Where Does This Leave Democrats? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Ezra Klein Show

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Where Does This Leave Democrats?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (The Ezra Klein Show) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

View full AI transcripts and summaries of all podcast episodes on the blog: The Ezra Klein Show

Episode: Where Does This Leave Democrats?

Author: New York Times Opinion
Duration: 00:37:08

Episode Shownotes

The coalition the Democratic Party built in the Obama years has crumbled. But Democrats can choose how to respond.Mentioned:“Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden”Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast.

Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Jack McCordick and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Elias Isquith. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summary

This episode of 'The Ezra Klein Show' delves into the current challenges faced by the Democratic Party, highlighting its failure to address voter dissatisfaction under President Biden. As the coalition that supported Obama crumbles, it emphasizes the need for Democrats to engage in a more inclusive approach. The podcast discusses Kamala Harris's struggle to establish a distinct identity amidst discontent with the Biden administration, the shifting dynamics of the political landscape, and the importance of curiosity in understanding voters' experiences. The conversation underlines the urgency for a new political strategy as traditional bases of support diminish.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Where Does This Leave Democrats?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_02
From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. I find I'm thinking a lot about the 2004 election. That was, in my lifetime, until today, the most absolute rejection liberals have experienced.

00:00:42 Speaker_02
In 2000, George W. Bush, he was this accidental president. He'd lost the popular vote. He'd won the Electoral College by a few hundred votes in Florida, maybe, depending on how you look at it. But by 2004, he'd become this other thing.

00:00:59 Speaker_02
9-11 had changed him, changed his presidency. He went from advocating this humble foreign policy to being an invader, a nation builder. And the lies and the failures and the travesties of his administration were clear.

00:01:14 Speaker_02
The disaster that was the Iraq War was clear. And Bush went in that election from accidental president to unquestioned victor. He won the popular vote cleanly. On the electoral maps, the center of the country was just this sea of red.

00:01:31 Speaker_02
And what made that loss hurt so much for liberals was that by then, Americans knew what George W. Bush was. They knew what he had done, and they chose him anyway.

00:01:43 Speaker_03
The voters turned out in record numbers. and delivered an historic victory.

00:01:48 Speaker_03
— We've congratulated someone who lied to the American people, and, as a result, not only is our health care and our economy in the pits, but our kids have died in a war that shouldn't have to be fought.

00:01:59 Speaker_00
— And I am pretty much terrified, because I'm not sure what's going to be the outcome in the next four years.

00:02:05 Speaker_02
— That is roughly what happened on Tuesday. Donald Trump's victory was not one of the grand landslides of American politics. As I write this on Wednesday, the estimates suggest he is on track for a one and a half point margin in the popular vote.

00:02:21 Speaker_02
If that holds, and it may not, it may change as California is fully counted, it is smaller than Barack Obama's win in 2012 or 2008. It is smaller than George W. Bush's win in 2004 or Bill Clinton's wins in 1996 and 1992.

00:02:37 Speaker_02
It may prove even smaller than Hillary Clinton's 2.1% popular vote margin in 2016. But it is a huge gain for Trump compared to 2020. In 2020, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly five points.

00:02:51 Speaker_02
And yes, I know, presidential elections in America, they are not decided by the popular vote. But it matters where the mood of America is moving.

00:03:00 Speaker_02
And the popular vote tells us more about that than the few hundred thousand voters who could have swung this thing in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. So what is behind Trump's game here?

00:03:13 Speaker_02
One theory is that this is the post-pandemic, post-inflation, anti-incumbent backlash that we've been seeing in country after country after country. Whoever was in power in 2021 and 2022 is getting annihilated in elections.

00:03:31 Speaker_02
This is true for parties on the right and parties on the left. In the UK, the Tories had their worst election ever. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party, which confusingly for us is a conservative party, had one of their worst elections ever.

00:03:45 Speaker_02
Left of center governments have fallen in Sweden and Finland and Portugal. Look a little bit north, and Canada's Justin Trudeau is hideously unpopular.

