The Ezra Klein Show - Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and the New Rules of Political Attention

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Attention is working in really unusual ways this election cycle. Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, ended up dominating his Senate primary against Maine’s sitting governor – even as his campaign was rocked by a series of scandals. James Talarico also seemed to come out of nowhere to become the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas. Jon Ossoff has ginned up a ton of excitement as a potential 2028 presidential contender, in part because of his viral videos. Meanwhile, the former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt became a political star on X during his bid to become mayor of Los Angeles and yet failed to make the runoff. All of this has a lot of lessons for how attention is working right now in American politics. So I wanted to have on my favorite person to talk to on this topic. Chris Hayes is the host of “All In With Chris Hayes” on MS NOW and the author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.” Mentioned: “Donald Trump is going to win the election and democracy will be just fine” by Jared Golden “We Took AOC to a Deep Red Data Center Town” by More Perfect Union “America Dissected” by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed “Can James Talarico Reclaim Christianity for the Left?” with James Talarico, The Ezra Klein Show “Joe Rogan Experience #2352 - James Talarico” with James Talarico, The Joe Rogan Experience “Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President” by Michelle Goldberg “Obama Suddenly Panicked After Gazing Too Far Into Future” by The Onion Book Recommendations: Transcription by Ben Lerner The Godfather by Mario Puzo Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Julie Beer and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How did Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, come from nowhere to so thoroughly dominate the primary that Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, dropped out or suspended her campaign, I should say, and didn't even come back in as Plattner was rocked by even more scandals. Now, the national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life, that they can define the campaign by. But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all. This is a movement about us. The answer is that he had

the most important political resource right now, and she was not able to grab any of it. That resource is attention. It's a constant theme now for me on the show, that you need to see attention as its own substrate of American politics. And attention is working in really unusual ways this year. In the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate, where Abdul Al-Said is now in the lead.

Who here believes in Medicare for all? And who believes it's time not abolish ICE? And who believes we've got to get money out of politics and in your pocket? In Texas, where James Tolerico, another person people haven't really heard of a couple years ago, is now the Democratic nominee for Senate. One thing is clear today. we're about to take back Texas. In Los Angeles, where we actually saw it fail in the mayoral candidacy of Spencer Pratt.

Reality TV star Spencer Pratt's insurgent campaign for L.A. Mayor has officially run its course. These corrupt crooks really do look out for each other, don't they? What's happening with John Ossif and the sudden rise in interest in what he's doing? All of it has a lot of lessons, I think, for how attention is working right now in American politics. To help me unpack them, I want to have on my favorite person to talk about this particular topic, with. My friend Chris Hayes, host of It All In with Chris Hayes, an author of the great book on Attention in the Modern Moment, The Sirens Call, How Attention became the World's Most Endangered Resource. As always, my email, if you need our attention, as a client show at

NYTimes.com. Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show. Always great to be back. So I want to have you here for one of our every so often check-ins on how attention is working in American politics. And I want to start with a Wall Street Journal interview. that was with the people who recruited Grand Platner. How did you find Grand Platner? Well, so, I mean, we went through thousands and thousands of prospects. We, you know, through a number of means, you know, assess just a huge amount of people.

Then, you know, Liam pulled up this video of this guy with an oyster farm. My name is Graham Platner, and I live in Sullivan, Maine, the owner of Frenchman Bay Oyster Company. And then she pulled up his FEC, his... and saw, you know, the money he'd given to Bernie Sanders and, you know, some other people. And that was enough information to know that we had the best prospect that we'd maybe ever seen. Okay, I want to flesh this out because I've been told this story by multiple people how this played out. This group, like, they were like, who could run in Maine? Right.

Like, lobster farmer, oyster farmer, some kind of fisherman. Yeah. And so when he says we looked at thousands of people, like the computer. look through occupational and other forms of records. Right. It was like, which lobster farmers? Who's donated to a populist candidate? Which is to say that, you know, we normally think of candidates as being, you know,

recruited because they are important in their communities or a lawyer. They run a hospital, something like that. A lot of people grow up wanting to run for office. But Graham Platner was cast, right? It was like Hollywood looking for somebody to fill a role. role. There's a long history there. I mean, the Democrats are running someone in in Tom Keene's district who's a like helicopter pilot. Mikey Sherrill was a helicopter pilot. They're like, you know, that's that's a bio that's Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer. So like that part of it is

an interesting version of a sort of grassroots lefty populist group doing what the D-Trip will do or the D-SCC. But the reason this worked was because of the charisma. And charisma at what, at one level it's like, I do think there's a kind of full circle thing happening in politics, which is like, of course, charisma is important to politics. But I think particularly at the level of scale, there was a period where the formula really didn't take into account charisma. Yes. It was like bio, social capital connections, ability to raise money, all that stuff. And then like, whatever, we'll cut some ads for them. We'll get them a good team and they'll be fine. I think charisma matters much more now because attention matters more. And charisma is the talent for

grabbing and holding attention. So I want to hold on what you just said about the D-Gy-C because I think we both know a fair amount about the way they recruit. And one of the grim realities of how they recruit is they very heavily emphasize how much money you can raise. One, they will force you to sit on the phone six hours a day. Yep. Six hours a day.

And they will punish you if you don't, right? You want to be on things like they're red to blue lists. And so I know candidates who are just browbeaten into being on the phone, raising money for hours and hours and hours a day. And the D-Triple-C, which is the sort of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, isn't doing that because they're cynics. Right. Or they have a fetish for it. Or they love money. You need money. Right. But the thing money is buying, largely, is attention. I mean, it also buys field and organizing other things, but buys attention. But the biggest thing is it buys TV. And so what this group is doing when they cast Platner,

he's not a person who you go to and think, can you raise the money to buy attention. He's a person you go to and think, can you unleash the charisma to earn attention? Yes, exactly. Which then will bring in money. Yes. But even if it doesn't, attention. And this is the point is that you have to, I think you have to have a theory of attention for a successful campaign right now in a way that when that formula was as dead set as it was in the kind of, you know, high point of broadcast TV ads, right? Like, raise as much money as possible, hit the airways with a ton of broadcast TV, and that's the recipe.

