Plain English with Derek Thompson - California’s Elections Sent an Important Message. What Is It?

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Today’s episode is about two California elections and the message they sent to the rest of the country. In San Francisco, progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled by voters after years of complaints about the rise of disorder, shoplifting, and homelessness in the city. In Los Angeles, Republican-turned-Democrat billionaire Rick Caruso had a strong showing running as a crimefighter in the L.A. mayoral primary. In the late 1970s, politics was defined by two topics: crime and inflation. Well, look around today: Various measures of crime are weighing on people, and inflation is near its 40-year high. Are we stepping into a time machine that’s taking us back to the '70s? To answer that question, we have journalist and author Ron Brownstein, a CNN senior political analyst, writer for 'The Atlantic,' and author of the book Rock Me on the Water: 1974, the Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, TV, and Politics. So if we are headed back to the '70s in a newly waxed maroon Pontiac Grand Am, this is the guy who can tell us what it means. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ron Brownstein Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, Rachel Lindsay here, and I am teaming up with your favorite Ringer podcasters to deliver the Bravo drama and news that you've been craving on morally corrupt. It's the show about all things Bravo. From the Housewise to Summer House and everything in between, we'll be mentioning it all every week. Check it out on Spotify and the ringer.com. Today's episode is about two California elections that have captured the attention of the media. and the message they send to the rest of the country. So this week in San Francisco, progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin

was recalled by voters after years of infamous complaints about the rise of disorders, shoplifting, homelessness, and violent crimes against the Asian community of the Bay Area. In Los Angeles, this week, the Republican-turned Democratic billionaire Rick Caruso had a very strong showing running as a crime-frivolving, running as a crime fighter in the L.A. mayoral primary. This is interesting to me because two summers ago,

protests across the country and around the world in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder made it seem to many people, including myself, like we were at the cusp of a criminal justice reckoning. You had slogans like defund the police that were going mainstream. Progressives felt like there was this once-in-a-generation opportunity to really move policing politics strongly to the left. But then, violent crime rose and rose, and rose, and rose, after decades of decline,

shootings surged by their highest annual rate ever in 2020. And by most accounts, gun violence has just continued to increase in 2021 and 2022. By the way, I say by most accounts, because for various stupid reasons, we have terrible up-to-date data on violence in America. But in any case, it seems clear that violence is increasing. and at the same time, homelessness is increasing, especially in California, and especially, especially in the major cities, like L.A. and S.F.

Now, I don't want to make things over simple here. The theme of this episode is not some clean story about how progressives are screwed, period. I think more subtly, this is a story about what happens when crime becomes more salient to voters. What happens when people pay more attention

to crime and safety, even in America's two most liberal cities, or two of their most liberal cities, San Francisco and L.A. What does that mean for national politics when crime becomes Marcellium? So 45 years ago, in the late 1970s, politics was defined, I think, by two topics. Crime and inflation. Well, 45 years later, look around. Various measures of crime are weighing on people, various measures of disorder are weighing on people, and inflation is near its 40-year high.

It makes you wonder, are we stepping into a time machine that's taking us back to the 1970s? And what would it even mean to step into such a time machine? So to answer that question, we have journalist and author Ron Brownstein. Ron is an encyclopedic political mind. He's a CNN senior political analyst, a writer for the Atlantic, and the author of the book, Rock Me on the Water, 1974, the year Los Angeles transformed movies, music, TV, and politics. So if we are headed back to 1970s in a newly waxed maroon Pontiac Grand Am, this is the guy you can tell us what it means. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English.

