There’s Been a ‘Regime Change’ in How Democrats Think About Elections

According to the conventional rules of politics, Democrats should be on track for electoral disaster this November. Joe Biden’s approval rating is stuck around 42 percent, inflation is still sky-high and midterms usually swing against the incumbent president’s party — a recipe for the kind of political wipeouts we saw in 2018, 2010 and 1994. But that’s not what the polls show. Currently, Democrats are on track to hold the Senate and lose narrowly in the House, which raises all kinds of questions: Why are Republicans failing to capitalize on such a favorable set of circumstances? How did Democrats get themselves into this situation — and can they get out of it? And should we even trust the polls giving us this information in the first place? Matt Yglesias is a veteran journalist who writes the newsletter “Slow Boring” and co-hosts the podcast “Bad Takes.” And in recent years he’s become an outspoken critic of the Democratic Party’s political strategy: how Democrats communicate with the public, what they choose as their governing priorities and whom they ultimately listen to. In Yglesias’s view, Democrats have lost touch with the very voters they need to win close elections like this one, and should embrace a very different approach to politics if they want to defeat an increasingly anti-democratic G. O. P. We discuss why Yglesias thinks the 2022 polls are likely biased toward Democrats, how Republicans’ bizarre nominee choices are giving Democrats a fighting chance of winning the Senate, why Biden’s popular legislative agenda hasn’t translated into greater public support, the Biden administration’s “grab bag” approach to policymaking, why Yglesias thinks there’s been a “regime change” in how Democrats think about elections, how social media has transformed both parties’ political incentives, what the Democratic agenda should look like if the party retains both houses of Congress and more. Book recommendations: Famine: A Short History by Cormac Ó Gráda Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld, Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

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

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  The midterm elections are just about two weeks away, and things are looking a bit different than I would have expected. So Biden's approval rating is hovering around 42%. Inflation is very high. And add in that midterms tend to swing against the president's party, and we should be on track for a massacre. But if the polls are to be believed, we're not. Democrats are favored to hold the Senate. Republicans are favored to win the House, and not by some giant landslide. No chamber looks set for the kind of wipeout we saw in 2018, or 2010, or 1994. And maybe the polls aren't to be believed. That's something we cover in this episode, too. But maybe there's more than that at play. My guest today is Matt Iglesias. Matt and I, we go way back.

• 1:08Ezra Klein?

  We were early political bloggers together, back when the blogosphere, and the internet, and we were young. We co-founded Vox together. Now Matt writes the newsletter Slow Boring, and he co-hosts the podcast Bad Takes. In recent years, Matt has become more focused on party strategies. How do Democrats and Republicans present themselves to the public? Who governs and shapes that presentation? What do they actually do when they govern? And how does that affect how they're seen? And Matt has particularly become a critic of a Democratic Party that he often argues is in hawk to a highly educated staffer class and has lost sight of the voters it most needs to win over. So I want to have him on the show to talk about where Democrats are on the eve of this year's 2022 election.

• 1:52Ezra Klein?

  As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:00Ezra Klein?

  Matt Iglesias, welcome to the show.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Hi, it's good to be here.

• 2:03Ezra Klein?

  So let's start with where we are. Joe Biden's approval rating is about 42% in the averages I'm seeing. At the same time, the polls and forecasts give Democrats, I'd say it's fair to say, a fighting chance in midterms, a two in three chance of keeping the Senate, a one in four chance of keeping the House. Those two things seem at odds to me, particularly given where inflation is and the general mood of the country. So how do you see what's happening here?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  I think obviously, part of what's happening in the Senate, like everybody would tell you, is Republicans have gone with a lot of bad candidates in a lot of races. And that is helping Democrats out. I mean, I think you see this really significantly in New Hampshire in particular, where Maggie Hassan, I think, was thought to be very vulnerable kind of early in the cycle. John Sununu, who would have been her strongest opponent, didn't run for the seat. Then Democrats sort of ran some ads kind of encouraging Republicans to vote for this guy, Bull Duck, who's like, super duper right wing. And so now, you know, she looks really safe there. I do think another thing is that, my guess is that the polling is biased in favor of overstating Democrats' chances.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  It's hard to be super duper certain about something like that, but if Nate Silver wanted to bet with me, I think those 538 odds have Democrats too high in the Senate.

• 3:26Ezra Klein?

  Nate, I should say, has written a bit about this and said that if he was going to imagine why his forecast is wrong, it would be polling biased towards the Democrats. At the same time, his argument here is that we've only seen that in two cycles. There have been a bunch of other cycles that go in other directions in terms of polling bias. We don't really know if pollsters are able to account for this, but they're certainly trying to. They know they missed the same thing in 2016. They know they missed it in 2020. The big misses were in presidential years, not in, say, the 2018 midterm election. And so he thinks Democrats have...

• 4:00Ezra Klein?

  Begun to think of anti-democratic polling bias as a kind of fact of nature, when you shouldn't think of it that way.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  I mean, that's, I think there's like two ways of looking at this, right? I mean, one is what you just laid out there, right? That like polling error happens. By definition, these are statistical samples. They're not 100% correct all the time, but you expect the errors to even out over the long term. I think the case that there's a systematic problem is you look at the pattern of these 2022 races. So in Nevada, the polling looks pretty bad for the Democrats. Cortez Masto, I think, is set to lose narrowly, according to polls, in a blue-leaning state. Then you look at Ohio. Tim Ryan is also sort of slightly behind in the polls, but Ohio is a much more conservative state. So Tim Ryan's polling looks really good.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Cortez Masto's polling looks pretty bad. Now, if you look back at 2020, Nevada is a state where the polling was extremely accurate, and Ohio is a state where the polling was very biased toward Democrats. And I think if you go across the landscape, that's sort of what you see. Exactly the states where Democrats are maybe doing better than you would expect in the polls are the states that had the large polling errors. And in the states where the polling was most accurate, like Nevada, things are looking rougher for Democrats. So that gives me reason to believe that the issues with the 2020 polling have not really

• 5:30Speaker 01

  been fixed, that you cannot do sort of simple demographic-based adjustments to reweight your polls, that there was just a strong correlation between inclination to answer surveys and partisan voting behavior, and the kind of methodologies are off. I mean, now, I should say, I'm not like... 90% sure on this. I'm more like 60%, you know what I mean? Like, if you asked me to bet with Nate Silver's forecast, like, I would go low, but I wouldn't put huge amount of confidence on it. The problem with elections is like, they don't run that many elections. So you can't, it's really challenging to test these theories out.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, we do what we can, and we'll see, right? If the 2022 polling turns out to be biased, I think everyone's going to say, okay, we now have enough in a row that we need to say there's like a fundamental methodological problem here. On the other hand, if it just swings back the other way, people will say, you know, shit happens, surveying is hard, statistical sampling is imperfect. And, you know, we're going to have to see what happens. But that is my best explanation of the seeming mismatch between a bleak national political climate for Democrats and this kind of surprisingly strong Senate polling is that the state-level Senate polling is just off.

• 6:53Ezra Klein?

