The Daily - Two Blue States That Will Determine Control of Congress

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

This year’s presidential race looks certain to be won or lost in a handful of swing states where neither party has a clear advantage.But that is not the case for Congress.Nicholas Fandos, who covers politics for The Times, explains why control of the House is likely to hinge on what happens in two deeply blue states where Democrats run the show.Guest: Nicholas Fandos, a reporter covering New York politics and government for The New York Times.Background reading: Far from the presidential battlegrounds, blue states could decide Congress.Tracking the House’s most competitive races.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Hey, it's Michael. Back again, doing the talking before the show thing. Last week, and yesterday, we gave you a heads up that The Times is going to be asking listeners to become audio subscribers if you want full access to podcasts. As we said, there are a few things to know. Every day, our newest episode, That Day's Show, will remain free to everyone listening everywhere, as will the shows from the last few days. If you have full news subscription to the New York Times, and thank you for that, audio will be included. And if you don't

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It's a fascinating conversation, something we think that daily listeners will get a lot out of, and exactly the kind of great show that we think makes it worth subscribing and supporting NYT Audio. So stay tuned for that after today's show. Okay, here's today's Daily. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobauro. This is the Daily. There's never been any doubt that this year's presidential race would be won or lost in a handful of purple swing states where neither party has a clear advantage. That however is not the case for Congress. Today, my colleague Nick Fandos on why control of the House is likely to hinge on what happens in two deeply blue states where

Democrats run the show. It's Tuesday, October 15th. Tuesday, October 15th. Nick, thank you for making time for us on a holiday, no less. Michael, I am very pleased to be here. So I feel like if you're keeping count, I dare say we have made a hundred episodes, that's an exaggeration, but a lot of episodes about the presidential race. But we have spent comparatively little time talking about who's going to control Congress. And today, with you, we are going to rectify that.

And in particular, we're going to talk about control of the House of Representatives, the lower chamber. So set the stage for us and walk us through the stakes of this year's races for the House. Yeah, let me make a case for why the House of Representatives is uniquely important in this election. So obviously, as we all know, the race for the White House is incredibly close. But the race for the Senate is really tipping towards Republicans right now. Democrats have a shot, but it's an outside shot

to keep control of the Senate. So the House of Representatives is really kind of the second most important question. Because if Donald Trump wins the White House and Republicans have the Senate, the House being Republican would be a trifecta. It would unlock his ability to implement most of his policy agenda.

It would protect him from investigation or impeachment and really kind of lay the groundwork for two years of conservative Republican policymaking. On the other hand, if Kamala Harris wins the White House and doesn't have control of the Senate, the House is really going to be her only leverage point on Capitol Hill. It's going to be the kind of Democratic beachhead to help her try and get anything accomplished. But it is so close this year that there's a feasible possibility that actually Trump could win the White House and Democrats could keep control of the House, which would be a very powerful, potent check on a potential Trump presidency.

Remember, they impeached him twice before when he was in office. Right. In other words, no matter what happens, no matter who wins the White House, the House becomes the linchpin for either unified government or divided government. Very consequential either way. Precisely, and even before that happens,

the House is going to play a very important role in the kind of end stages of this presidential election. It is, as we all learned in 2021, the body that has to certify at the end the results of the presidential election. And last time, Donald Trump and his allies in the House were able to make a remarkable run at trying to disrupt that process, despite the fact that Democrats were in control of the House. So one can imagine a scenario where this time around if Republicans narrowly hold on to it and the presidential election ends

up in a near tie or another contested outcome, who is in control on Capitol Hill could be unbelievably important. I just want to make sure I understand that because I think the timing can get confusing for people. We think of Congress being sworn in around the time of the presidential inauguration. It actually happens before, so a new Congress will be required to certify the results of the election. You're saying if Republicans win control

of the House of Representatives, and Kamala Harris were to win the presidential race, then suddenly you're looking at a Republican controlled house that may try to block her certification as president, which would once again plunge this country into a very complicated and potentially very dark place. I think that that's a good summary and certainly a question and a scenario that's on a lot of people's minds right now. Right.

So what, Nick, is the current understanding of both parties' chances of winning control of the House right now? You explained when it comes to the Senate that the odds are very much that Republicans will flip it, win control, now walk us through the odds are very much that Republicans will flip it when control now walk us through the odds at the House. Yeah, the House is a true toss up. It is on a knife's edge. Republicans right now effectively have a four seat majority, basically the narrowest majority

in the century, and they're out there defending it. And there's a very limited number of competitive seats across the country because of gerrymandering in both parties, which have shrunk the map. A few dozen seats that could tip either way and an even smaller number of that that may affect the final outcome. But the really interesting feature of the race for the House this year is that the true battlegrounds don't match up with the presidential race. We're not talking about Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.

There are some races there. But the biggest clusters are actually in two large coastal blue states, New York and California. And why would that be? Well, let me just give a sense of numbers first, which I think will help illustrate this. There are 17 seats that Republicans hold right now that President Biden won four years ago. Of those, 10 of them are in New York and California, and five or six of them, Biden actually won by double digits.

So to put it a different way, Republicans in 2020 and 2022 were able to win a set of districts to build their majority that by registration or makeup tend to tilt Democratic or vote for Democrats for president. And so that means that Democrats clear his path to winning back the majority runs through those two states. What do we need to remember about those races two years ago that helps explain this dynamic and how we got here in these two deep blue states? So just to rewind the clock a little bit, remember, you know, 2022 was Biden's first midterm. Typically the party out of power, Republicans are expected to make a bunch of

gains across the country in the House. Republicans were expecting to pick up a pretty big majority. By and large, they had an underwhelming night in most of the country, except for New York and California. There are different reasons for that. New York and California, as anyone who has visited there or lives there knows, are very expensive places. And so they're extra

sensitive to inflation and food and housing and basically put voters into a very sour mood. At the same time, the pandemic brought this disruption to life all across the board and a spike in crime in some places. And it was really intensely felt, for instance, in New York, where a daily drumbeat of crimes on the subway or violent crimes on the street became kind of the dominant issue of the midterm campaigns and Republicans were able to really effectively message on this issue. And I think that the thing that unifies these states is that they're both states where Democrats have total control of government. Right.

Where voters are looking at these problems, which many places are facing across the country, but they have one party basically that's in charge that they can blame. Democrats control mayors' offices, the governors' mansions, and the White House. So why wouldn't you, if you're fed up about these issues and you think that government is not doing enough to help? Well, you know, you go against the guys in power and that meant going with Republicans. Right. So in that sense, Republicans weaponized New York and California's blueness and used

it against them very effectively through the issue, especially of crime. Precisely. And there was another issue with that blueness that actually hurt Democrats that's a little different. So across the country, abortion rights were one of the biggest rallying cries for Democratic candidates in the midterms. And they actually had a lot of success in swing states where voters perceived their abortion rights to be at risk after the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. But in New York and California, I think voters were a little bit more dubious about that. They knew that Democratic super majorities in Sacramento and Albany were not about to overturn abortion rights.

And so the issue just wasn't quite as potent in motivating Democratic voters to come out in the same kind of numbers that Republicans who were concerned about cost of living and crime and independence were to come out and vote against them. And so by the time election night comes around... Now it was a bumpy night on Long Island for Democrats. We start seeing these districts from Long Island up through the suburbs of Westchester and the Hudson Valley start flipping towards Republicans one by one. There was good reason for Republicans to cheer at their watch party in Nassau County on election

night. They just turned blue districts red. And in California, a number of seats that Democrats thought Republicans had no business representing, that they'd won in 2020, they start holding those races. Each one of them tips towards Republicans. Mmm. California's 27th district, this win for Republicans is the 218th seat. Republicans have now secured a majority in the House of Representatives. And at the end of the night, it all adds up to be enough for Republicans to hate the House majority.

