents of 8 million unique people. There's precinct and county level election results. We're also gonna try to tie together, you know, all of the external data that other people have done. And, you know, what I'll say about this election is that our forecast this cycle were very accurate. You know, our overall error was about a third of a percent nationally, and I think that most of the things that we thought would happen did bear out. And, you know, just I do want to spend a second to answer, you know, something that you'd asked a second ago, which is just like, why look at survey data? But I think that, you know, super politically engaged people are overrepresented at every single step of the political process. And I think

• 5:40Speaker 01

  that the only point, other than Election Day, when regular people get a say, is in polls.

• 5:47Ezra Klein?

  So I take that point. I always think it is good to remind me and everybody who listens to this show that they are weird. And if their intuitions about politics were shared... Politics would not look the way it does at all.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:02Ezra Klein?

  Right. If the voting population were Ezra Klein's listeners and people they know.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:07Ezra Klein?

  Then elections end up very differently.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:10Ezra Klein?

  So I take a point on survey data. So where do we begin?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  All right. So first, you know, I'm just going to start with this slide over here that just looks at support for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, in 2020, and 2024 by race and ideology. In 2016, Democrats got 81% of Hispanic moderates. And in 2024, Democrats got 58% of Hispanic moderates. That's only about 7% more than the 52% that they got of white moderates. I think the main story with respect to this is just a continuation of the trends that we saw four years ago, that basically throughout the entire Trump campaign, we've seen this racial depolarization.

• 6:54Ezra Klein?

  The thing I find most surprising here is you look at white voters, liberal, moderate, and conservative. And at least in this data, from 2016 to 2024, there is a 0% swing in any of them. Because there are all these things that, if you go back to the debates we're having about Donald Trump then, it is the return and resurgence of a coalition trying to protect white power in this country. And I wrote things about this. I think there's good reason to believe that.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:22Ezra Klein?

  Even if that was part of the intention then, that does not appear in the results. Democrats lose modest amount of support among black voters in those years. They lose a huge amount of support among Hispanic voters and a kind of significant amount among Asian voters. Why do you think that is?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  I think that a lot of political analysis in America has been, you know, really centered around viewing everything through a very America-centric lens. Because there's this story in American politics. Like, if you want to understand 20th century American politics, then the big story is that there was this giant Southern realignment in 1964. And then, you know-

• 8:05Ezra Klein?

  Driven by the Civil Rights Act.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, driven by the Civil Rights Act. And- That carried forward, it took a really long time, you know, for that to really work its way through down ballot. And so I think it was really tempting for American political scientists and kind of a lot of the, you know, more detail oriented American political pundits to just kind of see everything.

• 8:24Ezra Klein?

  People who wrote books like Why We're Polarized, for instance.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, just to see everything through this transformation. But I think the most important trend politically of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world, at least Western country that has elections, has been this story of education polarization, you know, that basically everywhere we've seen highly educated people move to the left and, you know, working class people move to the right. I think a lot of people's analytical error when looking at Trump is that they saw Trump as this kind of reincarnation of, you know, the 1960s of like George Wallace or something, when really I think he was representing this global trend.

• 9:05Ezra Klein?

  The other thing that I find interesting here is the shift in voters who self-described as conservative. There's no shift in white self-described conservative voters between 2016 and 2024, but Democrats are winning 85% of black conservatives in 2016, but only 77% in 2024. They're winning 34% of conservative Hispanics in 2016. That falls by half to 17% in 2024. They're winning 28% of conservative Asians in 2016. That falls to 20% in 2024. So it's always a little bit weird for somebody who is self-described conservative to be voting for Democrats who are quite a liberal party now.

• 9:46Ezra Klein?

  What we're seeing among non-white voters is people voting more their ideology and less their ethnic group.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And I would just say, I think this shouldn't be that surprising. I think now, you know, we identify the Democratic Party as straightforwardly liberal. You know, the Democratic Party used to be a coalition between liberals and moderates and conservatives, and as liberals kind of became the dominant coalition partner, it makes sense, you know, that the conservatives and moderates in our coalition, who were disproportionately non-white, given that this ideological polarization happened, you know, among whites 20 years ago or 30 years ago, that you would start to see this.

• 10:23Ezra Klein?

  All right, let's move to slide two here.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  All right. This slide over here has what I think is probably the most important story of this cycle. So I have two graphs over here. You know, the first just kind of breaks down 2024 support by whether or not you had voted in 2020. And so this is New York Times data from, you know, Nate Cohn's Upshot polling, probably the highest quality public pollster in America. And what you can see here is just that in 2020, in their data, people who didn't vote, if they had voted, would have been a little bit more Democratic than the country overall. But over the next four years, people who didn't vote went from being a somewhat Democratic-leaning group to a group that Trump won by double digits. So the second graph here, we have, you know, for every precinct, we look at what percentage

• 11:11Speaker 01

  of people voted in 2022. And then we just look at what was the change in Democratic vote share from 2020 to 2024. And so what you could see here is that for the lowest turnout precincts, you know, Trump increased his vote share by, you know, something like 6%. While for the highest turnout precincts, Harris actually increased her support. And, you know, that's really the story of this election, is that, you know, people who follow news really closely, who get their news from traditional media, who like say that politics is an important part of their identity, they became more Democratic in absolute terms. But for people who don't follow politics closely at all, they they just became a lot more Republican.

• 11:50Ezra Klein?

  It's interesting because I obviously get a lot of incoming from people who would like the New York Times to cover Donald Trump differently.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:57Ezra Klein?

  And some of those arguments I agree with, some of them I don't, right? What I always think about with that, though, is that if your lever is New York Times headlines, you're not affecting the voters you are losing.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:14Ezra Klein?

  The question Democrats are facing, when you look at how badly they lost less politically engaged voters, is how do you change the views of voters you don't really have a good way to reach?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, that's 100% right. And I just want to stress that this is a new problem. You know, this problem didn't exist four years ago. And it's not just that New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population. That's definitely true. It's that they're more liberal than they were four years ago, even though the country went the other way. And so there's this great political divergence, you know, between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don't. And so as a result of these changes, this has really reversed a decades-long truism in American politics, where for the longest time, Democrats have said, and it's been true, that if everybody votes, we win, and that higher turnout is good for Democrats.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite of true. You know, here, I just have some numbers. If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. While if everyone had voted, you know, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points. And, you know, generally what you see now is that every measure of socioeconomic status and political engagement is just monotonically related to your chance of liking Trump.

• 13:41Ezra Klein?

  What is monotonically related?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, sorry, just that.

• 13:44Ezra Klein?

  This is why Democrats can't win.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. I'm the problem. But it's basically just that even the lowest political engagement categories, the lowest education categories, you know, the poorer, the lower socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, now the more Trumpy you are. And that just wasn't true four years ago.

• 14:02Ezra Klein?

  So here's something that I've heard from a lot of Democrats.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:05Ezra Klein?

