Ezra Klein on Where Democrats Go From Here

Summary

Pod Save America: Ezra Klein on Where Democrats Go From Here

Episode Summary

In this insightful episode of Pod Save America, host Jon Favreau engages in a comprehensive discussion with Ezra Klein, the host of The Ezra Klein Show. The conversation delves deep into the current political landscape, focusing on the challenges facing the Democratic Party, the dynamics of the Trump administration, and the broader implications of political factionalism and polarization in the United States. Below is a structured summary capturing the key points, notable quotes, and overarching themes discussed during the episode.

---

1. Personal Reflections on the Political Climate

Timestamp: 01:35 - 03:26

• Ezra Klein opens the conversation by addressing the emotional toll of recent election results. He humorously critiques the Democratic Party's focus on trauma over the middle class, stating,

  "This is why Democrats lose elections. We're all about trauma and not about the middle class."
  (02:17)

• Both hosts express a shared sense of unease, highlighting the pervasive tension within political discourse and the personal impact of political developments.

2. Trump Administration’s Personnel and Policy Moves

Timestamp: 03:26 - 08:22

• The discussion shifts to the recent announcements of Trump administration personnel, with Ezra expressing disappointment,

  "That's the energy I was looking for in a second Trump term."
  (03:26)

• Jon Favreau lists notable appointments, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy leading the "Department of Government Efficiency," emphasizing the unconventional nature of these choices. Ezra counters the expectation of a unified Trump administration, predicting increased factionalism due to the diverse backgrounds and ideologies of the appointees.

3. Factionalism in Political Parties

Timestamp: 08:22 - 16:19

• Ezra Klein argues against the notion that Trump's party is more united than before, suggesting that the inclusion of figures like Musk introduces new sources of internal conflict. He notes,

  "I don't think you're actually gonna have much more factional infighting than people are prepared for."
  (07:00)

• The conversation explores how factionalism differs between Trump's first term and the potential second term, highlighting the absence of moderates who previously held back extreme elements within the administration.

4. The Democratic Party’s Loss of the Working Class

Timestamp: 12:42 - 22:56

• Favreau brings up the decline of the Democratic Party’s appeal to working-class voters, prompting Klein to elaborate on the party’s disconnect. He asserts,

  "Democrats have lost touch with working class voters."
  (16:19)

• Klein explains that the Democratic strategy overly relies on policy-driven support without addressing the aspirational and identity-based needs of working-class voters. He criticizes Bernie Sanders' approach as overly unidimensional, failing to resonate with broader segments of the electorate.

• The hosts discuss how policies like the Child Tax Credit and housing initiatives failed to gain popular support despite their intended benefits, suggesting a deeper disconnect between Democratic policies and voter priorities.

5. Polarization and Competitiveness in American Politics

Timestamp: 25:29 - 36:17

• Klein touches on political polarization, arguing that the current era is marked by unprecedented competitiveness between the two major parties. He asserts,

  "Polarization does not imply competitiveness."
  (12:42)

• The conversation delves into the historical context of party dominance, illustrating how the Democratic and Republican parties have alternatively held sway, leading to the highly competitive environment seen today.

• The hosts explore the implications of this competitiveness, noting that traditional models of incumbency and party loyalty are no longer reliable predictors of electoral outcomes.

6. Messaging and Policy Disconnect Within the Democratic Party

Timestamp: 36:17 - 61:00

• Favreau and Klein discuss the messaging failures of Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris, who struggled to balance progressive policies with broader voter appeal. Harris's inability to authentically represent either the progressive wing or the moderate base led to mixed electoral performances.

• Klein critiques the Democratic Party's reliance on ideological interest groups, such as the ACLU, which often pushed for extreme positions that alienated mainstream voters. He states,

  "The Democratic Party settled on in practice... listening to groups that actually didn't represent their voters very well."
  (63:14)

• The impact of social media and public factional battles is highlighted as exacerbating internal divisions, leading to public displays of contempt rather than constructive policy debates.

7. Role of Interest Groups and Social Media in Shaping Policy

Timestamp: 61:00 - 66:35

• The episode examines how interest groups like the ACLU have wielded disproportionate influence over Democratic policy positions, often at the expense of electoral viability. Klein questions the strategic decisions behind such endorsements and their real-world effectiveness.

• The hosts discuss how social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have amplified internal party conflicts, making them more visible to the public and contributing to a sense of disunity.

8. Governance Failures and the Affordability Crisis

Timestamp: 66:35 - 78:51

• A significant portion of the conversation focuses on the Democratic Party's governance failures, particularly in addressing the affordability crisis. Klein emphasizes the importance of effective governance in states like Colorado, where policies focused on affordability have yielded positive results,

  "We're releasing supply of things people need to buy so they're cheaper and we're making people prosperous so they can afford things."
  (76:00)

• He contrasts this with states like California and New York, where mismanagement and high living costs have led to significant voter dissatisfaction and population losses to more affordable states like Texas and Florida.

• Favreau suggests that authentic and consistent messaging around affordability and economic well-being can resonate more effectively with voters than shifting focus to transient cultural issues.

9. Concluding Remarks: Path Forward for Democrats

Timestamp: 78:27 - End

• The hosts conclude on an optimistic note, advocating for Democrats to focus on policies that tangibly improve voters' lives, such as making living affordable and addressing infrastructural failures. Favreau remarks,

  "We're all going to move to Colorado."
  (76:53)

• Klein stresses the need for the Democratic Party to reconnect with the working class by ensuring that policies not only promise economic redistribution but also reflect the aspirations and identities of their constituents.

• The episode ends with a call to action for Democrats to "keep fixing the Democratic Party before it's too late," underscoring the urgency of addressing internal divisions and policy misalignments to secure future electoral success.

---

Notable Quotes:

1. Ezra Klein

   "This is why Democrats lose elections. We're all about trauma and not about the middle class."
   (02:17)

2. Ezra Klein

   "You have to figure out what's wrong with your theory, not just what's wrong with the electorate."
   (22:56)

3. Jon Favreau

   "It might just be specific to this election... how to govern."
   (27:36)

4. Ezra Klein

   "If you are giving people what you say they want and they are not voting for you... you want to build a coalition that includes the people you say your politics are on behalf of."
   (16:19)

5. Jon Favreau

   "It's not really about the position you hold. It's about what you're focusing on."
   (76:00)

---

Conclusion

This episode of Pod Save America with Ezra Klein offers a thorough examination of the internal and external challenges facing the Democratic Party. From the intricate dynamics within the Trump administration to the Democratic Party's struggle to connect with the working class, the conversation underscores the necessity for authentic, aspirational, and effective governance. The hosts advocate for a strategic realignment of Democratic policies and messaging to rebuild trust and broaden their electoral coalition, emphasizing the importance of addressing both economic and identity-based concerns to navigate the increasingly polarized American political landscape.

Transcript

[Ezra Klein]

The kind of burgers you get today tells you a lot about yourself. You're either someone who settles for sad, same old, same old burgers, or you're Edit Carl's Jr. Obsessed with a tangy OG Western bacon cheeseburger, demanding a house made guacamole, loaded guac bacon fired up for the insanely hot El Diablo, or craving a classic Charbold famous star. Give in to your flavored cravings. Do your mouth to Carl's Jr Big Burger good Burger.

[Jon Favreau]

If you nerd out about all things science, I'm excited to tell you about Radiolab, a podcast from WNYC hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Radiolab's goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that? Whether it's chemistry, politics, new technologies, ancient beliefs, even sex of bugs, Radiolab's rigorous curiosity gets you the answers so you can see the world anew. Radiolab adventures on the edge of what you think you know. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau, and my guest host for today is a friend and fellow podcaster who, like me and Nancy Pelosi, is probably not getting an invite to this year's White House Christmas party. The New York Times. Ezra Klein, host of the Ezra Klein Show.

[Ezra Klein]

Good to be here, man. Here at the end. Or maybe the beginning of all things.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes. Yeah, well, we'll see. We're going to talk all about what happened last week, what's next, and where Democrats go from here. But first, I'm just curious how, on a personal level, you've been processing the election results and the new reality in which we find ourselves again.

[Ezra Klein]

We're starting in the therapy space.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

This is why Democrats lose elections. We're all about trauma and not about the middle class. Look, I'm a professional political journalist. I will feel my feelings in three months. Right now, there's a lot to do.

[Jon Favreau]

I sort of feel the same way. And I'm not a professional political journalist. I'm a fool.