Right. And the question is, is that going to happen again this year on Election Day? Are Republicans going to be able to motivate, especially these suburban voters, on anxieties around cost and crime? And will Democrats fail to motivate their suburban voters in these same districts around essential democratic motivating issues like abortion that could well determine, as it did two years ago, who controls the House this year? I think that is the most pertinent question because Democrats feel that they have learned a lot of lessons from 2022. Their candidates are better funded. They're running more adept campaigns targeting more voters. They're not taking these districts for granted. And most

importantly, they're aggressively messaging on a lot of the issues that voters still say they care about Crime cost of living immigration has really creeped up and the result I think is an election where on paper at least Democrats have a lot of really good pickup opportunities It looks like they should have a clean path back to the majority But in reality poll after poll is showing these races within the margin of error, that they could flip in either direction. And as I'm thinking about all these things,

there's one district in particular, in the suburbs just north of New York City, where a lot of these issues are coming into play. The possibility for Democrats of winning back the House, but also the reality for Republicans of having a strong set of issues and candidates to defend their ground on. And the outcome of that race,

which could come relatively early on election night, is probably going to tell us a lot about which way the whole House is tipping. We'll be right back. Nick, take us inside of this New York house race that you have been tracking pretty closely. So this is New York's 17th district. It's just up the Hudson River from New York City. It's kind of an interesting and complicated district. So a lot of it is the northern suburbs of Westchester County, which on balance are really

pretty affluent. One of it is the northern suburbs of Westchester County, which on balance are really pretty affluent. This is the home in Chappaqua, for instance, of Bill and Hillary Clinton. They're kind of sprawling country estate and there's multimillion dollar houses all up and down the Hudson. But at the same time, just across the river, there's communities in Rockland County that are more ex-urban, more working class, retired or active cops and firefighters and their families that tend to be a more traditional swing district.

If you add it all up, this has been real friendly to Democrats in the past. Biden won this district by 10 points, something like 80,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. But in 2022, in the midterms, this Republican assemblyman named Mike Lawler kind of comes out of nowhere and ends up defeating one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress for this seat. He harnesses a lot of the issues that we've been talking about and takes down this guy, Sean Patrick Maloney, who was not only defending his own seat, but was the head of House Democrats' campaign arm responsible for defending the majority nationwide. Right.

Lawler doesn't take out just any Democrat. He takes out a kind of Democratic lion who's supposed to protect the rest of House Democrats. Exactly. And he does it through some really adept messaging, taking each of these issues that we've been talking about and deploying them in very specific ways. The best example of this is around crime. So in New York, the crime issue was really kind of localized and intensified around the issue of cash or cashless bail.

Democrats in New York with good intentions of trying to get rid of this practice had pretty dramatically changed New York's bail laws in recent years. Today, we are pleased to bring you a debate among all four candidates running for the Democratic nomination. And Lawler had an old clip that turned out to be really valuable of his opponent, Sean Patrick Maloney. Do you believe in ending cash bail, Mr. Maloney? Absolutely, and I'd make it the top priority.

Saying on a debate stage, I support getting rid of cashless bail. Now, the legacy of cashless bail is complicated, but in this moment, remember where crime has kind of bubbled up after the pandemic, it's a really easy scapegoat for Republicans to point to and say, this is the reason, this is the cause. Is this guy serious?

Sean Maloney said his top priority was releasing dangerous criminals so they can commit more crimes? That's nuts. And Democrats didn't quite know how to respond to this. They tried defending the law. They tried changing the subject. And on election day, it turns out that a lot of voters were very agitated and very worked up about it.

And Lawler wins by just the tiniest of margins, a few thousand votes to become the Republican congressman and a kind of instant celebrity by dint of beating the National House Democratic chairman. And what kind of congressman does Lawler turn out to be given the dynamics of this district? He knows he's just wanted by a hair. Yeah. So Lawler knows from day one that he's going to have to defend this seat in two years. So he spends a lot of time from the very beginning reaching out to groups that you wouldn't expect

a Republican to talk to. It is critical in this day and age to have strong Republican support for labor. He courts labor unions, he courts independent and Democratic leaning moderates. When House Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy, Lawler was like unmissable on CNN for weeks talking about how stupid his party was, how idiotic it was and out of control it was. All of that work, all of that important work has now been upended by these eight selfish people who joined up with the squad to, frankly, upend the institution of the House and create a constitutional crisis.

Not the kind of thing you would expect somebody to normally do, right? Right. And it's good to be back. At one point as Washington is headed towards a debt default, President Biden actually travels to Lawler's own district to try and put pressure on him to strike a debt limit deal. Republican Congress Mike Lawler is here as well. Mike's on the other team, but you know what?

Mike is the kind of guy that when when I was in the Congress, they're the kind of Republican I was used to dealing with. And he ends up complimenting the guy. He's not one of these mega Republicans. He says like, this is the kind of guy that I can work with. He's not like the rest of his party. I don't want to get him in trouble by sounding nice about him or negative about him, but I thanks for coming, Mike. Thanks for being here. This is the way we used to do it all the time. He was trying to establish this independent brand. Like, yeah, there's an R behind my name, but I'm willing to vote across the aisle.

I'm willing to criticize my own party. He presents himself in all of this as kind of the adults in the room. It's time we work together to get our country moving again and lead the games to the room. It's time we work together to get our country moving again and lead the games to the kids. So all of this I think is important because Lawler knows heading into the next election that he's not going to have the element of surprise this time. The environment may be different, it may not.

He's going to need some Democratic and independent voters to stick with him and maybe come over to his side if he's going to win a second term. Mm-hmm. Okay. So Lawler proves very deft at being the kind of Republican that this district can embrace perhaps twice in a row. Talk about who he is facing on the Democratic side in this year's House race.

His Democratic opponent is Mondaire Jones. I was lucky to grow up in Rockland County. Jones is a former one-term Democratic congressman who lost his seat after redistricting in 2022, but he's got a lot of strengths as a candidate. Raised by a young single mom who, like so many incredible women throughout this district, still had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. He's got this remarkable biography, like really an American dream story.

My grandfather was a janitor, and my grandmother cleaned homes. He grew up poor, he ended up at Harvard Law School, became a lawyer, worked in government, and then won a seat in Congress. Growing up, I didn't see people like me in Congress. Then I was elected to represent the same people whose homes I watched my grandmother clean.

It was the kind of guy who looked like, you know, he could make Mike Lawler a one term congressman. But Jones also has some real baggage because when he ran the first time, he ran as just an out and out progressive. This was in 2020. It was after George Floyd was murdered, it was in the middle of the pandemic. He was for, at the time, defunding the police. He was really against a lot of the Trump era

border and immigration policies. And he staked his tent with the left and with progressives, which at the time was quite convenient and now has turned out to be a real heavy weight around his neck. I'm going to guess that Lawler is pointing to all of those old policy positions and statements in this year's race. Exactly. So just like he was able to use old clips of Sean Patrick Maloney to remarkable effect to hurt him. He's turning to, you know, old statements that Jones made that in many cases he now rebukes. He says he was wrong about defund the police.

He's advocating for more aggressive border policies this time around. But the problem is, you know, when voters TVs are being saturated with all these old clips. Liberal Mondaire Jones wanted to defund the police. He needed in mass incarceration and defund the police, defunding the police, cutting that funding and reallocating it to social workers. And ads from Mike Lawler that try and portray Jones as more accountable to AOC, to Andrea Ocasio-Cortez, than to the voters of this district. It undermines some of what Jones is trying to do to look more pragmatic.

And that's what he feels he needs to do to win this district. So Lawler is very much trying to make this year's race a carbon copy of the race two years ago, where it becomes a referendum on whether Democrats are too progressive on criminal justice policy, and therefore not basically hard enough on crime. And he's got some ammunition there in Mondaire Jones's record. Yeah, that's right. The issues may be a little different than 2022, but the pattern is basically the same.

I'm the adult in the room. I'm the reasonable one. I may not be the party you're used to, but I'm going to be a much more responsible actor in Washington for you than these crazy, out of touch Democrats. And how, Nick, is Mondaire Jones framing this race? Yeah, so Jones is running his own very aggressive campaign here, and he is maybe unsurprisingly focusing on the issue of abortion. Loller empowers the worst people in Washington.

