Platner’s Top Campaign Strategist on What Went Wrong

Morris Katz helped orchestrate Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory and Graham Platner’s ultimately disastrous run for Senate. It’s quite a résumé for a political consultant who is still in his 20s. Platner’s implosion could prove particularly costly for Democrats. It may mean the difference between winning and losing a Senate majority. But before the rape accusation that ended his campaign, Platner had come out of nowhere to beat Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, who was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate. The lessons to take from that campaign remain angrily contested. Katz, a senior adviser to Platner, has been central to many of the most attention-grabbing, populist campaigns in recent years: Besides Mamdani’s New York mayoral upset, he worked on John Fetterman’s 2022 Senate campaign and Dan Osborn’s 2024 independent Senate run in Nebraska. He has figured something out about this political moment. Along the way, he has become a controversial figure himself. So what has he gotten right? And what has he learned from what he’s gotten wrong?

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

• 0:00Ezra Klein?

  Before we begin today's show, we're going to be doing an Ask Me Anything episode quite soon. So if you have any questions, email us at [email protected] with the headline AMA.

• 0:36Ezra Klein?

  The Democratic Party is in a tense moment right now, and the implosion of Graham Platner's Senate campaign in Maine has become a focal point for those tensions.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Democrat Graham Platner said he is dropping out of his state Senate race. It follows allegations of rape and physical abuse, which he denies. I just want to make it clear, this is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen.

• 1:00Ezra Klein?

  After months of debating what the lessons of Platner's sudden rise were, now it's all about the lessons of his even more sudden fall. And every faction has a lesson and wants the other faction to learn. To the Democratic establishment, it shows the failures of the populace to vet their candidates. You can't trust them. Look at how Platner fell apart under scrutiny. What if that had happened after the date, when Maine's Democratic Party could still choose a new candidate? The populace want to protect what Platner seemed to be proving before his implosion, that the Democratic establishment is intensely vulnerable, that it's out of touch with the electorate. Platner did, after all, beat Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, Chuck Schumer's handpicked candidate, before his campaign collapsed.

• 1:44Ezra Klein?

  And a lot of the anger has focused on Morris Katz, a strategist at the political consulting firm Fight Agency. You may not have heard of Morris Katz, but he is a consultant in his late 20s, so he's young. And he sort of burst onto the scene as Zorn Mamdani's key political advisor, and then as Platner's strategist. But before that, Katz was the ad maker for John Fetterman's 2022 campaign. He was one of the key strategists on Dan Osborne's independent run for Senate in Nebraska in 2024. So there's been a certain kind of working class, coded populist campaign that Katz has really become central in defining. So here was this guy who people really hadn't heard of before, and it was the right-hand

• 2:27Ezra Klein?

  man of the two Democratic politicians probably getting the most press this year. And now, among both the left and the center, the knives are out for him. You have all these stories about the slipshod way he was running the campaign. He had a DSA letter being circulated, trying to argue that the DSA shouldn't work with him any longer. And I think you can really see this one both ways. Katz made genuinely huge mistakes. It is very possible that the failure to effectively vet Platner could have cost Democrats the Senate this year. Katz has also clearly figured something out about this political moment that strategists many years his senior have not. So I wanted to have him on the show, ask him both about what he clearly has gotten right and what

• 3:11Ezra Klein?

  he just has clearly got wrong. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:26Ezra Klein?

  Morris Katz, welcome to the show.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Ezra. It's good to be here.

• 3:29Ezra Klein?

  So we're talking in the aftermath of Graham Platner's campaign imploding after a credible accusation of rape. There's a lot of people angry at you, some of the people you worked with for poorly vetting Platner, but also, I think, for attacking people who are trying to raise the alarm on him. So now that you've had some time to digest what's happened, what do you think went wrong?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I think a lot of the critiques and anger are fully valid. I've been very critical of the Democratic establishment frequently. And where those critiques come from is not that they make mistakes, it's that they make the same mistakes over and over again, because learning from those lessons would pose a threat to their kind of power. And I don't want to do that. And I think there are like things here, many of the critiques that have been made that are incredibly valid and things to learn from. The conversation around the vetting, there is no standard vetting process that would have found the credible allegation that ended the campaign. Eric Swalwell served on the House Intelligence Committee for a decade and then saw similar allegations

• 4:35Speaker 02

  in his campaign. That being said, I think in hindsight, knowing what we know now, the Reddit posts alone should have been enough. The tattoos should have been enough. The initial New York Times story on troubling behavior should have been enough. And I think both things can be true, that we need different kinds of candidates running outside of the political arena, and that it's the United States Senate. And candidacies should be held to an incredibly high standard. And there are a lot of incredible people who are not part of the political arena, a lot of incredible working class Americans across the country, who don't have those problematic Reddit posts, or who don't have a problematic tattoo, or don't have quite the level of controversy in their past.

• 5:19Ezra Klein?

  You had described the Reddit posts for him at one point as an asset.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  I think that there was a belief that I am still kind of wrestling with of, I think, over the course of the campaign, one of the things that was really frankly inspiring to see, I think, we have so little grace in our politics, and so little room for nuance. And it felt like this opened up a lot of those conversations. You know, you saw people just extend such grace and open up their hearts and be willing to hope and believe in, not just that we could change our politics, but that people could change. And I think like, that was something we needed. And I don't want to lose that. I don't want people's lesson from this to be that there should never be room for grace. And I think that there are a lot of people who've made mistakes or said controversial things, who we want

• 6:05Speaker 02

  to win the support of, who we need to earn the trust of. But I also think I was wrong. And not, it's not to say that everyone who has said controversial things on Reddit would then have things like this come out. I don't think that's the case. But it's to say that there's a higher risk there of it happening, when there are things like that, and there's too much at stake. And there are so many people who don't have that potential liability. And, you know, it's the United States Senate.

• 6:31Ezra Klein?

  I want to go back to the, the beginning of it. The story's been somewhat told by Dan Maraf, but I haven't really heard you tell it in public. So how did you meet Graham Platner? How did you find, what was the process that led you to him?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  The initial kind of factor that led to the broader efforts of recruitment in Maine was a lot of angst around Janet Mills being the presumptive nominee. You know, this was someone who was polling as one of the least popular governors in the country, who would have been the oldest freshman member of the United States Senate in Senate history, and who had made a lot of enemies out of key components of Maine, labor unions, tribes, and a network of us kind of connected with different local folks, labor leaders, organization leaders, with a vision of recruitment. And I think one of the important factors in that is, you know, there's been a lot of criticism, obviously, around it. But many

• 7:26Speaker 02

  of the people, and I still believe this, who are best equipped to serve are not people who are going to raise their hand and sign up for it. And so there was a lot of conversation thought around the kind of candidate who could win Maine would be a veteran, would be someone from outside of the Portland area, you know, a community in which Trump won, and someone tied to an industry that has a specific resonance in Maine. The kind of waterfront industry was a leading factor there. And that was then a broader process and a series of meetings that led folks to Graham.

• 8:01Ezra Klein?

  So you're, you're looking in a way for someone in, who's doing lobstering, who's an oyster farmer, who's a fisherman, right? You're, you're, you're almost casting a candidate.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  I think it's listening to the kind of specificities of an area and the specificities of the problems facing that area, and seeing like, who's the voice that should be representing these people in Washington? Who should be fighting for them in Washington? Who's most in touch? I think there's, we have a problem of like, the lived realities of so many of the people who run for office are so disconnected from the lived realities of the people they're running to represent. There is a friction there that is impossible to reconcile. And so how do you overcome that? You need people who don't have that same gap.

• 8:47Ezra Klein?

