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I’m Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.
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Welcome to the show. So we are recording here on Wednesday, and we’re going to do something a little bit different. I’ve asked my revered, honored editor Aaron Retica, the man who makes all of my thoughts somewhat worth thinking, and certainly somewhat worth reading, to come on and to have the conversation with me that we often have sort of every week in politics, but certainly around elections, to try to talk about what mattered, what we think is important, where we think our coverage should go.
But rather than having all that happen in private, we thought that we would do it in public. And it’d be a way to work through an election that we do not yet have all the information on, we should not yet have too much confidence about, but that we at least want to process a little bit in real time. And so I should say as we’re recording, here’s where things stand. The Senate looks like a pretty good shot for Democrats to keep it, if you look at “The New York Times” needle, which has now stop moving.
It’s at lean Democratic. It’s totally possible that what we’re going to see is the Senate control going to a runoff in Georgia, depending on how things like Nevada turn out. We don’t know yet. The House probably looks like Republicans are going to take control, but it is not nearly as sure a thing as one would have thought. And so overall, you have a lot more stability in this election than many expected.
This election looks like the election the polls promised us, an election where Democrats did a lot better than you would think they would do for a midterm with inflation high and Joe Biden’s approval ratings low. Republicans did a lot worse than you might have thought they would perform. And so the strange thing that has to be explained is not a wild swing in one direction or another, but the absence of a wild swing in one direction or another.
But with that, I’m going to turn this over to Aaron, who will pepper me and interrogate me with all the questions he has brought to bear.
So let’s start with a happy Republican, Ron DeSantis. He crushed his opponent. People got very excited about this. During the election itself, on Election Day, the chattering classes, the political chattering classes were freaking out, because Miami-Dade was looking like DeSantis would win, and he did. He rolled out an enormous juggernaut and did incredibly well. So immediately, the narrative, as people like to say — becomes OK, DeSantis is the winner. You have some heterodox thoughts on that. Let’s start there.
How great a night was it for DeSantis?
Oh, DeSantis. So I don’t want to say I have overly heterodox views on Ron DeSantis. What I have heterodox views on is the narrative. The big narrative of the night is Republicans did poorly everywhere, basically, except for Ron DeSantis, who wrecked Charlie Crist in Florida — won by, I think, around or a bit less than 20 points. And doesn’t this just show that DeSantis is the future of the party? The Trump acolytes didn’t do as well as, certainly, Donald Trump had hoped, certainly as well as they had hoped.
And maybe — maybe, maybe. I guess my question is if there is anything so profound that actually needs to be explained in DeSantis’s victory margin? So just a couple points for comparison here. Marco Rubio, running for Senate in Florida, he beat Val Demings by a pretty close margin to how DeSantis beat Crist. And I think everybody agrees that Val Demings is a fresher and more capable candidate at this point than Charlie Crist.
Go over to Ohio. Mike DeWine won his gubernatorial election by much more than DeSantis won. I mean, last I looked, it was about 25 points. Nobody’s talking about Republican Mike DeWine, who just stomped to victory in Ohio, as the future of all American politics, or some political model that we all need to reckon with at a deep level. Go over to Colorado, on the other side, Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado — Colorado’s about 80 percent reported as I’m speaking.
It’s been pretty stable in the margin. It could change, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt, but he’s up by 15, 17 points. That’s a pretty big win for a Democratic governor in a state that is no bluer than Florida is red, and I think at this point arguably less blue than Florida is red. And he ran ahead of Michael Bennet, who also did quite well and won the Senate election in Colorado. If you go back to 2018, you can see Tom Wolf, the incumbent Governor of Pennsylvania, the Democrat back then — that’s a big Democratic year. And Pennsylvania is a closer state than Florida. He wins by almost 20 points.
I say all this only to say that — look, if I were DeSantis, I’d be thrilled. If I were DeSantis, I would be plotting my 2024 run. But I think the narrative is so interested and attuned to Ron DeSantis that we are taking a victory that is quite well within the established boundaries of how incumbent governors run in a state that leans in their direction, in a year that leans in their direction, as some kind of cataclysmic political performance when it just looks like a strong win.
And it looks like strong wins that other governors are putting up around the country, and have put up in the past. So I don’t know. I think that the press is very interested in DeSantis and is making not more out of his win maybe than he deserves, but less out of other people’s wins than they deserve, in a way that is making him look more unique than he is.
Let me push back against that a little bit, Ezra. So if he’s winning Miami-Dade, that’s a huge thing, right? If the future of elections in America is in part about who’s going to win the Latino vote in various different places — and obviously, that’s a complicated question. Florida is a very specific Latino vote. It’s always specific. We talk about the Latino vote as if it’s a thing, but it’s a million different things.
But DeSantis runs his culture war playbook. DeSantis keeps his state more or less open, and then is rewarded for it with a gigantic victory. So that’s not nothing, right? It’s something he can work with. My question about this, though, is — like, here’s the part about Trump and DeSantis I don’t understand. Republicans actually have a very narrow margin — way of winning national elections, presidential elections, right?
How does DeSantis, if he somehow manages to defeat Trump — how does he win if Trump says, don’t vote for this guy? Like, even, if 5 percent Trump voters won’t vote for DeSantis nationally, that’s it. So I don’t — I actually find the DeSantis speculation a little weird.
So on the Miami-Dade question — and so the backdrop to that is that Miami-Dade is a big county in Florida, heavy Hispanic population. Democrats have typically done very well there, and DeSantis won it. And I just don’t exactly know what to make of what we’ve seen in Florida over the past couple of elections. There’s clearly compositional changes in the Florida electorate, even more so after the pandemic. A lot of people went there. People retired there. Then, a bunch of people left there during the hurricane, particularly if they could leave there.
I know people who were living in Florida six months ago who are not living there now. They were Democratic voters. We know Florida’s been trending more and more Republican. If I’m not wrong, Trump’s most significant improvement — certainly, in a swing state from 2016 — was in Florida in 2020. And so I wonder if we have gotten into a position where we should understand Florida as a much redder state than we do, so we are more surprised by close elections there than we should be.
There are clearly dynamics among the Florida Hispanic population that are not the same dynamic you see in every other state. I mentioned Colorado, that’s also got a high proportion of Hispanic voters, and Democrats did very well in Colorado. We don’t really know what has happened in Arizona yet, but it’ll be interesting, and it looks to me like Mark Kelly is at least going to pull it out in the Senate. So I just don’t know how to read Florida.
