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Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm John 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. Good to be here man. Here at the end or maybe the beginning of all things. Yes, 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, we're starting in the therapy space. Yeah, this is right Democrats will lose elections. We're all about trauma and not about the middle class. Look, I am a professional political journalist. I will feel my feelings in three months. Right now there's a lot to do.
I sort of feel the same way and I'm not a professional political journalist. You just play one on podcast. Yeah, right. Yeah, so no, but I kind of feel the same way. I see your back on Twitter, which is always a signal to me that we are indeed in a bad place. I like that I've become like my deciding to tweet for a couple days has become like a harbinger of doom.
Yeah, it's like a horseman. I like I come back to Twitter. I mean, look, I'm staying on I've already said I'm staying on Twitter until the you know, it's over. 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, right there. Yeah, it's enough 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.
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. Mark Rubio for Secretary of State is a little more neocon than I expected. Fox News host Pete Higgseth for Secretary of Defense. That's the energy I was looking for in a second Trump term. Like for a couple days, all of the announcements were pretty normal people. And then I woke up to them like, ah, here we go.
That's this guy's real crazy. Uh, Kristi Nome, Secretary of Homeland Security, John Ratcliffe at CIA, Mike Huckabee as US ambassador to Israel. And then we've got Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami 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 your general reaction been to this last week of announcements? I have a lot of reactions.
I had Vivek Ramaswami on my show a couple weeks before the election. And I thought it was an 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 was 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.
And I think that's a mix between Paul Ryan and Donald Trump and the National patronage side, which was implicitly JD Vance. And that was much more about shutting down trade. Ramaswami 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?
Is this something real that we're looking at? But as he spoke and as we spoke, I was like, oh, you see Elon Musk as your patron. The person who you're describing, who might be influential to 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 Ramaswami 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 re-sword, I just talked about with Twitter, is not going to be highly factional. That in Trump one, you had your Kushner and Ivanka and the sort of globalist, you had Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the nationalist or the American First Crowd.
You had a sort of national security establishment around atramic masters and people like that. You'd sort of Gary Cohn, who is 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 is they've got an over that they knew that they had lots of people working and they knew the traditional Republican Party of Mike Pence and a lot of people in the staffing levels of the administration.
And the view is they've gone pass that now, right? The Republican Party is Trump's party, he owns it, Laura Trump is the co-chair of the RNC. You can 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 going to have much more factional infighting that 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 H.M.R. 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 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. Yeah, I mean, I think you also have just a less homogeneous coalition that brought him out.
Yeah, R.F.K. Jr. Right. R.F.K. Jr. And then you got Elon Musk and the all-in guys and that whole crew. And I do think that the, like, just watching it's early days, but Elon Musk follow Donald Trump around everywhere and him just showing up at White House. We're wanting to go to the White House meetings and showing up in Washington and everything. It's fine for now. I think there are both personality reasons and policy reasons why that's not going to last.
And I don't think Trump's going to like that all that much either. I think that's right. I hesitate to predict too much about Donald Trump and these things can always settle into a middle ground. I think for both Donald Trump, Elon and Elon Musk, the other one is their newest toy. Right. It's exciting to have a new toy. I like to say I 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 Yahoo's around Donald Trump, Elon Musk actually has built to me very impressive things in the real world. Right. This politics is 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, you know, 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. Right. And at least Elon Musk has a view about emerging technologies in the future that I 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 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 and politics, what happens if the person with the most money decides to buy the politics of the country.
Right. And it's not that there weren't many big donors on the common hair side, but the rumor or the reporting I was saying today was that Elon Musk is making it clear that if you're a house for public and you oppose Donald Trump's agenda, he will fund a primary challenge to you. And you know, he was just pumping money in a create in a wild way into the campaign. So sort of musk is going to Trump basically and saying, you know, you keep me near you.
You listen to me. You will never worry about money again. There is no amount of money that Democrats can, you know, their billion dollars was impressive, but must spent $44 billion to buy Twitter. So he could just like play around with it and increases influence like there is no amount of money that 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's a 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 like a pretty scary one to watch playing out. It certainly is. It also I think leaves Trump and musk open. There's a vulnerability there, which is like all of Garx 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 of 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 requires to move beyond a polarized closely divided political environment. How do you think about breaking out of that? 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 in 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.