  So the assumption is Democrats are going to lose the House. If the polling is worse for Democrats than it appears to be, or the reality is worse for Democrats than the polls are, they'll lose it by more than people expect. In the Senate, what seats does this sort of mental model you have expect to go to Republicans that the polling might not say will? Because Ohio, I think, people are like, good job, Tim Ryan. Like, this is a strong race, and Democrats are hoping to see it break their way. But I don't think that is bought into most of the views about what Senate, most of the predictions about which seats Democrats will control in 2023.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Well, I agree, except that, I mean, if you look at how these sort of models work, the kind of long-tail opportunity for Democrats to win Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, actually does have an impact on the kind of statistical aggregate. Because if you look at the sort of the core battleground, right? We're looking at Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania. The issue there is just that, like, these are all close races, but to hold the Senate, Democrats need to win all of them, you know, which is just like a tough kind of bar. And, you know, so if Republicans win, it'll probably be because they take the seat in Nevada and they hold the seat in Pennsylvania. Those seem like the kind of...

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Decisive battlegrounds. Democrats definitely have a shot in Pennsylvania. Dr. Oz seems like a very poor candidate who is potentially blowing a super duper winnable race over there for them. There's also this weird situation in Arizona where I think on paper Mark Kelly seemed like he should be very vulnerable, but Blake Masters appears to be doing quite poorly and is also in these like constant fights with Mitch McConnell about who's going to put money into that race. So, you know, I mean, the-

• 8:43Ezra Klein?

  And Arizona and Georgia weren't bad polling states for Democrats before.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:46Ezra Klein?

  The polls have been pretty good in those states.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Georgia as well. You know, I mean, Republicans in a bunch of these key races, right? I mean, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, these are states that they're not gimmies for Republicans, but they're places where Republicans would have a very good shot to win. And in all three of these races, they didn't nominate like, just like a regular politician. Like, there's just lots of Republican Party elected officials in Georgia, and instead they went with Herschel Walker, who even aside from these like terrible scandals, it's just like, he's not conversant in public policy issues. He has all the, and Blake Masters, the same thing, who I guess doesn't have any particular scandals, but like, he's

• 9:30Speaker 01

  a real weirdo and he doesn't talk like a normal politician. And people always say that they like, they want political outsiders and people who won't be poll-tested automatons. But we always see that professional politicians like do much better on average than like random walk-on businessmen or football stars, things like that. And, you know, this is just kind of the weirdness of where Republicans are. I saw earlier today, before we recorded, Paul Ryan, we emerged from hiding and was talking about 2024, and he was like, I don't think Trump's going to be the nominee. Like, everybody knows Republicans would be better off with a different candidate. And, I mean, Paul Ryan knows that, and I guess I know

• 10:13Speaker 01

  that, but I, I just like, I don't have his confidence. If Republicans were good at selecting strong candidates, we wouldn't be having this conversation about Herschel Walker and a television doctor from New Jersey running in Pennsylvania. Like, it's, I don't, I don't exactly know what they're doing, but they have developed a taste for eccentric characters.

• 10:36Ezra Klein?

  One of the things we don't seem to be seeing and doesn't really look to be in the cards, even if you imagine a two to three point polling error against the Democrats, is a sort of 2018, 2010, '06, 1994 style wipeout. And I don't know, if you had told me a year or two years ago that Joe Biden's going to be the president, inflation is going to be generationally high, unbelievably high, 80% of people are going to not like where the economy is, 2/3 of people are going to say the economy is getting worse even as we speak, Biden will be in the low 40s, his disapproval will be in the mid 50s, what does that Democratic midterm look like? I'd be like, oh, that's going to be a massacre. Do you think Biden and the Democrats have played the political hand they have well

• 11:21Ezra Klein?

  here? Are they actually doing more with what they have than one should expect?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  It's interesting, right? Because definitely, like, the frame that you gave, it's like, oh my god, like, how are they doing this well? Then, on the other hand, if you say, well, okay, suppose Democrats, you know, advance this, like, fairly modest, super popular policy agenda, successfully stay out of, like, huge, weird, crazy controversies, I'd be like, yeah, like, this is a blueprint for success. What's interesting is that Biden's approval has been so low, really, right? Because there's this kind of push and pull of the economic situation is difficult, the agenda Democrats have been advancing in Congress has been, I think, a very, it's not just that it's been a popular one, right? But like, there's been no counter-mobilization to it, right?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  There's no, like, national protests against the Inflation Reduction Act kind of thing, the way you saw when Trump was passing his legislation, or when Obama was passing legislation. So, on that level, I mean, I think Democrats have done a great job of sort of minimizing thermostatic backlash and, you know, governing in a way that is at least acceptable to the vast majority of people. But then you have this inflation background, right? And so, you know, I think people are going to argue for a really long time, how much of the inflationary situation 2022 is due to policy errors that Congress and the administration made? Were the alternatives actually any better?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I would say, in defense of the substantive choices that were made, that of course, everybody would like to think that it would be better to have inflation at 2% right now, rather than 8%. But I think if you'd actually taken the steps that would have capped inflation at the 2% target level, that things would be much worse today. You would have much higher unemployment and, you know, people would be saying, oh, my God, like, we're never going to recover from the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I understand, like, politically, this is a really challenging thing for the White House and congressional leaders to talk about. But, you know, when all these people get sick from a new virus, like, there's going to be an economic impact of

• 13:40Speaker 01

  that. And having the impact take the form of this kind of high-rising prices and high-pressure labor market is probably, you don't want to say, like, optimal, but it was one of the better ways to handle it, realistically, given the sort of alternatives on the table.

• 14:00Ezra Klein?

  I don't know that I would frame the policy choices exactly as you did there, because, I mean, you go back to 1994. Bill Clinton doesn't pass much. What he does try to do at some point in the polls looks totally fine. 2010, obviously, there's a lot of policy that happens, and some of it, by the end, is quite unpopular, like the Affordable Care Act. But it's also made unpopular. And one thing that has been weird, watching Republicans, after, you know, a political career covering this kind of thing, is it never seemed to me that they cared to try to make the Inflation Reduction Act into a giant issue. I mean, there were big tax increases there. There's all kinds of stuff that you could make look a little strange in the climate side of the bill. The prescription drug stuff is popular,

• 14:44Ezra Klein?

  but, you know, there's a lot going on in the American Rescue Plan, a lot of random stuff in the background happening. I mean, I think we should talk about Dobbs here, which, on the one hand, is clearly mobilizing in the Democratic Party's favor. Democrats also pushed a very expansive abortion bill. In the aftermath of that, in the Senate, you might have imagined Republicans trying to make hay of that. Compared to previous periods in American politics, it doesn't actually seem to me that Republicans are united enough on or care enough about policy to do to Biden what they did to, you know, an Obama or in another way, a Clinton. Like, they have not attempted against the Inflation Reduction Act what they did against

• 15:26Ezra Klein?

  the Affordable Care Act. They didn't attempt against the American Rescue Plan what they did against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. There does seem to be a structural difference, too, in just what the Republican Party is fired up about nowadays.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, some of that is, obviously, so much of the Republican mobilization has focused on crime and, I guess, they characterize it as the border, you know, immigration stuff. And it's not that these are like non-policy questions, because obviously, like, the federal government has a substantial role in law enforcement and criminal justice policy. But Republicans are not saying, well, there's some bill that, like Nancy Pelosi passed that has caused crime to be high. So, you know, and I've been sort of trying to draw some conservatives out over the past couple of days as to like, what exactly

