What would it mean for the Democrats to not screw this up?

The Democrats won a landslide victory in the midterms. How could they actually wield power effectively during Trump’s final two years. Or: how could they Charlie Brown another football? We take our questions this week to Search Engine’s chief political correspondent Ezra Klein. 🚨 Become an Incognito Mode member! https://searchengine.supercast.com/#subscribe

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

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Hello, Search Engine Nation. It is Friday, November 6th, the week of what in America feels like a historic election, possibly the end of a 10-year chapter in our political life. And the thing nobody knows is the answer to the only question I can think about. What's next? While the future is fundamentally unknowable, human beings have developed one tool for trying to divine it, an ancient form of technology known as the emergency podcast. After a short break, a conversation we recorded just hours ago. I will press the glowing red button in the studio. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Raycon. Black Friday is right around the corner, and Raycon is making your decision effortless with up to half off sitewide.

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• 1:26PJ Vogt?

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• 1:36Speaker 01

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• 2:32PJ Vogt?

  Okay, ready?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35PJ Vogt?

  Here's something I've wondered and worried about a bit in the past few years. Is this the model for what politics in America is just going to be for my lifetime? The model goes like this. MAGA wins an election. Donald Trump behaves like he's been appointed dictator for life. Mass agents in the streets killing people. Golden monuments, Tim everywhere. We invade other countries at random. And then, American voters get angry and punish him. They put a Democrat in charge. And then Democrats hold power for 15 minutes before squandering it, either by pursuing unpopular ideas or by putting in uncharismatic political leaders, or sometimes both. And then Democrats get voted out. MAGA wins another victory. And we just do the same thing over and over again until the country really breaks. That's what America has sometimes felt like to me for this 10-year chapter,

• 3:20PJ Vogt?

  a country that just ping-pongs between one side, which is malevolent and scary, the other, which can be scolding and antisocial. And I didn't even think that would end with Trump necessarily. I thought Vance or somebody else like him would take the helm, and it would just go on like this. But this week, I don't feel so sure. Not just because of the midterms. It's also the rise of these new Democratic leaders, particularly Mumdani, who just seem able to talk charismatically about things voters actually care about. And then, yes, there was this week's enormous blue wave and the many different kinds of Democrats who won. And I just find myself wondering, wait, what are the politics of our country now? Are things going to be different? What would it mean for Democrats to not fuck this up?

• 4:04PJ Vogt?

  So I wanted to talk to my favorite politics podcaster, Ezra Klein, whose work helps me figure out the kinds of things I'm trying to figure out this Friday morning. Welcome.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Glad to be here. Chief political correspondent for Search Engine.

• 4:16PJ Vogt?

  It's a huge promotion for you. I guess I had assumed on election night, there was like, like a place that you go. And I don't know if I was picturing like, like a room with like lots of screens, like NASA, or just like a fancy place with lots of Democrats. Where did you begin election night this year, though?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  On my couch.

• 4:39PJ Vogt?

  With your phone?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  With my phone.

• 4:41PJ Vogt?

  How is that?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  So I have a particular approach to election day and election night, which is I try to not hook myself in until I can barely stand it anymore. Because it's a day when you have the most desire for knowledge, and there is the least to know. In fact, most of what you will learn on election day will mislead you. I will never forget, I'm scarred for life, by the release of the exit polls in 2004. I remember giving my friend at UCLA a giant hug because John Kerry was going to rout George W. Bush. And I've had that happen, I guess, as a professional now, many, many times. So on election day, I went to the gym. I went to the dentist.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  I took care of my kids. I was at home. And it was only when South Carolina began to move that I decided, I should go be around other people for this.

• 5:39PJ Vogt?

  This is going to be a big one. This is like, the next we're going to win tonight. And so that was the moment. Because I wanted to ask, like, what was the most surprising thing you felt that night? Was it watching, like?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  South Carolina shook. As soon as South Carolina began to shake. I mean, we had some early things coming in from Florida. But when the New York Times Needle began to swing its way, cutting back through years of built-up trauma in liberals, back in the other direction on South Carolina. Once things begin happening in the states you took for granted that they could not happen in, then you realize you're dealing with an election in which you can't predict the set of outcomes. And what is sort of beautiful about this election is I don't know anybody who predicted it. Not one person.

• 6:31PJ Vogt?

