Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Democrats Have a New Winning Formula

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

This week was a straight flush for Democrats. Zohran Mamdani completed his heroic arc to become mayor of the world’s most important city. Democrats ran up huge margins in the big governor races in Virginia and New Jersey, where Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, respectively, won by double digits. What unified the three victories was the Democratic candidate’s ability to turn the affordability curse against the sitting president, transforming Republicans’ 2024 advantage into a 2025 albatross. Affordability is the Democrats’ new watchword. And it’s a good one. It speaks to Americans' direct concerns. It’s a big-tent subject, allowing a democratic socialist to offer one message in South Brooklyn and a moderate Democrat to offer another message in southern Virginia. Today’s guest is Matthew Yglesias, a writer whose site, Slow Boring, is a must-read for me and many others who follow politics and policy. We talk about the affordability theory of everything and its weaknesses, the Democrats’ big night, the lessons of Mamdani, persuasion, moderation, and much more. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Matthew Yglesias Producers: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the way. Today, the Democrats. This week was a straight flush for the Democratic Party. Zoran Mamdani completed his heroic arc to become the mayor of the world's most important city. Democrats ran up huge margins in the big governor-rable. in Virginia and New Jersey, where Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Sheryl both won by double digits. But to understand what happened this week, how the Democrats won, why their message resonated, and how Trump has made himself so vulnerable to a huge backlash heading into next year's midterm elections. I do think it's useful to wind back the clock a few ticks and recall how we got here. The following is somewhat adapted from an essay that I just published on my substack.

And if you want to read the whole thing, I'd encourage you to check it out, either in our show links or at Derek Thompson.org. Five years ago this week, in November 2020, Joe Biden won by promising that he could restore normalcy to American life. That did not happen. As the biological emergency of the pandemic, death, wound down, the economic emergency of the pandemic, inflation, took off. An affordability crisis broke out all over the world.

The public revolted. Last year, in 2024, practically every incumbent party, in every developed country, lost ground at the ballot box. So it went in the U.S. Trump won an affordability election. But like Biden before him, Trump violated his mandate to restore normalcy. Elected to be an affordability president, Trump has governed more like an authoritarian dilettante. He's raised tariffs without the consultation of Congress. openly threatened comedians who made jokes about him,

pardoned billionaires who gave his family money, arrested people without due process, oversaw the unconstitutional obliteration of the federal workforce, and, with the recent bulldozing of the White House East Wing, provided an admirably vivid metaphor for his general approach to governance and norms. Listeners at this point might think I'm being a bit unfair to our president with that last description.

perhaps I am. But my unfairness, at least, is in line with public opinion. A recent NBC poll asked voters whether they thought the president had lived up to their expectations for wrestling inflation to the ground and improving costs of living. Only 30% said yes. It was Trump's lowest number for any issue polled. So again, for the second straight year, we have an affordability election. On the surface, Mamdani Spanberger and Cheryl's victories seem entirely different. Mamdani defeated an older Democrat, a washed-up Democrat, even, in an ocean-blue metropolis. In Virginia, Spanberger crushed a bizarre Republican candidate in a state that was ground zero for doge cuts. And in New Jersey, Cheryl, whose victory margin was arguably the surprise of the evening,

romped in a state that had been sliding toward the Republican column. But despite those cosmetic differences, what united the three Democratic victories was the candidate's ability to turn the affordability curse against the sitting president, transforming Republicans' 2024 advantage into their 2025 albatross. As Shane Goldmacher at the New York Times wrote, quote, Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia were built on promises to address the sky-high cost of living in those states while blaming Mr. Trump and his allies for all that ails those places. In an analysis shared with me by the polling and data firm Blue Rose Research, I learned that

the best testing ads in both Virginia and New Jersey focused on affordability. Affordability. It is the Democrats' new watchword, and it's a good one. It speaks to Americans' direct concerns. It's a big, tent subject allowing a Democratic socialist to offer one message in South Brooklyn while a moderate Democrat offers another message in Southern Virginia. But what is this new affordability theory of everything for the Democratic Party? And how will it serve them in the next few years as they win power back from the Republican Party? Today's guest is Matt Iglesias, a writer whose cite slow-boring is a must-read for me and many others who follow politics and policy. We talk about the affordability theory of everything and its

weaknesses, the Democrats big night, the lessons of Mamdani, persuasion, moderation, and much more. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Matt Iglesias, welcome back to the show. Good to be here. I want to start with what I'm calling the affordability theory of everything, which I've named especially to make you personally furious because I know, how much you hate theories of everything. I'm trying to draw a circle around this idea that Mamdani, Spamberger, and Cheryl ran in three very different places, ran certainly different elections if you compare Spamberger and Cheryl to Mamdani, and yet they all-centered cost of living concerns. All of their elections paid off. They all won by healthy margins. And moving

forward, I think that success is going to concretize this idea that affordability is Trump's biggest vulnerability and Democrats, respectively greatest strength. You have a healthy allergy toward anything that seems to be becoming a conventional wisdom. So I wanted to first allow you to comment on this idea that it's an affordability moment for the Democrats. What do you make of this? I mean, clearly the message about affordability is what is resonating with people, right? And you have different candidates, different kinds of campaigns. They're talking about affordability. people like that, it is spiking in all the polls. What I think is interesting is the question of like, what does that actually mean?