  And very good election analysts, which seems to be in some tension here. There is an argument that what happened to Democrats between 2020 and 2024 is their voters stayed home. And so what happened here was a shrinking of the electorate. They disproportionately sliced off what Democrats for a while were calling the anti-MAGA coalition. How does that idea, the Democrats didn't lose to Trump, they lost to the couch?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  It's just not empirically correct, I would say. Generally turnout and support go in the same direction for the basic reason that there are a lot of people who didn't feel ready to vote for a Republican, but were still mad at the Democratic Party. And so they stayed home in response. And if you just look at the demographics of who these people are, who voted for Biden last time and stayed home this time, they're generally low education, they're fairly politically disengaged, they're much less likely to watch shows like MSNBC and more likely to watch shows like Fox, and they frankly just look a lot like the voters who trended away from us.

• 15:10Ezra Klein?

  So if you had forced them out to vote, they may have just voted for Donald Trump.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And that does show up. You know, if you look at African Americans, for example, African Americans who didn't vote were much more likely to say that they supported Trump than the ones that did this cycle. It's true that overall turnout fell in a lot of the country, but in the battleground states that actually decided the presidential election, turnout was roughly where it was from four years ago. And it just is clear as day that a bunch of people changed their mind.

• 15:41Ezra Klein?

  How much is this just inflation? You are dealing with people who, they're not paying a lot of attention to politics. They do pay attention and feel prices and the state of the country. You had a massive inflationary period, and they're pissed. And being pissed about inflation moved them against the incumbent party, which they held responsible in this country as in other countries for inflation.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I think that that's a very reasonable explanation. You know, it makes sense that the people who care the least about politics are going to be the most mad about prices going up. And there's a lot of academic reasons to think that makes sense. And so I don't think it's necessarily true that it's impossible for us to win those voters back. But you know, I'll talk about this later. There have been dramatic shifts in the media consumption habits of these people in the last four years, and so it may be a harder problem.

• 16:30Ezra Klein?

  Before we discuss, I think it's worth talking about the next chart, too, because it's getting at the same question in a different way.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here, you know, we have a plot that we just took from The Economist. And in the bottom, we just have foreign-born population. And on the top, we just have increase in Republican vote share. And, you know, what you could see is there's a very clear correlation.

• 16:49Ezra Klein?

  This is by county.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  This is by county. And, you know, what you could see is just there's a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much it increased by Donald Trump, you know, towards Trump. You can see in counties like, you know, Queens, New York, or Miami-Dade in Florida, Trump increased his vote share percentage by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy. And so when we go and we look at the precinct election results, you know, what we see is that in immigrant communities of all races, you know, particularly Hispanic and Asian communities, but Trump even increased his vote share in Haitian precincts in Florida. You know, when we do that, you know, our best guess is that immigrants went from being a Biden-plus-27 group in 2020

• 17:33Speaker 01

  to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group, you know, of naturalized citizens is roughly 10% of the electorate.

• 17:40Ezra Klein?

  So that means that immigrants swung much, much, much more than the median of the electorate.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. You know, our estimates, and it's really hard to know exactly what happened. You know, it turns out that working-class immigrants do not answer a ton of surveys. But our best guess is that they swung 23 percentage points against the Democratic Party. And so the crazy thing is, if you believe this, and, you know, there's some uncertainty, but I think some version of this is probably true, then something like half of the net votes that Trump received came from immigrants. And, you know, this wasn't efficient for him. It's one of the big reasons, you know, why the bias of the Electoral College went down by so much this cycle. Because if you look in the battleground states, things swung toward Trump maybe by like half a percentage point, and that was enough for him to win, or, you know, one percentage point. But if you look at like the four biggest states

• 18:31Speaker 01

  where immigrants are concentrated, you know, New York, California, Texas, you know, Trump did extremely well. And so it wasn't very efficient for him. But in terms of people changing their mind, it was a massive percentage of the story.

• 18:44Ezra Klein?

  So this gets to another way that I think the data has proven conventional wisdom from at least 2020 wrong. So 2020, you have an election that Joe Biden wins. He wins by less than the polling says he will win by. And one reason he wins by less than the polling says he won by is that Donald Trump is much better with Hispanic and Asian voters than he was expected to. And I remember seeing pretty strong research afterwards and talking to people who study the Hispanic vote, who are saying, well, in 2020, the pandemic really scrambled what the election was about. So in 2016, the election was about immigration. In 2020, it was about the pandemic. It was about lockdowns. It was about the economy.

• 19:24Ezra Klein?

  And so Hispanic voters who were driven off of Trump by his border talk in 2016 were more likely to vote for him in 2020. But that was weird, right? It was the pandemic, in a way, moderating Donald Trump's appeal. 2024, Trump runs, I would say, to the right of where he was on the border in 2016, right? We're talking mass deportations. We're talking more than a wall. And Trump does better among immigrant groups than he really ever has before. So the Democratic belief that when the topic turned back to immigration, you would see some of that polarization around Trump return and that he would be harmed in immigrant communities did not occur.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  No. Inflation probably played some kind of role here, though, you know, the flip side is if you look in the UK again, it happened the same year. It's just that the incumbent was right wing instead of left wing. And, you know, their labor did also, you know, drop with, you know, Black and Asian and Hindu voters. And so I think that there's some kind of globalized right wing phenomena that's happening. It's hard to know exactly what, but I agree completely. So now just move on, you know, to the next slide. Here we have Harris support by single age, year, by race and gender. And one of the things you can see here is if you just look at 18 year olds, you know, women of, 18 year old women of color are the only of the four that Harris won. Trump narrowly won, you know, non-white men.

• 20:53Ezra Klein?

  So I do find this part of this chart shocking. I sometimes talk about narrative violations, and I think if we knew anything about Donald Trump eight years ago, it's that young people did not like him.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:04Ezra Klein?

  And Republicans are maybe throwing away young people for generations in order to run up their margins among seniors. But if you look at this chart among white men. White men who are 75 years old supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than white men who are 20 years old.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 21:27Ezra Klein?

  That's a real shift.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by, I think, in the last four years, is that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative, you know, generation that we've experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years. And so, you know, the next chart, you know, just to describe it.

• 21:52Ezra Klein?

  This chart, in some ways, convinced me to do this podcast.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 21:55Ezra Klein?

  This chart shocks me.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  I agree. This is, to me, the scariest chart in this entire presentation. And again, you know, something I'm very surprised by. So on the bottom, we have age. And at the top, we have the gender gap in support between women and men, you know, for support for Kamala Harris. And so what you can see is that, you know, for voters over 30, the gender gap was fairly stable at around 10%, which is roughly where it's been in American politics.

• 22:21Ezra Klein?

  And voters over 75, it's even lower.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 22:25Ezra Klein?

  It's a fairly low gender gap among older voters.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that a lot of people underestimate how recent the gender gap is. You know, historically, Republicans did better with women than men. And, you know, this was true across most of the West, that center-left parties did better with men than women. And, you know, that's changed in the United States in the Clinton era. But, you know, it's been stable since then. But what's crazy is if you look at people who are under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded. If you look at 18-year-olds, 18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics.

• 23:05Ezra Klein?

  Is that abortion?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  You know, I think it's too early to say exactly what the cause is. What's interesting is that this is happening in other countries as well. Obviously, different countries have different political systems, but I've seen similar patterns in Canada, in the UK, in Norway. There's a lot of research, you know, to do here, but it's still very striking. Like, a lot of people talk about the Democratic young men problem, and I think it's still somehow underrated because the actual numbers are just a lot worse than people think.

• 23:35Ezra Klein?