  And the beauty of finding that is not just like, the ideas that you support one, but the feeling that like, oh, this country might not be entirely predictable. Like, we might all be surprised about where we live.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  I want to be clear that if this was

• 6:44PJ Vogt?

  The other way?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  all the way the other way, I would not find it so beautiful.

• 6:46PJ Vogt?

  The beauty of the time.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I'm not just in here for high variance. But I think one of the tragedies of modern American politics is how much is taken for granted and how stuck in our perceptions of the country and political action and political boundaries we are. And when you get stuck, when you operate from the perspective that, you know, a Democrat can never win South Carolina, or Florida, or Mississippi. You know, the Republican can never win in California or New York. What happens is that the parties and the political professionals,

• 7:28Speaker 02

  with their affective knowingness, stop trying and stop being creative and stop acting as if you might be able to. Stop acting with agency.

• 7:42PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  And there's a term in political science, and you'll hear it. Donald Trump used it on election night 2024, a realignment. A realignment election comes from a 1950s political science paper, and it describes elections that have very, very high turnout, that have very surprising results, given existing political patterns, and whose results then persist over a period of time. And so, like, realigning elections are like the New Deal, where a bunch of constituencies moved over the Democrats and stayed there for a very long time. There was a lot of talk in 2024 of being a realignment election because it built on the surprising result in 2020, where Hispanic voters, Asian voters, some to be black voters, young voters, working-class voters had moved towards Trump. And so you were beginning to see this realignment theory

• 8:28Speaker 02

  about a multiracial, working-class Republican coalition.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  The 2026 midterm is a dealignment election. It is not, I don't know any Democrat who thinks, well, South Carolina

• 8:41PJ Vogt?

  Permanently blue.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Belongs to Democrats now, permanently blue. What it is, is first, the realignment melted away. The biggest swings in the electorate were Hispanic voters, young voters, Asian voters, all kinds of groups that Donald Trump had begun to really win. Now, how much of that is persuasion? How much of that is them staying home? A little bit unclear. We don't really have that data yet. But first, that new coalition not only didn't materialize, it went into hard reverse. But then the other thing is, because the swings were so big, the political map, like, melted from red and blue into just like, whatever happens if you combine red and blue, right? Like, Democrats didn't just win a Senate seat in Texas against a scandal-plagued adulterer.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  They won all of Texas, right? They won statewide. They won the governorship, right, against a completely normal gubernatorial candidate. They won House elections in Texas, Senate elections in Texas. Democrats won not just in Ohio with Sherrod Brown, who's a known quantity there, but Amy Acton routed Vivek Ramaswamy in the gubernatorial election. So you're seeing an election this week where, after it, the things people thought they knew about politics, about where particularly Democrats could compete, are not true. And that means going into the next election, and, you know, a lot is going to happen between now and then, which I think is an important thing to really talk about and keep in mind,

• 10:09Speaker 02

  that creates this strategic possibility to think in a way where you're asking yourself, what would it mean to wield power, to recruit candidates, to run campaigns? Such that Democrats won the next Senate seat in Kansas. Such that Democrats didn't just win the Secretary of State election in Indiana, which they did this week, they won the presidential in Indiana, which Barack Obama did in 2008, right? So it's not an impossible thing to imagine. What would it mean to use these two years with this incredible taste of winning power you didn't know you could win and didn't think you could win to build that power?

• 10:49PJ Vogt?

  But so what is, I mean, like, what confuses me is, I understood, I mean, I think I understood the country we were in 15 minutes ago, which is like, there's just places that are always going to be red and places that are always going to be blue, and there's a few places that are purple, and we just like, both of the parties just fight for those places. What does it mean in a world where, like, assuming that this is not just one really unusual election with one really unusually unpopular president, what does America look like in a world where nobody could take for granted that any state is anything? That like, that everything might suddenly be up for grabs?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  The world you're describing is the world of American politics for most of the existence of America. And the reason that was true, and this is sort of in part what my first book, Why We're Polarized, is about, the reason that was true was that the parties were less different from each other. You had conservative Democrats, you had liberal Republicans, there were times where you didn't have, you know, Democratic or Republican parties, at least in the way we do now. And it was totally normal for people to split their tickets and swing wildly, election from election. I am going to forget these numbers a little bit by memory, but what I'm telling you here is roughly right.

