From New York Times Opinion, This Is The Ezra Klein Show What a month this week has been. I don't think I've ever lived through a period in American politics that felt like as much changed as fast. On Sunday, we got the news that Joe Biden was dropping out. I was on a plane that night. I like feverishly wrote the audio essay that I then recorded Monday that came out Tuesday. And by Tuesday, I felt like we were in a fully different world than when I was writing.
Over the last year that I've been working on some of these issues, the most common and dominant worry that Democrats had, if something happened to Joe Biden or Joe Biden decided or was convinced to step aside, is that they had so little confidence in Kamala Harris. Sunday, I was still hearing from Democrats worried about Harris. There was reporting of Nancy Pelosi wanting an open primary or an open convention.
And now, I mean, watching the party not just converge around her, but feel a real thrill around her. Like really, really become passionate Harris stands. Like watching the whole party fall out of the coconut tree and live unburdened by what has been and only in the imagining of what could be. It's fun to watch Democrats have fun. They have not had fun in a long time. And it's also good reminder that people don't know how something is going to feel until it actually happens.
At the same time, when things shift this much, it is reasonable to ask, is anything being missed? Are things that people were legitimately worried about being suppressed? Kamala Harris is a liberal, black Democrat from San Francisco, California. For many in the party that is not the profile, they would imagine or prefer for Wisconsin, for Michigan, for Pennsylvania, for her zone of for Georgia, for all these states.
Now, Harris, as I've argued in other shows, has other political identities, right? That sort of list of attributes doesn't actually reveal that she was a moderate, tough on crime Democrat in California. But I think it's worth taking the concerns a party had about her, not very long ago, seriously. And the way to do that is to look at Wisconsin. Losing Wisconsin in 2016 was a trauma for Democrats. It's no accident that Harris's first major campaign rally, first campaign rally at all.
In fact, since Joe Biden stepped aside, was in Wisconsin, the same state where Republicans held their convention this year. Wisconsin is a must win state for everybody this year. But when Harris stepped out on that stage in Wisconsin, the next president of the United States, Kamala Harris. The feel of it was I think really different than the people who have been worrying about how she might play in Wisconsin, would have expected. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon, Wisconsin. How do Democrats win Wisconsin? Well, since 2016, they've been figuring that out. The Democratic Party there, the state party is run by Ben Wickler, a veteran of different organizing groups like Move On, and absolutely one of the most effective state chairs in the country. And they've been on a fair winning streak since in 2020. Joe Biden won the state in 2022.
Governor Tony Evers was reelected. There was a feeling Wisconsin might go red, and they really kept that from happening. It has gotten bluer since 2016. But that is not to say Democrats have been on an unbroken winning streak. And in particular, the lost sits in the Democratic psyche is Ron Johnson versus Mandela Barnes in the Senate campaign in 2022. 2022 was a good year for Democrats. Ron Johnson is one of their prime targets. He really don't like that guy.
And they thought he was really vulnerable. Barnes, the lieutenant governor, he'd been elected statewide. He's a young black Democrat, a charismatic guy. And he lost, and he lost in a race run by Chris Lasavita, who is now running Donald Trump's campaign. So what can be learned from that race? What can be learned from both Democratic wins and losses in Wisconsin? And how is the Republican Party position there now? Now that Donald Trump has chosen JD Vance for his vice president.
The person you would of course want to talk about this with is that Democratic state party chair, Ben Wickler, and he was kind enough to join me today. As always, my email at Ezra Klein Show at nytimes.com. Ben Wickler, welcome to the show. Great to be with you Ezra. So Kamala Harris's first campaign rally happened yesterday. Tuesday, the 23rd in Wisconsin, you were there. You helped introduce her. What was the vibe like? It was electric. Let me paint the scene for you.
We had a previously scheduled Kamala Harris visit to Wisconsin on Tuesday, on the books. So our team was preparing for that. And then the world changed on Sunday. And then the world changed again with a kind of whoosh. It was like the country was making a decision. The Democratic Party coalesced our delegates to pledging and mass for Kamala Harris. We endorsed her with a unanimous vote of our state party's governing body on Monday.
And meanwhile, the RSVPs were rolling in and the whole team planning the logistics of the event had to scramble to find a bigger and bigger place. They found West Alice Central High School with a huge gymnasium. And more than 3,000 people got into the event. It was the biggest Democratic political event in Wisconsin since 2012. And when you walked in, the room would just explode.
And when I walked out, people jumped to their feet, not because of me, because of this feeling that they were there for history. They were there for a kind of end to a period in American politics that people want to move past. And the beginning of something so much better.
And all the way through, through multiple speakers, through music breaks, there was this just sense of joy and hope and optimism that felt so unlike the sense of dread that people have had in the pit of their stomach since 2015, really. It felt like something new. And I feel so lucky that I was in the room and all that happened and it feels like what we're about to see unfold across the country. And I'm pumped here and that. I want to pick up on two things you said there, Ben.
One is the whoosh and the other is the joy. But let's do the whoosh first. I feel like my head is spinning. I've never felt political sentiment change faster than in the past couple of days. This candidate who people were actually afraid of, right? I think it's important to be honest about this, like inside the Democratic Party, they are thrilled about. And there's something very organic about it.
I mean, suddenly the internet is full of Kamala's brat memes and memes of her laugh and her dancing right there's this deep set of intangibles that have connected around her. That feels a lot to me like Obama in 2008, but instead of being this build, right? I mean, that was a multi year build to what he was in 2008. It all happened in like 48 hours. How do you account for it? I feel like as a country, we've been holding our breath. And it's like we can finally exhale.