Their platform would ban abortions even here in New York, without exception for rape or incest. Democrats think this time around, actually, it's a more potent issue because there's a presidential election at the top of the ticket, the specter of potentially a national abortion ban. They think will really motivate their voters even in these democratic states. Congressman Mike Lawler always votes against abortion, so we have to stop this guy. He is trying to take Lawler's record on this specific issue and show that it exposes him as kind of a fraud generally.

That he may say he's a moderate, but at the end of the day, he mostly votes with his own party. Right. He's saying Joe Biden might have praised him, but he's anti-abortion. Exactly. So all this has meant a very close and contentious race for months. There's been some surprises. Some of them brought by you yourself? Indeed, earlier this month I got a hold of some photographs of Lawler when he was a college student in the early 2000s

dressing up for Halloween in blackface. He was a Michael Jackson superfan. He still is. He even went out as an 18-year-old to Michael Jackson's criminal trial in California to attend it. But obviously, the imagery of Blackface is very charged and very offensive. Right. But it's unclear how much of an electoral impact this is going to have in the end. Lawler really didn't run away from it. He went right into it.

What did he say? For me, there was no ill intent. There was no effort to malign or make fun of or disparage black Americans. He went on CNN and said, look, I'm aware of the history of what blackface is. That's not what I was trying to do here. It was really an effort to pay homage to somebody who was a musical idol for me.

I've always loved Michael Jackson's music and his dance moves. Jones, for his part, called on Lawler to drop out of the race and resign from his seat. Mike Lawler knew exactly what he was doing. And he's not having his apology or explanation at all. He says, you know exactly what you were doing. And is only upset because he got caught doing it and

not because he actually engaged in offensive behavior. And you don't really seem that sorry. And so that brings us more or less to the present where Lawler has maintained a narrow lead in the polls. It's narrow enough that on Election Day this race could tip in either direction. You know that I think is indicative going back to this broader story about the climate in a state like New York or California, of just how surprisingly close each of these races are. Nick, we're spending all this time talking about the particular dynamics of this district,

New York 17, and the two candidates who are running for this seat. But I'm curious how the dynamics of the presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are likely to affect turnout in this district and voters' attitudes about the two candidates. Yeah, it's such an interesting one, because obviously the presidential candidates are not really spending any time in a district like this and in New York.

They're not really spending money here, but they are driving the kind of national mood around the election. For instance, you know, Democrats like Jones, I think were really heartened when Joe Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris got in because they saw the energy from their base, the engagement, the number of volunteers ready to sign up for them, just like skyrocket. And I think generally their theory of the case has been that in a presidential election, your turnout is much higher than a midterm. Both parties tend to turn out with enthusiasm.

And at the end of the day, it's a Democratic district. And if everybody turns out, the Democrat wins. Now, the interesting thing about that, I think, is that there's a Republican theory that Trump is actually becoming somewhat more palatable, or at least less offensive, in districts like these over time. Can you explain that? We've been seeing in national polling that Trump is actually improving most in states like New York and California. Blue states that he's never gonna win, but

where voters may be looking at his economic policies or his presidency with some nostalgia and saying, you know, he's not quite as bad as we thought or not as dangerous as we thought. Or you know, I still don't like him, but look what the Democrats have reaped in terms of inflation and crime and all these other issues. And this matters in these districts, again, not because it will affect Trump's outcome, but if Kamala Harris is winning Mike Lawler's district

by five points instead of the 10 that Biden won it by, it's a lot easier for Lawler to run ahead of the Republican ticket and still be able to win. So I think one of the questions I'm really interested in as we head into election day is actually how Trump performs in all of these districts. Cause it's gonna give us the answer of whether 2022 was just an aberration in places like New York

and California, or if, you know, some of these suburban exurban places that swung away from the Republicans during the kind of early to mid Trump era are now swinging back in a way that it's going to make them more competitive for years to come. Hmm. You're raising the possibility, which I'm sure Democrats are very loathe to contemplate, that Republicans have been developing in the Trump era a structural advantage in these

blue state swing districts? Yeah. I don't know that I would go as far as to say an advantage, but they have been eating into and eroding Democrats advantage, the advantage that they had and getting it back towards more kind of neutral competitive territory. And the question in this election is whether they can lock that in, and in doing so, open up possibilities for themselves not just this November, but in November's to come. But it's not a feta complete.

Harris and Mondaire-Jones, like, they get this. They're trying to communicate to voters that we have heard you. And if they can successfully convince them that they have, that they feel their economic pain, that they understand, you know, some of the policies of the past are not the direction that voters want to go in, then they could flip the script and buy themselves two more years to continue to change the democratic image in the way that they want to, and potentially reverse some of this swing back towards the Republicans in ways that could be just as meaningful and lasting.

Well, Nick, thank you very much. We appreciate it. You are welcome as always, Michael. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that Russia has recaptured several villages inside its own borders that Ukraine had invaded over the summer. That could threaten Ukraine's plan to use those Russian towns as leverage in negotiations to end the war. Ukraine still holds roughly 300 square miles of Russian territory.

But that's down from about 400 square miles that Ukraine occupied in the first week of its invasion back in August. And... And here we go. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, 4, 3, 2, 1, ignition. And liftoff. On Monday, NASA launched its first mission to Jupiter in more than a decade. This time, the objective is not to investigate the planet

itself, but instead one of its moons called Europa. This is a Falcon Heavy with Europa Clipper unveiling the mysteries of an enormous ocean lurking beneath the icy crust of Jupiter's moon, Europa. The $5 billion mission will study whether Europa, Jupiter's fourth largest moon, possesses conditions favorable for life. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke and Moudzadi. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Diane Wong, and was

engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landfork of Wanderley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Baboro. See you tomorrow. York Times opinion. This is the Ezra Klein Show. Pete Buttigieg has had one of these fascinating rises in politics. He went from being Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a small but noble town, to an unexpectedly competitive presidential candidate winning Iowa in 2020, to Secretary of Transportation, and now this year to the Democratic Party's acknowledged best of class communicator, a guy who fearlessly strides into Fox News, humiliating anchors and being the person sort of able to deliver

what the Democratic Party is about, what even in some ways Vice President Harris's campaign is about under duress. So with an opportunity to sit down with him, I wanted to ask him a bunch of questions I have of the Democratic Party. And they begin with a concept that he wrote a book about in 2020, which is trust. The Democratic Party has lost the trust of a lot of people once supported it. And it is presided over, endured, assorting of Americans by trust. Donald Trump's Republican Party

is a party full of people who don't trust the system, don't trust the government, don't trust Democrats, but it's become much more than that. So how does he think about trust? And what does he think government has done to lose it? What does he think Democrats have done to lose it? And what could be done to gain it back? I should say there is a rule, a law called the Hatch Act, that keeps members of the government from campaigning in their

official guise, which is fine. The strange thing about the Hatch Act though is it goes the other way too. And so in order to talk with Buttigieg more widely, I was not able to ask him a number of questions I would like to ask him about his work as transportation secretary. But given that, we had, I think, a pretty fascinating conversation. As always, my email is reclinejoe at nytimes.com. Pete Buddha, Judge, welcome to the show.

Pete Bouda Thanks for having me on. Pete So, back in 2020, you wrote a book on political trust. And there are a million ways to show that it has declined. But what's your explanation for why it has declined? So one of the reasons I think it's declined has been a kind of a feedback loop between public institutions letting people down and people then hesitating to empower those public institutions to solve their problems. So if you go back to the rise of Reaganism, one of the quotes he's best known for that the most

frightening thing you can ever hear is somebody saying, I'm from the federal government and I'm here to help. That generation of conservatives, when they took power, didn't just believe that government was the problem. His other famous saying, right? Government is the solution, government is the problem. But they also stripped away a lot of the capacity of government to solve problems. That becomes, I think, a feedback loop where if you're looking around and you're seeing crumbling infrastructure or widening inequality, you might think, oh, the government sucks at fixing these problems. And then the next time you're being asked, for example, in the course of an election to vote for a candidate who's going to make sure there's enough funding going to the government. You say, I'm not going to put tax money into the government.