Right? Like it tells us something that this line of argument is really resonating with voters. But if I was like, if I was working for Donald Trump, I would be going crazy about this because I can pull it up. If you look at median wages in inflation-adjusted terms, they are the highest they've ever been. If you look at household debt as a share of gross domestic product, it's the lowest on record. Now, the records for that don't go back that far, but it's like 20 years. It's lower than it was in the recent past.

Median household income, higher than it's ever been. So in what sense is there an affordability crisis? And I mean, I don't want to be too much of like a dunderhead about this, because if I ask anyone, they will name for me like 17 things that they're struggling to afford. But in objective terms, it seems that the material living standards of the American people are higher than they were one year ago, higher than they were five years ago, higher than they were 10 years ago. So if you were to sit down and say, not how do I run a political campaign, but like how do I do the job as governor, as mayor, as president of the United States, how do I tackle affordability? Well, you would need to know what affordability is in order to tackle it. And if it's not incomes rising faster than prices, what is it?

Well, I think, let me respond directly to that before we get into the political utility of affordability. Because it's a totally fair question. Is there an affordability crisis anyway? I think that if you look at, you know, you're talking about economic statistics, if you look at changes to real personal spending among especially lower income Americans, Americans below the median American. That seems to have stagnated in the last few quarters. I reached out to friends who are more familiar with some economic indicators than I am like Connor Senate Bloomberg, and I said to him, anticipating that you would make this point, because I guess between us and the thousands of

people listening, you told me that he were going to make a point somewhere like this. I said, what is the best evidence that we're seeing stagnation of wages, spending? for lower income folks right now. And according to Connor, he said, everything you're hearing from publicly traded restaurant companies that have to be reporting their earnings. On all their conference calls,

they're saying low-income QSR traffic is down double digits for eight, nine quarters in a row. So there are some indicators that lower-income people are struggling on top of the things that are most commonly reported by folks like you and me and Ezra and newspapers.

Housing prices are high. The average age, of a first-time home buyer recently reached its all-time record high of 40. Electricity prices are rising. And when you put together housing prices and electricity prices, well, that's a huge share of people's budget. So, yes, median wages are high. Certainly average wages are high because the richest folks in America are doing so well.

But I suppose if you were trying to anchor the affordability crisis in real hard economic data, you would look at the stagnation of real spending growth among lower-income Americans and the fact that the places where they would be spending, like the McDonald's of the world, are saying our QSR traffic has been kind of pathetic for the last year or two. So that's where I think you could say, if you were having this debate in the Trump White House, no, actually, we do see evidence that Americans are struggling. And that might indicate why Democrats are having this success in making the affordability pitch.

You can respond to that, but I don't want to get us to get, you know, too sucked into the Yeah, yeah. The economic question. You know, my defense of affordability for why it's been useful for the Democratic Party is that, number one, it allows Democrats to move from talking about climate or talking about cultural issues where their ideas tend to be less popular to talking about cost of living concerns where their critique is more popular. And, you know, you're a grand prudent.

of the popularist theory, that Democrats should talk about issues where they are more popular. This allows them to do that in the big picture. But also in the small picture, while it allows Democrats to be united at the level of party brand, were the folks for fixing things like cost of living, at the individual level, candidate to candidate, they can accept a certain amount of diversity, that Mamdani is going to be in New York talking about freezing the rent, but Spamberger's going to be down in Southern Virginia, not talking about freezing the rent. And, you know, Mikey Sherrill can be talking about utility prices because that's the issue that affects New Jersey. So it allows them to do both this act of shifting overall messaging toward material concerns

and also allowing for more heterogeneity at a local level, which I think would be helpful for Democrats to win in a bunch of very different races. How do you feel about that general defense of the idea that affordability is a useful direction for the party to move toward? I mean, I'm a congenital complainer, but this is clearly a, you know, it's both something that a lot of voters care about. And it's also a, it's a very flexible framework in part for exactly the reason I was complaining before. It's a little bit undefined. But that means that different elected officials can define their affordability agenda in different ways. I, you know, I saw data for progress, which is kind of, you know, left-wing group. They put out a thing about, it was like, you know, people overwhelmingly support mum. Domami's agenda, because that's what they do. And you look at their line item. And actually, the most popular idea that they attributed to him was speeding, permitting approval for housing. Right. So that's like the evil, moderate abundance. But it's something that Mamdami, the socialist, is able to embrace, you know, because he's a smart guy and a little bit flexible, but also because

the affordability is itself a flexible concept. So to him, subsidizing the bus fare, is affordability, but speeding housing approvals is also affordability because anything that's, there are many roads to affordability, right, which is part of what makes it kind of a good, a good frame. You know, I'm only, I'm struggling with it a little because it is a question of how will the governing agenda sort of work out? Because, you know, you and I both strongly believe that increasing housing supply will have very real economic benefits for people. I would struggle to tell you that changing zoning rules is going to make nominal rent go down. Like, I don't think that's true.