• 12:06PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  So these are numbers from a couple of elections ago, but I think it's in like the 50s, 60s, 70s. If you look at how much a state would swing presidential election to presidential election, it was something like 13-ish points. Huge swing.

• 12:21PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  By the kind of late Obama and Trump election eras, it was one to two points. So the likelihood that California was going to vote radically different one election to another had gotten very, very weak.

• 12:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  The, another political science term for this is calcification, right? They're frozen in place. That reflects in part the way media nationalized, people used to get very different information in different places. It reflects in part the way the parties have changed, but it also reflects in part what the parties have done. And so this is not just like a fact of political life. If the parties acted very differently, different outcomes would happen. Donald Trump himself is an example of this. He came into the Republican Party, he took it over, he gave it a very, very different face, whatever you think of that face, and it did alter the political map, it did alter the composition of the political coalitions. The strange thing about what happened with Donald Trump, the thing that doesn't even

• 13:19Speaker 02

  really have like a conceptual explanation for it, is Donald Trump heralds in this huge transformation because he so radically alters what the Republican Party stands for. And yet we remain this super narrowly divided electorate where like 2% of the vote in the swing states and the Rust Belt states decides functionally every election.

• 13:43PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Historically, this is really weird. Frances Lee is a political scientist who studies this, and she's written a whole book about this. And in, in American politics, it has traditionally been the case that you have a dominant party for decades and then a minority party in that period. So post-Civil War era, the Republican Party is dominant for a long time. Post-New Deal era, the Democratic Party is dominant for a long time. This period in American politics is competitive in terms of power swinging back and forth in a way no previous era has ever been. We have never seen power swing back and forth at the House, Senate, and presidential level as often as in the last 25 years.

• 14:22PJ Vogt?

  But, I mean, I know nobody can tell the future, but like, maybe it's over?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  I don't know. I wouldn't predict that. What I would say is, wouldn't it be interesting to try? And, and this is the thing, I think one of the things you're going to try to ask me here is what should the Democrats do?

• 14:40PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And here is, here is my answer to that. And this is, I actually think, what most of their voters ultimately really want from them. There are things that are going to have to do with the power they have been granted, and I'm, I'm thinking here nationally, not in the governorships, et cetera. You know, there's going to be a lot of accountability work to do, a lot of investigation, there's going to be a certain amount of actual legislating. But I think what the Democrats need to do, I think what the Democratic base wants them to do, is build power. Not win the 2026 midterm and then lose the 2028 presidential election or win it very, very narrowly, right?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  You can have a very big midterm result, 1994 for the Republicans, 2010 for the Republicans, and go on to lose the next presidential. You cannot draw a straight line from a midterm to a presidential. But you can also build power between 2006 for the Democrats leads to 08, and 08, they get a super majority in Barack Obama. So what they need to think about how to do is, they have power, and sometimes you have this metaphor in American politics, comes from George W. Bush, where he says after his reelection, "I've earned political capital and I intend to spend it." He does spend it. He tries to privatize Social Security, and it makes him hideously unpopular and in part leads to the 06 midterm.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  But I, I've been thinking about that line lately, because actually, what rich people do with capital is not spend it, they invest it, right? That's the point of capital. Capital, you invest it thoughtfully, and then you get all this extra capital, right? It begins to build for, for you. And the question for Democrats right now is not how to spend the power they got, it's how to invest the power they got.

• 16:31PJ Vogt?

  And what would, like, in your mind, what is the obvious kind of, because that, I was like, I was, I've been talking to friends this week, just like, normal people who follow the news, who are stunned by the size of what just happened, whose immediate thought is kind of like, how are the Democrats going to fuck this up? Like, what would squandering or spending in a like, there, there have been many times in the past where, whether it means like, I don't know, like, pursuing impeachment in a way that seems kind of unpopular, like, what would the fumble look like if you saw an immediate fumble?

• 17:02Speaker 02

  It would be Democrats listen to themselves and not to the voters. We so often think of politics as about talking, like, who's going to be a great Democratic candidate? You know, you were talking about Mamdani a second ago, a lot of excitement right now about John Osif. We're always like excited about how good people are talking.

• 17:17PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  But also, the people who are really good at talking have to first be really good at listening. That's not true always and for every one of them, and we like to imagine our leaders taking us to places we have not been and, and maybe we're not even ready to go. That is often what great leaders do. But also, great leaders are able to listen. And by the way, it's notable about Mamdani, that the video that begins his actual, like, rise into, you know, major politics right after the 2024 election, is a video where he goes around and talks to Trump voters and listens to what they are saying.