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 the rise of Reagan. Then in the post Reagan era things begin to get very competitive and they begin to trade back and forth. 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. Usually not what we see. A pretty simple model of elections is incumbent's win. If you make that your model, you will usually be right and recently hasn't been right, at least at the presidential level. One thing is why are we so close? 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 52-48 Democrats.
In 2020 where the coalitions look very much like they did in 2024, you have Donald Trump is the incumbent. You have a bad year for an incumbent. It's the pandemic. He's shitty at being the president. The incumbent suffers a negative three point. People are mad at you penalty.
That brings the coalitions down to Democrats winning a popular vote, victory of about four and a half points. Fast forward for years. Biden, Harris, you're the incumbents. It's a terrible year worldwide for incumbents, post pandemic inflation, etc. 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.
It doesn't look to me for all the grand pronouncements. There are publicants have assembled this completely dominant electoral majority. Two things do seem true, which is one. You have three elections now that Donald Trump either has one or could have won very easily, at least in the electoral college.
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 multi-racial working class. That's not gone yet, but it is following the same trend as the white working class. If you are a party that you're like a 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. You feel that people are born without the same shot and that we do not have, as it got called a lot in the campaign and 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.
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, like an anti-politics form of politics, like an anti-representational politics, that I think it's very important that Democrats don't lapse into.
This to me is the crux of the problem, and I've been, I mean, I'm biased here. My college thesis was about white working class defection from the Democratic Party. This was in 2002. How to create it? You were accepting that the next decade or two of, well, I will tell you the Democratic Party. And we can get into this. Like, didn't really expect that in 2008, the answer would be Barack Obama from Chicago.
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?
I think the thing you 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 know, you can run a tax policy table and see where the money is going towards, you know, 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, right? Maybe they are being turned against you on cultural issues. Maybe there is misinformation or media ecosystems.
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, like the money, basically, then something is wrong. And you just got to figure out the thing that is wrong. You have to unkink the system.
So voters know that you were giving them more money and support you. I got fundamentally on some level what Bernie Sanders is saying that 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 or 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, right, trade, right, they've knock on back to neoliberal trade economics. 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, Nora Bernie Sanders running way ahead of Kamala Harris and 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. 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 in economics, when I've been talking to various people practicing politics, I've been talking to Republican pollsters. I did an episode with Patrick Gufini, who's book very much predicted this election. And the one point he'll make to you is that when he has been polling sort of working class Latino voters, they feel that I'm going to party has also touched with them on economics, but not because the social safety proposals are insufficiently generous.
But because there's not like a language of aspiration, right, they're sort of being talked about like they need things not about what they can achieve, right. 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 like the worker is an aspirational category.
It is important. I think it's very hard to separate this also by the way from Donald Trump and Elon Musk, which is something I said in the thread and I like 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. They're 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 like make it more than anyone else has ever made it, you could be Donald Trump or Elon Musk right there not some unknown private equity, you know, Pluto, these are the guys who play rich guys on. They're not there. 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 to 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 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. It was 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. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but before we do that, in a moment when 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.
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 fallen and
any Larry who you happen to be married to just sort of piece in the Atlantic about this where she pointed out that 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 health care, child care 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 I 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 you know where we go from here in terms of talking about costs and
sort of this affordability crisis. Well, this is an, yeah, any Larry 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? Are you explaining the 2020 coalition we saw, which was larger the same coalition with the incumbent penalty applied to Donald Trump and not to to Biden Harris because Democrats were losing the working class in 2020 when inflation was not a problem.
Right. And I think that's a really important thing to say now that 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 like the two years ago this 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 you know a plus three in the popular vote to a minus you know one to two in the popular vote. So if you had none of the inflation and the economy is 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 the answer is yeah it was. 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 that is going to be quite popular and then after it was extended you know people thought.
Okay this is going to be popular when you looked at polls like it always pulled towards the bottom of the list and I also thought about this with cum laude Harris is twenty five thousand dollar down payment on helping people afford a new home right it didn't test as well as the building three 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 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 twenty 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.
It feels like it has sort of fallen out of the lexicon of Democratic rhetoric at least on the presidential level I mean I think there's something to this. God. So much 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 shock waves intellectual shock waves and recriminations hit Democratic economic policy making 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 you know what was then called sort of the continuation of neoliberalism which is an exactly what I saw at the time I'd seen.