Government sucks. That too becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the next thing you know, these public institutions are less and less able to address things. You contrast that with what you have, for example, in Nordic countries. And I know it is always like almost exhaustingly, like a go-to for liberals, right? To point to a Nordic example. Ah, Sweden. But importantly, one of the many, many things that would be nice for us to have that they have in Sweden is a high perception of tax fairness. Partly that's because I think they actually have a fairer tax code. But I also think there's been a virtuous cycle there where

public entities have done a reasonably good job of taking care of people. People therefore have a relatively high level of trust that their tax dollars will be used fairly and wisely. And therefore they allow those institutions to have the running room they need to try to solve things. I don't mean to reduce all of this to a debate over the size of government. I think one of the things that we've gotten smarter about now is how it's on the left, is that it's not just how big or how small government is. But I do think that's an example of one of the factors that was very corrosive. A more recent one, of course, is the way information moves around.

There's a lot of hope with the arrival of the internet that the democratization of reporting was going to be empowering. And in some ways it was some very important ways, like human rights abuses that were captured on smartphones could no longer be denied. Right. On the other hand, what we didn't think about was that the editorial function of identifying what is true or not true.

What is newsworthy or not is dissolved or non-existent in those same online spaces, which meant that lots of different things, some true, some false, some worth attention, some questionable, were all put into the same swirl and got imbibed as if they were all the same. I think that's another example of something that's led to this world we're in now where people don't even trust that we're in the same factual reality as one another.

So let me take these explanations in term. I would take the first one as a policy feedback theory. Bad policy creates negative trust. Good policy should create positive trust. I would say I believed something more like that at the beginning of the Biden era and watched a bunch of policies that I would have thought would have created, even just for themselves, feedback loops, like the child tax credit expansion.

Not quite work. I was thinking about this this week, because in the American Rescue Plan, the Teamsters got a big help in hand. And they just declined to make an endorsement in this election, declining to endorse Vice President Harris for the first time in modernity. And that's putting it mildly. I mean, their pensions were saved by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

So if you would have thought that policy feedback loops work anywhere, you save the Teamsters, the Teamsters like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris better, would have been about as tight a feedback loop as you could imagine. And it didn't work. And the description or the reason the teamsters gave for not making a national endorsement was that their membership is sort of heavily pro-Trump. So how does something like that fit with the theory that people are responding here to whether or not policy seems to be helping them?

Well, part of it, an unsatisfying, but I think very true answer is time. These things don't happen that quickly. The child tax credit can take effect very quickly. And the astonishing results in terms of the swift reduction of child poverty showed that some good policies can also work very quickly. But that doesn't mean that it soaks into where people award political credit for that very quickly or even embrace the policy that was helpful. And one good example, maybe the best example I can think of on this, on how there was in

fact a policy feedback, but it wasn't quick, has to do with the Affordable Care Act. Now I cut my political teeth running for an obscure statewide office in 2010, state treasurer in Indiana. And that's one of those races where your prospects pretty much depend on the generic rising or falling of your party. And believe it or not, it didn't seem insane to run as a Democrat in Indiana in 2010 because in 2008, Barack Obama had carried Indiana. You had to have it by as a senator.

Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I knew it was uphill even then. But of course I got clobbered. Every Democrat just about in any even remotely competitive area, let alone a reddening state like Indiana was clobbered. Because in 2010, the Affordable Care Act was absolutely toxic to us Democrats. It was the issue that cost many Democrats the election. By 2018, the ACA was actually the winning issue for Democrats. So much so that when Kamala Harris challenged Donald Trump

over his attempts to destroy it, he was avoiding his own commitment to what was very much his own policy. He definitely wanted and tried to undo the Affordable Care Act and get rid of all that. But it is now politically dangerous for him to admit it. So eight years is a long time and it's not a long time. I think it's not a long time for a major policy issue to flip its political valence. It's not a long time for an important policy to bear enough fruit that people appreciate it and then are protective of it. But it's also too slow for those who, including members of Congress who helped get the ACA passed to live politically, live to tell the tale.

So here's a question that may seem unrelated on trust, but I think it's actually related. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president this year. He dropped out and endorsed Donald Trump What did he make that that run end of that endorsement? Weird doesn't even begin to characterize how I view that campaign. I think the endorsement is less weird actually because there's an appeal to Anybody who kind of wants to burn it all down, is probably

a crossover Trump slash RFK junior voter. And a particular flavor of conspiratorial style that I see that they have in common, which is a conspiracy is introduced, a conspiracy theory is introduced by somebody saying, they won't tell you this. Don't trust them. They don't want you to see this. They're not reporting on this, but I'm going to tell you. Which ironically is saying like, you can't trust anybody else, but you can sure trust me, which should make you skeptical immediately. But that style of saying, I know something that the establishment doesn't and they're lying to you in RFK's case, most

famously about vaccines. And of course, again, there's a lot of crossover here, right, between his famous anti-vax stances and what you get in Trump world. But there's that same kind of affect. And it is a little bit post-policy. I don't know how much they align on policies really, actually with each of them for different reasons, it's hard to pin them down on policy. But I do think in that sense, it was natural. So I think that's right. And it gets at this other dynamic. So two things to me have happened with trust over the last couple of decades. One is that it's gone down, the kinds we're talking about.

The other is that it is sorted. So you used to have what I would call low trust in the system voters in both parties. And RFK Jr. was a recognizably left wing version of that. They don't believe in vaccines and GMOs, the corporations are taking everything over, maybe can cure cancer with vitamin C, that kind of thing. And the right wing versions of this, going all the way back to the John Birch Society. But he had a bunch of them on both sides.

And something that Donald Trump seems to have set off in politics is a realignment. My friend Matt Glacier calls it the crank realignment. And so now you have RFK Jr. moving over to the right. It's not that he's on policy a right winger. He doesn't want to necessarily get rid of Medicaid. I guess I don't really know his position on Medicaid. Maybe he does. I've not asked him.

It's a fair point. But there is this clustering of higher trust voters in Democratic Party, voters who believe in the system and lower trust in the Republican Party. What does that do to politics? I think that that sorting is kind of unique to this moment. I don't know that it's durable. In one sense, it's the most natural thing in the world

for the more right of center party to be anti-government and therefore if the establishment means government, for you to be skeptical. But when it becomes any institution, including your county run election administration, which is literally being run by your neighbors, or to move outside of government, kind of medical academia saying, hey, these vaccines are working or anything else. Then I think it becomes a lot more dangerous and corrosive. And again, I think it puts us back in this world where people kind of have their own

realities or their own facts. And if there aren't some agreed on trusted arbiters of some of this, whether it's in the press or in the academy, uh, it's less likely to be in government. But one reason we have certain. Importantly non-partisan institutions in government, like the judiciary is supposed to be is for this reason. You lose that whether it has a partisan valence or not, it's bad news. So this may be a good time to bring in your occasional foil, JD Vance.

There's just today, I guess, reporting that you are playing JD Vance in debate prep with Tim Walsh. As you've spent time trying to get into his head and into his demeanor? What have you come to understand in him or believe about him that you didn't before? He's somebody who is a product of the Midwest, but after trading off of that Midwest identity is now in my view promoting policies and a ticket that would be really harmful for the industrial Midwest. And so I'm thinking a lot about this kind of what I consider to be a faux populism, this space he's carved out, where he achieves a certain credibility by criticizing both parties, saying that Democrats and Republicans in the past have gotten things wrong. But then all the

prescriptions he seems to be ready to vote for or act for are things like undercutting a right to choose or tax cuts for the rich or a lot of other things that I think are objectionable about good old fashioned Republican policy. I'm just thinking a lot about how to penetrate that veneer. But that doesn't let you play him. I guess one thing I'm curious, the reason he's a curiosity to me, I knew him a bit, he was on my show back in 2017, back in an earlier guys, I've watched a lot of politicians in the Republican party go from being Trump haters to Trump supporters

or something beyond Trump supporters. He's really the only one who I've watched his whole temperament and personality and way of talking and being and moving through the world change. Ted Cruz had Ted Cruz's personality in 2013. Right. He was shutting down the government. He was not well liked by his colleagues. Marco Rubio is much friendlier to Trump now, but same sort of guy temperamentally.

