Two Blue States That Will Determine Control of Congress

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So stay tuned for that after today's show. Okay, here's today's daily. From New York Times, I'm Michael Babbaro. This is the Daily. There's never been any doubt that this year's president Joray's would be one or lost in a handful of purple swing states where neither party has a clear advantage. That, however, is not the case for Congress. Today, my colleague Nick Fando's on why control of the House is likely to hinge on what happens in two deeply blue states where Democrats won the show.

It's Tuesday, October 15th. Nick, thank you for making time for us on a holiday. No less. Michael, I am very pleased to be here. So I feel like if you're keeping count, I dare say we have made a hundred episodes. That's an exaggeration, but a lot of episodes about the presidential race. But we have spent comparatively little time talking about who's going to control Congress. And today, with you, we are going to rectify that. And in particular,

we're going to talk about control of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber. So set the stage for us and walk us through the stakes of this year's races for the House. Yeah, let me make a case for why the House of Representatives is uniquely important in this election. So obviously, as we all know, the race for the White House is incredibly close. But the race for the Senate is really tipping towards Republicans right now. Democrats have a shot, but it's an outside

shot to keep control of the Senate. So the House of Representatives is really kind of the second most important question. Because if Donald Trump wins the White House and Republicans have the Senate, the House being Republican would be a trifecta. It would unlock his ability to implement most of his policy agenda, it would protect him from investigation or impeachment, and really kind

of lay the groundwork for two years of conservative Republican policymaking. On the other hand, if Kamala Harris wins the White House and doesn't have control of the Senate, the House is really going to be her only leverage point on Capitol Hill. Right. It's going to be the kind of democratic

beachhead to help her try and get anything accomplished. But it is so close this year that there's a feasible possibility that actually Trump could win the White House and Democrats could keep control of the House, which would be a very powerful potent check on a potential Trump presidency. Remember, they impeached him twice before when he was in office. Right. In other words, no matter what happens, no matter who wins the White House, the House becomes the linchpin for either unified

government or divided government, very consequential either way. Precisely. And even before that happens, the House is going to play a very important role in the kind of end stages of this presidential election. It is, as we all learned in 2021, the body that has to certify at the end the results of the presidential election. Right. And last time Donald Trump and his allies in the House were able to make a remarkable run at trying to disrupt that process, despite the

fact that Democrats were in control of the House. So one can imagine a scenario where this time around, if Republicans narrowly hold on to it, and the presidential election ends up in a near tie or another contested outcome, who is in control on Capitol Hill could be unbelievably important. I just want to make sure I understand that because I think the timing can get confusing for people. We think of Congress being sworn in around the time of the presidential inauguration actually happens

before. So a new Congress will be required to certify the results of the election. You're saying if Republicans win control of the House of Representatives and Kamala Harris were to win the presidential race, then suddenly you're looking at a Republican controlled House that may try to block her certification as president, which would once again plunge this country into a very complicated and potentially very dark place. I think that that's a good summary. And certainly a

question. And the scenario that's on a lot of people's minds right now. Right. So what Nick is the current understanding of both parties' chances of winning control of the House right now? You explained when it comes to the Senate that the odds are very much that Republicans will flip at win control. Now walk us through the odds at House. Yeah. The House is a true toss-up. It is on a knife's edge. Republicans right now effectively have a four-seat majority, basically the narrowest

majority in the century. And they're out there defending it. And there's a very limited number of competitive seats across the country because of gerrymandering in both parties, which have shrunk the map. A few dozen seats that could tip either way. And an even smaller number of that that may affect the final outcome. But the really interesting feature of the race for the House this year is that the true battlegrounds don't match up with the presidential race. We're not talking about

Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. There are some races there. But the biggest clusters are actually in two large coastal blue states, New York and California. And why would that be? Well, let me just give a sense of numbers first, which I think will help illustrate this. There are 17 seats that Republicans hold right now that President Biden won four years ago. Of those, 10 of them are in New York and California. And five or six of them

Biden actually won by double digits. So to put it in a different way, Republicans in 2020 and 2022 were able to win a set of districts to build their majority that, you know, by registration or makeup, 10 to tilt Democratic or vote for Democrats for president. And so that means that Democrats clear as path to winning back the majority runs through those two states. What do we need to remember about those races two years ago that helps explain this dynamic and how we got here in these two

deep blue states? So just to rewind the clock a little bit, remember, you know, 2022 was Biden's first midterm, typically the party out of power. Republicans are expected to make a bunch of gains across the country in the house. Republicans were expecting to pick up a pretty big majority. And by and large, they had an underwhelming night in most of the country except for New York and California. And there are different reasons for that. New York and California, as anyone who

has visited there or lives there knows are very expensive places. And so they're extra sensitive to inflation and food and housing and basically put voters into a very sour mood. At the same time, the pandemic brought this disruption to life all across the board and a spiking crime in some places. And it was really intensely felt, for instance, in New York where a daily drum beat of crimes on the subway or violent crimes on the street became kind of the dominant issue of the midterm campaigns

and Republicans were able to really effectively message on this issue. And I think that the thing that unifies these states is that they're both states where Democrats have total control of government. Right. Where voters are looking at these problems, which many places are facing across the country. But they have one party basically that's in charge that they can blame. Democrats control mayors offices, the governor's mansions, and the White House. So why wouldn't you, if you're fed up

about these issues and you think that government is not doing enough to help? Well, you go against the guys in power and that meant going with Republicans. Right. So in that sense, Republicans weaponized New York and California's blueness and used it against them very effectively through the issue, especially of crime. Precisely. And there was another issue with that blueness that actually hurt Democrats. It's a little different. So across the country, abortion rights were

one of the biggest rallying cries for Democratic candidates in the midterms. And they actually had a lot of success in swing states where voters perceived their abortion rights to be at risk after the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v Wade. But in New York and California, I think voters were a little bit more dubious about that. They knew that Democratic supermajorities in Sacramento and

Albany were not about to overturn abortion rights. And so the issue just wasn't quite as potent in motivating Democratic voters to come out in the same kind of numbers that Republicans who were concerned about cost of living in crime and independence were to come out and vote against them. And so by the time election night comes around. Now it was a bumpy night, a long island for Democrats. We start seeing these districts from Long Island up through the suburbs of Westchester and the

Hudson Valley start flipping towards Republicans one by one. There was good reason for Republicans to cheer at their watch party in Nassau County on election night. They just turned blue districts red. And in California, a number of seats that Democrats thought Republicans had no business representing that they'd won in 2020, they start holding those races. Each one of them tips towards Republicans. California's 27th district, this win for Republicans is the 218th seat. Republicans

have now secured a majority in the House of Representatives. And at the end of the night, it all adds up to be enough for Republicans to hate the House majority.

Right. And the question is, is that going to happen again this year on election day? Are Republicans going to be able to motivate, especially these suburban voters on anxieties around cost and crime and will Democrats fail to motivate their suburban voters in these same districts around essential democratic motivating issues like abortion that could well determine as it did two years ago who controls the House this year? I think that is the most pertinent question because Democrats

feel that they have learned a lot of lessons from 2022. Their candidates are better funded, they're running more debt campaigns, targeting more voters, they're not taking these districts for granted. And most importantly, they're aggressively messaging on a lot of the issues that voters still say they care about. Crime, cost of living, immigration has really creeped up. And the result, I think, is an election where on paper at least Democrats have a lot of really

good pickup opportunities. It looks like they should have a clean path back to the majority. But in reality, poll after poll is showing these races within the margin of error that they could flip in either direction. And as I'm thinking about all these things, there's one district in particular in the suburbs just north of New York City where a lot of these issues are coming into play. The possibility for Democrats of winning back the House, but also the reality for Republicans

of having a strong set of issues and candidates to defend their ground on. And the outcome of that race, which could come relatively early on election night, is probably going to tell us a lot about which way the whole House is tipping. Nick, take us inside of this New York House race. That you have been tracking pretty closely. So this is New York's 17th district. It's just up

the Hudson River from New York City. It's kind of an interesting and complicated district. So a lot of it is the northern suburbs of Westchester County, which on balance are really pretty affluent. This is the home in Chapacua, for instance, a bill in Hillary Clinton. Their kind of sprawling

country estate. And there's multi-million dollar houses all up and down the Hudson. But at the same time, just across the river, there's communities in Rockland County that are more ex-urban, more working class, retired or active cops and firefighters and their families that tend to be a more traditional swing district. If you added all up, this has been real friendly to Democrats in the past. Biden won this district by 10 points, something like 80,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans.

