Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Your Questions on Open Conventions, a Gaza Schism and Biden’s Chances About this episode We received thousands of questions in response to last week’s audio essay arguing that Democrats should consider choosing a candidate at August’s D. N. C. convention. Among them: Is there any chance Joe Biden would actually step down? Would an open convention be undemocratic? Is there another candidate who can bridge the progressive and moderate divide in the party? Doesn’t polling show other candidates losing to Donald Trump by even larger margins? Would a convention process leave Democrats enough time to mount a real general election campaign?
In this conversation, I’m joined by our senior editor Claire Gordon to answer these questions and many more.
Mentioned:
“Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” by Ezra Klein
“Here’s How an Open Democratic Convention Would Work” with Elaine Kamarck on The Ezra Klein Show
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23 Ezra Klein? So last week, I did an audio essay arguing that Joe Biden, right now, does not seem up for the campaign he is going to after run. He is behind in the polls. He is skipping things like Super Bowl interviews, having trouble in press conferences, and that if things don't change, this is not going to go well. And that there is another option for Democrats, that Biden could step aside, and Democrats could do what parties have done many times before and go to a convention. Then we had Elaine Kamarck on the show to talk about how a convention would work. And this is something I said we would also do in this little series, which is take questions on it. And we got a lot of them. We got thousands of responses to the initial audio essay. Our great senior editor, Claire Gordon, has joined me here to sort of be the audience representative and make sure I'm actually
1:06 Ezra Klein? answering questions. So let's jump into it. Where do we begin?
1:09 Claire Gordon? Yeah, Ezra, you threw a bit of a grenade into the world, and now it is time to take a little bit of fire. And our first question is from MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes.
1:19 Speaker 02 I think a lot of people share this acute sense of Biden's campaigning ability, like his candidate quality, to be significantly diminished, even if they think he's not diminished in the actual office. But my big question about all of these scenarios, and there's been many about Biden not, you know, being the nominee, is it seems like there's one person who gets to decide if Joe Biden is going to run for president again, and that's Joe Biden. And I can't imagine a scenario in which he decides that, absent some, you know, medical situation that happens. So I just, I can't get past that first step. So I'm just curious what you, how you think about it.
1:55 Ezra Klein? Oh, thank you, Chris. So one way to say what I'm saying in that audio essay is I'm making a prediction about the campaign. I am saying that if you look at where Joe Biden is now, he is losing. He's losing in the polls, and typically Donald Trump overperforms his polling. So that's a pretty dangerous place for Biden to be. And his early speeches are not looking great to me. His performance in press conferences has been frankly disastrous. He skipped the Super Bowl interview. I am not seeing a kind of energy and aggression in that campaign that makes it look to me like Biden's can be able to close the gap. So that's my concern. One thing that could happen is I could just be proven completely wrong.
2:35 Ezra Klein? Maybe Biden shakes off the campaigning cobwebs, gets out there, gives a fiery State of the Union, gives really strong speeches, gives more interviews, gives strong pressers, maybe climbs a bit in the polls, the paid media advertising campaign begins to look really good, and I come to look really alarmist. My audio essay looks ridiculous. Joe Biden wins by five and everybody says I'm an idiot. And like, that would be totally fine. That would be a great outcome to this. But it could go the other way, too. Over the next three or four months, Joe Biden could look worse. He could freeze out on the campaign trail in a significant way or have some moment that reads to people like really profound confusion. He could be, in an effort to keep that from happening, kept in even more of a bubble by
3:20 Ezra Klein? his staff, the State of the Union could go poorly or just be very low energy or something. He could give interviews that go badly, right? Could sit for some things and it just goes disastrously. And he could be slipping in the polls, right? He could be down, you know, when I look at the polling averages right now, I see him down by one to two points. If he's down by three to four in May, late May, that's going to look really scary to Democrats. And then, of course, there's the things he cannot control. He could have a serious health event. That's a possibility, too. So if any of that happens, there's going to be more pressure from inside the party, more pressure even from the people directly around him for him not to run. Absolutely none of what I am saying here. Forget animus for Biden. I like the guy.
4:04 Ezra Klein? I think he's a deeply honorable person. I think he has done a great job. I think he's been committed to this work for his entire adult life. I think highly of him. And I think that if he or the people who he trusts and loves around him are looking at this in May or June, and it looks like they are going to lose, I would like to believe he will listen to them. I think there is some chance he could come to the view himself. To me, in all this, what is important is that Democrats feel they have this other option, if they need it. In four months, if Joe Biden looks great, they don't need to think about this ever again. But if in four months, Joe Biden is looking bad, if
4:48 Ezra Klein? it is looking like he is going to lose to Donald Trump, going to create a second Trump presidency with everything we know about that guy, well, then I think it's really important Democrats don't lapse into a kind of white-knuckled fatalism, believing that it's Biden or nothing, and all they can do is like, stay on this train that seems like it is derailing. That's why I want people thinking about how a convention would look and feel right now. Running Joe Biden is a risk. A convention is a risk. These risks come with upside potential and downside potential. And, you know, life is an endless process of risk management. Like, I would like to tell you, I would like to tell myself,
5:31 Ezra Klein? there is some way to not have to play the probabilities here, to bet on this with house money and be assured of a win. But nobody has that, right? I wish. Like, it would be nice. I would like to not worry about this election at all. I don't particularly like, I don't like covering elections. I find them too stressful. You know, but Joe Biden's not at 56. If he were, we wouldn't be having this conversation. He's at, you know, 38, 39 in favorability and a couple of points behind Donald Trump in the polls. And so people need to be thinking about what happens if that continues to deteriorate.