  So why not somebody like Troy Jackson, right, who's now going to be, it looks to be the nominee? And I find this interesting, because Jackson is somebody who, you know, I think, fifth generation logger, if I'm not wrong, very, very populist politics, doesn't have Platner's charisma, just like, I think it is fair to say that, has been a state senate president there, has this kind of mix of like, the right politics, but also, you know, an insider, a person who's been in politics for a while. Was that why he was not the sort of exciting figure for you guys?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Troy was really committed to running for governor at the time. I think if Troy Jackson was running for senate, there would not have been a process.

• 9:26Ezra Klein?

  What did you see in Platner when you first met him? What was that conversation like?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  I saw someone who lived on the same road he grew up on, who clearly loved Maine a lot, and who I thought really articulated in a powerful way, both a story that could capture the anger and angst that so many people feel over the status quo, but also had like, an affirmative vision of what government could do about it.

• 9:54Ezra Klein?

  How many people did you and Maraf and Leanne collectively meet with before settling on Platner?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  There were a number of meetings of which I was not a part of, but the kind of entire process was not limited. You know, it was, it was an extended process that landed on Graham.

• 10:11Ezra Klein?

  And it was a, an effort to convince him, right? I've read like, there were like 30 some efforts to.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:16Ezra Klein?

  He was telling you guys to get off his lawn.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. I think the state senate tried to recruit him in 2020. He had been, I think a number of people had reached out over the years of, you should run for office, you should run for office. And he liked what his life was and articulated a skepticism of it being possible to defeat Janet Mills. And so it was a running process.

• 10:36Ezra Klein?

  So I know when you did settle on him, there was a vetting document created. What did that document find?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  The document found a Reddit account. Essentially, there was the inclination that there were problematic posts on Reddit, not the full degree of what later came out, but that was the extent of what that document found. And I think like, an even more robust process would have found more of the specific Reddit comments and potentially the tattoo. But again, like a standard vetting process probably doesn't uncover most of the things that came after.

• 11:08Ezra Klein?

  So one of Platner's old Reddit posts regarding victims of sexual assault stated, "Holy fuck, how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up? They wind up having sex they don't mean to." So that's from 2013. What do you think when you hear it now?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  I think it should have been a red line. He talked about it being like one of the things he regretted saying the most, that it was indicative of a time in his life when he was lost, when he was angry, and that it was in no way reflective of who he was. And I think when I, you know, when I talk about the need for a different kind of standard for public office, I think we can both have a standard of which a normal person can say something deeply hurtful and harmful online and not be exiled from society and day to day life, if they've changed, if they're putting the work to change. But also that doesn't mean that they're entitled to a role in elected office.

• 12:04Ezra Klein?

  So I'm a big believer in grace in politics. And I think that we need to create a lot of space for people to change. Everybody from politicians to voters. One of the things that really shifted my thinking on Platner, though, was something that you did know early on, which is about him sexting as many as a dozen women in the early days of his marriage. So there was this narrative that I found, you know, at least I was very open to it, which is, this is a guy with a dark past, with a tough past, who'd put in a lot of work and changed. And he asked to be judged on his present. So when that came out, it made me wonder about his present. And particularly what it made me wonder about fundamentally was his honesty. But we sort of publicly didn't

• 12:48Ezra Klein?

  know that for quite some time. It was brought to the campaign early on through his wife, Amy. What did you think when you learned about that? And, and why sort of combined with some of these other things, the toe and cop tattoo, the Reddit posts?

• 13:05Ezra Klein?

  Why did that not begin to worry you more about whether or not he could actually be trusted in what he was saying?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I think it both did worry me more. And some of those concerns at the time were eased by the communication from Amy herself and from Graham of that this was something that they worked through extensively in their marriage that seemed like a kind of good faith engagement of two married people working through a difficult thing and working through it together and handling it in all the ways that one would handle something like that once it came up. And I wanted to, I think, respect both the privacy of their marriage and that. And also, you know, there's a difference between consensual sexting and the allegations that ended the campaign. And I think there was, I was trying to kind of hold room for all of those different things at once. And I think the challenge of all

• 13:54Speaker 02

  of this was like, as someone who does deeply believe in, in grace and in nuance and the fact that people are complicated and life is complicated, and maybe politics should reflect a little bit more of that. There was a constant weighing of like, how much is too much?

• 14:09Ezra Klein?

  Hmm.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  And, you know, what is the red line? And I think obviously I did not see it soon enough.

• 14:16Ezra Klein?

  Other people who were involved did see a red line sooner. So Genevieve McDonald was campaign's political director. She resigned back in October 2025. She knew about the sexting, she knew about the Reddit posts, the toe and cop tattoo. And so it's been reported that when you heard she was speaking to the Wall Street Journal about Platner's cheating, you demanded she retract her comments, that she send you a recording of her talking to the reporters, retracting her comments. And if not, sort of you would like attack her for sabotaging the campaign. Do you owe her an apology? Have you apologized to her?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  So there are parts of that description that I would take some issue with. The thing on that specific issue that I was articulating was, I believe that it was a violation of Amy's privacy. And of, you know, part of the, for all the conversation about vetting, part of what the vetting process requires is a lot of honesty and transparency from candidates. And when, as a team, you go to them and say, hey, we need you to tell us everything. Part of what didn't work in this instance is when there is not full transparency. And in that specific instance, Amy came to her and was fully honest. And to see Amy's trust violated like that, and to see that kind of practice that allows campaigns to

• 15:32Speaker 02

  operate and us to get to a place of honesty violated like that was frustrating.

• 15:37Ezra Klein?

  I think I can understand that. And on the other hand, I think one of the questions is what is the responsibility of a campaign to the public? The people around a candidate who maybe know more than the public knows? Or frankly, to the party or to the larger project of the politics? I mean, what seems to me to have happened, I mean, there are a number of people who resigned from the campaign over time. I sort of had this impression from the outside, no one thing until the final revelation was to me disqualifying for Platner. But, you know, I said this on a podcast a bit ago, it seemed like a lot of smoke, a lot of decisions that didn't look great. And you just wonder like, what is there that you don't know? And also, is this a person who should be in the senate?

• 16:21Ezra Klein?

  And so I think I can both really understand the frustration you must have had at people sort of revealing things that were in the campaign or confirming things that have been coming out in internal vetting. And on the other hand, there is this complicated question of what happens when the campaign consultants know things that maybe the public should know?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Just to like, be clear on one of the points, there's been like speculation of what we knew around some of the more serious later allegations and when. And we did not know until the day or two prior to that story coming out, that there was a credible and serious allegation of rape. And so the kind of area we were in of the things we knew were sexting, Reddit, tattoo land. And I think to your point, none of those things alone in a vacuum was necessarily disqualifying. And also, there was so much momentum and energy from the voters in Maine. Graham was traveling across the state. The campaign was building a movement of thousands and thousands of volunteers, bringing people

• 17:23Speaker 02

  off the sidelines. And I think that friction of like, really wanting to believe. And again, I say to my candidates a lot, like, I think a lot of candidates' greatest strengths are their greatest weaknesses. You know, you're an outsider, but you're inexperienced, or you're experienced, but you're part of the establishment. You're a policy wonk, but then you're overly in the weeds. Or, and I think one of my, I think it's true for people in general. I think one of it is like, I take the work that I do, I think, very personally. And maybe naive at times in the sense of wanting a different kind of politics to be possible and feeling that friction of sensing, yes, this is a lot of smoke and kind of being

• 18:04Speaker 02

  almost disoriented by that. But then also the euphoria of seeing a politics of what could be possible, of town halls of hundreds and hundreds of people in areas Trump won, talking about the New Deal and a different kind of populist politics and taking on corruption and Republicans saying that they'd have enough and independents saying they hadn't voted for cycles, but this campaign was bringing them up. And the friction of all of those things was a lot. And if I was doing it over again, I would do a lot of it differently. But that was kind of what was happening.