Because in addition to, you know, regulatory barriers to supply, it costs money to build a house. Right. A house is a giant bundle of physical objects and it requires a lot of skilled labor to construct it. the price of all of the components of a house is just a lot higher than it was five years ago. So a house is going to cost more to build than it used to. There's also financing barriers. There's also regulatory barriers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But so, like, the new house is not going to be cheaper than the existing houses.

Like, there's no way to make that happen, right? So even though, like, it would be good. It's better to have an abundance of housing than, you know, a perpetual scarcity. There's only so much you can do, right? Mikey Sherrill made a lot of headway promising to freeze people's utility bills, which sounds great, and she can maybe do. But it costs money to run an electrical grid, right? So Maine had the highest utility price increases in the country.

And, you know, so I was reporting, I was asking people, What's going on here? What did they do? And the answer, which is really tedious, is that winter storms blew down a large fraction of their electrical wires. And so they had to repair them all. And Maine is a very sparsely populated state. So the cost per person of repairing downed electrical wires is just really high. And it's like, what are you going to do? You know, like, hopefully they'll have better weather next year. And this won't recur. But, you know, sometimes prices go up. And it's, you can stabilize the macro economy, right?

And you can try to make good decisions about important supply side constraints. But it's really hard to make nominal prices fall. And yet that seems to be what people want. You've been part of a very loud, and I think quite interesting online debate, not just online, but really intra-party debate over the value of moderation in the Democratic Party. And in a way, unfortunately, Tuesday's election doesn't give us a really clear indicator of the value of moderation because like just every Democrat won. Like it'd be one thing if like the leftist Democrats got destroyed and all the moderates won or the moderates got destroyed, no, the leftist one. But just everybody romped and it was an amazing night for Democrats, which somewhat washes out the ability to delineate between what strategy is most successful. That said, I would be interested for you to just state.

like from first principles, what your pro-moderation theory for the Democratic Party is, and if you could, how it might intersect with this new affordability approach that the party seems to be taking? Yeah, I mean, so I think the clearest way that you see it manifesting is in turnout, right? So that if you look at New York, there was actually a spike in Republican turnout in New York City. And that's because for all the positive things that you could say about Mondami, right, you know, he's exciting. He got a lot of attention. He was highly viral. Right-wing people also received all that attention. And they were like, oh, this is bad, right? I mean, he attracted a lot of opposition. And it's, you know, he got 50% of the vote roughly in New York City, which is not an amazing number. Now, you can say, well, he had to run against another Democrat. But again, that speaks to the point that, the appearance of radicalism mobilizes opposition, right? Mikey Sherrill won a crowded six-way primary, and then having won, like, she didn't face a sore loser opponent

because she's a very moderate, she's a reassuring figure from the standpoint of New Jersey Democrats. And what she had was there was a good Democratic turnout for her because people are mad about Donald Trump. But Republican turnout was way down from 2020. because off your gubernatorial election is not as exciting as a presidential election. And it was hard to paint an alarming portrait of her.

She's a very regular New Jersey Democrat. It's a somewhat blue state. And so they could throw at her, you know, she has X, Y, or Z sort of banal Democratic Party position. But that's not, it's not counter-mobilizing. You know, like New Jersey people are very accustomed to that. Winsome Earl Sears, similar kind of story in Virginia, you know, she tried really hard to hit Abigail Spanberger with the sort of biggest conventional vulnerabilities of the Democratic Party, and people were just not that impressed with it. It was, it's, it's the inverse of the criticism

people often offer that these sort of mainstream establishment candidates are boring. They're also hard to radicalize people against, because, you know, they seem to. very normal and anti-Trump voters are very, very motivated one way or another. The problem with this election, I mean, not problem, but if you want to look forward to the future of American politics, is these are all states that Kamala Harris won. So it's not telling us that much about can Democrats eat into Donald Trump's political support in a meaningful way. You had some Virginia House of Delegates candidates winning in Trump seats. So that's probably the most positive sign for Democrats you could find.

We also don't have an incredible amount of national media scrutiny on individual state legislature races in Virginia to tell the world all about what it is they did down there. But, you know, we see this kind of backlash all the time. You know, the incumbent president stumbles, particularly he's seen as handling the economy poorly. So his opponents are really motivated to come out and vote. His supporters are a little bit depressed. And the one thing you can do to really reactivate those depressed Republicans is to present an alarming sort of figure against them.

And there's a lot of research on this, David Brookman paper, I think, on this kind of counter-mobilization and Andy Hall paper about it. And if you think about, you know, your own side or their enemies, right? Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor Green, these people are very mostly. You know, people are ready to go out and beat them. And it's easier to sort of demoralize your opposition if you're seen as sort of moderate and inoffensive. I want to recircle back to this issue of moderation because love him or hate them, the economic populace have a very clear and you could say falsifiable argument. They're like run a candidate who says, blame the rich, defend the people.

tax the corporations, break up the companies. There's like a very clear almost formula that you can basically take, and then you can apply it across the country, and then maybe you can easily measure the effectiveness of that campaign in Brooklyn and in San Francisco and in suburban Cincinnati. But I want to understand what the pro-moderation argument actually means. So here's a couple examples of what it could mean plausibly. Number one is run people with moderate biographies.