6:02 Claire Gordon? So you don't think it necessarily makes sense for Biden to drop out now, but a month from now, two months from now, it's a wait and see?
6:11 Ezra Klein? I wouldn't say makes sense. Like Chris, I don't think he will drop out now. I don't think the situation is dire enough. I don't think the people around him are going to come to him and make that argument. But that's going to be the thing that is playing out over the next four months. If things look worse four months from now than they do now, there's going to be real panic. I was looking at the 538 page for presidential approval ratings. And if you scroll down that page, they compare the current president, Joe Biden, in this case, with other presidents at this point in their terms. Obama's favorability was way higher than Biden's. It was almost 10 points higher. Donald Trump's favorability was higher than Joe Biden's at this point, and Donald Trump lost the election. You could just like go right down the list. I mean, Bill Clinton
6:53 Ezra Klein? way above Joe Biden right now. Jimmy Carter was above Joe Biden right now. So Biden is polling at a place it should have people worried. Approval ratings aren't everything, but if they don't start turning around, and he is behind Donald Trump, I mean, remember, in every election in which we have seen him run, Donald Trump has outperformed his polling. He was quite a lot behind Hillary Clinton, quite a lot behind Joe Biden, at least in key states, and he did better than that in every election we have seen him in. So a situation where Biden is actually behind Donald Trump. I mean, I assume the Democratic Party really does not want Donald Trump to win. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if they see him on a path to winning, I have to assume, you know, things are going to change in their minds, and again, potentially in Joe Biden's himself.
7:38 Claire Gordon? So we did like an episode a couple of months ago about how the polls this far out don't matter. And you're saying that at a certain point, they start mattering.
7:46 Ezra Klein? Yeah, we're no longer at the point where polls are completely non predictive.
7:49 Claire Gordon? All right, on to our next question. And we have lots of questions coming up about the strategic risks of a convention and the relative strengths of different candidates. But this one is partly about strategy, but also about the principle of the thing.
8:06 Speaker 03 Hi, Yara. Long time listener, first time caller. I couldn't help but think, you know, isn't this, as in like choosing a new presidential candidate at the convention, is that a little bit undemocratic? Which is like the Democratic Party's whole thing right now with like...
8:27 Speaker 03 We have to save democracy.
8:29 Ezra Klein? I think it's a great question, and let me answer it on two levels. So one is the very specific level right now, which is the scenario I'm describing, the only scenario of a convention I can imagine, is one in which Joe Biden himself drops out. If Biden gives a sorrowful but determined speech in June, saying that he's come to the conclusion that it doesn't serve the country for him to run again, that's not going to be Democratic elders making some weird move. There's going to be a convention process because there will have to be a convention process. And I think people will get that, right? They will have seen Joe Biden make this decision that led to the convention. So that is a specific answer, but I also want to give a general one, which is that I don't really buy the convention is less democratic than a primary.
9:14 Ezra Klein? Take this primary. If you look at polling throughout it, most Democrats say they did not want Biden to run again. They did not want that in 2022. They did not want that in 2023. There was a CNN poll back in September. There's been all this talk of like, the media has made Joe Biden's age into an issue recently, but this is September. This is not when it was getting a ton of coverage. Two thirds of Democratic-leaning voters said they did not want Joe Biden running again. But the party pressure was such that no major Democrat challenged him. You had Dean Phillips, who is a Minnesota congressman with no national profile, and his challenge is, I think, a move of a lot of political courage, but that's not the person Democrats were looking to elect. You have Marion Williamson. But the primary was not Democratic. People were not given a lot of options.
9:58 Ezra Klein? The party very tightly structured who is going to be in the field. And so even though Democrats were saying, in poll after poll after poll, we would like options, we are not comfortable with this campaign, they weren't given any of those options. This is something that I ended up talking about a little bit with Elaine Kamarck on the show a few days ago, which is conventions are representative democracy.
10:21 Ezra Klein? And primaries are direct democracy. And both have a problem, right? Representative democracy, when you're turning things over to the representatives, well, you might have chosen such and such governor or such and such senator, but maybe they're not doing a good job representing you, right? Maybe your representative has diverged from your interests, your values, whatever. But the problem with primaries is that very few people vote. This is always a problem with direct democracy. Direct democracy is often non-representative because you have 5%, 7%, 11%, 19% of the electorate coming out. And that part of the electorate is not a normal part of the electorate, right? The people who are choosing to vote in primaries are very highly informed, very highly ideological comparatively.
11:03 Ezra Klein? They're mobilized through certain kinds of organizations in a different way. A lot of Americans are independents and they functionally have no choice over who the two parties run in many, many, many states, even though how they vote ends up deciding who wins. So whatever we have right now, I would not call it highly small d democratic. I'll also say the primaries, to me, often don't end up making the most strategic decisions. And, you know, just look over the Republican side. It is still my view that no matter how badly DeSantis did in the campaign, he would have been a stronger general election candidate for the Republicans than Donald Trump is. If I were betting money on a DeSantis Biden matchup versus a Trump Biden matchup, to me, Trump Biden remains something close to even odds.
