Claire Gordon (7:11)

Would you have done something differently than.

Ezra Klein (7:13)

President Biden during the past four years?

Kamala Harris (7:17)

There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I've been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact. The work that we have done, for example, capping the cost of insulin at $35 a month for our seniors is something I care deeply about.

Ezra Klein (7:34)

But I'm not sure there was any answer she could have given there that would have worked. It's just not credible to run as a vice president disowning the record of the administration in which you served, of the ticket you were part of. I think she ran a pretty good campaign, given how little time and how little room she had to build and design it. But at the core of that campaign was this very difficult problem. An incumbent can run on their record if the record is popular. A challenger can promise change. Harris could do neither. There is for me, this what if. What if Biden hadn't run again? What if Democrats had given themselves the gift of a real primary? The party has plenty of talent and Harris had real weaknesses. She can be amazing on the stump. She's a killer in debates. But one thing Harris was not able to do, not in 2020, not in 2024, was define what her campaign was about. At least aside from keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. She ran as the guardian of the institutions, a candidate with Liz Cheney on one side and Liz Warren on the other. But she took for granted the worth and health of those institutions. Was the endorsement of the Cheneys and the enthusiasm with which it was embraced a sign of the Democrats big tent or a sign of its internal confusion? And Harris was not unburdened by all that had come before her. There were ways in which she wanted to build a bigger tent, but the Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent. I just went and I listened to some of the appearance Elon Musk made on Joe Rogan's podcast on Monday. It's gotten really deeply weird and right wing and conspiratorial over there.

Unknown Speaker (9:16)

If the Dems win this election, they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states and everywhere will be like California. There will be no escape.

Unknown Speaker (9:25)

That is so insane.

Unknown Speaker (9:27)

This is the final. This is it. This is the last chance.

Ezra Klein (9:32)

Has anybody tried to push?

Unknown Speaker (9:33)

And I just wanna, like, go out and vote. Vote like your life depends on it. Vote like your future depends on it. Because it does. This is the last chance, man.

Ezra Klein (9:45)

But it wasn't always like that on Rogan's podcast. It wasn't that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview. And then Rogan kind of sort of endorsed him.

Unknown Speaker (9:56)

I think I'll probably vote for Bernie, him as a human being when I was hanging out with him. And I believe in him. I like him. I like him a lot. He's been insanely consistent his entire life. He's basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life.

Ezra Klein (10:12)