Ron Brownstein, welcome to the podcast. Derek, good to be with you. So Ron, I want to break this show into two parts. We'll talk about these California elections and then I want to talk about what they might mean nationally and for the future of politics. So we'll start in San Francisco and the recall of progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin. Ron, what was this recall all about? Fundamentally, it was about public order and public safety. There are, as always, many complicating factors. The supporters of Boudin will point to the big role played by some Republican donors, some big tech, you know, entrepreneurs who have a lot of money and the police unions and elements of his own office that fought him from the beginning, a combination of

kind of the Republican minority, distinct minority in the city and the entrenched law enforcement interests. And there's no doubt that that was part of the story. But in a city like San Francisco, where Republicans are less than 10 percent of registered voters, this could not have gotten this far unless there was also a broad range of ordinarily Democratic-leaning voters who were very dissatisfied with what was happening. And, you know, the crime trends in San Francisco were not unequivocal, I mean, some categories of crime were going up, others were going down. I think what hurt him even more than crime per se, and certainly this is going to be the case when we talk about Los Angeles, was a broader sense of disorder of the city losing control of the streets to people who are using drugs on the streets, who are obviously suffering from mental illness. In San Francisco, as in L.A., it has become very difficult to get through your day without encountering someone who seems a threat.

to themselves or to others. And I think his recall, above all, shows us that when order is removed from voters' lives, they don't like it. And they want government to focus on providing that order. You know, more than one person has said, I think, accurately, that as the district attorney, he continued to see himself primarily as a public defender. The big story for Democrats here, I think, out of this is not that people have, not that Americans in general, but certainly Democrats in particular and Democratic-led cities in particular

have not abandoned the cause of criminal justice reform. That's a mistake. People are not erasing the tape as if the summer of 2020 had not happened. But I think what is what is being. demanded here, what voters, what Democratic voters are demanding in San Francisco and also in L.A. is a recalibration. I think Boudin gave the impression that reform of the system, reducing incarceration, was almost his sole goal, you know. And I think what voters are saying is that that has to be balanced against the demand, you know, the necessity for public safety and public order.

I wrote in a piece earlier this spring in the Atlantic that both Budin and the DA in L.A., George Gascon, who is facing his own recall that may reach the ballot this fall. They have both allowed the perception to develop through their choices that they are more concerned about the relative minority of people who are ever accused of crime than they are about the vast majority of the citizenry whose principal concern with the criminal justice system is that it keep them safe. And I don't think you have to abandon the former in a Democratic city, but you can't seem to abandon the latter either. Yeah, that's a really interesting way of putting it. Like one theory that I had that maybe I'll take out for a test drive here is like,

you know Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Like the pyramid. All right. So at the bottom, for people who aren't familiar with Maslow and his pyramid hierarchy of needs, at the bottom, you have like utter necessities for life, food and water. And then if food and water provided for you go up one level to safety needs. And then if safety needs are met, you go up one more level of needs to like relationships, love, friendship. And at the very, very tippy top, you have self-actualization. Am I achieving my full potential in life? Okay. So this is typically a theory about happiness, about satisfaction, about individual needs. It's this idea that people who are starving aren't concerned about whether they're like maximizing career opportunities. But I had a thought about

whether or not this applies to progressive criminal justice policies, right? So if you are Chesa Boudin, or if you're a progressive criminal justice reformer, and you believe that the criminal justice system is flawed and needs to treat the rich and poor equally, doesn't burden non-white Americans, you have a lot of utopian ideas about how to change the prison system. You can do that. That's a knowable goal. But that's at like the top of the pyramid. And voters will only go for it so long as foundational needs are met. Foundational needs like public safety, public order, public trust. And so maybe what Budin lost is the faith among his constituents that he was meeting those foundational needs in order to focus on the top of the pyramid. I think I completely agree.

I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. You know, as Russ Limbaugh would have said, Ditto. Look, I think that for most people in any community, the bare minimum requirement of the criminal justice system is that it is that it keep them safe to the greatest degree possible. And that further, that when you are running to be the prosecutor, you have to accept that that is part of your job. Your focus cannot be solely on increasing, you know, the support of justice, in effect, in the community, you also have to deal with bad guys, you know. You know, one Democratic consultant said to me early on in this, like, if you don't accept your job description, you know, you're asking for trouble.