• 18:38Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that McDonald has said is that she did come to you and she started trying to vet Platner more herself. We reached out to her, we weren't able to talk to her, but that Fight Consultancy, you all were not interested in going further down the vetting pathway. And she's expressed a lot of anger about that. And I mean, the finance director resigned, like, there were people who felt something was going wrong. And I wonder, just in the sense of what you are trying to learn from this, if you look back on those conversations, if you look back on people sensing that something was up here, what were these other members of the campaign beginning to see that eventually proved out true, even if they didn't know exactly what would prove out true eventually, that sort of you and Fight didn't?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Well, so I think like, you know, Fight's not a vetting agency. Like, that's not a service we offer. We work with campaigns and campaigns work with vetting professionals. I think there's a fair critique of Fight putting more pressure, me putting more pressure on people to ensure that their vetting process taking place is responsible and robust. And I don't recall that conversation that Genevieve is outlining. I think there was a mix of different kind of personal dynamics in some of those decisions. But I also think, you know, they were, they were right to feel that something was amiss earlier.

• 19:57Ezra Klein?

  One of Platner's accusers was Lindsay Fifield, who had been in partnership with him and accused him, it came out in the Times story, of being physically abusive when they were together. She's worked in conservative politics, and so there was a real rush to say that this was just politically motivated. She was just a Republican trying to destroy his campaign. Her story really bothered me for two reasons. One, obviously, the abuse, but the other was a contemporaneous, her telling other people, like, look, this guy told me his tattoo was a toten cop. I had always been pretty skeptical of the tattoo story. I didn't think Platner was in any way an anti Semite or a Nazi, but I wasn't really sure he didn't know what his tattoo was. Do you see her story differently now and wish you'd reacted to that story differently?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yes. I think knowing what we know now, there should have been more credibility given immediately to that story when it came forward.

• 20:49Ezra Klein?

  So this, I think, begins to get to the broader topic because a lot went wrong here. Also, some things went really right. I mean, until the last moment, Platner was, had, you know, wrecked the sitting governor of Maine in the primary. You know, throughout the campaign, you and many of your allies were arguing, the Democratic Party sort of only wants to run, your word was losers, who have wanted to be president since they were in fifth grade. And that what the party needs is like, normal, real people, and real people have checkered pasts. And that that just needs to be accepted to have a more authentic politics. Platner's such an unusual case because the strategy both worked and

• 21:33Ezra Klein?

  failed at the same time. So how now do you see that same theory?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  I think real people have checkered pasts. And also, there are many, many, many real people who do not have that kind of checkered past.

• 21:52Ezra Klein?

  It often seemed to be a little insulting to like, what gets called real people.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. I think it's a, it's a yes. Like, and I think the online stuff is fair of like, a lot of people have posted online. So I think the content of those goes probably a step beyond what most people have said. And I think there can both be room for some level of nuanced conversations about people who've lived lives not tailor made for politics, and also more strict standards on it. But like, like, even after the, two days after the Politico story came out, there was a poll that had Graham down to Susan Collins, but had Janet Mills running five points behind Graham Platner, even after the story, the day he suspended his campaign. We have a Republican majority in the House. We have

• 22:37Speaker 02

  a Republican majority in the Senate. We have a Republican in the White House. And we have no functional path to a clear governing Democratic majority. And I think there were mistakes made here, and they need to not be made again. But to go entirely in the other direction and decide, okay, well, we're going to totally write off trying a different approach. We're going to totally write off bringing outsiders in to run for office at a moment in which the party establishment, any kind of establishment institutions of power deeply unpopular, does not feel like a good faith effort to me to get to the place we need to get to. And if we're all serious about a powerful governing majority, then that is going to require a different approach. It's going to have to tap into the level

• 23:20Speaker 02

  of anger and angst that people are feeling, and also this deep, deep desire for hope that I think this campaign tapped into.

• 23:47Ezra Klein?

  What is an outsider to you? My understanding of the sort of list of campaigns you've been centrally involved in, in the past couple of years, is John Fetterman, where you were pretty centrally responsible for the ad strategy. And after his stroke, he was really reliant on that strategy. Is Dan Osborne, the independent who ran before and is running again in Nebraska, and wildly overperformed Democrats in that state, sort of a union guy. Is, of course, Zoran Mondani, who people have now heard of and needs no introduction. Is Graham Platner. Is Nathan Sage, who is running in Iowa for Senate. Some of these candidates are what you might call an outsider, right? Platner did not have political experience. Nathan Sage, I think, you know, did not have a lot of political experience. Fetterman was a

• 24:31Ezra Klein?

  lieutenant governor of his state. Osborne was a little bit better known as a sort of major union leader. When you talk about this strategy, what is an outsider?

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Inherent in part of the problem is that the people who are insiders right now in positions of power are incredibly narrow definition. You know, it's an incredibly small group of people who have power and influence and resources in our politics in our country right now. And anyone who's outside of that orbit, I think is an outsider. And I think it's similar to like, you get, you know, the discourse around class right now. It's like, majority of people are working and do not feel like they have enough to live the lives that they should be able to. And there is such a profound exclusion of the American people from access to resources, from access to power, from access to the

• 25:23Speaker 02

  lives they want to be able to live. And the people who are in that category, I think, need to be running for office. And that should look different in a lot of places. That has a lot of different faces, a lot of different backgrounds. But that, I think, is the goal that we should be coming to.

• 25:37Ezra Klein?

  The thing that I really notice about that list of candidates is that's not far from a list of candidates who have gotten the most attention in their cycles. The thing that even your critics who I talk to say about you, is that you, as an ad maker, as a storyteller, as somebody sort of both helping to recruit candidates or choosing candidates to work with, have figured out a way to break through attentionally at a time when it's very, very, very hard to do so. So there are a lot of people who are outsiders. But not everybody who is an outsider is going to be a good candidate. Not everybody

• 26:19Ezra Klein?

  who is an outsider is going to be somebody who goes viral on social or algorithmic media. One of the things when I was asking about where you found Platner, that I feel from the stories I know that you sort of underplayed, is the casting dimension of him, like actually looking for a charismatic candidate with a kind of bio. Now, like, you didn't invent looking for bios. The DCCC has been doing that forever. The Republicans have been doing that forever. It does feel to me you look for people who feel like their bios, which is a little bit different. I've watched a lot of veterans run in politics, and they just feel like normal candidates. John Fetterman, you know, sort of an insider, I would say, a lieutenant governor, like a known political quantity, but certainly in that campaign,

• 27:03Ezra Klein?

  you know, with his shorts and his tattoos, like, there was a, an aesthetic to him that felt different from other candidates. So when you're finding these people, when you're looking for them, when you're framing their stories with them, What is it beyond that sort of simple outsider insider thing are you looking for? What do you feel like breaks through and what doesn't?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  You know, there's a misconception sometimes in politics that to win an election, you're sitting down in a job interview. And I think right now where voters are, they believe that every single thing you're saying at a job interview is a lie. Like, they're just not going to believe it. They know, because you got some bill through the state legislator. Well, you're never going to get it done in Washington. Oh, you say you're going to lower prescription drug costs? How come nothing's happened? You know, maybe you'll get it done in 15 years. And we're actually not engaging in the job interview. We're engaging in something of a dating process with people who've been on, you know, 100 bad dates in a row and are holding out a little bit of hope that maybe tonight's going to be different. And how can you make people who've been given every reason to give up on love fall in love again? And I think that that's much like love.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  There is something magnetic to it. And I think to shake that loose, I think you need a candidate and a campaign that is telling a story that can bring people who have every reason to be out back in. John Fetterman was, there was a story about Braddock as much as it was a story about him. A forgotten steel town that believed its best days were generations ago. That just still deserves to be fought for. That doesn't deserve to be left behind. A bio isn't just bullet points, but a story to tell. And I think people talk about hope as kind of a political tool or like an abstract thing and not a tangible thing in of itself. And I believe that there's a power in hope, even just as a thing that people are feeling.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Like, everyone's having such a hard time. I also think there is an X factor in our politics, right? Like, someone could run for president and if have the exact same policy positions as Barack Obama. Barack Obama had an X factor that made him unique. So did Bill Clinton. So does Donald Trump. So did George Bush. The people who kind of rise to the highest ranks of political power in this country do have an X factor and we can't ignore that. And I think you uniquely can't ignore that in the modern media environment where you can't just run a campaign on 30 second television ads.