[Ezra Klein]

You just play one on a podcast.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, right. Yeah. So, no, but I kind of feel the same way. I see you're back on Twitter, which is always a signal to me that we are indeed in a bad place.

[Ezra Klein]

I like that. I've become. My deciding to tweet for a couple days has become like a harbinger of doom.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, it happens.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm like a horseman. I come back to Twitter, people are.

[Jon Favreau]

Like, uh, oh, I mean, look, I'm staying on. I've already said I'm staying on Twitter until it's over. I'm not.

[Ezra Klein]

Twitter is good for Twitter is bad for many things, most things, people's minds, American politics in general. But it's good for factionalism. And I think this is a factional moment. There are debates that have to happen inside the Democratic Party, inside the liberal coalition, and I think some of them are or are going to happen there, or at least I, I am trying to push some of them forward there. I try to use Twitter very instrumentally rather than having it use me. And this is a moment when I want to try to use it.

[Jon Favreau]

That is the way to do it. All right, let's talk about the news. There's been a flurry of Trump personnel news and rumored policy moves over the last few days. Marco Rubio for secretary of State is a little more neocon than I expected. Fox News host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.

[Ezra Klein]

That's the energy I was looking for in a second Trump term. Like for a couple of days, all of the, the announcements were pretty normal people. And then I woke up today. I'm like, ah, here we go.

[Jon Favreau]

That's this guy. Real crazy. Christine Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, John Ratcliffe at CIA, Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel. And then we've got Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead something called the Department of Government Efficiency, or doge, where they will, quote, provide advice and guidance from outside of government. The next administration is also gearing up for mass deportations, new tariffs, and reportedly drafting an executive order to fast track the removal of generals Trump doesn't care for. In fairness, these are all things that he promised to do during the campaign. I don't think it's especially useful to predict or even speculate about what the next Trump administration will or won't do. But this time around, I'm trying to avoid reacting to every personnel and policy announcement with outrage or alarm, both because Trump was quite clear in the campaign what he intends to do and because I do think that most people start to tune out all the hysteria after a while. But what do you think? What's, what's, your general reaction been to this last week of announcements?

[Ezra Klein]

I have a lot of reactions. You know, I had Vivek Ramaswamy on my show a couple of weeks before the election, and we had a long and I thought really interesting conversation. But one of the foundations of the conversation for me, one of the reasons I wanted to have him on was he had just released this book, which in many ways an odd book, which sort of felt like a holdover of his campaign, but it was framed in this much more distinctive way where he was saying, inside what he calls the America first movement, the Trump movement, there's a schism between what he called the national libertarians, which he was presenting himself as a leader of. And I'd say you want to think about this as more traditional Republicanism blended with more anti immigration sentiment, more nationalistic sentiment, more skepticism of China, sort of a mix between Paul Ryan and Donald Trump and the national patronage side, which was sort of implicitly J.D. vance, and that was much more about shutting down trade. Right? Ramaswamy wanted more trade with our friends. The national conservative side or national patronage side wanted less. And one of the things over the course of that conversation, I came to realize, because there was this question of, well, is this a live schism, right? Is this something real that we're looking at? But as he spoke and as we spoke, I was like, you see Elon Musk as your patron, right? The person who you're describing who might be influential in the Trump administration, who has these ideas more or less is Musk, who at that point had sort of emerged as Trump's most heavyweight donor advisor buddy. And I think that has only become true with Musk since. And now you see Musk and Ramaswamy here. So I don't think actually Vivek had that wrong at all. And the reason I bring all this up is that I think there's been a view that compared to the first Trump term, this Trump term, to reuse a word I just talked about with Twitter, is not going to be highly factional. That in Trump 1, you had Jared Kushner and Ivanka and the sort of globalists, you had Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and the Nationalists or the America first crowd. You had a sort of national security establishment around H.R. mcMasters and people like that. You had sort of Gary Cohn, who was again, more with Kushner, and you can sort of name like three or four of these that kept the White House quite split. And the view was they've gotten over that. They knew that they had lots of people working and they knew they were a traditional Republican Party of Mike Pence and a lot of people in the staffing levels of the administration. And the view was they've gone past that now, right? The Republican Party is Trump's party. He owns it. Lara Trump is the co chair of the rnc. You're gonna have a Much more united Trump administration if he wins again, which of course he did. And I don't think you are. I think you're actually gonna have much more factional infighting than people are prepared for. Because one thing you don't have now are all the parts of the Trump administration who don't like Donald Trump. Everybody is much better at appealing to him, supporting him, proving their loyalty to him. It's not rex Tillerson and HMR McMaster and Gary Cohn. It's all these people who are fully bought in and are trying to win the King's favor. So I think you're from the very beginning here, Marco, Ru, Rubio, JD Vance, these are all very different people. Seeing the beginnings of an administration that has not decided what its ideology is and is, in fact, putting people in different spots who have very, very different views on questions that were thought to be maybe settled.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. I mean, I think you also have just a less homogeneous coalition that brought him.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, RFK Jr. Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, RFK Jr. And then you got Elon Musk and the all in guys and that whole crew. And I do think that, like just watching, it's early days, but like, Elon Musk follow Donald Trump around everywhere, and him just like showing up at White House or wanting to go to the White House meetings and showing up in Washington and everything, like, it's fine for now. I think there are both personality reasons and policy reasons why that's not gonna last. And I don't think Trump's gonna like that all that much either.

[Ezra Klein]

I think that's right. I hesitate to predict too much about Donald Trump. And these things can always settle into a middle ground. Right. I think for both Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the other one is their newest toy. Right. It's exciting to have a new toy. It's exciting to have a new friend. Exciting to have a new kind of power center allied with you. I sometimes find it hard to know what to think or even how to predict where the Musk thing goes for two reasons. I mean, one is that I don't know, compared to some of the yahoos around Donald Trump, Elon Musk actually has built to me very impressive things in the real world. Right. His politics are obviously not mine, but SpaceX, Tesla, this is a person who knows a lot about how to get some pretty important things done. The way he's run Twitter, not great from a lot of perspectives, but he clearly ran it well to his own ends. Elon Musk is a quite effective person. And compared to some of the dunces Donald Trump sometimes surrounds himself with, maybe that's for the good. And at least Elon Musk has a view about emerging technologies in the future that think it is important for people around the president to be thinking a lot about. On the other hand, Elon Musk is also the democracy nightmare scenario in a way, right? The thing that not the January 6th nightmare scenario, but the more banal and long predicted nightmare scenario of a polity that has this much role for money in politics. What happens if the person with the most money decides to buy the politics of the country? And it's not that there weren't many big donors on the Kamala Harris side, but the rumor or the reporting I was seeing today was that Elon Musk is making it clear that if you're a House Republican and you oppose Donald Trump's agenda, he will fund a primary challenge to you. And he was just pumping money in a wild way into the campaign. So sort of Musk is going to Trump basically and saying, you keep me near you. You listen to me, you will never worry about money again. There is no amount of money the Democrats can. Their billion dollars was impressive, But Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter so he could just play around with it and increase his influence. There is no amount of money the Democrats can spend that is like what Elon Musk can spend just out of his own pocket. And so this thing that has always been predicted, what if you have one of these guys who is truly rich and he is the richest man in the world decide that what they want to buy is all of politics? We're about to see that theory tested. And from any kind of Democratic representativeness theory, it's a pretty scary one to watch playing out.