I think it's important to say, just building off of what where you were headed, you know, Budin's harshest critics were not just like tech billionaires and Republicans. They were Asians and Asian Americans, like the greatest support for recalling, for recalling Boudin in San Francisco came from Asian Americans who voted 67% in support of recalling him compared to about half of white and Hispanic respondents and just 34% of black respondents. That means it was basically these heavily Asian neighborhoods of San Francisco, the West and the South and Chinatown, that responded to these fears, or this reality of a wave of anti-Asian attacks in San Francisco, and the fear that Boudin wasn't doing enough to combat it

or demonstrate his care that something should be done. So, you know, we're going to take these ideas and talk about their national implications in a second. But I think it's just important to say that, you write, his recall was not just because it was a bunch of, you know, tech billionaires and Republicans and plutocrats who wanted them gone. He was ousted by his Asian American constituents. I just look at all of it. There has to be a recalibration. I don't think the proper read on this is that, as I say, Democrats and Democratic City,

have suddenly decided that, you know, the system is pristine and equitable and that there's nothing that has to be done to try to reduce over-incarceration or hold police more accountable for misbehavior. But they are very clearly saying, I think, that cannot be the sole goal. And that, in fact, the principal goal of the criminal justice system for most people is to keep their families and their communities as safe as possible. They want, I think, fairness, more fairness. their eyes have been open. They do want more fairness as part of that, but they do not want to take it to an extent that seems to jeopardize their safety. And I think that's what Budin and Gascon have allowed themselves not only to be betrayed at, but in many ways have contributed to. Yeah. The way I think about it is like it's not that people are for safety and against justice. They're for safety first and then justice. You have to provide public safety in order to stay in power to fight for justice, which is. the criminal justice system. I want to move on to Los Angeles, though. If you're fighting for

justice, you have to prove that that is going to make people safer. That's right. That's a good way of putting it. So moving to L.A., here you've got a former Republican billionaire Rick Caruso, who seems to have finished ahead in the L.A. mayor primary ahead of the progressive candidate, Democratic, representative Karen Bass. Tell us what we should know about Caruso and Bass and what this race came down to. Yeah, look, very similar dynamics, right? You know, there was, the limited conservative community in L.A. supported Caruso. The police unions and other law enforcement interests supported Caruso. Caruso put $40 million of his own money into this race. And all of those are factors that explain why he finished ahead of Karen Bass. But even with all of that, I think there's a widespread agreement that it would have been inconceivable that a former Republican until very recently billionaire developer running with the support of the police unions,

could have gotten anywhere near this far two years ago in the city in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. And the fact that he got this far is a reflection of the same kind of anxieties in San Francisco, partly about crime. I think more about disorder and pervasive homelessness and the unwillingness or inability of the city to maintain control of public spaces so that people feel disorder kind of crowding in around them. And also, I think, you know, the failure, the difficulty Bass had in articulating a message that did not completely alienate the groups that she grew out of on the left focused on justice, but tried to meet what is this very clear public demand for more focus on safety and order. That's not a unique problem to her, by the way. I mean, you look at Lori Lightfoot in Chicago is kind of going through something very similar.

London Breed in San Francisco has made a choice. You know, she's going to come down on the side of order. Eric Adams in New York also kind of struggling with this, but definitely on the side of order. But look, I think that, you know, it would be a mistake to look at this. I mean, certainly the guy spent $40 million. You know, I mean, that's a big, that's a big rock in the pond in a local election. But there has to be a receptive, you know, there has to be some kindling for all of this, you know, for all of this messaging that you're putting out there. again, Caruso's revealing, Derek, in that he is not running as the second coming of Giuliani.