00:03:56 Speaker_02
As Matty Glacius wrote, if you look at this internationally, the interesting question might be, why didn't Trump win this in a landslide? If Nikki Haley had been running, she probably would have.

00:04:08 Speaker_02
There's a lot to that, but it is incomplete, because Trump didn't just win this election. Democrats lost it. Joe Biden, at 80 years old and hovering beneath 40% favorability in most polls, should never have run for re-election.

00:04:24 Speaker_02
But for months and months and months, the Democratic Party, with very few exceptions, shout out here, I guess, to Dean Phillips, refused to say that.

00:04:34 Speaker_02
As poll after poll showed supermajorities of voters thought Biden too old for this job, the party continued to suppress any serious challenge to him or even really dissent about him. It suppressed its own doubts.

00:04:47 Speaker_02
It ignored its own voters to say nothing of ignoring the voters it was going to need to win in 2024.

00:04:55 Speaker_02
I was one of the people arguing, since back in February, for some kind of competitive process, a mini-primary or primary, leading to an open convention. Those processes, what they do is create information.

00:05:09 Speaker_02
Yes, they can bring argument and dissension and conflict and fracture, but it is through argument and dissension and conflict and fracture that you discover what you do not yet know.

00:05:20 Speaker_02
It is through the bruising process of primaries and debates and speeches and interviews that you see what candidates are made of. You see how and whether they are able to connect to the mood and the moment of the country.

00:05:35 Speaker_02
But Biden stepped aside mere weeks before the Democratic convention. The hour was so late. The party was so scared. It had wasted so much time. And in wasting that time, it had refused to face up to a core problem. Biden wasn't just too old.

00:05:51 Speaker_02
People were deeply unhappy with his administration. With the wars abroad, with the prices at home, with the absence of a story or a sense of leadership that made them confident that the people in charge knew what they were doing.

00:06:05 Speaker_02
The line in the Democratic Party was and is that Biden is one of the greatest presidents since FDR, that it's just a shame he's not 15 years younger. But Americans did not and do not believe that. Democrats never reckoned with that fact.

00:06:21 Speaker_02
They never came up with an answer for it. And that, more than any other reason, is why Kamala Harris lost. Harris was dealt a bad hand. She had no time to set up her own campaign. She had no time to work out its themes and core policies.

00:06:38 Speaker_02
And she was running inevitably as the champion or the inheritor, or frankly, just a member of an administration people were angry at. She cannot separate herself out from Joe Biden without being accused of disloyalty.

00:06:53 Speaker_04
Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?

00:06:59 Speaker_06
There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I've been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.

00:07:08 Speaker_06
The work that we have done, for example, capping the cost of insulin at $35 a month for our seniors is something I care deeply about.

00:07:16 Speaker_02
But I'm not sure there was any answer she could have given there that would have worked. It's just not credible to run as a vice president disowning the record of the administration in which you served, of the ticket you were part of.

00:07:29 Speaker_02
I think she ran a pretty good campaign given how little time and how little room she had to build and design it. But at the core of that campaign was this very difficult problem. An incumbent can run on their record if the record is popular.

00:07:43 Speaker_02
A challenger can promise change. Harris could do neither. There is, for me, this what if. What if Biden hadn't run again? What if Democrats had given themselves the gift of a real primary? The party has plenty of talent, and Harris had real weaknesses.

00:08:00 Speaker_02
She can be amazing on the stump. She's a killer in debates. But one thing Harris was not able to do, not in 2020, not in 2024, was define what her campaign was about, at least aside from keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.

00:08:15 Speaker_02
She ran as the guardian of the institutions, a candidate with Liz Cheney on one side and Liz Warren on the other. But she took for granted the worth and health of those institutions.

00:08:27 Speaker_02
Was the endorsement of the Cheney's and the enthusiasm with which it was embraced a sign of the Democrats' big tent or a sign of its internal confusion? And Harris was not unburdened by all that had come before her.

00:08:41 Speaker_02
There were ways in which she wanted to build a bigger tent, but the Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent. I just went and I listened to some of the appearance Elon Musk made on Joe Rogan's podcast on Monday.