11:47 Ezra Klein? Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less on that for Joe Biden, depending on the day. I think DeSantis would win and I think Nikki Haley would win. So primaries, again, they're weird. The people voting in them are weird. It's not that many people. And they are voting based on things that are not strategic. In theory, at least, conventions are making more strategic decisions and taking in a broader range of information, but probably are not as good at judging charisma and enthusiasm. So, I mean, you can take your pick of which of those you like, but I've just never bought this idea that the primaries are really democratic.
12:47 Claire Gordon? So this next question was emailed in from Jeremy G. And he wrote that he believes an underappreciated achievement of President Biden has been his ability to bridge the differences between moderate liberal and progressive Democrats and maintain a modicum of unity in the midst of Republican disunity. And you spoke to this in the beginning of your audio essay. Do you have concerns that a contested convention would just turn into open warfare between the moderates and the progressives that could end up weakening turnout among the faction that loses?
13:21 Ezra Klein? I very much agree. This has been an underappreciated strength of Joe Biden going back to 2020. Right? It's something, as you say, that I talked about in that first piece. I don't think it is his strength now. So I guess something I would say is I'm not more or less worried about that now at a convention than in a Biden runs again scenario. And the primary reason is that there's a tremendous amount of disillusionment with Biden on the left now because of Gaza. So the thing that Biden has done so well to bridge gaps, he's not being able to do. One interesting thread of reaction I saw to the piece, which I did not expect, was a bunch of people saying that this is great because they don't want to vote for Biden on Gaza, and so maybe there's a possibility of another candidate.
14:06 Ezra Klein? I think it's possible to imagine tickets emerging that would be able to bridge Gaza in a different way than he now can because the ticket would not be have been responsible for early American policy on it. But even putting that aside, what's holding the Democratic Party together right now isn't Joe Biden, it's Donald Trump. I suspect a Democratic convention would be very focused on the dangers Trump poses, very focused on the plan for beating him.
14:32 Ezra Klein? And that's also, of course, the Biden campaign's plan for managing the disagreements inside the Democratic Party and the lack of enthusiasm for Biden himself, right? The Biden team's theory of this whole thing is counter mobilization, that Donald Trump is going to be out there, he's going to be getting a lot more press coverage, and in doing that, he's going to mobilize the Democratic base, kind of heal any schisms, get over the disillusionment. I do think it's important to say that any choice Democrats make here is a choice of risk. With Biden right now, the risk to me does not feel like it is controllable. You can't stop him from having these senior moments on the trail, except by keeping him off the trail. With a convention, the risk is of a type that Democrats can make strategic decisions about. They can balance a ticket with a moderate and progressive, they can think hard about
15:17 Ezra Klein? the states the ticket comes from, they can use the platform and the policy agenda to smooth out disagreements. That's like how conventions have worked since time immemorial. And then, and I do think this is important to my thinking here, the risk to the upside seems higher to me in a convention. I don't think Biden has that much likelihood of really changing how people feel about him this year, at least not unless he proves himself to be a different kind of campaigner than we're currently seeing. But a sufficiently exciting ticket might be able to mobilize Democrats through enthusiasm for new leadership, not just opposition to Trump. So you might be able to combine more mobilization and counter mobilization. But I don't want to wave away the question here. Yes, like there are schisms in the Democratic Party right now. The big one is Gaza.
15:59 Ezra Klein? I see that as a very big problem for Biden, but it could just be a problem for Democrats no matter what. In any of the scenarios you might imagine, they're going to have to find a way to, say, not lose Michigan, because Arab-American voters are furious at the Biden administration and at Democrats. And then there's the obvious way, this could go badly, the one I hear a lot of people worrying about, is that the delegates don't choose Kamala Harris, who is the obvious candidate, who has experience from 2020, is Joe Biden's VP, and that creates a schism with black voters, or just creates an ugly convention while that process plays itself out. I've heard some people say things like it would be unprecedented not to have the VP become the nominee. And I do think that's a funny thing to say right now because we
16:43 Ezra Klein? just saw that happen in 2016. Joe Biden was Barack Obama's vice president. He was discouraged by people around Obama from running again. They wanted to pass it on to Hillary Clinton, who they thought was not just a more historic candidate, but they also thought was a stronger candidate. Within the administration, she was more respected. That does lead to some, even now, ill will between the Biden and the Obama camps, particularly the people in strategic positions in them. But it's not always the case that the VP is the one who gets the next nod. But in this particular case, I think people are worried about whether or not that would go badly. And I think it very much could go badly, depending on how it played out.
17:24 Claire Gordon? So you just brought up Kamala Harris. So let's go to our Kamala Harris question. This was another voicemail.
17:31 Speaker 04 Hello, Ezra. My name is Matt, and I'm calling from Brooklyn, New York. My question for you is in regards to your recent essay about Joe Biden's age, and particularly pertaining to Vice President Harris. I'm curious as to what you think the people find so displeasing about her, given her approval rating is lower than Biden, even though in private settings, she is viewed in a warm and attractive light. So yeah, I'm just curious on what your thoughts are on that. Thank you.