I mean, he emphasized the velvet glove more than the Iron Fist. He talked about building beds and, you know, getting more services to people. He talked about more gang intervention and more mental health professionals. But, you know, the Iron Fist is also there and people hear it. He says he would hire 1,500 more police officers. And he said he would take emergency. powers as mayor, taking away the authority that the city council now has to decide where and when encampments are cleared. So, you know, it is a reflection of, to some degree, of the, you know,

he, even he himself, it reflects the way the world has changed since 2020, but there's no question, you know, what the underlying, you know, fist is here. And that as a, it is a match just the right of pass. No guarantee is going to win in the end. I mean, the fact, I don't know, 42% is pretty good. But he's got a long way to go to 50 in an electorate that will be younger and more diverse in November. Yeah. So I think what's interesting about the debate about Caruso is some people say, well, you have to account for the fact that he outspent bass 10 to 1, right?

So of course he was going to do well. He outspent bass 10 to 1. But it's like, wait, his being a billionaire is still going to be a factor in the general election. So if he can outspend 10 to 1 now, he can likely out. spend by some very high margin later. So maybe that makes his case hard to extrapolate across the country because not every Rick Caruso-style candidate has that much more money than their opponent, but at least in Los Angeles, his coffer clearly provides an extraordinary advantage. I wonder, as I'm thinking about how you are connecting the stories of San Francisco and

Los Angeles. The idea that the public disorder problem is downstream of a housing supply problem that if fundamentally what is angsting people in Los Angeles and San Francisco is the shocking reality of a homeless population that is often doing drugs or often, you know, just in an enormous population, that that to a certain extent is a result to the fact that both of these cities have done a famously terrible. job of adding to their housing supply. And we know that while a lack of housing supply isn't the only cause of homelessness, it is a really, really important cause of homelessness. How much credence do you give to the idea that to a certain extent Californians have sort of, you know, made their

own bed here? They have refused to build sufficient housing for their populations. And now they are exclaiming at the reality of homelessness in the aftermath. Right. There's no question that housing supply is part of the problem, it's equally true that that has almost completely vanished from the debate. I mean, I think the point, the housing first perspective that the only way to solve homelessness is to increase the supply of housing has really lost out in California to the more immediate concern of people want their streets back, I think. And so I do think that, you know, that again,

there's a recalibration. Newsom, Governor Newsom is interesting on this because he wants to spend large amounts building housing, low-income housing, and housing for the homeless. But he is also in a big fight with the left in the state because he wants to pass legislation that would essentially put more homeless people into court-ordered treatment and get them off the street and require them to get drug or mental health treatment, you know, against their will, essentially. And so I think, again, the synthesis that's emerging is, yeah, let's provide more service, let's focus on justice, but we have to elevate order and safety in the conversation.

And, you know, even Eric Adam, I mean, like, everyone is, again, Democrats are not going back to the, they're not, we're not erasing 2020. Even Eric Adams talks about increasing police accountability. in New York. And Lori Lightfoot in Chicago has talked about providing more economic opportunity and had a whole big pilot program to do that. And Karen Bass certainly emphasizes all of these themes. I mean, she says explicitly that I am not giving up on police reform. I mean, that has been my life and I am going to continue to do that. But all of them, I think, are being forced to reckon with how great the demand is on the other side. Your kind of hierarchy of needs, I think is very applicable. And so I think, you know, when I say that, you know, when the headline in my story said, is this the end of the George Floyd moment, that doesn't imply this is the end of the concern about justice in the justice system.

It implies that it's the end of a period where Democrats could seem to elevate that goal above all others. I want to touch on that. I want to read a comment from your article. This is a comment from Will Marshall. He's the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, which is a centrist, Democratic think. tank in Washington, D.C. And he said this, after Floyd's murder, George Floyd's murder by the Minneapolis police, quote, we had this progressive reaction and a lot of utopian thinking creeping in. But the problem was to view a strong response to crime and public disorder through the narrow lens of racial politics.