That's 90% of a campaign. As broadcast TV particularly and as broadcast TV ads decline in their salience, right? You have to have some alternate theory of how you're going to get to people. In some places, like in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, like everyone in the state, knows who Roy Cooper is, right? He doesn't have the same problem. The guy's been elected statewide, I think five times at this point, something like that. So he doesn't have to do that. But if you're running another race, you do have to come up with some theory of how you're going to do it. In this case, it was casting, and then it was finding a person who genuinely has real,

obvious raw political talent and charisma. Okay, but we're underselling here, the accomplishment of Platner because they are running in that race, ultimately. against a Roy Cooper-like figure in Janet Mills. Yes. This is not a situation where there is an open primary of nobody's. It's not a situation where they're going into a place like Nebraska where they recruited Dan Osborne, the independent who ran, you know, a cycle go and is running again this cycle. This is a situation where Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senate campaign committee had a candidate in mind.

They have a Democratic governor of Maine, and they're going to run the Democratic governor, of Maine against Mills to pick up that seat. And what happens just very, very, very quickly is that Plattner squeezes Mills out attentionally. She, just the charisma gap between them. Yes. And the ability that he has to command attention, particularly online, but that then translates into all other forms of attention because, like, the newspapers follow it,

the cable news follows it, he's on your show. He also, he knocks out a sitting governor. Right. But he also, I mean, this is the other part of it is he, campaigns her in that state on the ground. Like, it's not just the online part of it. I mean, and again, this is part of attention too. Maine is a small state, right? I mean, Maine is a state where, you know, Susan Collins at this point, knows, like literally knows a shockingly high percentage of Mainers, right? Yeah. It's just the way it works when you're an institution like her. It's the kind of

state where you can make inroads in retail politics in a way that you can't the California governor's race. Right. So, Part of it, too, is that he just outworks her. But I think that much younger than she is. I mean, Mills is a 78-year-old candidate. Yes. And I think there's actually an interesting relation here between attention and risk appetite, because I think the two are so related.

I think a lot of the things that have guided democratic politics around attention have also related to risk aversion. Don't get negative press. if you're choosing between no press and negative press, minimize downsides, okay? Other people could have run that primary. They knew that she was trying to recruit Mills. She actually got in after Platner officially.

Almost all of the big-name politicians in the state of Maine went for the governor's race, which was going to be vacated, it wasn't going to have a sitting incumbent, and you weren't going to take on the electoral colossus of Susan Collins. That's a lower-risk choice. Platner made a high-risk bet. And I do think there's a relationship

between risk appetite and attention, that's very much part of democratic politics, which is there is a kind of institutional low-risk appetite. I want to pick up on the word institution there. So the Republican Party, pre-Trump is like this too. They choose people who succeed in institutions. So, I mean, if you think about the candidates after Barack Obama, right, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden.

in a different way, Kamala Harris, right? They're all people, they were not electoral juggernauts, right? Clinton lost to Barack Obama. But she was beloved within the Democratic Party at that time. Joe Biden was Barack Obama's vice president. And it kind of goes down like this. I think that there is an inverse relationship between the personality type that succeeds institutionally

and the personality type that succeeds attentionally. That's true. And I think it is really, really. related to what you're talking about with risk. Yeah. But I think it has created an almost structural problem in party recruiting. Because parties, as you were noting, they look for all these signals that are fundamentally signals of institutional capacity.

Yeah. Social capital. Right. Ability to raise money. Jobs that tend to have risen through the institutions. I mean, Platner is a downwardly mobile oyster farmer whose oyster farm doesn't really make money and sells to his mom's fancy. restaurant, right? He is not, you wouldn't just look at it and think, that guy is the most

impressive person in Maine. Right. Right. It's not like Mikey Cheryl as a Navy pilot, you know, but the people who succeed in institutions are often do not have personalities that are spiky in the way the attentional moment currently rewards. So I think that's true. I think there's a few things going on. One is we should talk about success in institutions and credentialing, which are sort of two different things, right? You know, it means a lot in the world of democratic progressive politics if someone went to Yale law. So there's the credential part of it.

There's actual success in institutions. There's relationships to those institutions. And then there's the kind of personalities that succeed in those institutions. The old term that you would use in the 50s and 60s, right, in a different era was like a company man, right? And like a company man is someone that gets along well with others in an organizational setting, doesn't make ways, doesn't upset people. And I think the idea of a company man is kind of what has been the template, again, almost necessarily, right?

I mean, if you, like, as you said at the beginning of this part of the conversation, the Democratic Party is an institution. One thing that Platner is able to carry in a way that feels authentic is a genuine feeling that the system is hollow at its core. you know, people talk about... Which is not a put on with him, which is the key part of this. I think that's really, yes, I think that's important. I mean, you can say a lot about his life and what he has done or has not done,

and we'll talk about some of that too. But he is somebody who believes the institutions have failed because they have failed for him, and he has failed out of them. Yeah. Right? The hostility is authentic. Yes.

And when you listen to him on the stump, more than he is carrying a message about single-payer health care or a Green New Deal. He is carrying a message about, you know, in a very different way, I think than Bernie did, but using similar language, about an unspecified political revolution.

He's carrying a message about this is all wrong somehow. Yeah. And what you need is somebody who fundamentally believes it is all wrong somehow. The world that we live in today is not natural. We do not live in a political and economic reality. that is organic. It is a system that is built by policy decisions,

policy that is written by establishment politicians in Washington, D.C., at the behest of their donors and their supporters. And it is a system that was made to make sure that no matter how hard you work, you will never feel like you have power. Powers for these people, and they're up there, they're qualified. they have the pedigree, they have the background, they're the ones that are allowed to make decisions for us. Don't worry ourselves.