  The huge gender gap implies to me it's not just inflation. Women pay high prices for eggs, too.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Right, and I'll say, if you look at the UK election last year, you know, the Labour Party did a lot better, you know, because the incumbent party was unpopular. But I think what's interesting is that if you look at it by age, the Conservatives actually increased their vote share among 18 to 24-year-old voters, I think by 2% or 3%, even though they did 8% or 9% worse overall. And so I do think it's not just inflation, it's not just backlash to the incumbent governments, though I'm sure that's part of the story, too.

• 24:12Ezra Klein?

  I feel like the story you're implying that you believe here is that this is polarization among young men and women, driven by men who are in high school, who are young, who are online, practically online during COVID, as Me Too is cresting, as Jordan Peterson is a big figure, Andrew Tate is rising, you have what now gets called the manosphere. But there is a sense the Democratic Party is becoming much more pro-women party and in some ways sort of anti-young men, and that that just had a huge effect on young men's political opinions.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I do want to just stress that this seems to be a global phenomenon. And, you know, I don't want to over-center the particular things the Democratic Party has done, rather than, you know, the broader cultural-

• 25:05Ezra Klein?

  Peterson and Tate are global figures.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  No, exactly. You know, what I'll say is, I just think that, you know, we're in the midst of a big cultural change that I think that people are really underestimating. You know, if you look at zoomers, there's just a lot of really interesting ways that they're very different in the data. You know, they're much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. You know, they are a lot more, if you look at their psychographic data, you know, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them. If I was going to speculate, I think that, you know, phones and social media have a lot to do with this. How that translates into partisan politics depends on what the parties do, but I think it's a big shift.

• 25:46Ezra Klein?

  It seems plausible to me that social media, online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:58Ezra Klein?

  That if you are young and online and a 23-year-old man who is interested in UFC, you're being driven into a very intensely male online world, whereas if you are 23 years old and female and you are interested in things that the YouTube algorithm codes that way, you are not entering that world. You're actually entering the opposite world. You're seeing Brene Brown, right? You're seeing these other things.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:24Ezra Klein?

  The capacity to be in highly gendered media worlds is really different in 2024 than it was in 2004. And that's true worldwide.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with that entirely. Online communities are way more gender segregated than offline communities are. And so it's in that respect, it should be unsurprising that suddenly shifting a bunch of young people's social worlds to be entirely online all at once caused the political situation to change.

• 26:53Ezra Klein?

  So Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters. I do think there was, even as the idea of the rising demographic, Democratic majority had become a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, I do think Democrats believed that these young voters were eventually going to save them.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:10Ezra Klein?

  That this was a last gasp of something, that if Donald Trump couldn't run these numbers up among seniors and you had millennials really coming into the voting power, Gen Z coming in, that was going to be the end of this Republican Party.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:23Ezra Klein?

  And that's just completely false.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean,

• 27:26Ezra Klein?

  It might be the beginning of this Republican Party.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  You know, I have to admit, I was I was one of those liberals four years ago. And it seems like I was wrong. You know, the future has a way of surprising us. You know, the flip side of this is that Democrats made a bunch of gains among old voters. And I'm sure that they'll be happy that they did two years from now in the midterms. But if we don't do anything about this, then this problem could become very bad. And so now I'm just going to move over to a little less descriptive and just kind of talking about how this happened. So right here I have this slide. This is very simple. This is just showing exit poll favorability for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidate in 2020 and 2024. And, you know, I think what's it's just really important to ground any discussion of the

• 28:10Speaker 01

  election with the simple fact that Donald Trump was just as unpopular on election day last year as he was in 2020, and maybe even a little bit more unpopular. But what changed is that Biden had a net favorability rating of plus six and Harris had a net favorability rating of minus six.

• 28:30Ezra Klein?

  So I want to play Mike Donilon, who was chief strategist to Joe Biden, was recently at a forum. And he made an argument that I think you at least could read this chart as backing up, which is that Biden was more popular in 2020 than than Harris was in 2024. Maybe the Biden Harris switch was a mistake. Here's Donilon.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  I think folks who had this view believed that, you know, that Biden was going to lose. He didn't have it anymore. He had to get out. That was the best thing for the party that I understand that's their view. You know, I have a view too. Right. And my view is, um, they're really, I think, I think it was insane. I think the party lost its mind.

• 29:11Ezra Klein?

  Did the party lose its mind? And that's why we see this chart?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I think the best explanation for why Kamala Harris was unpopular is in this next slide, which is just that. The Biden administration was extremely unpopular for most of its term. You know, they saw their approval fall off a cliff after Afghanistan, and then it dropped further as inflation and immigration and the budget fights all happened in the fall. And then it never recovered. And so, yeah, I don't know. I mean, you can never tell a counterfactual world, but I think that Biden would have had an even harder time distinguishing himself from his record.

• 29:44Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, it'd be even harder for Joe Biden to run away from Joe Biden, I guess.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:47Ezra Klein?

  Looking at this chart, it looks like there is a, by January, a plus 20 net disapproval. Maybe that was a little bit smaller in November. But it had been widening. I mean, you go back to the beginning of 2023, it was narrower. People were really pissed at the Biden administration by the time we hit the election.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that that's, you know, the big salient fact about this election. And, you know, I don't think it was impossible for Kamala to do better. This was a winnable election at the end of the day. It was very close. But this was the big thing, you know, that was weighing Democrats down. And so, you know, I just want to move forward, you know, just in terms of why. In our polling, the way that we measure issue importance is we show people two random issues and we just ask which of these problems is more important, you know, to the, you know, to the problems facing the country today. And, you know, people pick. And, you know, when you model it out, whenever you have cost of living or inflation put up against something else, eight or nine out of 10 people picked that cost of living and inflation was more important.

• 30:56Ezra Klein?

  What I find notable here, I mean, yeah, cost of living was bigger than student debt, fair. But you tested it against immigration and border security, and the share of voters saying cost of living or inflation was more important was about 70%.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 31:11Ezra Klein?

  You tested it against abortion. Their cost of living or inflation was more important to about 80% of voters. Against environment and climate change, 84% of voters picked cost of living inflation.

• 31:23Ezra Klein?

  One thing that the Biden people always believed was that this election would be very heavily about democracy itself. I mean, this was something that I was told by top Biden strategists going way back. I don't see democracy on here, January 6th, the stability of the system. Did you test that too?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  No, we did. But, you know, we did a survey where we just asked people, you know, what's more important right now, preserving America's institutions or delivering change that improves people's lives? And it was 78 to 18 delivering change that improves people's lives. But, you know, what's really hard, I think this has been one of the hardest things about, you know, being a political consultant in the last eight years, is that, you know, every day, Trump does terrible things that I think are objectively awful and scary and that piss me off. You know, I'm going to prosecute my enemies or, you know, whatever. And then we do a bunch of tests and voters really don't want to hear about it, you know, from us. I think that Trump would do better if he didn't do that

• 32:21Speaker 01

  stuff, for sure. But I think that, you know, voters want us to talk about, you know, concrete ways that they're going to improve people's lives.

• 33:04Ezra Klein?

