Central Air - The Gen Z Takeover (feat. Kristen Soltis Anderson)

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comThis week: pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson tells us all about the state of polling, what American voters are thinking about heading into the midterms, how AI and the death of the phone call are changing polling, and how polls identify fake responses. Kristen tells us about the “political tribes” that make up the Republican and Democratic parties, and how the middle-aged millennials and young adults of Gen Z are changing the landscape — that conversation is mostly for paying subscribers. Then, during cocktail hour (also just for paying subscribers), we discuss exciting food news: Alison Roman, like David Chang, shares my once-controversial-but-now-conventional opinion that grills ruin food. To hear the whole episode (and all future episodes), upgrade your subscription now at www.centralairpodcast.com.

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post, and Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. Megan, I heard you had a disintegrating mic stand? Yes, yes. This is a problem I've never heard of before. I'd also never heard of it until I pulled the microphone stand out.

So basically, you know, like I bought it on Amazon for not that much money. This is, I guess, on me. And it had two screws. and then it's like a heavy base, but it's got a foam top. And one of the screws came out in transit. I don't know if you have the experience. Every time I go through security, my suitcase gets pulled with a mic stand. My suitcase gets pulled.

And then I have to explain that it is not, in fact, like a torture device for digging over the plane. And so it had like swivel. One of the screws came out. It had two. And so it just swiveled around and like cut a hole in the foam. And now it is no longer a stable product. When I travel and I have to bring my audio coming with me, I often don't bring the stand.

I just bring the microphone and I hold it like I'm a newscaster doing a stand-up in front of a hurricane. Partly because of exactly what you described there, the bottom of the microphone stand is a heavy piece of metal so that the microphone doesn't fall over. And they always take it out at security because it's like a big heavy projectile that you're carrying around. But if it's just a microphone in your suitcase, I find that they let that pass through. I find this is rather hard to believe considering the number of people in America with podcasts. I know.

Yeah, Ben, I believe the projection is that by 2034, every American we'll have a podcast. At least one. It's going to be like those things with guns, though, where like per capita, everyone has 15 guns, but like the median is only two. There's just a lot of people with 45 podcasts. I have more podcasts than I need and less than I want. By the way, we have with us this week, Kristen Sultes-Anderson. She is founding partner at the polling from Eschlon Insight. She's also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and author of The Selfie Vote, a book about rising millennial political power. Kristen, my understanding is you don't have a podcast of your own. You're just a frequent flyer on podcasts.

I'm a frequent flyer on others podcasts, but I am no longer the captain of my own ship. I, for five years, co-hosted a bipartisan podcast about polling with a dear friend Margie O'Me. But she and I found that the actual work of running polling firms got in the way of a podcast about polling. And so now we just occasionally show up on our friends' shows like I am today. Yes. Thank you for joining us here. We had your partner, Patrick Raffini, on the show a couple of months ago. And one thing he sketched out for us was a route map for Republicans to hold their congressional majorities this fall. And version one of his story about how this would happen was that there was supposed to be a swoon of good feelings coming out of the America 250 celebrations and that, you know,

this rising patriotism would help Republicans. And, you know, then everyone except vanilla ice pulled out of those. But he offered a second version of the theory that I think was more grounded and plausible. which was that basically the economy had to hold up reasonably well, and Republicans needed to be able to turn this into a choice election rather than a referendum on the president and sketch out all of the extreme positions that Democrats hold and get people to decide that that was just worse

than what Republicans had on offer. We're now only three months from the election. I'm interested in what your take is here on Republicans standing. Are they in a decent position to hold on to those majorities? I don't feel like any data I'm seeing these days makes me feel like they're in a decent position, with the exception of people's low favorability toward the Democratic Party. The best thing Republicans have going for them these days are Democrats, but on all of those other metrics, whether you want to talk about the good vibes coming out of

America 250, which I actually think we briefly had some good vibes around the World Cup, but that too became partisan politicized. But then you also have the economy, which is not necessarily riproar and or doing the sorts of things it would need to do to turn around what is already supposed to be a bad political year for the party in power. The only thing Republicans are really hanging on at this point is the notion that there are races where Democrats could nominate candidates or have nominated candidates who are unacceptable and that that will mean Democrats are sort of leaving seats on the table in an otherwise favorable year.