Obama is actually in many ways a pretty big break with Bill Clinton's politics but but there's a sort of view that we have been in this neoliberal era which I think there's a least some truth to that stretched you know 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 you know that like they weren't building as.
The exception maybe the Affordable Care Act Medicare and and Medicaid these universalistic programs that that you know it survives in society and 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 a I think actually quite big thing in the party the sort of nonprofit groups and foundations like the intellectual infrastructure of the party became very dominated.
By a very very intellectual and quite left class which I am very comfortable mong and I'm not saying I'm not sort of part of this you know what will get called a gentry liberals by a guy like Michael Lind who's been a critic of it. But there were very very strong intellectual currents and all that welfare form was sort of look back on as you know not good politics but but a policy disaster I largely agree that it was bad policy.
But it but there's a reason it was important 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's 2016 run and the strength that he showed and then the rise of like Red Rose Twitter right and Jack Abin and the sort of democratic Socialist part of the party like in 2016 and 2020 those were incredibly live forces.
And the sort of traditional democratic party or what I 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 that thinking and again that thinking was much more big government right much more you know free call right to Bernie ran on free college and free health care and of course he's been ever free right free colleges and 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 health care right like you to do pay for like I'm a health care walk by by training single pay or something you pay for and if you're going to do it you end up abolishing private health insurance and like this was like the great debate of the 2020 primaries but I think all this you cannot unwind this from like 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 some new answer to that when maybe some of the old answers actually still had a lot of life in them one of the just I think difficult truth 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 Bernie Sanders 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 a lot of pieces to this answer but when you say the end there it kind of fell out in Kamala Harris's campaign from where it was in Joe Biden's campaign in in 2020 or or Barack Obama's campaign
and then he has a lot of great qualities as a politician but she never came from a D. B economic wing of the party right that's just like not who she was it's not what her profile wasn't California right she could have really run as a law and order candidate in some ways
particularly that hadn't been jettisoned in the 2020 election by her by 2019 in 2020 in her campaign then but she just wasn't associated with any of these politics right she didn't have Bernie Sanders is authenticity running as you know fundamentally burn the system down socialist or
a O C's populism or Joe Biden was associated with the hard work wing of the Democratic party I mean he was quite different and very moderate figure for much of his life and Barack Obama was like a kind of master of telling stories about America and about Americans and and you just like I think a lot of things can work here but but you need the candidate like policies are 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 that sort of happened here 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 the towards the end there are a couple times when she 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 right like that 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 in 2016 and how that played out specifically in the 2020 primary in which you know a lot of the positions that's Kamala Harris took then certainly came back to bite her and a lot of the candidates who ran then 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 is a big diverse class of of 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
had candidates on we 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 you know I think that had a real effect on both that primary and you know even though Joe Biden got out of that
primary his administration com la Harris is toughest opponent in 2024 was not Donald Trump it was com la Harris in 2019 yeah that like when people say she ran a moderate campaign with the mean is she disavowed her own policies from 2019 but also com la Harris of 2019 for no resemblance to com la
in 2015 right I'm from California you're in California right com la Harris was a tough on crime prosecutor right she was part of a sort of black more moderate politics it that you see there San Francisco is a place it is now is always very concerned about disorder it has a lot of disorder the people who win there are often quite quite good at running against disorder as she was and and she then you know ran against a sort of tough on
the public in for for AG is 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 you know wanting to double the bond of salary things like that I think a culture is emerge 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 rational so you all when when you were in the White House used to complain bitterly about what you called the professional left right there are there is always this friction between the Obama administration
the professional left these groups it was like trying to push you towards positions you didn't want to take and attack you for the things you were doing to to reach out to more moderate voters or even to Republican voters and 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 then he was in 2020 or 2024 Bernie Sanders is a very class based democratic socialist figure who I did a interview with him years ago and I used to light like when I do these interviews I would sort of try to push people on what I thought were sort of like interesting
tension points in their politics and so I asked him in that interview because the you know the Democratic left had become very very very pro immigration like you know what do you think of open borders right what is the you know and he said that's a Koch brothers plot right he wasn't