18:08 Ezra Klein? Yeah, so this is tricky territory. Let me say a couple of things here. Try to put your head back in 2020, when she gets chosen for vice president. There is not an immediate reaction among the commentariat, among politicos, among Democrats of like, what a crazy decision by Joe Biden. That is not how the Harris vice presidency is greeted.
18:35 Ezra Klein? Then, over the next couple of years, something happens and Harris's vice presidency is widely considered to be a kind of failure, or at least not going well. But if you try to look for what happened, you're not going to find a whole lot. It isn't like she gave some disastrous speech, like she screwed up some huge job they gave her. Like, anything happened in public that you can point to? There were a number of stories in newspapers and Politico and places like that, that there was a lot of staff turnover, that her office was a kind of unhappy place in which to work, that things weren't kind of running that well over there. In polling, she was consistently polling a little bit worse than Joe Biden, which freaked people out.
19:20 Ezra Klein? I also think something happened here where the kind of politics that was very strong in 2020 that Harris represented in the sort of post George Floyd moment, in a moment when the sort of backlash to what gets called now wokeness was not quite so strong, began to feel less like it was like the future of the Democratic Party and more like a faction within the Democratic Party. That Harris is not a politician like Joe Biden in the way that, say, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore, he chose like another kind of moderate Southern Democrat. She's a politician representing Joe Biden's recognition at that time, that he was maybe the end of something and he was going to pass on the torch of the party to somebody representing a new strain of its politics.
20:04 Ezra Klein? But that strain of politics either weakened or people believed it weakened or maybe not that Harris was going to be the standard bearer for it. But to me, this is all pretty thin. It's all pretty thin. If you ask me, not like what Washington thinks of her, but what I think of her, I think Harris is much more talented than people give her credit for. I think she has something that I've seen with many politicians who are, to just be blunt about this, women or Black where people will say, or I will tell you, that in private, she's enormously warm and charismatic and funny and compelling and then much more cautious and it seems very scripted on the stage. And I think- That's a very unfair way that candidates from different backgrounds get pushed to the side.
20:48 Ezra Klein? Right? Yeah, if you're Joe Biden, if you're Donald Trump, you're allowed to kind of go out and say any old thing. And you seem authentic, you know, you seem at home. But like, there's something people always said about Hillary Clinton, too. And it was true about Hillary Clinton, that she was amazing in small settings and not that good on the stump. But there was a reason for that, right? There was a reason that Clinton had learned to be cautious. There's a reason Harris has learned to be cautious. And so when you ask, what is it that people find displeasing? I think candidates like Harris are caught in a bind between not showing too much of themselves in a world that has not always been open to them as full people. But then they get to a certain level and it's like, well, why do you seem so held back? Why do you seem so controlled and contained?
21:33 Ezra Klein? I have my own views on Harris, right? I'm a Californian. I think Harris was a very strong candidate in California, right? She became Attorney General, she became a Senator, she ran for President. She was neither, I think, a like a generationally talented campaigner at any of those levels, but nor was she a bad campaigner at any of them. She didn't do a crappy job in the Senate campaign, did not do a bad job running for Attorney General, did not do a bad job running in 2020, in my view. Again, did not win in 2020, dropped out early. But she was a little bit trapped in between the moderate and progressive lanes. She was like to Joe Biden's left, but to Bernie Sanders's right. She didn't have that much name recognition. It was going to be a hard campaign. And I think the problem for Harris is that her politics are very rooted in California.
22:17 Ezra Klein? And so I think the kind of voter she is comfortable winning over and comfortable tuning a message to is a left of center Californian voter. Doesn't mean a very liberal voter. I mean, when she was running for Attorney General, she ran as a sort of more moderate, smart on crime Democrat. And there are people who are more moderate in the party. Matt Iglesias at the News, that was so boring, has made this argument a number of times, who think actually that older politics would make a lot of sense for her now, that like Harris should sort of reemerge as like a tough on crime, smart on crime, more moderate, kind of prosecutor like. But in 2020, she kind of abandoned all that. If people remember, there was this kind of internet meme that, you know, Kamala Harris is a cop, because being in any way associated with law enforcement was really bad politics that year.
23:01 Ezra Klein? May not be such bad politics now. But Harris's politics have a kind of very Californian root to them. And so the question of how does she win over voters in Pennsylvania, in Michigan? How good is she at winning over voters with a very different context? Who are much more moderate? That is where, when I kind of hear her give her speeches and tune her message and think about politics, I get more worried about her. That I think she doesn't always hold a kind of voter who is unlike the ones that she has traditionally known how to win very well in her head. Whereas Joe Biden, who comes from Delaware, who has roots in Pennsylvania, he was very well tuned to winning over those voters. The reason people get excited about Whitmer and Shapiro and so on is that they're worried
23:44 Ezra Klein? about Democrats winning in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Georgia and Arizona. And so candidates who have demonstrated a facility with voters in those states have a kind of strategic advantage. And that isn't something Harris has had to do or has done before. But again, I've said this now for a long time. I always thought she was going to have a very good 2024. That I thought the bar had now been set so low for her, there was going to be almost trivial for her to clear it. And that she's a better speech giver, a better debater, better on offense than a lot of politicians are, and that a lot of opinions were going to turn around on her in 2024. And I still basically believe that.