• 16:22Speaker 01

  are they saying? And what conservatives believe is that the racial justice and anti-police protests of 2020 and some of the statements and claims made by local and, to some extent, state politicians have created a big increase in crime. What they really, really think, though, is not even that, like, mayors caused this crime increase. They say that, like, the cultural climate became so hostile to and skeptical of police officers making judgment calls in dangerous situations, that police responded to this social demand for much more caution for many fewer stops, et cetera, et cetera, and that's caused this increase

• 17:06Speaker 01

  in crime. But it's what has given, I think, a lot of the politics this strange... Feeling because Republicans are running against the kind of attitudes and social mores of American progressives broadly construed, much more than they are running against like specific legislation that Democrats have passed or things that Joe Biden is saying or doing. And the fact that this happened, actually while Trump was president, I mean, it raises the question of like, you know, there's this idea, you like, scratch a Republican conversation like, aha, we've decided that we can't, you know, just be neutral and that

• 17:51Speaker 01

  the government has to like, come in and do battle for us in the culture wars. And it's never really clear to me what that amounts to exactly. But they, you know, it seems like it's going to win them the House of Representatives at a minimum because as Mitch McConnell said, people don't pay any attention to who the House candidates are. So candidate quality doesn't. I mean, it was a really funny thing where he's like,

• 18:15Ezra Klein?

  It's a very funny quote.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  He's trying to explain why like, his guys are doing worse than Kevin McCarthy is. And he's like, because people know who my candidates are and they're terrible. So it's a, it's a weird situation.

• 18:28Ezra Klein?

  The exact quote I believe is candidate quality matters. Senate candidate quality matters, something like that.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  But it's like, I mean, anyway, it's a weird situation.

• 19:03Ezra Klein?

  One of the things I'm hearing from you here is actually a fairly positive take on how the Democratic Party is officially construed is operating. I think it's become known in the past couple of years as having a more critical sense that Democrats are losing touch, they're becoming too in hock to a college educated staffer class, they're sort of talking about too many unpopular things. Do you feel that's changed or do you feel that's still happening in a, in a different part of the, the sector? You're sounding a little bit more bright about Democrats than I've heard you sound in a while.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, but I, look, I mean, I, I think so much, though, of the relatively bright picture for Democrats right now is parasitic on this very poor candidate choice by Senate Republicans. And, you know, Democrats have not done, I think, a great job of bringing coherence to the set of things that they say about American politics. Democrats have developed the idea that the Republican Party has radicalized against democracy itself and cannot be trusted with power, or else, as Joe Biden said, a semi fascist regime is going

• 20:17Speaker 01

  to come to power. I both find that to be a little bit overstated, but not, not like totally crazy. I mean, I think that's a reasonable concern to have. And yet, you know, as like your colleague Ross Douthat and, and other sort of moderate conservatives are always whining, Biden is not really like reaching out to be like, I want a grand coalition of all Democratic forces to come together. I mean, who's very insistent on like, we've got this whole agenda, right? Like, we need to take people's guns away. We need to have

• 20:58Speaker 01

  this like expansive pro-choice agenda, et cetera, et cetera. In terms of their actual legislation, they got really edited by Joe Manchin down to a much more modest, and I think much more politically viable agenda than the kind of big picture agenda that 46 or 47 Democrats have signed on to. You know, people will sometimes do these like memes, right? Like, if only Cal Cunningham had kept it in his pants. Like, look at all this stuff we could have done. If Cal Cunningham had kept it in his pants. And, I mean, you gotta nuance a couple of other things. But like, if Democrats had-

• 21:33Ezra Klein?

  The Democrats had 54 seats.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Right. And they had ended the filibuster and-

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Pass this assault weapons ban and pass the women's reproductive health. I forget the exact name of that bill. Pass the full $3 trillion Build Back Better. Like, if they had done all that stuff, I think then we'd be looking at a much more typical midterm with like a huge counter mobilization of people going like, holy shit. I wanted to get Donald Trump out of the White House because he seemed unstable and I didn't sign on for this like sweeping transformation of all of American society. You think about the water Biden is taking on over sort of asylum seekers and you imagine if he had passed the like path to citizenship with no stepped up enforcement bill that he

• 22:23Speaker 01

  proposed on his first day in office, like, people would be really upset. Republicans have made some gains on that issue, but it's limited because I think the White House can like legitimately say, like, what do you want from us on all these topics? But that's because they like haven't done this gigantic progressive agenda that Chuck Schumer, in some theoretical sense at least, signed on for. So I, I'm like pretty positive on what Democrats actually did and pretty negative on what at least they tell themselves they wanted to have done.

• 22:59Ezra Klein?

  One thing that strikes me about your thought here is you seem to be positing a pretty clear connection between what actually happens in politics and how the voters feel about what actually happens in politics. A clear one that I would probably say, like, when I go back to, say, Obamacare discourse in 2010, I don't think it was all that related to what was in the Affordable Care Act. You know, there are some things there, but there was a lot of death panels, you know, a lot of just kind of random lying about things. I don't know. When we talk about vibe, political vibes and political aesthetics, you know, I look at somebody sometimes like Bernie Sanders or in a different way, John Fetterman. And it makes me wonder a little bit about the sort of policy literalist tendencies I

• 23:42Ezra Klein?

  have or maybe that, that you have, because I think both get pretty far with a much more expansive agenda of some things that are popular and some things that are maybe unpopular, some things that are unpopular, actually. By just their political directionality seeming to voters to be a kind of on your side, don't like the bad rich guys, tired of corruption in Washington. And so I just wonder both how much like policy communication, but also sort of policy, like reality matters. It's just it's hard for me to believe that the connection is really that close between more modest pieces of legislation or whether something like passed the Senate but died in the House as opposed to didn't pass the Senate in the case of the Post-Dobbs abortion

• 24:23Ezra Klein?

  bill. Like, how do you think about the connection between what actually happens and what voters feel about what's happening?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm a little bit torn because I, to some extent, am trying to get people to think harder on the margin. And I think that 20 years ago, there was a conventional wisdom that was like, comically literal about the relationship between politics and public opinion, right? And so like, if George W. Bush won an election, that must show that people really liked the details of his leadership in the war on terror, rather than just there was a kind of like, rally around the flag effect that just kind of happens. I tend to think, though, that progressive minded journalists and advocates and just like people

• 25:12Speaker 01

  who talk on social media have gone overboard in terms of like, what do you get with the vibes and the atmospherics? That I think that there is a desire to believe that if you just kind of like, put a guy who looks like John Tester out there, that he can vote like Kristin Gillibrand and win everywhere. But if you look at John Tester, until quite recently, he really broke from the Democratic Party on important substantive issues related to guns. He was against the Dream Act when that came up in the Obama years. And like, I don't think that that's a coincidence. I also don't think it's a coincidence that