And then we can start singing with joy. It is a head spinning moment. It really is a head spinning moment. And I say this as someone who believes deeply that Joe Biden was an extraordinarily effective still is, are extraordinarily effective president. And he made this really extraordinary decision, born out of I think a really deep patriotism and a sense of something bigger than himself. And so I was in my feelings when that announcement came through.
I had spun the first time when I saw President Biden's tweet. Yeah, when I saw that tweet, I actually had to sit down. Like I felt like everything went quiet around me. Like you could feel history happening right there. I think that's right. I was sitting down, think goodness. I was sitting down with my laptop, purchased next to me. If I had been standing, I think I would have dropped my computer and smashed it. So on that front, I was well prepared only on that front in a sense.
There was this kind of yawning moment of no one knows what's going to happen now when that word went out. And then President Biden shortly thereafter endorsed Vice President Harris. And then the work that the Vice President has been doing, I think started to bear fruit in a very rapid way. She has been building relationships across the country. She's been working closely with Democratic and Progressive Leaders and activists, union leaders, elected officials all over the country.
She's been on this nationwide tour since the Dobs decision, meeting with people involved on the front lines of the fight for reproductive freedom. People directly affected and providers and advocacy groups and organizers. She was in my office at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin earlier this year and met the whole team, people filing through and meeting her individually.
She's been doing this work in a way that I think the country hadn't quite realized in a way that made her the totally clear choice as our nominee. And this is something that I think in a funny way is starting from the party and moving out. Because the people who've been closest to the campaign, the people who've been seeing her in her stops across America, those are the people who are actually delegates.
She's gone through the process that kind of, you know, many primary people have talked about have wanted, which is for people to actually see her in action on the campaign trail. But she's not been the locus of the national conversation. The national conversation was about Biden and Trump, then briefly about JD Vance, which decision that will live in infamy by Donald Trump. But for Kamala Harris, she has been doing this.
She has very visibly been a just a powerhouse spokesperson in these in these last few weeks. And it is so natural now for her to step into this role as the nominee. She tipped the balance and got the presumptive nomination on Monday night. So she's now the presumptive nominee of the party and the general election has begun. The last couple days, she has raised more than $100 million, breaking all fundraising records. We're hearing a lot about money beyond that, right?
Money from big donors going into the Super PACs, money going down ballot in Wisconsin in the Democratic Party there, in the down ballot races there. What are you seeing in fundraising since Harris got Joe Biden's endorsement? I can say that in the last 48 hours at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, we've had a flood. We've had more than $250,000 just loaded. The people have been logging on and clicking on.
I'll say at Wisdom.org, our website, the people have been who have I've left messages for for the last year have now been sending me text back that they just contributed $500, $5,000. People making bigger contributions than they thought. And it's totally talking to state legislative candidates already. It is a new day for them too. There's a general sense, I think, of yes, like we can actually do this. We can not only win, but we can win up and down the ballot.
The goal now is a Democratic trifecta. They can actually pass row into law. The Women's Health Protection Act led by my Senator Tammy Baldwin, I'm proud to say, we can pass the pro act for union organizing. We can expand social security and Medicare, not watch them get eviscerated by the Vance Trumpites. You can kind of feel the future on your fingertips. That is going to fuel energy in state legislative races. It's going to fuel energy for people running for county offices across the country.
It gets volunteers jazzed for weeks. Every time I would go to a campus kickoff, someone is asking what's going to happen with the ticket. They're watching the news. They're listening to your podcast. They're wondering what should happen next. What is going to happen next? Now there's clarity. And from that clarity comes unity. And I think that that's what everyone involved in Democratic politics is feeling at this moment.
So I am personally thrilled to see Democrats have some joy in this election. I think they, as you put it well, I don't think they quite realized how much dread they were carrying. I mean, it's like this mass collective effort of essence. It's really fun to watch and to see. And I'm going to be counter vibes for a minute, which is not going to be the most popular place to be right now.
And in habit, some of the concerns I was hearing a few weeks ago, even through the weekend, that have now been pushed to the side. And one of the reasons I wanted you on today is it was constant is a good place to focus on these concerns. There's a tendency as Democrats have been very focused on this midwestern blue wall in recent years. To just kind of say like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.
It's like sort of moderate-ish midwestern states, you know, tight elections could go either way. Obviously there are different states. What is the political culture of Wisconsin that people should take into account when they're thinking about it? Yeah, people see Wisconsin as the state where it's always a nail-biter, not every time, but over and over.
You know, the government race here was 1.1 percentage point in 2018 during the blue wave, the presidential elections that come down to a fraction of a point. And they think that means that kind of everyone's clustered in the middle of the political spectrum. And the reality is, like swing voters themselves, people have conflicted idiosyncratic, interesting views that are deeply rooted in the history of this place.
And just to spell it out, Wisconsin was the state where the Republican Party was founded as a radical anti-slavery party in the 19th century. It became the birthplace of the progressive movement as a kind of popular, you know, farmer labor, like in Minnesota, movement against the big trusts and corporate power. Fighting Bob LaFalla is this iconic figure whose bust is in the state capital. He was this founder of the progressive party and this forefather of the progressive movement here.
Wisconsin was the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment, so women could vote, it was the first state to have a statewide equal rights law for women, Wisconsinites wrote the Social Security Act. They created workers' compensation, unemployment insurance here, people fought and died in battles for labor rights. There's this deep, rich, progressive streak, the founding of Earth Day, all these things that happen here that people learn about in school.
It's also the state where Joe McCarthy rose to power. This also a state where the John Birch Society had a huge role in Republican politics where the Bradley Foundation, which funds the Heritage Foundation and was involved in, you know, stop the steely stuff and, and Project 2025y stuff, all that happened in Wisconsin. And we got this red wave in 2010 with Scott Walker, the Republicans in the state legislature who we finally have the chance to kick off.