24:25 Ezra Klein? I don't know if Harris is the right candidate for the Democratic Party, but I don't think that the drop in esteem for her is based on anything all that real.
24:37 Claire Gordon? All right, our next question packs a lot in.
24:41 Speaker 05 Hey Ezra, Jon Favreau here. First time, long time. I appreciate your piece and share a lot of your concerns, as do most voters, including most Democrats. I think the challenge is, we just don't know and really can't ever know if nominating Biden is riskier than letting Democratic activists and insiders pick a lesser known and potentially weaker general election candidate at the convention in Chicago with just three months to go. There hasn't been much polling on how other Democrats might fare against Trump. But from what we've seen, people like Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, pull similar or worse than Biden against Trump. Now, some of that might just be because fewer voters are familiar with them, which would
25:24 Speaker 05 obviously change if one of them became the nominee. But if you're Biden, you have to be thinking that a decision to step aside also comes with a real risk that the party will nominate someone who loses to Trump. And my sense is that's a big reason he's unlikely to do.
25:38 Ezra Klein? Thanks, Sean, for being such a good friend of the pod. So let me try to actually make the strongest version of this argument against what I'm saying. There's a recent poll that had Biden losing to Trump 45 to 44. It had Harris losing to Trump 46 to 43. It had Gavin Newsom losing to Trump 46 to 36, and had Gretchen Whitmer losing to Trump 45 to 33. So if you're just taking that poll at face value, it isn't just that Newsom or Whitmer would do worse than Biden or Harris, but they would get destroyed compared to Biden or Harris. And bluntly, I just don't buy this at all. I think polls like this are just pure name recognition at this juncture, because most
26:22 Ezra Klein? Americans have no idea who Gretchen Whitmer is. If you're listening to this show, you are a weird politics junkie. You have a level of political information and you're willing to give a level of your time to politics that virtually no one is willing to do. If you are listening to this show and you don't live in Michigan, how many Gretchen Whitmer speeches have you actually seen? Like, how much do you actually know about her? I guess for most people, the answer is zero Gretchen Whitmer speeches. Most people have seen maybe one at the 2020 Democratic Convention. I think if you want to look at more usable data, you want to look where you have name recognition between the candidates. So if you look at polling in Michigan, where both Joe Biden and Gretchen Whitmer are well-known, Whitmer is running ahead of Biden against Trump by quite a lot.
27:07 Ezra Klein? So there's a January poll from the Glenn Garif Group, which found Biden losing to Trump by eight in Michigan, but Whitmer beating Trump by four. I've seen other polling from Pennsylvania that says Josh Shapiro is much more popular in Pennsylvania than Joe Biden is. So you can ask, will that generalize? I think there's a good chance that it will. But to me, this all comes down to upside and downside risk. My worry with Biden is I think he has more downside risk than upside risk at this point. It's likelier that something goes really wrong, that crystallizes people's fears about him being president for four more years, than something goes really right, that boosts his support sharply. But look, I would like to be wrong about this. I would like to see the next three or four months play out where things go really right
27:51 Ezra Klein? and Biden seems like a political juggernaut or just like a quite strong incumbent candidate. And then everybody can make fun of me for these pieces down the road. But if that doesn't happen with these other candidates, and I do think this goes for Harris too, she's just functionally polling like Biden, but I think they all have more upside risk. People might be really excited about some of the possible tickets that could emerge here. They might be really excited about the people they would see at the convention and the speeches and so on. And so if people got to know them, I mean, if they were, any candidate chosen at the convention is going to rocket to functionally 100% name ID. And when it does that, the polling is going to look very different.
28:30 Claire Gordon? This was from David, who was worried that Democrats would end up picking a candidate who seems great, but then they have skeletons in their closet that come out on the campaign.
28:41 Ezra Klein? So I think this depends a bit on what kind of lead up we've had to the convention. So if Biden steps aside in late May or June, you then have months of scrutiny on the possible candidates. A lot of CNN and MSNBC town halls, a kind of multi-month vetting process in the mass media. So I'd be less worried about the skeletons in the closet question. And also, just to be honest, I have trouble believing any candidate is going to compare poorly with what is stuffed in the Mar-a-Lago closets. So that doesn't really feel to me like such a worrying matchup. But particularly in the scenario where there's not much time to vet the candidates, I think you can imagine a candidate who looks good on paper, like a Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro, proving unable to bring it under the full force of a presidential campaign.
29:23 Ezra Klein? We know that Shapiro and Whitmer have performed really well in, say, Pennsylvania and Michigan, respectively.
29:30 Ezra Klein? But there is something about presidential campaigns that is different. Something about the debates, something about just like the level of scrutiny and intensity. And that can prove to be a problem. This might make you think that what you actually want is a candidate who proved pretty strong as a campaigner in 2020. I think Amy Klobuchar is somebody who has consistently overperformed in Minnesota, which is a state very much like Wisconsin, very much like some of these other Midwestern states that Democrats need to win in. And she did a good job on the campaign trail in 2020. And so I think Amy Klobuchar is like, you should understand her's a real political talent. Again, this goes back to my, I just don't think primaries are the be all and end all. They have weird dynamics. They have big name ID dynamics.
30:13 Ezra Klein? And so people who were able to break out and be serious candidates and campaign without making huge mistakes, that's the kind of thing I'm looking for, that we don't know yet about a Whitmer, about a Shapiro, about really anybody who hasn't run at the presidential level. I do think that there is a preference for new faces when people kind of imagine these scenarios, but experience under the presidential level should not be taken for granted.