  There is an argument you hear from many Democrats, there was no problem here except for inflation. That in fact, if you compare Democratic vote outcomes with incumbent parties in many other countries, Democrats did better than incumbent parties in other countries did. So you look at the conservatives in the UK, they had a much worse election result. You look at what happened to the ruling coalition in France, some ways like Democrats were doing fine. They had a fairly modest drop in support. And it's just a shame for them that inflation happened on their watch. That if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election, inflation would have happened on his watch, completely discrediting him and his administration, and that would have been the end of them. How do you distinguish between there is a broad structural problem the Democratic

• 33:49Ezra Klein?

  Party is facing that needs to think about for 2028, and there's actually no problem here?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's when we measure issues, you know, we measure how important voters find it, and then we just measure, do you trust Democrats or Republicans more on this issue? And what you see here is if you look at the top issues that voters care the most about, cost of living, the economy, taxes and government spending, you know, the deficit, foreign policy, you know, healthcare, other than healthcare, where Democrats have a narrow lead, Republicans have massive trust advantages, 15 points on all of the issues that voters care the most about. And so the story that I would tell in response to your question is that in this election, voters trusted Republicans way more than Democrats on all of the most important issues,

• 34:38Speaker 01

  but also bought into this idea that Donald Trump was a terrible person who couldn't be trusted with power. That made the election be close, but four years from now, Donald Trump will not be the nominee, and maybe they'll nominate somebody who's just as terrible and just as unlikable. But if we don't get out of this trust deficit, I think that, you know, we'll have a lot of problems.

• 35:00Ezra Klein?

  So this is a, for people listening along, this is a chart broken into quadrants.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 35:06Ezra Klein?

  And the, the top right quadrant is issues that are very important and issues where Democrats are more trusted. And it's a, an untilled bit of farmland up there.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 35:20Ezra Klein?

  So there's mental health, which voters don't rate that important, but they do trust Democrats quite a bit more. They rate it higher than they rate, though, climate change and the environment and abortion, which struck me as surprising. Their one bright spot is really healthcare. That's kind of it in terms of issues where it is quite important and they have a genuinely noticeable advantage.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's just worth saying that four years ago, the number one issue was COVID and healthcare. And those also were the issues that people trusted Democrats the most on. And so the strategy was really obvious, you know, just talk a lot about COVID and healthcare. But, you know, this time, we had a much harder problem, which was that the issues that people cared the most about, for the most part, voters didn't trust us on. And the issues that people did trust us on, you know, climate change and reproductive rights, probably the big ones, voters just didn't care very much about. And so that was just a very difficult strategic position. And it's also one that was just very different than it was four years ago.

• 36:20Ezra Klein?

  I just want to tick off some issues voters ranked as important that they trusted Republicans on and then ask you a question about it. So they thought cost of living, the economy and inflation were very important, had a lot more trust in Republicans. They thought national security and foreign policy were important, trusted Republicans, taxes, government spending, government debt, trusted Republicans, crime, immigration, trusted Republicans, social security, trusted Republicans. That seems like a bad one for Democrats. A political division, they thought was important. They trusted Republicans a bit more on that in this data. If I looked over time, right? If I looked at 2016 and I looked at 2020, would I see on all of these that Republicans had advantages and Democrats were just winning on healthcare? How much of this is something flipping around

• 37:04Ezra Klein?

  as an incumbent penalty and a sort of reaction to conditions in the country at that moment? And how much of it is a durable situation where Republicans have a trusted advantage where Democrats would have to act in a spectacular way over time to change voters' impressions of them on that issue?

• 37:23Speaker 01

  You know, what we saw in our data was that as the Biden administration became a lot more unpopular, all of these things dropped a lot. So some of it was uniform shift. But I think that the last four years, there were some things that structurally changed a lot. In every center-left party in the world, you know, generally, the left has its issues that it owns and the right has its issues that it owns. But usually, the economy is pretty neutral. During the Trump administration, the economy was fairly neutral. Another really big shift was just that education has gone from being basically one of the best Issues for Democrats to being something that's basically neutral now. And, you know, we saw that, you know, in the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2021, we even saw it be a, an advantage for Republicans.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  And then, you know, the other big shift, you know, on the other side was that reproductive rights used to be a fairly neutral issue for Democrats. And immediately after Dobbs, we saw a party trust on reproductive rights shoot up. And so I think, you know, these, these numbers, they do change. And this is, you know, one of the big messages I, I want to get through is just that the world has changed a lot in the last four years. It's gonna keep changing and we have to kind of adjust in response to what happens.

• 38:33Ezra Klein?

  Tell me what's going on in this next slide because I also, as I understand, this is really very connected to the work you do specifically.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:40Ezra Klein?

  So, so what, what are you doing here?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  You know, one of the big things that my firm does, it's probably our biggest product, is that we do randomized controlled trials on ads. The idea is that for a given ad, you take a thousand people, you split them into a treatment and control group, you know, 500 people see the ad, 500 people don't. And then you survey them after and you see, ask them who they're voting for. And then the difference between treatment and control can be described as the causal effect. And so, you know, we tested, you know, on the order of, I'd say probably like four or 5,000 Harris ads last cycle. And I just wanted to call out these two ads that were in the top 1% of ads that we tested. One is from Kamala Harris.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  I get it. The cost of rent, groceries and utilities is too high. So here's what we're gonna do about it. We will lower housing costs by building more homes and crack down on landlords who are charging too much. We will lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers who are keeping the cost of everyday goods too high. I'm Kamala Harris and I approve this message because you work hard for your paycheck. You should get to keep more of it. As president, I'll make that my top priority.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Obviously, there's a lot for several parts of the Democratic coalition there. And then on the, um, another ad by Future Forward just shows, uh, tax him for a national sales tax for the idea that Trump's-

• 40:06Ezra Klein?

  Tax him being Trump.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, tax Trump.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  He fights for himself and his billionaire friends. He intends to enact a national sales tax, the Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle-class families by $4,000 a year. Instead of a tax hike, we will pass a middle-class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  FFPAC is responsible for the content of this ad.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  These were obviously the best ads in the campaign. And the point I just want to say is, I think this reinforces the point that what voters cared the most about was the cost of living and that voters were really mad, you know, about the actual situation. And I think that Harris being able to, you know, in this ad, acknowledging, oh, things are actually very bad. I don't like this. I have a plan to fix this, is part of what made it so effective.

• 40:54Ezra Klein?

  There is a view out there, I saw Jacobin had just done some research on this, which is a socialist publication, that at the beginning of the Harris campaign sprint, I mean, she was only the head of the Democratic ticket for three months, she was talking a lot about the economy. And that by the end, she was talking a lot about democracy. There was sort of phases of the Harris campaign, and the first one was more populist and the last one was more institutional. From what you saw was that true?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  I think that there was this big strategic question that Democrats faced, and it wasn't just the Harris campaign, which is polling would tell them, you should talk about the economy, or voters care a lot about the cost of living. But, you know, it's very hard, one, you know, to get media attention on those things. And two, you know, I think that Trump has done a good job of baiting us. You know, I think what's really interesting about a lot of the democracy and authoritarian stuff is just that it's how concerned you are by it really varies a lot by political engagement and by education and the kind of people who set media decisions, you know, at CNN or who work in politics are the kinds of people who are going to be much more concerned about it than working-class folks are.

• 42:06Ezra Klein?

  But look, there is a difference between the Harris campaign was running the optimal David Shaw strategy in late October of 2024, and they were not.

• 42:17Ezra Klein?