It's the state where there's both the greatest traditions of expanding freedom and making the government work for regular folks, and also a state where there's a far right streak that has scarred our politics, I think, for so long. It's led to some of the biggest racial disparities in the country. All of those stories have played out here. And in every election, it's kind of a choice of which Wisconsin is going to show up, which Wisconsin are we going to be?
So 2022, surprisingly good year for Democrats in the Senate. They beat a bunch of Maga Republicans, but not in Wisconsin where Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes loses in a pretty tough race to Ron Johnson, who had become very Maga over those years. Mandela Barnes is a liberal black Democrat. Johnson's race is run by Chris Lasavita, who is now running Donald Trump's campaign. And I want to play you one of the ads from that race.
What happens when criminals are released because bail is said dangerously low? Tragedy in Waukeshaw and SUV plows through the city's Christmas parade. Six people were killed and dozens more injured. Brooks was freed from jail and $1,000 bailed. Mandela Barnes wants to end cash bail. Completely. He wrote the bill. Barnes still wants to end cash bail. Today, Mandela Barnes, not just a Democrat, but dangerous Democrat.
Lasavita's attack line on Barnes was different, dangerous. These were very, Willie Horton-like ads, very racially coated. They darkened his skin with the filters they were using in the ads. Republicans have already started using dangerously liberal, which is quite similar as are lying on Harris. So this was the kind of race that people were afraid of and that many of them are going to probably wondered how Harris would fare in.
So I think it's good to focus in on it. Talk me through from your perspective, the Barnes, Johnson, race, and its lessons for Democrats now. First of all, that ad makes me want to punch through a wall, hearing it again. Just as I felt at that time, just to be clear, Mandela Barnes's position was that rather than how much money you have, the question should be whether you're a danger to the community if you're held and pretrial detention, which actually is a pro community safety point of view.
But putting that aside, I think that race actually illustrates the path to victory for Kamala Harris in the following way. Mandela Barnes came out of that primary ahead against Ron Johnson. Ron Johnson had pretty high negatives, but about a third of Wisconsin did not yet have a view about Mandela Barnes.
And then Chris Lasavita and super PACs allied super PACs, which put in $29 million to smear Mandela Barnes, they came in and they were outspending the pro Mandela antigen inside in some media markets in some weeks by like four to one people were seeing attack after attack after attack.
Of course, they're going to use, I mean, we see this all the time in Wisconsin, Republican ads using inflammatory racist often, you know, racially coded sometimes not even big leaf, dog whistle racism or bullhorn. Of course, we're going to see those ads. And just to pull the lens back here, you know, Wisconsin, we've had nail biteers over and over for the last six presidential elections have come down to less than one percent point.
But the other two out of the last six were landslides for Barack Obama, we've elected Tammy Baldwin in huge margins in 2012 and in 2018 Wisconsin's the first state in the country to elect a black woman to statewide executive office of Vell Phillips in 1978.
In all these races, we've seen hideous Republican attacks. The question is how we punch back and in that moment, Mandela's campaign and I say this, you know, being close to the internal side of this whole thing, they knew that they could actually beat that hideous message. And it took three things one is responding to the attack head on and deflating it. The second was laying out who Mandela Barnes is and what he wants to do what he's for and the third is being on offense.
The campaign didn't have the resources to do all that. This was a campaign that had just finished a primary groups had not yet kind of clicked into gear to provide outside support. And so there was this massive imbalance and people were hearing surround sound with the most vicious attacks without hearing the combination of defense, self definition and offense.
And what we know from a million other races, when you do all those things, it works. And we know that from that race too, because by the final stretch in that race, the kind of cavalry arrived, the whole progressive movement was information fighting and supporting Mandela Barnes.
And he started gaining. He went from a significant deficit in the polls and seeing the internal polls, I can vouch for this to being right on the cost. He was gaining about a point a week and he ran out of weeks. He wound up losing by one point. When you say the cavalry came in, do you mean they came in with money or there was a change in feeling towards him like, was this a resources gap the closed.
Fundamentally, this was resources when you have to choose you only have enough money to have one add on the air in every part of the state. You have to choose which of those messages you want to communicate or try to cram three messages in the 30 seconds, which is really hard to do. There were a whole bunch of groups on the air by the end. There were groups going after Ron Johnson for his support for January six protesters who beat up law enforcement officers.
And with US veterans talking about how Ron Johnson attacked everything that they fought for. There were ads about Mandela Barnes and his story. And there was ads, you know, making clear that he's always supported community safety. He's supported funding first responders that the ads that Republicans were running were total BS. But critically, if all you're doing is defending, you're going to lose.
You have to be on offense at the same time and to do that, you need to have the resources. We do not have to be terrified of a red wave in 2024. That was the narrative in 2022 and Democrats went on defense. And, you know, I get that. I want to ask everyone to bring their minds to the fact that when we are on offense, when we are proud and fighting for who we are, what we want for a country that works for everyone, we win these elections and we're going to win this year.
I think it's important to talk about this bluntly because I will say this was a big whisper campaign against Harris over many months, which is this idea that I'd say a liberal black Democrat from California, a woman is not going to be able to win in Wisconsin in Pennsylvania in Michigan.
You need someone from there, you need somebody like scrant and Joe, although it doesn't just have to be scrant and Joe. And at the same time, if you look at Wisconsin's record, Barack Obama wins in Wisconsin twice.
Almost, Wisconsin has a very progressive record and the Mandela Barnes Johnson race. I don't think I had realized in retrospect even how close it was, it was a 27,000 vote win for Johnson. I mean, it was nothing. And both Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Trump and Joe Biden and Trump, these were 20,000 vote margins.