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Joe Manchin and Susan Collins do much better than their kind of overall party brands. Or that, you know, a guy who lost, like Colin Peterson, still massively overperformed the fundamentals in his district because people kind of knew him, knew what he was. And I think that there's a real backlash dynamic, that when you do things, whatever it is you do. You alienate some people because, I mean, there's nothing you can do that makes everybody happy, but that people respond to sort of getting mad at incumbents more than to being delighted about them. And that if somebody does 11 big things and you, you

• 26:39Speaker 01

  like two of them, you hate two of them, and you're okay with the other seven, that tends to hurt the incumbent in the midterms, you know. And the fact that Biden hasn't like actually delivered sweeping change on immigration is sort of like, I think it's substantively bad and maybe contributes to inflation and other things that hurt him politically. But I do think that it's limited the kind of blowback that Republicans have been able to mobilize. Because one thing we know, right, is like, Republicans love to talk about the border. And what I've seen in experiments is that like, getting people to think about immigration helps Republicans. But if you're not watching a lot of Fox News, you actually

• 27:20Speaker 01

  don't hear that much about the situation at the border. Because, you know, mainstream journalists think it's kind of demagogic and think it's kind of unfair. And Biden isn't like, doing big dramatic policy announcements. When, you know, Ron DeSantis came up with this kind of clever, kind of shitty, like, scheme to get a lot of attention, that seemed like that worked well for him, right? And but I think it's mostly worked well for Biden to sort of keep focus off that stuff and keep people-

• 27:51Ezra Klein?

  Do you think that scheme worked well for Ron DeSantis? It seemed to me that it ended up in a very much too clever by half.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Eh, I mean, I feel like Republicans mostly liked it, you know, and appreciated it, all things considered. I mean, I guess there's like, some chance that he's gonna turn out to have broken the law, and, you know, might get in some kind of trouble for that. But I feel like it was pretty good, you know, and that like, I don't know how things are where you are out in California, but like, in DC, they've successfully gotten the mayor to be like, oh, man, this is a lot of asylum seekers. It's a real problem for our city. We need some help. And- You know, so I, I, I think that that basically works as a tactic. And conversely, that like Biden not delivering on his full promise of sweeping change has like,

• 28:43Speaker 01

  kind of worked for him. But if I was to offer a strong criticism of the Biden administration, which I sometimes do, and the Democrats more broadly, it's that I don't think that they've like set priorities very clearly across this whole set of issues that they have operated as this kind of, you know, checklist, log roll, where if like, if you're, if you're in a safe seat, right? Like, it doesn't matter. You can just be for everything that everybody asks for and not think that hard about it and like, use the word crisis for everything and, you know, it's all good. But when it has come time to actually govern, they're quite tangled up and betwixt and

• 29:27Speaker 01

  between, both on this like, are we in a popular front against fascism or are we not? But even like, when OPEC announced that they were cutting oil production the other day, the members of Congress, you know, I, I spoke to a couple of members of Congress and I saw statements from dozens of them, and they weren't like, this is bad, right? None of them were like, this is amazing. It's going to help us meet our climate goals. So if Democrats agree that like, high oil prices are bad, that it's bad for the economy, it's bad for them politically, it's bad for the American people, like, it raises the question of why did they come into office and like, cancel all these oil and gas leases? And now, I mean, I, I talk to everybody and, you know, don't, don't give me a hard time,

• 30:12Speaker 01

  White House Communications Office, like, I know that if you get attacked now and saying that like, Joe Biden is the cause of the expensive oil, they'll be like, they eventually did do the leases and, you know, production is close to record highs, but that's because they were blocked in court, right? They, they came in to office with the intention of reducing American oil and gas production. They were blocked in court. They then reversed their own policy when oil got expensive. And now when Saudi Arabia increases the price of oil, they're like, maybe we need to rethink our whole alliance structure. But that reflects a failure to like, think this whole issue through from sort

• 30:54Speaker 01

  of first principles and be like, what do we actually believe about this? And we eventually got to the point where, you know, I heard from people who work for Deb Holland, who's, you know, a very progressive person at Interior, that like, they want the advocacy groups to get off their backs. They're like, you're asking us to do stuff that's not within our legal authority. And it's like, embarrassing to lose in court. But that's a contrast to, there was this good story in the Semaphore about, you know, anti-abortion groups like wanted Senate Republicans to sign on to a bill that anti-abortion groups love, that would have been toxically unpopular. And they like, they told them, no, like, we're not going to do that. We're going to try to win the election.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, we've like, done great things for you guys, and you got to give us a break. And, you know, that's a problem that progressives keep confronting, I think, across the issue space, is that there's not like, a forum through which people are setting priorities, telling people no, et cetera, et cetera. Instead, it's all been left to Kristin Sinema and Joe Manchin to sort of do the edit.

• 32:04Ezra Klein?

  There's something weird here that I'd be curious for your take on. So I covered policy design in the White House and Congress pretty closely in the Obama era, covered it now. I would say there's just much less of a policy design process in this Democratic Congress. I think the stimulus, the initial stimulus in the Obama era, had also that flavor of the Christmas tree.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:30Ezra Klein?

  Where it's like, they were coming in, they needed something really, really quickly, and they kind of just threw the doors open in Congress, right? You know, everybody bring us your ideas, and we're going to put them into a gigantic bill. But the other bills didn't work like that. Like, the Affordable Care Act was this, you know, year-long policy design fight. And a lot of things people wanted ended up out of it. And the things that ended up in it, for the most part, you know, people would explain to you why they were there. I think you could say the same with Dodd-Frank, which had a really serious policy design process behind it. The point here isn't that I agree with every decision made, either political or substantive, in these bills. But you could really watch the way the prioritization process was working. And, you know, sometimes there was a backroom deal that came to a settlement. Sometimes it was, you know, arguments.

• 33:15Ezra Klein?

  But but there was a structure through which things got said yes to and things got said no to. And it took quite a lot of time to play out. And nothing has really looked like that to me in this Democratic Congress. I mean, the American Rescue Plan kind of had a similar flavor to the stimulus. So I think I'd put that a little bit to the side, though, obviously, there are Democratic economists, like, you know, Furman and Summers, who think it was much too big. But after that Build Back Better, which you did have quite a bit more time to figure out, had this same flavor of like, all right, everybody throw everything you can into the pot. And there wasn't even much debate over how the individual things were designed. I mean, you did some coverage on things like the paid family leave and the childcare sides of it,

• 33:58Ezra Klein?

  which I agreed with, that were just very strangely, to some degree, poorly designed. You know, CHIPS, which is a big deal, was a very weird design process that I don't think anybody actually understood. And so part of the prioritization question is like a top-down thing, right? You know, does Joe Biden come out and say, here's what I really care about? Could a voter give you an account of the three things Joe Biden thinks are the most important things? But there's also a genuine procedural question about why policymaking right now seems to be a little bit more like... I would also put this, by the way, on the democracy bills, which work this way, too. Just like, throw everything related to the topic or the topics in the Build Back Better system into this bucket.

• 34:41Ezra Klein?