  The Harris campaign had access, Future Forward had access to all of this issue by issue polling. They had access to all this randomized ad testing. Did they run a heavily economic campaign and it didn't work? Or did they not run a heavily economic campaign at the end and it didn't work? Because like, if they did the thing and it didn't work, then maybe it just didn't work. Did they not do it?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Asking the hard questions. Yeah, I think, you know, obviously, I think that Democratic messaging last cycle was not economically focused enough. I think that it focused too much on, you know, narratives of defending institutions, defending democracy. And I think it's just very easy for folks to fall into that trap.

• 43:01Ezra Klein?

  But why, right? If they did that, and I heard this from different people, like, you know, David Plouffe is a smart guy. I'm not telling you to, I'm not asking you to critique David Plouffe. I can watch you getting physically uncomfortable as I harm your business here.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 43:14Ezra Klein?

  But these people all wanted to win. They really did. Like, every single one of them. And they had a lot of data. So I think this has been a thing on my mind. If they weren't running the optimal strategy, why? For instance, it's very easy to get media attention for anti-price gouging policies, because there's a lot of controversy over them about whether or not they worked. But they did make people talk about whether or not you were going to do an anti-price gouging policy. This is a Donald Trump move constantly. Announce a policy that probably doesn't work, or is in some way outrageous, or beyond the bounds of political possibility. Maybe it's even all that popular when you poll, but you get people talking about you having a very strong view, right? You're going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Everybody knows Mexico isn't going to pay

• 43:56Ezra Klein?

  for it. But you are talking about how Donald Trump hates immigration, and it breaks through. It is not rocket science to get people to pay attention. If Bernie Sanders had been running in the campaign, people would have paid attention to his economic messaging because he does economic messaging that creates conflict. If it was really this big delta between the economic push and the institutions' push, and the institutions' push is what got made, or at least got made more than one, it should have, why?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  The thing I'll say, you know, in terms of why I'm sympathetic to the people who actually had these jobs and had to make these decisions, is it just feels wrong. You know, like, I have a situation, I mentioned this before, where donors will email me and they'll be like, "Oh, look at this crazy, absolutely terrible thing, this evil thing that Trump is doing. We need to test it. We need to tell the voters. When you test it and it really doesn't work, people want to hear about eggs," you know, and it's easy for me to say that, you know, because I don't really, I'm not directly in charge. But I just think it's, it just feels really wrong when you're in the moment. It's just very, it's very hard to totally shift direction, you know, just because data tells you one thing.

• 45:07Ezra Klein?

  I do think the campaign photo ops that we all remember at the end are telling, which is, it was an extraordinary visual, Harris at the ellipse. And then there were the visuals of Donald Trump in a garbage truck and Donald Trump at McDonald's. And there was a ridiculousness to those visuals. I saw a lot of liberals making fun of them on various social media platforms. But there was something about which visuals are being chosen by the two candidates. I mean, I mean, of the two of them, only Kamala Harris had actually worked at a McDonald's.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:43Ezra Klein?

  But she wasn't the one who ended up, like, putting on the apron and getting photographed at McDonald's. And there's a thing about what the candidates end up wanting to do that is meaningful, too. And I do think there's a way in which, I wonder if that explains part of what we ended up seeing.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Each coalition's campaigns are ultimately going to reflect, you know, the aesthetic and cultural choices of the people who staff them. And it makes sense. Like, if you had just said two years ago, "Oh, Trump's going to end by showing up at a McDonald's," like, it just wouldn't have been surprising, I think. And so it's just hard to escape, you know, that kind of demographic pull. But we have to try, because we have to actually win these people over. Okay, and so now I just have a couple more slides I want to go through. I talked about this before, but voters cared a lot more about delivering change than preserving institutions. And then we have this other polling question here, which I think is interesting, which is just, you know, asking people to pick between the statements, "Things could be going better in America, but what we need is a return to basic stability."

• 46:43Speaker 01

  And the other is things in America are going poorly. And what's needed is a major change and a shock to the system. And when you have those two things, it's 53 37, which is a lot wider than the election result ended up being.

• 46:57Ezra Klein?

  What really strikes me about this is that sometimes I read polls and the wording is pretty clearly there to make something sound better than the other thing.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:07Ezra Klein?

  Things could be going better in America and what is needed is a return to basic stability from whoever becomes president. And things in America are going poorly and what is needed is a major change and a shock to the system from whoever becomes president. I would in some ways say the second there is worded to turn people off a little bit. It sounds disruptive, crisis, a shock, right? It's not just major change. It is something beyond that and it dominates. I guess I have a question about this, which is, on the one hand, we see lines like that outpolling the incremental change everywhere. On the other hand, if you look at the new split ticket ratings for who overperformed in the election, very moderate House Democrats did very well.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 47:52Ezra Klein?

  There does seem to me to be a tension between two forms of political wisdom that they both have data behind them right now.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:59Ezra Klein?

  Which is that voters want huge, massive change. And like the optimal political strategy is Joe Manchin or Jared Golden or Ruben Gallego, Susan Collins, who are not people who promise unbelievably shocking change. They are moderates who kind of tack between the parties a little bit and, you know, try to represent a center that wants something a little bit less dramatic than either side is offering. How do you reconcile them?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  There's an enormous amount of status quo bias in politics. Campaigning on big policy changes can be pretty unpopular. But I think the way to thread the needle is that what this is really saying is that voters were very angry about the state of things. And what they wanted totally was someone who acknowledged that anger. Because Ruben Gallego did a lot of criticism of the status quo and was able to outperform.

• 49:01Ezra Klein?

  So people on an angry moderate?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  That's right. I think that's exactly right.

• 49:04Ezra Klein?

  I think if temperament and ideology is being separate axes in American politics, that we connect too much. So we think about people who are moderates often have the moderate temperament. What this is implying is what people want are moderate policies in a more revolutionary or certainly more upset temperament.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:27Ezra Klein?

  We're pissed but not ideologically extreme about it. It's like a funny chant, but...

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that's right. When people think about moderates, they think of somebody like Joe Manchin, someone who's just down the line on everything. And the reality, I think that's an accurate description of what highly educated moderates are like. But most low socioeconomic status moderates, they're very extreme on some issues, they're very conservative on other issues. When you think of that, it's maybe less surprising that a lot of them like Donald Trump.

• 49:56Ezra Klein?

  Back in 2016, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump that has one of these headlines that now people will sometimes screenshot and be mad at me about. But it's called something like "Donald Trump is a perfect moderate." And the point of the piece was not that he's not extreme, because I think he is extreme, but that the way his politics worked, particularly on the campaign trail, in things he said, was that it was internally disorganized. So he'd be extremely far right on immigration, but compared to other Republicans, much more centrist on things like Medicare and Social Security. He would talk about giving health care to everybody, even though Republicans wouldn't like that. He'd talk about raising taxes on people like him, not how he governed. But there's a lot of research that actual moderates, like people in the electorate who are moderate,

• 50:41Ezra Klein?

  it's not that they have a in-between-the-two-parties view on everything. It's that they might believe in completely legalized weed, on the one hand, and mass deportations, on the other. That they, it's like if you imagine positions as like being, they can be very liberal or very conservative. They average out to moderate as opposed to being consistently moderate.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And you know, the way I like to put that in math terms, you know, the issue correlations for highly educated people are just a lot higher than they are.