JD Vance has, it's like went through a temperamental overhaul. He became angrier and resentful and contemptuous of the people who disagreed with him. Also at the same time, things were going really well for him personally, right? It's not like he was vastly rejected by him. He was a best seller. He was the toast to the town. How do you understand, as you're one trying to absorb his temperament? Cause you're, I'm sure you're trying to prepare him all for that. What do you make of that? Well, I've certainly seen a lot of Republicans, especially my generations,

Republicans go through some version of this evolution, although you're right. I think it's more dramatic in his case. I think it means there's a real contradiction in him because he is simultaneously the Republican who's supposed to explain a new kind of conservatism to the world, including the New York Times readers, and he's supposed to embody this kind of angry populism and this kind of facts don't matter nihilism of what Trump represents, even though he eloquently called it out before he got on board with it. But I think sometimes we make these things way more complicated than they are. I think there's a bunch of people, including him, who know deep down how bad Donald

Trump is for the country, realize that they could gain power by attaching themselves to him, and they did it. And that's one thing that he has in common with a very different Midwestern, Mike Pence. It worked out really poorly for Mike Pence. And that's part of why it's going to be JD Vance sitting on that stage. A big part of the JD Vance theory of the world now, theory of politics, you see this in Project 2025 too, is that they, you, have captured the institutions, right? Captured the government particularly. And that the thing that the MAGA movement needs to do,

which is now sort of laid out in much more detail on something like 2025 than it ever was in President Trump's first term, is that they're going to march through the institutions, break them, rid them of the deep state of the liberals of whatever, and get them back. JD Vance once called this deep authentication, working off of what America did after the invasion of Iraq. An interesting analogy. But this is

their sort of promise to the low-trust voter. You think the system is against you, you don't trust it. Don't turn away from the system. We're gonna take it, break it, and wield its power for you, and use that to bring corporations to heel, universities to heel, all the other institutions in American life you don't trust anymore. Right, that's the sort of unified governing theory of MAGA. How do you take it?

Well, the problem is what he's saying is these institutions don't work for you, the people, so we're gonna take them back on behalf of the people. But what he means is these institutions don't work for me, a right-wing politician, and so we're going to put them under the control of right-wing politicians. And if you look at something like what project 2025 would do to the civil service and taking a lot of what are importantly nonpartisan roles and make them directly subject to political control, it is less than plausible that that is going to benefit

anyone but whoever's controlling them. Now, of course, I think it's completely upside down to have a political party that's most associated with tax cuts for the rich and letting corporations have their way, offered to be the ones that are going to make these institutions work better for you precisely because we have had nonpartisan institutions handle things like regulation, that we have some stability to the rule of law in this country and that it's aligned not around the interests of any one person, political or financial interests of any one person, but around those of the public. You cannot have safety and peace and rule of law, let alone a healthy political system if there's this sense that the government is personally controlled by one person that's not safe or good. And so I think what we have to do is see through that. Now, you are more susceptible to

believe something like that. If you feel like it has failed you so completely that anybody offering to just smash it is bringing you some kind of benefit, which is why these institutions really have to do a better job of delivering for people. I think sometimes one way you build trust with people is owning up to failure. And something you said I thought was interesting, you and I sort of come up in the same era of elite failure. The Iraq War is an elite failure. The financial crisis is an elite failure. There's a lot that goes wrong in this period.

What specifically in your view does the Democratic Party have to own up to? Where did the Democratic Party go wrong in this era? And what lessons either has it learned or does it still need to learn? Well, certainly I think the complicity of the Democratic Party in the run-up to the Iraq War continues to be something that really helped set America onto the political trajectory that we're on right now.

And I think that you see, for example, another flip in politics that's very revealing is that I remember in 2002 as a college student, volunteering on a democratic congressional campaign, the Democrats everywhere who were skeptical of the idea of the Iraq war were still kind of pretending to be okay with it because they thought they had to be. What campaign were you volunteering on? The local congressional race where I lived in South Bend, Indiana, and we did not win. But by 2016, Donald Trump, who was for the war, is pretending he was against it.

So again, it took a while, but things really shifted there, obviously, partly because of the disastrous consequences of the invasion. But I think that provoked or should have provoked a lot of introspection on the left or among Democrats, I should say, on how we allowed ourselves to go along with that. There's a lot of introspection in our party, I think, over policies that may be making it harder to build things. Housing is the one that I know you've paid a lot of attention to and probably gets the most attention, but there's lots of things from mining for materials needed for clean energy to infrastructure, which I won't get into now because I'm here in my personal capacity. But a lot of things that it's clear,

it's not a straightforwardly clear. So I think the right thing is that, well, if you got rid of all these regulations and environmental protections, then we wouldn't have this problem. But I do think we've, you know, we've got to be a little more serious about, about that. I could go on. There's a, you know, we're a party that loves to criticize ourselves. You can't dangle that housing bait in front of me and not expect me to take it. Expanding housing supply, which is not a thing Democrats were emphasizing 10 years ago, was the first thing on Kamala Harris's first major set of policy proposals.

She wants to build 3 million new houses over her first term. Barack Obama, when he was at the DNC, he brought that up first in his list of new ideas for a Democratic party. Housing is a lot harder to build. I have done a lot of work on this. Where Democrats govern, it's a lot easier to build a I have done a lot of work on this where Democrats govern. It's a lot easier to build a home in Texas than it is in California. That is true today, right?

Gavin Newsom is the governor of California and has passed a lot of pro-housing legislation. It is still harder to build in California than in Texas. Why? What, what did Democrats get wrong here? Well, I don't want to make this out to be just a democratic thing, but it's clear that out of a desire, part of which, by the way, is very well-grounded to make sure that bad things don't happen.

You wind up with a lot of measures put into place that stop anything from happening, including good things. Right. But I also think it's important in telling that she has led with this policy to expand housing supply because that's clearly a problem. And one thing that I think is especially important about this moment, and I think also characterizes what I would think of as Bidenism, is a willingness to meet a big problem with a lot of ambition

and a belief that if you get it right, good government can be part of the solution. There's been a tremendous amount of energy in the Democratic Party, in the Biden administration, to build more clean energy by creating subsidies, tax credits, making sure people know there will be a market for this if you build it, if you design it, creating innovation hubs. If you can spend money to create energy, we are doing it. And it's having an effect, a big effect. And I support that hugely. This question of Democrats and maybe the government in general has made it too

hard to do good things and an effort to stop bad things. Not a lot has happened on that side. There's not been permitting reform passed. There's not been major changes made to things like the National Environmental Policy Act. There's a lot of housing talk, but there's not been much done on deregulating housing. This seems like a thing that is sort of winning intellectually much more than it is winning at a policy level. And when I report on it, it's because people are inside among Democrats very uncomfortable

with this still, right? They don't want to unwind this. They are very worried, again, understandably about bad things happening. So in terms of managing something that has been a bit of a failure, like what are the ideas here that might work? What are the steps Harris could take if she were president or just it should be taken in your view as a private citizen? Part of it is resources matter, right? That's why she's proposed resources going into that. I don't want to dismiss how fundamental that is, but yes, for that to work, you also have to have policies that accompany that. And part of it, I think that's important, is empowering the local. And this might be another example of where, well, I can give you all kinds

of reasons why in my time as mayor, I thought Democrats tended to be better allies to my city than Republicans, I will still acknowledge that Democrats have sometimes been a little quick to look at a federal solution when we really need to recognize that a lot of our salvation socially and policy-wise, I think will come from the local. Now, part of that's my bias probably is having been a mayor, but I've also seen many ways that that's true. Partly because things like misinformation and disinformation, while of course, crazy rumors happen at every level, they are less likely to dominate at the local

level because when you're closer to home, you can see through what's real and what's not, whether that's, uh, uh. Whether that's threats being invoked about what bad thing would happen if you built this. Or an example that's live in the news right now, which is how the community of Springfield, Ohio, at a local level, is handling itself in a much more dignified way than what is being said about them and done to them in their