What's your sense of what the electorate is focused on right now? I mean, the president was talking about this just this week saying, people don't care about the border anymore. I fixed the problems of the border too fast. I should have dragged it out longer. Obviously, immigration had been a strong issue for Republicans in the last election. What is your sense of what issues are actually driving this election? Yeah, the issue salience of immigration has fallen a lot. And in a sense, the president's analysis of the politics of the issue are somewhat right.

I mean, two years ago when you asked people what their top issue was, immigration wasn't the top issue, but it was pretty high up there driven by Republicans who were incensed about what they thought was a totally porous border, a Biden administration that wasn't doing anything on the issue. And now when you ask Republicans what their top issue is, even immigration falls pretty far down the list. It is not to say that the party has moved dramatically to the left on the issue. It's just not the thing that's driving most sort of normal Republicans day to day. The economy has overwhelmed it. I think there's a second issue. that matters a lot, though. And it's very easy to do the James Carville. It's the economy stupid.

And no doubt the economy is the big driving force in a lot of this. But we find that corruption and things like the state of democracy also wind up being a pretty strong top of the second tier in terms of people's top issues. It mostly motivates the base of the Democratic Party. It's maybe not as big a for voters in the middle. But I think affordability plus this guy is using my tax dollars to coat stuff in gold is a very potent combination that gives Democrats a lot of advantages. Whenever I see the polling subject of, you know, democracy, I sort of know what it means a little bit just because I've been sort of trained now by the Democrats. It's sort of it means something to do with Trump stealing elections and stuff like that.

it's never grafted on perfectly to that for me. But, you know, I get what they mean. When Republicans talk about it, when they say that like it's an issue of salience, I have, I think even less of an idea of what it means. So two things. One is that we separate out the political corruption and the state of democracy in our questions. And so we can see them independently. And the political corruption one is really the one that has rocketed up the charts in just the last year. But state of democracy has been around as a middle of the second tier top issue for a while, you're right that Republicans mean something very different. In fact, part of what I think inflates state of democracies standing on that list is that it means very different things to very different people. So for Democrats, it means the norms.

But for Republicans, it doesn't just mean, I don't think election fraud or allegations thereof. I think it also means, look, the Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court. Look, the Democrats want to get rid of the filibuster. Look, the Democrats and the DSA want to what. abolish the Senate. So I don't think it's just about kind of save act, voter ID, election security. I think it is also a sense among some Republicans that Democrats would very much like to sort of take the governor off and have the ability to run wild when they have power next. And that's why both parties view this as a big issue. When you talk about corruption as a political issue, do Democrats have an advantage on that issue? Is that something that is perceived as specifically related

to Donald Trump and, you know, investments that his family is making and the effort to, you know, obtain a release from IRS investigations over his taxes and to create that fund that was supposed to go to, you know, people who would riot at the Capitol. Because it feels to me like Democrats should be able to use that issue to their advantage. But I think there's also just a really broad cynicism among the electorate about politicians in both parties. And, you know, I've seen a lot of journalists talking about how when you talk to ordinary voters about this, they mutter things about, well, you know, like Pelosi's insider trading. And the supposed insider trade is like long invidia, which like half the country is long invidia. Are Democrats able to capitalize on that?

Or is this just sort of like a broad thing where voters are just like, I think everybody sucks and everybody's corrupt? So people have thought everybody sucks and everyone's corrupt for a while. I think it is the Trump of it all that is what is new and is giving the issue additional salience, especially with people on the political left. So we've asked a question in our survey every year for the last couple of years where we say, what do you agree with more? Most politicians are honorable public servants trying to do the right thing for the country or most politicians are corrupt or just looking out for their own interests. And it will not surprise you which half wins by like a two to one margin. I'm actually fascinated by the 32% of Americans who do believe, look, I think most politicians are honorable public servants. So you're right that there's this overarching bipartisan sense that, look, all of these people in D.C. are corrupt.