• 51:10Ezra Klein?

  Your eyebrows get excited when you do math terms.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I'm sorry. It's, uh, all right. But I'm glad we started talking about ideology because that dovetails to the next slide. Here, we just ask for each of the candidates, do you think this candidate was more liberal than me, more conservative than me, or close to my views? You know, 49% of voters said that Kamala Harris was more liberal than me, while only 39% of voters said that Donald Trump was more conservative than me. And so there was this big ideological perception gap where a lot of voters saw Donald Trump as more moderate than Kamala Harris.

• 51:47Ezra Klein?

  What did this look like in 2016 and 2020?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  So in 2016, it looked fairly similar to this. In 2020, perceptions of Donald Trump being too extreme went up relative to 2016. And perceptions of the Democratic candidate being too extreme went down from 2016 to 2020. Now, you know, that, I think, wasn't a property of Joe Biden, per se. Like, obviously, him being moderate was a big part of his brand at that time. But, you know, in our polling, you know, we would ask, you know, do you think that Joe Biden is too liberal or too conservative or whatever? And we saw that over the course of 2021, as his approval ratings dipped, the perception that he was too liberal also went up.

• 52:25Ezra Klein?

  Well, it's also true that Joe Biden became more liberal. Like in terms of how he governed and in terms of what he ran on. So you're saying that in the 2020 election, you actually did see people say that they were ideologically closer to Biden than to Trump?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:40Ezra Klein?

  And then over time, that eroded.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  That eroded. But you know, the thing I want to say here before I move on is I'm really not trying to beat up on Kamala Harris here. Like, I think if you just step back, if you have a situation where only 42% of Americans trust the Democratic Party on the economy relative to 58 for Republicans, you know, obviously, the standard bearer of the Democratic Party is going to be perceived as too left-wing unless they do a lot of stuff to try to counterbalance that.

• 53:07Ezra Klein?

  I mean, people were living under the Biden-Harris administration. Whatever they thought of it, the line Trump would sometimes deliver on Harris, which in many ways is unfair if you're a super politically engaged voter and you have a lot of thoughts about the powers of the vice presidency. But to most people, if you have all these great ideas, why don't you do them in the last four years while you're vice president? Was a pretty strong argument.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  I think there's a good argument that, given that, you know, it's amazing that we did as well as we did. But it was a close election. And so I don't, you know, who knows what the counterfactual could have been.

• 54:06Ezra Klein?

  I want to note something as a dog that is not barking across this presentation.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:12Ezra Klein?

  If you look at punditry about the election, then if everybody agrees on anything, it's that the election was a huge verdict on wokeness. Famously, one of Trump's higher testing ads was this, Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you. As you're sort of running through this, I'm not saying you're saying, you know, DEI programs are popular, but I'm not seeing it emerge as a major explanation for 2024 here. I'm curious how you both think about it in the election and think about the role that's playing in the post-election narrative.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  You know, I just want to say, you know, the they/them ad that everybody talks about, it was a good ad, but it was like a 70th percentile ad, you know, in our testing. If you look at all of the best testing ads from Donald Trump, it was basically the economy, it was gas prices, it was immigration, crime. And so I think that there's definitely been an over-focus on DEI, on wokeness, on trans issues. I think it definitely, you know, played a role on the elite discourse and why so many tech CEOs have become more right-wing and, you know, all of that. But I think the Republicans are making a mistake, honestly, to focus on these things so much relative to concrete issues that people actually care about. You know, I think that there's this bigger picture point I want to make, where

• 55:30Speaker 01

  I think that a lot of people see the Trump administration as kind of a break that shows that all of the traditional rules of politics no longer apply. And I think that, to some extent, that's wrong, that a lot of what's happening is really very easy to understand. You know, Donald Trump, you know, to go back to the ideological thing, he broke with his party. You know, he might have been dishonest about it, but he disavowed Project 2025. He said that he wouldn't cut social programs. He ruled out a national abortion ban. And I think that, you know, that kind of thing just plays a big role in his success. And I think that a lot of these newer things, you know, that we talk about might be less

• 56:10Speaker 01

  important than we think. So now I just have the last slide of the retrospective. And so, you know, what I have here is we have the share of voters who get their news from TikTok by year, the share of voters, of young voters who get their news from TikTok more than quadrupled in the last four years. This is the biggest and probably fastest change in media consumption, you know, that has happened in my lifetime. And it was

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Quite correlated with support change. Now, obviously, TikTok users are younger, they're less politically engaged. It's like not surprising that we dropped among this group. You'd expect that from demographics. But if you go and you do the regressions, I think there was definitely a causal element there. And when you zoom in particularly to people who get their news from TikTok, who don't care very much about politics, this is a group that's eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago, and that's a lot.

• 57:05Ezra Klein?

  So by the end of the election, Donald Trump is promising to save TikTok. One possible explanation then for TikTok users shifting towards Trump is that they like TikTok and they didn't want it to be taken away from them. Another, which people have worried about quite a bit, is that the company behind TikTok could very easily have been turning dials, you know, just softly, right? It's not that nothing that is liberal does well on TikTok. I've seen videos of me get posted there and do very well on TikTok. But that it would not be hard to turn up the dial a little bit on issues that are tricky for Democrats. When you look at this data, do you think it is something about TikTok? Do you think it is something about TikTok's audience just being young people who are

• 57:50Ezra Klein?

  seeing this movement? Or does it make you suspect dial turning?

• 57:54Speaker 01

  I don't know the answer to that. It's totally possible. Like, we know that they do dial turning on some topics, you know, like, you know, stuff like Ukraine or Tiananmen Square or whatever. But, you know, what I'll say is I think that TikTok represents something fairly radically different than social networks that came before it. And I'm sure, you know, that, you know, there could be some malfeasance on the part of people who work there. But the thing that I think about sometimes is just that I think TikTok is really the first social media platform that is really, truly decentralized. And what I mean by that is just, it's not based on follower graphs. Like, if you look at reels or Twitter or whatever, how many people see a video or

• 58:36Speaker 01

  a piece of content is highly correlated with how many followers that person has? TikTok's a lot more random, and there's like very interesting machine learning reasons for why. But I think that it really allowed a lot of content That never would have gotten a lot of views on Twitter or on television to suddenly escape containment and get directly into the eyes of like people who don't care that much about politics. And, you know, I don't know, like, you could tell a story that maybe just anti-incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok and Democrats are going to do great now. I don't really know. But I think that, for whatever reason, you know, this big change, I think, really did help Republicans. And it's just an example of how the world has really changed a lot.

• 59:19Ezra Klein?

  So I know that you're near Democratic, both freak-out and funding world. I hear a lot from Democrats about how to fix what they now call their media problem, or, you know, sometimes you hear the TikTok problem. When you look at this, do you think this is something that an established political party and a bunch of donors can do something about? Or do you think this is a TikTok is a vibes machine? And basically, for reasons of inflation, for reasons of incumbency, for reasons of censorious, you know, Democratic Party that people got tired of, the vibes are bad for Democrats in 2024. And vibes machines like TikTok, like some of the other social media things, they're going to be an amplifier of bad vibes.

• 1:00:04Ezra Klein?