Let them take care of it. Well, I'm going to tell you right now, that story is bullshit. And you can look across a lot of the candidates who are succeeding right now. You know, here I do think Mom Donnie, you know, fits in. We'll talk about Abdul Sayad. Donald Trump was obviously like this. A large number of the candidates who have broken through are breaking through with a with a message more even than an agenda of genuine disillusionment and anger?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few related questions. So one, I think people use the term populism, which I think gets probably as close as any to what we're describing as a tendency. You know, disillusionment, frustration with a failed status quo, elite failure particularly. So there's a few interesting questions that flow out of that. One is, does that have a specific ideological valence? Can you be a moderate populist? Yes.

Right? Can you be a centrist populist is one interesting question. Another is, can you channel the attentional politics when you are suddenly in the incumbent position? I want to pick up on something you said about being a moderate populist. You can be a moderate populist. And you know how we know that? Because there was one in Maine. Right.

The Democrat in the House representing the redest, district in the country is Jared Golden. He's a main member of Congress. He's a populist. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter. He is also a moderate. You know, he kind of famously wrote this op-ed about how Donald Trump would be the end of the world. He supported Donald Trump on tariffs, but he is also very, very pro-labor. He's very, you know, disgusted with politics. And he has existed in a kind of politically miserable existence. Yes. He's been holding a probably no other Democrat could hold. And in fact, he's leaving now.

And he is this year getting primaried from the left. And he decided, I'm done, I'm retiring. You know, you could have imagined a world where Democratic Party, you know, fell in love with this guy, embraced him and elevated him to run against Susan Collins. And in that world, I'd be like, Susan Collins is gone. Like she is gone. But I think the issue you see with Jared Golden in moderate populism is that, you're a little bit of, you become very vulnerable in primaries. Yes.

Because on both the right, but now on the left, I mean, the polling on this is really fascinating. If you look at the number of Democrats who said they were very liberal and say 1995, right? I mean, most Democrats were not liberal or very liberal in 1995, like they self-described as moderate. And now it's like very liberal. It's very hard to survive. And it's also just very unpleasant.

Yes. That part of it is a big part of it. Even if you can survive the day to day of being like yelling. that by the advocacy groups on your side, by your own friends, the thing that you cannot seem to do right now is hold that together with being a successful candidate in primaries where you're having to appeal to a high attention electorate with very, very, very, very sorted political opinions. Yes. And you have, right, particularly in this sort of nationalized attentional atmosphere. I mean, that's part of it too. Like, in another universe, people, no one online is paying

attention to what Jared Golden's doing. Right? Like, you could be Jared Golden for your district and like the local news would cover you and the, you know, the local TV news, the newspapers, maybe some, you know, some nerds would read about you in roll call. Because we're all operating in one attentional sphere, there's little, there's less and less room for. You know, there's less and less room for that sort of variation, that used to just come about because, like, people just didn't pay attention of what the main two congressional candidate was doing. I think this, like, brings up some of the flip side of Platner. And one reason I think Platner is such an interesting figure to start with here is he represents

both sides of the gamble being made, right? The high-risk, high-attention, charisma on the one hand. On the other hand, the point of getting this high-risk candidate with a sort of anti-institutional a life story is you're not getting somebody who has been watching his step for a long time. And you're getting somebody who's maybe misstep quite a lot. So you've got the Nazi tonkopf tattoo on the chest. And this kind of pulsing question about whether or not he knew about that. I'm honestly a little skeptical that he did not know about it for as long as he says he didn't.

I share that skepticism. You have him sexting, seems like about a half dozen women during his marriage. or at least, you know, texting with them in an effort to set up some kind of relationship. Also, the abusing claims from an ex-girlfriend, the one who works in Republican politics, that he was, you know, borderline abusive when they fought. I've had this trouble with Planner because, on the one hand, I've got him very charismatic. Much of what he says I like. No particular thing that has come out about him has been, I mean, he's also like these very politically, incorrect Reddit posts, maybe the best way to put it.

Nothing that's come out about him on its own has been disqualifying for me. I don't think he's an anti-Semite. He was so politically incorrect on Reddit that if he were an anti-Semite, I think we would know. That's a good point. I think that one would have come out pretty clearly. That's a good point. I think he knew what the tattoo was earlier. Yeah.

And I think the spirit in which he, this is my view of him, right? This is not based on anything but my Rita's situation. The spirit in which he and his friends got it was edge lordy. it was about it as a signal of a kind of vicious badassery, not a signal about Jews or Nazis. That's my view. I don't have, I cannot prove it, but I'm telling you what I think. The thing that worries me about Platner isn't any one thing.

It is the sense that there is just bad judgment in the guy. I mean, the sexting with like the women is like, it's early in a marriage and that's pretty recent. Yeah. Right. The thing that worries me about Platner isn't kind of any one of these things individually. It's that, you know, one thing about a guy who's failed out of a bunch of institutions and has kind of been down really mobile and has made a bunch of weird decisions and had a kind of Nazi tattoo is you might think, yeah, I want the best for him. I hope for all the best for him. Should he be a U.S. senator? Should he be a U.S. senator is a very different question than that, right? Yes. I mean, what I, if I were appointing people from Maine, would I appoint Graham Platner? Like, I would not. But that's all.

also not how elections work. Yeah. We have the 17th Amendment, right? Yes. But so that I think is, but here's like the thing. He's not run in a general election yet. Susan Collins overperforms in polls. He has been generating attention and energy among Democrats and among particularly like

the online left. And whether or not it creates an attack surface that, you know, you can attack this guy is fundamentally unreliable, which is what they will do, which is what they are doing, are doing with a lot of money. Yeah. If Democrats win that seat, maybe this all looks genius. If they lose that seat, I think there's going to be like a level of factional hell to pay. So let me say that I basically share essentially share everything you said, like couldn't and have made those arguments.

Let me just for the sake of this conversation, take the other side for a second. One is they did run someone in 2020 who was the most standard possible state legislator, no scandal to speak of, raised a ton of money, a woman. And she got her butt kicked. In fact, she lost by like, I think, nine points, right? When she was up in all the pulse. She was up on all the polls. Which is part of why people are so nervous about this race.