This is this whole sense that the swamp needs draining has animated the Trump political project for a while. But I think it's now become, there are some really visible, tangible symbols that are very prominently related to Trump. whether it's his crypto, whether it's the ballroom or any number of things that people have really latched onto. I frankly think part of this is the Epstein files, where people now are saying, look, we've been calling for this to be released for years, and it seems like it's just people covering up for one another. Those are all the sorts of things you hear about when we ask a follow-up question in our surveys, and we say, okay, you say corruption is a big issue. What do you really mean. For most of them, they do mean Donald Trump, but that doesn't mean only Donald Trump.

One question I have is, why do people hate Democrats so much? Like, it's sort of surprising to me, not that, like, I do love my Democratic friends, but, you know, you usually think of this as being thermostatic and, like, they don't like the people in power. They do like the people out of power. Now they just hate Democrats. Like, the passion with which they have maintained their hatred for Democrats has surprised me somewhat. Has it surprised you? Well, it hasn't surprised me in part because of my broader theory that the Democratic Party is going through its own version of the Republicans Tea Party moment from 2010. And if you looked at polls back in 2010, you know, Republicans were doing reasonably well on things like the generic ballot. The question where you ask voters, if the election were held today, who would you vote for, a Republican or a Democrat? Republicans did okay on those questions. But then when you said, you know, how favorable or unfavorable are you to the different parties, Republicans used to do pretty poorly. And they did poorly because people who were Republicans said they hated the Republican Party. And that's not really the case today. The Republican Party's

brand is now propped up a bit by the fact that people who think of themselves as Republicans are generally okay with the state of the GOP. They're okay with Donald Trump, where it is now Democrats, who will say, I'm a Democrat, but boy, my party is completely asleep at the wheel. They're a disaster. they're selling us out. Either they're two left or they're two center. And so Democrats have lots of reasons to say they hate their own party. And if your base says that they don't like you, then nobody's there to say that they like you. And your favorables will look terrible as a result. I may have mentioned this on this podcast before, but now I'm an old lady and I can't remember a damn thing I've said after like five minutes after I've said it. My husband tells me he loves hearing my stories at least five or eight times. But like when I went to Asia for two

trip right after the 2016 election. Because we were like, ah, Hillary Clinton, they're not going to talk to us anyway. Those people don't like us. There's nothing to, nothing to see here. We know who all the people in the administration are going to be. It's going to be pretty boring. So, yeah, that didn't work out. So there I am. I am in Hong Kong. I am also, like, my circadian rhythms are militant. They are like, no, it is six o'clock in the morning in Washington, D.C. I don't give a, you know, rats pitutti. about what's going on outside. So I was really jet-lagged and at 2 in the morning.

There I am wide awake, totally unable to sleep in Hong Kong, despite my best efforts and Ambien's best efforts. No dice. So I ended up writing a bunch of Facebook posts about the election. And one of them basically said that

was like, this is coming for Democrats too. And over the last, you know, 10 years, Democrats have really enjoyed a lot of fun at the expense of various flavors of right pundit saying, you know, you guys nurtured this, this was the real party, and you knew it, and you were making this happen.

But the other thing they said is like, why didn't you stop this? Why didn't you stand up against it? I'm now watching many of those pundits and elites kind of be like, oh, oh, that's why you didn't, because you can't stop it when they get going. You can explain to them that this is all a very bad idea, none of it's going to work, and they don't care.

They just want what they want. I think the situation is different on the Democratic side for a few structural reasons. We're more of a real party than Republicans are. Like we were able to force Grant Platner off the ballot when the worst stories came out. The party apparatus can't necessarily control the outcome of every election, but it retains a lot more influence than similar. And yet. And yet, what, though? No, I mean, the Republican Party did manage to get rid of some of its worst candidate.

it's in the early Tea Party days. It's just it turned out they couldn't keep doing that. The more you did that, the angry or the base got, and the more determined that they were to have their Christine O'Donnell or their whoever it was. I mean, like, maybe the Democrats are different. It's entirely possible. But Republican elites thought they had a lot more power over the party than they did right up to the point where Donald Trump took it from them.