[Jon Favreau]

It certainly is. It also, I think, leaves Trump and Musk open. There's a vulnerability there which is like oligarchs in control of the government. If the government is not delivering sort of effective governance and people's lives are getting better and they see Elon Musk there, you know, all the time promising a lot of shit that doesn't come true. I do think that could be a vulnerability, but we'll have to see. Let's talk about what the Democratic Party can learn from 2024 and what the best path forward might look like. I know you've been thinking and talking and writing a lot about this, and I thought the way that you frame the challenge in your Twitter thread from this week is a good place for us to start. You wrote the hard question isn't the two points that would have decided the election. It's how to build a Democratic Party that isn't always two points away from losing to Donald Trump or worse. You wrote an entire book about political polarization. It seems like in order to move beyond a situation where we're always only two points away from losing will also require us to move beyond a polarized, closely divided political environment. How do you think about breaking out of that?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, it's a good question. One thing I will say is that polarization does not imply competitiveness. I always find it fascinating the political scientists, even the ones who study why this is. This is a very unusually competitive era in American politics. It used to be a truism that American politics had a sun and a moon party. So in the post Civil War era, the Republican Party is the sun party and the Democratic Party is the moon. The Republican Party is very, very dominant for a long time. In the post New Deal era, the Democratic Party becomes much more potent and it sort of dominates politics until you could call it maybe the 70s, the 80s, with, with the rise of Reagan, and then in sort of the post Reagan era, things begin to get very competitive and they begin to trade back and forth. And we've never had a period in American politics at the Congressional, Senate and White House levels this competitive. The last three presidential elections have just switched back and forth, right? Usually not. What we see, a pretty simple model of elections is incumbents win, right? If you make that your model, you will usually be right. And recently hasn't been right, at least at the presidential level. So one thing is, why are we so close and there's not. People have theories about this. It's actually really not well understood. Then you have this sort of other thing, which is about 2024 and realignments. I think a pretty easy way to think about the electorates right now is that the natural split for American politics over the past couple of years has been 5,248 Democrats, right? And in 2020, where the coalitions look very much like they did in 2024, you have Donald Trump as the incumbent. You have a bad year for an incumbent. It's the pandemic. He's shitty at being the president. So the incumbent suffers a negative 3 point people are mad at you. Penalty, right? And that brings the coalitions down to Democrats winning a popular vote, a victory of about four and a half points. Right? Fast forward four years. Biden Harris for the incumbents. It's a terrible year worldwide for incumbents. Post pandemic Inflation, et cetera. Say you have another incumbent penalty of two to three points. That is Donald Trump winning by one to two points, which is exactly where we are. So it doesn't look to me for all of the grand pronouncements that Republicans have assembled this completely dominant electoral majority, but two things do seem true, which is one, you have three elections now that Donald Trump either has won or could have won very easily, at least in the Electoral College. And the other is that even putting aside competitiveness, Democrats are losing the working class. They just are. They are losing the working class, and they are increasingly losing the multiracial working class. That's not gone yet, but it is following the same trend as the white working class. And if you are a party that your reason for being at some fundamental, characterological, philosophical level is you want to represent the interests of the working class, you feel that American life is economically unfair, and you feel that it is that people are born without the same shot and that we do not have, as it got caught a lot in the campaign, an opportunity economy. Then it actually, whether you're winning elections or not, to have the people you are supposed to represent not voting for you should be taken as a kind of spiritual crisis for a party. Right? Not like, well, if we can win the suburbs, we can still win. No, you want to build a coalition that includes the people you say your politics are on behalf of and not just come up with a lot of excuses for why they're not voting for you, even though you are certain that you best represent their interests. That's a very condescending, an anti politics form of politics, an anti representational politics that I think it's very important that the Democrats don't lapse into.

[Jon Favreau]

This, to me, is the crux of the problem. And I've been. I mean, look, I'm biased here. My college thesis was about white working class defection from the Democratic Party. This was in 2002.

[Ezra Klein]

How to create it. You were plotting out the next decade or two of supporting the Democratic Party.

[Jon Favreau]

And we can get into this. Like, didn't really expect that in 2008, the answer would be Barack Obama from Chicago. Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Isn't that a thing?

[Jon Favreau]

I know, but. So the difficult question, I think is why and what to do about it. And it's made more difficult now that it is not just white working class defection. I think after 16, a lot of the analysis was, well, it was racial resentment that drove white voters to vote for Donald Trump, and that's why we have Trump. And obviously, you Know, we could get into a whole thing about, it's complicated, there is some racial resentment, but clearly we have now moved beyond just racial resentment as a reason for voting for Donald Trump. As we see, you know, Latino voters, some black men, Asian American voters, all starting to move towards Trump and Republicans. Bernie Sanders said after the election the Democrats have abandoned working class people. Others have noted the Biden administration, Democrats in Congress have actually done quite a bit for working class middle class voters. What do you think about like how the party thinks about sort of winning back these voters? Is it, you know, there's pure economics, there's policy, there's attitude, there's branding. Like, what do you think?

[Ezra Klein]

I think the thing that one can say without it even being questionable is Democrats have lost touch with working class voters. Working class voter like Democrats have had, I think for a very long time a simple and pretty materialist view of voters, particularly working class voters, which is if your policies are sufficiently redistributionist, right, if they are sufficiently oriented in terms of you can run a tax policy table and see where the money is going towards the voters you think of as a working class, they should support you. And if they don't, that requires some kind of extraordinary explanation. Maybe they are being turned against you on cultural issues. Maybe there is misinformation or media ecosystem you don't know how to penetrate or that are lying to people about you. Maybe they're mad about a war, maybe they just don't like your candidate. But if voters are not following the money, basically then something is wrong and you just gotta figure out the thing that is wrong. You have to unkink the system so voters know that you are giving them more money and support you. I think that's fundamentally on some level what Bernie Sanders is saying there. When he says Democrats have abandoned the working class, he means that their policies are not sufficiently big and redistributionist enough in favor of the working class. Now, as you note, the first thing to say about this is Joe Biden has been the most left presidency on economics of my lifetime. He's been the most pro union president by far. Even though Democrats have lost, are losing union voters by larger and larger numbers. He has been kind of big on industrial policy, all these things people used to say as explanations of it. Trade. They have not gone back to neoliberal trade economics. The, you know, they tried to expand the child tax credit, right. Republicans have been quite far right on a bunch of things. So the sort of basic test of the model isn't working, by the way, nor is Bernie Sanders running way ahead of Kamala Harris in Vermont. I mean, I haven't looked at the latest count, but when I last looked, he was running slightly behind her. So the sort of old sense that Bernie Sanders is way outperforming other Democrats is no longer true. Although you do see him some places. Right. AOC outperformed Harris quite a bit in her district. I think the problem sometimes with the Sanders wing of the party is that it just has an overly unidimensional sense of working class voters or just voters in general. Right. It's a little bit too Marxist in this way. And it sort of believes any departing from that model of politics is just some kind of aberration to be explained or worked out. But even if you're just thinking about economics, when I've been talking to various people practicing politics, I've been talking to Republican pollsters. I did an episode with Patrick Raffini, whose book very much predicted this election. And one point he'll make to you is that when he has been polling working class Latino voters, they feel the Democratic Party has lost touch with them on economics, but not because the social safety net proposals are insufficiently generous, but because there's not a language of aspiration. They're being talked about. They need things, not about what they can achieve. The emphasis on work itself was a very big part of both the Clinton and the Obama presidencies. And I'm not saying it's been totally absent in the Biden presidency, but the idea of the worker as an aspirational category is important. I think it's very hard to separate this also, by the way, from Donald Trump and Elon Musk, which this is something I said in that thread and I saw people sort of scratching their head at it. But I think it's very important. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are not just billionaires. They are people's idea of what a billionaire is. Their entire public Persona. First Donald Trump for decades in American life, and now Elon Musk. They are the public's idea of a rich guy, Right? If you make it more than anyone else has ever made it, you could be Donald Trump or Elon Musk, Right? They're not some unknown private equity, you know, plutocrat. These are the guys who play rich guys.

[Jon Favreau]

They're not Mitt Romney.

[Ezra Klein]

They're not Mitt Romney. And I actually think it's really important they understand something about how economics is not just a people have more than just material economic needs. There are economic identities or economic aspirations or economic stories. They're telling about themselves and their communities and these really matter too. So yeah, I do think there are a lot of ways that Democrats have sort of in the Bernie Sanders language there, abandoned the working class. But again, I would use the term lost touch. I think they've sort of lost touch with like the texture of what the people, again they say they're representing want. When you are giving people what you say they want and they are not voting for you, which I do think is true of sort of the Bernie Sanders Joe Biden economic policy. There's a reason Bernie Sanders was defending Joe Biden up until the end because Biden had been more aligned to Bernie Sanders than any other president. And it is not having the effect you think it will have on the electorate. You have to ask what's wrong with your theory, not just what's wrong with the electorate.