But in 2022, in the midterms, this Republican assemblyman named Mike Lawler kind of comes out and nowhere and ends up defeating one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress for this seat. He harnesses a lot of the issues that we've been talking about and takes down this guy, Sean Patrick Maloney, who was not only defending his own seat, but was the head of House Democrats campaign arm responsible for defending the majority nationwide. Right, Lawler doesn't take out just any Democrat.

He takes out a kind of Democratic lion who's supposed to protect the rest of House Democrats. Exactly. And he does it through some really adept messaging, taking each of these issues that we've been talking about and deploying them in very specific ways. The best example of this is around crime. So in New York, the crime issue was really kind of localized and intensified around

the issue of cash or cashless bail. Right. Democrats in New York with good intentions of trying to get rid of this practice had pretty dramatically changed New York's bail laws in recent years. Today, we are pleased to bring you a debate among all four candidates running for the credit nominee. Lawler had an old clip that turned out to be really valuable. I was opponent, Sean Patrick Maloney. Do you believe in ending cash bail, Mr. Maloney? Absolutely. And I'd make it the top priority.

I'm saying on a debate stage, I support getting rid of cashless bail. Now, the legacy of cashless bail is complicated. But in this moment, remember where crime has kind of bubbled up after the pandemic. It's a really easy scapegoat for Republicans to point to and say, this is the reason, this is the cause. Is this guy serious? Sean Maloney said his top priority was releasing dangerous criminals so they

can commit more crimes? That's nice. And Democrats didn't quite know how to respond to this. They tried defending the law. They tried changing the subject. And on Election Day, it turns out that a lot of voters were very attradated and very worked up about it. And Lawler wins by just the tiniest of margins, a few thousand votes to become the Republican congressman and a kind of instant celebrity by dent of beating the National House Democratic chairman. And what kind of congressman does Lawler

turn out to be given the dynamics of this district? He knows he's just won it by hair. Yeah. So Lawler knows from day one that he's going to have to defend this seat in two years. So he spends a lot of time, from the very beginning, reaching out to groups that you wouldn't expect a Republican to talk to. It is critical in this day and a to have strong Republican support for labor. He courts labor unions, he courts independent and democratic leaning moderates.

When House Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy, Lawler was like unmissable on CNN for weeks talking about how stupid his party was, how idiotic it was and how controlled it was. All of that work, all of that important work has now been upended by these eight selfish people who joined up with the squad to frankly upend the institution of the House and create a constitutional crisis. Not the kind of thing you would expect somebody to normally do, right? Right. And it's good to be back.

At one point, as Washington is headed towards a debt default. President Biden actually travels to Lawler's own district to try and put pressure on him to strike a debt limit deal. The President and Republicans and Congress make laws here as well. Mike's on the other team, but you know what? Mike is the kind of guy that when I was in the Congress, they're the kind of Republican I was used to dealing with. And he ends up complimenting the guy.

He's not one of these Maggar Republicans. He says like, this is the kind of guy that I can work with. He's not like the rest of his party. I don't want to get him in trouble by saying he's in the nice bottom or negative bottom, but thanks for coming, Mike. Thanks for being here. This is the way we used to do it all the time. He was trying to establish this independent brand that like, yeah, there's an R behind my name,

but like, I'm willing to vote across the aisle. I'm willing to criticize my own party. He presents himself in all of this as kind of the adults in the room. Hmm. Is time we work together to get our country moving again and lead to the games to the kids? So all of this, I think, is important because Lawler knows heading into the next election that he's not going to have the element of surprise this time. The environment may be different.

It may not. He's going to need some Democratic and independent voters to stick with him and maybe come over to his side if he's going to win a second term. Hmm. Okay. So Lawler proves very deft at being the kind of Republican that this district can embrace perhaps twice in a row. Talk about who he is facing on the Democratic side in this year's House race. His Democratic opponent is Mondair Jones. I was lucky to grow up in Rockland County.

Jones is a former one-term Democratic congressman who lost to see it after redistricting in 2022, but it's got a lot of strengths as a candidate. Raised by a young single mom who like so many incredible women throughout this district still had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. He's got this remarkable biography like really an American dream story. My grandfather was a janitor and my grandmother clean homes.

He grew up poor. He ended up at Harvard Law School, became a lawyer, worked in government, and then won a seat in Congress. Growing up, I didn't see people like me in Congress. Then I was elected to represent the same people whose homes I washed my grandmother clean. It was the kind of guy who looked like he could make my Lawler a one-term congressman. Hmm. But Jones also has some real baggage because when he ran the first time,

he ran just an out and out progressive. This was in 2020. It was after George Floyd was murdered. It was in the middle of the pandemic. He was for at the time defunding the police. He was really against a lot of the Trump era border and immigration policies. He staked his tent with the left and with progressives, which at the time was quite convenient. Now, his turned out to be a real heavyweight around his neck.

Hmm. I'm going to guess that Lawler is pointing to all of those old policy positions and statements in this year's race. Exactly. Just like he was able to use old clips of Sean Patrick Maloney to remarkable effect to hurt him. He's turning to old statements that Jones made that, in many cases, he now rebukes. He says he was wrong about defund the police. He's advocating for more aggressive border policies this time around.

But the problem is, when voters' TVs are being saturated with all these old clips, liberal, modern-air Jones wanted to defund the police. He made it in mass incarceration and defund the police. He's deep-funding the police, cutting that funding and reallocating it to social workers. It adds from Mike Lawler that tried portray Jones as more accountable to AOC, to Andrea Casio Cortez, than to the voters of this district. The pride of New York right now, modern-air Jones.

That's AOC praising modern-air Jones because Jones supports a radical agenda. It undermines some of what Jones is trying to do to look more pragmatic, and that's what he feels he needs to do to win this district. Lawler is very much trying to make this year's race a carbon copy of the race two years ago, where it becomes a referendum on whether Democrats are too progressive on criminal justice policy, and therefore not basically hard enough on crime.

And he's got some ammunition there in Mondair Jones's record. Yeah, that's right. The issues may be a little different than 2022, but the pattern is basically the same. I'm the adult in the room, I'm the reasonable one. I may not be the part of your use to, but I'm going to be much more responsible actor in Washington for you than these crazy out of touch Democrats. And how Nick is Mondair Jones framing this race?

Yeah, so Jones is running his own very aggressive campaign here, and he is maybe unsurprisingly focusing on the issue of abortion. Lawler empowers the worst people in Washington. Their platform would ban abortions even here in New York without exception for rape or insist. So we have. Democrats think this time around actually it's a more potent issue because there's a presidential election at the top of the ticket, the specter of potentially a national abortion ban.

They think we'll really motivate their voters even in these democratic states. Congressman Mike Lawler always votes against abortion. So we have to stop this guy. So he is trying to take Lawler's record on this specific issue and show that it exposes him as kind of a fraud generally, that he may say he's a moderate, but at the end of the day, he mostly votes with his own party. Right, he's saying Joe Biden might have praised him, but he's anti-abortioned. Exactly.