So I mean, these were all, I mean, it's all been teetering. But what do you say to Democrats who have this view that these Midwest states will not vote for someone with Harris's both geographic and racial and ideological background. As Wisconsin, I would say that cheese curd don't squeak. It's just not the case. And you can see that in our electoral record. I would also say in 2022, the national incumbent advantage was 2.2 points.
So Mandela Barnes was running against an incumbent US Senator and he lost by one point. If he had been the incumbent, he probably would have won that election. No incumbent from either party lost the Senate race in 2022.
So this was within the margin of what a fully funded resource and supported campaign can do. And I will never not be mad that we didn't, we didn't find a way to find all the resources needed to be able to cross the finish line. But that election illustrates exactly why this is a winnable race in this moment.
First thing I'll say is unlike Donald Trump and like Tammy Baldwin, Kamala Harris lived in Wisconsin when she was four. She was a kid who grew up in part in the Midwest. She visited her house in Madison, her childhood home when she was in Madison in a recent campaign visit.
She understands the state she's been here every year during her best presidency in not just Milwaukee, but in Western Wisconsin and in Walker, the heart of Republican Wisconsin. That's where she kicked off her fight for reproductive freedom tour. She is 100% credible as someone who will restore women's freedom over their own bodies. No one can ever hear her speak or even see her and think, oh, this is not someone who would actually carry that forward.
So, you know, campaigns are about narrative about momentum. They're about deep visceral sense of, you know, whose team is this person on and Kamala Harris is evidently clearly on the team of people who want a country that's characterized by freedom and opportunity and hope in the future.
Donald Trump is manifestly the opposite and that's a contrast that works out for team future. We people do not want to go back to the sense of constant conflict and dread and fear and menace that Trump represents. I want to know before I play this that I think Republicans are scrambling and confused right now. So I'm not sure where they are at this moment is where they're going to land in their attacks. But I want to play one of the early ads Republicans have for lease on Harris.
Kamala was in on it. She covered up Joe's obvious mental decline. Our president is in good shape and good health, tireless, vibrant, and I have no doubt about the strength of the work that we have done. But Kamala knew Joe couldn't do the job. So she did it. Look what she got done. A border invasion, run away inflation, the American dream, dead. They created this mess. They know Kamala owns this failed record.
The way some of the early ads I've seen from them are working is on two things. One is saying she was a bort-as-r and you know the Trump campaign is very built around this idea of migrant invasion. And the other is tying her to Biden's record and Democrats are very proud of Biden's record. I think there's a lot for Democrats to be proud of in Biden's record. But Biden's record is not been popular. People are mad about inflation. How do you think about that? How do you respond to that?
That feels like an ad crafted for a Fox News audience that's been following the narratives in the magasinomatic universe. And this is the next plot twist. I don't think that moves normy voters. I think for people that don't live sleep, eat and breathe this stuff. It's very clear that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are two separate people.
It's also a moment that is fundamentally different in terms of what is moving people day to day. We have seen a drop in border crossings. We've seen an enormous rapid drop in inflation. People are still frustrated about higher prices, but Trump is running on a increased prices platform. And that may have been a tough message for people to kind of hear from Joe Biden.
Joe Biden, I think that Kamala Harris can make it really powerfully. And if people are frustrated with the way things have been going and they want change, Kamala Harris is a change candidate. And this is, I think speaks to this kind of deeper underlying structure politics recently.
There have been a series of change elections, a series of elections where people were frustrated 2008 was a change election and voters voted for Barack Obama once. And then a second time, this was like, let's finish the job. We can't go back in 2012. 2016, there are a lot of reasons that 2016 happened, but for some voters, it was a kind of burn the house down sick of this. Let's, let's, let's change everything kind of vote for Donald Trump.
2020, those same voters, the ones who bounced back so many of them were like, oh, we voted for Trump and look what we got. This is terrible. They want change again. One thing I've heard from a lot of political strategists is that Harris's vice presidential pick is going to be meaningful. It is the first huge decision voters will see her make and it will help define her to them. What would you advise her to look for in terms of a candidate who would actually help in a place like Wisconsin?
My core advice would be to make the decision on the grounds of a governing partner that you can work with to build a better future for the country. I think the more political in a sense, a stunt pick would actually not send the clear message that this is someone who's planning for how to make everyone's lives better.
That's that I don't think any of the names that are being thrown around are are stunt picks. These are all people who are credible partners and governance. I think fundamentally what people are going to be responding to in this race is a choice between two different futures and every brush stroke that helps to paint that future can help make that choice vivid.
JD Vance actually reinforces that aspect of the menace the Trump poses to people and the mega poses to people. I think for Kamala Harris, her partner is an opportunity to help paint a vision of change and moving forward in a way that I think will be really exciting folks. I'm glad you brought up Vance. I don't normally think vice presidential picks are very significant. It obviously certainly Sarah Palin was one.
But Vance feels significant. I mean, one dimension is the amount of blood Democrats smell in the water around JD Vance is like nothing I've ever seen just watching every vice presidential possibility line up on morning Joe and cable news to show how they would take Vance apart in a debate. And I want to play you what Minnesota governor Tim Waltz the line he was trying out here.
Well, it's true these guys are just here and you know, they're running for he man women haters club or something that's what they go out that's not what people are interested in and there is
a lot of things because Robert Barons like JD Vance and Donald Trump gutted the Midwest told us we did that they talk about private schools where in the heck are you going to find a private school in a town of 400. Those are public schools. Those are great teachers that are out there making a difference and gave us an opportunity to succeed.