But the other thing that's different about the Democratic Party is that the same thing can't work on our side because globally, you know, the hard right is stronger than the hard left appeals to a larger fraction of voters and can sometimes win elections when it, you know, when it gets control of the party. But what's going to happen in swing state races where you nominate these extreme left candidates is just that they're going to lose. And meanwhile, part of why Trump's revolution taking over the party worked was that he, you know, he harnessed this outrage about immigration and the essential. establishment in the party not taking anti-immigration views of the base seriously and got control.

And then he moved the party leftward on many key issues. Medicare, Social Security, gay marriage, don't ask, don't tell, to some extent, abortion. And so it is hard for me to imagine a situation where someone executes a hostile takeover the Democratic Party and then proceeds to move the Democratic Party towards the center on several. I'm not saying it's going to be exactly parallel and that President Abdul El-Sayed is going to be running things in. I just mean that like the Democrats thought that they had way more control over their party than it turns out they have. And I'm watching people grapple with the fact that they have explained very nicely like 20 times that if you nominate these people, it's a bad idea and it's going to

be bad for the party. And this has absolutely no effect on the Democratic base, which is just like you, you people are all liars. And I just think if Trump had lost in 2016, I just think that like the Republican elites would have gotten control back. Anyway, Ben, I would just say that like, conservatives like to say this idea that like, it's all the same thing. And like, I'm very sympathetic to, you know, Kristen's point about how this is sort of a Democratic Tea Party moment, right? With this, we're having our own little populism moment from the extreme base. But, like, it is really different than the situation you're talking about, Megan. I mean, for one thing, Democrats have, as a centrist member of the Democratic Party,

I have an unbeaten victory streak in national primaries. You know, we have, we've never lost this one. We have pushed the left out every single time. It's a holding action, but like we've been keeping these guys out of the cockpit for decades. And I think that then everyone looks at these ones on the blue sides and, you know, great, okay, that's interesting. You'll be in a much better position to make these arguments if you can get in two years to like an example of where finally maybe, you know, a lemming will fly and they all go into it. But right now, like, they're much better. it's just true that the Democratic Party has been better about on a national level dealing with we shouldn't indulge the left too much because they're communists.

Look, I mean, it is very obviously true that the Democratic Party has held together better. But I think a thing that I think this is happening later than I thought it would in part because Trump was a real unifying force for the resistance, libs and the hard left. and that that unifying force is no longer holding the center in the way that it did. I would argue that for folks like Ben, you're right. You have kept crazy out of the cockpit, but that your luck may be about to run out. And a big thing that Democrats have had working in their advantage different from Republicans up until now is that they're on the Republican side, the Republican base and the Republican activist class were, pretty similar. There was a lot of overlap between what they believed. And the most ideologically far-right voters were also the voters who turned out the most in weird, off-year primary elections.

But on the Democratic side, that wasn't the case. On the Democratic side for a long time, the activist class of very online people with views that were very outside of the mainstream, we're wholly different than, say, the senior citizen African-American woman living in a suburb in the southeast, who is the backbone of the Democratic Party's base and has been for quite some time. What I would argue is that we are now seeing people with more far-left views taking up a bigger and bigger share of what we call the highest propensity voters, that those are no longer, I believe, things that are wacky, but actually I'm a small piece of who really votes. they're becoming a larger and larger piece of who really votes in low turnout elections. And so, yes, it may be 16 years later, but it's those two things that base in the activist class are starting to converge a little more in a way that for Republicans, they converged 16 years ago.