They're nervous about the race. But the other thing is it's not like that was not tried. against Susan Collins. It was tried. It didn't work. The second thing I would say, and this goes back to our risk thing, is there were like five people in that gubernatorial primary. They could have run for Senate. Like the big names of Maine all ran for governor. So part of this is a little like everyone's sort of bringing their hands. It's like, well, you have to have people running. Totally. They didn't run. He ran. Yeah. What do you want to like what is the magic wand that makes them run? And they didn't run because that was a harder race. The third thing I would say. is I think there's a theory of the case here, and I'm not saying this is true. I'm just presenting it as a possibility, is that part of the brand problem for the Democrats has been excessive conscientiousness. Yes. That this is the party of essentially kind of like school marm tisks-tisking.

Now, that's extremely gendered. I want to be very clear about that. And I think a lot of the conversation about Platner on both sides of the very intense polarized debate within the Democratic coalition is very gendered. That said, I think it's, you know, there is a kind of post-COVID hangover of the sort of idea that the Democrats are just this like, again, this kind of like quick to cancel, tell you what you can and can't do, kicking people out who talk a little salty, et cetera. I think there's something to that.

I think there's particularly something to that with a certain subset of cross-pressured swing voters. And maybe this is a kind of antidote to it. Yeah, maybe, maybe none of this is negative for him. Right. In the sense, like the Reddit post, people have joined me the joke. The Reddit posts are the median voter. Right. That's the joke people of me. When I saw the Reddit post, I was like, that's a asset. Right. I don't have to agree with them or like them to be like, that's a political asset. I mean, this is a line. I say all the time, but, and it's something we need to like spin out into an essay, but the personality type of the left is bureaucratic and the personality type of the right is autocratic. And those are failures, right? The left is another version of it that I use

is the left is overformed by institutions and the right is underformed by institutions. But you can imagine a world where Platner loses or doesn't win by as much as you could have. And the answer is simply like you kind of almost got it right with him. Yeah. You know, you just pick somebody like a little too underformed, right? You don't want the straight-A student and you don't want the kid smoking pot in the parking lot. You need something sort of... Right. You need something sort of in between there.

But the question is really, we're going to see a test of whether or not this works in... Of whether or not this works in Maine. It's going to be very, very interesting to see how that plays out. Can I say two more things about him? So one is, I think the way that... I also think there's something interesting in how he has handled the last few weeks. He has been doing a lot of press.

And I think this is another thing where... you have to, if you're going to do it, you've got to be all in, which is you're going to go into your face questions and you're going to talk to people. And that is, I think, one of the lessons of our new era of the dynamics of scandal, whatever they are, is that attention moves very quickly. And if you embrace that and you're like, talk to people, you can move through things in a way that used to be very difficult. And then the last thing I'll say about Platner, I think this is a really important aspect. his appeal. People have talked about the fact, oh, he went to a private school and his grandfather was this famous architect and his mom has his restaurant. Dad bought his house. Dad bought his house. This is a guy who was enlisted. An enlisted Marine during the global war on terror in multiple tours fighting in really brutal circumstances. And here's why I think that's politically salient. he has an ability to, for lack of a better word, code switch. I think code switching is actually like one of the superpowers of a successful

Democratic politician because the Democratic Party is so varied and diverse and pluralistic. You have to move between different groups. And it's hard to learn how to do that without some organic experience in different worlds. Graham Platner really genuinely has that. It gives him that thing where he's able to talk to different audiences. audiences, Barack Obama really had it. Bill Clinton. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.

All of these people, you know, Bill Clinton was like, that's interesting. Does Ocasio-Cortez have code switching at that level? I think she does, actually. And I think one of the things that you see also, you saw this with Obama. You saw it with, you know, they used to call Barack Obama in the right-wing press, Barry, because he was Barry in high school at a certain point. The idea being, this guy's inauthentic. He's not really who you think he is.

he's pretending to be this thing. The flip side of that is this is a person who's had many different experiences in radically different life worlds that has given this person an organic ability to connect across difference that proves to be this superpower in democratic politics. I'll take a beat on Ocasio-Cortez here because it's something I'm really interested to see with her. I think nobody knows if she's going to run for precedent. I'm not sure she knows if she's going to run for president. She is a tremendous political talent by any measure. But unlike, say, a Bernie Sanders, or as weird of saying, a grand platinum, she stays away from disagreement. You do not see her doing what Bernie does, what Rokana does.

She's not on flagrant. No. She's not out there with Lex Friedman. No. She, I mean, she just did a thing with more perfect union, which is like a lefty content producer, you know, talking to Trump voters, but in a very controlled environment. Controlled environment, right? She's not on Jubilee, which Roe Kana. and for that matter, James Telerica went on.

And I think one of the biggest questions for her is actually whether she is comfortable. Yeah, that's interesting. Either switching into places that are not natural alliances for her or being herself in those places. Gavin Newsom is doing this everywhere right now, right? He will go anywhere he has asked and he particularly wants to go to places where it's going to be unusual to see him there. She runs a very, very, very, very, very careful operation. Yes. And often when she is in spaces where she's not comfortable, like the Munich Security Conference, it can get hairy for her.

She can sort of fumble. And Congress, I'll start with you. Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move? You know, I think that this is. is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is, of course, a very longstanding policy. I mean, if I were her advisor and I'm not, I think the problem is she's not doing enough. So she's not getting the sea legs and not getting comfortable with things going wrong and also not getting the sort of like swiftness to sort of rescue them when they do, right? You remember that Gavin News something a couple months ago where he's doing a book talk and he's.

It's like, I'm just like you to a mostly black audience. I'm like you. I'm no better than you. You know, I'm a 960 SAT guy. It's like, my SAT sucked and I can barely read. I can barely read, yeah. Like, it looked really bad. It was everywhere for a couple days.