And I think that's the thing that J.D. Vance talks about in Hill, Billie, LG none of my Hill, Billie cousins went to Yale and none of them went on to be adventure capitalist to whatever it's not who people really are. The reason that connected I mean, I've seen that all over is it gets at something true, which is that there's something weird about Vance. I mean, I'm sorry there is like watching the guys own ideological evolution.
I'm very willing to take people's conversions is sincere, but going from Trump might be Hitler to as Slavish as Vance is towards him now the way Vance just talks about other people kind of the way he's on the stump.
I like feels like a guy who has spent too much time in like a MAGA comment section like late at night on YouTube for the last four years and it feels like it is crystallized something about Trump like it is created a different kind of attack surface around him that he'd almost become this sort of, I don't know, he was treated as an nostalgia like people got used to him.
Vance made him in them weird again. I think a lot of people are about to find out what gripper means. Do you want to say what gripper means they got to find out somehow, Ben. I think people should Google gripper, GR, OYP are you know bordering on alt-right online provocateur universe. And there's a very, very extreme edge of this that includes all the kind of most terrifying Charlottesville type of people.
But this is the part of Trump that is the most repelant to voters, but who's been on display ever since he lost the election in 2020 most of all. This is a kind of the Stephen Miller wing of Trumpism, but it's the same Trump who had a meal with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist far right political commentator who's kind of a king of the groupers. Often you'll see Trump post these things on truth social that come from the far far right ultra mega extremist fever swamps.
And some of the things that Vance talks about and the ideas that he puts forward, they kind of come from that same fringe. I remember when I was working at move on during the Trump presidency, there was one big kind of showdown around immigration.
And there was this rumor, this possibility that Trump was going to support the Dream Act. And then at the last second, he completely ripped away from that and endorsed the worst most far right positions, the stuff that we saw with the family separation policy. And over and over what we would find is that Trump would dip into the well of the alt-right ultra extremist fringe conservative movement.
And that feels like the swamp from which JD Vance emerged that version of Trump can never win a majority in this country cannot win a majority in Wisconsin. The Trump and the JD Vance that comes and talks about trade and talks about factories closing that has a certain populist resonance, but this kind of seething hatred and fury. That does not appeal to people.
I have a theory on this and I'm happy to share it, but I'm curious for your theory on why he chose Vance. Trump, I think, in a lot of ways, has pretty sensitive political instincts when accounts. He's been running away from Project 2025. He came out with a more moderate state's choice position on abortion and really pushed that in the Republican Party platform, recognizing what a vulnerability that is for him.
He picked Mike Pence in 2016 and he had these other candidates he was thinking of. I mean, the moment Doug Bergham was on his short list. My first thought was, oh shit, like that's the kind of move from Trump that would actually be quite dangerous. I would have never in a million years thought Doug Bergham, the completely normal Republican governor of North Dakota would end up on his short list.
That was also a pretty interesting figure from that perspective. Rubio is a very talented politician. He's moved more Maga-E over time, but he's able to really do it with a smile. He knows how to run in a very big, diverse state. Vance is inexperienced. He's not great on TV. He comes across as pretty mean. What's your theory of how he ended up on the ticket?
It feels like the Trump who thought he could not lose. Maybe it's the part of Trump that thinks that he can't lose unless there's cheating and he wants the person who's willing to use their muscle to overturn election results he doesn't like. But fundamentally it felt like an act of supreme overconfidence of choosing the person who he just really actually liked their vibe as opposed to the person who he thought voters would really like.
It feels to me like he was on a boat and he thought that he was so certain to win the race that he picked up his anchor and started spinning it in a circle and then hurled it through the floor of the boat. It's like an act that you only do when you think that there's no way that you can possibly lose. And yet here he is in a totally different race.
There's rumored or there's reported angst within the Republican world already that he picked the wrong guy. I think that's just going to get worse. And I think that's going to get worse as more comes out about JD Vance and what are you written? What he says and whose ideas he's most interested in. He does not represent somebody you want a heartbeat away from the presidency. He represents menace.
And the decision to go with that might be one of the biggest political mistakes we've ever seen from Donald Trump. I think that political parties, political coalitions, they have virtues and vices that are associated with them that are sort of their the lightside and the dark side. I think for Democrats, all this is particularly true under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
I think they're sort of lightside is the thoughtful, they're curious, they're open-minded, they think through things really hard, they take serious things very seriously. And the dark side is smugness, is condescension, is a kind of faculty club, elitism. It came out sort of in Hillary Clinton's deplorable comment. I think that one of the things the Democrats have had to really work on inside their coalition and their presentation in this period is not seeming smug, right?
Not treating the people voting for Donald Trump, like the sort of dying spasm of white rage, which was a real tendency in the party. On our public inside, I think they've got some virtues, patriotism and sort of a love of country and a love of tradition. And the vice is a sort of rage and contempt. Everyone is against us, the people against us are un-American.
And those aesthetics really matter. And to me, the difficulty that the advance and also oftentimes Trump, which I think is actually coming out anymore and more as he feels a little bit cornered by Harris now, is that rage and that contempt. And I want to play this clip from advance because I remember being stunned by it at the time. And I think it really shows this sort of politics.
We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.
And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it? Kamala Harris, I should say, has two step children who they call her mom-alive. It's a very important part of her life and identity. Pete Buttigieg was in the process of adopting while J.D. Vance was saying that. But even putting on that aside, how does that vibe play in your view in Wisconsin? To hell with that guy.
Yo, wherever you go in Wisconsin, Wisconsin is small towns, factory towns or water tower towns is their call that has bigger cities, no huge cities. Milwaukee is well under a million people. It has a ton of rural areas. But wherever you go in our state, there's all kinds of families. That is part of the American story now. There are families with stepkids, there are single people, there are people who've divorced and remarried and blended their families together.