  But nobody's really saying no to what goes into the bucket, which is just different than it has been at other times when I've covered these things.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's like two aspects to that, right? Like, one is, healthcare emerged, clearly, as Democrats' top priority for 2009, before 2009, right? Like, I was talking to a Democratic senator who... 2009 was his first year in the Senate, you know, and I was, I was trying to ask him as a reporter. I was like, how did healthcare become your top priority? Like, how was that communicated to you? Like, through what? How did they like make you prioritize this? But I guess I'm like not good at asking questions. And he, I think, thought I was asking a rhetorical question and threw it back at me. He was like, I don't know, I wasn't here. Like, how, how did they do that? And I was like, I don't know.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  But it definitely happened, right? And I think you and I were both in conversations with Nancy Pelosi, with Barack Obama in 2008, 2009, in which both of them expressed some diffidence, actually, like about that prioritization, just some ambivalence about it, you know? But it was the decision that was made and they were going with it, even if they maybe thought that climate and energy was more important than healthcare. And Max Baucus was laying groundwork for the approach that became the Affordable Care Act before the election, right? And it was already mapped out then that-

• 36:14Ezra Klein?

  I remember this event he threw that I covered-

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:17Ezra Klein?

  That is called the Prepare to Launch Event. And when it started, and Max Baucus is a very weird speaker. He's a former Senate Finance Chair. And he just, he made everybody watch like a video of the space shuttle launching, like as a metaphor, like, we're getting ready to launch. And like, when this happens, like, we're going to be ready to go. But it was a lot of work that went into that.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Right. And then, you know, somebody, a staffer for a progressive senator, who was also new in 2009, I remember was, was talking to me relatively early in the process. And she was like, she was very frustrated with Baucus and the moderates and where things were going. And she was like, do you think like, are we even going to be able to get a public option? And I was telling her, I was like, no, like, you're not, because this has all been orchestrated, like, long in advance, what's going on here. And I knew that. Whereas I'm like more knowledgeable and better sourced, I think, in 2021 than I was in 2009. But I had much less of a sense of what was going on. And I think that's because there wasn't like an answer to that question, right? Like, it was genuinely very improvisational.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  A part of that is, you know, a lot of people decided that Obama didn't throw enough long balls, right? That ultimately, the moderates in Congress are going to cut down whatever you propose. So it was foolish of him to have sort of come out of the gates so reasonably, and that he should have been like, we're doing single payer healthcare, and then let Baca's come back with with public options, something like that. And that's something that I think, like I had said in 2010, 2011, so I don't want to completely divorce myself from it. But that turned into the idea that you should just kind of like, do whatever, and like,

• 38:06Speaker 01

  just make it someone else's problem to decide what actually happens. And that is what happened, right? Like, the White House signed off on all kinds of stuff, and then ultimately, Joe Manchin decides what happens. But that's like, actually abdicating your power? Right? Like, in a weird way, to not engage constructively, and be like, here's what we're doing. The democracy bills, I think, was the, in some ways, like, the most egregious example of that, right? Where they had all these campaign finance reform provisions in there, that like, no one could explain exactly why they were in there, just, it was something that progressives

• 38:50Speaker 01

  had been really fired up about, like, 10 years ago. So it just kind of made it onto the list, and people put it there.

• 38:59Ezra Klein?

  I mean, the reason for that is that the the primary author in the House was Sarbanes, and Sarbanes is a longtime campaign finance guy.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, that's an explanation, but that's not a, like, a reason, right? I mean, a lot of people were left very worried about the state of American democracy by what happened in the 2020 election in the lame duck on January 6th. And public financing of House elections is just like, not what that is about at all, right? It's an idea that was completely out of left field. And then meanwhile, they went actually very soft on gerrymandering reform, because...

• 39:37Speaker 01

  A couple of Southern CBC members and the Congressional Black Caucus. Yeah, Congressional Black Caucus and the Massachusetts delegation did not want strong anti-gerrymandering rules because in particular in Massachusetts, strong anti-gerrymandering rules would make it go from nine seats that are safe for Democrats to probably nine seats that are all strongly blue-leaning, but not 100% safe. So gerrymandering is actually a really big deal in terms of democracy in a way that I think campaign finance isn't. And, you know, it was just a kind of a... I mean, it's tough, right? I mean, if key members don't want strong anti-gerrymandering provisions,

• 40:21Speaker 01

  like, maybe you can't get it done. But then you could just focus on something else. Like, I guess we're going to have this electoral count reform legislation may really happen in the lame duck, which could have been non-controversial. But it was just odd to have votes on this, like, total overhaul of the campaign finance system when that had nothing to do with what anyone was upset about. I think fortunately for everyone involved, barely anybody even remembers that that happened. But it's like a little bit embarrassing. Public financing also polls terribly. And in the current alignment, it would disadvantage Democrats. So it was like a particularly odd thing to sort of focus on. I mean, maybe just high-minded of John Sarbanes

• 41:04Speaker 01

  that he has this principled view that we need to have public financing. But it's weird, right? And there's been this kind of "lol, nothing matters" attitude, I think, that took over in a way that it wound up not being, maybe not being damaging because like none of these poorly-written bills passed anyway. But it just sort of makes you wonder, like, what was everybody doing for the four years that Donald Trump was president?

• 41:58Ezra Klein?

  A couple of minutes ago, you'd said something interesting that I want you to unspool, which is that you're trying to push people to do more thinking along the margin.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:06Ezra Klein?

  And that in, let's call it 2005, there was an almost absurd policy literalism, or 1998, and that now you think it's flipped to the other side. And this is something, I think, that's kind of come to define your work in the past couple of years. Tell me about, as you see it, the almost regime change in how Democrats think about elections, like the dominant political theory of how you win elections and brand yourself as a party.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. So, I mean, after 2012, Obama got reelected, and Republicans still controlled the House. And what Obama's team really wanted to do was pass an immigration reform bill. Republican, a lot of Republican elites sort of seemed open to that idea, which is part of what made it a reasonable thing for Obama to push for. You know what I mean? Like, there would be no point in pushing for a climate bill, because it wasn't going to happen. An immigration bill really might have happened.

• 43:02Ezra Klein?