sitting there saying you know like borders are kind of immoral what we have to have them he's like that's a plot of plutocrats right and Sanders was pro gun and he was and you know complicated way but but still is pro Israel said you know the if sort of famously one way Hillary Clinton beat him in the primary in 2016 was running to his left on cultural issues is a sort of weird but famous like breaking up the banks won't end systemic racism exchange
yep but over time Sanders also within his own coalition started saying yes to much more right it wasn't just sort of he was like very very far left on economics but you know on cultural issues he was just kind of cranky northeastern or you know 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 right they are not they they are sort of saying yes on most things like not on not on just one thing right they're not just moved you know left here or on that and so what was happening in the center of the Democratic Party where Joe Biden had become much more coalition 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 terrible policy right the worst but Joe Biden was somebody who was very much like lunch pale Democratic Party and was like trained and grew up in this era where you know you like 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 a government you're trying to assemble the largest possible coalition and you were very worried about being taken down by another faction right it became possible to Democrats
like in 2012 the idea that you know the Democrat will lose in a primary to a self-described socialist was ridiculous right that wasn't something they feared at all right by 2016 and very much by 2020 they were terrified of it because I'm not a Harris who is very much atop to your contender in 2019 was considering how to build out her campaign she endorsed Medicare for all and then with what standards in the Senate
then when she was actually campaigning came out with a sort of triangulated plan between Medicare for all and sort of other health care plan and became a kind of debacle for her but she and everybody else was trying to figure out how to not get beat and buy the left at the same time they're worried about sort of like every group on You have, you know, the sort of post pandemic era, you have racial reckoning, 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 see more culturally comfortable with the Chinese than with Joe Rogan and Theovan.
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 Chinese should be accountable for ruining American politics, creating the space at Donald Trump eventually occupied, and like 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 like they would go out of their way to feature Liz Cheney and be campaigning Liz Cheney, but would not go out of their way to be on maybe the biggest media platform in America. This 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. 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 a close attention to politics.
And what we might be able to do is squeeze more juice out of the, the suburbs and college educated voters and 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 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 of months of campaign. We don't have a lot in campaign here. And, you know, we've got Liz Cheney. We'll go to the suburbs of Milwaukee where she did make some inroads with voters. That's a one place she did over a perform Biden. But it wasn't enough because it's more to your point about like the broader challenge of losing touch with the working class. It's like it's harder to repair that with like one interview on Rogan.
You know? Yeah, I think it's very important to, well, I'll say two things because one, I think it's, 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 at, 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. Right? 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, right? The battleground states were sort of one to two points, whereas like, they seem to have lost about 10 points in California. Right? They lost more than that, I think, or around that in New York, right?
New Jersey, though, you know, it was a six point margin in New Jersey, lost I looked. Yeah. So something really bad was happening, by the way, in the places Democrats govern. And all this deal, the 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 the 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, you know, 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, he was an Andrew Yang fan. He was an RFK junior fan, and RFK was sort of like in the Democratic primary. He endorsed Bernie Sanders to some degree in 2020. Like, this was not an impossible place for Democrats to be.
But I do think one thing that happened in the Trump years, and like, this is again a part of losing touch, is Democrats developed a sort of specific kind of... There are people who, instead of disagreeing with them, they sort of wanted to write them out of the coalition. And the they here is complicated. Because 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 gaps, right? So Barack Obama's bitter comment, and I believe that was the OAA election, the deplorable 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 OAA comment, which for young listeners is he's caught at a fundraiser saying, basically that you have these deindustrialized towns, where people have lost their jobs, their communities are frayed. The situation is very bad. And so it shouldn't be surprising that people become, you know, bitter and they cling to guns and religion.
And this was sort of a hot mic comment, caught, leaked, creates huge problems from, because it's very condescending, specifically to religion and gun culture, right? Which people have... Said in San Francisco of all places. Said in San Francisco. 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.
Like something bad has happened in them. If you feel culturally different from them, or remember, you haven't had the experience they've had. And if you're like, why are these people, you know, on the evangelical rights, you know, moving into the politics or moving? Well, like, look at what has happened to their communities. Why should they trust us, right? It is for all the problems of that comment, and it was a problematic comment. It wasn't argument about pulling closer, right?