So, you know, Mikey Sherrill is a former naval officer. a former federal prosecutor, right? These are not like stereotypically left-wing careers. Abigail Spamberger talked a lot in her advertisements about being the child of military and law enforcement family. So that's number one is run people with moderate biographies. Number two is run on ideas that code as moderate. And code as moderate is a little bit of me sort of waiting my hands a bit.

Like maybe it's political scientists saying it's moderate. Maybe you ask a panel of voters, like what ideas are left, center, and right. And then number three is maybe a subtle variation. Number two, don't talk about ideas that code is very progressive. So it's almost like it's not about the ideas or policies that you proactively support. It's really about what you don't say. Don't say defund the police. We all know what that means.

Don't center, you know, LGBTQ issues. We all know what that means. So when we're advanced, when you're talking about the pro-moderating, argument, the reasons of the Democratic Party to moderate to win the Senate and to win the Congress. Is it about moderate biographies? Is it about moderate issues you're trying to make more salient? Or is it about avoiding issues that we all understand to be overly progressive? So, you know, all of these things matter. Military veterans tend to do better in elections than other kinds of people. You know, vibes matter. Your language matters. Downplaying things can be

effective. But I think that actual issue taking, position taking on the issues, is really underrated in this sphere of time. You remember that, you know, the guy who won Iowa for Democrats twice in a row after George W. Bush won them, they got an African-American law professor from Chicago. And he went to Iowa, and he won it twice in a row. But then Republicans won it back three times in a row with a real estate developer from Manhattan who wears a suit and tie every day. And there's this kind of, you know, obsession with like, well, we've got to find the guy with the exact correct farmer vibes and he's going to win. But the actual thing that happened, I think, was, you know, Obama went to Iowa. He said that marriage is between a man and a woman.

He said that he was skeptical that his daughters deserved preferences in college admission because they're the children of the United States Senator, and there's hardworking white people in Iowa who maybe deserve more consideration. And he savaged his opponents over privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Donald Trump comes around. He's very, like, extreme, quote-unquote figure in so many different ways. But he actually looked at Republicans' vulnerability. and Social Security and Medicare, and he disavowed those positions. And he ran a race against Hillary

Clinton and then later against Biden and Kamala Harris, where he was like, you know, these people are soft on crime and they favor lax immigration enforcement. You know, he reframed what the argument was about in terms of his pitch and his strategic issues. But he also changed the Republican Party's position to be one that more voters in Iowa agreed with. And, you know, it drove Democrats, nuts. They'd be like this fraud, this, like, fancy guy with his private plane, just like Obama drove Republicans nuts, you know? And I think it's because the issues actually matter more than a lot of people want them to believe. Because if you yourself are an activist and you have really strong convictions on the issue, what's most convenient for you is to say, you know what,

Like, we're going to get a guy who has, like, just the right look and just the right biography, and he's going to sell my ideas all over the country. And I think successful politicians don't really do that. Like, Mamdami, you know, this is clearly a guy with significant, you know, convictions and ideological commitments. But he saw that his glaring weakness was that people didn't trust him on crime and public safety. So he disavowed defunding the police. he committed to retaining Eric Adams' police commissioner. Like, he met voters where they are, you know, not just on a level of vibes, et cetera, et cetera. But they had a real objection to him, and he has been trying to answer that objection.

And I think everybody knows that the success of his mayorality will depend in part on, can he deliver on public safety? Right. Like, if the crime rights soars the way his critics were saying it would soar, that'll be really bad for him. And so he's probably going to work hard to make that not happen. And if you look at Trump, right, he campaigned saying that prices were going to go down when he won, which was like, that's what people wanted to hear. And since he's been in office, he hasn't been able to make that happen. And as you were saying, that's his biggest problem right now is the issues, not, you know, nothing about his personality has changed. The Democrats haven't even changed that much.

But this central promise of Trump's campaign now looks false to people, and that makes a big difference. There's a big question that that raises in my head, which is a question about bigotry and the Democrats' relationship to it, right? So it's 2025. Iowa has changed a lot, and America has changed a lot. And being against gay marriage in 2025 versus 2007-2008 feels bigoted in a way that it didn't necessarily feel whatever 18 years ago. And it rules in this subject that I'm very interested in, but I've been following without really talking about or tweeting about. And so a lot of these words from me are sort of coming out for the first time. Essentially, the question is, as we try to make the Democratic Party, the Democratic tent to bigger tent, the Democratic Party, a more popular party,

how open should Democrats be to people that we want to call bigots? What should the Democrats' relationship be to people who hold? reactionary views about gender and marriage and race. And you wrote about this very recently for the argument. And I'd like to guide you into this subject in a very specific way. Can you share the story you tell about your son and balloons? And then can you tell us what lesson you take from that story that applies to more than just one birthday party with your son and balloons? Rather applies to the entire Democratic Party and its relationship to those we might call biggest. So I live in a Logan Circle neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It's a kind of, you know,