  And Marco Rubio went on Sean Hannity's show, and the two of them agreed this was a good idea.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Right. So, a big part of, like, selling that immigration push was selling the idea that, you know, Republicans had really lost touch with the growing Latino electorate, and that this was really, really important. And I think a lot of things were said in the wake of that election that were not analytically true, but were well-intentioned. There was an overstatement of the centrality of the Latino vote to that outcome, and of the centrality of the immigration issue to the Latino vote. And, like, you look at a map, right? Like, people know that a surge of Hispanic turnout is, like, not why Obama

• 43:47Speaker 01

  won Wisconsin. I wrote an article, you know, in the wake of that election, being like... I don't know, guys, like Nevada, Colorado, like maybe, but like Obama would just, he won all these Midwestern states, right? But Obama did get a very strong performance from Hispanic voters, like that is true, right? So there was just like more focus on that fact than that fact sort of bore and analytical weight. And then if you talk to people who worked on the Obama campaign, you know, they say, look, our Latino messaging just did not involve that much immigration stuff. It involved some, but it was like a lot of healthcare and education.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  But in the wake of the election, there was a lot of discussion of the Latino vote and a lot of discussion of immigration's role in the Latino vote, because that was to back up a legislative agenda, right? I mean, they don't just run these campaigns like for their own amusement, like they're trying to pass bills. The bill wound up not passing, but this idea that Democrats were going to win by mobilizing the forces of demographic change and that they were going to mobilize those forces primarily by like emphasizing progressive ideas on identity and cultural issues, kind of like kept going forward.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  And if anything, like snowballing in the wake of the failure of what was really a legislative strategy, not an election-winning strategy. Because again, if you look at the campaign, it's not like they forgot that they had to win these Midwestern states, or that they couldn't count like how many Mexican-Americans live in Iowa, right? Like some, but like not that many. And they knew that, right? But it kind of rolled forward to the point where, you know, everybody starts making the case for their own ideas in these electoral terms. And so like, I mean, we know why environmentalists care about climate change, right?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Like it's because greenhouse gases lead to warmer temperatures on the planet and sea levels rise, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, Sierra Club and other groups start like putting out all this stuff about how like young voters are demanding action on climate change and it's like garner turnout. We need this like strong environmental agenda. And the evidentiary basis for that kind of claim was just always like really, really weak. But people got very dug in on mobilization, mobilization, mobilization as a kind of ethos, in part, you know, because they believed it, because certain demographic facts got read

• 46:36Speaker 01

  wrong, but I think in part because it just became like the coin of the realm. Like, this is how everyone was supposed to talk about their ideas, was like, how it's going to contribute to base turnout. And if you came to a meeting being like, I just think it's like a really good idea to do this, but kind of keep it quiet and, you know, do it under the table, people are like, no, you're so weird. Like, you're supposed to talk about how you're going to mobilize, mobilize the base. And we saw in 2016, and then we saw again in 2020, these extremely high turnout elections, which is like, nice from a civic, you know, standpoint. I mean, I guess it's like, good to see people participate, but it doesn't alter the partisan

• 47:17Speaker 01

  composition of the electorate in the kind of way that I think a progressive in 2010 would have told you it would, right? Like, people would have said, oh, if we get this surge in turnout, it's gonna, it's gonna push things way to the left. And that just, you know, turns out not to be true, which is fine in some ways, but it just means that a lot of stuff about demographics and turnout and mobilization, I think, has really not, you know, aged well as a, as a take or as an analysis. And a lot of old conventional wisdom about like, swing voters and boring stuff like that, I think, you know, is at least approximately true.

• 47:58Ezra Klein?

  So let me try to frame this slightly differently, or the version of it I've watched happen, which is, I think it's useful to keep in mind who it is politicians think they are trying to persuade and of what. I'd say when I got into politics, you know, I started covering professionally in the early 2000s, you know, I was paying attention in the 90s, Democrats in particular had a sense that what they truly believed was reviled by the electorate. You know, they had lost three times, Reagan, Reagan-Bush. Bill Clinton won, but he was this great compromiser who sort of won by repudiating parts of the Democratic, or at least a liberal agenda. And so-

• 48:42Ezra Klein?

  This sort of implicit question that dominated, it wasn't the only one people asked, but the people who asked this one seemed to be the ones who were in charge, was what would somebody who doesn't ideologically or culturally agree with us, but is open to us, think about this? Mm-hmm. Right? The somewhat mythical moderate. And I think that the implicit version of this that became stronger over time, which did reflect changes in the electorate. The Obama coalition doesn't exist in 1988. So the idea that you can run Barack Obama and that he will win and win really big. What's the famous number? Is that Obama and Dukakis got very similar shares of the white vote. In 2012, yes, in the white vote.

• 49:26Ezra Klein?

  I think that Obama slightly underperforms Dukakis in the white vote in 2012, if I'm not wrong. But he wins. And so the marginal voter, I think, becomes a younger, not that interested, but pretty liberal person. So it's like, are you trying to convince somebody who is interested but doesn't really agree with you versus somebody who is kind of uninterested and is mainly suspicious and cynical of you, who thinks you're just another bought and paid for politician who won't actually do what they want? And to me, in a bunch of different ways, and I want to talk about other things that happened at the same time, but that's like the main shift in the cognitive structure of the way the Democratic Party sees politics.

• 50:09Ezra Klein?

  And I think it's also worth noting that it is accompanied by a shift in the Republican cognitive structure that I'd honestly have somewhat more trouble articulating in a clear way because Donald Trump emerges in the Republican Party in such a burst of his own intuition, to put it lightly. So I don't think it's as clearly stated anywhere. But the Republican Party also shifts from, I think, having a little bit more of a sense of the wind at their backs, but also being somewhat more cautious, to being completely YOLO in their approach to politics. And because Donald Trump wins, even if he doesn't win with a popular vote, which Democrats typically can't do, there's a sense that he's proven something.

• 50:53Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I think this actually ends up affecting the way Democrats think, that if the Republicans can do this and not just get away with it, but be rewarded for it, and more people agree with Democrats in theory than agree with Trumpist Republicans. Then the question of can you win elections through mass mobilization begins to seem very relevant. And then I think the third thing is like, there is a not just a kernel, a reality, an analytical reality under this, which is ticket splitting goes way down. The number of floating voters goes down. It's not down to nothing, but the number of voters who shift parties, election to election, has gone down quite a bit over the years. And so there actually are fewer persuadable voters. I mean, that middle is shrinking. And so the sense is there are more voters you can pull off the sidelines,

• 51:36Ezra Klein?

  rather than more voters who can pull out of the middle. I think that's a lot of the shift.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  I want to put a pin in the ticket splitting thing because I, to me, there's like a big question as to have the ticket splitters gone away, or have the politicians stopped trying so hard to get them. But I think a lot of what you said is right. And I would also throw in there, I mean, not to like, make too much a deal out of one thing, but David Bruchman wrote this paper that I think we've both written about that wasn't sort of single handedly influential.

• 52:09Ezra Klein?

  A political scientist.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Political scientist. Part of what, what changed people's thinking was the discovery that self identified political moderates have a lot of immoderate opinions. I think a lot of people read that as saying that like, it doesn't matter what you say, or do in politics, or like, issues don't matter to anybody. I think like, the right way of reading that is just like, much more literally, that like, some widely held views are also just coded as extreme, in sort of conventional wisdomy circles. Right? So, at the time the

• 52:49Speaker 01

  paper comes out, no big time people in American politics were for marijuana legalization. But marijuana legalization polled perfectly well. So, something that's happened since it came out is, there's been all this legalization of marijuana. And it's been perfectly popular, right? And so the fact that like, a congressional reporter would have told you, like, that's a really marginal opinion. But a survey researcher would have told you, no, that's actually a very mainstream opinion. So that's like, an important fact, that is different from a kind of old fashioned, elite centric way of doing politics. So, Trump comes along, right? And

• 53:32Speaker 01

  The other thing that happens with Trump is that people have very strong reactions to him. And it's like, I know how strong their reactions are, so I just like, I want to be careful in what I'm saying. But Donald Trump's stated policy views are just not that extreme. The positions he took on immigration are pretty similar to the positions Mitt Romney took on immigration. The positions he took on economic policy are much more moderate than the ones Romney took in 2012. His wildest ideas, like we should completely ban Muslims