There's all kinds of different family structures and everyone knows people who have different ways that their lives are proceeding. That is just a universal experience in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania. It's the human condition now that not everyone follows the same script. And part of living in our society is honoring everyone making their own decisions about their own personal lives.
Like that is the essence of freedom, right? Is the idea that each of us should be able to make the most important decisions in our lives for ourselves. And I think that Vance clip kind of illustrates the core of this. Abortion is a big deal. It is a part of that freedom of making your own decisions about your own body.
Vance wants to control people. He wants to shame people for being different. And he wants to create a system of control so that people follow the script that he wants them to live. That doesn't actually sell. So many inconsistent voters and swing voters, what they really don't want is politicians getting so interested in their lives that they want to make their big decisions for them.
That is voter repellent and more powerful than bug repellent is to bugs. And it is not something that wins you an election. And we are going to make sure that voters know that if they want to be controlled and dominated by people like Donald Trump and JD Vance, they should vote for Trump in Vance.
If they want the freedom to live their own lives, then they should vote for Kamala Harris. That is a crystal clear message that results, I think, in a victory that will end the mega era in American politics. I want to read something you said to me for an article I wrote back in February about the Democratic Party. You said, quote,
when you talk to inconsistent voters and swing voters, you see a very high level of cynicism the government can ever deliver. To be persuasive to them, you need to credibly describe what kind of change you can generate and on what kind of things. And it tends to be on things that people know the government already does. That's how you wind up with Whitmer and Evers running on fixing the damn roads in 2018. Then they did fix the damn roads. And then they got reelected.
Tell me about that theory of winning over swing voters. So it starts there's a book which I preview will recommend later by a political scientist named Samuel Popkin.
And it's called the reasoning voter and his argument is essentially a lot of people in politics and political science and posters talk about low information voters, but he argues for low information rationality, which is to say people who don't want to think about politics much the way that I don't think about Olympic sports when that's not the every four year Olympics very much.
Those voters they often do vote. They don't have a ton of information, but they connect the dots based on the information that they do have. They have ideas in their mind about what the government does and what it doesn't do. And they don't get mad at politicians for things that they don't think are affected by those politicians. But things that they do identify as the work of government as the domain of public policy.
They do look at what they see and then hold politicians accountable for it. So governors and roads is a great example. And it was the case for a while that people felt like abortion probably was not going to be determined by presidents. It just didn't seem real. But then dobs happened. And for 451 days in Wisconsin after the dog decision came down every abortion provider in Wisconsin stopped providing abortion care because of a 19th century law.
Voters experienced in their own lives in the lives of people that they knew crises usually happening in private where people got pregnant they needed emergency care in some cases at a topic pregnancies. There were doctors who were terrified of providing that care because they thought they might be sent to jail.
Those stories spread going back to the quote that you just read me the question of whether women or politicians make decisions about abortion whether it's the person who gets pregnant or the politician passes law. That is clearly in the domain of politics now. One of the arguments that is in this bucket in political science broadly is that people make inferential shortcuts from the things that they can see the information that they have close to hand and what people's positions are likely to be.
The more a campaign puts a highly charged issue front and center the more voters distinguish between the different candidates and what their positions are. Now we have a very handy easy shortcut on who's going to defend your reproductive freedom and who isn't Trump has been trying to take abortion off the table first less of you did that with Ron Johnson as well they tried to.
To dox the issue completely but it's clearly there JD man's makes clear it's there project 2025 makes clear it's there and Kamala Harris makes clear that it's there and this is the most potent issue in American politics right now not the first issue people name with the issue that moves swing voters and even some Republicans to vote for Democrats and the issue that gets people off the couch and into the ballot box and it is now unignorable in 2024.
I'm glad you went there with it because the question I was going to ask you is what is the equivalent of roads for federal politicians so abortion is one I actually think that's a very sharp point that it is moved out of this realm of things you don't really think the president is going to do anything about either way to things that you do are there other things like that for you.
Roads and row are two pretty big ones so I'm glad that we're noting those there's another kind of broader one which is are you on the side of the people or special interests in Kamala Harris as a prosecutor she went after the big banks she got $18 billion for consumers in California she embodies this sense of protecting and standing up to bullies and to kind of predatory wrongdoers like Donald Trump.
Her life of public service as a prosecutor as attorney general as a senator I worked with her very closely in the fight against the repeal of the affordable care act when she was in the US Senate and I was at move on my previous job and she's very credible as a messenger of someone who will take on special interests and corporate criminals on behalf of the people and Trump is pretty obviously a guy who loves being friends with billionaires he had that meeting with oil companies executives and told them that he'd give them whatever they wanted if they funnel the billion dollars to his campaign.
And so that's there's a set of things that all touch on the same kind of emotional core of whether you're for the wealthier whether you're for the people whether you're for big powerful special interests who are gouging regular folks or whether you're someone who will stand up for regular folks and come as a very strong messenger on that there's also another thing that is more complicated in terms of how it plays out which is this idea of democracy and the weird thing about it is that for people that are highly motivated high information voters democracy is often the most important thing.
The sacred idea that the people should decide rather than than politicians overturning election results that they don't like. The reason why it's a little complicated is that if you're a cynical voter you might already think the systems rigged you might already think that your vote isn't powerful.
The idea that you're going to vote for someone because I'll say democracy if you think democracy is already broken is not super credible and yet it is a really potent and really important and really powerful issue because it motivates people that do the work and become messengers.
If the people who think that it's worth wildly got a knock on doors those people believing to their core the democracy's under threat which it manifestly is from Donald Trump that is a powerful motivator and for a slice of high information Republican voters it's actually a deal breaker for Trump.