But then you just go do something else. He just keeps moving forward. So partly though, I think all of these calculations about risk, reward, control, lack of control, how much you're going in is what your own. personal position is with respect to attention, right? Because she is so commanding of it, she has the luxury to take much more sort of conservative stances about what press she does. And I think that's a tradeoff. I agree with you that like there's probably a degree to which more would be better. Taylor Swift doesn't need to do a lot of interviews. Exactly. That's exactly it. That she just doesn't

have to go. Yeah, whereas Rocah is everywhere. Because he is trying to build. Exactly. Exactly. Like attentional strength. I want to move to Michigan. Let's start here. Do you want to just give an overview of the Michigan Senate Democratic primary? I mean, you have a situation in which you have a departing incumbent Democratic senator, Gary Peters, who's retiring.

So you have an open seat. You have a very, I would say, from the Republican perspective, high quality recruit for the Republican side, who is Republican Congress from Mike Rogers, who is. truly out of like Normie Republican kind of central casting. Like if you're trying to win a swing state, he is not, you know, he's not some Peter Thiel weirdo who's going to do an ad with his gun silencer. This is designed to kill people. I'm Blake Masters. I'm running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona.

And then on the Democratic side, you've got Abdul Siyadh, who is a really fascinating dude who was a public health official in Detroit. He's a road scholar. MD PhD. MD PhD incredibly credentialed dudes. Has run statewide and lost for governor. Exactly. And but it's very, very charismatic.

Extremely bright to. Had a crooked media podcast. Had a crooked media podcast. I don't know if you've, you know, I've spoken to him at length. He's an incredibly impressive dude. Yeah. In terms of like, he's a really smart guy who knows a lot of stuff. You have a state senator Mallory McMorrow who has been kind of like, I would say like a charismatic up-and-comer in national politics,

even when she was a relatively obscure state rep. Yeah, starting with this big speech she gave after being accused of being a groomer. Yes. So I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night.

I know who I am. I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win. But she also has good, like good video content. Yeah, she's very charismatic. You know, like a year ago, if I were doing this, I'd be like Mallory McMorra, like one of the big attentional, like emergent attentional stars.

And then you have the person who I think there's reporting to indicate that I think, and it's probably sure that Haley Stevens, who's a sitting congresswoman, who is, I think, probably the establishment choice to the center of. It seems like it was recruited by the establishment in part. And what's happened is she has not taken off. And she's not, of the three candidates, whatever you think about Haley Stevens issue positions, for qualifications, whether she be a good senator, like I think she's the least intentionally gifted of the three. And I think

the polling indicates that right now, Abdul El Cid is probably in the lead. He's gotten a huge amount of benefit from sort of the Bernie faction of the party, streamer Hassan Piker, who came and did a rally with him, which was both controversial but got a ton of attention. And in a first past the post, again,

first past the post primary split field, what do you have to get? You got to get 30%, 35% of the vote, 38% of the vote. So I want to talk about this primary because first in one way, Abdel Sajad is like the opposite candidate from Grand Platner. Right. He is intentionally capable, but he is not a outside the institution, right? Like is a guy who he taught a Columbia. The road scholar.

Road scholar. He's like the ultimate rassering of credentialing in the American meritocracy is worn on his hand. Yes. he has run before and lost. When people talk about candidates who have wanted to be in public office for a very long time, he is one of those candidates.

And if you look at the polling in this race, you look at polymarket or calci in this race, you can see that he did not walk in and start dominating it. What happened was that he started centering Israel and Gaza. Hassan Piker coming was part of this. And the role Piker played in this, to me, the way at least I observed it happening, it's not that it was Piker's endorsement or something that mattered. It's that Piker himself was so controversial that outside groups like third way and then

the other two candidates attacked. Yep. And in attacking, they centered Israel and Gaza, which turned the, like Israel and Gaza is, like, Israel and Gaza is like an attentional superconductor. Yes, it is. It is like no other issue with the exception of Donald Trump himself in American life. And for an engaged Democratic primary electorate, Abdul Al-Sayad is more on the right side of that issue.

Yes. And so I think you're saying something that's going to be very important about attention. There are certain issues in any moment. Like his background, the way I came to know him as a political figure, is Medicare for all. Yeah, right. He emerges in politics, you know, Bernie Sanders guy, and like, his whole thing is Medicare for all. And, like, he still believes in that. And from a health care, a public health perspective.

But what has happened here is that there, like, a lot of attention on Israel and Gaza. And it has become, like, the defining issue. And Michigan, obviously, very big Arab population, right? So. And also the Haley Stevens component of this, right? Yes, we're talking about that. We should give the backstory here, which is that, you know, Haley Stevens, primary to Andy Levin.

Andy Levin was this, you know, labor organizer and very kind of two-state solution, Israel critical Jewish lefty labor. Synagogue president. Synagogue president. Who was, who had like a ton of A-PAC money dumped on his head. Yeah. Because he was insufficiently loyal to the, essentially the Netanyahu line. And Stevens knocked him off as part of that effort.

And the other thing I would say is, and I think this is incredibly dangerous for the folks who spend their time worrying about America's relationship to Israel and defense of Israel, you have a situation in which you have kind of stacked these different things atop each other where it's like money and politics, the establishment, the failed status quo, the pro-Israel lobby are all stacked atop each other and very hard to disentangle. And so being the populist insurgent against the status quo, your criticism is Israel, your criticism of the war on Gaza, your views on that puts you across these incredibly salient divides that sort of reach up and down from the actual issue of Gaza and Israel. I wrote a piece on this when all the attacks were centering on Piker. And one of the points of that piece was it it is going to be very, very, very important. to break the effort to conflate anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism. And it is going to only become more important as Israel's actual actions make anti-Zionism a more popular and, like, morally compelling position. Among progressively minded people.

I mean, look, you can look at polling of young Jews. Yeah, right. Right. How many of them want a one-state solution? It's pretty high now. So I will say also, and it's worth playing this, I thought Abdullah Sayad himself had a very, very good answer, disentangling this.