[Jon Favreau]

Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but before we do that, in a moment we could all use a push forward. Stacey Abrams gave a really helpful post election pep talk on her show Assembly Required. She talks about leaning in to understand the voters we lost and how we can work together going forward. Stacey is going to have another episode out this Thursday on the election. I highly recommend you check both out and subscribe to Assembly Required wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. Pod Save America is brought to you by Indochino. You can't go wrong with a classic suit, right? That's right. It's you look good, feel good. You look good, feel good. With weddings to galas, fall brings more opportunities to dress up. Indochino makes it easy to get custom men's and women's wear that will turn heads with made to measure suits, dress shirts, blazers and more. Their latest fall winter collection combines classic tailoring with contemporary aesthetics inspired by Europe's most iconic designers. Design the suit of your dreams and fine tune every detail, including lapels, linings, monograms, pocket flaps. The best part is that you can get a tailored fit from home. Set up your measurement profile on Indochino's website and choose customizations without even leaving the house. Or opt in for a premium in person experience. Book an appointment at a showroom near you and let an Indochino style guide walk you through every step. I got two Indochino seats at home. I've had them for years. They look fantastic. It was very affordable. The process is very easy and they look great. This fall, update your wardrobe to quintessential suiting elements with contemporary flair from Indochina. Visit Indochina.com and use code CROOKED to get 10% off any purchase of $399 or more. That's 10% off at I N--O-H-I-N-O.com promo code CROOKED this podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place. All on your terms. You can get 10% off your first purchase of a website or [e-mail] Crooked Introducing Design Intelligence from Squarespace Combining two decades of industry leading design expertise with cutting edge AI technology to unlock your strongest creative potential, Design Intelligence empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to their unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity to use across one's entire online presence. Presence Squarespace is great. You don't have to be an engineer or know code to build a website. You just gotta get some Squarespace and easy peasy looks super professional. It's easy to do.

[Ezra Klein]

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[Ezra Klein]

From.

[C]

A massive presidential election to yet another war in the Middle east and whatever drama is unfolding on TikTok, the world is a complicated place. Hi, I'm Jane Costen, former writer and podcaster for places like the New York Times, the Atlantic, and National Review. And now I'm here to hang out with you five days a week on what a Day. Crooked's daily news podcast. In just 20 minutes, you'll get the top news and stories that matter most to the way you live, work and play. You can listen to the show wherever you get your podcasts or search what a Day on your nearest YouTube search bar to watch the new video version. And while you're at it, consider subscribing to what a Day's companion newsletter.

[Jon Favreau]

There's a couple different challenges here. One is just, and it might just be specific to this election, which is the way that the Biden administration and I think Democratic pundits and others handled the persistence of high prices after sort of inflation has has fallen. And Annie Lowry, who you happen to be married to, just wrote a piece in the Atlantic about this where she pointed out that, you know, people aren't just frustrated about the cost of living because Democrats or the media, you know, failed to adequately convey how wonderful this economy is, but because people are actually struggling with high costs, some due to inflation, high interest rates, and some just, you know, on healthcare, childcare that have been building for years. So I do wonder, like, how to tease that out from sort of the more cultural issues with appearing in touch with the electorate, just from a policy level. Like, you know what, I don't know if there's anything the Biden administration could have done differently here, but I am thinking a lot about where we go from here in terms of talking about costs and sort of this affordability crisis.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, this is. And yeah, Annie Lowry, America's greatest journalist, this is where I think it's useful to ask this question of are you explaining the marginal difference between the 2020 and 2024 results or are you explaining the 2020 coalition we saw, which was largely the same coalition with the incumbent penalty applied to Donald Trump and not to Biden Harris, because Democrats were losing the working class in 2020 when inflation was not a problem.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

And I think that's a really important thing to say now. We've seen this trend in a lot of wealthy democracies, right, this sort of realignment around education. There's a lot of theorizing about why it is it was happening. It was present in the 2016 election. Right. This has been building for a very long time. It is not just like two years ago this began. And so one way I think just like to tease it away from prices. I think prices very likely were the margin in this election, right, from moving Democrats to a plus three in the popular vote to a minus one to two in the popular vote. So if you'd had none of the inflation and the economy was better, I think Democrats probably would have won, but they were losing the working class before and they would have like the way Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 is that he increased Democratic margins, particularly among college educated white voters. Right. This was a kind of big point everybody was making about the suburbs. The reason Donald Trump outperformed his polls in 2020 was he surprised heavily to the upside with working class Latino voters in particular black voters to some degree too. And so he was beginning to reshuffle the coalitions even then. So I think the way you can tease out like is this inflation epiphenomena or is this something broader? It's just like, was it going on before inflation? And the answer is, yeah, it was.

[Jon Favreau]

I do wonder. You talked about sort of losing the idea of like, you know, the aspirational view of what it means to, like, you know, achieve the American dream and work. I also wonder if there's like, a responsibility part of it that we've lost a bit. I mean, I think about the child tax credit, right, which we thought Democrats thought was going to be quite popular. I think it's good policy, for sure. I believe that thought it was going to be quite popular. And then after it was extended, people thought, okay, this is going to be popular. And then when you looked at polls, it always polled towards the bottom of the list. And I also thought about this with Kamala Harris's $25,000 down payment on helping people afford a new home, right. It didn't test as well as the building 3 million new homes did. And I do wonder if some of the desire for redistributive economic policies that you hear from Bernie, like, it hits people so that, like, well, I don't want handouts from the government. I don't want people. I don't want the government to just give people money. I don't think that's a good idea. I want to make sure that work is rewarded. Right. Which is, you know, Biden had said this in his 20 campaign. It was part of Obama's rhetoric. It was Clinton rhetoric. You can go back through successful Democrats, and I don't know, that feels like it has sort of fallen out of the lexicon of Democratic rhetoric, at least on the presidential level.

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, I think there's something to this. God, sometimes like more, more, more in a question than you can answer. I think that after the Obama era and the post financial crisis, sort of slow growth turnaround, a bunch of kind of shockwaves, intellectual shockwaves and recriminations hit Democratic economic policymaking and political sort of economic thinking. And one of the big ones was that first Democrats were losing the working class, right? And they were losing it because starting with Bill Clinton and continuing into Barack Obama's what was then called sort of the continuation of neoliberalism, which isn't exactly how I saw it at the time. I had seen Obama's actually, in many ways a pretty big break with Bill Clinton's politics. But there was this sort of view that we had been in this neoliberal era, which I think there's at least some truth to that, stretched across Clinton, across Obama. And in it, Democrats had become overly narrow and targeted and specific in their policies, right. They weren't building these big things like FDR did, Social Security. They weren't building as with the exception maybe the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid, these universalistic programs that had survived since Great Society and grown since then. And there was sort of a turn in the party on this, sort of like the deserving and the undeserving. There were the rise, and this is I think actually a quite big thing in the party. These sort of nonprofit groups and foundations, the intellectual infrastructure of the party became very dominated by a very, very intellectual and quite left class, which I am very comfortable among. And I'm not saying I'm not sort of part of this what will get called gentry liberals by a guy like Michael Lind, who's been a critic of it. But there were very, very strong intellectual currents in all that. Welfare reform was sort of looked back on as not good politics, but, but a policy disaster. I largely agree that it was bad policy, but there was a reason it was important in politics at the time. And all that just kind of fell out of favor. And I will also say that I think this is inseparable From Bernie Sanders 2016 run and the strength that he showed. And then the rise of Red Rose Twitter and Jacobin and the sort of democratic socialist part of the party in 2016 and 2020. Those were incredibly live forces. And the sort of traditional Democratic Party, or what we might think of as a traditional Democratic Party was trying to figure out, I think not cynically like actually trying to understand it and sort of absorb more of that thinking. And again, that thinking was much more big government, right? Much more, you know, free. Right. Bernie ran on free college and free health care. And of course these things were never free. Right? Free college isn't free. It's paid for by taxpayers. Canceling student loans is not free. Somebody actually does pay for that, right? We don't just like the money doesn't just go nowhere. Free healthcare, right? Like you actually do pay for it. Like I'm a healthcare wonk by training. Single payer is something you pay for. And if you're going to do it, you end up abolishing private health insurance. And this was the great debate of the 2020 primaries. But I think all this, you cannot unwind this from the center of the Democratic Party trying to figure out, okay, things are moving left. There's all this populist energy, all this anti establishment energy. Our old incrementalism is not going to meet the moment. And trying to come up with some new answer to when maybe some of the old answers actually still had a lot of life in them. One of the just I Think difficult truths is that it is very hard to separate politics from candidates and candidates can the right candidate can win with I think very different politics. Right. Donald Trump is very different from Bernie Sanders is very different from Barack Obama is very different from Bill Clinton, is very different from George W. Bush. But things need to be authentic to that candidate and that person. And sort of when you say at the end there, I recognize there are a lot of pieces to this answer, but when you say at the end there, it kind of fell out in Kamala Harris campaign from where it was in Joe Biden's campaign in 2020 or Barack Obama's campaign. Kamala Harris has a lot of great qualities as a politician, but she never came from a deeply economic wing of the party. Right. That's just not who she was. It's not what her profile was in California. Right. She could have really run as a law and order candidate in some ways particularly if that hadn't been jettisoned 2020 election by 2019 and 2020 in her campaign then. But she just wasn't associated with any of these politics. She didn't have Bernie Sanders authenticity running as fundamentally burn the system down socialist or AOC's populism or Joe Biden was associated with the hard work wing of the Democratic Party. I mean he was a quite different and very moderate figure for much of his life. And Barack Obama was a kind of master of, of telling stories about America and about Americans. And you just like I think a lot of things can work here, but you need the candidate like policies are a way the candidate communicates about themselves. But if the communication about themselves doesn't feel authentic, then the policy doesn't work at all. And I think that sort of happened here.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean she also had the option. I always thought of running as more of a Katie Porter, Elizabeth Warren type populist in the sense of she was attorney general, took on the big banks for the homeowner settlement. Right. That was a very popular thing to do. Didn't talk about it a ton. Took on for profit colleges. Right. Like there's towards the end there were a couple times where she's talked about like, you know, I'm not from Washington, I haven't spent my career here. So I've been outside Washington. I've taken on corporate interests like it was maybe an option to her, but it just wasn't her.