I think this might be a good opportunity to talk about your firm's political tribes analysis. You guys have put out this chart that basically breaks the electorate down into eight different classifications that make up the Republican and Democratic coalitions. Obviously, you know, you have lots of people with differing views have to cluster into the same political party. I guess why don't we start by talking about the groups on the Democratic side? Is that like what you call the loyal left is those people who, you know, reflect those views of the activist class that, you know, what does that mean? They want to defund the police. They want, you know, they think that every deportation is a crime. Like, what's the, what is, what is.

Is that rising group in the Democratic Party? What do they believe in? Who are they? So in order to come up with our eight tribes, we asked people in a survey to answer almost 30 questions about views on their social positions, on their economic views, on their views toward things like foreign policy. And again, questions like, do you think that most journalists are pushing their opinions or are reporting truthfully? Do you think free trade agreements are good or bad? We ask a whole bunch of different questions. And then we come out of that with, these different clusters. And on the Democratic side, the biggest cluster, one that is grown by a lot in just the last two years, is what we call the loyal left. We think they make up about one out of every

five voters in the country. They are the people who, when you ask them nine questions about social and cultural issues, they're picking the progressive position on eight out of nine. And these are not, one thing that we really try to do is be thoughtful about what we're counting as the social and cultural issues. I find a lot of people think of themselves as socially conservative, or pardon me, socially moderate, because maybe they have, you know, they're maybe pro-choice. And they're like, oh, well, that can, that makes me a social moderate. But they actually are, you know, they are skeptical of transgender athletes. They believe that, you know, actually we should have Second Amendment protections.

They do sometimes think that the woke left has gone too far. They do think we need police funding. And so suddenly it turns out that they're actually not as socially progressive as they think. These folks are progressive on most of everything. But there are three other groups that Democrats have in their coalition that they need in order to win. One of those groups we call electability Democrats. Maybe, Ben, you fall into this category. I'm going to be fascinated to see where you might place yourself. But they're more left leaning on a variety of issues, but there are a couple of issues, particularly in the social questions, where they're like, no, I'm not in on this.

They are more likely to say we should fully fund the budget for police departments. They're more likely to take the conservative position on the transgender athletes question. And so there are a couple of issues where they're like, no, I'm not actually all in with all of that. And then the last two groups on the Democratic side are what we call American institutionalists. Maybe you would put resist libs in this category. I joke that these are folks who, like, they've got the NPR tote bag and they read the Buller. and they have like a favorite Ron Chernow biography of a founding father. And they're the group that is, they tend to be older,

but they tend to also believe that it is still possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps these days. They think that the U.S. has a past that's worth being proud of and a future that once we can get past this Donald Trump guy will still ultimately be pretty bright. And then the inverse of that is what we have called the young and disillusioned. They are young. They are disillusioned. They tended to vote for Kamala Harris, but not overwhelmingly so. And they're actually more economically conservative than you might think.

Like if you're looking for a classic capital L libertarian, this is probably where they'd fall. They're pretty anti-war. You can imagine somebody in this group listening to Joe Rogan and being out on maybe 70% of what Donald Trump does, but finding 30% of it intriguing. So that's interesting. Because I think about like there's this governor primary. happening in Wisconsin right now that has been a comedy of errors for the Democratic establishment, the lieutenant governor who was supposed to be the standard bearer for the, you know, and Democrats have done pretty well in Wisconsin and statewide elections over the last decade plus. They're considered

to have a well-organized Democratic party. The lieutenant governor ran out of money. They miscounted or something. It was very strange. They thought they had hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand. They realized a month before the primary election that they were in fact broke. She had to drop out. And then the Milwaukee County executive who had dropped out of the race got back in and got the governor's endorsement. And then it turned out he had all these like really weird tweets from when he was a young adult. And this, you know, this keeps happening over and over again. And so as all of this is happening, there's a state representative from Madison named Francesca Hong. It was probably the most left-wing person in the Wisconsin legislature who has gotten a commanding lead in the polls and is very likely to be the governor nominee after August 11th.