And you know what happened after that? Many liberals were furious at Bernie Sanders for going on Rogan in the first place. I was still on Twitter back then and I wrote about how of course Bernie Sanders was right to be there, that the fact that Sanders could attract people like Rogan was one of the very best arguments for his campaign. One of the reasons he might be able to beat someone like Donald Trump. This was 2020. If you wanted to beat Trump, of course you try to win over Rogan and his voters. But online liberals got so pissed at me for that. As briefly a trending topic on Twitter, Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not the kind of person you wanted to talk to. But if these last years have proven anything, it's that you don't get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on Rogan regularly all these years. They should have been prioritizing it this year. Yes, Harris should have been there and in places like it. Same for Tim Walsh. On YouTube alone, Rogan's interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. You're just going to abandon that in an election where you think the other side winning means fascism? In 2016, Democrats were shocked to lose to Trump but that loss had the consolation of chance. Democrats won the popular vote. And you can make a very good case that if the Comey letter hadn't hit right at the end of the campaign, Hillary Clinton would have won. I believe that case. And so the response was resistance, treating Trump as accidental, sometimes even illegitimate. In 2020, Trump loses a popular vote decisively. But more people voted for him than did in 2016. He still came within a few hundred thousand votes of winning the Electoral College again. And that was true despite all the chaos of his administration, despite the harm he caused during the pandemic. And it was true, in part because he began doing something Democrats didn't, winning over black and Hispanic voters who Democrats thought they had a lock on. And now we're here. Trump got the win in 2024. He could only see the glimmers of before he got it. Despite January 6, despite the criminal charges and convictions, despite the wild statements, the weaving rants, despite how terribly he performed in the debate with Harris, Democrats did everything they could to convince voters Trump was unfit for office. And voters gave Trump his first ever popular vote victory. It is brutal losing an election, particularly one with the stakes that this one carried. And emotionally, there are two ways Democrats can respond right now, contempt or curiosity. And I've seen plenty of contempt already. The sentiment that if Americans are willing to vote for Donald Trump, given all that he has said and all that he has done, then that's on them. There's nothing Democrats or Harris could have done to dissuade them. There will be a desire to retreat back, to hunker down, to draw the boundaries of who is decent and who is a fascist ever more clearly. But Democrats are losing too many people they need. Trump sharply improved his margin in New York City. So many people I've met since moving here, they just don't like Democrats anymore. They're not that political. They voted for Democrats in the past to the extent they voted, but now they're mad about prices, they're mad about immigration, they're mad about a sense of disorder and failure and confusion and fecklessness. I want to be very careful about relying on exit polls, but one thing we seem to be seeing in polling is that Trump improved a lot, with voters making less than $50,000 a year. These are the voters a Democratic Party prides itself on serving. They are losing the voters at the core of their conception of their own party. There has to be curiosity here, curiosity about what these people are experiencing and why they're seeing Trump so differently than liberals. Do Democrats have to be going to places they have not been going and taking seriously opinions and experiences they have not been taking seriously? And I'm not just talking here about a woke unwoke divide, though I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men now consume. I don't think Rogan was closed to them. I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them. And it was a terrible mistake and one that's going to take a long time to undo. But I'm also talking here about the day to day Democratic governance. When voters are this unhappy with the way you've wielded power, particularly if you think you've wielded it well, you really have to struggle with why that work has maybe begun in the Democratic Party. I think you see it in the Biden administration's eventual pivot to border enforcement, which Harris very much emphasized in her campaign. But it was clearly too little and too late. It was another part of the 2004 experience and its aftermath that I've been thinking about. So immediately after that election, Democrats became obsessed with winning back the heartland, with their cultural distance from the voters they needed. There was this belief that gay marriage ballot initiatives had cost Democrats the election. There was a vogue for tough, masculine politicians like Brian Schweitzer, then the Democratic governor of Montana. Democrats felt they were considered weak. And if they were ever to be competitive again, they'd have to be seen as strong. They'd have to moderate, both ideologically and culturally. To win again, they would need to become more like what had defeated them. But George W. Bush's win in 2004 was not the beginning of a Republican realignment. It was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. Because what liberals thought of Bush then was true. His administration was a disaster. The Iraq War was a catastrophe built on lies. And all of that would come clearer and come to be more widely believed within a few years. By the time of the next presidential election, Democrats had opened the door to a new politics, a politics that seemed almost unimaginable in 2004. Yes, Barack Obama's convention speech that year was startlingly good, but he was still an anti war black man with a middle name, Hussein, whose politics were forged in Chicago. That wasn't what Democrats thought would win them Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Indiana in 2008, but it was. And meanwhile, the Bush administration's overreaches, failures and scandals left the reputation of the Republican Party's elites so absolutely smashed that the stage was set for Donald Trump's eventual and complete takeover of the party. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I know how the next Trump administration will go. Trump is surrounded now by people who are much more relentlessly focused on carrying out his will and their own. Republicans have the Senate and the Supreme Court and will likely win the House. That is just a huge amount of power for a man not known for wielding power carefully or responsibly. And sure, maybe J.D. vance and Elon Musk and RFK Jr. Will bring a judiciousness or a coherence to Trump's governing style that he didn't have in his first term. I think it is as or more likely that they egged Trump into ideological overreach and my God, the corruption we are about to see. So is this the beginning of the Trump realignment, or will this end with Trump's name and reputation as tattered as that of the Bush dynasty he destroyed? I don't know. But Democrats need to admit that they are at the end of their own cycle of politics. The Obama coalition is over. It is defeated. It is exhausted. What comes next needs to be new. That means going to new places and being open to new voices. A politics right for the next era will not be a politics designed to win the last election. It's not going to be predictable from where we stand right now. Just as Obama's 2008 landslide would have sounded laughable in 2004 and just like how Donald Trump's 2016 win would have sounded like a joke in 2012, discovering what is next amidst the pain and possibly the horror of what is about to come is going to require Democrats to open themselves to a lot of conflict and a lot of curiosity.

Unknown Speaker (19:03)

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Unknown Speaker (19:32)

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Ezra Klein (20:08)

I'm joined now by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon, to talk a bit more about the election and that essay. Claire, Hi.

Unknown Speaker (20:16)

Great to be here.

Ezra Klein (20:17)

Really. Are you thrilled to be here?