• 54:13Speaker 01

  from entering the country, like, all better than lots of more quote unquote mainstream sort of opinions. So in some sense, if you were to tell someone, okay, Republicans would nominate someone with more moderate opinions on Social Security and Medicare, but also he has a lot of scandals, and so he would like, do okay, but not great. You betcha, that's really boring. But like, we were all there. We all watched Donald Trump. Like, there was nothing boring about it. It was like, the craziest, like, most captivating thing that's ever happened in politics. So it was just really hard to kind of shrug that off as like, eh, this is kind of how we thought the world worked. Instead, you

• 54:54Speaker 01

  wanted to react like, oh, my God, this upends everything we know. But like, what did it really upend? You know, like, on some level? Because he didn't come out there and say, like, hey, we should privatize Social Security and get crowds cheering for him. What he did was, he was like, let's not do the most toxically unpopular stuff that the Republican Party used to stand for. Let's just kind of pound the table on status quo cultural politics. And it worked not that well, even.

• 55:27Ezra Klein?

  Let me give you a contrary view of this. Because I agree that people underestimate that Trump shifted the Republican Party's economic policy substance a little bit more centrist from where it was under, say, Paul Ryan. So I want to grant that point.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Well, what he said, I'm not sure about the substance.

• 55:47Ezra Klein?

  What he said, yes. I mean, but he was out there, he said he was going to raise taxes on people like himself. He said he was going to cover everybody with really great healthcare. I mean, there was something to that. But two things I think happened in 2016, which are really, really like blow up anybody's sense that they understand what is going on in American politics. What is Trump, who I think the thing that you're not giving enough sort of credence to, just in the way you frame that, is that what Trump did was excite people by breaking every basic rule of political behavior.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:22Ezra Klein?

  I think people thought you couldn't be that cruel and have folks stand by you, that you couldn't be that insulting, that you couldn't say some of the things he said, that you couldn't tell Ted Cruz that his wife was ugly and his dad probably helped kill JFK.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:37Ezra Klein?

  The question Donald Trump raised wasn't how could you be a major anti-immigrant politician in this country, but it was if you can act like that and survive it because you are exciting to the people who like you and then ultimately win, then what does that imply? And then on the other side is Bernie Sanders. And in some ways, I think Bernie Sanders and his run in 2016 is as or more important in seeing how sort of liberal thinking changes than Trump. Because, one, running as a socialist was supposed to be absolute poison in politics. You just couldn't do it, it would have been ridiculous 15 years before. Two...

• 57:18Ezra Klein?

  You have Hillary Clinton lose, so her brand to Donald Trump. So her brand of politics and the sort of politics around the kind of mainstream lane of the Democratic Party becomes somewhat discredited. You know, Bernie Sanders was exciting. He had huge rallies. People loved him. Now all the journalists are on Twitter and all the political professionals are on Twitter. And you can see on Twitter that the energy is all people with little red roses after their profile, right? It's all these sort of like Brooklyn socialists. And so something is happening where on the right, Donald Trump breaks a bunch of rules of political behavior and prospers for it. On the left, Bernie Sanders breaks a bunch of known rules of political behavior and prospers for it. I mean, when he announced his run, I think the conventional wisdom was, well, too bad for the left. Elizabeth Warren didn't get in the race.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 58:02Ezra Klein?

  Right? Instead, you've got this marginal figure who's going to get 7%. But no, he does really, really well. The center of the Democratic Party becomes somewhat discredited. And I mean, I remember this feeling very well. It's like, oh, maybe the boundaries aren't what anybody thought they were.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:20Ezra Klein?

  And Clinton, I think in particular, I think bears too much of the brunt of this. But I think there was a real sense that you couldn't win without enthusiasm.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  But that's what I mean, though. Like, I'm being deliberately obtuse about Trump because like I was there and I saw it and it was shocking and it changed everybody's thought. I'm just saying, like, if you weren't there, if you didn't know anything about the Trump campaign, other than, like, if you were reading about an obscure foreign country, you'd be like, yeah, okay, that's just like, it kind of makes sense, right? And as you say, it changed our view of what the limits were. But one inference that people drew from it is, oh, my God, there are no limits.

• 59:05Ezra Klein?

  Right.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Right? And I think that that is the wrong inference. It just, it turns out that certain norms of conduct are not as constraining as people might have thought before, that you can be really mean about your political adversaries and people will kind of shrug it off. And there's things that are a little bit nuanced, right? That like, you can be, if you're a Republican...

• 59:37Speaker 01

  You can be sort of negative on America's global role and people won't read that as like unpatriotic. They'll just read it as like, well, he's tough, right? Things like that. And there's like a lot I think we can learn from it. But there was a implication drawn that like if Trump can get away with making fun of John McCain's wartime service, then like, we can say we're going to abolish ICE. But like, those things don't follow from each other. And life is a learning process. Like, I've been on this journey as much as anybody else. Like, Trump was, in fact, quite surprising to people's expectations.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  And the Bernie thing, though, captured something that is very real, which is, before 2016, self identified liberals are not just a minority of America, they're a minority of Democrats. Right? So like, you could consolidate all the liberals and just lose, like, lose the primary. And that has changed. Like, the demographic bulk of the Democratic Party is more left wing than it used to be. And you now can win a Democratic Party primary, at least by saying, F all this moderation. Like, we should be like a European social democracy, right? Not this, oh, you know, Bill Clinton did a lot of like, really overt

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  triangulation. But Obama did a lot of like, light triangulation, right? Where he would be like, I'm not an ideologue. Like, I'm just a guy who looks at the facts. I'm interested in pragmatic solutions. And like, okay, 90% of my solutions are like, progressive stuff. But like, that's just, you know, the facts have a liberal bias. Like, that's who I am. Right? You can now win a Democratic primary by saying what Bernie Sanders said, which is, like, I've looked at it, and I think Denmark is a fundamentally more just society than the United States of America. We should have a wholesale transformation of our social and economic model to be like the economic model of a foreign country. And you're just like, you never before in American history, like, you wouldn't have

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  been able to get any lift off with that. Right? And the fact that you could now was really striking. And I think like, we both saw at Vox, like, in the early days of Bernie's campaign, how like, articles would just like, pop on the internet if somebody would be like, It would be better to be Scandinavia, you know, like 20 billion clicks. You're like, whoa, you know, okay. Because like, the fact that there was a different social model in the Nordic countries and that it was admirable in many ways was like, that was a known piece of information in the universe. But it didn't seem like there was much public interest in it. And then suddenly, there was a lot, right? And you could get people to come to your rallies. It was a whole thing. That's just very different. That's a different landscape from the one when we started our careers.

• 1:02:28Ezra Klein?

  Well, something else happens in this period that I think you touched on there, which is interesting, which is the signals of, and then capacity for those signals to amplify into real world outcomes of enthusiasm, become much more mirrored and much more clear. So how would you really know enthusiasm very early in a primary year, 25 years ago? And there actually aren't that many ways. I mean, okay, if the rallies are big, but they're just, you know, Iowa and New Hampshire for a couple of months, like, who really cares? But by the time you get past the Dean campaign, which I was an intern on, and I remember like the unbelievable rise of national small donor online fundraising. So you have that capacity.