So all this has meant a very close and contentious race for months. There's been some surprises. Some of them brought by you yourself. Indeed, earlier this month, I got a hold of photographs of Lawler when he was a college student in the early 2000s, dressing up for Halloween in Blackface. He was a Michael Jackson superfan. He still is. He even went out as an 18-year-old to Michael Jackson's criminal trial in California to attend it.

But obviously, the imagery of Blackface is very charged and very offensive. Right, but it's unclear how much of an electoral impact this is going to have in the end. Lawler really didn't run away from it. He went right into it. What did he say? For me, there was no ill intent. There was no effort to malign or make fun of or disparage Black Americans. He went on CNN and said, look, I'm aware of the history of what Blackface is. That's not what I was trying to do here.

It was really an effort to pay homage to somebody who was a musical idol for me. I've always loved Michael Jackson's music and his dance moves. Jones, for his part, called on Lawler to drop out of the race and resign from his seat. Michael Lawler knew exactly what he was doing. And he's not having his apology or explanation at all. He says, you know, exactly what you were doing. And is only upset because he got caught doing it and not because he actually engaged in offensive behavior.

And you don't really see that sorry. And so that brings us more or less to the present where Lawler has maintained a narrow lead in the polls. It's narrow enough that on Election Day, this race could tip in either direction. You know, that I think is indicative going back to this broader story about the climate in a state like New York or California of just how surprisingly close each of these races are.

Nick, we're spending all this time talking about the particular dynamics of this district, New York 17, and the two candidates who were running for this seat. But I'm curious how the dynamics of the presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are likely to affect turnout in this district and voters' attitudes about the two candidates. Yeah, it's such an interesting one because obviously the presidential candidates are not

really spending any time in a district like this in New York. They're not really spending money here. But they are driving the kind of national mood around the election. For instance, you know, Democrats like Jones, I think we're really heartened when Joe Biden dropped out in Kamala Harris got in because they saw the energy from their base, the engagement, the number of volunteers ready to sign up for them, just like Skyrocket.

And I think generally their theory of the case has been that in a presidential election, your turnout is much higher than a midterm. Both parties tend to turn out with enthusiasm. And the end of the day, it's a Democratic district and if everybody turns out the Democrat wins. Now, the interesting thing about that, I think, is that there's a Republican theory that Trump is actually becoming somewhat more palatable or at least less offensive in districts like these over time.

Can you explain that? We've been seeing in national polling that Trump is actually improving most in states like New York and California. Blue states that he's never going to win, but where voters may be looking at his economic policies or his presidency with some nostalgia and saying, you know, he's not quite as bad as we thought or not as dangerous as we thought. Or, you know, I still don't like him, but look what the Democrats have reaped in terms of inflation and crime and

all these other issues. And this matters in these districts, again, not because it will affect Trump's outcome. But if Kamala Harris is winning Mike Lawler's district by five points instead of the 10 that Biden won it by, it's a lot easier for a Lawler to run ahead of the Republican ticket and still be able to win. So I think one of the questions I'm really interested in as we head into Election Day is actually how Trump performs in all these districts because it's going to give us

the answer whether 2022 was just an aberration in places like New York and California. Or if, you know, some of these suburban, ex-urban places that swung away from the Republicans during the kind of early to mid-Trump era are now swinging back in a way that it's going to make them more competitive for years to come. You're raising the possibility, which I'm sure Democrats are very low to contemplate that Republicans have been developing in the Trump era a structural

advantage in these blue state swing districts. Yeah, I don't know that I would go as far as to say an advantage, but they have been eating into and eroding Democrats advantage. The advantage that they had in getting it back towards more kind of neutral competitive territory. And the question in this election is whether they can lock that in and in doing so, open up possibilities for themselves not just this November, but in November's to come. But it's not a feda-complete

Harris and Monday are Jones like they get this. They're trying to communicate to voters that we

have heard you. And if they can successfully convince them that they have, that they feel their economic pain, that they understand, you know, some of the policies of the past are not the direction that voters want to go in, then they could flip the script and buy themselves two more years to continue to change the Democratic image in the way that they want to and potentially reverse some of this swing back towards the Republicans in ways that could be just as meaningful and lasting.

Well, Nick, thank you very much. We appreciate it. You are welcome, as always, Michael. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that Russia has recaptured several villages inside its own borders that Ukraine had invaded over the summer. That could threaten Ukraine's plan to use those Russian towns as leverage in negotiations to end the war.

Ukraine still holds roughly 300 square miles of Russian territory, but that's down from about 400 square miles that Ukraine occupied in the first week of its invasion back in August. And here we go. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, ignition. And lift off. On Monday, NASA launched its first mission to Jupiter in more than a decade. This time, the objective is not to investigate the planet itself, but instead one of its moons called Europa.

The $5 billion mission will study whether Europa, Jupiter's fourth largest moon, possesses conditions favorable for life. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke and Mouge Sadie. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Mary and Luzano and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landfork of Wonderland. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bore, see you tomorrow. From New York Times' opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

Peep Buttigieg has had one of these fascinating rises in politics. He went from being Mayor Seth Beniniana, a small but noble town, to an unexpectedly competitive presidential candidate, winning Iowa in 2020, to Secretary of Transportation, and now this year,

to the Democratic Party's acknowledged best-of-class communicator, a guy who furiously strides into Fox News, humiliating anchors, and being the person to be able to deliver what the Democratic Party is about, what even in some ways vice president Harris's campaign is about, under duress. With an opportunity to sit down with him, I wanted to ask him a bunch of questions I have of the Democratic Party. They began with a concept that he wrote a book about in 2020,

which is trust. The Democratic Party has lost the trust of a lot of people once supported it, and it is presided over, endured, assorting of Americans by trust. Donald Trump's Republican Party is a party full of people who don't trust the system, don't trust the government, don't trust Democrats, but it's become much more than that. So how does he think about trust? And what does he think government has done to lose it? What does he think Democrats have done to

lose it? And what can be done to gain it back? I should say there is a rule, a law called the Hatch Act, that keeps members of the government from campaigning in their official guys, which is fine. The strange thing about the Hatch Act, though, is it goes the other way too. And so in order to talk with Buttigieg more widely, I was not able to ask him a number of questions I would like to ask

him about his work as transportation secretary. But given that, we had I think a pretty fascinating conversation, as always, my email is reclined show at nytimes.com. Pete Buttigieg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. So back in 2020, you wrote a book on political trust, and there are a million ways to show that it is declined. But what's your

explanation for why it has declined? So one of the reasons I think it's declined has been a kind of a feedback loop between public institutions letting people down, and people then hesitating to empower those public institutions to solve their problems. So if you go back to the rise of Reaganism, you know, one of the quotes he's best known for, that the most frightening thing you can ever hear is somebody saying, I'm from the federal government and I'm here to help. That generation of

conservatives, when they took power, didn't just believe the government was the problem. His other famous saying, right, government is the solution government is the problem. But they also stripped away a lot of the capacity of government to solve problems. That becomes, I think, a feedback loop where if you're looking around and you're seeing crumbling infrastructure or widening inequality,

you might think, oh, the government sucks at fixing these problems. And then the next time you're being asked, for example, in the course of an election to vote for a candidate who's going to make sure there's enough funding going to the government, and you say, I'm not going to put tax money into the government, government sucks. That too becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the next thing you know, these public institutions are less and less able to address things. You contrast

that with what you have, for example, in Nordic countries. And I know it is always like almost exhaustingly like a go-to for liberals, right, to point to a Nordic example. Ah, Sweden. But importantly, one of the many, many things that would be nice for us to have, that they have in Sweden is a high perception of tax fairness.