That missed something big, which is that low income and minority communities are on the front lines of crime. They are the number one victims. They don't want police beating up their sons, but they also don't want to be ignored. End quote. This connects to a certain extent with what we certainly saw in San Francisco and what we may be seeing in Los Angeles and possibly in New York and across the country as well, which is that in the summer of 2020, there was this high, salient idea that criminal justice reform was

about racial justice. It was about eliminating the phenomenon, the rotative. phenomenon of police murdering black, brown, non-white Americans and white Americans as well. But what happened since the summer of 2020 is that crime rates rose. Violent crime rose across the country. And when violent crime rises, the communities that are hit are black and brown communities. And so suddenly these groups that I think progressives thought might be a part of the defund movement have rather voted a little bit more like moderates

or even moderate conservatives about eliminating the risk of crime first and foremost. To what extent do you see this as an absolute like hair-on-fire emergency for the progressive movement in America today? Well, first, I think the Eric Adams victory really underscores that with how well he did in black and Hispanic communities in New York. And the polling in L.A., we don't really have a precinct level results yet, but the polling in LA shows the concern about crime, you know, extends across racial lines.

I mean, you know, in the kind of revisionist history of the 90s, the crime bill was solely a sop to basically racially resentful whites. That was always wrong. I mean, I covered the crime bill in 94. Some of the biggest advocates for it were black mayors around the country because they knew their voters, their core constituents were those, as Will said, on the front line of facing. these problems, which is not to say that there were not, you know, mistakes in the crime bill of 94, just that it was wrong to view even that, which was the discussion in 2020 and 2016 in the Democratic presidential primary, that this was solely kind of a, you know, a political ploy to win back racially resentful white voters. I think this is a hair on fire moment only

to the extent that progressives try to deny what's happening. Because I don't think in that within the Democratic coalition and within Democratic cities, I don't think voters are saying to them they have to abandon the goal of creating a more equitable justice system. I think what they are saying is that they have to pursue that in a less dogmatic way that also elevates and acknowledges that, as I say, for most people, their principal concern about the criminal justice system is that keep them safe. You know, I think there are many people that I have spoken to in this whole period do not believe it is impossible to develop agendas that generally make the system more equitable, but also show voters that you are concerned about crime and disorder in their lives.

And I totally agree with this. It makes me think of something, you know, let's say that you're someone like Jason Boudin, you're a progressive district attorney, and you really want to do something like, you know, reduce mandatory sentences for petty crimes and drug possession, things like that. you want to reduce all sorts of inequities within the criminal justice system. In a weird way, I don't know if this is obvious or profound, but in a weird way, it's even more important that you demonstrate that you have a masterful control of public safety and public order because you have to build that foundational bottom layer of the pyramid in order to climb to the top,

right? You have to prove to people that you can keep them safe in order to get them to shift their focus from safety to justice, personal safety to communal justice. You have to do that first order step of providing public safety. And to a certain extent, that's like the original sin of the Chase of Budin situation. He continued to push for justice even as perceptions of public safety were withering. And maybe this is the lesson going forward, that if you're going to be a progressive on criminal justice reform, it's just all the more important. that you be masterful at providing for public safety. You know, go ahead.

Real quick, can I just say, I mean, we've been writing and doing events around these issues at the Atlantic for, really, since Michael Brown, you know, since Ferguson. And the question to me always was whether it was sustainable to move as far and as fast in this direction as advocates wanted if crime was going up. And I think we are learning that it's not. Now, in fairness to Budin and Gascon and other like-minded prosecutors, I think their calculation was, that the system they were walking into was so calcified and opposed to change, that the only way to get it to move was blunt force blanket proclamations that left no room for kind of discretion on the part of people who really didn't want to do what you wanted them to do.

The problem with that is that that absolutism leaves you vulnerable when it inexorably leads to decisions that seem a rhapsorably. from the other way. Like if you are, you know, if you would have said, if you would have said, you know, from the beginning, I am really reluctant to try juveniles as adults. I am really reluctant to seek sentencing enhancements because I think they are misused and keep people in prison too long. But I'm going to have an open mind and examine these on a case-by-case basis. I think the evidence that we're seeing is that that is a better, more politically sustainable posture than simply saying, never going to seek an enhancement, you know, no matter what the circumstances in the case.