• 1:03:11Ezra Klein?

  So enthusiasm that is diffuse, but is able to find a website can turn into money. And money really does matter in politics, particularly in primary campaigns. Then two, you have attention. The Bernie Sanders articles keep popping to the top of Reddit. Or you can feel on Twitter, because all the journalists on Twitter all the time, and you can feel that there's a lot more energy around Bernie Sanders, around Donald Trump than there is around some of these other candidates. That leads to, particularly now for media outlets that are competing with each other, that have analytics inside of them. You don't really know who read what in your newspaper 25 years ago, but you know exactly who reads what on your website. You know which quarter hour of your cable news show rates the best.

• 1:03:54Ezra Klein?

  You know, as a journalist or just a user of Twitter, which tweets of yours or around you are getting the most retweets. So all of a sudden, this capacity for ideas that are maybe not, I don't want to say broadly popular, because the ideas before weren't always broadly popular either, but mainstream within the political institutions. But ideas that rather than having that kind of support have intense minority or majority, but in this case, I think minority support online.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Well, there's no gatekeeping.

• 1:04:25Ezra Klein?

  They can really quickly, yeah, there's no gatekeeping, but there's also amplification. This is, I think, a really big difference. It isn't just that there is some kind of, you know, random poll happening here. The better something does, the better it does. The more Bernie Sanders gets to the top of Reddit, the more articles get written about Bernie Sanders from outlets that are trying to get to the top of Reddit. The more journalists notice that a really, really sharply worded tweet, you know, in this direction or that direction will get 25,000 retweets, the more of them you get. This can also become money over time. I mean, it becomes Donald Trump just owns attention in 2016. I do think that has a pretty big effect on changing political incentives, on sort of what people are actually hearing about.

• 1:05:10Ezra Klein?

  And then it also has a compositional effect. I mean, you mentioned here that liberals are slowly becoming a larger part of the Democratic Party, but there's also a conversion. I mean, when you're hearing constantly about how great Bernie Sanders is, that's going to create more, more people who might have been curious and open to Bernie Sanders-style ideas are going to learn about them and become socialists and would have back when Sanders would have had a harder time getting covered by the political system or by the media. And so I do think you end up in a structural shift towards ideas that have super diehard fanbases instead of ideas that are maybe good enough for, you know, as broad a swath of the electorate as you can possibly, you know, get to.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that that's right. I mean, especially of the internet of some years ago. I mean, I mean, the internet has like changed again since 2015.

• 1:06:03Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  And it's a, it's an, I mean, I say this, like, you probably know this better than me in the Bay Area, but like these tech guys are like incredibly upset all the time about left-wing figures in the media. And I always feel like, you did this. But like, old guys of journalism were not sitting around in 2014 saying like, it's amazing that This like weird left wing content is going viral all the time. Like that was the technology platforms altered the objective incentive structure of the media landscape. There've been like many iterations of further alteration. Like, I have no idea what would perform well on a TikTok. Podcasts have a completely different ideology and demand

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  structure from Facebook, social sharing. Google is weird, but there was this moment when politics stories could go very viral on Facebook in particular. And that really opened the door to not like more extreme in a like spatial view of ideology, but like much more. I mean, when we used to like help people with headlines, I don't know exactly how you would put it, but there's like a certain kind of emotional strenacy that was like really, really selling there. Right. Like a complete alignment of like fact, value and emotion all behind like, this is obviously right.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  And that lent itself to a certain style of politics that was really different from traditionally, you needed all these kind of elite validators, right? And that's like a different world. And old time politicians, media people, political actors, struggle to learn how to operate in a new media environment. And I don't think that that actually means that all of those old ideas are obsolete, but the ideas about like what to do, you know, in a mechanical sort of like tactical logistical sense, maybe were obsolete.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  And it's been a real kind of struggle, I think, for party establishments in both sides.

• 1:08:18Ezra Klein?

  Let me end on this question before we go to books. Let's say that there is polling bias this year, but it's a two-point bias towards Republicans. So Democrats wake up after the election and they have kept the House and they've kept the Senate.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:32Ezra Klein?

  Let's say it's basically what they have now, 50-50 and then a slim majority in the House. I'm doing some reporting on this, but my basic view is Democrats have no idea what they would do if they woke up in that situation. What do you think they should do if they wake up in that situation?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  So, one thing is that I think that would show that the voters are actually like more concerned about the sketchy authoritarianism of the Republican Party than they seem to be, which would be nice. I mean, that would be like validating, I think, for our society. And I think that that would suggest that Democrats should try to shore up those kind of institutional bases of the country. I mean, I've been talking about gerrymandering a number of times. Electoral Count Act reform is a sort of on the table, but we don't know if it's going to happen. Really kind of like digging in, I think, on telling people,

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  like, we are pulling out of this emergency situation. We are going to try to ensure that there are like free and fair elections on an ongoing basis going forward. We're going to act very boldly and decisively on those topics. And then we're going to like try to make inflation be lower. I think the risk would be, okay, we just want to like replay 2021 and wish away Joe Manchin and we're gonna pass all these bills that people have forgotten about entirely. Sorry, I should also, I should mention the abortion issue. We haven't talked a lot about Dobbs, but that was a big momentum shifter

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  because it's unusual when Democrats control Congress and the White House to have such a big sort of conservative policy win. If Democrats do really well, they obviously have to do something on abortion rights. But I think they should try to do something like set a national floor, guaranteed legality through 12 weeks, something like that, and then allow for some state-to-state variation.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  But not kind of like poke the bear of federal funding and some of the other things that are in the Women's Health Protection Act. Just because you don't, you want to try to minimize backlash. You want to try to get things done that will be sustainable and that people will like. And so I think I always urge caution.

• 1:11:02Ezra Klein?

  And then always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  So I recently read Cormac O'Grady's book, Famine: A Short History. That's like old and I bought when it first came out, but it's super fascinating. And I mean, it does what it says on the tin. It's a history of famines, which used to be a huge problem and have now become a not that huge problem, which is really good. Brad DeLong's book on, called Slouching Toward Utopia, which is a kind of a broad-based history of economic growth over the course of the long 20th century, is really, really good. I do want to recommend Rachel Aviv's book. It is called Strangers to Ourselves. A friend of mine recommended it to me and it has just like really blown my mind. It is a kind of a fresh perspective

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  on mental health that loyal as reclined listeners probably know all about, but I found it really, really enlightening. I think the hardest thing about books is like I always read books about topics I'm interested in, but then I like know so much about them already that I just get annoyed by the books. Whereas this was one that was like, yeah, like I'm expanding my mind. I'm becoming a stranger to myself as I learn about new things and it's great.

• 1:12:12Ezra Klein?

  Matt Iglesias, thank you very much.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:12:24Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Merzi Karma. Our researcher is Emma Pha Agawu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld, Sonia Herrera, and Isaac Jones, and audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lynn and Christina Semuluski.