busy, recently gentrified, upscale neighborhood. And, you know, I tell a story. I went to a, it was a party. It was, I think, a street festival. I don't know, with my son when he was a little kid. And there was a mix of, like, Logan Circle, affluent, mostly, but not exclusively white, college-educated professionals, but there were also some kids who were there with nannies, who were typically Afro-Caribbean or Latina. And somebody was handing out balloons, and the balloons were blue, and some of the balloons were pink. And the kids were grabbing balloons kind of at random. And then a few people stepped in to organize and make sure that the girls had the pink balloons and the boys had the blue balloons. And so I ask people who work in Democratic Party

politics, do you think the people who stepped in were the working class women of color, or was it the white, rich people there as parents? Nobody gets this wrong, right? Like, everybody knows that working class people of color with immigrant backgrounds frequently have much more conservative ideas about gender norms than, you know, urban, white, professionals. Bigot is a strong word, etc. But if I said to my friends, I strongly object to a little boy carrying a pink balloon. Like, my friends would get really mad at me. They extend grace to, in practice, like in the real world, if they see an immigrant nanny expressing these kind

of retrograde ideas, they might roll their eyes or like, talk. to somebody about it later, but they understand, like, that's what people are like, you know, and they view those people as sympathetic, and Democrats absolutely view those people as people who should be in their tent, in their coalition. When you talk to Democrats, like, who are you fighting for? Who are you working for? Those nannies are absolutely, like, meant to be in the coalition, whether it's Bernie's coalition, you know, Kamala's coalition.

All Democrats want the votes of people like that. to get somebody's vote, you know, you can have ideas that they disagree with because, you know, there's only two candidates. You're not going to agree with anybody about everything. But you can't be canceling people and then expecting them to vote for you. You know, you can't say, look, if you don't agree with my views about, and this, the balloon thing is trivial, but I think it's telling. It speaks to a larger set of ideas about gender and. sexuality and, you know, the good life even in some ways. And it's deeply meaningful to people. But I think Democrats often get too into their own bubble. And they recognize if you tell a

story like that or if they just interact in their daily life with service sector people you encounter in Washington, D.C., in New York City, Los Angeles, wherever it is, they know there's an incredible diversity of views about these topics. And they're not, everyone who's conservative on some cultural matters is like putting on a Ku Klux Klanhood after work. But when they conduct politics, they act like, you know, they're on a college campus. And these are incredibly marginal positions that you can just stigmatize and shame people out of. And it's just not true. You know, you need an electoral coalition that includes,

a large number of people who have traditionalist opinions about some important subset of topics out here. And that's the way, you know, small D democratic politics has always been conducted. And, you know, it's quite recent, I think, that there's been a sort of lack of tolerance for those sort of basic realities, and it hasn't worked out well for Democrats. No, I mean, if you look back over the last three or four election cycles going back to the early 1990s, late 1980s, I mean, one of the really striking things about the popularity of the Democratic Party, if you decompose by ethnic group, is that basically Democrats are less popular than they were four, eight, 20 years ago, among black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, working class white Americans, the only group that they have expanded their, electoral lead in is college-educated white Americans. The only reason Democrats aren't getting entirely wiped out is that the lead they have had with non-white Americans, even though it's shrinking,

is bolstered by the fact that the country is getting more diverse. And so that shrinking lead among a rising share of the electorate is helping them tread water. Taking everything you just said, how do you make that lesson useful? for Democrats. Like, what's the advice that flows from that Iglesian wisdom if you're talking to someone running for office and they're like, hey, you know, I heard you tell the story about, you know, your son and the balloons.

Okay, but what do I do with that? Right. I mean, you know, I think it depends to an extent on, you know, where you're running and what's going on. But, I mean, I think you have to pay attention to public opinion, which is quite conservative on certain topics, right? I mean, particularly on crime, on immigration, on, you know, questions related to how Democrats practice diversity, quote unquote, like you saw, so you saw a lot in the Biden administration

was like he publicly committed to appointing a black woman to the Supreme Court. But that kind of explicit saying you're going to use racial and gender identity criteria for who you hire, that's like super unpopular. People really do not agree with that idea. On the question, I mean, I know this is a sensitive topic and people have strong feelings about it, but the voters have been really clear that they think like sex segregation of youth sports teams should be done by traditional biological criteria. And Democrats have been just like really reluctant to let the voters have their way on this topic. I think in a sense, you could, like, debate it one way or the other and, like, the metaphysics of gender till the cows come home. There's something a little bit arbitrary about, like, how are you going to regulate school sports teams, I think, inherently. But, like, sometimes you just got to do what people want. Like, that's what politics is. And it's a little bit perverse to me than in this period where Democrats have been expressing this very intense anxiety about democracy,

that they've also become more reluctant to just say, you know what? Like, we're giving people what they want. So, you know, mention Obama and marriage equality. Because it's comical the extent to which his official position on this just tracked public opinion. You know, when it was unpopular, he had this deep-seated religious conviction about the nature of marriage. And then once it became a 51% issue, he said he was evolving on it to sort of like dog whistle, to liberals, and then then Vice President Joe Biden blurted out in an interview. It's like, yeah, we should do marriage equality.