Unknown Speaker (20:19)

Uh, no. I'm in a. In a pretty weird place right now, and it is amazing how quickly Joe Biden can go from a hero to the man who handed the White House to Trump.

Ezra Klein (20:32)

Yeah. Look, I have a lot of sadness for Joe Biden in this, but it. It is what it is, right? If your whole point in coming back into politics is to win the fight for the soul of the nation, to vanquish the threat that Donald Trump poses, and in the end, Donald Trump succeeds you with a larger coalition than he's ever had before, then your political mission failed.

Unknown Speaker (21:01)

Watching the returns with you last night, you were surprised. You thought Harris was going to win. Why were you surprised?

Ezra Klein (21:11)

When I looked at the election, the polls were so 50. 50. You couldn't just say, well, I go with the polls, and that shows Harris will win or Trump will win. They were right on the edge. So the question was, is there a miss in one direction or another? And I looked around at things that looked like signals of enthusiasm to me, how big the rallies were, how much money was being raised, including by small donors. I do think that what led me and what has continuously been leading people astray, is that the voters turning out for Trump are not highly political. Right. There was an argument going into this election that the coalitions have flipped such that high turnout is bad for Democrats. Now, early on the election day, you saw a lot of Democrats celebrating high turnout, and that was clearly a mistake. High turnout was bad for Democrats. And so one reason, I think signals of enthusiasm that reflect people doing highly political things, like going to a rally or going out door knocking or donating money, didn't tell me which way the polls were going to be wrong. Is it the way in which the polls were wrong? Again, was that Donald Trump is pretty good at exciting or turning out disaffected voters and his coalition, they don't do a lot of things that highly political voters do, like turn out in midterms and special elections, but they will turn out in a presidential campaign, given how high the stakes are and how much people hear about it and how much money's invested in turning them out into the polls. And that's what happened here.

Unknown Speaker (22:49)

I want to go back to something you said early on in your piece about how based off of the macro conditions in the world, the anti incumbent sentiment that Trump really should have won by more and that Nikki Haley would have won in a landslide. That feels very different from the narratives you hear now about Trump being this like specifically transformative political figure. He's speaking to this anti elite sentiment that Nikki Haley has like no place in the Republican Party anymore, that Nikki Haley is not the kind of figure that would win this kind of election. So is it wrong to interpret Trump's win that way?

Ezra Klein (23:25)

I think both things can be true. Trump is triggering a realignment of the parties, which is a really remarkable thing to trigger in American politics. It's not an easy thing to do where the nature of the Republican coalition really has changed. And if you had told Democrats in 2016 the margins Donald Trump would be getting with black and Hispanic voters in 2024, they would have laughed in your face. At the same time, that realignment is not coming along with historic success for this new Republican coalition. It's not weird for the out of power party to win an election, not weird for them to win the popular vote by a point or two, which again right now looks to be where Donald Trump will end up. This is not like a 2008 landslide and it's not like the Tories loss in the uk. This is a still fairly close election that could have been flipped by a couple hundred thousand votes in the swing states. There's not been a down ballot red wave this year either. I think they're going to win the Senate and the House, but it looks like a lot of endangered Democrats in swing states are going to hold on. And I think something that shows you is that this wasn't just broad anti incumbent sentiment. Plenty of incumbents did just fine and it wasn't even broad anti Democratic sentiment. If you look at a lot of these Senate races and House races, plenty of Democrats did just fine. There was specific anger at the Biden administration and that was what Trump was able to take advantage of. Not just support for him, but a genuine disappointment people had in what the Biden and Harris administration has wrought.

Unknown Speaker (25:08)

How do you understand like specifically that anger? Because there was a theory too, you know, when Biden was still in the race and his approval ratings were, you know, in the toilet, where they have stayed, that it was because he couldn't communicate well enough. He couldn't sell these like amazing legislative accomplishments. He couldn't do the dance of selling how like actually the economy in America is great. If you compare it to other countries in the world, but Harris couldn't sell that either.