What do you say to the Jewish community, who you're going to want to vote for you, about your positions on Israel, on APAC funding, et cetera, and how they shouldn't feel alienated by a candidate like you? Okay, I'd say this. Nobody understands what it's like to be discriminated against for how you pray like someone who gets discriminated against for how we pray. And most of the time, we don't ask how we pray. Most people are asking,

what do you pray for? And I pray for peace and dignity and basic goodness for all of our kids, whether they're Jewish kids who are neighboring a couple of houses down from me or my kids who are Muslim. And I'll tell you that it's really important for us to be able to differentiate between Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish contributions to this country, which are vast, and A-PAC and Israel. Those are two different things. I, when I'm elected, will be the chief opposition to what the Egyptian government does. Now, my family immigrated from Egypt. That doesn't make me anti-Egyptian.

That just means that I want my tax dollars to be spent here rather than sent over there to cement the chokehold of a military dictatorship on its own people. And I apply the same exact principles to Israel. I don't want my tax dollars being spent to backstop apartheid and genocide when they could be used to provide things like glasses or health care or schools for our own kids.

And I worry that a lot of times people want to use the word anti-Septioners. to spread to defend a foreign government. And I think it's just really important for us to differentiate between those two because I don't want to be held accountable to what another government does simply because I share ethnicity with the people who live there. And I know the same for my Jewish sisters and brothers. I remember a sign that was put up in Los Angeles. I saw a picture of in 2008. It was on a lamppost. And it was during the Hillary Barack primary. And the sign was a campaign sign. And it had one sentence. And it said,

said she voted for the war. And it was like, that's all you need to know. Like, that vote for the Iraq war. That was the thing. That was the reason Hillary Clinton lost that primary, ultimately. There's a million reasons, and she came very close and re-litigate it. But that was the thing. I know a lot of pretty good older Jews who was in me, I don't understand why you

don't get so much attention. Right. You know, look at what China's doing to the Uyghurs. And one of the things I say, I'm. is that they are making themselves a center of attention, right? They really pushed hard to have America join them in a war. They've expanded the scope of that war. They have allowed just constant, you know, in addition to Netanyahu saying he wants now 70% of Gaza,

they have, like, allowed and enabled and protected and cause, like a constant stream of atrocities out of the West Bank. You can support what Israel is doing, but I don't think you can deny that it is going to come with a tremendous cost. And if you are not willing to have Israel pay the cost of its actual actions, I don't think you should be supporting its actions. I mean, let's talk about what happened in the Israel Day parade here in New York in terms of attention. So you got this, you got the Israel Day parade. It's happened every year. And in the context of New York, it has been a kind of. you know, cross ideological day of Jewish unity and solidarity.

Now, this year, it's controversial for reasons. The mayor's not going to attend for the first time in a long time. Other politicians will be there. What happens in that parade? Bezal Smaltrich. The most, one of the most far right ministers who's in the Israeli government, who is, you know, pushed for along with Ben Gavir the law to execute people by hanging, who has been, you know, a proponent of the settlers and excuse.

More than that has put out a functional plan for the expulsion of Palestinians. Yes. What I think it is reasonable to call the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Yes. He shows up at the Israel Parade with a bunch of like also hardcore extremist right-winger's. And they do. His intentional politics. His intentional politics.

And they do a bunch of interviews. And he even says to one of the interviewers, I love this parade. It reminds me of Jerusalem Day, which of course is like the far right parade that happens every year in Jerusalem where like a very extremist right-wing Israelis march through Jerusalem in an act of like very clear provocation. Yes, like chanting, horrifying things. Yes, death to Arabs and things like that. But Smotrich says this because he's playing his own attentional politics.

But you can't. It's like, so then after that, it's like, well, whose fault is it? People are paying attention to the parade. Yeah. You know, and you could say, well, he's an extremist. He doesn't represent. He's in the Israeli government. He's got authority over the West Bank.

Yeah. It actually drives me completely insane. And it happens all the time in conversations. I mean, but it drives me insane the effort to say that what the sitting cabinet ministers in Israel are doing is irrelevant or they're controversial or it is it is. They're in power. They're in power. There's also, there's a southern expression I love this throwing rocks and hiding hands, which I love. which I love.

And there's just also, I feel like this isn't the Israeli government, but APAC and sort of groups around them and associated super PACs. There's a lot of throwing rocks and hiding hands. You've just played in a succession of the most expensive congressional races in history, like a set of record setting ones where you have spent the money that have made them the most expensive. That's fine. It's America.

In the post-citizens United Era, people get to do that. What you can't do is be like, why is everyone focused on us? It's like you spent tens of millions of dollars to knock people out. Like, you could do one or the other. You know, you play in these races, you play in these races. But then you get to be criticized for you. I want to move to Texas. And I want to move to Texas is so interesting right now.

James Tolariko, because I think he reflects maybe something different than what we've been talking about. He is the one case in which I think you can really see an intentional superstar who rose during this cycle, but did not run. because he was so far left or so far right. He has, I mean, I had him here on the show. It's a great interview. People should go check it out. He has bog standard progressive politics. Now, it is connected to a beautifully articulated Christian moral framework. But he's somebody who is broken through attentionally not by being very far left or very far right, not by choosing a highly controversial issue, but actually by front-loading a religiously rooted decency that in part got him on Joe Rogan's podcast and became this signal that maybe he could do something other

Democrats couldn't and win Texas. So I'm curious what you've made of him. Again, I would start with the thing that we've been saying about a number of these people, including Platner and I think Abdu Say it, is that he's charismatic. in, again, in the ancient Greek sense. And I think, obviously, the sort of pastoral tradition that he's coming out of means that he's both naturally charismatic and also has access to a set of rhetorical tools that have been developed literally over thousands of years to grab and hold people's attention, right? So I think that's a huge part of what's going on. And again, I think that connects to this back to the future theme that we keep coming back to, which is like, You can't just raise money and run ads, right?

If you want to be successful, you've got to have something going on about how you grab people. And he clearly has that. I think you're totally right that he's a unicorn in that it's not connected to that kind of populist message in the same way. He is, I think, a populist and I think he's very much framing himself as a sort of insurgent outside the status quo. But he's not, he's really not relying on any kind of us versus them framework. I mean, he does a little bit of the billionaires. But it's rhetorical flourishing. It's not the core in the way Platner.