• 29:30Ezra Klein?

  So this is what I want to zone in on because I think Fight as a consultancy, you as a consultant are good at finding people the X factor. And one place where I think Democrats have the strategy of the broad coalition of the Democratic Party has fallen apart is I think they were looking for the ability to raise money, not the X factor.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  I mean, I think there is a deep lack of updating in the strategy. To kind of break down the way that this traditionally works is there's a district or a state where there's a competitive election. And the institutional approach to recruitment there is who can raise the most money in the first 48 hours? And that is literally the driving determining factor in who the democratic establishment wants to recruit. Inherent in that, when you're, the question you're asking is who knows the most wealthy people? That is probably someone ill-equipped to make a credible case as an outsider running against a rigged economy. And I think it's the job of the consulting class. One of the reasons I do what I do now.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  One of my first jobs was in North Carolina, working for a candidate there, Erica Smith, who had an incredible story to tell. She also had some like issues of her own, but it was from a rural part of the state that was rapidly falling behind and had been kind of left behind by the political establishment where Democrats were collapsing. She had a decent electoral record even as a state senator, you know, a pastor, grew up on the same family farm that her family was enslaved on, like a really profound story about North Carolina and overcoming hardship and a vision. And we did 100 county tour in 100 days across all of North Carolina. And in that campaign and that tour, I saw kind of two things.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  One was the political establishment did not exist in a way to see there's a candidate here with a really compelling story and some really good talent. How do we wrap around her and protect her and lift her up and fill in the blind spots here and support it? It was, she can't raise the money. It's unserious. Or someone from there can never rise into political power.

• 31:37Ezra Klein?

  Is the issue that it did work differently before? I mean, I always understand money as having been able to buy two things. Money could buy a certain amount of attention by buying mailers, by buying TV spots, that kind of thing. And money could buy a certain amount of organizing by paying for yard signs, by sending out people into the field. And that both of those things have gotten in a way harder to buy. People don't watch TV spots anymore in the same way they used to and easier or more straightforward to earn. Like, if you have enthusiasm, if you're somebody compelling, all of a sudden your videos can go viral and people scrolling through TikTok in your area will see you. That it actually was optimized for something that made sense at one time and that now

• 32:22Ezra Klein?

  that's no longer true? Or is it just that you just get the money a different way? The money still matters just as much, but you get it differently?

• 32:29Speaker 02

  I think money still matters profoundly and you get it differently. But I do think the main thing is you can't hide behind 30 second ads anymore. You know, like you can't just run a campaign predicated on paid media. You are constantly expected to be communicating. And I think people's standards for transparency has risen in the social media age. Like, we now know everything about our celebrities. The standard for the ways in which LeBron James has to interact with the public are fundamentally different than the standards for the way Michael Jordan had to interact with the public. If LeBron James was at casinos till 5:00 AM every day, we'd be telling a very different story about LeBron. And I think there's a similar thing in politics of everything's under a microscope. You're being recorded at any given moment.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  You can't put on a 30 second facade and hope that that's enough. You need every part of a campaign working together to tell a complete story that can't be artificially constructed. And you can't cover up for a lack of talent candidate. Still, I think the most compelling indicator of candidate overperformance is candidate quality. And we can have all of these different debates, but that just, I think, remains fundamentally true.

• 33:38Ezra Klein?

  The candidates on that list have a, an ideological range to them. Fetterman sort of changed a lot after the campaign, so he's a little bit of an unusual case here after the stroke. But Dan Osborne, running as independent, was very populist candidate, but very moderate on other issues. Did a ad, maybe you made the ad about wanting to help build the wall on the border with his own hands. You have Plutus, much more progressives, Zora Maldoni, who's a democratic socialist, Nathan Sage, who was sort of in between that. You've said before that for you, the candidates don't need to be progressive, they need to be populist. What's the difference?

• 34:15Speaker 02

  I think frankly, a lot of the difference is in the labels the general public assigns to it. But what I think frustrates me about the current state of the Democratic Party is we have a big tent party that is constantly kind of shifting and rearranging to exclude people who challenge the powers at the heart of it. And a lot of the-

• 34:40Ezra Klein?

  Be specific. What do you mean by that?

• 34:42Speaker 02

  I mean, watching people who are like the Josh Gottheimer of the world, for example, who's someone who's very like, we need a big tent party.

• 34:48Ezra Klein?

  Member of Congress.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Member of Congress, but, but no one in DSA should be allowed in that party. It's like, well, that's not a big tent party then. Or you see, you know, people who anytime anyone's critical of Israel, well, that's not who the Democratic Party should be. And I'm interested in a big tent party that kind of flips that a little bit where we're allowed to disagree on, you know, people have different politics on the border or slightly different approaches on a variety of issues across the country. And candidates and campaigns can reflect those, but we are united in a belief that we are not even having a good faith conversation until we've done serious things about corruption at the heart of our politics and until we're working to address an economy that's broken. And to me, like, that's the baseline of where people are.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  And the longer it takes us to get to that place of kind of being a party that's embodying a challenge to the status quo rather than embodying a protection of the status quo, the longer we're going to be in the wilderness.

• 35:42Ezra Klein?

  You sort of dodged my progressivism versus populism question. So let me sharpen it. What is populism?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  I think it is a belief that the people should have more power.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  It's kind of how I think about it. And that's a very my specific interpretation, but I think a lot about the nature of power in terms of how much people feel like they have it in their lives. And I think a lot of the issues we have stem from the fact that we're at a moment in history that I think people feel more powerless than ever before.

• 36:11Ezra Klein?

  Was Obama populist?

• 36:12Speaker 02

  I believe so, yes. I think his entire theory of the case is deeply populist. You know, he told the story of the country belonging to everyone and that being at the heart of things, and he told and particularly his reelection campaign, I don't think gets talked about enough for just quite how populist the approach was. Mitt Romney was a Wall Street villain who had shipped our jobs away, who wanted more money for himself and his Wall Street friends. Well, Obama was a president who took them on, who brought the economy back, who stared down those same villains. I think that's a, you know, example where populism allows for a big tent and the people who critique it are just upset because they don't, it's against their own interests.

• 36:55Ezra Klein?

  Fight. And I think this was not as much specifically you, but worked on Tom Steyer's campaign for governor of California. Tom Steyer is a billionaire. Can a billionaire be a populist?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  If you're a class traitor. I think Pritzker is another example of like, they act in a way their policies are in conflict with the interest of the billionaire class.

• 37:15Ezra Klein?

  I think one of the things I'm trying to get at is, in your theory of where the Democratic Party has gone wrong, in your theory where politics is going, what separates the candidates able to make the kind of appeal that you think works from the candidates who can't? I don't know Janet Mills myself, but I am certain if we had Janet Mills in this studio, she would say she also believes more power should go to the people. She also believes that politics is corrupt and has certainly had to like make compromises as any governor has, as Zohar Mumdani has to make compromises as people in power do. But she would probably see herself within that definition as fitting within it. So would many of the people, most

• 37:58Ezra Klein?

  probably, in the establishment Democratic Party that comes in for pretty regular tongue lashings from you and some of the people around you. So what is the line here?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  The ability to name villains. It drives me insane about that. You have these people who've kind of taken on affordability. And so can you hear these politicians talk about it? And they're like, you know, we have an affordability crisis, which is why I'm here talking about affordability. Because what Democrats need to do is we need to talk about affordability. And it's like, you're not saying anything. Everyone is dealing with some version of an affordability crisis across the country. The villains of it are specific in specific places. In some places, it's broken right to repair laws. In some places, it's bad landlords. In some places, it's electric monopolies. In other places, it's specific billionaires or corporations. I don't think Janet Mills would name the people who are taking the power and using it to hurt working people.