And how you read Florida has a lot to do with how you read DeSantis, because if you understand Florida as a real swing, and what DeSantis did is turn it red, I mean, that’s a remarkable political achievement. And if you understand Florida as more like Ohio, then it looks more like what Mike DeWine did in Ohio, which isn’t to say it’s not a strong performance. It’s just to say it’s not as unique a performance as people think. So then you bring up the question of Donald Trump. And yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways things play out in the moment are not the way they play out over time. And I’ll give two examples — one sort of the DeSantis example, and one the Joe Biden example, of the way a narrative can in the moment mislead you.
This looks great for DeSantis, right? He’s getting all this coverage. He did great when a lot of Donald Trump’s people did poorly. What this is actually going to do for Donald Trump is make clear that his main competition in the world, the person who could turn him from — in his own mind — winner to loser is DeSantis. And he is going to put everything he has into destroying this person.
So maybe a more normal performance, right — a 10 point win or an 8 point win or something for DeSantis — would have kept him a little bit more out of Trump’s sights for longer, and would have been better for him. Or who knows? Maybe DeSantis crushes Trump and that’s the end of that. But I do think it’s a mistake right now that the narrative in the press is thinking about 2024 as this two man race, because the nature of Trump and DeSantis both being in the game, and possibly destroying each other like Godzilla and Mothra, is that it creates space for other candidates to emerge. It makes for a more multi-candidate race than it otherwise would be.
If it was just Donald Trump or it was just Ron DeSantis, they would have that lane, like, that main lane of the Republican Party right now, that post-Trump lane to themselves. But it won’t be. And they may well split that lane. And that might create space for a Nikki Haley, a Glenn Youngkin, a Tim Scott, somebody we’re not thinking of right now, to win in New Hampshire. And all of a sudden, a snowball effect happens.
And Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are doing to each other what Chris Christie and Marco Rubio did to each other — what Chris Christie did to Marco Rubio. And so things could just go in very weird ways. And I just — I would really urge people to not get too caught up in just, like, the idea that only DeSantis and Trump — Mike Pence might run. It’s going to be very weird in 2024.
I’ll note there’s a similar thing, I think, with Joe Biden. Biden and the Democrats clearly overperformed compared to what people were expecting in the midterm. And on the one hand, that puts Biden in a stronger position, if Kevin McCarthy, as Speaker, is going to have a very narrow majority. There’s a good chance Chuck Schumer will remain Majority Leader. That puts Biden in a much better governing position. It puts Republicans in a worse position. But it makes it harder for Biden to do what Bill Clinton was able to do after 1994, what Barack Obama was able to do after 2010, and let Republicans create so much chaos and become so unpopular, become this whole pole of American governance that he can stand presidentially against, sort of be the bulwark between the country and Republican cataclysm. And so in a way, I’m not sure this outcome is as strengthening for Biden 2024 as really a worse one would be.
Now, I’m not saying that should make you want a worse outcome, right? I don’t think you should want worse things based on these speculative reads of the future. But I am saying it’s one reason I’m very mistrustful of the political narratives that take hold immediately after an election because everything that happens creates a counter-reaction. And we’re often looking at the thing that happened without assessing or even knowing what kind of backlash or response it’s going to create in a very, very dynamic system.
And oftentimes, that response ends up mattering as much or more as the original event. So this is where we are today. Where we’re going to be in a year, who knows?
Let’s just stay with Trump for a second. What does he do now? How does he read this election? What do you think he sees? I mean, obviously he sees some victories that he’s taking responsibility for. That’s always how he behaves. But in his colder calculus, what does he see?
The way you phrased that is, I think, impossible. I mean, I think Donald Trump walks around the world, and he looks at the world, and he thinks — that’s me, and that’s also me. And that’s also related to me. And that’s me too. And what level of rationality, what level of cold analysis he has I’ve never known. And I don’t know that anybody does. I think that the coverage of Ron DeSantis today is going to drive him insane.
I mean, he was already starting to say some very weird things about DeSantis, saying I know more about him than anybody but his wife, and the things I could tell you — like, the sort of threat that he has secret negative information about Ron DeSantis that he will reveal to the public.
Plus the nickname.
Plus the nickname.
Ron DeSanctimonious.
Ron DeSanctimonious, which — also, in the way that Trump is sometimes a little bit of a genius, like a bullying genius at pinpointing somebody’s actual weak spot, it’s not an amazing nickname. It’s not quite as good as like Low Energy Jeb. But Trump has this kind of manic circus charisma where he doesn’t seem to take it all so seriously. He seems a little bit, like, always winking at you. And DeSantis has none of that. It’s like a complete literalization of Trumpism.
Trump is seeing something clearly there that’s I think actually quite interesting. So yeah, I mean, I think the thing Donald Trump wakes up and sees — I don’t think Donald Trump cares about the actual results of things. When not enough people attended his inauguration, he told his press secretary to go out and lie about it. And he might really have believed his own lies. You know, he’s endlessly talked himself into ideas about his Electoral College victory that clearly weren’t true.
Or he would believe a poll result that was actually a subgroup of a random poll in the state. I mean, like everything you ever hear about talking to Donald Trump about the outcome of anything is that you’re talking to somebody living in a world of their own fantasies, spun around tiny grains of sand of truth, right? And after 2020, I don’t know what Donald Trump truly believes about whether or not he won or he lost. But it doesn’t matter. Like, I think he believes what he needs to believe.
And so he has moved forward on the view that he won, and has made everybody else move forward in either agreement or opposition to that view, too. So I don’t think Donald Trump wakes up today, and — whatever he says in public — starts going through the exit polls in private. I think he watches “Fox and Friends” and I think he flicks through the other cable news channels. And he sees everybody talking about how Ron DeSantis is so great, and Donald Trump’s candidates didn’t do that well.
And it’s Ron DeSantis’s party — and oh, did you notice in the betting markets, all of a sudden, Ron DeSantis is ahead of Donald Trump in the 2024 betting. And I think the guy’s going to have a conniption.
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Let’s talk about how we got to where we are today, because it really is mystifying, right? You have a very high inflation rate, which just on its own should have meant that there was much more punishment for Democratic candidates all over the United States. You have gas prices that were very high — fluctuating a little bit, but super high. One thing that people are citing as — an example of that you talked about at the beginning is the idea of calcification.