Platner is like, that is Platner's thing. It's what comes out of his chest. This guy is a former president of his college Democrats. Yeah, exactly. Like he is a different type. He is a person who has wanted to run for Britain. He's a teach for America kid. Yeah.

Right. He's not a person who has been failed by American institutions. He is not a person who you feel harbors a great anger. at the Democratic establishment, you know, he's a state representative. And I think that's an interesting dimension of him. But he also has a quality that Plattner does in a different way, which is that, well, I'm not saying he was cast in the sense that somebody came out and found him, the way they came out and found Plattner.

He does look like what he is. In the same way that Plattner looks like what he is. I mean, a lot of people are oyster farmers or lobstermen, but they don't, like, you wouldn't see them on the street and think, well, you definitely spend all your time on water. Right. And, you know, Plattner looks like a seaman. Yes. And Tala Rico, like, you would cast him as a pastor to play the idealistic young pastor, like rooting a corruption. Yes. In a complicated church. Yes, exactly. He just has the whole... You could put him in a scene and there will be blood. And he, right, exactly. And he rises, you know, by running his social media

strategy, which, you know, eventually gets him on Rogan. And I think that... that he also reflects this yearning people that I think is really powerful and now is underplayed, which is not just for populism or radicalism or even inspiration, but in the Trump era for decency. Totally. And there's a yearning for public virtue, which I think is a sort of funny inversion of some of the politics of our youth. I'm starting to talk a lot about virtue on this show. Yeah, and I'm thinking about a lot about virtue. I think that's partly the experience of Trump. it's partly that I'm a middle-aged dad with three kids, and I think a lot about moral instruction.

And particularly a moral instruction in a world in which, like, the most powerful and famous figure in the country is a moral degenerate. The other thing I would say is there's these different, there's different kind of vibratory levels that different coalitions play on. And I do think that, like, the appeal for connection, Brother and sisterhood, solidarity, unity. You know, that was the thing that Barack Obama was able to marshal. And that's still deep in the progressive soul.

I think it's deep in the American soul. It's not what Donald Trump. Donald Trump is totally incapable of playing in that register. I think the Republican Party increasingly in his era is incapable of playing that register. And the last thing I'll say, and I think this applies to John Ossoff as well. Where we're going next. Oh, good. When you think about, like, what's the opposite of Trump?

One typology of the opposite of Trump is a nice young man. Like, what's the opposite of Trump? It's like, a nice young man. And James Tolerico's a nice young man. Let me hold before we go to John Ossif and the different Obama registers. The nice young man, the what it means to be nice, the weakness of being nice, has been the main form of attack. The Paxton campaign has decided to. on leash. Like low tea Tala Rico, tofu, Tala Friko, which now the Tala RICO campaign has

Talafrico shirts. I think that one was a Paxon mistake. But the weakness they think they have sensed is that people want strength. Yeah. And a nice young man who wants you to like him and speaks often of his own humility and has a vegan girlfriend is not strong enough for Texas. I mean, that's a charitable version. They're calling them the Fsler is what they're doing. I mean, you're giving a charitable version of what the actual campaign is. And actually quite literally, like, you know, you have Stephen Miller saying the first transgender candidate. Yes, right. You know, he's a queer. Yes. It's very schoolyard, all of it. Yes. When we take a step back and it's a true just like cruelty versus kindness. Yes.

They're really, they're really playing into the campaign Tala Rica wanted to set up. I once heard somebody around the, the Mamdani, Cuomo campaign, be like, they both got the exact antagonist they wanted. Yeah, that's a great point. Right? And it just turned out, Mamdani was right about which antagonist he wanted

and Cuomo wasn't. In terms of that race and who's making the right tactical calls, we should just take a step back and say, you know, Texas is Texas for a reason. And if you run a moderately competent campaign with a moderately competent candidate,

you will win by five points. Like, as a Republican. As a Republican, it's just structurally there. So you really got to screw things up. If not more than five points. Yes. I mean, 10.

10 to 5, right? You run a bad campaign. It's 5. You run a miserable campaign like Ted Cruz did in 2018. In a really, really good year for Democrats, you win by 2. What I would say is about Paxton is that he's kind of the worst of all worlds in this way, which is that Ken Paxton is someone with a lot of baggage. He was impeached by a supermajority Republican state legislature for corruption. He was indicted for securities crimes, although not convicted. He was also not convicted on his impeachment. His wife recently divorced him for what she called. were biblical reasons. There were a number of his ex-staffers who came out with a statement where they talked about just how awful he was as a boss and in his public positions. I've covered Ken Paxson a ton in my journalism career. You don't hear him talk that much. This is not a super charismatic guy. He's got all the baggage and none of the charisma. It's a weird combination of things. But it's, it's not like there's some amazing magnetism on the other side of it. So, I, If you were setting up the worst kind of candidate in this era who's got the kind of all the negatives of sort of high risk attentional strategies and none of the positives, it kind of is Ken Paxton.

Yes. But this is where I think there's like just something genuinely interesting about Tala Rico because he to me shows there's actually a lot of pathways in to breaking out attentionally. It's generally interesting that Tala RICO is able to beat Jasmine Crockett, who is also like big. MSNBC figure, Jasmine Crockett. Yes, it's big on viral video and is not super guarded and talky poinsy, you know, that, and I think that's a good attribute and it, you know, he beat her in that primer. But it goes to show, I think, that there's probably a lot of different angles. Yes.

That you can play here. I think one thing that these platforms sniff out, and I don't know why, but podcasting, video, et cetera, I think they sniff out in authenticity, that in a way that was not true when you are giving quotes and newspapers or going on Meet the Press or being on the nightly news, I think actually inauthentic figures could do perfectly well there. Somehow institutions, to go back to what we were talking about, institutions don't care about authenticity. They actually want you to change who you are to conform to what they need.

Yes. But these sort of anti-institutional spaces, they do, yeah. There's something about them where people, I always feel some people are on the show, the first thing the audience can sense is in authenticity. The first thing they can sense is you not telling them what you really think. Yeah. And you got to be, I think that's such a good point that you have to be, you have to be some version of your actual self to figure it out and to do it right. Rahm Emanuel is not, in my view, likely to be the Democrats' 2028 nominee.