• 38:52Ezra Klein?

  So that's the point of populism. It's not just believing the people should have more power, but it's believing that there is a small group of people or corporations or something that has collected the power and that's what needs to be broken and articulating that conflict clearly.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I think there's a case to be made that's like, basically populism is politics that points. And what we have in the rising in the Republican Party is a populism that points the finger down or to the side, targeting trans communities, targeting immigrant communities. And what we are advocating for is a populism that points the finger up. And I think the friction and the fight right now with a lot of the Democratic establishment is there is a belief that we are not in this populist moment, or that we can just kind of get through this moment and things will collapse. The reason that frustrates me so intensely is I don't think there is any electoral indication that that is true. And I think

• 39:51Speaker 02

  there is going to be a populist future in this country. It is a question of who's going to control it. And if it is not the Democratic Party, then it is only going to get worse on the other side. And so we need to start pointing up before there's no one left around.

• 40:06Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned Obama's 2012 campaign before. Obama has these two campaigns that are different. You have the 08 campaign, which is very hope and change, and we can all come together. And the 12 campaign, which is harder edged, more about plutocrats and billionaires and Bain Capital, et cetera. And I still see the Democratic Party sort of vibrating between those two approaches, right? You know, and you can see reasons to think about both in polls. People are very upset about political division. They want politics to feel differently than it does. It is a big 10 party that needs to have many kinds of people inside of it. And on the other hand, you know, you ask people like, do you think the political system

• 40:47Ezra Klein?

  basically needs to be burnt down? And they tell you, yes. So how do you think about the balance of there's simultaneously a desire in the public for a politics that points and a politics that unites and has a kind of fellowship to it?

• 41:05Speaker 02

  It's an interesting question. I think, and this is a slightly different answer to the question you posed, but like, I think there's a sustainability question with it. Like, there's this kind of friction of, you know, how quickly incumbents, not just America, all over the world are turning over because you can ride this populist wave, but then, then what? I think we need a populism that's actually, I guess, to play to the crowd, like married to a bit of an abundance. You simultaneously need to restore, another word for the kind of unity, I think is a restoration of faith in government. I think that contributes to dividing factor and kind of this baked in cynicism that's divisive. Populism can be hopeful if you marry it with an abundance-esque approach of the deep belief that government needs to work.

• 41:49Ezra Klein?

  This sort of the Zohar Mumdani approach.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Yes. I don't think it's a credible claim that we're going to take back all this power and all this fortune from the billionaire class or from the oligarchy if we can't even build 100 homes. And marrying those things together, I think, begins to tell a story of a populism that's hopeful, because it's like, you can believe in it, it's tangible in your life, and it's a reorientation of power. And it's all of those things combined. And I think we need more of that. Like, it frustrates me when we get into these debates over like, you know, you can believe in antitrust policy, or you can believe in abundance.

• 42:27Ezra Klein?

  I've also found those debates frustrating.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  I think we can massively cut red tape that makes people's lives more difficult, and we can impose new regulations that protect people from predatory actions. Also, I do, I think there are a lot of people who are doing a compelling job of this. In raising the finger from pointing to your neighbor to pointing towards the powerful, there can be a story of unity and of hope and of love. Like, I think about, you know, I can't, I did not come up with this. I can't remember who came up with it. And so I apologize to whoever it is. The idea that like, it's Obama's we, and it's Bernie's them. Like, it's this Obama-esque coalition that's inclusive and that we're all a part of, and we're stronger when we're all in it together. And we're taking on the Bernie Sanders version of the villains who are opposing us.

• 43:12Ezra Klein?

  I want to come back to some of the synthesis questions, but I want to stay in populism for a minute. One thing that connects the candidates we've been talking about is they're all men. Is there a connection for you between populism and gender? And between what you think the public reads as populist and working class and gender?

• 43:29Speaker 02

  I think the public tends to more loosely assign that term to men. And I don't think it's particularly accurate. I think there's, you know, a lot of candidates, like I think about Rebecca Cook running in Wisconsin, who meets all of those same criteria. I think about even like Governor Sherrill across in New Jersey, who I think is an example of not like necessarily the traditional topics, is probably something of a kind of technocratic populist hybrid, but has campaigned in that way and has governed in that way. AOC is an example of this. And I think the way people use the term populist oftentimes is they're kind of code switching. If something's progressive, it's unelectable and populist becomes the

• 44:12Speaker 02

  electable version of progressive. That's not my interpretation of it, but I think that that then contributes to like, people are afraid if they start saying AOC is a populist, then it undercuts their arguments to keep her from running for president or to keep her from being president. And then there's a kind of component of that.

• 44:26Ezra Klein?

  But is there an outdated idea of what the working class looks like here?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:31Ezra Klein?

  Because there, not all these candidates, it doesn't fit Mumdani or some of the others. But if you look at Nathan Sage, or Fetterman, or Plattner, Dan Osborne, it has this kind of guy who could be a, you know, work on a, on an oyster farm, on a lobster boat, in a factory, when, you know, the working class today is almost like in a more modal sense, an immigrant woman working as a home health care aide. That there is this, our politics treats the working class as if it goes to work in a hard hat. And it has been a critique of you, but it's broadly speaking been a critique, I think, of Donald Trump, of Bernie Sanders,

• 45:12Ezra Klein?

  of a lot of people in modern politics, that they have not tried or managed to come up with a more modern way of thinking about and presenting.

• 45:24Ezra Klein?

  What it means to be working class.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  I certainly can't speak for Donald Trump and I can't speak for Senator Sanders either. But I think there is an element of it's the ways in which these things are written about and grouped and covered and the perception. Someone like Jamal Bowman is a working class candidate who the stories written about him were oftentimes tended to leave out the fact that this is a working class outsider because it was more convenient to lean into other critical narratives than to embrace that. Or, you know, Cori Bush and the two members primaried by AIPAC last cycle. And because they don't meet the traditional definition, then that tag is not applied to them, which then perpetuates the cycle.

• 46:05Ezra Klein?

  Another way of putting this and a different direction from it is even in polls toward before Platner dropped out, Susan Collins was winning by quite a lot among white men in Maine without a college degree. And there's sort of like two dimensions of this. There's been a well documented shift where the Democratic Party has become the party of the college educated. The more left you go in the party, in some ways, like the more true that often is. So the DSA is doing incredibly well among people with postgraduate degrees who have like struggled in the economy, for instance. And the critique has been, as I have heard it, that the Democratic Party's theory of

• 46:45Ezra Klein?

  how to win back the working class has been to sort of cosplay the working class. And one of the reasons that's not working is that, one, it's not what those actual voters want. Again, Platner did very well with people who had postgrad degrees, that there's some sort of weird conflict here between the Democratic Party's image of itself and what they call the Democratic Party or the DSA, who's actually in it? How do you see that?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  I think it is not a problem that we're going to solve in one election or with one campaign. I think it is indicative of a massive brand problem that now comes when you have a D next to your name, or even frankly, don't have an R next to your name. I mean, it's kind of foundational to, it sounds like a bad political speech riff, but it's like, it is fundamentally true that the worker in Michigan, whose factory closed, has more in common with a waitress in Texas who's working at the starvation wage as a minimum wage in Texas, regardless of their races and genders and ages, than at any point probably in kind of American history in terms of the degree that there's just this kind of broad class erosion.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  I think to change it, we need so many of these people stepping up and running. There are people who would say that we need more than just an economic argument to win back these people. I don't think that that's untrue. I would argue that like, I think there are alternatives to mass moderation. I think like, you know, localized moderation for their things is appropriate. But I think we need to be telling a story as part of this populism that does extend beyond just the economics.