And she's tweeted on, you know, in November of 2020 about how it's a good thing that we have to cancel Thanksgiving and we should have canceled Thanksgiving all the way back in 1621. And it's, you know, a terrible racist tradition and all this stuff. And so that seems like the sort of thing where like, you know, maybe those loyal, I mean, I don't, I don't, I assume not even all of the loyal left voters are on the cancel Thanksgiving bandwagon, but that seems like the sort of thing where, you know, if those are the people running the party, those are the sorts of ideas that get out there. And then the question is how many of those people in those other groups find that too off-putting

to sign up for it? Can I just say they were in no position to cancel Thanksgiving in 1621? That was a choice between eating eels and death. They needed the calories and they could not say, this isn't going to work. We shouldn't have this dinner tonight. Kristen, what do you? I mean, what does that primary election say to you? I mean, for that primary election, what I'm going to be looking at to see is not just does this sort of very far to the left candidate prevail,

which I think is entirely possible for the reasons I laid out that these sorts of folks are a bigger and bigger piece of the Democratic primary base. But the reason, the second piece of my whole, oh, this is the Democrats' Tea Party moment, is that in order for it to be the Democrats' Tea Party moment, you can't just have far left people winning primaries. You also have to have people winning primaries who then go on to lose what would have otherwise been a winnable general election. So, you know, Megan has already invoked the name of Christine O'Donnell on this podcast. Like, I don't need to go through the litany of people in 2010. which was a very good year for Republicans.

Nevertheless, Senate seats were left on the board in Delaware, in Nevada, in Colorado, because this movement chose people in primaries who couldn't pull it off. And so the question is, in Wisconsin, does this nomination actually suddenly revive the Republican Party that has not been doing great in Wisconsin in the sort of post-Scott Walker era? Does the Wisconsin GOP get its revenge because there's a chance that this primary electric could someone who's actually not not even able to hold together all four of those tribes within the Democratic Party. I mean, this is also just where I feel like another reason I think Democrats are a stronger party than Republicans is that I think there is more of a feedback mechanism where news about

what wins and loses elections gets back to Democrats and influences their future behavior. I mean, I go back to the primaries for the 2020 presidential election where Elizabeth Warren was basically done in by a New York Times poll that, you know, pulled all these swings. States and found her running more weekly than both Sanders and Biden across swing states. And her base voters are like exactly the sort of people who are most likely to read the New York Times, trust what the New York Times has to say and take that information in. And so I think, you know, if we have 2010-style fumbles of general elections, I think that our ecosystem is more primed to actually take that information in, understand it,

and respond to it rather than, you know, like, oh, that's an aberration. that's a fluke, that's, you know, I think there is a little bit more of a reality-based sentiment in the party that will help us with that, or at least I hope that's the case. I'm curious to hear what Kristen says, but I mean, I think, right, you've now got a growing activist base that is like, the New York Times is a fascist rag that is just trying to, like, you know, kill trans people and who seemed to sincerely believe that. Yeah, there was a freak out on Blue Sky this week about Ken Jennings playing, New York Times spelling bee because that's anti-trans.

I know that if you go to Blue Sky, they're going to get Maddie from playing spelling B. But like, I think if I asked my mom who watches MS now all the time, she would have no idea what the hell I was talking about. Kristen, what do you take of my Pollyannish view there on Democrats' willingness to process information? So I think that there's a chance that the feedback loop is broken by the Democrats getting defeated in 2024. If you'll remember, a piece of what made the Tea Party so interesting and viable in 2010 was that Republican-based voters and activists said, look, the establishment wanted John McCain all this time, and then you got him, and then, look, that was a disaster. And then in 2012, the establishment actually did fight back, did kind of what you've described, Josh, like still kind of had its ability to sort of get its person through. You admit Romney as the nominee in 2012.