[Ezra Klein]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Like that's, you could tell that's not like what she believed in her core. So it probably wouldn't have worked. I have been thinking A lot about, like, the party's reaction to Trump's first win in 2016 and how that played out specifically in the 2020 primary in which, you know, a lot of the positions that Kamala Harris took then certainly came back to bite her. And a lot of the candidates who ran that. And it was interesting because like in 2018, you know, we have these midterms and a lot of the Democrats who won in the midterms from that class, some of them were quite progressive, some of them were quite moderate. A lot of them just fit their district really well. It was a big diverse class of House members and senators. And then in the primary, there was this race, I don't want to just say the left because some of it was economic, some of it was cultural, some of it was on immigration, like you could name the issue. But you know, and I think about our part in that too. We were. We had candidates on. We'd push them on all these issues and it was a. It became a bit of a purity test, litmus test on. You had to be the most left possible position on a whole host of issues. And if you weren't, you were insufficiently Democratic or progressive. And I think that had a real effect on both that primary and even though Joe Biden got out of that primary, his administration.

[Ezra Klein]

Kamala Harris, Toughest opponent in 2024 was not Donald Trump. It was Kamala Harris in 2019. When people say she ran a moderate campaign, what they mean is she disavowed her own policies from 2019. But also Kamalaris in 2019 bore no resemblance to Kamalaris in 2015. Right. I'm from California. You're in California. Right. Kamaras was a tough on crime prosecutor. Right. She was part of a sort of black, more moderate politics that you see there. San Francisco is a place that is now and is always very concerned about disorder. It has a lot of disorder. The people who win there are often quite good at running against disorder as she was. And she then ran against a sort of tough on crime Republican for ag. It was a very, very close race. But she didn't win it by running to his left. She ran it by running in many ways to his right and sort of attacking him for sort of wanting to double dip on his salary, things like that. I think a culture has emerged in the Democratic Party since the Obama era. I don't think this was true in the Obama era. I think Obama had the strength in the party and the Obama administration had the strength in the party to say no. But since Then I think the Democratic Party has lost a culture of saying no. It has become much more coalitional. So you all, when you were in the White House, you used to complain bitterly about what you call the professional left. Right? There was always this friction between the Obama administration and the professional left, these groups that were always trying to push you towards positions you didn't want to take and attack you for the things you were doing to reach out to more moderate voters or even to Republican voters. Then after Obama, as Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden tried to put that coalition back together, I think the ability to say no collapsed. I'm not 100% sure why. But not just among them, right. Bernie Sanders himself was a very different figure in 2016 than he was in 2020 or 2024. Bernie Sanders was a very class based, Democratic socialist figure who I did a interview with him years ago and I used to, when I do these interviews, I would try to push people on what I thought were interesting tension points in their politics. And so I asked him in that interview, because the Democratic left had become very, very, very pro immigration. What do you think of open borders? And he said, that's a Koch brothers plot. He wasn't sitting there saying that borders are kind of immoral, but we have to have them. He's like, that's a plot of the plutocrats. Sanders was pro gun and he was in a complicated way, but still is pro Israel. Sort of famously, one way Hillary Clinton beat him in the primary in 2016 was running to his left on cultural issues. There was this sort of weird but famous breaking up the banks won't end systemic racism exchange. But over time, Sanders also within his own coalition, started saying yes to much more. Right. It wasn't just he was very, very far left on economics, but, but on cultural issues. He was this kind of cranky northeasterner from a state with a lot of rural areas. He began to open up a much wider left. The squad is a highly coalitional version of the left. They are sort of saying yes on most things, not on just one thing. Right. They've not just moved left here or on that. And so what was happening in the center of the Democratic Party, where Joe Biden had become much more coalitional. I mean, Joe Biden used to be a political figure who delighted in drawing lines. He supported a balanced budget amendment when Republicans were rising in the 90s. Right. Which is terrible policy. Right. The worst. But Joe Biden was somebody who was very much like lunch pail Democratic Party and was like trained and grew up in this era where the fear of being called a liberal was very real. Biden, Hillary, I mean, in different way, Harris, I think this just became a kind of culture in the party about how it governed. You were trying to assemble the largest possible coalition and you were very worried about being taken down by another faction. Right. It'd be became possible to Democrats in 2012. The idea that a Democrat would lose in a primary to a self described socialist was ridiculous. That wasn't something they feared at all. By 2016 and very much by 2020, they were terrified of it. When Kamala Harris, who was very much a top tier contender in 2019, was considering how to build out her campaign, she endorsed Medicare for all. And then with Sanders in the Senate, then when she was actually campaigning, came out with this triangulated plan between Medicare for all and other health healthcare plans. And it became a kind of debacle for her. But she and everybody else was trying to figure out how to not get beaten by the left. At the same time. They're worried about sort of like every group on the board. You have, you know, the sort of post pandemic era. You have racial reckonings, right. Like a lot is happening and the party just becomes like very big tent, but big tent in a way that I think it didn't actually realize. Like it stretches its tent in a very particular direction. Right. It stretches its tent left, but on every left issue simultaneously, and it doesn't really realize who it's not building its tent out to. Like, I just have thought a lot after the election about the fact that Democrats at a national level seem more culturally comfortable with the Cheneys than with Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughan. I just think that says something very interesting about what axes are of most importance and are really operating here. Because like, I don't know, I think the Cheney should be accountable for ruining American politics, creating the space that Donald Trump eventually occupied and launching absolutely catastrophically disastrous wars. And I appreciate that Liz Cheney was willing to risk something to oppose Donald Trump, and I think it's great if she wants to vote for Kamala Harris, but I think the sense that they would go out of their way to feature Liz Cheney and be campaigning with Liz Cheney, but would not go out of their way to be on maybe the biggest media platform in America that is actually culturally quite different from them and is reaching people they do not reach and do not know how to reach a Joe Rogan. I just, you know, whether you believe she should have gone on Rogan or not, that says something about like who the Democrats are comfortable having over for dinner.