• 48:25Ezra Klein?

  How much is the kind of candidate you look for? Somebody who actually has to feel themselves failed by the institutions?

• 48:33Speaker 02

  I think the credibility thing is absolutely a component of what needs to be factored in, like what gives you the credibility to make this argument and to have voters believe you? But I also think there are a lot of people who are not trying that hard to make this critique. Look, I think that there's a whole segment of the Democratic Party that still believes like the end all be all problem is Donald Trump. The entire critique is one of Donald Trump. Every problem we're facing is a result of Donald Trump. And our heads are in the sand if we can't acknowledge that for 12 of the last 17 years, Democrats have had the White House. Over those periods of time, we had control of both chambers multiple times. And people's lives have gotten worse. And so we can't just go and tell people Donald Trump is the reason everything's bad when they've been alive this whole time and experienced it.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Clearly, there's a systemic issue here that extends beyond any one president or any one office. Yet a lot of our party, or at least the people in positions of power, aren't levying that critique.

• 49:46Ezra Klein?

  To what degree does this demand in the Democratic Party? These candidates who can code switch? So one of the interesting arguments is made in the party going way back, right? Norm Mailer wrote about this. There's a famous Ron Brownstein piece on Barack Obama about the sort of wine track and the beer track in the Democratic Party. But Platten, an attack people launched at him, which I thought was sort of wrong, was, you know, he came from a family that had been well off. You know, his dad helped buy his home. He went to an elite private school. But you see something like this with Mumdani, who comes from a sort of family where his mother's a celebrated director, his father's an academic, that, you know, Donald Trump himself is a billionaire.

• 50:27Ezra Klein?

  Oftentimes, what you end up seeing in candidates who sort of succeed is this ability to operate across different worlds. And so is that something you look for? Is that something you think is important? Like, how do you rate that?

• 50:45Speaker 02

  I don't think it's something that should be important. There needs to be a way for people to get elected without having kind of coastal communities getting all on board with them. And even still, like, there are ways to challenge that. There are ways to overcome it. There's grassroots money. But you would, to some degree, need buy-in from coastal communities to be able to really launch to the degree you traditionally have to.

• 51:11Ezra Klein?

  That's because you need to raise money from them?

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Money and media. I think the mix of money and media attention. And it's just a lot harder. And I think there's something to be said for the like political utility in being able to talk to a variety of your constituents, and that should be important. But I think once you kind of extend into, oh, how comfortable do they make a donor feel? We're not in a place anymore that's serving an electability goal.

• 51:36Ezra Klein?

  The campaign here that you worked on that didn't take off was Nathan Sage in Iowa. What went wrong?

• 51:41Speaker 02

  So, I mean, he was one of the people I had in mind when I was saying this. So I think like Nathan was an incredible candidate, who I think would have won the Iowa US Senate seat, who had an incredible story. He served three tours, I believe. He was, grew up in a trailer park in Mason City, worked his way through high school, went to serve, then served his small town chamber of commerce and brought small businesses back. And his like anger and disdain for the people who had sold out families like his was profound and real. And he also connected deeply with voters when he was in a room with them at town halls, at campaign events.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  But I think to the kind of donor class, it felt abstract or they didn't quite see it because they weren't living the lives of other families struggling in Iowa. And so it didn't quite break through in the same way. And it's a different skill to pitch donors and to pitch press than it is to pitch voters. The collapse of local media, I think, has made this problem a lot worse. You know, 20 years ago, there's profound local media circuits that exist. They're actually in the weeds. If you have really strong feelings about a factory that's giving workers cancer in Iowa, you can go and do five interviews about that and show your knowledge of local issues and show your passion, the way that's going to make people's lives better. It's not a particularly sexy pitch to national reporters of, hey, are we going to, you know,

• 53:08Speaker 02

  do you want to write four different articles about a factory giving workers cancer in Iowa and a candidate who's incredibly angry about it?

• 53:14Ezra Klein?

  It also, I think, speaks to one of the pathologies of a lot of Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party to me right now is that it is a party of people who love institutions at a time when institutions are failing. And one of the places where I'm sympathetic to that is that institutions were actually one of the ways you got attention. I mean, there's a huge amount Democratic Party just optimized for a period when you went to the newspaper editorial boards and you had to win them over. And so it wasn't just, could you get attention? It's could you impress the editors? Could you get the endorsement of the local civic groups? And now all these layers are weaker across much more of the country. There's less union density. There are fewer civic groups that have real memberships.

• 53:59Ezra Klein?

  There's fewer local newspapers and their editorial boards carry less weight. And so it means skills that once really important are less important and skills that once like couldn't get you anywhere, right? The newspaper would not cover someone who both did not have any support and was just making people mad by saying sort of outlandish things. But now, you know, you could be Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles and like rocket forward in attention at the very least from being a candidate like that.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  The gap between editorial rooms and

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Corporate boardrooms and what is driving voters has never been more profound. And I think that's been exacerbated, I think, in the Democratic Party by what I think was kind of a problematic shift after you had in 2012, the kind of moderate to Republican elites essentially handpicked Mitt Romney and he receives the nomination and Obama wins a daunting reelection on the populist campaign against him. And then you see Donald Trump rise up against that Republican establishment. And then I think you see this kind of misleading exodus from the Republican Party of donors, of institutional figures to the Democratic Party saying, I can't be a part of this. And of course, they're welcomed into the tent because they come with resources and they

• 55:15Speaker 02

  come with platforms that have historically been of electoral significance. We suddenly, at a moment in which there is a massive uprising against institutions, think that we're building a new coalition that is pro-institution. And it's, we took all of the people who made the Republican Party unelectable, folded them into our tent and let them influence our approach. And I think it's fundamentally wrong and broken. And I think there is a interesting friction that's going to have to play out here of what is the traditional media's role in politics, which I think is fundamentally different than what it has been before. It would have been unimaginable 20 years ago if I told you the New York Times editorial

• 55:59Speaker 02

  board is going to write a piece essentially telling voters, do not vote for Zohar Mumdani. And then that person was going to win the Democratic primary by 12 points. But that's what we saw happen. And I think there's just this disconnect and I think there's the curiosity problem. I think oftentimes we're not asking the right questions about what is driving this. You know, there's a, to now compliment the New York Times, Emma Goldberg did a good piece on this after the election, talking about the affordability angle of the New York City slate that won. But that was the only piece really written in a traditional media with that as the center point. And those are the main things those campaigns focused about. But all of the kind of dialogue was around unrelated components of it.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  And there's just this disconnect that I think there's a real, real friction there.

• 56:46Ezra Klein?

  When you met Mumdani the first time, what made you think there was some magic there?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  I think his profound and earnest belief that it was government's job to be making things better. The marriage of that with a vision is just frankly incredibly rare and it shouldn't be, but it is. Like the number of people who sit down and say, you're thinking about running for an office and whose initial answer is, we have this crisis. I think this office can address this crisis if we just decided we wanted to. Yeah, I'm a big believer in campaigns aren't won in the content of the battle, they're won in the context in which they're taking place. And if we're taking campaigns in a context in which we are ashamed of government, in which we don't believe government can do anything, in which we're apologetic about government, then it's going to be really hard for, to convince people to vote for the party that is the bigger government party.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  And if we can't prove that government is one of the greatest tools for good known to human history, then how are we going to do anything?

• 57:45Ezra Klein?

  The first time Mumdani started coming on my radar, I think, was the halal flation video where he was going around with the halal carts and just noting how much more expensive it had gotten. And it wasn't like this grand socialist vision for what government could be. It was very specific. It was the whole thing in miniature, like repeatedly. And every Democrat now wants to copy the Mumdani visual language and the Mumdani dominance of a vertical video. Very few are able to do it. You guys sort of built that together. When people come to you asking for lessons from it, what do you tell them to take from it and what do you tell them to not take from it?