31:02 Claire Gordon? So we did a whole episode about how the Democrats have been losing the white working class. And I think part of Biden's strength was that he was able to stem those losses in the last election. Because of Biden, because of who he is, do you think that that's a huge risk here?
31:21 Ezra Klein? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't put this primarily on the white working class. You have to win the most votes in the states Democrats need to take the Electoral College. And there are different ways you could put that together. What Biden really did was not improve a lot among the white working class. He improved among college educated whites, which turned out to work and was enough. But this is why I think there's a lot of interest in candidates who are winning the states Democrats need to win in. Again, this is why people mention, why I mentioned Shapiro, why I mentioned Whitmer, why I mentioned people like Raphael Warnock, why I think, you know, you should think very hard about candidates from states where, you know, Democrats need a majority. I don't particularly care how that majority gets put together.
32:06 Ezra Klein? Whether that majority is put together with more young voters, because you get a lot of young voter turnout, whether it's a more multi-ethnic coalition, whether it's, you know, different states have different dynamics. And you can imagine a candidate who's going to be really good at putting together a coalition in Georgia, in Arizona, but maybe not quite as good in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. Michigan, again, because of the Arab-American vote there, and Michigan has been close, is going to be a tricky place for Democrats right now. This is really the kind of thing you would imagine being debated at a convention. When the delegates get together in a room and they've heard the speeches in public and they've seen the interviews the candidates are giving on TV and they've had the candidates
32:48 Ezra Klein? come and give their presentations and they've had the candidates, deputies and campaign managers and, you know, liaisons come and make the case to them, they're going to sit there and say, if you're the Pennsylvania delegation, well, who do I think can really win Pennsylvania? If you're the Michigan delegation, who do I really think can win Michigan? And in theory, the Michigan delegation knows a lot about winning Michigan. They have a sense of who the voters in Michigan are. And so this would be the thing that all these candidates would be out there trying to persuade people of, right? That they have a pathway, that they have a way of seeing the electorate that is going to appeal to these particular states.
33:30 Claire Gordon? So the convention picks a ticket and this next question is about what happens next. This is from Evan.
33:40 Speaker 06 Hey, this is Evan calling from Maryland. Um, I wanted to thank you for your most recent episode because it's a question that I'm sure for myself and for a lot of voters is really exciting, but also really scary. And I think one of those sources of fear to take this leap of faith for a new Democratic candidate is, okay, let's say that we elect someone to run the party in August. We only have three months to go through the process. And I'm just wondering if that's enough time to run a national campaign, especially for
34:19 Speaker 06 some of these newer generation politicians, um, like Wes Moore, who I love, but I'm just worried is three months enough time. Thanks so much.
34:31 Ezra Klein? So I'm not very worried about this for a bunch of different reasons. One reason is that in most countries, like that is how long elections are, or it is longer than elections are. We just have very long elections in America, and it is not clear to me at all the candidates benefit from that long period of time out in the public eye. This is, by the way, particularly true for the current two candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who have both been in the public eye for a long time now and are both extremely unpopular. So I'm not too worried about that. The other dimension is that, think about the, the reasons people vote. So the first and strongest motivator on the Democratic side this year is going to be anti-Trump sentiment. So most Democrats are coming out to vote against Donald Trump, no matter what else
35:16 Ezra Klein? is going on. That is what is going to get Democrats to a pretty high level in the vote. And frankly, if you listen to a lot of the strategists on the Democratic side, they're really saying that is what is going to get the Democrats to victory. I just have not heard anybody make the case to me, the Democrats are coming out for Joe Biden, or frankly, for Democrats in general, that you're creating this anti-MAGA majority, and as long as you've got MAGA on the other side of the ticket, you're going to win. If Republicans had chosen Nikki Haley, Democrats would have had to come up with another strategy. And I think they would have very quickly found out they don't actually have another strategy and they might have ended up in in real trouble here. And then you would have a tremendous burst of almost an overwhelming amount of focus and press and energy and attention on the election.
36:01 Ezra Klein? People don't need that long to get to know somebody, to get excited about them, to see them. In fact, I think three months, even three months, would end up feeling like quite a long time. So you have this incredibly dramatic, unexpected, unprecedented, within the last 50 years, convention on the Democratic side. Everybody's watching it. The press is covering it all the time. The press had been covering the run up to it, you know, all the time. And then it's September and you have all of September where just like wall to wall coverage of this thing and all of October into November, when you have the actual election. That's actually, to me, quite a lot of time. This isn't 1978. It's pretty quick to cut an ad. You could just like, at this point, wander over to GPT four and be like, what do you
36:45 Ezra Klein? think a good ad for Wes Moore would be? And they'll give it to you in a second, basically. And so I'm just not concerned about this. I'm actually, I am more concerned about the amount of time this campaign is going to stretch on for both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, given the way they're both campaigning, than what it would mean to have a sprint campaign for like an exciting new ticket coming out of a convention.
37:10 Claire Gordon? What about ground game for a candidate that say just doesn't have a lot of friends in Michigan and Wisconsin because they haven't been campaigning for a year?