[Jon Favreau]

I think it was a strategy born of some kind of necessity in that they, like you said, they thought, okay, we're losing working class voters, we're losing these low propensity voters who don't always show up and by the way, don't always pay attention, close attention to politics. And what we might be able to do is squeeze more juice out of the suburbs and college educated voters in the suburbs. And for those voters, you know, it would make sense to talk about defending democracy and Liz Cheney as a spokesperson for that and bipartisanship and all that. And the bet did not pay off because she did not improve move Biden's margins in the suburbs. If anything, in some suburbs, she underperformed him some. She, you know, she maintained the same, but it seemed to be like a more of a slap dash. Okay, it's the last couple months of campaign. We don't have a long campaign here and you know, we've got Liz Cheney. We'll go, we'll go to the suburbs of Milwaukee where she did make some inroads with voters. She, that's the one place she did overperform Biden. But it wasn't enough because it's more to your point about the broader challenge of losing touch with the working class. It's harder to repair that with one interview on Rogan.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, I think it's very important to. I'll say two things because one, I think it's so easy right now for everybody to second guess every decision that the Harris campaign made. But the Harris campaign, if you look, I mean, you guys have made this point too. If you look at the battleground states, they seem to have made up a fair amount of ground. The battleground states look a lot better than the rest of the country. So if you're just. Here's how the country felt about the Biden, Harris administration and here's where we think we can see a campaign effect happening. Where there was a campaign effect happening, they made up ground. The battleground states were sort of 1 to 2 points, whereas they seem to have lost about 10 points. In California, they lost more than that, I think, or around that. In New York, New Jersey, it was a six point margin. In New Jersey lost. I looked. So something really bad was happening, by the way, in the places Democrats govern and all this de alignment and this sort of. When I say who the Democratic Party will have over dinner, there's a reason I'm not saying who Kamala Harris will have over dinner because this sort of disattachment from a lot of these cultures that began to feel unfriendly to Democrats or maybe the opposite. Right. Democrats became unfriendly to them. Like that happened earlier. Right. That's been going on for years now. And the loss of a space like Rogan as a friendly space for Democrats, which it used to be quite open to them. Right. Rogan was an Andrew Yang fan. He was an RFK junior Fan when RFK was sort of like in the Democratic primary, he endorsed Bernie Sanders to some degree in 2020. This was not an impossible place for Democrats to be. But I do think one thing that happened in the Trump years, and this is again a part of Losing Touch, is Democrats developed a sort of specific kind of there are people who that instead of disagreeing with them, they sort of wanted to write them out of the coalition. And the they here is complicated because it's like, I don't exactly mean Joe Biden. I mean this amorphous mass of culture that is the Democratic Party. And I think there are a lot of good examples of seeing this happen, but one that I've just been thinking about is a difference between three gaffes. Right? So Barack Obama's bitter comment in, I believe the OC08 election, the deplorables comment from Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and the garbage voters comment by Joe Biden at the end of this election. And One thing about Obama's 08 comment, which for young listeners, he's caught at a fundraiser saying basically that you have these deindustrialized towns where people have lost their jobs, their communities are afraid, the situation is very bad. And so it shouldn't be surprising that people become bitter and they cling to guns in religion. And this was sort of a hot mic comment caught, leaked, creates huge problems for them because very condescending specifically to religion and gun culture. Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Which people said in San Francisco, of all places, said in San Francisco.

[Ezra Klein]

So big problem for Barack Obama in 2008. But it is nevertheless, if you listen to that comment, it is Barack Obama telling this group of rich donors why you don't want to write these places off and write these people off. Something bad has happened in them. If you feel culturally different from them, well, remember, you haven't had the experience they've had. And if you're like, why are these people on the evangelical rights moving into the politics? They're moving well, look at what has happened to their communities. Why should they trust us? Right? The problems of that comment, and it was a problematic Comment. It was an argument about pulling closer and trying to see more clearly the pain people were in and try to find a way through to a politics that could bring you and them into some kind of alignment. The deplorables comment from Hillary Clinton is very different. It's half of the Trump voters are reasonable people and half of them are. These people are deplorables, racist, sexist, misogynistic, and we should write them off. Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Irredeemable was always the worst. Irredeemable.

[Ezra Klein]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Than deplorable.

[Ezra Klein]

That's not anger or disagreement, that's contempt. Right. That is not politics, really. These people are gone. And not only are they not in our coalition, we don't want them to be in our coalition. We don't have a conversation to have with them. And there's a bit of that, I think, reflected in that Biden garbage comment, though. There was a lot of garbled syntax and that. So it's always been a little bit unclear to me what he was saying. But I think these all do reflect something that was actually happening in the Trump years. And the number Democratic Party, which is, you know, there's Arthur Brooks, the sort of head of the American Enterprise Institute turned happiness columnist.

[Jon Favreau]

I was about to say the happiness guy.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. Used to make this argument to me that there's this big difference between the emotions of anger and contempt. And anger is an emotion that brings you closer to people. Right. When you're angry with somebody, you sort of want to have a fight with them, argue it out, but find resolution. Right. Anger is something that pulls you into relationship, and contempt is something that pulls you out of relationship. Right. Contempt is. You don't need to have an argument with them. Right. There's nothing to say here. That's what contempt is. Contempt is a kind of writing off. And I think a lot of these spaces and people and cultures got treated with some contempt, which was just a very big, to me, shift in politics. Obama's sort of a. Like a. Like, at his core, his great grace as a politician is his deep commitment to pluralism in his politics. Right. You could disagree with him about him and he still wanted to talk to you. And what came sort of after was more of a. Something that. Where a lot of people felt in the end, not even like they didn't like the Democrats or that was true too, but that the Democrats didn't like them. And like, that's the most lethal emotion in politics. Right. When you don't feel these people like you, you're not going to Vote for them no matter what fucking policies they promise you. Because you can't trust people who don't like you.

[Jon Favreau]

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[C]

From a massive presidential election to yet another war in the Middle east and whatever drama is unfolding on TikTok, the world is a complicated place. Hi, I'm Jane Costen, former writer and podcaster for places like the New York Times, the Atlantic and National Review. And now I'm here to hang out with you five days a week on what a Day. Crooked's daily news podcast. In just 20 minutes, you'll get the top news and stories that matter most to the way you live, work and play. You can listen to the show wherever you get your podcasts or search what a Day on your nearest YouTube search bar to watch the new video version. And while you're at it, consider subscribing to what a Day's companion newsletter.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, I also think that that contempt helps shape a lot of Democratic rhetoric and policy position if you're a candidate, right? Because if the groups or folks on Twitter or whoever it may be come after you, it's not like, hey, we disagree with your Policy and let's have it out. It's like you are bad because you said X or proposed Y and you're just like you're morally bad and you're not part, you're not a good Democrat anymore. I keep thinking about immigration on this, which is like I wrote, I don't know how many speeches, immigration speeches for Barack Obama and he would say, we're a nation of immigrants. We're also a nation of laws and there are millions of undocumented people in this country and most of them are here just because they want to make it and work hard and contribute to this country. But it's also true that illegal immigrants, and he would say illegal immigrants back then were our. Make a mockery of the people who were here legally or trying to come here legally through the legal immigration system. And while we want a path to citizenship, if you are here, we want you to come out of the shadows if you're undocumented and then pay a fine, learn English, get to the back of the line behind people who are trying to come here legally and et cetera, et cetera. Right? So that's later on. Everyone was like, okay, Obama's did so many deportations and focused on security and had that kind of rhetoric because he was trying to get Republicans on board for comprehensive immigration reform. Right? And I always thought that was wrong. I thought that the reason that he talked like that about immigration is because that's where the country was. That's where most people in the country were. Fast forward to the 2020 primary. Joe Biden in one of the debates says something about how, you know, the, raise your hand if you're for, you know, decriminalizing border crossings. Right. That was a question to all the, all the candidates. I believe Castro, Representative Castro at the time, he proposed decriminalizing border crossings, Right. And Biden says, well, I think if you're here, you have to like get to the back of the line, right? If you're undocumented before you get a path to citizenship. There was like a multi day blowup about Biden's comments about getting to the back of the line. He had to hold a roundtable in San Diego with immigration leaders, activists, Latino leaders. He was criticized for it by other candidates. It became this whole thing that like, how dare he say this? And it's, you know, it's bad and this is just, and there was a sit in, in his campaign office. There are people protesting him right now. This is all in the context of like Donald Trump had just carried Out a family separation policy, right? Which is like the most xenophobic, anti immigrant president we've ever had. And the focus was on Joe Biden using terminology that Barack Obama had used for eight years and no one had complained about. And I always think about that and I'm like, that's, I think that's where things went off the rails a bit.