• 58:28Speaker 02

  There were a lot of incredibly talented people on that team from, you know, Todd and Andrew. And I think as good as I might be, as good as they might be, everyone looks really good riding a Cadillac and Zohar Mumdani is a generational leader. And it's hard to take any credit for that. I think one of the roles that there is to play is frankly, like getting out of the way. And we have an entire consultant industry and a party establishment that has kind of built its role of being like, oh, you have a big idea? Well, don't do that. You have something that's going to expose you to some risk? Don't do that. You have a broad vision? Scale it down. You have a new tactic you want to try? Well, not on our watch.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  And I think the reason it was, is a lot of that was very specific to the mayor. And he had a vision. He had a specific way he was good at communicating. And we all worked to build a system in which he was able to do that, that could meet people where they were. And then also could reimagine what an electorate would look like. And I think that's one of the issues we get into is we should have these like imaginary visions of a baked in electorate with no imagination of reshaping. And I think this speaks to like the white working class issue too. How much of the issues we face there are the result of the fact that we have pulled resources from the places that are predominantly rural, white working class areas? You combine that with the rise of conservative media in those areas.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  They are hearing a 365 day a year narrative that is going uncombatted. It is not enough in eight weeks or eight months to just fight back against that. It takes a year round effort to reach those people. I think what you saw at the mayor was a belief that no, maybe actually if we talk to young people and gave them a vision for a city they can afford, they will come out and show up for it. Maybe if you did not run away from Muslim identity, but embraced it, Muslim voters are going to come out en masse to support that vision. I think meeting people where they are and believing that people actually will want to take part in our politics if we extend a hand is something that can be taken to any campaign.

• 1:00:32Ezra Klein?

  One thing that was striking to me about you and Mumdani, and I always want, when I'm talking about attention, to not make it feel like I'm separating out political positions or, right? Like the product you're selling is the most important part of selling it. But I think there's also something about having a touch for how stories and storytelling in this moment work. And Mumdani's mother is a famed film director. Your godfather, I learned, was Philip Seymour Hoffman, right? That your father, I think, was a producer. Is there something right now, for you actually, just about the centrality of being able to storytell in this moment, right? Is there something in that campaign between the two of you around that? It seems to me not accidental.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  I think there's something to our politics that, relating to some of the other things we've talked about, like the requirement of a leap of faith and that that takes more than just an argument, but it takes a story.

• 1:01:29Ezra Klein?

  A leap of faith from the voter.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  From the voter. I, I think a lot about, my God, probably when Phil was doing Death of a Salesman, early on, when he was like first talking about doing it, he was describing it as like the best play ever written. And he talks about how it's an incredible play, but barely anything happens. It starts with a sigh. It's the first stage direction, our first audible stage direction is a sigh from Willie Lowman. And in that sigh, you've met a man who's been defeated by feeling like no matter what he does, it is not enough. He has no path to hope, to prosperity. And over the course of the play, what we just see is someone who's already given up on life, finally give up on life. And I think we need to fundamentally materially change people's lives in massive, massive ways.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  But we also need to find, there's so many people right now who I think that is a version of the story they're living, not, not necessarily literally, but just this deep hopelessness. And if we can tell a story that things can be different, if we can tell a story that they have a role to play, if we can tell a story that they matter, then that is an act of radical change too.

• 1:02:33Ezra Klein?

  I was genuinely skeptical that the way the campaign was constantly present, the way Mumdani was constantly present during the campaign could translate into governing. Trump has done that, but he does it by constantly pissing people off, right? Unlocking constant energy through outrage and conflict and anger. Mumdani has managed to maintain a constant presence if you're in New York, probably if you're not in New York too, but certainly if you are in New York. And just the, you know, almost separate from what he is doing, though there are real things he's doing, you just kind of see him doing things for New York all the time, right?

• 1:03:17Ezra Klein?

  You turn on your phone and there he is. It's genuinely felt new to me. Is that something sort of only he can do? And New York is an unusual media market. It's giant. A lot of the media centered here, so he can sort of project the outward from being here in a way that it is harder if you're in Boston or to say nothing of a smaller town than that. Or is there a genuine lesson there?

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  I think there's a genuine lesson. I think the, the first lesson is to elect leaders who are serious about governing and of, who believe in a very proactive approach for governing. But I think in some ways, to me, it's like the second side, if you wrote a sequel to Abundance, I feel like it would be the communication side of it. And if we believe that there is a crisis of faith in government's ability to do things, I think there is an obligation to not just do things, to not just make it easier to do things, but to tell the story of doing things. In 2023, 2024, I was driving through Michigan and there was a sign somewhere that was like, this road is being paved because of the bipartisan highway bill. And it's like, barely any Republicans voted for that piece of legislation. And that is how we are marketing it.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Why wouldn't we be leaning in? And like, Democrats fucking did this. Sorry, I don't know if I can curse.

• 1:04:30Ezra Klein?

  You can, I, I did, so you're welcome. We're trying to get attention here, man.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Attention economy. We need to campaign at the speed of the modern attention span. And I just think you need to govern at the speed of the modern attention span. And there is such a laid back approach to, you know, in eight years, this is going to be phased in. In a decade, this is going to be built. And like, that does not meet the urgency people are feeling. And to restore the bond between the public and government, there needs to be that urgency.

• 1:05:03Ezra Klein?

  What about at the level of affect? One way Mumdani feels different to me than some of the other people who have been on your roster and, and populism in general. Populism in general, I think, has a reputation rightly or wrongly as being pretty pissed off. And I'm not saying Mumdani isn't, like there is genuine anger in him, correctly so, about the ways people are harmed and ripped off and how unaffordable it is to live in this city.

• 1:05:32Ezra Klein?

  But one, he always looks like he's enjoying governing. Like, he looks like he likes his job, which a lot of people, they get elected and then they seem kind of miserable from then on, which is fair enough. It can be a pretty miserable job, but he looks like he enjoys it. But there's also a, like a positive affect from him, like a sunniness that I don't associate with Democrats in general. I don't associate with populist and specific, right? Bernie Sanders isn't known for his sunniness. I just don't see it from that many politicians. Like, most politicians, and Trump is not like this, but most politicians, it's like they, they treat the work pretty grimly.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  You can't fake it. And I think that is one of the challenges. Like, there are a lot of different things in politics you can fake. You can't fake a true love of the place and the people you're representing. And the mayor doesn't. The mayor loves, truly loves every single New York City resident. Like, regardless of what they may say about him, like, he just loves this city and he, and it comes through. I think there couldn't be a better job done on the kind of, at least on the left populist side of the spectrum, of articulating that this is a labor of love. I think Trump supporters are having a very good time. It's abstract to us, but there was a joy to when he was campaigning.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  It's like almost a cultural phenomenon of what it means and you're wearing your Trump hat or your Trump sticker, like a badge of honor. And I think there's something to that of like, something people can take pride in, something people can see themselves in where they belong. And to me, it does relate to the power component of people feel, I think, of a mix of factors from like globalization, economic factors to then like the influence of social media. People feel just so small. And if you can bring them into something that makes them feel big, which is what populism should be at its best, there is joy in that process and it needs to be reflected.

• 1:07:29Ezra Klein?

  One of the more radical things I think Mamdani has done has been to then use the kind of popularity he has as mayor, the influence he has as mayor, to launch a series of primary challenges of either incumbents like Dan Goldman or sort of incumbent-backed, establishment-backed politicians to send allies like Brad Lander or Valdez to Congress. There's also been a DSA component of this. You worked on these campaigns, I think, sort of working through Mamdani. And it led to a lot of debate and discussion about whether or not the Democratic Party is in like the beginning of a schisming moment. So is that how you see it? Like, how do you understand the power building efforts

• 1:08:15Ezra Klein?

  that Mamdani, that the DSA, that some of the more, frankly, that the Platner campaign represented? Like, what is the relationship of the sort of populist push and the established Democratic Party?