And in the aftermath of that, there was a huge debate within the party over some who took the, at the time, RNC autopsy view, which said, hey, we need to go to the center on immigration. We need to be more inclusive as a party. But there was a very strong counter-narrative that said, no, the reason why Mitt Romney lost is there were eight million missing evangelical voters and that he simply failed to energize the base. And that's why what we really need is someone who is a capital T-True, capital C, conservative. That's why you had Ted Cruz et al all fighting over that mantle in 2016 before Donald Trump came and blew it up. All of which is to say, I think it's easy to imagine a democratic base that for a long time has said, you didn't give us Bernie in 2016, you didn't give us Bernie in 2020, you didn't even give us Elizabeth Warren. We got saddled with Biden.

Look how that turned out. I'm tired of taking orders from the establishment and that this becomes the moment where they say, I'm sick of you people telling me what isn't isn't electable because we got blown out of the water in 24. So it's time to try something new. The funny thing about that, though, is that the Tea Party presented itself as a movement that was principally about economic policy. People were outraged about the housing bailouts. And that was supposed Rick Santelli on CNBC so angry about that stuff. Also Obamacare. Yes, and also Obamacare. And Ted Cruz seemed like the personification of that sort of politics with the very hard-edged, socially conservative

and economically conservative approach. And if Ted Cruz had actually managed to ride that to a presidential nomination, he would have done terribly. And then somehow the movement ended up in the hands of Donald Trump, who was to the right of the establishment on certain issues, but then was to the left of the establishment on other issues. And it's sort of people on both Republicans and Democrats don't really like to talk about this as much as they should, because it, the the implications about what the party should do are not super congenial to the activist bases on either side. But people just think about Trump as like this right-wing guy who took over the party when in fact he was someone who repositioned the party, I think a more politically favorable set

of positions, but in some cases that involved moving to the center on big important things. And that's, you know, that's the piece that I, you know, as a Democrat, I would like the Democratic party to find in this shakeout. I just don't see an end of it. Sometimes the like Bernie type left talks about how it's off-putting, how woke the progressive establishment is, and sometimes they'll even talk about, like, you know, they use the wrong language and that sort of thing. But it's not like the Democratic version of the Tea Party is going to produce someone who wants much higher taxes on billionaires and single-payer health care and who also wants strong immigration enforcement and to take crime seriously. Like that, there is a set of issue positions where you could move the Democrats left on some things and write on other things and probably do better politically.

but I see no vehicle for that in the way that Trump was a vehicle for a similar thing on the Republican side. Well, you're right that Donald Trump did put together a coalition that was not ideologically coherent. And that sounds maybe meaner than I intended to mean, but that, you know, when we look at the four tribes that we have on the right side of the aisle, you know, there are your traditional, you know, loyal right and they believe all the things that you think the loyal right would believe. And then the moderate right is pretty economically conservative, but they're a little more open to government involvement in health care and they're pretty pro-LGBT rights. But there are these other pieces of the coalition that really were brought in by Donald Trump or cemented by Donald Trump that when you ask them, which would you, which do you agree with more? You'd rather have a smaller government providing fewer services or a bigger government providing more services. They're like, bring on the big government. When you ask if you think, do you think that income inequality is a problem that needs to be fixed or not?

People on the far right and moderate rights say absolutely not. But people who are in these like new Republican populist type tribes that we've identified, they're quite okay with that. They want to see the federal minimum wage increased. And so it's like a fascinating, I think, experiment of if the Democratic Party actually tries to make an electability case for these further to the left, mom-dani, whatever we want to call it, type candidate on the grounds that the Republican Party is actually not uniformly economically conservative. And maybe if you can tamp down some of the social woke stuff, quote unquote, you can pull some of these people back in because they would

quite like government benefits and free health care and all of that. One of the things I think of, you know, in this podcast, particularly just because of who three of us are and just this general era is as somebody whose politics, I feel like have shifted to the center a lot over the last decade or so. I would have definitely used to describe myself as the loyal left in the other version of it. And now like somewhere between electability and institutionalist, you know, definitely not on that loyal left part anymore.