Partly, that's because I think they actually have a fairer tax code. But I also think there's been a virtuous cycle there, where public entities have done a reasonably good job of taking care of people. People therefore have a relatively high level of trust that their tax dollars will be used fairly and wisely. And therefore, they allow those institutions to have the running room they need to try to solve things. I don't mean to reduce all of this to debate over the size of government.

I think one of the things that we've gotten smarter about now is how it's on the left, is that it's not just how big our house is. Small government is. But I do think that's an example of one of the factors that was very corrosive. A more recent one, of course, is the way information moves around. There's a lot of hope with the arrival of the internet that the democratization of

reporting was going to be empowering. And in some ways it was, some very important ways, like human rights abuses that were captured on smartphones could no longer be denied.

Right? On the other hand, what we didn't think about was that the editorial function of identifying what is true or not true, what is newsworthy or not is dissolved or nonexistent in those same online spaces, which meant that lots of different things, some true, some false, some worth attention, some questionable, we're all kind of putting into the same swirl and got imbibed as if they were

all the same. And I think that's another example of something that's led to this world we're in now where people don't even trust that we're in the same factual reality as one another. So let me take these explanations in term. I would take the first one as a policy feedback theory. Bad policy creates negative trust. Good policy should create positive trust. I would say I believed something more like that at the beginning of the Biden era.

And watched a bunch of policies that I would have thought would have created, even just for themselves, feedback loops like the Child Tax Credit expansion, not quite work. I was thinking about this this week because in the American Rescue Plan, the teamsters got a big help in hand. And they just declined to make an endorsement in this election, declining to endorse Vice President Harris for the first time in modernity. And that's putting it mildly.

I mean, their pensions were saved by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. So if you would have thought that policy feedback loops would work anywhere, you save the teamsters. The teamsters like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris better would have been about as tight a feedback loop as you could imagine. And it didn't work. And the description or the reason the teamsters gave for not making a national endorsement was that their membership is heavily pro-chrom.

So how does something like that fit with the theory that people are responding here, to whether or not policy seems to be helping them? Well, part of it, an unsatisfying but I think very true answer is time. These things don't happen that quickly. The Child Tax Credit can take effect very quickly. And the astonishing results in terms of the swift reduction of child poverty showed that some good policies can also work very quickly.

But that doesn't mean that it soaks in to where people award political credit for that very quickly. Or even embrace the policy that was helpful. And one good example, maybe the best example I can think of on this, on how there was in fact a policy feedback, but it wasn't quick. It has to do with the Affordable Care Act. Now, I cut my political teeth running for an obscure statewide office in 2010, state treasure in

Indiana. And that's one of those races where your prospects pretty much depend on the generic rising or falling of your party. And believe it or not, it didn't seem insane to run as a Democrat in Indiana in 2010 because in 2008, Barack Obama had carried Indiana. That you had to have it by as a senator.

Yeah, um, don't be me wrong. I knew it was uphill even then. But of course, I got clobbered every Democrat just about in any even remotely competitive area, let alone a reddening state like Indiana was clobbered because in 2010, the Affordable Care Act was absolutely toxic to us Democrats. It was the issue that cost many Democrats the election.

By 2018, the ACA was actually the winning issue for Democrats. So much so that when Kamala Harris challenged Donald Trump over his attempts to destroy it, he was avoiding his own commitment to what was very much his own policy. Right? He definitely wanted and tried to undo the Affordable Care Act and get rid of all that, but it is now politically dangerous for him to admit it. So eight years is a long time and it's not a long time, right? I think it's not a long time for

a major policy issue to flip its political valence. It's not a long time for an important policy to bear enough fruit that people appreciate it and then are protective of it. But it's also too slow for those who, you know, including members of Congress who helped get the ACA passed to live politically live to tell the tale. So there's a question that may seem unrelated on trust, but I think it's actually related. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president this year.

He dropped out and endorsed Donald Trump. What did you make that run end of that endorsement? It's a weird, it doesn't even begin to characterize how I view that campaign. I think the endorsement is less weird actually because there is an appeal to anybody who kind of wants to burn it all down, is probably a crossover Trump slash RFK Jr. or a voter. And in particular, flavor of conspiratorial style that I see that they have in common, which is a conspiracy is introduced, conspiracy theories

introduced by somebody saying they won't tell you this. Don't trust them. They don't want you to see this. They're not reporting on this, but I'm going to tell you, which ironically is saying, like, you can't trust anybody else, but you can trust me, which should, you know, make you skeptical immediately. But that style of saying, I know something that the establishment dozens and they're

lying to you in RFK's case, most famously about vaccines. And of course, again, there's a lot of crossover here, right, between the his famous anti-vax stances and what you get in Trump world. But there's that same kind of affect. And it is a little bit post policy. I don't know how much they align on policies really. Actually, with each of them, for different reasons, it's hard to pin them down on policy. But I do think in that sense, it was natural. So I think that's right. And it

gets at this other dynamic. So two things to me have happened with trust over the last couple of decades. One is that it's gone down, the kinds we're talking about. The other is it is sorted. So you used to have what I would call low trusts in the system voters in both parties. And RFK Jr. was a recognizably left wing version of that. They don't believe in vaccines in GMOs, corporations are taking everything over, maybe you can cure cancer with vitamin C, that kind of thing.

And the right wing versions of this, like going all the way back to the John Birch society. But you had a bunch of them on both sides. And something that Donald Trump seems to set off in politics is a realignment. My friend, Madaglaced, calls it the crank realignment. And so now you've RFK Jr. moving over to the right. It's not that he's on policy a right wing or he doesn't want to necessarily get rid of Medicaid. I guess I don't really know his position on Medicaid, maybe it does.

No, I've not asked him at the fair point. But there is this clustering of higher trust voters in Democratic Party voters who believe in the system and lower trust in their Republican party. Does that do to politics? I think that that sorting is kind of unique to this moment. I don't know that it's durable. In one sense, it's the most natural thing in the world to the more, for the more right of center party to be anti-government. And therefore, if the establishment means government,

it should be skeptical. But when it becomes any institution, including your county run election administration, which is literally being run by your neighbors, or to move outside of government, kind of medical academia saying, hey, these vaccines are working or anything else, then I think it becomes a lot more dangerous and corrosive. And again, I think it puts us back in this world where people kind of have their own realities or their own facts.

And if there aren't some agreed on trusted arbiters of some of this, whether it's in the press or in the academy, it's less likely to be in government. But one reason we have certain and importantly, non-partisan institutions in government, like the judiciary is supposed to be, is for this reason. You lose that whether it has a partisan valence or not, it's bad news. So this may be a good time to bring in your occasional foil, JD Vance. There's just today,

I guess, reporting that you are playing JD Vance in debate prep with Tim Walls. As you've spent time trying to get into his head and into his demeanor, what have you come to understand in him or believe about him that you didn't before? He's somebody who is a product of the Midwest. But after trading off of that Midwest identity is now in my view promoting policies in a ticket that

would be really harmful for the industrial Midwest. And so I'm thinking a lot about this kind of, what I consider to be a faux populism, this space he's carved out, where he achieves a certain credibility by criticizing both parties, saying that Democrats and Republicans, the past have gotten things wrong. But then all the prescriptions he seems to be ready to vote for or act for are things like undercutting or right to choose or tax cuts for the richer, a lot of other things

that I think are objectionable about, good old fashioned Republican policy. So I'm just thinking a lot about how to penetrate the Avenir. But that doesn't let you play him. I guess one thing I'm curious, the reason he's a curiosity to me, I knew him a bit who's on my show back in 2017 back in an earlier guys. I've watched a lot of politicians in the Republican Party go from being