You just had Lynn Vavreck and John Sides on your show. And Lynn just did a great piece for us on this subject. And the basic idea is that everything is at such parity, everything is so connected, half and half, and the parties have separated ideologically so that there are very few heterodox people within those parties — is that the reason that inflation did not matter as much as it did? Do you think that the calcification controlled voting, polarization prevented a big swing? What happened here?
So first, I cannot recommend enough that people go listen to that show with Lynn Vavreck and John Sides. So they are political scientists who just wrote this big book, along with another co-author, on 2020. And what they show is that 2020 looks just eerily like 2016. For all that happens, like Donald Trump’s whole first term, impeachments, pandemic, Russia, everything — right, all that craziness we lived through, basically nobody changes their mind about anything. You could have predicted 2020 very, very, very closely just by knowing 2016.
So that is calcification. People are not changing their minds. But the other opposing force is parity. For whatever reason, and this is much more of a mystery than people would think it is — I mean, I actually talked at some length with John and Lynn about it. And we ended up cutting that section of the conversation because the answers are just so unclear — the parties are very closely divided in power. And so on the one hand, huge events in American politics, huge changes, are not shifting large numbers of the vote.
And on the other, you shift one or two or three percentage points of the vote, and control of everything goes the other way, right? I mean, both the 2016 and the 2020 elections could have been flipped, presidentially, by the movement of well fewer than 100,000 voters. And here, too, this stayed very, very closely divided. You’re going to have a 50/50 or 51/49 Senate. You’re going to have a very closely divided House.
And so not many people moved because the parties are very different. But on the other hand, because they are so narrowly matched, those movements could change everything. So then you get into inflation. And inflation was the force that could have made this — or in many of our expectations — would have made this something like 2010, where a bad economy is understood to have created a huge midterm wave for Republicans.
And it didn’t. Now maybe that expectation was wrong. Matt Grossman, who’s a political scientist, tweeted out this chart that was really surprising to me showing that there’s a very weak relationship between the rate of inflation and midterm election results. And he actually also showed there’s a pretty weak relationship between employment and midterm election results.
But now, you might say that’s mediated by something else, so something that Sides and Vavreck show in their book is that the really strong predictor of what happened in the 2020 election was Trump’s approval rating. His approval rating was bad. He did about as badly as that would anticipate. And so yeah, there’s all kinds of weird stuff happening in the economy in 2020, but basically, what ended up mattering is how people absorbed that into their view of the president.
And so at the end of that conversation, I asked them what the fundamentals — sort of presidential approval and the economy — would say about Democrats in 2022. And John says, basically, if I were a Democrat, I’d be terrified. This looks bad. Joe Biden’s approval rating is bad and inflation is high. And so the interesting thing to me is that Democrats did not perform as badly, not just as inflation might have made you think — but yeah, maybe inflation doesn’t work like that in midterms.
Maybe I need to take the Grossman chart more seriously. But they didn’t perform as badly as Joe Biden’s approval rating would have predicted. And that’s the real surprise. There was a decoupling of how people felt about Joe Biden from what they did in the election. And I think that reflects that the driver for Democrats is fear of Republicans.
You don’t have to like Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi to fear Republicans coming back in power, to fear what they would do to, say, a woman’s right to choose in a post Roe landscape, to fear what would happen if they breached the debt ceiling or have a lot of power over election administration. So negative polarization can be a profound driver of votes. You’ll sometimes hear politicians say things like voting is an act of hope. Yes, sometimes, but voting is also very much an act of fear.
And as the parties become more different, as the Republican Party in my view becomes more deranged and more frightening in terms of how it sees the system, and what it will permit and what it will accept within its own ranks, that fear based voting becomes more prevalent on the Democratic side. And so you don’t have the collapse in turnout among Democrats in 2022 that you might have expected. I mean, that’s why midterms swing so much. The governing party becomes dispirited and they don’t turn out. Republicans might have had a little bit of a turnout edge this year. I’ve seen some varying analyzes of that. I don’t think we’re really going to the numbers on that for some time. But what’s clear is Democratic turnout did not collapse. And as such, Democrats were able to hold on.
I’m going to say that the debt ceiling was not a big factor in how people voted out of fear.
You don’t think they read my piece on that?
I don’t know, just a thought. But obviously, fear is critical, right? It’s —
But wait? What do you think about this, Aaron. What do you think is the driver?
It’s really hard to know. I mean, the calcification thing is really weird, right, because it’s not that the parties are static. There’s been tremendous movement from side to side. College educated people have moved out of the Republican Party into the Democratic Party in huge numbers. In smaller numbers, but still significant numbers, Black and Hispanic men in particular have moved, as far as voting goes, from the Democratic column to the Republican column.
So the coalitions have actually changed even though there’s parity, right, which is very strange. So I’m not sure what happened. I do think fear of Republican majorities is there. There’s no question about that. I was joking about the debt ceiling. I don’t think people are too worried about the debt ceiling. I do think it was interesting. The Times/Siena poll said that a lot of people were worried about what Republicans were going to do if they were in control of more of the levers of democracy, but they didn’t actually care that much about it.
But maybe they did. Maybe it had some influence on how people voted. And maybe people understand more than a lot of media chatters think about what the president can and cannot do about inflation, about gas prices — right, because inflation is a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, Western European countries are doing worse in most of the cases than the United States is. So maybe people are more resigned in a way, and so they weren’t voting on that because they didn’t think the president could do anything about it. I don’t know.
Well, let me add two ideas to that. So one is that I don’t think Republicans ever convinced anybody they had a plan on inflation. And they didn’t pretend to have a theory that they messaged repeatedly and consistently in a clear way, that if you elect us, this is why inflation is going to come down. I mean, in 2010, Republicans really put a lot on the budget deficit. They really put a lot on that what was happening in the economy was Democrats are running up all this debt, and it was making businesses uncertain.
And people — wrongly, often, in my view — but nevertheless intuitively feel like it’s a bad thing when government runs up all this debt. And so they really pushed this sort of view of Republicans as the responsible belt tighteners. And that was going to — something, something, something, and make a better economy. And I disagreed with that view, but it was a message. And the view was that it resonated. I mean the view is that it resonates so much that Barack Obama, then — and his administration — make this, I think, quite ill chosen turn to austerity in the aftermath.