37:19 Ezra Klein? That's what a political party is for. That is what the party is supposed to be doing. There's elections happening in every single one of these states. There's campaign offices happening in every one of these states. I mean, the Biden campaign is still funding things. That money is usable, right? I don't imagine they would close everything down. And this is also what Trump did in 2016. Like, Trump had functionally no campaign mechanics happening in 2016. He was running this very strange insurgent campaign, and it was the RNC that took care of the ground game. Trump did not have a highly organized, disciplined operation. One reason he's going to be potentially a stronger candidate in 2024 is he does have a much more professional campaign happening around him
37:59 Ezra Klein? that is like opening offices in the right places and hiring field organizers. But that is something the party is supposed to be doing all across the country and has been doing, right? A reason that Democrats have done well in Michigan is that the Michigan Democratic Party has done an extraordinary job organizing in Michigan, and that infrastructure is all being built for 2024. The reason they're doing well in Wisconsin is an extraordinary amount of energy has gone into building infrastructure in Wisconsin, and that has all been being built with the attention on 2024. And like, you can go state by state. The things that have won Georgia for Democrats in recent years have not gone away. They're all there. So, yeah, this is just not a part of it that worries me all that much.
38:44 Ezra Klein? And then the final thing I would just say is that ground game is great. What you need is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm against Donald Trump, enthusiasm for a ticket. But more than anything else, the thing you want, the thing a ground game needs to have, is an enthusiastic voter pool. And so, like, the first and most important thing is your product. Not how you market your product, not how you distribute your product. The first and most important thing is that people want your product. And so, I don't want to say everything takes care of itself if the product is good, but a lot more can be taken care of if the product is good.
39:21 Claire Gordon? So this question is more about the upside of a convention and the kind of ticket that could come out of it. And it's another voicemail.
39:31 Speaker 07 Hi, my name is Neve. I'm calling from New York. And I, like many voters on the left, have been really checked out of Biden's presidency. Haven't really been excited about any political candidates since Bernie Sanders. So I haven't really considered any, anything to do with politics being appealing to me. So I'm just wondering, in this potential world where Biden steps aside, if you could talk a little bit about some of the political features that you could imagine coming from candidates on the left? And how, how some of them might be able to appeal to voters like me,
40:12 Speaker 07 who have been really disillusioned by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party at large, especially since their position on Israel-Palestine? Okay, thank you. Bye.
40:26 Ezra Klein? The honest answer is I don't know to this. I suspect that a convention would be trying to choose a very highly strategic ticket, more than a highly ideological ticket. And so it'd be very focused on people who they thought could win, you know, the kind of five key states. But I do think they would care about enthusiasm. And I do think, depending on how things go, there's going to be a lot of concern about Gaza and the ruptures in the Democratic Party over this. And so the possibility of a new ticket allows them to have someone or some set of candidates who doesn't have to defend and doesn't have to be yoked to every moment of the Biden administration's support for Netanyahu.
41:10 Ezra Klein? Right now, I mean, this is where all this started, right? Biden comes back at that press conference to give an answer saying that he thinks Netanyahu's invasion now is over the top. And that's when he makes the CC as president of Mexico flub. But what was really happening in that question is Biden trying to sort of shift the energy and the orientation of his administration, right? He says, "As you all know, I think." Right? I'm not sure most people did know that. But the thing that even is there rhetorically beginning to move a little bit on this? They are not yet substantively moving on this. The America just vetoed another UN resolution calling for a ceasefire.
41:51 Ezra Klein? We have put forward our own more compromised resolution, saying there should be a humanitarian pause, like a temporary ceasefire, also calling for the return of hostages, saying the ceasefire should happen as soon as is practicable, like who decides what is practicable? I, at this point, believe that the Biden administration's position on this is not really defensible anymore. Netanyahu is not listening to them. They are not supporting Israel, they are supporting him. And Netanyahu has been very clear that virtually all the things Joe Biden thinks about Israel and Palestine, Netanyahu does not think. Netanyahu does not think Palestinians should be running Gaza after all this is over.
42:35 Ezra Klein? Netanyahu does not think the Israeli military should be acting with a lot more restraint than it currently is. Netanyahu does not think that we should be on a path to a two-state solution. And Netanyahu has been extremely clear about all of this. And the consequences he has faced for it, at least publicly from Joe Biden, are none. There's really interesting reporting recently that Richard Haas, who's a, just until a year or two ago, was president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is now president emeritus. He is like the center of the foreign policy establishment in the United States, right? Like, the most establishment figure you can imagine. He's been really trying to say to the Biden administration and going out and lobbying them, like, you have to shift policy here.