• 17:51PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Right? It's like, oh, they care about affordability, right? Mamdani did not run on Trump is an authoritarian. Mamdani ran on New York is too expensive for you. One of my kind of one-sentence summations of this election is that Donald Trump didn't listen to the country and Democrats did. And, I mean, Donald Trump didn't even listen to himself. He ran in 2024, he said he was going to bring down the price of groceries, he wasn't going to start any new wars, he's raised the price of functionally everything.

• 18:18PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  He started some insane new war, he has aligned his family's pockets, his things are getting more expensive for everybody else. He was hired to do a job by, by the people who made up the winning margin for him, which was not MAGA. And not only did he not do that job, he did the reverse of that job and bragged about it, you know, overhauling the ballroom and the reflecting pool, and meanwhile, you know, you can't afford gasoline. Democrats, meanwhile, the biggest failure the Democratic Party tends to make is it stops listening to the electorate and it instead listens to its own people, its own staff, its own groups, its own kind of hardcore base voters. And what they want is different than what the broad electorate wants.

• 19:03PJ Vogt?

  We're going to take a short break. If politics works better when politicians listen to voters, I think we can agree that podcasts work better when listeners listen to ads. But after those ads, what the broad electorate might actually want from Democrats?

• 19:40Speaker 03

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• 20:09PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. For the next two years, Democrats will have the House, they will have the Senate. Most states' governors will be Democrats, but the presidency still belongs to Donald Trump. In that world, I wanted to know, what does Democrats exercising their power even realistically look like? Particularly when what voters have been promised relentlessly is affordability. I asked Ezra about this.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  So first, to be blunt, Democrats cannot substantially lower the overall prices of everything from the House and the Senate in the next two years. That is not within their power set. There are bills they could pass that could be helpful. You know, there's like a big permitting reform bill that would make it easier to build all kinds of big energy, and this is going to split the Democratic Caucus in different ways because it would make it much easier to build clean energy, which is why a bunch of Democrats negotiated out this bill. Also make it easier to build dirty energy, right? Which is why a bunch of Democrats don't like the bill. The bill is, I think, on net better for climate, but you could argue it. The bill is definitely better for affordability. So there's going to be a question here of, well, which thing do Democrats actually prize?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Because the other thing is, you can put an affordability skin suit over all of your normal political opinions.

• 21:31PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  But actually, you don't care about affordability. You care about all of your other political opinions, and you just like, like talking about affordability. So there's going to be places where they have to make governing decisions about lowering prices. That's, I think, not going to be the core of it, though, because fundamentally, Donald Trump is not going to want to work with them that much. Donald Trump is not a bipartisan dealmaker. He never has been.

• 21:53PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  And the thing that is going to happen over the next two years is Donald Trump is still going to be president. Like, here's a question for you, PJ. What did Democrats do with power in 2007 and 2008?

• 22:06PJ Vogt?

  What did Democrats do with power in 2007, 2008?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  I asked you.

• 22:12PJ Vogt?

  I don't remember. Last couple of years before Obama, what were they doing?

• 22:18Speaker 02

  So until the financial crisis, when the economy bottoms out, nothing anybody remembers.

• 22:23PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  The thing is, the opposition party in Congress is not the one held responsible for the condition of the country.

• 22:31PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  And what is going to happen for the next two years is Donald Trump is going to go on tilt. I think people are making a bit of a conceptual mistake and thinking that there's going to be the straight line from the country here to the country in 2028. There isn't going to be. One, Donald Trump is an 80-year-old, decompensating, erratic, reckless person who is going to come under tremendous investigatory pressure, not just him, but his family and his administration, many of whom have been lining their pockets or seeking investment that when sunlight shines on it, people are not going to like it.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Like, how much money from the Gulf States did go into Jared Kushner's investment funds during this period? And what did the Gulf States want for that money? Are they just so impressed by the kind of investor Jared Kushner is? So it's going to be that. You have AI, which is, I mean, AI was a major part of this election, and it is reshaping everything in ways people don't like, kind of across the board. And Trump is extremely bought in on a "let her rip" AI strategy. But in the next two years, it is entirely possible you will see big loss-of-control incidents, entirely possible you will see more effects on the labor market, particularly for young workers, entirely possible we will have, you know, frightening geopolitical