But Republicans didn’t try anything like that this year. So that’s one thing. And the other is that to pull back the curtain on our process a bit, you and I were working — and I was working on this piece for a bit — that was about on the off chance, and it turned out there was an off chance — maybe even still is an off chance — the Democrats end this with control of the House and Senate maintained, what are they going to do? What’s their agenda? What is the positive Democratic agenda going forward?
And I scrapped that column, and I scrapped it in part because I don’t think Democrats actually have any agreed upon positive agenda going forward. I don’t think they were expecting to hold it. I don’t think they will hold the House, for that matter. So that’ll probably prove to be right. But one, there wasn’t an answer there, because they weren’t trying to come up with an answer there. I mean, people talk about child care, this or that. But they didn’t really have anything.
And the second thing is they didn’t have anything in part because they didn’t think that was how they were going to get people to vote for them. They wanted Republicans scariness to be the center of the agenda. And within Republican scariness, I think there’s a miasma of different things, right? I mean, I take your point that they’re not — most people aren’t sitting around being, like, well, we’ve got a debt ceiling coming up, and Congress is going to need to raise that, or the full faith and credit of the blah, blah, blah is going to go down. What I do think happened, though, was a sense that there’s just a lot of chaos on the Republican side. They are willing to do a bunch of things that are kind of frightening, from elections to abortion to the economy, to just like what the Republican Party is and represents. You can’t cut out from all this the kinds of people they nominated in a bunch of key races, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia.
So part of it was a candidate quality issue. Like, people looked at the actual person who might represent them and said, I don’t want this person. But Democrats really chose not to run on a positive agenda. They chose to run functionally on — I mean, you don’t want these maniacs in charge, do you? And that worked.
So if the Democrats had been wrecked on Election Day, there would be bitter recriminations going on between the more progressive side and the more centrist side. There would be more inside baseball. There would be the argument between David Shor and Sean McElwee, who are arguing for doing popular things, and other people who think that the party has to orient more around a — whatever race, class narrative, or any of these other things.
But do those conversations get obliterated by what happened here? Are the Democrats going to be missing out on recriminations that would actually benefit them — is really the question I have.
I think the Democrats did plenty of recriminations about the 2022 election in the weeks leading up to the 2022 election, so they might have actually gotten most of the benefit of it. I mean, they had really turned, I think because they didn’t believe the polls, and the polls were tightening against them, to the view that this is going to be a bloodbath. Emotionally, that’s where they had gone. The thing is that there actually isn’t a ton of strategic questions that are open to the Democrats right now.
If Democrats had gotten wiped out, if they had lost 30 seats in the House and actually five seats in the Senate unexpectedly, losing all of the marginal seats — they lose in Pennsylvania and they lose in Nevada and they lose in New Hampshire, I think the question of whether or not Joe Biden runs in 2024 would — whatever Joe Biden decides — have been opened. And putting aside whether he runs, whether or not there would be a primary in 2024.
But with Biden and the Democrats doing unexpectedly well, so long as Biden wants to run, he’s probably going to have the field to himself. And that means he’s going to run on whatever Joe Biden is, right — Joe Bidenism. He’s got his record. He’s got his political style. It’s the same one it was in — not the same record as in 2020, but the same political style as in 2020. He has mostly done popular things. I mean, the individual component parts of his agenda have been pretty popular.
He’s got weaknesses as a communicator. I mean, we know what Joe Biden is. I think there would be a real question otherwise — right, again, if there had been a bloodbath. I don’t think it would have really been a debate between the so-called populists and the virallists and the progressives and everybody else. I think it would have been a debate about standard bearers.
And with the possibility that Biden wouldn’t run, or wouldn’t win if he did run in the primary, you would have had people who were out there saying that AOC should run, or saying Jared Polis, the Colorado governor should run — Gavin Newsom and Pritzker clearly seem to be playing around with the possibility of runs, the governors of California and Illinois. There are many, many more people out there like that — Chris Murphy out of Connecticut.
I mean, you can name a bunch of people who look like they would be in a scrum to be the future standard bearer of the party. And those people would be the vehicles, containers, through which that debate would happen. But I think assuming nothing really surprising happens as the results come in from the West, I think that Biden’s position, rightly or wrongly, is quite strengthened.
And as such, I don’t think there’s much of a debate to have, because what’s going to happen over the next two years, particularly if Kevin McCarthy is the House Speaker, which again, I think is the right bet to make right now, Biden will be acting in opposition to House Republicans who are going to be doing a lot of nutty things — and oh my God, Kevin McCarthy’s life is going to be miserable with a tiny House Majority, just miserable. He will be led around by Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Freedom Caucus. I mean, he’s going to be able to say no to nothing. He’s a weak leader already. He’s going to have no margin in the majority if he gets a majority. It’s going to be a disaster, which means he’ll probably end up having to do crazier things like debt ceiling showdowns — which, by the way, Donald Trump is already saying they should do a debt ceiling showdown. And then there’ll be Donald Trump out there. There will be Ron DeSantis out there.
And so you’re going to have all these other poles of politics who Joe Biden is going to be acting as the Democratic safe harbor from. And it could really rebuild his strategy from 2020 of, like, Joe Biden may not be any Democrats’ favorite Democrat, but there’s a sense that he’s acceptable enough to sort of everybody, and so he himself forestalls this debate that might otherwise happen.
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Let’s look at two states that are right next to each other, right, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Tim Ryan, people had a brief moment of thinking he was going to do well, but he did not come close to beating Vance. He had one model of how you’re going to have a kind of inclusive, pro-labor, liberal left idea, where you’re kind of knocking the national Democratic Party and you’re going to run next to him. In Pennsylvania, there’s Fetterman, who had a different approach to it, right? It’s more like, I’m like you. I’m a regular person. And he won.
Can we draw any lessons from that, or is this the same situation as Florida, where Ohio is just getting more and more red? And so we can’t actually say anything, because Tim Ryan had no chance.
I have two thoughts on this. So one, I think Ohio is just way redder than Pennsylvania now. I mean, you can look at that in the 2020 results. Joe Biden wins Pennsylvania and he loses Ohio handily. So Fetterman running in Ohio loses, probably. Now, it’s interesting, right? What is Fetterman’s outcome here if not for the stroke?