Trump haters to Trump supporters or something beyond Trump supporters. He's really the only one who I've watched his whole temperament and personality and way of talking and being and moving through the world change. Ted Cruz had Ted Cruz's personality in 2013. He was shutting down the government. He was not well liked by his colleagues. Marco Rubio is much friendlier to Trump now, but same sort of guy temperamentally. JD Vance has, it's like went through a temperamental

overhaul. He became angrier and resentful and contemptuous of people disagree to them. Also, at the same time, things went really well for him personally. It's not like he was vastly rejected by a seller. He was the toast to the town. How do you understand, as you're one trying to absorb his temperament? Because you're, I'm sure you're trying to prepare him all for that. What do you make of that? Well, I've certainly seen a lot of Republicans,

especially my generations, Republicans, go through some version of this evolution. Although you're right, I think it's more dramatic in his case. I think it means there's a real contradiction in him because he is simultaneously the Republican who's supposed to explain a new kind of conservatism to the world, including the New York Times readers. And he's supposed to embody this kind of angry populism and this kind of facts-don't-matter nihilism of what Trump represents, even though he eloquently

called it out before he got on board with it. But I think sometimes we make these things way more complicated than they are. I think there's a bunch of people, including him, who no-dee down how bad Donald Trump is for the country, realized that they could gain power by attaching themselves to him and they did it. And that's one thing that he has in common with a very different Midwesterner, Mike Pence. It worked out really poorly for Mike Pence. And that's part of why it's going to be

JD Vance sitting on that stage. Big part of the JD Vance theory of the world now, theory of politics. You see this in Project 2025 too. Is it they, you, have captured the institutions,

captured the government particularly? And the thing that the Magham movement needs to do, which is now sort of laid out in much more detail on something like 2025 than it ever was in President Trump's first term, is that they're going to march through the institutions, break them, with them of the deep state of the Liberals of whatever, and get them back. JD Vance once called this debathification, working off of what America did after the invasion of

Iraq and an interesting analogy. But this is their sort of promise to the low trust voter. You think the system is against you. You don't trust it. Don't turn away from the system. We're going to take it, break it, and wield its power for you, and use that to bring corporations to heal, universities to heal, all the other institutions in American life. You don't trust anymore. Right. That's the sort of unified governing theory of Magham. Yeah. How do you take it?

Well, the problem is what are you saying is these institutions don't work for you, the people. So we're going to take them back on behalf of the people. But what he means is these institutions don't work for me, a right-wing politician, and so we're going to put them under the control of

right-wing politicians. And if you look at something like what Project 2025 would do to the civil service and taking a lot of what are importantly nonpartisan roles and make them directly subject to political control, it is less than plausible that that is going to benefit anyone but whoever's

controlling them. Now, of course, I think it's completely upside down to have a political party that's most associated with task cuts for the rich and letting corporations have their way offered to be the ones that are going to make these institutions work better for you precisely because we have had nonpartisan institutions handle things like regulation that we have some stability to the rule of law in this country and that it's aligned not around the interests of any one person, political

or financial interests of any one person, but around those of the public, you cannot have safety in peace and rule of law let alone a healthy political system if there's this sense that the government is personally controlled by one person that's not safe or good. And so I think what we have to do is see through that. Now, you are more susceptible to believe something like that.

If you feel like it has failed you so completely that anybody offering to just smash it is bringing you some kind of benefit, this is why these institutions really have to do a better job of delivering for people. I think sometimes one way you build trust with people is running up to failure and something you said that was interesting. You and I sort of come up in the same era of elite failure. Iraq war is an elite failure. The financial crisis is an elite failure. Like there's a lot

that goes wrong in this period. What specifically in your view does the democratic party have to own up to where did the democratic party go wrong in this era and what lessons either has it learned or does it still need to learn? Well, certainly I think the complicity of the democratic party in the run up to the Iraq war continues to be something that really helped set America on to the political

trajectory that we're on right now. And I think that you see, for example, another flip in politics that's very revealing is that I remember in 2002 as a college student volunteering on a democratic congressional campaign. The Democrats everywhere who were skeptical of the idea of the Iraq war were still kind of pretending to be okay with it because they thought they had to be. What campaign were you volunteering on? The local congressional race where I lived in South

Bend, Indiana. And we did not win. But by 2016 Donald Trump who was for the wars pretending he was against it. So again, it took a while, but things really shifted there. Obviously, probably because of the disastrous consequences of the invasion. But you know, I think that that provoked or should have provoked a lot of introspection on the left or among Democrats, I should say, on how we allowed ourselves to go along with that. There's a lot of introspection in our party. I think over policies

that may be making it harder to build things. Housing is the one that I know you've paid a lot of attention to and probably gets the most attention. But there's lots of things from mining for materials needed for clean energy to infrastructure, which I won't get into now because I'm here in my personal capacity. But a lot of things that it's clear, it's not a straightforwardly clear. So I think the right thing is that well, if you got rid of all these regulations and environmental

protections and we wouldn't have this problem. But I do think we've, you know, we've got to be a little more serious about about that. I could go on. You can't, you can't, you can't dangle that housing bait in front of me and not expect me to take it. Expanding housing supply, which is not the thing Democrats were emphasizing 10 years ago, was the first thing on Kamala Harris's first major set of policy proposals she wants to build three million new houses over her first term,

Barack Obama. And here's the DNC. He brought that up first in his list of new ideas for Democratic party. Housing is a lot harder to build. I have done a lot of work on this where Democrats govern. It's a lot easier to build a home in Texas than it is in California. That is true today, right? Gavin Newsom is a governor of California and has passed a lot of pro-housing legislation. It is still harder to build in California than Texas. Why? What did Democrats get wrong here?

Well, I don't want to make this out to be just a democratic thing. But it's clear that out of the desire, part of which, by the way, is very well-rounded to make sure that bad things don't happen. You wind up with a lot of measures put into place that stop anything from happening, including good things, right? But I also think it's important in telling that she has led with this policy to

expand housing supply, because that's clearly a problem. And one thing that I think is especially important about this moment, and I think also characterizes what I would think of as Bidenism, is a willingness to meet a big problem with a lot of ambition and a belief that if you get it right,

good government can be part of the solution. There's been a tremendous amount of energy in the Democratic Party in the Biden administration to build more clean energy by creating subsidies, tax credits, making sure people know there will be a market for this if you build it, if you design it, creating innovation hubs, if you can spend money to create energy, we are doing

it. And it's having a big effect. And I support that hugely. This question of Democrats and maybe the government in general has made it too hard to do good things and in effort to stop bad things. Not a lot has happened on that side. There's not been permitting reform past. There's not been major changes made to things like the National Environmental Policy Act. There's a lot of housing talk, but there's not been much done on deregulating housing. This seems like a thing that is sort of

winning intellectually much more than it is winning at a policy level. And when I report on this, because people are inside among Democrats very uncomfortable with this still, right? They don't want to unwind, they say are very worried, again, understandably, about bad things happening. So in terms of managing something, it has been a bit of a failure. What are the ideas here that that might work? What are the steps Harris could take if she were president, or just it should be

taken in your view as a private citizen? Part of this resource is matter, right? That's why she's proposed resources going into that. I don't want to dismiss how fundamental that is. But yes, for that to work, you also have to have policies that accompany that. And part of it, I think that's important is empowering the local. And this might be another example of where while I can give you all kinds of reasons why my time is mayor, I thought Democrats tended to be better allies to my

city than Republicans. I will still acknowledge that Democrats have sometimes been a little quick to look at a federal solution. When we really need to recognize that a lot of our salvation, socially and policy was, I think we'll come from the local. Now part of that's my bias,

probably as having been a mayor, but I've also seen many ways that that's true. Partly because things like misinformation and disinformation, while of course crazy rumors happen at every level, they are less likely to dominate at the local level because when you're closer to home, you can see through what's real and what's not, whether that's threats being invoked about what bad