00:08:54 Speaker_02
It's gotten really deeply weird and right-wing and conspiratorial over there.

00:08:58 Speaker_07
If the Dems win this election, they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states and everywhere will be like California. There will be no escape.

00:09:07 Speaker_01
That is so insane.

00:09:09 Speaker_07
This is the final. This is it. This is the last chance.

00:09:15 Speaker_01
Has anybody tried to push back?

00:09:17 Speaker_07
Go out and vote. Vote like your life depends on it. Vote like your future depends on it. Because it does. This is the last chance, man.

00:09:27 Speaker_02
But it wasn't always like that on Rogan's podcast. It wasn't that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview. And then Rogan kinda sorta endorsed him.

00:09:38 Speaker_01
I think I'll probably vote for Bernie. Him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe in him, I like him, I like him a lot. He's been insanely consistent his entire life.

00:09:49 Speaker_01
He's basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life.

00:09:54 Speaker_02
And you know what happened after that? many liberals were furious at Bernie Sanders for going on Rogan in the first place.

00:10:02 Speaker_02
I was still on Twitter back then, and I wrote about how of course Bernie Sanders was right to be there, that the fact that Sanders could attract people like Rogan was one of the very best arguments for his campaign, one of the reasons he might be able to beat someone like Donald Trump.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
This was 2020. If you wanted to beat Trump, of course you'd try to win over Rogan and his voters. But online liberals got so pissed at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic on Twitter.

00:10:28 Speaker_02
Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not the kind of person you wanted to talk to. But if these last years have proven anything, it's that you don't get to choose who is marginalized.

00:10:43 Speaker_02
Democrats should have been going on Rogan regularly all these years. They should have been prioritizing it this year. Yes, Harris should have been there and in places like it. Same for Tim Walz.

00:10:53 Speaker_02
On YouTube alone, Rogan's interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. You're just going to abandon that in an election where you think the other side winning means fascism?

00:11:07 Speaker_02
In 2016, Democrats were shocked to lose to Trump, but that loss had the consolation of chance.

00:11:14 Speaker_02
Democrats won the popular vote, and you can make a very good case that if the Comey letter hadn't hit right at the end of the campaign, Hillary Clinton would have won. I believe that case.

00:11:24 Speaker_02
And so the response was resistance, treating Trump as accidental, sometimes even illegitimate. In 2020, Trump loses a popular vote decisively, but more people voted for him than did in 2016.

00:11:39 Speaker_02
He still came within a few hundred thousand votes of winning the Electoral College again. And that was true despite all the chaos of his administration, despite the harm he caused during the pandemic.

00:11:50 Speaker_02
And it was true in part because he began doing something Democrats didn't expect, winning over Black and Hispanic voters who Democrats thought they had a lock on. And now we're here. Trump got the win in 2024 he could only see the glimmers of before.

00:12:06 Speaker_02
He got it despite January 6th, despite the criminal charges and convictions, despite the wild statements, the weaving rants, despite how terribly he performed in the debate with Harris.

00:12:19 Speaker_02
Democrats did everything they could to convince voters Trump was unfit for office. And voters gave Trump his first ever popular vote victory. It is brutal losing an election, particularly one with the stakes that this one carried.

00:12:36 Speaker_02
And emotionally, there are two ways Democrats can respond right now, contempt or curiosity. And I've seen plenty of contempt already.

00:12:44 Speaker_02
The sentiment that if Americans are willing to vote for Donald Trump, given all that he has said and all that he has done, then that's on them. There's nothing Democrats or Harris could have done to dissuade them.

00:12:57 Speaker_02
There will be a desire to retreat back, to hunker down, to draw the boundaries of who is decent and who is a fascist ever more clearly. But Democrats are losing too many people they need. Trump sharply improved his margin in New York City.

00:13:14 Speaker_02
So many people I've met since moving here, they just don't like Democrats anymore. They're not that political. They voted for Democrats in the past to the extent they voted. But now they're mad about prices. They're mad about immigration.