So Fetterman runs way behind Shapiro, the Democrat for governor in Pennsylvania. Now, Shapiro is running against a truly crazy candidate, but Dr. Oz was also a pretty weird candidate. So if he had Shapiro’s margin, if he’d run closer to Shapiro, maybe that can make up some of the gaps in a place like Ohio, if you believe it would have held there. So I don’t know. I think there’s too much difference between the states. But I will say in terms of the difference between Ryan and Fetterman — particularly, again, Fetterman pre-stroke, because — look, the stroke really did impair Fetterman. I mean, there’s been all kinds of commentary about this, and it’s just an auditory processing issue. I’m not his doctor. I’m not inside his brain. But the man suffered a traumatic brain injury, and he is visibly, obviously altered in its aftermath in a way that would reasonably give voters pause about his capacity as somebody to represent them. Now, they still would prefer him to Dr. Oz, which I think says a lot about Dr. Oz.
All that said, and I’m very happy to see Fetterman win, what Fetterman had and has as a candidate, which is different than Ryan — Ryan is a capable politician whose policies and beliefs position him in this older, labor oriented tradition. He’s always been very skeptical and hawkish on China. He’s very pro organized labor. But he’s not somebody who if you meet him, or you look at him, or you listen to him talk, he bleeds a working class aesthetic. He’s a big meditator, right? I mean —
You don’t imagine John Fetterman doing a lot of yoga.
Yeah. And he probably does, weirdly enough, knowing a little bit about him. But Fetterman has the aesthetic, right? And this is a place where I think I end up having a real disagreement with the David Shors, and my friend Matthew Yglesias and others, who — I’m a policy guy. I’ve been covering policy my whole career. I think they’ve become too literal about policy, and too literal about how much voters know about policy, and how much policy positioning matters.
I think a lot of things are tributaries into this overall gut sense of whether or not this politician is like you, and they like you, which are different ideas. You know, are they like you? Do they come from the world you come from? Do they understand you? And also, how do they feel about you? And Fetterman, who I think in a lot of ways is more liberal than Ryan, Fetterman visually and communicatively signals like he’s a guy who not only would be at the bar, but would be in the bar fight.
And that’s not Tim Ryan. And so Fetterman is a kind of visual of this — rightly or wrongly, whether or not you believe this to be true about him — this sort of working class aesthetic. And so will that work in Ohio? It’s interesting. It’s an interesting question. But if you’re comparing the two of them, I think you’re comparing trying to signal whose side you’re on through the positions you take and the things you say versus who you are, how you move through the world, how you dress, what your temperament and comportment as a person are.
And I think at a candidate level, the latter set of qualities tend to trump it.
What interests me about that is that most people live — right, you might live in a media bubble, but you live in this world where some people you know support Trump. Maybe they’re at work, maybe they’re your family. Some people you know support Biden. Again, maybe they’re at work, maybe they’re in your family. And the world that you live in is much more like the world as a whole than your political world is, or your media consumption is.
And I think Fetterman was able to work with that in a way. Lots of people who certainly do not have the left wing populist ideas that he had have to have voted for him, because otherwise there’s no way in hell he would have won, right? And so how does he do that? He does it by being who he is. And therefore, even the stroke in a weird way does not hurt him, because as Dr. Oz his campaign is lecturing him about eating vegetables, lots of people are thinking, like, well, that could be me, which I think is an interesting part of it. This actually brings us to another interesting question. So Democrats made a big deal about democracy. People were perplexed, or at least worried, that the Democrats who helped radical Republican deniers like Bolduc in New Hampshire — he’s probably the best example where the Democratic Party spent really quite a fair amount of money to make sure that he won the primary. So that strategy has moral questions in it, right? If you’re really that worried about democracy, why are you promoting these people. What if they win?
But on the other hand, it does seem as a tactical matter to have worked fairly well on Election Day itself. What do you think about that? Does that mean that Chuck Schumer doesn’t really fear for our democracy if he’s willing to let some of these people run? Or is it just — this is political hardball and that’s what they should be doing?
I always thought the discourse around this was weird, this idea that because Democrats were trying to push for these weaker but more extreme candidates, it meant they didn’t care about the thing they said they cared about. To your point about there being moral questions, and I know what I’m about to say is very on brand, the moral question is what moral philosophy you follow? Are you a consequentialist, are you into Aristotelian virtue ethics?
Like, what are you — what kind of moralist are you — because if you’re a consequentialist who cares very deeply about democracy, and you believe that the somewhat less crazy Republicans are not actually that non-crazy, and they will go along with what the broader Republican Party wants them to do, which is very often the case and has become more so — I mean, most House Republicans voted against certifying the election.
Even after, right — it’s not like they did that in a blue sky, right? They did it after January 6, in the middle of the night, on January 7.
Yes. So I think the view that there’s a sharp cut between the election denying Republicans, your Kari Lake’s — the good, normal Republicans. I mean, there are some of them, right? Mitt Romney — I don’t think Mike DeWine, who’s been around for a long time, and has a sense of himself, is going to go in for a steal. But for a lot of them, a lot of the ones who are coming up in this era, through this party, they have shown a tendency to be very submissive to what Trump and his base want them to do.
And so if you believe that you have a — let’s put it this way. The difference between a Democrat in these positions and any Republican is so much larger than the difference between a sort of cowardly Republican who has never spoken out against this dimension of the party, and a fully bought in, stop the steal Republican, that it becomes a kind of math problem. Like, OK, well, how much likelier is a Democrat to win the seat if you get the more extreme person in?
If you think the more extreme person has x chance of winning the election and you multiply that by — you get into all these very weird consequentialist math problems. But I don’t know what I would have done if I were in strategic charge of this, but I think the people who made it seem like a completely easy question were not actually taking it seriously. And beyond that, I think we’re not taking seriously how complicit the Republican Party has been particularly, post-2020, in Trumpian nonsense.
Look at how Kevin McCarthy interacted with the January 6 commission. Look at what happened to Liz Cheney. The idea that there is this normal Republican Party is just not true anymore. I think I said this in a recent column. I wrote about Democrats being the party of normalcy and Republicans being the party of crisis. But in many ways, the bigger threat to democracy is the Republicans who will go along with the election deniers, rather than the election deniers themselves.
It is that larger mass of cowardly Republicans who create the numbers for really terrible things to happen. So I don’t know. I have much more complicated feelings about this. I understand the position that just, morally, you don’t try to put these people closer to power. But it’s not a choice between two Republicans. It’s a choice of, how do you try to not have either of them in power?