At which point, all elite Democrats were like, yes, of course, I agree with that. I remember I was at a dinner with a cabinet secretary from the Obama administration when this was raging. And the guy is like joking about it. He's like, oh, I guess four people have said it now, so I can come out too. You know, I'm for it. But all of that happened after the advocates had made their position. popular, right? There's a division of labor in a democracy. And I think on a lot of transgender

issues in particular, there's been a putting of the cart before the horse. And it's like, you as an advocate need to make your case to the public and persuade them that your ideas are correct. And at that point, it's reasonable to expect practical politicians to follow you. Like, that's the time for the pressure campaigns and the activism and the protests in your office and so on and so forth. Trying to get people to sign on to ideas that you haven't sold the public on makes it hard to win elections. And it's also just not, like, it's not very sustainable. It's really hard to make enduring policy change in the face of massive public opposition. I could imagine a progressive listener saying that what's lacking here,

or what I'm not yet hearing is a clear theory for how you determine when to lead the public toward an unpopular position. That is to say, when to persuade the public and when to follow the public. So, for example, just to put two issues side by side,

gay marriage and yimbi politics, right? They might say, well, Matt, what you're essentially saying is when it comes to a cultural issue, gay marriage, the president should essentially be like a seismograph for public opinion. And once public opinion passes some imaginary threshold in Gallup or Pew, like now 51% of Americans are for gay marriage, or now 47% of Americans are for, you know, biological males who transitioned to female playing in college sports, that there we should follow the public.

But on YIMBY politics, you, Matt, have written for years, maybe even decades, that we should all be at glazer-pilled and make it easier for developers to build houses in downtown areas and inner suburbs where there's lots of demand for housing, but where decades of rules have accumulated that make it harder for supply to meet demand. So sometimes, Matt, now I'm just pretending

to be this progressive listener, sometimes, this is totally unfair. Sometimes you're telling politicians to lead the parade and sometimes you're telling them to follow the parade. What's the difference? Where do you draw the line? So, Matt, where do you draw the line? Well, I mean, I think the biggest difference there is that I think it was my job, and then it was your job to, like, popularize these ideas, right?

We've been out here, you know, on these streets telling people about zoning and permitting rules for about 15 years now. And I think that we have collectively, as a community, created a lot of space for these ideas by persuading people. I actually think it's notable that if you say like, where have the most impactful housing reform bills passed? These are normally bipartisan bills.

You know, it's at a certain point, elites in both parties have been convinced that this is a good idea. They have meetings with each other. They hash something out. The bill passes. The governor signs it. Everybody likes bipartisanship.

And then we see what the outcome is. You know, these bills aren't old enough to know whether there's going to be a huge public backlash to Florida live local or if people are going to say this is amazing because now there's apartment buildings on top of strip malls. But the way that legislation came together was that Democrats who care a lot about affordable housing and, you know, business Republicans who care about the Chamber of Commerce, like, came together and they said, like, we should do a zoning reform. and advocates had different ideas about exactly what that reform should be, and they tried to come up with something that they felt the public would swallow. In Texas, they did a zoning reform, and if you look at it on paper, it's sort of crazy. Like, it's required, you know, it preempts local jurisdiction zoning authority, but only in counties over a certain population threshold.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as an idea. But, you know, like the state legislators got in a room. And there were enough Republicans from rural areas who said, like, we want to do this bill, but we don't want it to apply to our counties. And there were enough Democrats from the cities who looked at it and were like, eh, like, good enough. So we'll do it. And, you know, that's politics, right?

So I have a kind of an unromantic view of the political process. I think that a lot of people have gotten ensnared in a much more kind of noble theory of how change happens, where practical politicians are going to get out there and they're going to lead and they're going to convince the people. And I don't think there's a lot of examples of that happening. You know, if you think about everybody on the progressive side, you know, we all like to talk about the civil rights movement and sort of what happens there. very little of that progress takes the form of President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, President Johnson, like boldly leading the charge for action. What you have is persuasion. You have elite bargaining. You eventually have pressure on the presidents to take action in ways that are discombobulating to their elite coalitions. And you also have judicial rulings, right? You know, you have consistently presidents of both parties,

appoint judges who do pro-civil rights rulings. That's how Brown v. Board of Education happens. There's no point in time when the mass public is, like, strongly in favor of segregation, and the president tells them that they're wrong and wins that fight. It was just civil rights was broadly popular with the northern white public. It was unpopular in the South. Lyndon Johnson, when he signed the Civil Rights Act, said, this is going to cost us the South for a generation.

And it kind of did. But he decided that was a price worth paying for an issue of extreme significance. And, you know, that's the other part of politics. Sometimes you've got to decide something is so important that I'm willing to lose my seat for it. You know, that's the big moral stakes. But you have to ask yourself, like, is this issue that?