• 24:01Speaker 02

  things happen. So I think the question of how AI shapes politics in this period is very open. Then there's AI and the economy. The economy is currently held aloft on a wave of capex spending and like Nvidia valuations. But if, for instance, you can't build data centers anymore, and then you get a bad loss-of-control incident, that could pop the stock market, lead to a pretty significant correction very, very quickly. So we could end up in a recession. We don't really understand. I don't buy anybody who says they fully understand the way this sort of circular private financing dealmaking is happening. So I don't think we're looking at a '08-style global financial crisis. You never really know what is connected to what in private credit markets.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  It is very possible things could pop, and they could get like, very, very, very shaky and very, very uncertain, and people could panic. You have the war in Ukraine, right? Russia's invasion of Ukraine. You have Israel and Gaza. You have China and Taiwan. You have the things we're not even thinking about. I mean, who thought when we were talking in 2018 that in 2020, the election would happen amidst lockdowns and face masks?

• 25:09PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  So we have like, a world that is just thrumming with risk right now. That is how I perceive it, thrumming with risk. And honestly, Trump got more or less lucky by mainly the bad things that happened during the first two years of his term. He just did them.

• 25:31PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, totally self-inflicted.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  What happens when he doesn't do them, and he has to respond? I mean, we watched this during the pandemic. He didn't respond well. So it's not even clear the 2020 election will be about affordability. It could be about some total other crisis, or a financial crisis, or it's all here.

• 25:49PJ Vogt?

  It's interesting, though. It's like, my imagination, and like, everybody I've been talking to this week, their imagination goes to like, well, what mistakes might the Democrats make? Or how might they do things well? The thing you are thinking about is more, Trump is still president for two years. The world feels like it is in a very uncertain wobble right now. He still has power. He's cornered. He's erratic. He never sort of behaves well under those circumstances, and he has very little incentive to care about how he leaves government after he leaves government. So your thinking is more like, you're still thinking about Trump as a source of instability, less than you're thinking about like, what? Like, he is still the person with the most power to change things for the worse.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And the person is going to be focused on. So Democrats have to do the job of an opposition party, and investigate, and legislate, and keep up pressure, and be disciplined. Honestly, I'm not that worried about them doing that in this period. You know, one reason Democrats won the shutdown is, they just remained disciplined, and Trump acted crazily during the shutdown, right? Under that pressure, he wasn't negotiating. He was releasing AI videos about Russ Vought as like, the Grim Reaper. He was acting like a complete lunatic, and he lost the shutdown. Because under pressure, he didn't respond in a way that made people sympathetic to him. So there's that. I've also just been thinking about the difference between the Democratic Party coming out of

• 27:17Speaker 02

  the 2026 midterm, and the Democratic Party coming out of the 2018 midterm, right? Both, you know, big midterms. I mean, this one was bigger, but 2018 was a gigantic victory. I think that Democratic Party was actually quite different, though. And the reason is that I think that Democratic Party still thought Trump was a fluke.

• 27:38PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  He was an aberration. He had won by accident. And that if you just mobilized, and you doubled down on who you were, and you got like, the whole country to see Trump the way you saw Trump.

• 27:50PJ Vogt?

  It would be over.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  It would be over, right? This thing that should have never happened would never happen again. I don't think Democrats have that delusion anymore. I think that they've seen Trump-like politics take off all over the world, right? It's not just here that we have this kind of thing. But also, Democrats won in 2018, they won in 2020, and then the way they wielded power...

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Alienated, disaffected people sufficiently. The Trumpism roared back stronger than ever, more popular than ever, with more allies than ever, like Elon Musk. Now, that had its own countereffect because Trump then had the actual power to run the administration he had always wanted to run. Instead of being constrained by Democrats, by Republican Party that wasn't entirely in his pocket, as he was in the first term, Trump was surrounded by yes-men and accelerants. He could do whatever he wanted, and he did, and people hate it. I don't think Democrats think, though, that all they need to do is double down on who they always were to win. There are maybe some people who think that, but I think they understand that if they're

• 29:01Speaker 02

  going to maintain popularity in Texas, where they now have a governor's mansion, they need to be a party that appeals to Texans who have not voted for Democrats for a very, very long time.

• 29:15PJ Vogt?