[Ezra Klein]

I wonder if it's true though, that nobody complained about it, right? Because I used to hear a lot of complaints from immigration groups about Barack Obama. And one of my theories about the Democratic Party is that not even my theories, I think this is just true. The party particularly, again, like in the post Obama period, there were these politicians who were trying to build out what the Obama coalition seemed like it was possibly eventually going to be, which was a dominant majority coalition for an extended period of time in American politics. Right. And to do that, you needed these young voters, you needed to keep getting these huge numbers among Hispanic voters, black voters, Asian American voters, union voters are important the party, working class voters. And you have this question then, right? Well, how do you appeal to these voters? What do they want? And the answer the Democratic Party settled on in practice, if not in theory, although maybe in theory too, was that you listen to the groups that purport to represent them. If you want to win Hispanic voters, you listen to the immigration groups. They're going to tell you what these voters care about. If you want to win black voters, you listen to the groups that say they represent them in different respects, ranging from the NAACP to environmental justice groups, unions. You listen to the unions sort of down the line. They didn't do it for no reason. Right. They thought that they were trying to win the allegiance of these voters and it just didn't work because these groups actually didn't represent their voters very well. And different ones are different. The unions, I think in many ways are better than some of the other groups because they do have memberships. But a lot of these groups actually believed things, particularly immigration being a great example, because the Hispanic shift has been huge on this. You know, if you poll Hispanic voters, particularly near the border, they just don't have super far left views on immigration. Like, they don't. I don't know what to tell you. Like, it just is not what the groups told you it was. And so a big part of the thing that happened, I think, is that the, like, the role that the groups played in the Democratic Party changed. They went from like, I think it used to be understood that like the role of these, these sort of Highly ideological interest groups is to push politics in the direction that they believe is right and just. And there's nothing wrong with that. Groups do not need to stay within the Overton window. And the role of the politicians was to say when no meant no for them. Right. When the politics didn't reflect that the politics couldn't support that. Right. It is the job of the politician to be in touch with the constituency and say sorry, like this is where my people are. And I hear you and you make a lot of good arguments, but we're not going there either because I actually don't agree with you or because I think the politics of this are not doable. In 08, I don't think any of us believe that Barack Obama was against gay marriage. I don't currently believe that in 2008, Barack Obama in his heart of hearts, was against gay marriage. But what Barack Obama was against was losing the election. Election. And so I was in roundtables when he was a candidate and without going into them exactly, the impression I definitely got was somebody who saw that he was going to wait until the politics of that were ripe because he also thought he could do more for non discrimination and other things if he worked through where the country was and got it further along to where even he would like it to be. And so that used to be the sort of relationship, the group's push. And sometimes they pushed and won, but a lot of the time the politician said no. And I think that just kind of stopped being the case, particularly during elections. And I think this actually has to do weirdly with Twitter and sort of the dynamics of social media where like the role of everybody collapsed and they were all like in public arguing with each other, like doing the same thing all the time.

[Jon Favreau]

That is my take on this. And I listened to your episode, episode that's out today with Michael Lind about this. And I think it, it gives the groups like it imbues them with too much power that I don't think they have. Because I think what happened is, you're right, there would always be this tension between the, you know, electeds and the groups in quotation mark. Let's talk to the groups about this. And there would always be disagreements and the groups would always be pushing and you'd have these disagreements and you'd have them in meetings and you know, sometimes the groups would go public, but they'd do like a press release here and there, you know, and social media and especially Twitter, just all of this spilled out into the open. And because Everyone on Twitter and everyone in the Democratic Party are all talking to each other. And most of the rest of the electorate that might not have these same views paid less and less attention to politics and is participating less in politics than Democratic elected officials. I think a lot of times saw the conversation on social media and Twitter, and that is represented by the groups as, like, indicative of where the larger electorate was, and they are not there. And so we ended up having all these fights amongst ourselves in public, but the public that we were having the fights with is like a small, unrepresentative portion of the larger American electorate.

[Ezra Klein]

I think that's right. I also think when we talk about the groups, right, it can. It can sound like there's this very separate thing. But you wanna talk about where the revolving door in the Democratic Party is, It's between the groups and the administrations and the staffs. Right. People go from serving in politics to being in the think tanks, being in the interest groups, et cetera. So I've been thinking a lot, like, what in God's name was the ACLU doing giving Democratic candidates in 2020 a written exam, asking, among other things, are you supportive of providing gender reassignment surgery to undocumented immigrants in prison? Right. Like writing this Edge case, Mad Lib, basically about the most unpopular policy one could possibly imagine. Did they? I mean, there's another question of what were the Democrats doing answering it.

[Jon Favreau]

Right, Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Which Joe Biden, to his credit, doesn't just, like, leaves the thing blank. But one thing that's worth saying is that a lot of people working for these campaigns, and Harris in particular, comes out of the legal wing of the Democratic Party. Right. A lawyer, the aclu, a bunch of them have worked in the aclu. If you look at the legal establishment in the Democratic Party, the connections to the ACLU are very deep. Many of them have worked there. They go back and forth from there. So having your friends at the ACLU mad at you doesn't feel good. Aside from anything else you might think about them, these are social networks. These are people you see. These are people you are in communication with, the people you go to for feedback on your proposals. They are places you might want to work after the administration, particularly now that it's become verboten to work on wall and other things, and tech became less of a good thing to have on your resume. So there's a deep social dimension to this. But did the ACLU think it was helping trans people when it did this? Because it wasn't helping to raise this up as an issue that helped defeat Kamala Harris in 2024 and helped elect Donald Trump. What was the ACLU doing here? What role did it think it was playing by coming up with this edge case and trying to get all the Democrats to say on the record they were for it as a way of getting more ACLU support of something in the primary so they could outflank each other. Now, that's not the only thing that happened. The sort of TV ad on this was Kamala Harris bringing up basically unprompted in a sort of forum about transgender issues. So that was also her sense of the politics and how to differentiate herself. But there just was something happening in this period where I just think the lines, everybody's role in this was sort of getting erased. And yeah, if the groups want you to take a position you shouldn't take, the politicians need to know that their role is to represent the public and also to think about what is good politics. Because losing, I mean, American politics turns on the head of a pin. Now, now losing all of the power of the federal government doesn't just mean there aren't going to be gender reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison. It means terrible things are going to happen to trans people in this country. Right. Where the politics might have been on your side. Right. Where people actually do have much better views about non discrimination and they don't want people, they don't want kids bullied for no reason. Right. And they understand these are difficult issues in families. Instead of pushing all the way to where the ladder of public support collapses under you, there actually is so much to do. Right. It's not like we've solved every other problem. So the only things we have to worry about are like NCAA swimming competitions and immigrant detention centers. Right. There's a lot to do here. But somehow you had this, yeah, just like collapsing of the roles, but also I think, really strange culture emerge of just differentiation among the groups, among the candidates, and always, always, always to the most extreme position, which Joe Biden wins in 2020 in the primary, in part because he doesn't do that, because he still has the old instincts of a politician who has seen more than one cycle in front of him before. The fact that he was then in his 80s to run for reelection was a separate problem, but his instincts were very good in 2020.

[Jon Favreau]

It was a bit of a misread of why Trump won as well. There was this feeling after 2016, like, well, if Donald Trump can become president, then politics maybe doesn't matter as much or at least politics as we traditionally thought. And if someone that far to the right or that extreme can be elected, then maybe it's just time for us to say what we really believe. And we're the majority of the country and it's the fact that we have anti majoritarian institutions that is the only real problem. And left to our left, you know, if we had all just vote and the majority would be in, in favor of this and et cetera, et cetera. And I think there was, it was just a complete misread of how and why he won in the first place that sort of let everyone just say, okay, let's just, let's say whatever we have to now, say whatever we've wanted to say all this time, and it'll somehow work. I do wonder, like, to me, like the big elephant in the room here is this divide between that you and I have talked about before, that you've talked about in your podcast, between the like, high propensity professional class that pays a lot of attention to political news and these working class voters, low propensity voters who also happen to be people who pay least attention to the news and consume the least political news. And you know, we've talked to Yana Kripnikov, both on our respective pods. She has this book, the Other Divide, about how like that is maybe the most salient divide in politics right now between the like 20% of people in the country who pay a lot of attention to the news and like the 80% who do not. Not even though a lot of that 80%, most of that 80% votes. And I do, I do wonder like if sometimes we're having all these debates with each other and no one is really figuring out like how to reach all of everyone else in the country, how to actually communicate with them, how to build relationships with these voters on a year round basis, which is again going to require more than just like going on Joe Rogan a couple times. And I don't know, sometimes I just wonder like all these debates we're having, like, if no one's hearing anything, if no one's listening to anything, like, what are we? How do we govern?

[Ezra Klein]

I think the way I understand these ecosystems is not that people hear nothing, it's that what they hear is sort of muffled and episodic and they tune into some things and not others. And so the consistency of what they're hearing matters and then the condition they see around them matters. So we were just, I was just thinking about this as we wrapped up that conversation about the ACLU and that particular ad and the sort of trans stuff. I also at the same time think trans issues are getting too much attention in the postmortems because if you look at where Democratic vote share dropped the most, it is where the cost of living is highest.