  So it's not really a thing to do in the sense of strategy. What you're trying to do is be culturally, both in terms of the candidates you have and the actual things you say and believe, culturally a better product. And then the things that pick up good cultural products and amplify them are going to be friendlier to you.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of truth in that. I think that TikTok is genuinely strange relative to platforms before it in that its audience is more politically disengaged and more working class. And I think it's just been very hard for us as a party to find creators and content that appeals to people like that, because all of the people who work in Democratic politics are not like that. And I think that in the old traditional media world, we were a lot like the media gatekeepers. And so it was kind of clear how to win that war. And I think Democrats did a good job of doing it. But now we have a totally different fight. So. You know, just, you know, to move on and talk a little bit about the present

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  as opposed to the long, a long time ago of, you know, four or five months ago. So you've talked a lot in your previous episodes about Trump's flood the zone strategy. And what we've done here is, you know, we've polled all his executive orders and stuff that he's campaigned on. I think we have something like 60 dots here. Every one of these dots is a policy that we've polled. And you know, what you can see is that there's a lot of variance, you know, a lot of the things that he campaigned on, you know, no taxes on tips, deploying the military to the border, voter ID laws, ending remote work for federal employees. A lot of that stuff is very popular. While the flip side is a lot of stuff that he's actually doing, you know,

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  he talks about this stuff less, but Medicaid cuts, repealing the ACA, extending tax cuts to billionaires, a lot of that stuff is really unpopular. I mean, just to say something a little controversial, I think a lot of the challenge of the Trump era is that they're going to try to bait us. And, you know, we should do everything we can, you know, to actually meaningfully resist and protect the populations that we care about and everything. But I think we need to make sure that we're preserving a considerable amount of time, you know, to attacking Trump on the most effective things that voters are concerned about.

• 1:02:21Ezra Klein?

  You've used the term bait a few times.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Ezra Klein?

  Right? They're going to try to bait us.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:26Ezra Klein?

  I think of a political party baiting you as dangling something in front of you that, you know, they know is going to make you mad, but it isn't that big of a deal. They're doing mass firings around critical functions. They're destroying USAID. They're arrogating a huge amount of executive power. The set of things that I find Democrats are really worried about at the moment. It's, on the one hand, I suspect they're not the things that the public cares about, wants to hear that much about, you know, making a podcaster the deputy director of the FBI.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:58Ezra Klein?

  But at the same time, they're not baiting. They're real. They're important. Like, what is the point of a party?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:04Ezra Klein?

  That will not fight those. There's sometimes, I think, this thought of the party that's just gonna, I mean, James Carville's been saying Democrats should basically play dead for a while and wait until the Trump administration's unpopular actions destroy the Trump administration, but don't get in the way. Or there's this version of a party that various things Hakeem Jeffries has said at different points have sounded like this to people, I think is, thinking is a little bit more complicated than this, but, you know, we're not going to run after all these things. We're going to focus on the price of eggs, price of goods. You can really lose your own base if you're not defending democracy when they care about democracy because you're waiting for an opportunity to attack prices. Am I getting what you're saying right? Is there a way of threading the needle? How do you think about that?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  You could imagine a theoretical world where we would have really hard and unpleasant trade-offs. But I think the world we actually live in is that a bunch of the things that we're extremely concerned about are actually really unpopular. And, you know, just kind of going forward to the next slide, here's some randomized control trial data that we did that, like I was talking about earlier with the ads, where we just kind of went through and we looked at 58 different things that Trump's going to do, and then we kind of recorded them by how persuasive they were at actually changing people's votes and making people disapprove of Trump. And, you know, I think that a lot of the things that we're most concerned about, Elon causing chaos in the federal government, cuts to,

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  you know, Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security, extending tax breaks for the rich. Obviously, this list of things is not exactly the same as my top five things that I am personally most concerned about with the Trump administration. But I think that the Republicans are making a lot of unforced errors that make it easier to thread the needle on these things than I think it otherwise would be true.

• 1:04:55Ezra Klein?

  But these are also pretty small. Changes in Trump disapproval, if I'm reading what this chart is right, you know, if Democrats attack Trump for cutting Medicare and Social Security, or wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security, that increases Trump disapproval by 2.5 points. If they attack him for letting Elon slash budgets hurting Americans and putting privacy at risk, that hurts him by 2.2 points, going down. Passing a one-party power grab to cut government services without compromise, that's 2.1 points. These kind of all look the same, and none of them are very big.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Can you just like think for a second? Can you imagine 70 words? You like stop a Trump voter on the street and you say the 70 words to him, and then there's a 2.5% chance he changes his mind? I think that's incredible. Like, I think it is a big deal. I just think that these two pieces of data tell a story of how we should try to shape the campaign against Trump in the next couple of months, which is that he is wrecking havoc in the federal government. I think that is consistent with our principles and also something that voters are very concerned about. You know, that he is trying to slash support for the safety net and that he's trying to do tax cuts against the wealthy. And, you know, I think that a lot of this critique of Trump is really very similar to the campaign

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  that we ran against Mitt Romney. And I think that this kind of gets back to what I was saying before of I feel like, you know, we were so shocked by Trump that we kind of forgot that the old rules of politics.

• 1:06:21Ezra Klein?

  I want to read two of these, because I think something you just said is important when we're talking about these old laws of politics. So here's the, these are all high polling, high-testing messages, but this is the lowest one on the chart. So, "Trump is working to repeal a law that lowers the cost of healthcare and prescription drug costs and caps insulin costs at 35 a month for seniors. By repealing this law, Trump will increase the cost of life-saving medicine for millions and create more financial strain when costs are already too high." So that increases Trump disapproval by 1.9 points. I think that is as like right down the middle a Democratic message as you could possibly imagine. "That does not test as well as Trump is letting Elon Musk slash federal budgets with no oversight, checks, or balances. Musk gave $250 million to Trump's campaign,

• 1:07:06Ezra Klein?

  and now Trump is letting Musk reshape the government in ways that advance Musk's interests, even if they hurt working Americans by cutting the basics like Medicaid and public schools." I am actually surprised that the Elon Musk attack is outpolling the insulin attack. And it's interesting because I see this in Trump voters in my own life. Some of the ones I know, they're actually not happy with what's going on in the Trump administration. There's a lot they don't like. There's a lot going on, but too much. But Musk creeps them out.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  I think it's really telling that Elon stuff floats to the top here because it's really very hard for something to be competitive with protect Social Security and Medicare. And the fact that there are multiple Elon things up at the top, I think, really does tell a story that there's something really unusual about what he's doing. It's very easy to tie what he's doing to harming individual people. You know, in ads, one of the clearest patterns in ads is that getting a real person and just having them stare at a camera and talk about the ways that Republicans have personally hurt them, it's the best content. You know, it's funny, if you hire actors, it doesn't work as well. You know, people have tried. And that's why, in some ways, I'm optimistic that Democrats will be able

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  to thread the coalitional needle here because the two things that we should do is fight against social welfare cuts and also attack Elon Musk for the chaos he's creating. And I think that that's something that basically every wing of the party should be on board with.

• 1:08:33Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump is polling better than he was at this point in his first term. And, you know, the vibes have really shifted in a pro-Trump direction. And look at how much he and Elon Musk are doing. And, you know, I've certainly talked to Republicans who have this feeling that Trump has unlocked a sort of political juggernaut here, that he has cracked the code of American politics. But you have this, this side is titled Trump is vulnerable. So why is he vulnerable?