And trying to see more clearly the pain people were in and trying to find a way through to a politics that could bring you, bring you in them into some kind of alignment. The deplorable's comment from Hillary Clinton is very different. It's, you know, half of the Trump voters are reasonable people. And half of them are these people are deplorable. It's racist, sex, misogynistic. And we should write them off, right? It's called irredeemable was always the worst... Irredeemable, right?
Like you need... That's deplorable. That's not anger or disagreement, that's contempt, right? That is not politics, really. Like, 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 for that with them. It was a bit of that, I think, reflected in that Biden garbage comment, though there was a lot of garbled syntax, and that'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 in the Democratic Party, which is, you know, Arthur Brooks, the sort of head of the American enterprise institute, turned happiness columnist. It used to make me... It was about to say the happiness guy. Yeah, it 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 it arguing 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 in people and cultures got treated with some contempt, which was just a very big, to me, shift in politics. Obama is sort of 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, so that was true, too. But that the Democrats didn't like them. And like, that's 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.
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, we're are make a mockery of the people who are 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 etc., etc. 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
a comprehensive immigration reform. And I always thought that was wrong. I thought 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 the razor hand, if you're for decriminalizing border crossings, that was a question to all the candidates. I believe Castro or Senator Castro at the time, he proposed
decriminalizing border crossings, right? And Biden says, well, I think if you're here, you have to 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 round table 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 he had, 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? Just 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. 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 Democratic
Party is that, not in my theories, I think, 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 of an 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. You know, you need voters are important to the party working the host voters. And you might, you have this question then, right? Well, how do you appeal to these voters? What do they want? And the answer to the Democratic Party's settlement 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 like the NAACP to environmental justice groups, unions, you listen to the unions, right? Like 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, have made ways are better than some of the other groups because they do have memberships. But a lot of these groups actually believed things, particularly like immigration being a great example because Hispanic shift has been huge on this. You know, if you pull Hispanic voters, particularly near the border, they just don't have super far left views on immigration. Like they don't. I 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, the role that the groups played in the Democratic Party changed. They went for, like, I think it used to be understood that like the role of these sort of highly ideological interest groups is to push politics in the direction that they believe is, you know, right and just. And there's nothing wrong with that. Groups do not need to stay within the
over 10 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, uh, 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, oh, eight, uh, I don't, I don't think any of us believe the Barack Obama was against gay marriage. Like I don't currently believe that in 2008, Barack Obama and his heart of hearts was against
gay marriage. But what Barack Obama was against was losing the election. And so he, I was like in round tables like when he was a candidate and you know, like without going into them exactly, like the impression I definitely got with somebody who saw that, you know, he was going to wait until the politics of that were right because he also thought he could do more for non-discrimination and other things if he, if he like worked through where the country was and
got it, you know, further along to where even he would like it to be. And so that used to be the sort of relationship. The group's pushed and sometimes they pushed in one, but a lot of the time, uh, the politician said, no. And I think that just kind of stopped being the case particularly during elections. And I think it's 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. That, that is, that is my take on this. And I listened to your episode that's out today with Michael Lind about this. And I think it, it gives the groups, like it, 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 and 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, then 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. I think that's right. I also think that when we talk about the groups, right, it can, it can sound like this very separate thing. But you want to talk about where the revolving door
in the Democratic Party is. It's between the groups and the administrations and the, the staffs, right? People go from serving in politics to being in the think tanks, being in the interest groups, etc. 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 madlib, 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, right? Which Joe Biden to his credit doesn't. Just like that leaves a thing blank. But one thing that's we're 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? She's a lawyer. The ACLU, like all their friends, they like bunch of them have worked in the ACLU, right? They're, you know, like if you, if you look at the legal establishment of Democratic Party, the connections to the ACLU are very deep, right? 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, right? Aside from anything else you might think about them.