00:13:26 Speaker_02
They're mad about a sense of disorder and failure and confusion and fecklessness.

00:13:32 Speaker_02
I wanna be very careful about relying on exit polls, but one thing we seem to be seeing in polling is that Trump improved a lot with voters making less than $50,000 a year. These are the voters the Democratic Party prides itself on serving.

00:13:46 Speaker_02
They are losing the voters at the core of their conception of their own party. There has to be curiosity here, curiosity about what these people are experiencing and why they're seeing Trump so differently than liberals do.

00:14:01 Speaker_02
Democrats have to be going to places they have not been going and taking seriously opinions and experiences they have not been taking seriously.

00:14:09 Speaker_02
And I'm not just talking here about a woke-unwoke divide, though I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men, now consume. I don't think Rogan was close to them.

00:14:24 Speaker_02
I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them, and it was a terrible mistake and one that's going to take a long time to undo. But I'm also talking here about the day-to-day democratic governance.

00:14:35 Speaker_02
When voters are this unhappy with the way you've wielded power, particularly if you think you've wielded it well, you really have to struggle with why. That work has maybe begun in the Democratic Party.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
I think you see it in the Biden administration's eventual pivot to border enforcement, which Harris very much emphasized in her campaign, but it was clearly too little and too late.

00:14:57 Speaker_02
There's another part of the 2004 experience and its aftermath that I've been thinking about. So immediately after that election, Democrats became obsessed with winning back the heartland, with their cultural distance from the voters they needed.

00:15:14 Speaker_02
There was this belief that gay marriage ballot initiatives had cost Democrats the election. There was a vogue for tough, masculine politicians like Brian Schweitzer, then the Democratic governor of Montana.

00:15:26 Speaker_02
Democrats felt they were considered weak, and if they were ever to be competitive again, they'd have to be seen as strong. They'd have to moderate, both ideologically and culturally.

00:15:37 Speaker_02
To win again, they would need to become more like what had defeated them. But George W. Bush's win in 2004 was not the beginning of a Republican realignment. It was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it.

00:15:50 Speaker_02
Because what liberals thought of Bush then was true. His administration was a disaster. The Iraq War was a catastrophe built on lies. And all of that would come clearer and come to be more widely believed within a few years.

00:16:04 Speaker_02
By the time of the next presidential election, Democrats had opened the door to a new politics, a politics that seemed almost unimaginable in 2004.

00:16:14 Speaker_02
Yes, Barack Obama's convention speech that year was startlingly good, but he was still an anti-war black man with a middle name, Hussein, whose politics were forged in Chicago.

00:16:25 Speaker_02
That wasn't what Democrats thought would win them Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Indiana in 2008. But it was.

00:16:33 Speaker_02
And meanwhile, the Bush administration's overreaches, failures, and scandals left the reputation of the Republican Party's elites so absolutely smashed that the stage was set for Donald Trump's eventual and complete takeover of the party.

00:16:50 Speaker_02
I'm not going to sit here and tell you I know how the next Trump administration will go. Trump is surrounded now by people who are much more relentlessly focused on carrying out his will and their own.

00:17:04 Speaker_02
Republicans have the Senate and the Supreme Court and will likely win the House. That is just a huge amount of power for a man not known for wielding power carefully or responsibly. And sure, maybe JD Vance and Elon Musk and RFK Jr.

00:17:19 Speaker_02
will bring a judiciousness or a coherence to Trump's governing style that he didn't have in his first term. I think it is as or more likely that they egg Trump into ideological overreach. And my God, the corruption we're about to see.

00:17:35 Speaker_02
So is this the beginning of the Trump realignment? Or will this end with Trump's name and reputation as tattered as that of the Bush dynasty he destroyed? I don't know.

00:17:46 Speaker_02
But Democrats need to admit that they are at the end of their own cycle of politics. The Obama coalition is over. It is defeated. It is exhausted. What comes next needs to be new. That means going to new places and being open to new voices.