It's interesting because what you're advancing is quite a weak theory of the presidency, or even a weak theory of politicians. You're saying it's not the president's job necessarily to persuade the public, but rather to win power with a public that believes what it believes, and then to marshal the public's, you know,

appetite for change, just enough to do good things without entirely losing them to the wave of thermostatic public opinion that will inevitably move against you. I mean, this is a very constrained theory of presidential power. It's just, I don't even have a question here. I just want to note it.

It is. I mean, I think it's a limited sphere. I think it's a, it's a theory that gives a good amount of scope for people in our line of work. Right. We're the persuaders who persuade, and the president's just preside, literally, over the landscape of our persuasion. But the most important thing politicians do goes back to what we were talking about. earlier with affordability, which is, you know, the public has opinions about a lot of things. And if the question is, like, who should hold which balloon, then an opinion is just an opinion.

But when the public's opinion is, like, I would really like you to bring the cost of living down, as we were saying before, it's A, it's not totally clear what that means. And B, it's definitely not clear, like, how would you do it? Right. Like, the really hard part of governing is you've got to take these things that people want you to accomplish, right? We want affordability. And so now it's like, you've got to make wise choices to achieve affordability. You know, back to Mamdani, right? He said he was going to freeze the rent.

I think most people who heard that believe that Mamdami will make their rent be frozen. His actual proposal is to freeze the rent on about 43% of New York City's rental stock, which is subject to this rent stabilization board. I think, I mean, I'm not, you know, clairvoyant, but I believe that if you freeze the rent on 43% of the rental stock, that's going to accelerate rent on the remaining 57%. So that's a technical problem, right? Like, it's good for him. It's a good campaign. But if your rent freeze actually makes most people's rent go up, I don't think you can come back to them and be like, but when this was my campaign slogan,

you really enjoyed it, right? And just to be fair, can you actually unpack why it would make the other 50% of renters' rent go up? Is it that landlords tend to oversee both rent-controlled and non-rent-controlled apartments? And so if they are trying to eke out a similar Y-O-Y revenue growth, then if you freeze 40% of their units, they have to increase the rent on the other 60% of their units, in order to make that revenue growth and keep up, you know, maintenance and everything else on the building. Is that the general idea?

Well, so that's part of it, right, is you would sort of puts the pressure to, you know, recoup the costs of building up to take care onto the deregulate ones. But just even more mechanically than that, it's, you know, a certain number of rent-stabilized units become available in any given year because people vacate them. if you give those people a better deal on the rent, via freezing the rent, they become less likely to vacate. So there are fewer rent-stabilized units available. This is not any galaxy brain, econ 101 stuff. It's just mechanically,

you're less likely to leave your house if you're getting a better deal on it. So then all the other people are pressed into the other, you know, you're like squeezing a balloon of demand for real estate. So it should, you know, it should accelerate the costs in the unregulated market. And again, you can't go back to the voters and say, like, well, you asked for this, right? Like, if the idea doesn't work, people aren't going to be very happy with you. Now, there's a million other ways he can try to address this and deliver on it.

But the point is, people wanted, for some definition of progress on affordability, progress on affordability. He centered housing affordability in particular. And now, like, his job as mayor is to come up with some way to deliver on that. Just like Donald Trump, he told us grocery prices we're going to go down. And then grocery prices have gone up and people are mad. And some of the reason grocery prices have gone up is he's put tariffs on imported food. He has deported the agricultural workforce. I said during the campaign, like, these ideas are not going to work. This is going to backfire. People voted for him anyway. So that's the flip side of like needing to listen to the voters is you have to think hard about what you're actually doing because the voters are not very

self-critical or self-aware about these things. Nobody ever says like, oh, it sounded like a good idea to me at the time. So like no harm, no foul. If their life isn't getting better in the specific way that they want, they will punish you. So you've got to try to solve problems. And it has to be said, this is one of the biggest problems with affordability as a theme, period. It's an incredibly falsifiable promise. Hope and change is beautiful in its vagueness. Who can say, oh, where'd the change go? Where'd the hope go? Harder to do. If you say, I'm the affordability president. I'm winning an affordability election. I'm going to make your grocery prices go down. And 12 months later, grocery prices are up because you've passed tariffs on Brazilian beans and, you know, South

American bananas, well, you have violated your promise and your economic popularity will plummet. And that's exactly what's happened to Trump. And this could happen. I put this in my essay this morning. This could also happen to the Democrats who win on the affordability message. They're making a very specific, very falsifiable promise. I'm going to freeze your rent. I'm going to freeze utility bills. I'm going to bring down the cost of everything. And if whenever those election cycles are over, four years from now, five, seven years from now, voters very well, might remember what they were promised and weren't delivered, and that makes those candidates quite vulnerable. I want to hold on Mundani for a minute longer, for somewhat surprising reason.