And I understand why people who are actually in charge of making that decision don’t find it easy to say, well, we’re going to give up our chance to win this seat because this particular Republican, despite clearly backing Trump and everything he does, has not literally said the 2020 election was stolen. Yeah, it’s not easy.
I want to stay with the democracy thing for a minute, though. A lot of people voted on Election Day. Millions and millions of people voted early, mail in votes. I wonder a little bit if both sides here don’t believe the rhetoric that they spew fully at all, right? Maybe — I mean, I don’t know whether turnout — what to say about that. Does that really mean that people actually believe in democracy, and they’re not that worried about it? I mean, somebody I work with here I was chatting about retirement. And I was saying like, OK, when I’m 70, I’ll leave right after the 2036 election. And she looked at me, and was like, what makes you so sure there are going to be elections in 2036? And I laughed, but also like, I absolutely think there will be elections in 2036. You know, I’m very concerned about Republican election denialism, and deeply worried about it.
And at the same time, I’m not thinking that 2036 isn’t going to be happening. Another way of thinking about that is that if you are in the ruling party in many other countries — bear with me for a second, I mean, over time, right — Brazil, Turkey, Argentina in different decades and different times. Like, if you’re a politician, you’re having to think like, well, what does the Army think about this? And here, no one’s thinking that way, or very, very few people are thinking that way.
So we’re still in a very larval state in terms of going really down the path of being anti-democratic. And yet, you have hundreds and hundreds of people running who claim that the 2020 election was won by someone who didn’t win it. So I’m not sure what to make of all that. It’s very hard to think through. Do you have any thoughts about whether we’re actually living in Rome, 250 AD, or Rome 350 AD, and just not realizing what’s around the bend? Or do you think that this is all going to calm down at some point?
Well, of the two of us, you’re the one who knows the difference between Rome in different periods. So I’ll let you do the historical analogy —
What I meant by that was just — I just meant, like, you’re living in a city, and you’re —
I know, I know. I’m just playing with you.
You’re in this empire. And you’re living in this city. And you think, oh, this is going to go on forever, when meanwhile, a mere 200 years from then, your city is going to have half the people in it, and there’s no more empire.
Human beings, I think, have a lot of trouble living and thinking in probabilities, which is normal. I mean, I do too.
Yeah.
We’re really playing to type here. You’re, like, Rome in 20 — I’m like, well, it’s hard to live in probabilities. This is what all of our conversations are like, people. Look, I think the way to think about the election and sort of democracy crisis is that the near term possibility for the kind of crisis that can dissolve a system, collapse the system, create violence in the streets, has gone from — I would have said in the ‘90s, very, very low, right?
Like, obviously, always something could happen, but a point, two points — to if I said on the 15-year time frame, if you told me 15 percent, I wouldn’t think that was crazy at all, right? A election as unclear as 2000, with the polarization, media institutions, and figures that are dominating the situation of 2022 — I think you rerun 2000 now and there’s blood in the streets. I have no doubt about that, actually.
Florida again, by the way, right?
Florida again. So I think that people thinking about this, what they are saying is not that we have lost our democracy, or we no longer have elections, but that we stand very close. I mean, it is — we stand at a reasonably high probability of a crisis. We do not know how to resolve or whether it would be safely resolved. And yet I don’t think that’s a majority probability. I don’t think the probability of that is 75 percent or 85 percent. And this is true in all kinds of things. I mean, we always knew a pandemic respiratory virus was a high probability. I mean, we knew it would happen some time. I mean, back at Vox, we ran a piece from Ron Klain, who at that point was out of office. But he had been the Ebola czar, talking about how we were unprepared for this. I did a video and an interview with Bill Gates about all the damage that a pandemic respiratory flu would do. This is well before the coronavirus.
And even in the early months of the coronavirus, a lot of the people who worry about this most, they still felt — even knowing that this was going to happen eventually, they couldn’t see, because they didn’t have the information or they didn’t want to believe the information yet that it was happening now. And so when it did happen, in many, many ways, we were very unprepared. And so I just think that’s the answer to that. I don’t think these things are — I don’t think it’s revealing that people don’t believe what they say they believe.
I think what people believe is that there is a non-negligible and in fact significant chance of a constitutional or electoral crisis of the kind that can break a system. And yet day to day how you live in that when it’s not happening today is very unclear. I don’t know, like, I’ve got to go to work. I just had — I’ve been thinking a lot — I had somebody I love die recently.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about something George Saunders once said to me in an earlier podcast, where he said — and I’m paraphrasing, but he said, it’s a very strange world. The people you love, the people we love die, and we are supposed to just go back to normal within a couple of months. And that’s both horrifying and necessary.
I mean, that’s kind of how I feel about almost everything. We live in a moment in which there are a hundreds possible cataclysms.
What’s the chance of a nuclear escalation between Russia and Ukraine — not nothing. We could enter into a world of antibiotic resistance. The possibilities of climate change setting off runaway feedback loops are lower than we used to think, but not completely negligible. But also, like, I got to get my kids to school. And I got to record this podcast with you. And I hurt my neck the other day, and I needed to do my stretching.
And so it’s just kind of constant tension between you live the banal, even as you exist amidst the very sacred and the very profane. But to be really open to how wild the world can get is a sort of paralyzing way to exist, and so most people cannot day to day in truth maintain it.
We’re kind of a long way from the midterms. But I want to stay with your point for a second because it actually is connected to this whole calcification idea. I mentioned this earlier, but it is truly astounding, right, that more than a million people died as a result of the coronavirus pandemic just in the United States alone. And it had almost incalculable effect on the families, on the health care system, on all of this.
But compared to plagues in the past, it had not that much effect on anything political or historical, at least in the short term. Everything is pretty much as it was, which is really very, very strange. So I want to ask you how we’re going to get beyond calcification for a little bit, because what’s truly remarkable — I referred to this earlier, but the coalitions have actually changed somewhat, but the calcification has remained. The parity has remained.
What do you think could possibly happen that would create a shift here, where one coalition could actually dominate — which outside of the late 19th century has actually been the norm in American politics, where one side was up and the other side was more clearly in opposition? Like, what do you think could happen that would either shift things — and not even necessarily which side would be ahead, although obviously that’s part of it. But what do you think could come soon that would alter these coalitions in a way that would alter the politics, and make it no longer so calcified?