Ezra Klein (25:35)

I still think that's true, actually. It's so hard because we're all a little too patterned on the elections we've lived through. But I talked a lot about 2004 in the essay. But think about 2012. Barack Obama's running for reelection. Unemployment, at least as of the middle of that election cycle, was above 8%. It was so high, the economy was so much worse than it is now. And Obama ends up winning by quite a bit. And one of the ways he wins is that Obama and the Democratic Party united around him are able to really tell a story about the economic recovery. They're able to take how people feel about the objective facts that are around them and give them this different gloss. Yes, this is hard and it is grueling and it is grinding, but America is coming back faster than other countries. This is a mess that was left for Obama and the Obama administration. And Mitt Romney, given who he serves and what he has proposed and what his intuitions in politics are, is not going to lead to a kinder, gentler economy for the people currently left out. And that works. And if Joe Biden were 65, maybe he could have pulled that off. But instead, there's this late baton handoff to Kamala Harris, who has to decide between trying to sell the Biden administration's record when it is quite unpopular and trying to create her own separated identity and kind of ends up in between the two things. And so I don't think we know what this looks like with a more capable incumbent who could have run an actual reelection campaign, which is what you normally would have seen in this scenario, or a non incumbent who is not tied to the current administration's record. As I say, I think she was dealt a very difficult hand. I think in many ways she played it very well, moderated on key policies, really did some excellent speeches and did an excellent debate and had some really, really strong set pieces. The place where I do fault her and where I faulted that campaign is I don't think they came up with a message connected policy critique and vision in a way that really said this is what Kamala Harris is about and this is the way the country will change if she is elected. And I think that's always been a weakness of hers. She has other strengths, but you would have needed a really, really, really strong candidate to do that at that speed, and she wasn't able to do that.

Unknown Speaker (28:05)

Was it possibly an impossible job you wrote A piece back in February about the Democratic Party's identity crisis and how basically it was trying to represent now many contradictory things, that it was now the party of normalcy in contrast to Trump, but also as the party of progress and change, that it was the party of the working class, but actually it's a core constituency or college educated voters. Was Harris just like trying to speak to and unite all these different positions and groups? And it turns out you can't do that?

Ezra Klein (28:44)

I don't think so. Democrats have won too many elections, including in this election cycle, for me to believe Democrats cannot win in the states they need to win. Arizona has a Democratic governor and it has a Democratic senator in Mark Kelly and now looks to have another Democratic senator in Ruben Gallego. And so the idea that Democrats cannot win in these places, I just don't think it's true. There are Democrats who choose to run as the institutionalists, the guardians. Right. That's much more how Joe Biden ran in 2020, and Democrats who choose to run more as outsiders, more as people making a critique, more as candidates angry at the way things are. I mean, you can see that in a Bernie Sanders, but in other candidates too. And what I think was very hard for Harris here was there wasn't a lot of time to build out either of those pathways. And again, as the sitting vice president, she did not have that much maneuverability. So, look, her task was very hard. I'm not sure if it was impossible, but I don't think the Democratic Party's task was impossible. And I think from a standing start, with a full primary to work out her campaign, or in which Democrats could have figured out which candidate was building a campaign that resonated most strongly right now in this environment, I think they could have won.

Unknown Speaker (30:05)

You said the Democratic Party hasn't been listening enough to their voters. Harris presented a very different figure than who she cut in 2020. She basically abandoned all her more progressive positions from that year. She leaned into the fact that she's a former prosecutor, she led with housing policy. Is it just that she couldn't tie everything together into a coherent story?

Ezra Klein (30:32)