And I see all these people I know on the crank left, they seem to see that every, Every time things get close, you know, like Bernie in 2016 or Bernie in 2020 or whatever's going on now or Mondami, like, this is their one shot. You know, if they don't get it this time, it's never going to happen because most of the times these people never won anything in there. They couldn't get fucked in a whorehouse, right? Like, this is the closest they will ever have. America is primed for it, and they have the right things. And I, as someone with fairly conventional moderate views, like, have a very calm down approach to it just because it's the luxury of having moderate beliefs.

eventually I'm going to win. Eventually, the popular calm ideas are win nine out of ten elections and it'll all be fine. And this is maybe naive and stupid, but it seems to have paid off. And I guess what I'm wondering is when we go through that list of people in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party who feel these things, like, what are the ones that have that sort of sensibility of like that confidence in just things will work out here? These are elections. Sometimes you lose them and sometimes you don't. The thing that I just constantly see on the left is this belief that it's not just like this is an election and sometimes you win them and sometimes you lose them. It is like this is the most important election of our lives and this will decide the fate of history. One might even call it a flight 93. It's the constant flight 93 election thing that, you know, that the guy said in 2016. So, Ben, this is not a perfect proxy for what you're talking about, but we also asked a question, how important is politics to your personal identity? So that's not asking, you know, what do you think the stakes of the next election are?

But one can imagine that if you are somebody who genuinely believes that the next election, if it does not go your way, it means the end of the republic and the American experiment. That's going to be more important to your identity. And the graph looks almost exactly like what you would imagine, right? The loyal left, 55% of them say my politics are very or extremely important to my personal identity. Electability Democrats and the loyal right are kind of come in second there. but there are groups like those middle American optimists where I think that's what you're describing. They sort of feel like everything's going to be okay. I think in the end it's all going to work out. I want government to do some stuff but not too much stuff. And politics is not my personality.

And so there is a group that believes that the problem for our system is they don't participate in primaries. And as long as groups like that don't participate in primaries, their voices will be dramatically underrepresented in our elected officials. So one thing that's very alarming to me is all these people who are much younger than me who vote And sometimes even serve an office the vice president is younger than me like by two weeks But even so like it's you know this makes me feel old It gets worse Josh Kristen you it's about a decade ago that you wrote the selfie vote right more wow Yeah it's a book where the word Donald Trump does not appear that's how old it is it is truly like the last book that got

before the timeline split. Yeah. So anyhow. So, you know, that was a book about millennials as youth rising into political power. Now millennials are middle-aged. Some of us are, at least, anyway. And Gen Z is aging into the electorate. And so, you know, partly as I watch these election results happen on the Democratic side

and feels like things are slipping away from the establishment, I guess much of what we're just seeing here is that, you know, the youth movement for Bernie Sanders that existed. 11 years ago. Those people are middle age now. There's younger people who are coming in who are also very left wing. And so presumably this is just a generational shift and it's going to keep getting worse for people like me. Well, there was a belief that I encountered all the time that was part of why I wrote the book to begin with, which said, young people are always progressive. And then when they get older, they go on the journey Ben went on and they throw away the childish things they believe and they come around to the views.

that maybe free markets are good and maybe some traditions are good and they become conservatives. And this is something that I found Republican strategists and conservative donors and think tankers really held on to. And every piece of data I looked at that. That's it for this week's free episode of Central Air. If you want to hear Kristen's analysis on how Gen Z is reshaping our politics in both the Republican and Democratic parties, and if you want to join us for our Central Air cocktail hour, which we did at the end of the show this week, We have a discussion about a brownie experiment that Kristen actually ran for us. Megan and I have had a dispute about whether you should put vegetable oil and brownies to get a better, chewier texture.

Kristen actually made side-by-side mixes of all butter and vegetable oil brownies. Spoiler alert, she agrees with me. And we also talk about Allison Roman, who has sided with me on grilling. Grilling is bad, not just my take. Now also Allison Roman's take, I feel validated. If you want to hear all of that, go to centralairpodcast.com. You can become a premium subscriber. You'll get every full episode of the show.

You'll be able to join our comments sections. You will be part of the community that makes it possible for us to bring this show to you every week. We would love to have you. Again, that's centralairpodcast.com.