thing would happen if you built this. Or an example that's live in the news right now, which is how the community of Springfield, Ohio at a local level is handling itself in a much more dignified way than what is being said about them and done to them in their name by people like JD Vance. Yeah, I mean, well, we'll talk about that in a minute, but just before we leave this, what do you mean by empowering the local level? Because on the one hand, little sounds better,

and I agree that the local politics are typically more dignified and decent than national politics. And on the other, when you think about what makes it hard to cite transmission lines, what makes housing hard, it's often decisions, local governments are making fully rationally, right? Maybe you don't want to be the city where the solar farm is placed. Maybe you don't want to be the city where the transmission lines go through. Maybe you don't want the big multi-family units going up

near you. So you see in a lot of places, Governors trying to take power up to the state level, right? Trying to make more of the decisions, state decisions rather than local decisions. So on the one hand, there's this tendency and politics to want to empower local government. A lot of these decisions are local. And on the other, when I look at this, I often see the problem is that these decisions are extremely local. And so the governor of California, the governor of Maryland, might need

for their state to have a lot more homes build or clean energy built. But for each individual city, they don't want it in their city. They want it in the other city. Yeah, I mean, in that sense, it can seem like a classic collective action problem. I guess my point is if there is a local obstacle, there's more choices on how to handle that than just to ram it down the local community's throat.

And one of them is to adequately set a table where mitigations or trade-offs can be set so that a local community, if it's really being asked of them to swallow something that's difficult for them on the one hand, can be made better off on the other hand in a way that's also consistent with the bigger thing getting done. Vice President Harris has said that what you want to build is an opportunity economy. Opportunity is always one of the weird terms in American politics because you

can't find anybody who disagrees with it, right? You're not going to, there's no politician who says, look, I'm against opportunity. I do not want an opportunity economy. And so it's been there with Bill Clinton, been there with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, because you're a little normal Trump, I don't actually remember him talking about opportunity, but he might have

what is different about the theory of it this time? If we've been pursuing this for so long, across so many administrations, so many sessions of Congress, and we haven't got into a thing where people can say, look, we've built the opportunity economy that you've been promised by administration after administration. What about either the definition of opportunity here or the

policies under consideration here will make that different? Well, I'll tell you the artistic I would use to see if we're getting to the thing, social mobility, the kind of mathematical definition of the American dream, if it can be reduced to that, is the likelihood that you're going to wind up better off than you started. If you were born in 1945, it was a 90% chance that would be true.

For someone your age or my age, it's coin flip, changing that is I think the best indicator that this is an opportunity economy, that this is an opportunity society, but I don't know that I would accept the premise that we're kind of still casting about for it. I'd say we're very much underway in making it happen. There are some indications that we're already trending toward more

social mobility, economic mobility being available. I think this is especially important because I know in past political generations, opportunity has been basically a code for ideological centrism that

means that you're going to see the kind of neoliberal framework kind of playing out. But what's different in the most last few years, I think, is a real level of investment, recognizing that opportunity isn't just about deregulating some space where you're hoping to open a small business, but also making sure that by the time you're out to open a small business, you're doing it on a foundation of education, the infrastructure, whatever else you needed in life to get to that point.

And so to me, it's not kind of we're wandering around looking at for a solution. It's that we're trying to reverse 40 years at least, 50, depending what metric you're looking at, of widening inequality and in some ways diminishing opportunity. And the last three or four years has been an incredible amount of head weight toward that. Let's see how far we can take it. It also had off

the threats to opportunity that we know we're looming most notably climate. So the other side of the race here, Donald Trump, his economic plan is, I guess, an away straightforward, which, depending on the day you hear I'm talking about it, is a 10 or 20% tax on all goods imported from many country and a 60% tax on goods imported from China. His argument made an debate, made a different speeches is that Americans won't pay that as higher prices. That will be companies in

other countries giving us money, sort of like a tax that'll fill our coffers. It'll make sure more production happens here. And that is the way we will become more competitive. Pauling chose 56% of American support the plan. What do you think of both it as actual policy and it as politics? Well, he's terrible policy. And I think that Americans will be less supportive of that as they do the math about the estimated $3900 a year in cost that a typical family might face if he got a

chance to implement that policy. But just as importantly, in results terms, we need to be talking about, and my party needs to be talking about, why it was that there was a manufacturing recession on his watch before COVID, by the way. And what it means that actually jobs are coming back to the United States in manufacturing right now. And that is because of industrial policy. That is

a huge achievement of the Biden-Harris years. And it is just getting started. I can't tell you how many places I have seen where I mean, think about where I grew up, South Bend, Indiana. Still in some ways trying to recover from the loss of the student-maker car company in 1963. Our downtown was haunted by huge factories with broken windows. The biggest investment that I'm aware of happening in my lifetime up until recently was about a $1 billion investment in the

steel plant on the west edge of the county. That was such a big deal that even though it happened in 1990, people were still talking about it. And many economic development professionals were still kind of making their name on it 20 years later when I became mayor. Right now, there is a three to four billion dollar investment in electric vehicle batteries going on right next to that steel facility. There is an $11 billion Amazon Web Services data center being built, a few miles from there.

And another one going up the Microsoft putting in that I can't even remember how much is being invested. So collectively, in order of magnitude beyond anything we had seen since the Kennedy administration, those are the kinds of things that he is falsely saying would be delivered by his all tariffs, no investments strategy. Subhan, the all-terra strategy is a theory. And I think it's consistent in Trump and deep in him, but now sort of more broadly shared by the Marga movement,

which is a very zero sum theory of how the economy works. We are in competition with other countries for factories, for jobs. And the way to win that competition is to tilt the field against them. The sort of trade theories of Trump would go even beyond tariffs, kind of a similar view of it.

And so there's a zero sum competition between native born workers and immigrants for jobs, for wages, when JD Vance is not just being racist about Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio, what he is saying is that they're there, they're taking away the jobs, they are raising housing prices. This is an old strain in economics and in politics. But I'm curious what you think about, I guess it and it's appeal because I do think it's sort of intuitive to people that there were in different

kinds of competitions. People do look and they think, well, yeah, if an immigrant gets a job, I'm probably not getting it or somebody else is not getting it or if another country gets a, you know, a TSMC semiconductor factory, we're not getting it. But how do you answer the intuitive appeal of zero sum economics? Well, look, two things can be true at the same time. One is that there is

competition between us and other countries. And the other is that it is in zero sum. And I do think another thing that really costs a lot of trust in places like where I grew up is we were told, just go along with all these things that are positive sum. The pie will get bigger. Don't worry about your slice, it'll definitely be bigger because the whole pie is going to get bigger. And only half of that promise came true. The pie got bigger, but a lot of people's slices in

places like the industrial Midwest where I grew up didn't. And so there, you got to understand why people have a level of receptivity to that. And at the same time, the idea that it's zero sum is just clearly not true. And again, that's why I think stories like immigration are a lot more nuanced and less kind of fit to that narrative when you actually look at them at the local up, certainly in South Bend, part of how we finally, finally became a growing city after being

called a dying city had to do with immigration. And that was also tied up with economic growth that was happening. Jobs were growing and people were growing and it was not people were coming into compete for the same jobs. We wound up with more jobs and more people. That's happening in Springfield, Ohio right now. And it's a complicated situation there. But one thing that's definitely happening is way more jobs than they had before and way more people in a city that lost thousands

and thousands of its people. But I also think this is a good example of the benefits of taking politics offline. And part of what I mean when I say that salvation will come from the local. Because even though obviously these attitudes can prevail on the local level too, I think actually people do have a richer understanding of how we benefit from what one another brings when it's in the context of your own community.