Just that kind of absolutism is difficult for public officials on any front. I want to ask about whether or not you think if you put together the two big issues that seem to be defining politics right now, which are crime and the public's reaction to the perception of rising disorder on the one hand. And the other hand, clearly inflation. Right? Crime and inflation. Those two things are what I associate with the 1970s. Now, I wasn't alive in the 1970s, and you were, and you wrote a book about the 1970s. And so I wonder if you think we are in a strange way heading back to the politics and the culture of the 1970s. Because if politics is going to be oriented around responding to crime and inflation,

it seems possible to me that we might retrace some of the steps that we took 40 years ago? I would say yes and no. Actually, my book, Rock Me on the Water, is about kind of the more sunnier, optimistic part of the 70s in the early 1970s here in California, as opposed to what you're describing. And obviously, inflation had started the gas shortages and so forth, but really what you're describing is the Carter years where crime and inflation, the sense of cities being out of control were a big part of the politics. To some extent, yes, but in big ways, I think the situation is different. And the situation is different more because of the evolution of the two-party coalitions and the competition between them. There's a lot less give in the system. You know, it's much more rigid in terms of fewer voters available to move between the parties

based on current conditions, especially in a presidential election. I'll come back to that. And the other big difference from the 70s is that in the 70s, we were still in a political system in which class was the single most important dividing line between the parties. It was already starting to move in this direction by then, but certainly by now we are in a system where culture, cultural attitudes, attitudes about kind of the basic demographic, cultural and even economic changes remaking the country are the fundamental dividing line between the parties.

So just go one level deeper on that. In what way was classed the most important dividing line in politics the 1970s? And then say one more beat about. why you think culture rather than class is the dividing line today? Well, you know, I mean, in the 70s, we were still coming out of the New Deal era where in politics, which was essentially 1932 to 1968 and but was lasting, that system was still largely in place where essentially that, you know, you could draw a line somewhere in the income ladder and most people above it reliably voted Republican and most people below it reliably voted Democrat.

But no Democrat won college-educated voters in that whole period. And they always ran better among non-college whites than college whites up until into the 1980s. And, of course, there were many white evangelical Southerners who still voted Democratic in those years, 76 and 80. And again, it's beginning to change, but it hadn't really fundamentally changed. But, you know, what we see, starting with the civil rights movement in the 60s, getting on to issues like the racially tinged battles over affirmative action, crime, busing, welfare in the 70s, and then on through abortion, gay rights, and all the other issues that have followed, is that the electorate has sorted out much more in the past few decades based on their cultural

attitudes, based on whether they, as, you know, I call it the Coalition of Transformation and the Coalition of Restoration, a Democratic Coalition of Transformation that is fundamentally comfortable with the changes that are remaking America. and then a coalition of transformation that responds to the idea of making America great again, which involves restoring a social hierarchy that used to exist and which many red states are actively trying to get back to, I think. So in this world, obviously dissatisfaction with the current state of the country is going to be huge in the midterm, and midterms really are a snapshot of how people think about the way things

are right now. But I don't know if 2024 is 1980 because I think that in the presidential year, it is, I think, more of a stark chasm or schism over values. And obviously, if inflation is 8 percent and there's a sense of crime being out of control, it's going to be tougher for Democrats than otherwise. But I don't think it ensures as guaranteed a win for Republicans, much less as decisive a win as we saw. In 1980, I mean, yes, voters vote on circumstances, especially in midterms, but I still think in a presidential race that your basic posture on whether you, you know, believe that abortion should be legal and gun control should be in place or both should be banned is going to matter a lot. Let me try to summarize what I think you're saying. You tell me if I'm doing a good job,

summarizing it. It sounds like you're saying, to a certain extent, some of the material conditions that are present in 2022, were present in the late 1970s, like elevated crime and higher inflation. But the difference between 2022 and, say, 1976 or 1980, is that material concerns aren't as salient as they used to be. Instead, post-material or cultural concerns are more salient. So it's more likely that 2024 is going to be about not just something like inflation, not just something like crime,