I don’t know that I think the calcification can be broken. And the reason I say that is that we have maintained pretty close parity despite the fact that the parties have changed very dramatically over the past two decades. So you think of how close the Bush-Gore election was. But the Bush-Gore political parties, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as Ralph Nader said at the time, were very, very, very, very, very different than the Obama, George W. Bush parties that went into contest in 2008.
Those were very, very, very different than the Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump parties, which were in turn somewhat different than the Trump-Biden parties. And I bring that up because the two major variables you might imagine as being what you could manipulate here both changed. What the parties believed changed dramatically. I mean, you’ve seen the Republican Party go from, say, humble foreign policy to democracy-promoting neoconservatism, to Trumpian, resentful — not quite isolationism, but a strange, sort of resentful retreat.
Isolationism with drone strikes.
Right, sure. You’ve seen the Democratic Party become much more diverse, much more self-consciously multi-ethnic, move quite far to the left. You’ve seen the Republican Party go from moving quite far to the right economically to becoming less certain about what it stands for economically, but more a party of cultural backlash. And yet through all this, we’ve maintained this incredible razor’s edge of power.
The balance of power in the country is often closer than the votes are, but political parties orient around the system we have, not around a popular vote that often doesn’t matter. And so whatever the force that is keeping the parties near parity is really profound. And then whatever is keeping calcification — right, the fact that the parties are very different. One thing that has maintained through this whole period is the parties are just getting more and more and more different.
The Obama-Bush parties are more different than the Bush-Gore parties were. The Clinton-Trump parties were more different than the Obama-Bush parties were. And now, the Republican Party is becoming in my view deranged in its orientation towards the political system itself — right, its orientation towards elections and so on, the kind of temperament it rewards in its people. The Democratic Party has moved quite far left. And post Joe Biden, I expect that to continue.
And so calcification is a byproduct of the parties becoming very different. The choice is so clear that even when you don’t love the party you support, the idea of going to the other party becomes unthinkable in a way that it wasn’t when only half of Americans thought there was a major difference between the two parties at all. And so I don’t really see that changing. Now, things could happen that are so profound — we could go to war with China, or a Russian nuclear attack or something.
I mean, you can imagine things that are so unignorable that they reorient American politics. And then I’d also just note that the rise of these populist right parties is happening in a lot of different countries, as my episode with Pippa Norris talked about. And so the sort of appeal of this kind of politics is not some weird quirk of the American system, but something you’re seeing in Italy, something you’re seeing in Germany, something you’re seeing in Switzerland.
Something you’re seeing — and you can go down this list. I mean, the closeness of the Lula-Bolsonaro match up in Brazil — just achingly sad to me. I mean, I’m glad Lula won, but Bolsonaro getting in the very high 40s — like, he’s a terrible leader, did terrible things. A lot of people suffered and even died. What he’s done to the rainforest is appalling, but also just how he treats other human beings, and how he treats the truth, and how he treats his own base is quite appalling.
So taking the more global perspective, there is clearly a lot of space for parties to move into what seem to be extreme directions and maintain a very high level of competitiveness. And so I think it would be foolish for me to suggest that there is some tactic or event that could change it. Maybe if technology changes, communication technology changes dramatically in some way I can’t foresee, maybe that would do it.
But I think we’re kind of stuck in this period of high calcification, high parity, and the central dynamic of politics being the sort of — do you like this diversifying, more individualistic, more freedom oriented future, or do you feel disoriented by it, and you want people who at some level aesthetically and substantively are promising to go back to a world that you understood better and you felt more comfortable in?
All right, so I want you for a second to put away the metaphysics and the ethics and imagine that you’re a Democratic strategist, and this election, just happened, and you have to deal with it. What do you take out of this? What lessons do you draw for not just 2024, but for trying to create a coalition that is bigger than the parity that we’ve been talking about? What do you do?
I think the lesson of the election for Democrats is that the motivating force for Democrats is Republicans. And Republicans are likely to have a very, very ugly bruising primary. They’re likely to have a lot of really wacky candidates, both who are trying to win power in 2024, but also have power from 2022 or before. And you are thinking about how to make them the issue and not get in their way. That’s the key lesson here.
If Donald Trump and the bruising Trump-DeSantis war can be the central topic, I think that’s the question. Then, there’s this issue of what the match-ups end up being, because the issue with Joe Biden, I think, is that he’s a very good match for Donald Trump for a bunch of different reasons, and not as good a match — plausibly, we’ll see about DeSantis — but particularly if the Republican Party goes in a different direction.
And look, I think Democrats need to think seriously about the fact that Joe Biden is in his 80s. And it is taking nothing away from his mental acuity or his governance strategies to say that voters might reasonably have concerns about this job for a guy in his 80s, who shows his age, and not in any abnormal way, but just because he’s a very old man. So I do think that’s the open strategic question for Democrats, and honestly for the Biden administration.
If it’s Trump, then we’re just kind of in this weird rerun with these two old guys who are now, like, known antagonists of each other. But if the Republican Party turns a page on Donald Trump, or looks to be turning the page on Donald Trump, that’s going to be a hard internal question for the Biden administration and the Democratic Party to face up to, that they obviously didn’t have to face up to in 2022.
So you’re saying if it’s a generational battle as well, right, if it’s somebody in his 50s or her 50s running against someone who will be over 80.
Yes. People don’t really like talking about this, but I think it is like burying your head in the sand to not think about this seriously. Also, just for the job itself — like, I don’t know how Joe Biden feels about the question, but the presidency is a very demanding job. Should he be doing it from age 82 to 86? I just think there are very hard questions here that don’t have an obvious way to resolve them.
And because there’s a very strong norm within parties that you don’t challenge an incumbent president in the primaries, there is not, I think, an intention or an expectation that the Democrats are going to test out the Joe Biden question within a Democratic primary where information on it can be gathered and a decision on it can ultimately be made. So this decision is going to be made quietly, and possibly just by Joe Biden and his direct team, but also by the question of whether or not some of the other candidates in the party decide to run when that would be a very dangerous thing for them to do against an incumbent president.
It’s a hard question but 2024, will not just be 2022 in part because Joe Biden will be on the ballot, or some Democrat will be on the ballot as the presidential nominee. And how they think about that — in many ways, I think there’s a conversation that would have opened here if Democrats did a bunch worse than they did, that may not open. But it doesn’t mean that conversation is irrelevant. But I don’t think anybody in the party quite knows how to have it.