name by people like JD Vance. Yeah. I mean, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about that in a minute, but just before we leave this, what do you mean by empowering the local level? Because on the one hand, little sounds better. And I agree with you that local politics are typically more dignified and decent than national politics. And on the other, when you think about what makes it hard to cite transmission lines,

what makes housing hard? It's often decisions local governments are making fully rationally, right? Maybe you don't want to be the city where the solar farm is placed. Maybe you don't want to be the city where the transmission lines go through. Maybe you don't want the big multifamily units going up near you. So you see in a lot of places, governor is trying to take power up to the state level, right? Trying to make more of the decisions, state decisions rather than local

decisions. So on the one end, there's this tendency in politics to want to empower local government. A lot of these decisions are local. And on the other, when I look at this, I often see the problem is that these decisions are extremely local. And so the governor of California I look at this, I often see the problem is that these decisions are extremely local. And so the governor of California, the governor of Maryland might need for their state to have a lot more homes built or clean energy built. But for each

individual city, they don't want it in their city, they want in the other city. Yeah. I mean, in that sense, it can seem like a classic collective action problem. I guess my point is if there is a local obstacle, there's more choices on how to handle that than just to ram it down the local community's throat. And one of them is to adequately set a table where mitigations or trade-offs can be set so that a local community, if it's really being asked of them to swallow something that's difficult for them on the one hand, can be made better off on the other hand, in a way that's also consistent with the bigger thing getting done.

Vice President Harris has said that what she wants to build is an opportunity economy. Opportunity is always one of the weird terms in American politics because you can't find anybody who disagrees with it, right? There's no politician who says, look, I'm against opportunity. I do not want an opportunity economy. And so it's been there with Bill Clinton, been there with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, presumably Donald Trump. I don't actually remember him talking about opportunity, but he might have.

What is different about the theory of it this time, if we've been pursuing this for so long across so many administrations, so many sessions of Congress, and we haven't gotten to a thing where people can say, look, we've built the opportunity economy that you've been promised by administration after administration. What about either the definition of opportunity here or the policies under consideration here will make that different? Well, I'll tell you the yardstick I would use to see

if we're getting to the thing, social mobility. The kind of mathematical definition of the American dream, if it can be reduced to that, is the likelihood that you're going to wind up better off than you started. If you were born in 1945, there's a 90% chance that would be true. For someone your age or my age, it's coin flip. Changing that is I think the best indicator that this is an opportunity economy, that this is an opportunity society. But I don't know that I would accept the premise that we're kind of still casting about for it. I'd say we're very much underway in making it happen. There are some

indications that we're already trending toward more social mobility, economic mobility being available. I think this is especially important because I know in past political generations, opportunity has been basically a code for ideological centrism that means that you're going to see the kind of neoliberal framework kind of playing out. But what's different in the most last few years, I think think is a real level of investments, recognizing that opportunity isn't just about deregulating some space where you're hoping to open a small business, but also making sure that by the time you're out to open a small business, you're doing it on a foundation of education, the infrastructure, and whatever else you

needed in life to get to that point. And so to me, it's not kind of we're wandering around looking for a solution. It's that we're trying to reverse 40 years at least, 50, depending what metric you're looking at, of widening inequality and in some ways diminishing opportunity. And the last three or four years has been an incredible amount of headway toward that. Let's see how far we can take it. And also head off the threats to opportunity that we know are looming, most notably climate. So the other side of the race here, Donald Trump, his economic plan is, I guess, in a way straightforward, which depending on the day you hear him talking about it is a 10

or 20% tax on all goods imported from any country and a 60% tax on goods imported from China. His argument made in the debate, made in different speeches, is that Americans won't pay that as higher prices. That will be companies in other countries giving us money, sort of like a tax that'll fill our coffers. It'll make sure more production happens here. And that is the way we will become more competitive Polling shows 56% of Americans support the plan

What do you think of both it as actual policy and? It as politics only is terrible policy and I think that Americans will be less supportive of that as they do the math about the estimated Americans will be less supportive of that as they do the math about the estimated $3,900 a year in costs that a typical family might face if he got a chance to implement that policy. But just as importantly in results terms, we need to be talking about, my party needs to be talking about why it was that there was a manufacturing recession on his watch before COVID by the way.

And what it means that actually jobs are coming back to the United States in manufacturing right now. And that is because of industrial policy. That is a huge achievement of the Biden-Harris years. And it is just getting started. I can't tell you how many places I have seen. Think about where I grew up, South Bend, Indiana. Still in some ways trying to recover from the loss of the Studebaker Car Company in 1963. Our downtown was haunted by huge factories with broken windows. The biggest investment that I'm aware of happening in my lifetime up until recently, was about a $1 billion investment in a steel plant on the west edge of the county. That was such a big deal that even though it happened in 1990, people were still talking about it and many economic development professionals

were still kind of making their name on it 20 years later when I became mayor. Right now, there is a $3 to $4 billion investment in electric vehicle batteries going on right next to that steel facility. There's an $11 billion Amazon Web Services data center being built a few miles from there. And another one going up to Microsoft putting in that I can't even remember how much is being invested. So collectively, in order of magnitude beyond anything we had seen since the Kennedy administration, those are the kinds of things that he is falsely saying would be delivered by his all tariffs, no investment strategy.

So behind the all tariffs strategy is a theory, and I think it's consistent in Trump and deep in him, but now sort of more broadly shared by the MAGA movement, which is a very zero sum theory of how the economy works. We are in competition with other countries for factories, for jobs, and the way to win that competition is to tilt the field against them. The sort of trade theories of Trump, which go even beyond tariffs, kind of have a similar view of it. And so there's a zero sum competition between native born workers and immigrants for jobs,

for wages. When JD Vance is not just being racist about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, what he is saying is that they're there, they're taking away the jobs, they are raising housing prices. This is an old strain in economics and in politics. But I'm curious what you think about, I guess, in its appeal, because I do think it's sort of intuitive to people that we're in different kinds of competitions. People do look and they think, well, yeah, if an immigrant gets his job, I'm probably not getting it, or somebody else is not getting

it, or if another country gets a, you know, a TSMC semiconductor factory, we're not getting it. Like how do you answer the intuitive appeal of zero-sum economics? Well, look, two things can be true at the same time. One is that there is competition between us and other countries. And the other is that it isn't zero-sum. And I do think another thing that really costs a lot of trust in places like where I grew up is we were told, just go along with all these things that are positive.

Some the pie will get bigger. Don't worry about your slice. It'll definitely be bigger because the whole pie is going to get bigger. And only half of that promise came true. The pie got bigger, but a lot of people's slices in places like the industrial Midwest, where I grew up didn't. And so you got to understand why people have a level of receptivity to that. And at the same time, the idea that it's zero sum is just clearly not true. And again, that's why I think stories like immigration are a lot more nuanced and less kind of fit

to that narrative. When you actually look at them at the local level, certainly in South Bend, part of how we finally, finally became a growing city after being called a dying city had to do with immigration. And that was also tied up with economic growth that was happening. Jobs were growing and people were growing and it was not people were coming in to compete for the same jobs. We wound up with more jobs and more people.

That's happening in Springfield, Ohio right now. And it's a complicated situation there. But one thing that's definitely happening is way more jobs than they had before and way more people in a city that lost thousands and thousands of its people. But I also think this is a good example of the benefits of taking politics offline.

And part of what I mean when I say that salvation will come from the local, because even though obviously these attitudes can prevail at a local level too, I think actually people do have a richer understanding of how we benefit from what one another brings when it's in the context of your own community. I've been thinking about this question with Vance because I've been going back and rereading Hillbilly Elegy. And one of the striking things about that book is that Vance understands his own story as an immigration story, that his family is part of an immigration to Ohio, for jobs that when they got there, they were looked down upon.

Right. He's extremely explicit about this and extremely compassionate about it when it is about his people. And, you know, I've been reading a lot of the reporting from Springfield. And there's a lot of decency there in it, right? That the people who are in Springfield have been like trying to shout, right? Like, yeah, the problem is here. This has been tough in certain ways or happened a lot of new immigrants to the community. And also our economy is doing well.