You anticipated the lesson of Mundani that I think is most convenient for centrist and moderates, which is that, yes, he won, but he only won with barely 50% of the vote, and his election seems to have accelerated turnout from Republican districts, which just goes to show that if you run candidates who the left wing praises for their leftiness, well, conservatives might notice their leftiness as well and show out in droves in order to defeat them. But there's also an interpretation of Mamdani's win that I think is quite convenient for the left. I remember this summer when I was at the Edinburgh Book Festival to talk about abundance. And Scotland, like every English-speaking country in the world cannot build a single house, and so they were enthralled

by this idea of housing abundance. But they didn't really want to talk to me about abundance. They wanted to talk to me about Zoran Mamdani, the recent winner of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. And I was like, what are you even, like, this man isn't even mayor of a city. He's the winner of a primary in every single human being in Scotland seems to have a picture-perfect familiarity with his biography. It speaks to the fact that Mumdani has done something here that's pretty remarkable. He's achieved a level of celebrity that I think has eluded moderates for a long time, arguably going back all the way to Barack Obama if we're going to call him moderate.

And I think that's a fair descriptor. And it returns me to this fixation of mine, which is, do moderates have a story problem? Does the center left have a story problem? Does abundance have a story problem? I talked about this with Representative Jake Ockin-Claas in the show a few weeks ago, and I think my answer from that conversation, as much as I really respect and love Congress from Ockin-Claas, is, yeah, we kind of do. There's a clear story to tell among economic populace.

There's a villain. It's the corporations. There's a good guy. It's the people. The corporations are beating up on the people, and we're going to invert that, and David will defeat Goliath. it's hard to tell a similarly clean hero's journey story about the center or moderates or even abundance.

And I just want to, I don't even have a question, I guess, at the end of that monologue. I just want to like throw it to you. Like, do we have a story problem? Well, so here's a slightly different interpretation of the same events that you have. It's a guy named Benjamin Barber, and a long time ago, 30 years ago now,

he wrote a book called Jihad versus Mick World. And this is about, you know, sort of dynamics in the globalized marketplace. And part of his point is that, like, McWorld is global, right? There's a sameness that exists in every country. And then there's always a counterreaction, like a jihad, which is local and is different in different places because the localized tradition is different places. You say that, like, everybody in Edinburgh knows about Zohan Mamdami. But what you're talking about is the narrow self-selected group of Scottish people who go to a book festival.

Right? So there's a kind of a micworld of college-educated professionals who take place in this globalized culture, right? That has certain shared values, that cares a lot about climate change, that cares a lot about certain senses of diversity that is sort of instinctively skeptical of nationalism, of different things like that. In that circle of people, Zohan Mamdami is incredibly popular, right?

So I'll get at these sort of like circular conversations with journalists. Well, they'll say, but doesn't Mamdami have like some like special sauce, some like extra juice that other politicians don't have? And, like, what he has is that his core demographic appeal is to the kinds of people who have access to a media megaphone. Right. Like, his favorable ratings are not particularly high.

Mamdami-style politicians lost mayor elections in Seattle and in Minnesota because their opponents in those cases weren't dogged by scandals. You know, Jeremy Corbyn was not ultimately popular in the U.S. but he attracted a large following among American leftists when he was the Labor Party leader. And then he went and phone bang for Mondani, right? And so there's this very interconnected world, which 15 years ago, you know, because you said like, you know, Obama, I think, was in many ways moderate by contemporary standards. But the Mick world of his time was really into Obama-style politics. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for no reason, you know, other than, like, Norwegian fancy people like to Barack Obama, right?

And, you know, this is where people in our line of work need to be a little bit self-aware. I mean, I'm much less left-wing than Mamdami is. At the same time, I find him quite charming. Like, I see the appeal versus somebody like Jared Golden, who I think is like an objectively more successful politician, I find myself very out of sync with him. When he says something I disagree with, I tend to be like, what is he even talking about? Like, where is this guy coming from? But the honest answer to that is where he's coming from is Lewiston, Maine.

Where Mamdami is coming from is New York City, just like me. And he went to Bronx Science. I know people who went to Bronx Science. He went to Bowden. I know people who went to Boone. Like, he's like me. So even when I disagree with him, I'm like kind of in sympathy. And when he says something I agree with, I'm like,

like, this is great. Like, the smart leftists understand the importance of permitting reform for housing. And you just got to remember, again, like, do the nannies fussing the kids about the balloons feel the same way as me? If you went to talk to, quote, unquote, everybody in Enborough, like, what would they think? Because I, I mean, just like you, like, I go all around the country and everywhere I go, I talk to people who are the same as the people who I know here. And I can go around the world and have the same experience. Like, I can go to, I've been to like the think tank for the German Social Democratic Party. And, you know, you go to Karl Marx House. And all those people, they all speak English. They all get all my references.

They've seen the same movies as I have. And they'll be like, you've probably only ever seen one German movie and it's Run Lola Run. And like, ha, ha, ha. I'm like, you know, because we're participating in the same culture. And so it's true that tapping into. into that culture has a certain kind of power. But it's not obvious that that's the power that wins elections or that those of us who have that power

are actually using it responsibly by just endlessly talking up the kinds of politicians who we enjoy. I think that's one of the more entertaining defenses of intellectual humility I've heard in a while. So I think we'll, in the interest of humility, I suppose we'll leave it there. Matt Iglesias, thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Beraldi, and we are back to our twice-a-week schedule. We'll talk to you soon.