00:18:02 Speaker_02
A politics right for the next era will not be a politics designed to win the last election. It's not going to be predictable from where we stand right now. Just as Obama's 2008 landslide would have sounded laughable in 2004,

00:18:16 Speaker_02
And just like how Donald Trump's 2016 win would have sounded like a joke in 2012, discovering what is next, amidst the pain and possibly the horror of what is about to come, is going to require Democrats to open themselves to a lot of conflict and a lot of curiosity.

00:18:55 Speaker_02
I'm joined now by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon, to talk a bit more about the election and that essay. Claire?

00:19:01 Speaker_05
Hi, great to be here.

00:19:04 Speaker_02
Really? Are you thrilled to be here?

00:19:07 Speaker_05
No, I'm in a pretty weird place right now. And it is amazing how quickly Joe Biden can go from a hero to the man who handed the White House to Trump.

00:19:19 Speaker_02
Yeah, look, I have a lot of sadness for Joe Biden in this. But it is what it is, right?

00:19:26 Speaker_02
If your whole point in coming back into politics is to win the fight for the soul of the nation, to vanquish the threat that Donald Trump poses, and in the end, Donald Trump succeeds you with a larger coalition than he's ever had before, then your political mission failed.

00:19:48 Speaker_05
Watching the returns with you last night, you were surprised. You thought Harris was going to win. Why were you surprised?

00:19:58 Speaker_02
When I looked at the election, the polls were so 50-50. You couldn't just say, well, I go with the polls and that shows Harris will win or Trump will win. They were right on the edge. So the question was, is there a miss in one direction or another?

00:20:10 Speaker_02
And I looked around at things that looked like signals of enthusiasm to me. how big the rallies were, how much money was being raised, including by small donors.

00:20:22 Speaker_02
I do think that what led me and what has continuously been leading people astray is that the voters turning out for Trump are not highly political, right?

00:20:32 Speaker_02
There was an argument going into this election that the coalitions have flipped such that high turnout is bad for Democrats now. Early on the election day, you saw a lot of Democrats celebrating high turnout. And that was clearly a mistake.

00:20:47 Speaker_02
High turnout was bad for Democrats. And so one reason I think signals of enthusiasm that reflect people doing highly political things like going to a rally or going out door knocking or donating money.

00:21:03 Speaker_02
didn't tell me which way the polls were going to be wrong, is that the way in which the polls were wrong again was that Donald Trump is pretty good at exciting or turning out disaffected voters.

00:21:17 Speaker_02
And his coalition, they don't do a lot of things that highly political voters do, like turn out in midterms and special elections.

00:21:25 Speaker_02
But they will turn out in a presidential campaign, given how high the stakes are and how much people hear about it and how much money is invested in turning them out into the polls. And that's what happened here.

00:21:35 Speaker_05
I want to go back to something you said early on in your piece about how, based off of the macro conditions in the world, the anti-incumbent sentiment that Trump really should have won by more and that Nikki Haley would have won in a landslide.

00:21:51 Speaker_05
That feels very different from the narratives you hear now about Trump being this like specifically transformative political figure.

00:21:58 Speaker_05
He's speaking to this anti-elite sentiment that Nikki Haley has like no place in the Republican Party anymore, that Nikki Haley is not the kind of figure that would win this kind of election. So is it wrong to interpret Trump's win that way?

00:22:12 Speaker_02
I think both things can be true. Trump is triggering a realignment of the parties, which is a really remarkable thing to trigger in American politics. It's not an easy thing to do, where the nature of the Republican coalition really has changed.

00:22:27 Speaker_02
And if you had told Democrats in 2016 the margins Donald Trump would be getting with Black and Hispanic voters in 2024, they would have laughed in your face.

00:22:38 Speaker_02
At the same time, that realignment is not coming along with historic success for this new Republican coalition. It's not weird for the out-of-power party to win an election.

00:22:51 Speaker_02
Not weird for them to win the popular vote by a point or two, which again right now looks to be where Donald Trump will end up. There's not like a 2008 landslide, and it's not like the Tories' loss in the UK.