And I’m not saying I even know what the answer to it should be. I just think it has to be had.
What’s interesting about that also, though, is that you say that people shy away from talking about. That may be true for professional politicians. But in regular life, people talk about it constantly.
Yes.
Right. Biden’s too old.
Right. This is, like, a point of elite sensitivity. And that’s exactly what I’m saying — that Democrats can’t pretend that because they don’t like to talk about this — right, elite Democrats can pretend that because they don’t like to talk about this, that the country will not talk about it, or that a capable, younger candidate will not find ways to weaponize it or whatever. And maybe it’s fine, right? I mean, we’ve had a real gerontocracy in this country. It’s not like McConnell or Pelosi or Trump himself are young.
And so maybe the views I have as a 38-year-old, or the worries I have as a 38-year-old are not shared. And in fact, maybe it helps Joe Biden win over older voters, who are very powerful. You can make different arguments about this but. But you have to think about it, both as a political question and then again also as a substantive question. I don’t know how the job feels for Joe Biden. But he’s not out there, like, running around the country in the way he would have as a younger man.
And this is tough. And we’re two years from the election, and then six years from the end of the second term. So that’s a long time in your mid 80s. And so I don’t know. I just think it has to be taken seriously. And the normal way you might imagine this getting worked out, which is a primary, I think has become less likely given the election results. And so — but it will have to be worked out and thought through somehow.
Yeah, there’s a — I mean, not that I’m going to be laying down political rules, but there’s an interesting rule here, right? If your public conversations are too out of line with the private conversations, you have a political problem, right, because if people are in the proverbial kitchen tables discussing things that are not being talked about by the politicians themselves, that divergence probably means that you’re not doing things quite the way you should be.
So let me ask you to go into a headspace that’s a little further from where you actually live, which is the Republican strategist just waking up to these results. So they ran on fear, disorder, chaos, senility. They tried to run a very negative campaign. It didn’t work as well as they thought it would. And by the way, getting back to our DeSantis discussion, he didn’t totally do that, right? He had the negative thing, but he also had the sunny side. So if you’re a Republican strategist, what do you take out of this?
I don’t know that I think Republican strategists have much control over their own party. So I’m not sure what — I mean, you feel depressed, maybe? They can’t control Donald Trump. They can’t get Republican primary voters to vote for the most capable candidates. Once you’ve got Dr. Oz, once you’ve got Herschel Walker, once you’ve got Donald Trump, you’re in trouble.
So I mean, I think what’s going to happen is the party machinery is going to try to organize itself around DeSantis because he’s the best weapon they have against Trump being the standard bearer again. But what is his relationship to that strategic class? What would it mean for him to listen to them more or less? I really don’t know. I mean, what the Republican Party wishes it had was more of the actual structure of a party, where the people who make strategic decisions and run polls and so on had had a little bit more influence over the base.
But they don’t. And so I think what you’re going to have is not so much a bunch of lessons learned here. I think the lesson they have learned is that Ron DeSantis is the one figure in the Republican Party, notwithstanding things I said about other governors who also did quite well — people like Mike DeWine. But Ron DeSantis is in the Venn diagram of a Republican who won very big in 2022 and a Republican who the Republican primary base might support for president.
Now, other weird things could happen in a DeSantis-Trump race, as we talked about. But in terms of who the strategists, I think, are going to try to make a gold rush around, it’s going to be DeSantis. So ultimately, I think a lot now depends on the strategic decisions that Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis make about how to position themselves in the Republican Party. I don’t think the strategists have a big say in this one.
I wanted to ask you something. You always ask your guests for three books they would recommend. But I want to try something a little different here, for my little cameo on your show. Could you recommend to your listeners three podcasts that you like to listen to, always listen to, think are important?
I’m going to do two versions of this. One is what you actually asked. I don’t get to listen to that much. Most of what I listen to is this podcast, or evaluating guests for this podcast. So I listen to random things that people we might want to have on have been part of. But I have been listening to “The Prince” which is an Economist podcast — by the magazine, “The Economist,” about Xi Jinping, the leader of China, who — I think it’s probably fair to say, is the single most powerful person in the world.
And where China goes and what our relationship is with China is probably — I mean, certainly in the top three fundamental questions of this era. And I’m not through the whole show, but I’ve loved it and I really recommend it.
Another show that I just love is Odd Lots, which is a Bloomberg podcast by Joe Wiesenthal and Tracy Alloway. And it’s an economics show, but the thing I love about the way they do Odd Lots is it is specific.
You will have full shows on, what’s going on in the lumber category right now — and super smart, great vibe with the hosts and the guests. I’ve been on it once. But I just think it’s a really good show for actually learning about what’s going on in the economy all the way from the real tangible economy of moving materials around, and supply chains, all the way up to the crypto economy. And so I get a lot out of Odd Lots, and I think other people will too.
And then we’ve been doing a lot more climate on the show, but, Volts, the Dave Roberts climate podcast, is a great show. And I’ve gotten a ton on climate and energy and the energy transition out of Volts.
And then I want to recommend a couple — just quickly episodes from my show, because we really — like, they ended up shaping both this conversation and a lot of how I understood the election.
So my podcast with John Sides and Lynn Vavreck about what happened in 2020 and calcification and parity — I mean, we’ve done a kind of a thin job on these ideas in the show, but that’s the place to go to really hear that explained. And I think it is a model of elections that is really helpful right now.
Pippa Norris, also right around just a couple of weeks ago, about cultural backlash and the rise of the populist right.
And then going back a couple of months, we did a series on the right, which we call the rising right. But the first one was with Matt Continetti all about a sort of alternative history of conservatism, understanding the more conspiratorial, anti-elite, more resentful side of conservatism, not as something that had ever been purged from the right, but was always a life force, and now has become a dominant one.
And I think in thinking about who the Republican Party ran, and what kind of Republican Party we now have, you’re seeing a thread that has always been there flower into — I guess threads don’t flower, you would tell me. You’re seeing a seed that has always been there flower into the dominant plant of the party. And I think that show holds up pretty well and is worth going back to. So we’ll put all of those in show notes.
All right, so I’ll mention since you mentioned that — obviously, anyone who wants to understand that should read the “Paranoid Style of American Politics,” famous Richard Hofstadter essay which takes up that question, and is amazingly relevant even though it was written decades ago.
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The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Roge Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld and Sonia Herrero. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special Thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.
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This was super fun. I really enjoyed it.