but also maybe something like, is wokeism good or bad? Is Roe versus Wade good or bad? Is democracy good or bad? Is, you know, loud liberals on Twitter within Disney complaining about state laws, annoying or not annoying? That these kind of cultural concerns are going to be just more important

in terms of dividing the marginal voter than some of these material concerns? And the reverse, right? Is it appropriate for Republican states to be banning books and preventing LGBTQ, you know, transgender girls from competing in sports and limiting how classes can talk about race? Teachers can talk about race. I mean, I think that the... So let me, I think I agree with that to a certain extent.

I mean, I agree with the idea that post-material concerns, that cultural concerns over time be... become more important to people, in part kind of because of Maslow's hierarchy. Like, you care more about the cultural issues about the higher part of the pyramid as the lower part of the pyramid needs are met. At the same time, you look at what Democrats are likely to face this November, and like, why are marginal voters angry at Democrats? I don't think it's just about cultural issues. I think it's about inflation. I think it's about crime. Like, I think it's actually about material issues. So how can both those things be true? Yeah, well, because I think, first of all, I think

Two things. Midterm elections are much more about current conditions. The midterm elections are not a big philosophical statement on the future of the country and what our values are. They are a snapshot of how people feel about the way things are going in their lives right then. So there's no question that crime and especially inflation, I mean, inflation really dwarves everything else. Inflation is the driving force of this election and will likely produce a very tough outcome for Democrats. And in fact, if they have any chance of mitigating those losses, it's by elevating the issues of values, particularly abortion and guns in some of these more white-collar districts where they've done and communities where they've

done well in the past. Second, obviously in a presidential election, even in a presidential election, material conditions matter at the margin. And if things, and inflation is still 8% in 2024, you know, those last 10 or 12% of voters who aren't really committed to either side in this fundamental culture war are going to be influenced by it, and that could make it very tough for Democrats. But compared to 1980, a bigger share of the electorate is locked down for one side or the other because of its views about what, you know, what drives their political loyalties have moved, I think, more toward post-material, you know, as indicated by the fact that the group that's staying with Biden more than any other are college-educated white voters. And, you know, he, he,

he could have really significant erosion with Hispanics over, you know, basically the way things are, the way things are going. So I'm not saying that, you know, as I say, if inflation is where it is now in 2024, that's going to be really tough for Democrats. If it's more equivocal kind of what the story is, I think we will revert to this kind of battle of the bulge kind of politics we've had for the last two sides where you have fundamentally two different countries that are sharing the same landmass. And they are just kind of mobilizing to see which one can control the national government. You know, I actually wanted to close with one more thought that's my own thought. I was thinking about this episode, in conjunction with the episode that we did a few weeks ago, I hope you listened to it, about America's housing situation, about how hard it is to find housing in some of America's richest cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Now, where's the connection between that episode and this episode? Well, Chesa Boudin came into the office of district attorney of San Francisco hoping to pass a bunch of progressive criminal justice reforms. But he ran up against the problem of homelessness and fears of public safety. Well, look at how these dominoes click into each other. Number one, a lack of affordable housing in San Francisco is part of what leads to homelessness. part of what leads to this sense of disorder. Number two, this sense of disorder creates dissatisfaction among people who live in San Francisco about safety.

Number three, fears about safety in San Francisco have now defeated potentially progressive criminal justice reform. And number four, those defeats, that very defeat, now is creating a broader narrative of progressive weakness throughout the country, right? you see the dominoes click click click click click and if you take domino one and domino four you have a lack of housing in san francisco creating a national narrative of progressive weakness this i think is the way in which at the heart of so many issues you have housing that housing affordability and

housing abundance so interestingly lies at the heart of so many national issues in America. Just someone to think about something to chew on because I think it's an issue we're going to want to return to over and over again on this show. Housing abundance. Thanks very much and we'll talk to next week.