And also people are not eating cats and dogs. The cat was in the basement, sort, famously now in one of the... And there is a sort of remarkable absence of the grace asked for, for your version of the same story playing out now. I don't know, I just find it hard on myself to track. Yeah, I think, look, I have very mixed feelings about even talking about this because my opinion, my strategic opinion is that when they do things like spreading rumors about people eating cats

in Springfield, it's not to help with the plight of Springfield, Ohio, it's to make sure that we're not talking about how Donald Trump dismantled the right to abortion in this country and the manufacturing recession that happened on his watch and his plans to tax, do tax cuts for the rich and everything that's in project 2025. And we're also not talking about it, how and why Kamala Harris won the debate and what she's going to do to make sure we have a fairer tax code. So all of that is in the back of my head as I even take this up. And yet I think it is worth

dwelling on something you mentioned. I think one of the most interesting details to come out of this whole set of stories is that when that resident of Springfield realized the cat was in her basement, she didn't just go dark. She reached out to her neighbor, if I understand the story right, used a smartphone translator app to help express regret to her neighbor. And as she's telling the story, she's still in a MAGA hat and a Trump shirt. It's not that she suddenly flipped over to become a bleeding heart liberal Democrat, but that's exactly the kind of grace that at our best we show. By the way, it takes a lot to do that, to make an apology, to acknowledge regret.

Exactly the thing that is literally anathema to Trump and Trumpism, right? Never admit you were wrong even when you're obviously wrong. Never back down even if you're obviously lying that JD Vance has taken to its extreme level when he literally sat on CNN and said, if I have to create stories, I'll do it. But I think what happened there, that grace, that humanity is incredibly important because in our actual lives, these things are complicated. It is true that Springfield is growing. It is true that their economy is growing. It is true that their population is growing. It is also true that with thousands of new arrivals there, not because they are immigrants, but because they are people.

There are a lot of people going to the hospital and enrolling in schools that were not designed to take that big of a shift in a single year or a couple of years. It was not true that disease is up or crime is up. So it's complicated, but what you didn't hear from JD Vance is what I think an earnest politician would do, which is say, some of my constituents had this problem, so I went and got them help. Right? I mean, this all originated supposedly with them saying we need more federal help. He's their United States Senator, it's literally his job to mobilize federal help for his constituents. I haven't heard a peep out of him about anything he's doing to solve the problem. Because of course, his purpose is not to solve the problem, because of course his purpose is not to solve the problem, is to use the problem.

And that's a pattern we see again and again and again in how Trump fans deal with any issue from immigration to any of the others. And yet that decency is there. And there's even a part of me, and I admit that this sounds optimistic, but there's a part of me that wonders when the breaking point will come, as it always does when there is a vulnerable group set out to be targeted, set out to be hated, feared, discriminated against, subject to random violence. At various times, it's been different groups. I mean, at one point it was the Irish,

and then it was the Italians. Before it was Haitian immigrants turn, it was LGBTQ Americans. And maybe in the most parallel example in terms of the way it kind of looked and felt for the persecutors, people who were suspected of being communists. And then something happened and it's not really clear what exactly changed, except after years of everybody being on the hunt for communists, one day Joe McCarthy's out there sputtering about communists everywhere. And somebody says, at long last have you no decency. And the whole thing fell apart. I don't know whether that day is 10 years away or whether the fact that this Ohio narrative coincides with Trump and

Vance slipping in the polls this week means that it's sooner than we think or somewhere in between. But I do believe that that day will come and anybody who signed up for this nonsense will have a lot of explaining to do. The reason I have trepidation talking about this is that I think the way the human mind works is even if the reason you're hearing the words Haitians and eating dogs and cats in a sentence 40 times a week now is to be told it isn't true, that there is in some limbic level, associations begin to happen that then can be activated in negative ways. But one of the things that has put me in mind of, which was true, I guess, even before we got to this distilled point of hatred and libel, is in my political lifetime, I have

never felt the conversation about immigration as far right as it is now. The frame is border security. We don't talk about comprehensive immigration reform. The frame is border crisis, right? And there is a genuine policy problem here. But it does seem like a lot of ground has been lost, right? The discussion is almost entirely about how to get fewer people to show up and not what immigrants contribute, not even what the goals of American immigration policy should be except to not have so many

people show up and claiming asylum. I'm curious how you track why those politics have moved and changed the way they have. Well, to come back to where we started, I think people are more susceptible to that message and that frame when they feel like they are being shorted, cheated, or left out, or failed. I think a lot of people feel that way. I think there are good reasons, not immigration isn't necessarily one of them,

but there are good reasons for people to feel shorted and left out and cheated. We're doing something about that. And a lot of the Biden Harris message has been about standing with workers, standing with consumers, people who are getting shorted, cheated, left out or treated unfairly. But I feel like that's been happening to you for a long time. It's just going to be more fertile ground for that kind of thing. It doesn't make it right. It doesn't make it okay. But it's one of many, many reasons why lots of different problems, including social and political problems, open up when you allow inequality to widen, as America has done for a half century. And perversely, in my opinion, sometimes that inequality leads to resentments that lead to politics that empower politicians like

Donald Trump and JD Vance, whose policies will definitely make that inequality worse. And yet, policies will definitely make that inequality worse. And yet, it's a clear result of allowing that corrosion to happen in the first place. Obama sort of reflected something, you saw it in Clinton in a different way. A view that you had to have credibility on border security first, to have credibility in the rest of the conversation. So famously Obama, early in his first term, really increased the pace of deportations. And there was a lot of anger at him later for that because there was a feeling that he did that

to win credibility that didn't lead to anything. They were not able to pass comprehensive immigration reform, even though it did pass out of the Senate in 2013. And Donald Trump obviously swung things very far in an anti-immigration direction. And then the border under the Biden administration did see a huge, huge influx. We did see record levels of encounters at the southern border. But I guess one of my questions is whether or not this sort of

old theory of this was right, that in order to be credible on the compassionate side as a Democrat, you had to first sort of be able to say, look, we take seriously that a country needs to control its own border. We take seriously security here. We take seriously what is wrong in our own system. And because you know we will do that, you can trust us on this other piece. In some ways, it feels to me like what is happening now under Biden-Harris is an attempt with the Lankford bill, with the executive actions, to win back that credibility so a broader conversation can open again. Well, I think you do have to start by

acknowledging a commonsensical view, which is not wrong or xenophobic, that the border ought to be secure. And that in a healthy system, you would have more lawful and less unlawful immigration. And generally that's been the equilibrium of public opinion, as well as just kind of the bar room slash chamber of commerce conventional wisdom, we ought to have more legal and less illegal immigration. Now lately, even that has shifted. But I don't think that's where the center of gravity of the American people are. I think generally, most of the time, most Americans get that if it's orderly, immigration is an important part of what can grow our economy.

And I think that's especially going to be true as we enter this stage where it appears for hopefully some time, will continue to be an economy that is less certain about where we're going to find the workers to do all these good paying jobs than we are about how we're going to find jobs for all the workers we have, which is the condition we were in just as recently as 10 or 15 years ago when I entered politics. I don't think there's anything wrong with recognizing that any border ought to be orderly and secure. And I do think we lose credibility if we look unserious about that, even as we're making the case for broader, bigger immigration reform. I'm going to tap foreign policy for a bit here. I thought one of Harris's strongest debate moments was around Ukraine. And when she said, yeah, Donald Trump might end that war faster by ceding it to Vladimir

Putin. That also got at a real change that's actually happening, seems to be happening in the Republican Party towards a much more isolationist strain than we've seen in a long time. I think with Trump as sort of instinctual, with someone like Vance, it's becoming more ideological, right? On Ukraine funding among young conservatives, there is a skepticism of different kinds of aid, including on Israel. There is the Chicago Council on World Affairs survey. For the first time in nearly 50 years,

a majority of Republicans prefer isolationism. What do you make this turn? I think a lot of it is contingent. It's a specific result of the roller coaster that Americans have been on when it comes to foreign policy, including, again, the defining experiences that our generation would have seen of America's involvement abroad, largely involving policy failure, the Iraq War, which I view as a failure

in its conception, and then the experience in Afghanistan. That doesn't change the fact that supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. And it's especially concerning that in JD Vance, you really could not have found a running mate more visibly aligned with the anti-Ukraine, more or less, side of the party. Yeah, he's not just been nice, like he's been contemptuous of Ukraine. It's a different emotional tone of it. That's right. And it is jarring for those who remember as recently as 10 or 15 years ago, there being a sense that it was actually Republicans who were too stuck in views about Russia that

had formed under the Soviet Union. Although I think another thing for us to think about as Democrats is how naive we may have been about any democratic tendencies in Putin's Russia all along. There's a lot of mocking of Mitt Romney for saying Russia was our great geopolitical threat. Not saying they ranked them first, but it doesn't look as crazy as it did when he said it. That's true. That's true.