43:16 Ezra Klein? And he's been saying that Biden specifically should go give a speech at the Knesset, the sort of Israeli legislature, arguing, going over Netanyahu's head, by the way, as Netanyahu has done here before, coming, going over Barack Obama's head and giving a speech to Congress, calling for another pathway. So far, this has not apparently been met with any take-up from the Biden administration. But Haas, I think, is right, that Biden would need to do something, at this point, fairly spectacular to change people's views about where he is. Kind of criticizing Netanyahu a little bit on the margins, but not actually shifting the substance of American policy is not going to do it. So either Biden has to do something really big. Or in this kind of convention scenario,
44:01 Ezra Klein? you might get a ticket that just doesn't have his baggage, a ticket that is younger, that was not backing Netanyahu out of the hilt, kind of like all the way through this, and could just have a different policy and would just have more credibility on having a different policy. The only other thing I will say on this, though, is that, again, we're speaking in February. This is August. It might all look worse in August, right? That is a possibility, too. And I take very seriously the depth of the anger towards the Biden administration on this issue. I think early on, I was pretty skeptical this would be a voting issue for people. But I think for, you know, if you are on social media and you've been plugged into this in the last couple of months, I think the depth of disillusionment with Joe Biden is very hard to convey. And I don't think it's going to go away,
44:45 Ezra Klein? at least not easily, at least not with some kind of major change. So, you know, you could imagine someone else being able to put the party in a different place here. But where the whole situation will be by then is so unknowable to me now that I'm cautious about making any predictions about the role it will or won't play at a convention.
45:04 Claire Gordon? What do you think is the best argument against your argument for a convention?
45:08 Ezra Klein? Look, I think the best argument against my argument is that you think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are a strong ticket. And one of the things that has, I don't know if I want to say it surprised me or it's freaked me out, but is, for all the brickbats I've gotten on this, I've not seen one email, not seen one reply on social media, not one voicemail to my knowledge. Maybe I missed something. I definitely could have, making this argument. The Democratic Party is just constantly sending me emails telling me Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, that he is an existential threat to the country.
45:51 Ezra Klein? And I believe them. I think that's true. I think Donald Trump existential is a strong word, but I think Trump is very, very dangerous. And the primary strategic decision Democrats have to make in terms of beating him is their ticket. That is the main point of leverage they have over this election. Every campaign decision downstream from that is less important than that crucial decision. So if you think Biden and Harris are a strong ticket, or they show themselves in the coming months to be a strong ticket, fantastic. That is your, in general incumbents are very strong. Most incumbents get reelected. In general, you don't want to switch horses midstream, right?
46:36 Ezra Klein? Doing something that is risky and unusual and that people have not done for a long time carries a lot of risk. And so the best argument against it is that the ticket Democrats have is strong, is likely to win, and there's no need to change it. And if that's what you believe, great. You know, my argument right now is that that is not what I am starting to believe. Now, I could just be wrong. I have changed my view on this from where I was six months ago. But maybe they're just off to a slow start. Maybe over the next three or four or five months, everything kicks into gear and their paid advertising campaign is excellent and we begin to see the movement that one would want to see.
47:17 Ezra Klein? But if you don't see that, I mean, I guess a challenge I would offer to a lot of people is to like say in your own mind, what would you need to see? What would be the evidence to you that the ticket was weak? And that if Democrats want to beat Trump, they should change it? I think that the question that a lot of people, particularly in the Democratic Party and at its high level, should be asking is what is your red line? Imagine yourself in May. When you're talking about May-June, polling is pretty predictive. We tend to have a pretty good idea what's going on in an election by May or June. So what would you need to see in May or June to feel comfortable?
47:59 Ezra Klein? And what would you need to see in May or June to feel like, no, we're on the wrong path here? A journalist friend of mine said to me recently, in response to my piece, that his read on the Democrats was that they would prefer to lose in a way that is comfortable for them than to win in a way that is uncomfortable for them. That if Joe Biden is renominated and he loses, nobody's really going to be blamed for that but Joe Biden. I think that might be wrong, and there might actually ultimately be a lot of backlash to the Democratic establishment for running a candidate who a lot of Democrats are like, this seems like not a great idea, but whatever. That is a safe way to lose.
48:41 Ezra Klein? By contrast, if you come out against a ticket and the ticket maintains, then you have put yourself crosswise with the Biden administration. If you come out for a convention and the convention fails, reputationally, then you're in real trouble. You put your head out, and Democrats did this thing, and it went badly, and how dare you? If only they had stuck with Biden, it all would have been fine. It's very easy to see, from a perspective of people's individual incentives, how it would make more sense to stick with the Biden-Harris ticket, even if you don't think the Biden-Harris ticket is going to win. But I think what I am trying to say is that that is an abdication of duty.
49:22 Ezra Klein? That is an abdication of what a party is supposed to do, and it is much more so an abdication of what a party is supposed to do when the party believes the other candidate is as dangerous as they believe Donald Trump is. It's not Mitt Romney here. It's not George H.W. Bush. If you think Donald Trump is going to win, you have to do something about it. Otherwise, you've kind of just been lying to people and lying to yourself. So look, if you get to May-June, and you think Donald Trump is going to lose, Biden's now up by three, people are focusing in on Donald Trump, they like what they see with Biden, they don't like what they see with Trump, fantastic. Write all this off. But if you get to May-June, and Biden is down by three...
50:08 Ezra Klein? And Trump seems stronger. And Biden's not performing well on the campaign trail. And you don't think he's going to win. And you don't really understand what this turnaround is supposed to be. Well, then you have to ask yourself, what are you here for? What is your job in this? What are you going to feel good about, having done or not done, on the other side of the election? Thank you, Claire, for sitting in on this with me. Thank you to everybody who's listened to the piece and sent in these questions. I'm sorry we couldn't get to more of them. As always, our email on the show is [email protected] .
50:41 Ezra Klein? We can't always answer everything, but we do try to read everything. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Afim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Semuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rosestrasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrera.
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