00:23:02 Speaker_02
This is a still fairly close election that could have been flipped by a couple hundred thousand votes in the swing states. There's not been a down-ballot red wave this year either.

00:23:13 Speaker_02
I think they're going to win the Senate and the House, but it looks like a lot of endangered Democrats in swing states are going to hold on. And I think something that shows you is that this wasn't just broad anti-incumbent sentiment.

00:23:27 Speaker_02
Plenty of incumbents did just fine. And it wasn't even broad anti-democratic sentiment. If you look at a lot of these Senate races and House races, plenty of Democrats did just fine. There was specific anger at the Biden administration.

00:23:42 Speaker_02
And that was what Trump was able to take advantage of, not just support for him, but a genuine disappointment people had in what the Biden-Harris administration has wrought.

00:23:55 Speaker_05
How do you understand specifically that anger? Because there was a theory, too, when Biden was still in the race and his approval ratings were in the toilet where they have stayed, that it was because he couldn't communicate well enough.

00:24:09 Speaker_05
He couldn't sell these amazing legislative accomplishments. He couldn't do the dance of selling how actually the economy in America is great if you compare it to other countries in the world. But Harris couldn't sell that either.

00:24:22 Speaker_02
I still think that's true, actually. It's so hard because we're all a little too patterned on the elections we've lived through. But I talked a lot about 2004 in the essay, but think about 2012. Barack Obama's running for re-election.

00:24:37 Speaker_02
Unemployment, at least as of the middle of that election cycle, was above 8%. It was so high. The economy was so much worse than it is now.

00:24:49 Speaker_02
And Obama ends up winning by quite a bit, and one of the ways he wins is that Obama and the Democratic Party united around him are able to really tell a story about the economic recovery.

00:24:59 Speaker_02
They're able to take how people feel about the objective facts that are around them, and give them this different gloss. Yes, this is hard and it is grueling and it is grinding, but America's coming back faster than other countries.

00:25:12 Speaker_02
This is a mess it was left for Obama and the Obama administration.

00:25:16 Speaker_02
And Mitt Romney, given who he serves and what he has proposed and what his intuitions in politics are, is not going to lead to a kinder, gentler economy for the people currently left out, and that works.

00:25:31 Speaker_02
And if Joe Biden were 65, maybe he could have pulled that off.

00:25:35 Speaker_02
But instead, there's this late baton handoff to Kamala Harris, who has to decide between trying to sell the Biden administration's record when it is quite unpopular and trying to create her own separated identity and kind of ends up in between the two things.

00:25:51 Speaker_02
And so I don't think we know what this looks like with a more capable incumbent who could have run an actual re-election campaign, which is what you normally would have seen in this scenario, or a non-incumbent who is not tied to the current administration's record.

00:26:08 Speaker_02
As I say, I think she was dealt a very difficult hand. I think in many ways she played it very well, moderated on key policies, really did some excellent speeches and did an excellent debate and had some really, really strong set pieces.

00:26:22 Speaker_02
The place where I do fault her and where I faulted that campaign is I don't think they came up with a message connected policy critique and vision.

00:26:33 Speaker_02
in a way that really said, this is what Kamala Harris is about, and this is the way the country will change if she is elected. And I think that's always been a weakness of hers.

00:26:42 Speaker_02
She has other strengths, but you would have needed a really, really, really strong candidate to do that at that speed, and she wasn't able to do that.

00:26:52 Speaker_05
Was it possibly an impossible job?

00:26:55 Speaker_05
You wrote a piece back in February about the Democratic Party's identity crisis and how basically it was trying to represent now many contradictory things, that it was now the party of normalcy in contrast to Trump, but also as the party of progress and change, that it was the party of the working class, but actually it's a core constituency or college-educated voters.

00:27:20 Speaker_05
Was Harris just trying to speak to and unite all these different positions and groups, and it turns out you can't do that?

00:27:31 Speaker_02
I don't think so. Democrats have won too many elections, including in this election cycle, for me to believe Democrats cannot win in the states they need to win.