Because only a few years after that, that a Russian influence operation really affected and harmed our country. So I don't know how to make sense of it other than to say that one of many things that I think might be possible, if there's a decisive defeat of Trump and importantly, a decisive defeat of many members of Congress who were aligned with him in swing districts, is the prospect. Again, I don't want to sound too optimistic. I know it could go many different directions, but at least the possibility of a normal Republican party in the future, by which I mostly mean one that is no less committed to democracy than the Democratic Party, as we would have expected of

both parties until a few years ago. But I also think that means one where we can debate exactly how America makes good on our values as well as our interests abroad, but less disagreement over whether we should. Is there a danger in Democrats becoming too big a tent on this? I was thinking about this when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris and thinking about the same history you're describing, right? I am not on the George W. Bush revisionism train. I think we're still dealing with the wreckage of the policy failures and disasters that he and Dick Cheney created.

But people, as you say, there is a widespread agreement Iraq was a disaster, Afghanistan was ultimately something of a disaster, and the obviously withdrawal very, very difficult in part for those reasons. I think people feel very uneasy about what we can achieve in the world. We're arming Ukraine, but is a really a path to any kind of resolution there. Or are we just throwing money, dollars, weaponry into a stalemate? We have been behind Israel and Gaza, but you know, people are mixed on what they want to see happen there, but not this, right?

This does not look good to anybody. And I think there's a feeling that what we're doing abroad is just not working, that the world feels in disorder, that we're funding it, but don't have a clear pathway through it. And then like here comes Dick Cheney to endorse a democratic nominee. So on the one hand, yeah, I'm not where Donald Trump is. I'm not an isolationist, but I also wonder about whether or not Democrats are getting themselves into some trouble here by, I don't think not all that clearly articulating

by, I don't think, not all that clearly articulating what stability looks like or what the goals beyond were pro-democracy. What is democratic foreign policy trying to achieve? Well, part of how I try to square the circle here is that a huge part of the problem with Bush-Cheney foreign policy was this idea that there was good and evil. We were good. The countries that they wanted to attack were evil. And that was how policy worked. And if we, the good, came in and blew away the evil, everything would be better. Obviously, that was a disastrous way to think about US foreign

policy. What you have with Trumpism is not a reasoned response to that. It's more saying, basically, right and wrong don't matter. At best, it basically right and wrong don't matter. At best, it's right and wrong don't matter. At worst, we should actually be doing the opposite of believing in democracy. We should be aligning ourselves with dictators or would-be dictators or at least authoritarian and authoritarian-like leaders. A commitment to democracy is wildly important for America at home and abroad. Without it, we are just another country out there. We've never been a perfect democracy, but democracy is the most important thing about us and we remain the most important democracy.

And I believe that continues to have to be at the core of how we engage around the world. It doesn't mean we get to dictate how other countries work. It does mean that we promote the values that go with that and a set of values that it turns out even if you're not a democracy, you can buy into in the name of some universal commitments, which is a rules-based international order where it matters if you follow the rules. That's part of what's at stake in Ukraine as well as regional security concerns, as well as the importance of standing up to the kind of aggression that is trying to change an international border through force in Europe. And the strategy that

the Biden-Harris administration has has been one of finding ways to stand up to that without a single American troop being sent into conflict, partly in the view that if we don't, we might make it a more dangerous place where more American troops will be sent into conflict. So I think the answer isn't to throw up your hands and run away screaming and say, we can't do any good by engaging, even if we've been humbled by foreign policy misadventures from Iraq back to Vietnam and more. But it also certainly can't be one where we are amoral or worse, which is the direction that Trump has led us in. Going back to your theory though, that you build trust by showing gain. I think that gain can be ideological.

I don't think everything in politics is material. One thing that has not been all that clearly articulated to me, in my view, is well, in these two conflicts that the Biden administration has committed itself to, what are we looking to have happen here? We're calibrating Ukraine very carefully, what kind of weapons we give them and in their view such that it is possible for them to survive in the war, but not necessarily possible for them to win the war. And similarly in Israel, it's a little hard to say what the end game is here.

We've not demanded they do these ceasefires or they don't get our weaponry. We don't have a pathway there to a two state solution and there's none coming from their leadership. I think one reason support for some things is beginning to drain is people think, I don't know what I'm even supposed to be hoping for here. This just seems like we are now in a grind. So when you think about that, what does success look like? Well, I don't think you can look at either of those or any of those in terms of a glorious

victory. That's not what this is about. Sometimes it's about facing terrible things that are happening and preventing a bad outcome or preventing a worse outcome. And certainly in the case of Ukraine, the right outcome is for Russia to go home and leave and leave Ukraine alone. What actually happens next depends first and foremost on the Ukrainians themselves. But also what happens there and in so many other places depends on whether a freedom-loving world stands with them. Not because it will kind of easily or automatically lead to some simple outcome that anybody would have asked for. Remember, Ukrainians didn't ask to be the

symbol of world democracy. They actively worked to avoid the struggle that they are in. This is not something that we created or wanted to create. It's when that happens, what do you do, especially when it tests your values. There's a test of our values and we have to meet it. Then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? I just read Jan Fassa, the Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize recently. He's got a book, a really short book. You and the Scandinavians.

I know somebody heard that I like Norwegian literature, asked me if I'd read this novelist who had become very famous with the Nobel Prize. I hadn't. Then I picked up this very slim, almost a novella called Morning Evening. I'm sadly choosing a lot of books based on their size because I need books that can be read in one sitting sometimes, the way travel works. And I cannot remember the last time I was more emotionally moved by a novel. The first few pages, I almost gave up on it because

like a lot of Nordic writers, he's not really into punctuation and you have to commit to it a little bit. And then it wound up being this really affecting, it's hard to describe, but it's just this really powerful piece of fiction that really moved me. And it made me wonder if I would be moved in the same way if I read it when I was younger or if it's because I'm a little older and have a family that meant a lot to me. I recently read Masha Gesson's book, The Future is History. It's the most helpful account I've seen of what happened in Russia and why Russia is now the way it is. And it's built out of narratives of people who are about our age, which maybe is why I found it more intelligible than Sovietology or just the kind of day-to-day reporting you read

about what Putin's doing and who he is. And then now on my nightstand, I've got a book called Mr. Churchill in the White House by Bob Schmoll who's a scholar of American studies that I know from Notre Dame. And just when he thought there couldn't possibly be another book about Churchill, I think somebody counted and there's literally like a thousand. So a kind of interesting and sometimes fun read because it's a book that's specifically about the time he spent in Washington. So there's an interesting psychodrama of how he related to Roosevelt and Eisenhower. There's a fascinating description of just how executive power worked back then that's really interesting to compare to how the interagency works today. And then you just try to transpose it to where we are and you imagine Zelensky was just moving to the White

House for a while and kind of roaming the halls in his slippers. And you just think to transpose it to where we are and you imagine, you know, imagine as Zelensky was just moving to the White House for a while and kind of roaming the halls in his slippers and you just think about how much time has changed. So I'm just, I'm just getting into that, but it's pretty good read. Pete put a judge. Thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair, our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota,

our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, and Kristen Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, Audience Strategy by Kristina Simuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Roy Strasser and special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Elliott De Bruyne, and Selçuk Kara Olam.