[Jon Favreau]

Right?

[Ezra Klein]

Right. It is not where there are the most gender reassignment surgeries or something else. There are these things that are unbelievably hot button issues. And I'm not saying they don't matter, but I said this in this thread, if you ask me. What do Democrats need to sister Soulja? Right. It's not like the most weak and vulnerable members of their coalition, although they need to not take a bunch of stupid positions for no reason, it's the parts of their coalition that made it very hard for them to govern. Well, I come from outside Los Angeles. I lived in San Francisco until 18 months ago, and I live in New York City. The thing that surprised me least about the election was the sharp red shift in these big cities. Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. And this idea that like, oh no, the economy is actually good or crime is actually down, this is all just Fox News. Like, shut the fuck up with that. Like, talk to some people who live near you. The rage I just hear from people in New York. This is partially Greg Abbott bussing huge amounts of migrants here. But that does mean, by the way, there were enough migrants that Greg Abbott could bus actual human bodies to New York City. And it was a big enough problem that New York City was not able to effectively deal with it. Right. It does show that what was going on on the border was much worse. I think the Democrats were letting themselves accept that was not for all the cruelty of what Abbott did there. That was not like an ad campaign. Those were like actual people who had come into the country who were overwhelming border states. The sense of disorder rising. Right? Not just crime, but homeless encampments, trash on the streets, people jumping turnstiles in subways. Right. You just like crazy people on the streets. You just talk to people and they're mad about it. They feel it's different than it used to be. I mean, in San Francisco, the fury is overwhelming. And you see that it's not just the presidential level. London breed. The SF mayor just lost reelection in Oakland. They recalled the mayor. A bunch of the progressive das across the country were recalled or beaten in reelection campaigns. If Eric Adams has a lot of problems, but if he were obviously on the ballot, he would Almost certainly, it seems to me, lose. You have to be able to govern well. People don't follow politics, but they live in the place they live. They see if prices have gone way up and a bunch of economists telling them, no, no, no, no, don't worry about the price of everything, at least for some people. And maybe net, net a slight majority of people, real wages have modestly outpaced inflation is like not going to do it because people feel when they get a raise, that's them. And when prices are going up, that's you, the government, right? You, the government screwed something up. When governance is good, well, you can't build enough houses and people can't afford homes. Right. The much broader affordability crisis, which again, Annie Lowry named some years ago in 2020, right before the pandemic. One of my big theories of politics is that the inflationary period we went through was sort of a portal of economic politics and it changed what was salient to people for a very long time. Jobs and wages had been the thing people talked about the most. Right. Coming out of the financial CR crisis where we had very high joblessness and very low wage increases, you had demand side problems. Inflation made prices very salient and that was prices on sort of normal things, right. Eggs and gas. But it also focused attention on the prices of things that had been building in the background for a very long time. Homes, healthcare, childcare, elder care, higher education. Things people need, they absolutely need them and they've gotten way out of where people can afford them. The fact that California and New York are losing people by droves to Texas and Arizona and Florida isn't just an interesting fact about America. If you are losing people because of the cost of living in blue states, talk about losing touch with the working class. You have made it unaffordable to live there. You can't really be a firefighter who protects San Francisco and buy a house in San Francisco, the city you protect, Right. It's just not possible. The average house goes for, I think it's 1.7 or 1.9 the average sale price. Now, unless you have money coming from somewhere else, it's not possible. These are huge failures of governance. In terms of what I would like to see Democratic politicians repudiate and whatever, I'm literally talking my book, I have a book coming out on this in March called Abundance. What I would like to see Democratic politicians repudiate is what has made it hard for them to govern. Govern in a way where in the places they are in charge, people can afford to live there or there's enough clean energy that we can meet our climate goals. Or in California, that high speed rail we're supposedly building that was supposed to be operational by 2020 at a cost of $33 billion. Instead maybe at some point soon, in the next couple of years, maybe 20, 28, 2030, we'll have a Merced to Bakersfield line that will cost as much as the entire thing was supposed to cost. And to finish the rest of it, which they have no line on the money for, will be over $100 billion. Right. And nobody knows how they're going to get that money. And they're probably not going to get that money. This inability to govern well, where you actually hold power, I do think that matters. And when you talk about what matters to voters who aren't paying that close attention to politics, the sense of things are doing well. I just talked to Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado. Colorado had one of the smallest red shifts of any blue state in the country is very, very modest. Like a point or two. Some blue shifts in Colorado and some blue shifts. Right. And Colorado is a place that is growing in population. Where do people from Texas go? They go to Colorado first. And we're talking about why. And he's just like, he's like, I'm paraphrasing him here, but he basically said our governing philosophy is just like everything we do, the message is we want to save money, we want to make things affordable and save you money. That's the whole thing. He was saying that he's an abundance politician and that's a theory I'm associated with. But I'm like, okay, well what is your definition of it? And he's like prosperity and saving you money. Basically we're releasing supply of things people need to buy so they're cheaper and we're making people prosperous so they can afford things. He was bragging about income tax cuts. Right. So why those voters in Colorado has plenty of voters who don't pay close attention to politics. But I don't know, things in Colorado are working pretty well. It's a well run blue state, so they're not that unhappy. And like I do still think like that matters in politics. Like that is how you reach people. Like their lives are pretty good and on the margin. Like, you know, people who don't really know what to think about politics. If things are going well, they'll vote, you know, they'll vote for the people they think are making it go well.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I've come to think that it's less about the need for Democratic politicians to move to the center or moderate their positions. But it's not really about the position you hold. It's about what you're focusing on. It's like when people tune in and they see you, what are you talking about? What are you focused on? And if you're someone who is relentlessly focused on making sure that a decent life is affordable, then if they see the inevitable ad from Republicans that actually, you know, you're for they, them. And whatever the hot button cultural issue is of the moment, it changes, like, every year. It's not going to work as well because they're going to be like, well, I know that person. They're just, they're out there fighting every day to make sure that my life's better. And they're like, maniacally focused on costs. And so, yeah, I can maybe I don't agree with them on X position or Y position, but that's okay because they're trying to help me.

[Ezra Klein]

I was asking polis, what's the one policy you've done that has broken through the most? And I thought his answer was interesting because usually politicians, they're so excited to tell you that answer, right? Like, here's my trademark policy. He's like, I don't think that's how politics works. We've done like 30 or 40 things. We have cut the income tax rate time and time and time again. We have taken the sales tax off of diapers and baby wipes. We have passed all these housing bills. Right? He just sort of has this huge list. It's like every time people tune in, if they tune in, that is what they hear. Like, the only thing they hear me doing basically, is trying to bring the cost of living down or trying to put more money in their pockets. And so it is like that relentless repetition. Different people hear about different things, or maybe they never hear it about anything, but they just sort of know things are working pretty well. Like, we're building houses. And he's like, the first thing I did was create a commission to save money in healthcare. And so it's not all, like, moving to the right on things. Right. They created a public option in Colorado. Right. That the Colorado government runs. Or separately, they created free. A certain amount of free childcare and pre K. Right. It's not like a full, super expansive program as I understand it, but it now exists and people can use it and those things matter. Right? So it's like, you can move left. He's like, he had this kind of funny line to me. He's like, I think as a politician, if you say something a lot, it's probably the thing you believe. And the thing I say a lot in speeches, which was just a funny preamble to this, was we'll take a good idea from the left or the right, as long as it saves you money.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, it's good. Well, you know what? We're going to end on that fairly hopeful note. We're all going to move to Colorado. Ezra Klein, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America. And let's go keep fixing the Democratic Party before it's too late.

[Ezra Klein]

Thank you man. Fun as always.

[Jon Favreau]

That's our show for today. Ezra, thank you so much for joining us. Every Everyone listen and subscribe to the Ezra Klein Show. It is essential Dan and I will be back with a new episode on Friday. If you want to get ad free episodes, exclusive content and more, consider joining our friends of the pod subscription [e-mail] friends and if you're already doom scrolling, don't forget to follow us at podsave America on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and more. Plus, if you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a review to help boost this episode or spice up the group chat by sharing it with friends, family or randos. You want in on this conversation? Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producers are David Toledo and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safaree, Reed Churlin is our executive editor and Adrian Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Kiefer Madeline Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hethcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelaviev and David Toles.