There's a slice of people who voted for Trump twice who are going to vote for Kamala Harris this fall because of January 6th and because of Trump's continued insistence that the last election was stolen and the next one will be stolen. He won't accept election results. There's a meaningful number of those voters and Wisconsin went for Trump by 22,748 votes in 2016. It went for Biden by 20,682.
This is a small margin state those voters the voters who believe to the core of that democracy even if they disagree with Democrats about a lot of other things those voters can tip the election as well. You said that Wisconsin is a small margin state and it has been in recent presidential elections but Tammy Baldwin senator Baldwin is on the ballot this year she is leading her Republican opponent in the latest Marquette Paul by five points in 2018 she won by 11 points.
Wisconsin is an usualness it is still a state that is sending a Republican and a Democrat to the Senate but I'm like John sent me bald one has been winning by pretty big numbers I don't think she's seen in general as an easily beatable figure. So what is behind her success what lessons are there in it.
Tammy Baldwin is a dynamite senator she's dynamite campaigner I'm I feel very lucky I got to know her when I was in high school and she was a state representative and I volunteered on her first congressional campaign when I was a senior in high school in the primary she won thanks in part to the strength of a huge turnout at the university Wisconsin campus the newspaper headline the next day was youth quake.
And she went to congress she did a great job there when she ran for senate a lot of people were having this conversation can the Tammy Baldwin become the first out lesbian woman elected to the United States Senate could she win a state like Wisconsin she was up against Tommy Thompson who was the legend early four times elected Republican governor of the state who then went to Washington they see the work for George W Bush.
And she housed him in a big victory in 2012 and then was real number one target by the Republicans going to 2018 and then she won in an 11 point landslide. There are some key lessons to be drawn there first of all she does communicate all over the state and she travels all over the state and she connects with voters in rural areas in small towns in suburbs in cities.
She listens to people they can tell that she likes them she has this record and if you listen to her stump speech there's a lot about how she stands up to the big drug companies she stood up to the insurance companies she wrote the law that allows people to get on their parents health insurance till age 26 her current opponent is a guy in air cavity air cavity is a mega mega million air hundreds of millions of dollars who runs a banking California he grew up in Wisconsin and left came back to run for senate and lost to Tommy Thompson the primary 2012.
And then left again and then has come back to run for senate again and he said all these different things that convey that he doesn't actually like Wisconsin it's he has a little bit of that JD Vance problem of contempt for a lot of people.
And Tammy Baldwin is able to show people that she's on their side and that she's effective and she's showing showing that her opponent is not on the side of regular folks I think there's a lot to learn from that and there's a lot to learn from the way that she derives a crystal clear message that is rooted in her story and that connects with the lives of voters all over Wisconsin.
And in some ways the most powerful thing in politics is the messenger having a messenger who instantly makes clear that you're for real that you can deliver on what you're saying that this is what the election is about.
I want to pick up on that issue of enthusiasm going back to the early Tammy Baldwin races as long as I've been in politics there's been this idea that Democrats benefit from high turnout high enthusiasm elections and Republicans benefit from lower turnout and that reflected compositional differences in the parties that Democrats you know we're stronger. You know we're stronger among young people stronger among black and Hispanic voters stronger among voters who don't turn out that often.
But the belief was that if this was a high turnout election in 2024 given the surprising strength that Trump seemed to be showing among more marginal voters younger voters black voters that that would be good for him. Now if a sudden there is this huge what what it feels like I mean we don't know the polling really yet huge shift in sentiment around Harris right and particularly on around these very same voters.
And so I guess I'm curious from your perspective if you feel the race has changed around this question of of turnout and enthusiasm if this is just all across the board. A really high energy high turnout clash has that shifted in the Democrats favor is that something that we're going to want.
A lot of theories around this there's a lot of different ways you can slice the data Mike pod or runs a sub stack called weekend reading where he maps out in 2016 a lot of people voted 2020 a lot more people voted.
Biden won the people who had voted in 2016 by two points he won the people who had not voted in 2016 but did in 2020 by 12 points this is new voters who turned out to defeat mega and a lot of those voters voted in 2018 and in the battleground state specifically not so much in California New York.
Those voters turned out in 2022 and helped to reelect governor Evers and Whitmer and Shapiro and and you know dealt this huge blow to the mega politicians who wanted to create the conditions for success in the 2024 coup that they had failed to execute in 2020.
And that anti mega coalition I think now has a very clear reason to show up a lot of what we saw in the polls was a striking absence especially of young voters and this is you know as a lot of people discuss this is also true of black and Latino voters which I want to emphasize a lot of black and Latino voters are young voters so all these things layer on top of each other.
And a lot of those folks just were not opting into voting the level of voter interest enthusiasm had waned the people who were left the people who said that they might vote a lot of those were more mega folks who were ready potentially to vote for Trump going back to something you're saying earlier if you look at the polling just recently in Wisconsin there's a public poll by you got that found that that Tammy Baldwin had 50% support air cavity her Republican opponent had 43% support.
Trump had 43% support Biden in that poll was at 38% so it's not the Tammy was defeating her Republican opponent because her Republican opponent was less popular than Trump Trump and air cavity had exactly the same level of support in Wisconsin it's that there were a whole bunch of people who were not sure if they would vote in the presidential election.
And they were sure that they would support Tammy if they did vote and I think that changes now so much of what was happening was people who felt frustrated that they were seeing a rematch of a choice that they had to make before they're fed up with things they want to change they didn't feel like they had a way to express that through their votes and now they do that I think is is part of the shift for a lot of those voters I also want to say for Democrats we've had weeks where Democrats every time they gathered they were talking about what should happen what was going to happen at the top of the ticket.