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  My perspective on it is either politicians can change or the voters for whom they represent are going to change who, who's representing that. The idea that anyone gets to be a gatekeeper to the party, I find kind of absurd. It is not our tent to define. Voters can define and we, you know, everyone can play their role in making a case to voters of what they believe it should be. And it's like, why are we not asking the question?

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  What did Dariel Lisa do right to energize all these new people and bring in all these young voters? And you can hold room for, I disagree with whatever respective comments, but I'm also curious about, maybe there's something here to offer. Putting aside the moral component of it all, it is bad electoral math to believe in subtraction. The job is to bring more people in. We have primaries, we have elections, that's how this works. And the sore loser component of it, I don't think is like particularly productive. And I think there is, we should be excited by the fact there's so many new young people showing up to vote. We should be excited by the fact that people who haven't voted in decades are something to vote, that people are early voting faster because they're more eager. Like, there is something good here that's happening.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  And I think the people who feel threatened by it could do themselves a favor by embracing it.

• 1:09:44Ezra Klein?

  The critique I hear from the sort of Democrats here, I think, talking about there is that what's going on now is that in safe Democratic areas, the party is going left. And that's, they might have whatever view they have on that, but they're worried about it and they're worried about the energy around it, they're worried about the amount of media attention it gets from people like me, is they feel that it makes the Democratic Party's job in a place like North Carolina or Ohio harder, that the, the perception of the national party is that it's becoming more socialist, you know, you have people who've made all kinds of comments about, you know, defunding the police or abolishing prisons.

• 1:10:29Ezra Klein?

  So I think as somebody who does care about winning, not just in places like Maine, which is more blue, but in places like Ohio and Alaska, et cetera. How do you think about that challenge? Like, how does this mass of Democratic parties become one thing that can compete not just in a New York City, but, you know, in places Democrats used to win, like Indiana and North Dakota?

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  To me, there are two things that are kind of true. One, there is a national brand problem that is undeniable. To me, that national brand problem does not come from more liberal social perspectives from representatives in deep blue places. It comes from a tangible feeling the Democratic Party is out of touch with the things that voters care about. And if you, you know, look at polling, Bernie Sanders is more popular than Chuck Schumer. It is a disdain of kind of the elites and the powerful that I think fuels the Democratic brand issue. And that is what we need to address to overcome that.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  I think the other component is Democrats have an eat their own component that fuels these flames. You know, so like you see some of these candidates win and instead of us wrapping our arms around them as a party, instead of it being like, look, we disagree with their positions on A, B, and C, but what we're all aligned on is that they're, you know, we should be spending our taxpayer dollars on babies, not bombs. We all, we all agree is that we need stronger unions to be able to lift up working people. We, there's like a, yeah, they're a fucking radical, that's not my party. And it's like, well, now-

• 1:12:04Ezra Klein?

  Are you so friendly to the establishment Democrats in the way that you're asking them to be friendly to you?

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  I think the people whom I'm critical of oftentimes are not engaging in good faith the way that they're critical of our. Like, I don't think, I think that when their positions are compromised because of the money they take and the people they're answering to, and that that is what is hurting the brand, and then they have the audacity to throw other people under the bus for it, it's bad faith and it's the problem.

• 1:12:31Ezra Klein?

  I, I'm just saying, and I don't actually have, I'm a big tent party guy. I've done a lot of work on this and, and I think I've proven this out. But I am just saying that sometimes I, I find that both sides feel the other one, that, that they're willing to play nice and the other one isn't. It's like you're, the way I would describe what you are saying to me here is the Democratic Party, to the extent such a thing exists, but the sort of elites of it should be more embracing of Claire Valdez and should recognize that even if they have disagreements with her, you know, everybody's kind of on the same side. You know, and you're like, look, the problem with them is that they're corrupt.

• 1:13:10Ezra Klein?

  And I think they might, you know, not see that as such a friendly way to frame the, the work they've been doing to say, try to win a majority.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  I, I mean, I-

• 1:13:20Ezra Klein?

  I'm not even saying they're not corrupt, but, and I'll just say that this is like, actually one of the critiques I've heard of you, of fight of, it's like, you'll say they're corrupt and then it's like, you know, I actually like Tom Steyer quite a bit. But it's like, as long as you're working with the right billionaires, it's fine. As long as you are working with the right, more establishment candidates like Michael Asher in New York 12, which I think you were a little bit involved in that race, it's fine, that anybody's fine as long as they're on our side. And that, you know, if they're on the other side, then they're possibly a corrupt traitor of the people.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  And what I'd say about that spectrum of candidates, none of them take money from lobbyists.

• 1:13:57Ezra Klein?

  Well, Tom is a billionaire, he doesn't need to-

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  None of them take money from corporate PACs. All of them have a deep belief in government's role and what it should do. And I think we should give a ton of leeway for people running in Trump plus 20 places. What doesn't feel like it quite corresponds is a lot of the people who are like the harshest critics are actually not running in those Trump plus 20 places. Like, you hear Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown punching left a whole lot less than you hear like, you know, the frequenters of certain cable news circuits who are just members of Congress in like D plus 10 seats or something. If you look at the people who really have proven records of overperformance,

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  it's not the tactic they're taking. That's not to say they're like in lockstep with the party at large and everything, but they're not reaching those overperformances by just piling on to the left. They're just carving out unique things to their places.

• 1:14:55Ezra Klein?

  So I want to loop back to Platner here at the end. One of the things I thought was just most interesting about the Platner story was that he was recruited, that you all went out and found a candidate you thought would fit Maine. And to a large extent, you were right. Now it fell apart at the end.

• 1:15:13Ezra Klein?

  But that sense that there are different kinds of candidates out there who could work in this moment, I don't think that's something that people should throw overboard. And sort of my question for you, and honestly for sort of like others who might want to learn from what you all at least were trying to do there, is what have you learned, both for good and bad, about how to find candidates? If you want to say the Democratic Party needs to recruit a different kind of person to run, but also you want to take seriously that, that people who have not been in politics and have not been aggressively vetted in politics might come with more downside risk? What would be your, what would be your process next time?

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  I think that there is a deep, deep hunger for a different kind of politics. There is a deep, deep frustration with the status quo. And what we're seeing right now is not a democracy the way the founders intended it. You know, it was supposed to be something that looked more like a farmer going to serve their two terms than going home and a small business owner going to serve their two terms and coming home. And it was, you know, the idea of it being almost a cathedral represented of the fabric of America. And we are so far from that. And I think that is why we have so many of the problems we have. Only 2% of Congress is from the working class. It is not baffling that we have policies that are screwing over the working class.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  And so there are many things that are devastating about all of this. But one of the many is the degree in which people who'd kind of written politics off felt inspired again. And I think when we do that, we're asking for so much for people to believe that maybe their lives can actually get better, maybe politics can actually be a tool for good. We can't let them down. And that's going to mean different standards. That's going to mean a far more robust vetting process. That's going to mean, I think, bringing in more partners and larger conversations. But I think there, there's too much at stake to walk away and things are so clearly not working the way they are right now. We need to find a way to bring more people in.

• 1:17:19Ezra Klein?

  And then also our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, a really stunning kind of human portrayal of ramifications of the Holocaust and that entire era. Shame by McKenna Goodman, beautiful book of, of kind of the friction of isolation and dreams and anxiety. And, and again, some way it's not at all a political book, but it feels political in the way of the conversation we're having. I think the results of modern society on people. And then The Fourth Branch by Daniel Squadron. I think it's a really astute observation of where political power is and how we can kind of shape a government that's on a day-to-day basis improving people's lives.

• 1:18:04Ezra Klein?

  Boris Katz, thank you very much.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me as well.