00:27:39 Speaker_02
Arizona has a Democratic governor, and it has a Democratic senator in Mark Kelly, and now looks to have another Democratic senator in Ruben Gallego. And so the idea that Democrats cannot win in these places, I just don't think it's true.

00:27:53 Speaker_02
There are Democrats who choose to run as the institutionalists, the guardians, right? That's much more how Joe Biden ran in 2020.

00:28:02 Speaker_02
And Democrats who choose to run more as outsiders, more as people making a critique, more as candidates angry at the way things are. I mean, you can see that in Bernie Sanders, but in other candidates, too.

00:28:15 Speaker_02
And what I think was very hard for Harris here was there wasn't a lot of time to build out either of those pathways. And again, as the sitting vice president, she did not have that much maneuverability. So, look, her task was very hard.

00:28:30 Speaker_02
I'm not sure if it was impossible, but I don't think the Democratic Party's task was impossible.

00:28:37 Speaker_02
And I think from a standing start with a full primary to work out her campaign or in which Democrats could have figured out which candidate was building a campaign that resonated most strongly right now in this environment, I think they could have won.

00:28:52 Speaker_05
You said the Democratic Party hasn't been listening enough to their voters. Harris presented a very different figure than who she cut in 2020. She basically abandoned all her more progressive positions from that year.

00:29:07 Speaker_05
She leaned into the fact that she's a former prosecutor. She led with housing policy. Is it just that she couldn't tie everything together into a coherent story?

00:29:18 Speaker_02
Maybe the thing I'm saying there is the Democratic Party didn't really listen to the voters until it was too late. The Biden administration has been extraordinary at managing the Democratic coalition.

00:29:29 Speaker_02
and passing things inside the Democratic coalition that were thrilling to its progressive wing and somewhere between acceptable and exciting to its moderate wing. And so you had real support and love for Joe Biden and real admiration of him.

00:29:44 Speaker_02
And many of these policies are things that I think are really strong policies. And over time, they're gonna show their worth, like the investments from the Inflation Reduction Act.

00:29:54 Speaker_02
At the same time, the party never answered, I think because it didn't really wanna face up to the fact that voters disagreed. They didn't like the way things felt, looked. They didn't think Joe Biden was up to it.

00:30:08 Speaker_02
And I do think Harris, when she took the reins, immediately began to pivot and try to emphasize things that reflected a sense of what people are upset about, right? Emphasizing the bipartisan border bill.

00:30:22 Speaker_02
Housing, I think it was really an important thing that she put it so centrally in her proposals. It's not a thing I ever found that she spoke that effectively or passionately about. I think sometimes people can feel when a policy is really your policy.

00:30:35 Speaker_02
I would say that Harris really felt When she talked about Roe, when she talked about Dobbs, when she talked about reproductive rights, you could feel this was her issue. On others, you couldn't.

00:30:46 Speaker_02
When Donald Trump talks about immigration, you can feel it is his issue. Voters are pretty good at that. Always this critique that Harris needed more policies, I never bought it.

00:30:54 Speaker_02
I always said she needed two or three policies, the two or three that really defined her and that she cared the most about. Voters do not hold a large policy agenda in their heads. They sense what is fundamentally important.

00:31:08 Speaker_02
But Harris was listening, and she was trying to build a campaign quickly that reflected where she thought the electorate was. I do think time was just such a problem here. I don't think it's easy to build a campaign.

00:31:21 Speaker_02
I don't think it's easy to build a message. I don't think it's easy to do the work sometimes as a politician of understanding what you think is the right thing to say and emphasize in that moment. And she'd do all of it so fast.

00:31:32 Speaker_02
I mean, the time between taking the reins of the campaign and picking the vice president and having the entire convention is a matter of weeks. That's supposed to happen over months. And so I am not highly critical of Harris here.

00:31:47 Speaker_02
I think she did a quite extraordinary job under very difficult circumstances.