And now they can direct their attention to making the case for our nominee against their Republican nominee and that kind of clarity it's it's kind of liberating allows people to focus on doing the things that will actually affect the election result it's the best cure for political anxiety is taking action so there's a ton of.
Of that kind of energy that is bursting forth as well people who felt like the family is having a fight instead of the family standing shoulder to shoulder and going out there in the world to win.
One thing that it feels constant around me is people who say to me you know I know my vote doesn't matter right like where they are that I'm quite is going to win but I know people live in red states who care a lot about this election and to them where they are their vote isn't going to matter because Donald Trump is going to win what is going to matter and it almost seems like this amazing privilege is living in Wisconsin in Michigan in Pennsylvania in Arizona maybe you know or maybe in Georgia you know maybe in North Carolina.
Whatever side of this you're on if you are in a state where the person you support is going to win it overwhelmingly and you want to be useful you want to be involved in the places where the election matters where the election you know my tip as it has in Wisconsin 20,000ish votes what is useful like somebody who who I'm sure gets a lot of this question incoming like what is valuable for you beyond just money from people don't live in your state.
I have a list of five things that people who live outside of a battleground state should do they are one donate to recruit other people to donate three volunteer for recruit other people to volunteer and five move to a swing state and I say this in seriousness especially the first four money does matter and you can see that in some of the races that we've we've talked about here there's a certain point at which it is going to be a lot of money.
And point at which it stops mattering but my general philosophy is we should use better messages to out communicate the other side in every time period and every medium all the way through and posting wasn't on your list just being on.
That actually looks I would say it's actually it actually does not hurt to post this used to be there was a kind of stigma that republican voters talked about for announcing that you supported Trump more recently it's felt a little weird for some people to say out and proud that they supported Noah Bye the and for Trump World there's is this level of enthusiasm where people have started to overestimate or public in support so I think does help.
say is that if you amplify the other side's messages when you're trying to respond to them, that is counterproductive. There's now a lot of research about how lies spread. And if you repeat the lie before you do pumpkin, people remember the lie more strongly. But I do think that posting is helpful.
It's not the case that arguing with Republicans on X is going to win this election, but reaching out to people who are not thinking about politics much, who you know in your life, who are in your timeline, that can help. And that adds up. I mean, this might be a blood election. I want it to be a blood election. It might be another razor-thin election. And just in case it is, don't act like this is a spectator sport for the next 102, 103 days.
Put yourself in the game and get involved so that the day after the election you wake up, either feeling like you were part of the victory or knowing that you did everything you possibly could. Then all is our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So the first book is one that I mentioned that I cannot recommend strongly enough, the reasoning voter.
And I think what's so helpful about it is that it is so cheap and easy and cynical to think that nothing matters, to think that voters are go-off vibes in a way that is meaningless. In fact, people do think about this stuff, but a lot of them don't pay attention much to politics.
And the reasoning voter goes through a huge amount of evidence and data and kind of a theoretical way to think about people who don't think about politics much, which no listener to this podcast, our members of that club, no one who reads the reasoning voters a member of that club, but it helps to put your mind into the place of someone who is picking up little bits here and there and then earnestly trying to figure out who's on their side and who will make their lives better.
So the reasoning voter by Samuel Popkin, the second book that I recommend is a Wisconsin book that when I read it, it made me want to pump my fist in the air. It's a book called Finding Freedom, the untold story of Joshua Glover Freedom Seeker. It's by Ruby West Jackson and Walter McThomold.
Ruby West Jackson is an amazing Wisconsin original woman, an African American woman from Baleut, who became a kind of historian of slavery and of the Underground Railroad and of African American history in Wisconsin. And it tells a story of a man who escaped slavery in Missouri, came to Wisconsin on the Underground Railroad, and then was tracked down.
They put him in detention in Milwaukee and then an uprising, a kind of riot broke out, broke him out of jail, helped him get on a boat and escaped to Canada. The people involved in that protest were tried and their case went to the States of Supreme Court in Wisconsin, which unanimously decided before any other court had ever reached this conclusion that the fugitive slave act was unconstitutional. It helped lead to the civil war and the cessation of the Southern States.
And it's a story about people organizing fighting for justice. It has these speeches by black abolitionists in Racine that will make you just jump out and you're sitting on a run through a wall in the fight for a better world. And it is rooted in the state that I love. So that's my second book. The third book is a book that led to a movie that is a key part of my life. I grew up watching the Princess bride over and over.
I memorized the movie, equated it in my toast at my sister's wedding, the part about marriage. I, the high point of my time as a Democratic State Party Chair in terms of fun was a original cast reading of the Princess bride script as a fundraiser during the pandemic. I now watch the Princess bride regularly with my kids, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I read the book. The Princess bride is by William Goldman. It is hilarious.
It's a kind of a book that pretends to be in a bridge version of a different book. It started with William Goldman telling stories to his own daughters when they were kids. And in a moment when there's so many things that make your head spin, it is, I think, an important part of finding joy to go back to that being in this conversation. I read things that just make you laugh and make you glad that we live in the world that we live in.
We're so lucky to be alive in this moment when we have the power to change the future where we have the power to vote for our highest aspirations. And it's a world that has freedom as a world where we can laugh. Ben Vokler, thank you very much. Thanks so much for having me on, Ezra. This episode of The Ezra Clan Joe is produced by Roland Hu, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair, mixing by Isaac Jones, our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, our senior editor is Claire Gordon.
The show's production team also includes Andy Galvin, Elias Isquith, Kristen Lin and Amman Sahota. We have original music by Isaac Jones, Audien Stragi by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Basta. The executive producer of New York Times' opinion audio is Anaro Strasser and special thanks to Sonia Herrera.