  What does that look like, though? Like, what is the version of a Democratic platform that people in Texas get excited about and stay excited about?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it'll be a mix of things, right? On the one hand, you're going to need real border security. Democrats really fucked up on the border in the Biden era. The sense that people don't care about order at the border, that that's simply like a racist Trump thing, it's just not true. Now, people also don't want cruelty within the country, right?

• 29:41PJ Vogt?

  As a person who's not an immigration expert, it always just sort of seems like what people want is, they want the way that people get in to be like basically fair, but if people are here, they do not want them like pulled apart from their children outside of school. Like, I'm sure the actual policy of how you have like a tight border and then like humane enforcement is hard, but it doesn't seem as complicated as our political system seems to make it.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  A simple cut to say is the Democratic Party is popular when it focuses on economics and not that popular when it moves into other areas. And I don't like the economic-cultural language, because I don't think, say, immigration is a cultural issue, or at least not just a cultural issue, but it's basically true. You know, the way that Keanu Hossa ran in Texas was downplaying a lot of traditional other fights, right? She would say, for instance, you know, "I might be pro-choice, but I'm not going to focus on abortion because abortion divides us. I'm going to focus on what we agree on," which is, you know, data centers not being owned by Elon Musk, you know, making your groceries cheaper. The Democratic Party, the dangers for it are there are things that its own base is

• 30:49Speaker 02

  very, very excited about, like, say, spending two years on impeachment, which, you know, Trump could do something where that becomes popular in the country, but the country did not elect Democrats to impeach Donald Trump, even if impeaching Donald Trump would be sort of satisfying. The country elected Democrats to make things cheaper, and so they need to be focused. And then when they wield power, this is like the harder part, when they wield power, if they win in 2028, then they actually have to deliver that, right? And not just that, they need to be caught trying to deliver that. I actually think the public is pretty forgiving of politicians not achieving everything they said they would, so long as they really think you're trying.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  So Obama wins in 2012, not because the economy is great in 2012. The economy is not great in 2012, but the public believed that Obama was trying, that he had been handed a bad hand, and he was doing maybe not a perfect job with it, but a good job with their interests in mind, and it was worth giving him more time to keep doing the work. And, you know, Mondani here is, say, not governing really as a hardcore democratic socialist from the New York mayoralty, like, we are not, you know, socializing the means of production in New York. Mondani is constantly out there in front of people, getting caught trying to make government work better on their behalf.

• 32:11PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  You can just endlessly see him out there working for you and not getting distracted on a bunch of other issues, right? Not kind of all over the place on everything. And that kind of focus, like, listening to what people want from you and trying to deliver it, and trying to keep the place where you and them agree at the forefront of American politics is really important. That can be hard to do because there are issues you may not all agree on that are important. The fact that, you know, climate change is a more controversial issue and particularly big action on climate change is not, you know, necessarily a winning platform in every state. It doesn't mean that greenhouse gas science isn't real.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  So you have situations where you're dealing with something where maybe the public doesn't feel the problem yet, or they're not where you are on it yet, and you might still have to try to act on it. But day in, day out, they have to feel that you hear them, and they also have to feel that you like them. I mean, this, again, you know, there's this other side of building power, which is candidate recruitment and political campaign design, and Democrats did a really good job, you know, with people like Adam Hamilton in Kansas and James Talarico in Texas and some of these other candidates, you know, Josh Turek and Rob Sand in Iowa, nominating people who seemed like they were really of their places and seemed like they really liked their neighbors. Like, the biggest problem Democrats have politically is not even what they believe,

• 33:40Speaker 02

  it is a sense that Democrats kind of look down on you.

• 33:42PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  And the Democratic Party needs to make its face people who the public sees as different than that.

• 33:51PJ Vogt?

  What happened that they seemed to figure that out this time? Like, what happened behind the scenes where all of a sudden you had, rather than a bunch of candidates from different places saying the exact same things in the exact same way, which is what it felt like a few years ago? It did feel like this year, there was just like a slate of people that felt ideologically somewhat different. Like, it felt like something had shifted in the giant factory where Democratic candidates are constructed.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Parties respond to defeat. To go back to what we were talking about at the beginning, like, what might make this midterm different? Parties respond to defeat, and they respond to victory. They don't always respond well to either.