00:31:52 Speaker_02
Doing it at that speed was just, you would have needed somebody who basically had the campaign all ready to go and had been like thinking about how to run as the principal already and had exactly the right critique and message for the moment.

00:32:05 Speaker_02
And clearly in the end, she didn't. There are things I think they should have done differently, things in their media strategy. I mentioned things like Rogan, things in their policy strategy.

00:32:14 Speaker_02
But I don't know how much any of that would have really mattered. In the end, Harris was a representative of the Biden administration, no matter whether she wanted to be or not.

00:32:22 Speaker_02
And people did not like the Joe Biden administration, and she did not have a long time to build an alternative relationship with the electorate before they actually had to go vote.

00:32:35 Speaker_05
You ended your piece with a call for folks to be curious. I imagine a lot of people listening aren't really in the mood to open their hearts and minds in a space of curiosity to Trump and the people who support him.

00:32:52 Speaker_05
What do you recommend for folks who feel exhausted right now about the idea of living through another four years of Trump? Scared? Like what should they do? What should they read?

00:33:06 Speaker_02
And people should take a rest, right? It's the end of election. The election was exhausting and anxious for everybody, I think, or at least everybody who is very tuned into it. You don't need to be engaged in politics 24-7.

00:33:20 Speaker_02
And look, I'm saying this as much for myself as anybody. I've tried in the last couple of months to have a number of people on from at least some factions of the MAGA right, right? That's been a project I've been trying to pursue on the show, right?

00:33:35 Speaker_02
To try to be curious about what's happening there before the election, to try to understand it better. And I do think that's helped me understand it better.

00:33:42 Speaker_02
And with Trump, the empathic gap of getting to, you know, how somebody might support him is for a lot of people is for me such a tremendous effort. It just takes a lot of work.

00:33:58 Speaker_02
But I don't think you can watch the way he has dominated politics now since 2016. I mean, that is an appeal that if you refuse to work on what is driving it, I don't know how you think you're going to defeat it, right?

00:34:17 Speaker_02
And also, it just requires, like, you should be curious about your country and the other people in it and how they're experiencing things. But again, my view about curiosity here is not just towards Donald Trump, right?

00:34:30 Speaker_02
This is not just the sort of canonical going to the diners and talking to his voters. It is also about just the way politics has changed. As I say at the end, I think this is the end of the Obama era too.

00:34:44 Speaker_02
We'll see where the Trump era goes, but Biden was part of the Obama era. He was Barack Obama's vice president. Kamala Harris rose in politics in the Obama era.

00:34:54 Speaker_02
And a lot of the fundamental assumptions in the Democratic Party, they've been challenged by people like Bernie Sanders and AOC. They've been altered a bit, but this was fundamentally the Obama coalition. And I think that coalition is over now.

00:35:07 Speaker_02
It's lost too many people to Trump. It has lost elections it shouldn't have lost. I think it's a bit out of ideas and appeal. I don't think, you know, Joe Biden was not able to turn the page on Donald Trump, this battle for the soul of the nation.

00:35:19 Speaker_02
There was not a compelling story Democrats told about America, or at least a story that was compelling enough to Americans for them to win this year. They've lost touch with too many people they claim to represent.

00:35:31 Speaker_02
So something else is gonna have to rise. And so when I say that this is going to require a lot of curiosity, you know, being curious about voters doesn't mean it doesn't mean abandoning your values. It doesn't mean abandoning your moral commitments.

00:35:45 Speaker_02
And it doesn't mean thinking that any choice that was made was right just because somebody else won an election. Right. Terrible people win elections all the time, all over the world.

00:35:55 Speaker_02
But it does mean, I think, taking seriously the world people are experiencing such that you can think about how to respond to that world.

00:36:06 Speaker_05
Um, well, with that, I'm going to go and take a nap. Thanks, Ezra.

00:36:10 Speaker_02
Thank you, Claire. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Jack McCordick and Kristen Lynn.

00:36:40 Speaker_02
Our senior engineer is Jeff Gellold with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, and Elias Isquith.

00:36:48 Speaker_02
We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Kristina Samuelski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.