I've been thinking about this question with Vance because I've been going back and rereading a Hullbelly Elegy. And one of the striking things about that book is the advance understands his own story as an immigration story that his family is part of immigration to Ohio. Four jobs that when they got there they were looked down upon. Right. He's extremely explicit about this. And extremely compassionate about it when it is about his people. And you know I've been

reading a lot of the reporting from Springfield. And there's a lot of decency there. And that the people who you know are in Springfield have been like trying to shout. Like yeah, the problem is here. This has been tough in certain ways or having a lot of new you know immigrants to the community and also our economy is doing well. And also people are not

eating counts and dogs. The cat was in the basement. So famously now in one of the and there is a sort of remarkable absence of the grace asked for for your version of the same story playing out now. But I don't know. I just find it hard to myself to track. Yeah. I think look I have very mixed feelings about even talking about this because my opinion, my strategic opinion is that when they do things like spreading rumors about people eating cats in Springfield

it's not to help with the plight of Springfield Ohio. It's to make sure that we're not talking about how Donald Trump dismantled the right to abortion in this country and the manufacturing recession that happened on his watch and his plans to tax due tax cuts for the rich and everything that's in project 2025. And we're also not talking about it. How and why Kamala Harris won the debate and what she's going to do to make sure we have a fair tax code. So all of that is in the

back of my head as I even take this up. And yet I think it is worth dwelling on something you mentioned. I think one of the most interesting details to come out of this whole set of stories is that when that resident of Springfield realized the cat was in her basement she didn't just go dark. She reached out to her neighbor if I understand the story right used a smartphone translator app to help express regret to her neighbor. And as she's telling the story she's still in a

magahat and a trump shirt. It's not that she suddenly flipped over to become a bleeding heart liberal Democrat but that's exactly the kind of grace that at our best we show. By the way it

takes a lot to do that to make an apology to acknowledge regret. Exactly the thing that is literally anathema to Trump and Trumpism right never admit you were wrong even when you're obviously wrong never back down even if you're obviously lying that you know JD Vance has taken to its extreme level when he's literally sat on CNN and said if I have to create stories I'll do it. But I think what happened there that grace that humanity is incredibly important because in our

actual lives these things are complicated. It is true that Springfield is growing. It is true that their economy is growing. It is true that their population is growing. It is also true that with thousands of new arrivals there not because they are immigrants but because they are people. There are a lot of people going to the hospital and rolling in schools that were not designed to take that big of a shift in a single year or a couple of years. This is not true that diseases up

or crime is up. So it's complicated but what you didn't hear from JD Vance is what I think an earnest politician would do which is say some of my constituents had this problem so I went and got them help right. I mean this is all originated supposedly with them saying we need more federal help. He's their United States senator. It literally has job to mobilize federal help for his

constituents. I haven't heard a peep out of him but anything he's doing to solve the problem because of course his purpose is not to solve the problem is to use the problem and that's a pattern we see again and again and again in how Trump fans deal with any issue from immigration to any of

the others and yet that decency is there and there's even a part of me and I admit that this sounds optimistic but there's a part of me that wonders when the breaking point will come as it always does when there is a vulnerable group set out to be targeted, set out to be hated, feared, discriminated against subject to random violence.

At various times it's been different groups right. I mean at one point it was the Irish and then it was the Italians before it was Haitian immigrants turn it was LGBTQ Americans and maybe in the most parallel example in terms of the way it kind of looked in felt for the persecutors,

people who were suspected of being communists right and it's something happened and it's not really clear what exactly changed except after years of everybody being on the hunt for communists one day, Joe McCarthy is out there sputtering about communists everywhere and somebody says that

long last have you no decency and the whole thing fell apart. I don't know whether that day is 10 years away or whether the fact that this Ohio narrative coincides with Trump advanced slipping in the polls this week means that it's sooner than we think or somewhere in between but I do believe that that day will come and anybody who signed up for this nonsense will have a

lot of explaining to do. The reason I'm I have trepidation talking about this is that I think the way the human mind works is even if the reason you're here in the words Haitians and eating dogs and cats in a sentence 40 times a week now is to be told it isn't true that there is in some

limbic level associations begin to happen that then can be activated negative voice but one of the things that is put me in mind of which was true I guess even before we got to this like distilled point of hatred and libel is you know in my lifetime I in my political lifetime

I have never felt the conversation about immigration as far as it is now the frame is border security we don't talk about comprehensive immigration reform the frame is border crisis right you know and there is a genuine policy problem here and but but it does seem like a lot of ground has been

lost right the discussion is almost entirely about how to get fewer people to show up and not what immigrants contribute not even what the goals of American immigration policy should be except to not have so many people show up and claiming asylum I'm curious how you track why those

politics have moved and changed the way they have well to come back to where we started I think people are more susceptible to that message and that frame when they feel like they are being shorted cheated or left out or failed I think a lot of people feel that way I think there are

good reasons not immigration isn't necessarily one of them but they're good reasons for people to feel shorted and left out and cheated we're doing something about that and you know a lot of the Biden Harris message has been about standing with workers standing with consumers people who are

getting shorted cheated left out or treated unfairly but if you like that's been happening to you for a long time you're going to be more it's just going to be more fertile ground for that kind of thing doesn't make it right does make it okay but it's one of many many reasons why lots of different

problems including social and political problems open up when you allow inequality to widen as America has done for a half century and for virtually in my opinion sometimes that inequality leads to resentments that lead to politics that empower politicians like Donald Trump and JD

Vance whose policies will definitely make that inequality worse and yet it's a clear result of allowing that corrosion to happen in the first place Obama sort of reflected something you saw in Clinton in a different way a view that you had to have credibility on border security first

to have credibility in the rest of the conversation so famously Obama early in his first term really increased the pace of deportations and there was a lot of anger at him later for that because there was a feeling that he did that to an credibility that didn't lead to anything they

were not able to pass comprehensive immigration reform you know even though it did pass out of the Senate in 2013 and Donald Trump obviously swung things very far in an anti-immigration direction and then the border under the Biden administration did see a huge huge influx we did see record

levels of encounters at the southern border but I guess one of my questions is whether or not this sort of old theory of this was right that in order to be credible on the compassionate side as a Democrat you had to first sort of be able to say look we we take seriously that a country needs

to control its own border we take seriously security here we take seriously what is wrong in our own system and because you know we will do that you can trust us on on this other piece it in some ways it feels to me like what is happening now under Biden Harris is an attempt with the

Lankford bill with the executive actions to win back that credibility so a broader conversation can open again well I think you do have to start by acknowledging a common sensical view which is not wrong or xenophobic that the border ought to be secure and that in a healthy system you would have

more lawful and less unlawful immigration and generally that's been the equilibrium of public opinion as well as just kind of the bar room slash chamber of commerce conventional wisdom we ought to have more legal and less illegal immigration now lately even that has shifted but I don't

think that's where the center of gravity of the American people are I think generally most of the time most Americans get that if it's orderly immigration is important an important part of what can grow our economy and I think that's especially going to be true as we enter this stage where

appears for hopefully some time we'll continue to be an economy that is less certain about where we're going to find the workers to do all these good paying jobs then we are about how we're going to find jobs for all the workers we have which is the condition we were in you know just as

recently as 10 or 15 years ago when I entered politics I don't know if there's anything wrong with recognizing that any border ought to be orderly and secure and I do think we lose credibility if we look unserious about that even as we're making the case for broader bigger immigration reform

on a top foreign policy for a bit here I thought one of Harris's strongest debate moments was around Ukraine and when she said yeah Donald Trump might end that war faster by seating it to Vladimir Putin that also got at a real change it's actually happening seems to be happening in their public

and party towards a much more isolationist strain than we've seen in a long time I think with Trump as sort of instinctual with someone like vans it's becoming more ideological right on Ukraine funding among young conservatives there is a skepticism of different kinds of

it including on on Israel there is the Chicago Council on Rola Ferris survey for the first time in nearly 50 years a majority of Republicans prefer isolationism what do you make this turn well I think a lot of his contingent it's a specific result of the roller coaster that Americans have