These are our social networks, right? These are people you see. These are people you are in communication with, right? The people you go to for feedback on your proposals. There are places you might want to work after the administration, particularly now that it's become, you know, verbode into work on Wall Street and other things and and tech became, you know, like less of a good thing to have on your resume. So, 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, right? Like helping to raise this up is an issue that helped defeat Kamala Harris in 2024 and helped elect Donald Trump. Like what was the ACLU doing here, right? What role did it think it was playing by coming up with like this edge case and trying to get all the Democrats to say on the record they were for it as a way of getting the more ACLU support of something in the primary so they could have flank each other. Now that's not
the only thing that happened, right? The sort of TV ad on this was Kamala Harris bringing up basically unprompted in a sort of forum about transgender issues. So, you know, that was also her kind of sense of the politics and how to differentiate herself. But, but there just was something happening in this period where I just think like all the like the lines like everybody's role in this was sort of
getting erased. And yeah, like if the groups want you to take a position you shouldn't take like the politicians need to know that they're role is to represent the public and all should have think about what is good politics because losing, I mean, American politics turns on, you know, the head of a pin now, losing all of the power of the federal government. It 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 and families. Instead of like pushing all the way to where like the ladder of public support claps is under you, they're actually so much to do, right? It's not like we've like solved every other problem. So the only things we have to worry about are like NCAA swimming competitions and
like immigrant detention centers, right? There's a lot to do here, but somehow you you had this yeah, like just like collapsing of the roles, but but also I think really strange culture emerge of just differentiation, you know, among the groups, among the candidates and always, always, to the most extreme position, which Joe Biden wins in 2020 and 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 on front of him before. The fact that he was, you know, then in his 80s to run for election was a separate problem, but his instincts were very good in 2020. It was a bit of a misread of like why Trump won as well, which was 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 where 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 you know the majority would be in favor of this and etc, etc. And I think there was it was just a complete misread of how and why he won in the first place that sort of led everyone just say, okay, let's just let's say whatever we have to now say whatever
we 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 Krippnikov 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 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 Jorogan 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? I think the way I understand these these ecosystems is not that people hear nothing. It's what the 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 that conversation about about the ACLU and in 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 post-mortem. Because if you look at where democratic vote share dropped the most, it is where the cost of living is highest, right? It is not where they're the most gender-assigned in surgeries or something else. There are these things that
are unbelievably hot but in issues and I'm not saying we don't matter. But if I said this in this thread, if you ask me, what do democrats need to sister soldier? Right? It's not like the most weak and vulnerable members of their coalition, although they need to like 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 are 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. There's like actual people who would 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 and in some ways, right? You just like, yeah, 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, like 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 or beaten in in reelection campaigns. If Eric Adams has a lot of problems, but if you 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,
we 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, like 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 have been the thing people talked about the most, right? Coming out of the financial crisis where we had very high joblessness and very low wage increases, you would 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, like they absolutely need them. And they've got in a way out of where people can afford them. Like the fact that California and New York are losing people by droves to Texas and Arizona and Florida isn't just like an interesting fact about America. If you're like losing people because of the cost of living in blue states, like talk about
losing touch with the working class, you've made it unaffordable to live there, right? Like you can't really be a firefighter who protects San Francisco and like 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. Like unless you have money coming somewhere else, it's not possible. Like these are huge failures of governance. And so in terms of like what I would like to see
Democratic politicians repudiate and like 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 in a way where 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 2028, 2030, will 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. 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 are 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 pointer to 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 wine. He's just like, I'm paraphrasing him here, but basically said, our governing philosophy is just like, everything we do, the message is we want to save you money. Like, we want to make things affordable and save you money. Like, that's the whole thing. He was saying that he's an abundance politician. And like, that's a theory I'm associated with. I'm like, okay, well, what is your definition of it? And he's like, prosperity and saving you money,
basically, right? 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, like those voters in Colorado's 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 for the people they think are making it go well. 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 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 exposition or why position, but that's okay, because they're trying to help me. I was asking Paulus, what's the one policy you've done that is 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.
Is it, I don't think that's how politics works. We've done like 30 or 40 things. We have cut the income tax rate like 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? It's 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 pocket. And so it is like that relentless repetition. Different people hear about different things or maybe they never hear about anything, but they just sort of know things are working pretty well. Like we're building houses and you know, 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? The Colorado government runs. Or separately,
they created 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. Yeah, it's good. Well, you know what? We're going to end on that fairly hopeful note where we're all going to move to Colorado. As we're climbing, thank you so much for joining Pods, Dave America. And you know, let's go keep fixing the Democratic Party before it's too late. Thank you, man. Fun is always. That's our show for today. As we're thank you so much for joining us. Everyone, listen and
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