• 34:30PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  You know, you can get defeated and radicalize even further, right? That's the Republican Party after the 2020 election. You can get defeated and rethink everything. You can win and you can wildly overreach, right? You've won enough power now to make yourself unpopular again.

• 34:46PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Or you can win and you can, you know, use that power very carefully, very thoughtfully, very wisely. And I think basically what happens in 2018 and 2020, and it's not the only thing that happens, but particularly in 2020, Democrats, helped very much along by social media and by the sort of counter-radicalization to President Trump, they just went into a mode of overreach. They were driven sort of mad by, like, "This can't be our country. Like, we have to stop this from happening." And I do think algorithmically, there was like a big thing happening where they were like trapped in a Twitter echo chamber.

• 35:24PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  I continue to think Elon Musk buying Twitter is functionally a good thing for the Democratic Party.

• 35:28PJ Vogt?

  Because he becomes, he deranges himself, and the right deranges itself, where it's like, they become convinced that what America really wants is like anti-Indian racism and things.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Right. The right deranges itself on Twitter, and the left is fractured across too many competing social media platforms to believe any one of them is representative. Nobody's like, "You know what really represents the American public? Blue sky."

• 35:50PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Like, that's got its, like, finger on the pulse of Oklahoma. So nobody believes that, which is good. It's fine to have a place to talk to your co-partisans. There's nothing wrong with that. Just don't mistake anything being said there for reality, right? Or at least for the representativeness. So there's that. Um, there's also just the reality that there was a massive global inflation spike during Biden's term, and Joe Biden was 80 than 81 and rapidly losing his ability to communicate.

• 36:19PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  You know, if you imagine that same election and that same presidency, but you put in a younger, more communicatively capable president, and there's not a historic rise in prices, it probably all looks pretty different.

• 36:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  So, I mean, you also, there's a, look, if Democrats take power in 2029 and the economy bottoms out, that's going to be a big problem.

• 36:43PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  So the reality has its say in all this, too.

• 36:46PJ Vogt?

  What about, like, how do you balance, like, I feel like the last time Democrats had power, there was this feeling of like, "Oh, what we need is accountability," but what that ended up looking like was impeachment, and what that felt to a lot of voters like was just like score settling and distraction. On the other hand, this is an election where people really do care about corruption. The corruption has metastasized. Like, how do you strike a balance between there needs to be accountability and you're telling voters, "We care about gas prices, not about getting another mugshot of Donald Trump"?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  I think on the accountability side, because gas prices out is going to be different, but they are elected to contain Donald Trump. That's true. Investigations and rules. So they're going to need to do a lot of investigations, and I do think people want to know who is paying for what in the Trump administration and around the Trump family, and what are they getting for that money?

• 37:38PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  I think following that money, and you can listen to somebody like John Ossoff, that kind of investigatory work connects, actually, to they're getting rich and you're getting poor.

• 37:51PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Right? They're making billions of dollars over here, and you can't afford your rent. So there actually is a way to connect those into one super-conductive political message. Ossoff's capacity to do that is why he's vaulted to the front of the 2020 prediction markets. So there's that. There's also rules, right? So they should be passing bills through the House and the Senate, that then they are forcing Donald Trump to have a sign or veto that say, "End stock trading by members of Congress."

• 38:22PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  That impose incredibly intense rules on the president and the people in the administration about what is happening with their money and what their families can and can't do, right? There's like a million ways you can actually legislate, like, tight rules on ethics, and I can tell you for a fact, that is where Democrats are beginning to start. You could do a lot on money and politics, certainly on bills about money and politics. Should we have Elon Musk, or for that matter, on the left, Michael Bloomberg, who put in a lot less money than Musk, but still, I think it was $80 million at the end of the election? I don't want this situation where America's richest people can warp the reality of an election by pumping in enough money. Now, that money didn't do much in this election because I actually think Musk made himself such an issue that it was counterproductive.

• 39:08PJ Vogt?

  Because people in Texas didn't want to feel like he was buying the election.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  But it is still the case that we do not want our elections so oriented around

• 39:18Speaker 02

  This set of people who can donate between 40 and $400 million because the amount of time they're getting and the ways the parties try to serve them in advance to either neutralize a threat or win over the funder is corrosive to democracy.

• 39:31PJ Vogt?