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  The most predictable thing in American politics, and we get surprised every single time it happens, is a president comes in, he wins a trifecta, and then he does a bunch of unpopular stuff, he overreaches, and then he becomes very unpopular and loses big in the midterms. You know, that doesn't mean you can't avoid the cycle. But I think that in order to avoid it, like, when you look at the people who did the best job, you know, Clinton in 1998, or Kennedy in 1962, you know, they did it by engaging in an enormous amount of policy restraint. And that is just not what Trump has been doing at all. And I think that you can just see in the data that his approval rating is dropping pretty quickly. And you can see that he's just pissing off lots of people and that the stuff that,

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  a lot of the stuff that he's doing and drawing attention toward is really quite unpopular.

• 1:09:50Ezra Klein?

  There is this reality of the coalitional realignment you were talking about at the beginning, which is Democrats now have this higher information, higher engagement coalition. Those are the people who turn out in midterms disproportionately. If I were a moderate Republican right now, or a Republican in any way vulnerable, I know they're all afraid of Elon Musk and they're afraid of primaries. I'd be pretty afraid of losing, you know, as you've showed earlier, right? If only 2022 voters had come out in 2024, Harris would have won.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:24Ezra Klein?

  You gotta be pretty confident in Donald Trump's political skills to think that he is gonna shift that dynamic.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right. But, you know, that said, it gets to this like tension in all of these like Democratic soul searching conversations, which is if Democrats do nothing, really, like they'll probably be okay in 2026, because all of these voters, you know, who get their news from TikTok, who don't care about politics, these like voters under 25, they just really are not gonna vote very much in the midterms. But if we don't fix this problem, then four years from now, we could be in the same trust deficit on all of these core issues, and these voters that didn't turn out in 2026 will come back, and except we'll be running against a candidate who's a lot less unpopular potentially than Trump, and we could be in a real problem, a real, real pickle.

• 1:11:14Ezra Klein?

  How about the Senate? So you and I, I did a big piece on kind of debates about populism a couple of years ago, and followed a model that you had, and that model was predicting in 2022, but specifically 2024, Democratic Senate annihilation.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:31Ezra Klein?

  And Democrats are down a couple of seats in the Senate. It's, what is it, 53, 47?

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:37Ezra Klein?

  It's not a good map for them in 2026, and they did lose some seats that were really important to them, like Tester in Montana and Brown in Ohio.

• 1:11:48Ezra Klein?

  How do you see the Democratic Senate future?

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  If you had told me in 2019, when I started worrying about the 2024 Senate election, that we would have 47 seats, I would have jumped for joy. You know, the really big factors there is like, Republicans ran a bunch of really terrible candidates in a bunch of swing races, and it turns out those Democratic candidates did a good job of distancing themselves from the party. You know, I don't want to spend too much time speculating about the 2026 map, but I think that even though the bias in the Electoral College has gone down quite a bit because of the swing among immigrants, that doesn't really change that the Senate, it's very hard for Democrats to take the Senate unless they can consistently outperform how Harris did and how Biden did in most of the country.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  These problems won't be fixed unless we spend the next two years or four years changing the party's brand among, you know, working class voters who are overrepresented in the Senate. Okay, the one exception to this, I think, and you know, this is just controversial and you know, might get me in trouble, is I think that if you look in Nebraska, the single biggest overperformance that we had was Osborne, you know, running as an independent. He outperformed the top of the ticket by 7.1%. Now, obviously Nebraska is an extremely red state, and I think that we've only ever tried this strategy of running people who are literally formally not tied to the Democratic Party in extremely red states.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  But I think the argument for doing that kind of thing in merely red states, in places like Florida, or places like Ohio, or Iowa, you know, those are hard questions, and it's not up to me, you know, what we end up doing, but I think it's something that we have to really seriously consider. And you know, then that also just brings up the really awkward point of like, well, what do we do with the reality that by land area, in most parts of the country, it's almost impossible for a Democrat, or someone with a Democrat on their ticket, to win?

• 1:13:39Ezra Klein?

  What do you do about the reality of the Democratic brand is toxic in, yeah, most of the land area in the country?

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:50Ezra Klein?

  You always have to be careful at which conversation you're having. Is the conversation, can Democrats win in 2026 or 2028? And the answer there is yes.

• 1:14:01Ezra Klein?

  If the conversation is how do you get back to a place where you're putting states in play that Democrats have just kind of given up on, Mitch McConnell's retiring in Kentucky, there's a Democratic governor in Kentucky, it's not literally true that no Democrat can ever win there, I don't think anybody seriously thinks so that a Democrat is going to win Mitch McConnell's seat, because the Democratic brand nationally, which is different than its kind of state party brand, is pretty bad. And people understand when they're voting for Senate, they're voting for the national brand. See, I've been thinking about this for a long time. If you were trying to think about reversing these much deeper trends, these educational trends, if your whole point in life was to make Democrats

• 1:14:40Ezra Klein?

  competitive again in Florida, in Missouri, in Kansas, right, not the red states, but states that they were competitive in a couple of years ago, what would you advise Democrats to do?

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Democrats are not in power right now, and so we don't have agenda control. And I think a lot of this just depends on what Trump does, and then who replaces Trump. You know, like, something I'll say, going back to the first time that Trump was president, is that when we were looking at polling of non-college whites, you know, and these Obama-Trump voters, their approval rating for Trump was really very stable for most of his term. And the only time that it declined was when Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But once that was out of the news, they switched back. Like, at this moment, given that there is no party leader, I think it's mostly a question of if Trump does successfully push a bunch of welfare state cuts, then that might change the realignment. But I think

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  realistically, at least until 2026, it's mostly a function of what Republicans do. But, you know, when we pick a new presidential candidate, that will be a reset. And I think it's, you know, I don't think it's too early to talk about that, but I think that you could imagine us picking candidates who would do a much better job.

• 1:15:52Ezra Klein?

  I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  I want to just call out "Hollow Parties" by Danny Shosman. He's a good friend of mine, and I think it's--

• 1:16:04Ezra Klein?

  And Sam Rosenfeld.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  And Sam Rosenfeld, of course.

• 1:16:06Ezra Klein?

  Our colleague.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Yes. I think it's hard to talk about a lot of these questions that I was kind of dodging about, you know, why parties were doing what they did without kind of reading that. You know, the other thing I want to call out is something that was usually influential for how I think about politics. This is a really nerdy pick, but "The Origin and Nature of Mass Opinion" by Zoller kind of gets at this question of how much does what people say in surveys matter versus how much of it is downstream of what people are saying, you know, what elites are saying? And I think his answer is mostly elites, but both. And then the last thing I just wanted to call out was "Victory Lab" by Sasha Eisenberg. You know, it kind of talks a lot about, you know, the history of the democratic analytics industry.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  A lot of the stuff that these numbers that I've shared here kind of come out of that machine. And so if you're just interested in kind of the history of the Democratic Party's internal analytics and research structure, it's the only book, really, that's ever been written about it.

• 1:17:04Ezra Klein?

  David Shor, thank you very much.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:17:24Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Clanjo is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, mixed in by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristin Lynn. We have original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Semiluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rostrosser.