been on when it comes to foreign policy including you know again the defining experiences that our generation would have seen of America's involvement abroad largely involving policy failure the Iraq war which I view as a failure in its conception and then the experience in Afghanistan

that doesn't change the fact that supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do and it's especially concerning that in JD Vance you really could not have found a running mate more visibly aligned with the anti-Ukraine more or less side of the party he's not just been

isolated been contemptuous of Ukraine it's a different that's right it's a different emotional tone of that's right and it is drawing for those who remember recently is you know 10 or 15 years ago they're being a sense that there was actually Republicans who were too stuck in views about Russia

that had formed under the Soviet Union although I think another thing for us to think about as Democrats is how naive we may have been about any democratic tendencies in Putin's Russia all along there's a lot of mocking a bit Romani for saying Russia was our great geopolitical threat not

saying they I think I'll rank them first but it doesn't look as crazy as it did yes that's true I've exited only a few years after that that a Russian influence operation really affected and harmed our country right so I don't know how to make sense of it other than

to say that that you know one of many things that I think might be possible if there's a decisive defeat of Trump and importantly a decisive defeat of many members of Congress who were aligned with him in swing districts is the prospect again I don't want to sound too optimistic I know it could

go many different directions but at least the possibility of a normal Republican party in the future by which I mostly mean one that is no less committed to democracy than the Democratic party as we would have expected of both parties until a few years ago but I also think that means one where we

can debate exactly how America makes good on our values as well as our interests abroad but less disagreement over whether we should is there a danger in Democrats becoming too big attempt on this I was thinking about this when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris

and thinking about the same history you're describing right I am not on the George W. Bush revisionism train I think we're still dealing with the wreckage of the policy failures and disasters that he and Dick Cheney created but people you know as you say there is a widespread agreement

of rock was a disaster Afghanistan was ultimately something of a disaster and the obviously with draw very very difficult in part for those reasons I think people feel very uneasy about what we can achieve in the world we're arming Ukraine but is a really a path to any kind of resolution

there are we just throwing money dollars weaponry into a stalemate we have been behind Israel and Gaza but you know people are mixed on what they want to see happen there but not this right this does not look good to anybody and I think there's a feeling that what we're doing abroad is just not

work in at the world feels in disorder that we're funding it but don't have a clear pathway through it and then like here comes Dick Cheney to endorse a democratic nominee so on the one hand yeah I'm not where Donald Trump is I'm not an isolationist but I also wonder about whether or not

Democrats are getting themselves into some trouble here by I don't think not all that clearly articulating what stability looks like or what the goals beyond were pro-democracy what is democratic foreign policy trying to achieve well part of how I tried to square the circle here is that a huge

part of the problem with Bush Cheney foreign policy was this idea that there was good and evil we were good the countries that they wanted to attack were evil and that was how policy worked and if we the good came in and blew away the evil everything would be better obviously that was

a disastrous way to think about US foreign policy what you have with Trumpism is not a reason to response to that it's more saying basically right and wrong don't matter at best it's right and wrong don't matter at worst it's we should actually be doing the opposite of believing in democracy

we should be aligning ourselves with dictators or would be dictators or at least authoritarian and authoritarian light leaders a commitment to democracy is wildly important for America at home and abroad without it we are just another country out there we've never been a perfect democracy

but democracy is the most important thing about us and we remain the most important democracy and I believe that continues to have to be at the core of how we engage around the world doesn't mean we get to dictate how other countries work it does mean that we promote the values

that go with that and a set of values that it turns out even if you're not a democracy you can buy into in the name of some universal commitments which is a rules based international order where it matters if you follow the rules that's part of what's at stake in Ukraine as well as

regional security concerns as well as the importance of standing up to the kind of aggression that is trying to change an international border through force in Europe and the strategy that the Biden Harris administration has has been one of finding ways to stand up to that without a single American

group being sent into conflict partly in the view that if we don't we might make it a more dangerous place where more American troops will will be sent into conflict so I think the answer isn't to throw up your hands around wastegreaming and say we can't do any good by engaging even if we've been humbled by foreign policy misadventures from Iraq back to the Anaman more but it also certainly can't be one where we are amoral or worse which is the direction the Trump has led us in.

Going back to your theory though that you build trust by showing gain I think that gain can be ideological I don't think everything in politics is material one thing that has not been all that clearly articulated to me in my view is well in these two conflicts of the Biden administration

has committed itself to what are we looking to happen here where we're calibrating Ukraine very carefully what kind of weapons we give them in their view such that it is possible for them to survive in the war but not necessarily possible for them to win the war and similarly in Israel

it's a little hard to say what the end game is here we've not demanded they do these cease-fire or they don't get our weaponry we don't have a pathway there to a two-state solution and there's none coming from their leadership I think one reason support for some things is beginning

to drain is people think I don't know what I'm even supposed to be hoping for here this just seems like we are now in a grind so when you think about that what does success look like well I don't think you can look at either of those or any of those in terms of a glorious victory that's not what

this is about sometimes it's about facing terrible things that are happening and preventing a bad outcome or preventing a worse outcome and certainly in the case of Ukraine the right outcome is for Russia to go home and leave Ukraine alone what actually happens next depends first and foremost

on the Ukrainians themselves but also what happens there and in so many other places depends on whether a freedom-loving world stands with them not because it will kind of easily or automatically lead to some simple outcome that anybody would have asked for remember Ukrainians didn't ask to be the

symbol of world democracy they actively were to avoid the struggle that they are in this is not something that we created or wanted to create it's when that happens what do you do especially when it tests your values there's a test of our values and we have to meet it then always

our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience I I just read Jan Fossa the Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize recently he's got a book a really short book in the Scandinavian I know somebody heard that I was I like Norwegian literature asked

me if I'd read this novelist who would become very famous with Nobel Prize I hadn't and then I picked up this very slim almost a novella called morning evening and I'm sadly choosing a lot of books based on their size because I need books that can be read in one sitting sometimes the way

travel works and I cannot remember the last time I was more emotionally moved by a novel the first few pages that almost gave up on it because like a lot of Nordic writers he's not really in a punctuation and you have to commit to it a little bit and then it wound up being this really affecting it's

hard to describe but but it's just this really powerful piece of fiction that really moved me and it made me wonder if I would be moved in the same way if I read it when I was younger or if it's because I'm a little older and have a family that it that meant a lot to me I recently read Masha

Gessens book The Future of History it's the most helpful account I've seen of what happened in Russia and why Russia is now the way it is and it's built out of narratives of people who are about our age which maybe is why I found it more intelligible than Sovietology or just the kind of day to day

reporting you you read about what Putin's doing and who he is and then now on my nightstand I've got a book called Mr. Churchill in the White House by Bob Schmull who's a scholar American studies that I know from Notre Dame and just when he thought there couldn't possibly be another book about

Churchill I think somebody counted there's literally like a thousand so kind of interesting and and sometimes fun read because it's a book that's specifically about the time he spent in Washington so there's an interesting psychodrama of how he related to Roosevelt and Eisenhower

there's a fascinating description of just how executive power worked back then that's really interesting to compare to how the interagency works today and then you just try to transpose it to where we are and you imagine you know imagine as Zelensky was just moving to the White House for a while and kind of roaming the halls in his slippers and you just think about how much time has changed so I'm just I'm just getting into that but it's pretty good read.

Pete Buttigieg thank you very much thank you this episode of The Asperch Lancho was produced by Roland Hu back checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Almanso Huta our senior editor is Claire Gordon the shows production team also includes Annie Galvin Elias Isquith and Kristen Lin we have original music by Isaac Jones audience strategy by Christina Simulusky and Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York Times opinion audio

is Andrew Strosser and special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Ali De Bruin and Selchuk Kara Olon