  So your thing would be make rules that are almost impossible to argue with unless you're arguing for corruption and then either the rules get passed, which is good, or Trump has to take a positive stance towards corruption, which will be unpopular.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Yes. Sometimes these are called messaging bills. I was talking to somebody in the House. He's like, you know, like, we're trying to create conflict. Conflict is what gets attention. And you do bills to, you know, maybe Trump does sign them, right? Sometimes he just capitulates right on, say, the Epstein files. But you are doing bills to make clear what the two sides believe.

• 40:08PJ Vogt?

  What are the conversations you're having with Democrats in leadership right now? Like, when I talk to just the people I know, they're like, this is exciting and new, and I hope they don't fuck it up. When you talk to the politicians that are like, this is exciting and new, and we hope we don't fuck it up?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were not ready for how much power they were going to win. I don't mean that negatively, that like, they're sitting there quaking in their boots. They're thrilled.

• 40:28PJ Vogt?

  But they, like everybody else, were like, probably the Democrats win. They did not see the size of them.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, they thought probably Talarico wins in Texas and probably Gina Hinojosa doesn't, right? You know, which is like what the polls said, what the prediction market said. They, all of them have been burnt by all the wrong polls we've all been burnt by.

• 40:49PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  And so they don't go into elections thinking, the polls are going to be off by three or four points in our favor.

• 40:54PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  That is not the psychology of the Democratic Party. So they are adjusting, right? They still don't know how many seats they have. They, right now, it looks to me like Democrats are going to win Alaska and Mississippi. So there'll be 56 in the Senate. That was, that was, it is really worth saying that eight months ago, Democrats were not expected to take the Senate, except in an extreme scenario. They were not expected to get to 51, except in extremists. Now they're going to be at 56. That is shocking. It is shocking. It looks like they'll end a few seats shy of 260 in the House. That is the largest

• 41:32Speaker 02

  House majority in like, half a century. They didn't plan for that. Now, I'm not sure how different planning for that actually is, because, again, Donald Trump is still president, and these are not veto-proof majorities. But they're waking up to a different world. And the thing that it also makes possible is, well, if you have 56 Senate seats now, and Donald Trump fucks things up further in the next two years, is it really so impossible? You get 60? And if you have 60, then you have a filibuster-proof majority, or separately a majority that could pretty easily get rid of the filibuster or carve out new exceptions

• 42:14Speaker 02

  to it, then you could do a lot more. So, again, I think like, the, the key thing here is power building. It's not, what do you do with the power now? It's how do you build on all this power so you get more power in 2029? And you can actually dramatically expand Medicare, dramatically expand pre-K. You can actually regulate AI. You could end gerrymandering. You could pass campaign finance reform. You could do all these things you've not been able to do because you didn't have the unity and you didn't have the power. So, the exciting thing, I think, for them is not, what can you do in the next two years? That is the

• 42:53Speaker 02

  necessary thing. But if you do the necessary thing well, Democrats don't get into office because they're excited about being the opposition party to Donald Trump. They get into office because they want people to have healthcare. They get into office because they want people to have clean energy. They get into office because they want people to have childcare, and a good school, and clean water. So what happens if you can actually do that?

• 43:26PJ Vogt?

  Ezra Klein. He's the host of the very excellent Ezra Klein Show. And he brought us answers to our question this week. How the Democrats might not fuck up this political opportunity by listening to voters, by trying to keep the focus on the issues where the party's trusted, like the economy and cost of living, and not on the issues where it's not. And, he says, rather than Democrats just spending their political capital, they should try to accrue more of it. So that in two years, the Democratic Party might deliver more to voters than just a block against MAGA. Although, as of November 2026, it seems that that is also something American voters have emphatically asked for.

• 44:13PJ Vogt?

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• 45:16PJ Vogt?

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• 47:27PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pennamineni, who is also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Shuck. If you have a question you'd like our show to answer, please shoot us a line at [email protected]. That is also the place to email us if you are interested in advertising on Search Engine. Just use the subject line, "advertising." If you're a listener who would like to hear a version of this show without any ads at all, you can sign up for incognito mode. That's

• 48:10PJ Vogt?

  our paid feed. You also get bonus episodes, access to our weird online and sometimes in-person experiments, and you're first in line for tickets to our live events. And, and, you get discounts on merch. You can find a link to subscribe in our show notes, or just go to searchengine.show. Your contributions there are what make this show possible. Another way you can help out, if you'd like, is to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, or follow us on Spotify. Thank you, as always, for listening. We'll see you next week.

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