Maybe the thing I'm saying there is that the Democratic Party didn't really listen to the voters until it was too late. The Biden administration has been extraordinary at managing the Democratic coalition and passing things inside the Democratic coalition that were thrilling to its progressive wing and somewhere between acceptable and exciting to its moderate wing. And so you had real support and love for Joe Biden and real admiration of him and many of these policies are things that I think are really strong policies, and over time they're going to show their worth, like the investments from the Inflation Production Act. At the same time, the party never answered, I think, because it didn't really want to face up to the fact that voters disagreed. They didn't like the way things felt, looked. They didn't think Joe Biden was up to it. And I do think Harris, when she took the reins, immediately began to pivot and try to emphasize things that reflected a sense of what people were upset about. Right. Emphasizing the bipartisan border bill, housing. I think it was really an important thing that she put it so centrally in her proposals. It's not a thing I ever found that she spoke that effectively or passionately about. I think sometimes people can feel when a policy is really your policy. I would say that Harris really felt when she talked about Roe, when she talked about Dobbs, when she talked about reproductive rights, you could feel this was her issue. On others, you couldn't. When Donald Trump talks about immigration, you can feel it is his issue. Voters are pretty good at that. Always this critique that Harris needed more policies, I never bought it. I always said she needed two or three policies. The two or three that really defined her and that she cared the most about. Voters do not hold a large policy agenda in their heads. They sense what is fundamentally important. But Harris was listening, and she was trying to build a campaign quickly that reflected where she thought the electorate was. I do think time was just such a problem here. I don't think it's easy to build a campaign. I don't think it's easy to build a message. I don't think it's easy to do the work sometimes as a politician of understanding what you think is the right thing to say and emphasize in that moment. And she had to do all of it so fast. I mean, the time between taking the reins of the campaign and picking the vice president and having the entire convention is a matter of weeks. That's supposed to happen over months. And so I am not highly critical of Harris here. I think she did a quite extraordinary job under very difficult circumstances. Doing it at that speed was just. You would have needed somebody who basically had the campaign all ready to go and had been like, thinking about how to run as the principal already and had exactly the right critique and message for the moment. And clearly in the end, she didn't. There are things I think they should have done differently, things in their media strategy. I mentioned things like Rogan, things in their policy strategy, but I don't know how much any of that would have really mattered in the end. Harris was a representative of the Biden administration, no matter whether she wanted to be or not. And people did not like the Joe Biden administration. And she did not have a long time to build an alternative relationship with the electorate before they actually had to go vote.

Unknown Speaker (33:48)

You ended your piece with a call for folks to be curious. I imagine a lot of people listening aren't really in the mood to open their hearts and minds in a space of curiosity to Trump and the people who support him. What do you recommend for folks who feel exhausted right now about the idea of living through another four years of Trump? Scared? Like what? What should they do? What should they read?

Ezra Klein (34:20)

And people should take a rest. Right. It's the end of election. The election was exhausting and anxious for everybody, I think, or at least everybody who is very tuned into it. You don't need to be engaged in politics 24 7. And look, I'm saying this as much for myself as anybody. I've tried in the last couple months to have a number of people on from at least some factions of the maga. Right, right. That's been a project I've been trying to pursue on the show. Right. To try to be curious about what's happening there before the election, to try to understand it better. And I do think that's helped me understand it better. And with Trump, the empathic gap of getting to how somebody might support him is for a lot of people is, for me, such a tremendous effort. That just takes a lot of work. But I don't think you can watch the way he has dominated politics now since 2016. I mean, that is an appeal that if you refuse to work on what is driving it, I don't know how you think you're gonna defeat it. Right. And also, it just requires, like, you should be curious about your country and the other people in it and how they're experiencing things. But again, my view about curiosity here is not just towards Donald Trump. Right. This is not just sort of canonical going to the diners and talking to his voters. It is also about just the way politics has changed. As I say, at the end, I think this is the end of the Obama era, too. We'll see where the Trump era goes. But Biden was part of the Obama era. He was Barack Obama's vice president. Kamala Harris rose in politics in the Obama era. And a lot of the fundamental assumptions in the Democratic Party, they've been challenged by people like Bernie Sanders and Aoc They've been altered a bit. But this was fundamentally the Obama coalition, and I think that coalition is over now. It's lost too many people to Trump. It has lost elections. It shouldn't have lost. I think it's a bit out of ideas and appeal. I don't think, you know, Joe Biden was not able to turn the page on Donald Trump. This battle for the soul of the nation. There's not a compelling story Democrats told about America, or at least a story that was compelling enough to Americans for them to win this year. They've lost touch with too many people they claim to represent. So something else is going to have to rise. And so when I say that this is going to require a lot of curiosity, being curious about voters, it doesn't mean abandoning your values, it doesn't mean abandoning your moral commitments, and it doesn't mean thinking that any choice that was made was right just because somebody else won an election. Right. Terrible. People win elections all the time all over the world. But it does mean, I think, taking seriously the world people are experiencing such that you can think about how to respond to that world.

Unknown Speaker (37:19)

Um, well, with that, I'm gonna go and take a nap. Thanks, Ezra.

Ezra Klein (37:23)

Thank you, Claire. This episode of the Ezra Klein show is produced by our supervising ed editor, Claire Gordon. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Jack McCordick and Kristen Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu and Elias Isquith. We have original Music by Pat McCusker, Audience Strategy by Christina Samielewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

Claire Gordon (38:22)

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