But his somewhat unlikely presidential campaign is going to do better than I think people realize it's going to do in being a sort of force in the primary. Yeah, because he's fundamentally himself. Totally, yes. In all places. Yes. And so that allows him to just sort of attack and run plays and be compelling. And also, he's got to go back to the risk calculation, he's got nothing to lose. He can say yes to everything.

And he's a high risk personality. Yeah, he's got high risk personality. He's an unusual highly institutional figure. Yeah. Who's very high risk. Has very, very, very high risk appetites. Speaking of 2028, we talked about AOC a little bit ago, and I think she's one of the big figures here. But what if you made of John Osses' emergence as like a cross-ideological 2028 Dark Horse,

the person who I've been talking about for a while, but Hassan Piker is talking about, you know, Matt Iglesis is talking, right? Like, you know, Michelle Goldberg just did a great piece on him. There's something interesting in what people are projecting on to John Ossif. I have been jokingly calling him in our team Slack the Lisan Al-Gaib. which is just a Dune reference to the like the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the way that the, the, the way that he is, the kind of chosen one, right? The, the foretold profit. This is a joke, just to be clear. And the reason that I use that is Jewish Kennedy, man. There is something about the, the, the way that he is performing his candidacy, the social media videos that putting out, the fact that he is very conventionally handsome and young and could be in a movie.

Like AOC, he's very controlled in his media. Yeah, he's not playing a volume game. Not playing a volume game. No, not playing a volume game. I think that he has figured out a way in a broadly palatable ideological fashion to leverage a populist moral critique of the rot of Trump that can appeal across the different Democratic factions, which is important. But also, he's running for reelection in a swing state and is right now polling very well.

We'll see what happens. But if you back up a couple of years, if I said to you in 2024, which of the, or 2022 or whatever, which of Georgia's Democratic senators is everybody going to be talking about in 2020? 26 as a 2028 savior. I think the answer would have been Raphael Warnock. 100%. And instead, Assoff is the one people are talking about. And I was looking at Rafael Warnock's YouTube page

because he's doing content. But it doesn't have any of the visual grammar. One thing that you see in a Mamdani, you see in a John Osse, if you see in a James Tolerico is we, this is not just a like a, an age of algorithms. It's visual.

Very visual. And you'll see Warnock, and he's, like, talking in, you know, the Senate press conference setups, and he's just, like, in front of American flags. And Asov, they have figured out,

you know the clip, like, immediately when you see it. And Aosov used to be a documentarian who did documentaries on international corruption. Right. So there's a background here. This guy actually knows how to create TV

about corruption. Yep. But there's something really interesting to me about yeah, first the scarcity that the creating want this who is John Osset,

this building anticipation plus this figuring out of a visual grammar that's distinct and wholly your own and looks like Obama. Yes, it does look like Obama. It looks like. It's also the hero shot.

It's always a hero shot which was a constant you remember there's an onion. You got to be skinny for that to work. I just want to, for anyone else who's taking notes out there in production, you got to be pretty thin for that hero shot.

There was a great. The hero shot being this sort of three-quarters upward angle. And otherwise, you get a lot of chis. Yeah, you get a lot of chin. And there was this great, the other article on Obama, something like Obama accidentally stares too far into future. Because he was very good at this. And the Assoff shot is always...

It's always like this. Like, he doesn't seem like he's looking at a crowd. Yeah, he's teasing out past the crowd. No, you're right. And I do think it's true that kind of visual branding is so interesting. There's one other dimension of Asaf that I think is really worth mentioning in terms of 2028, which is that he's Jewish. Yes. And a genuine Israel critic.

See, this is, so I think to go back to what we were saying about that Michigan race, there's no way of getting around the fractures in the party on Gaza, Israel, perceptions of anti-Semitism, perceptions of anti-Semitism, perceptions. of undue influence by the Israel lobby. Like, the coalition contains both elements. And someone's going to have to figure out how to thread that needle. And if you were asking me what that person might look like, I would say, the first Jewish nominee in history, who is also a critic of Israel, would be one recipe to thread a very difficult. needle for the coalition.

Yeah, and the point of years that Ossive has substance on this. So he early on sent onto a Bernie Sanders letter that I think only had 19. Yes, very, like with a small group. It wasn't, yes. That was against sending more arms to Israel, given the level of humanitarian devastation

that was currently being inflicted by Israel upon Gaza. My colleague Michelle Goldberg had a great profile of him. And, you know, she mentions like a Haaret's piece, which is like the liberal Israeli newspaper saying, well, this position is going to make it much harder for Aosf to win in Georgia. And no, it put Asov in position to actually navigate this in a way the others are going to have a lot of trouble with. Josh Shapir is going to have a lot of trouble here. It's already having a lot of trouble here.

And, you know, but if you go too far to the other side, you're going to have, right, you're going to need somebody who can represent both sides of the divide at once. And Aesf, who is one, centering. on a corruption story, who is too, centering on a, he moves a corruption critique into an argument for liberal pluralism. Yes. Right. It's sort of a populist critique with a liberal pluralist answer, right?

Talks a lot about values, talks a lot about being rooted in the civil rights movement, and then is able to navigate this dimension of the party's schism. He's also done something on corruption that I have struggled to do, and I don't know if you've felt the same way. the corruption is so overwhelming. And you can hear my voice right now, like so, it leaves me speechless. It's so brazen.

It's so insane. Every single day I discover some new story that is like, would have been the end of any other politician I've covered. Asaf has figured out how to tell that story very, very well. But one reason is that he often, he moves it to be as about Donald Trump and also about the Democratic Party, also about the existing institutions, right? See, I get why people voted for him.

Because even before he came on the scene, America had the most corrupt political system in the Western world. It's been running on corporate money, secret money, billionaire money, both sides. And it's worse than ever now. Citizens United was the worst

court decision in modern American history. And when members of Congress aren't begging for money from lobbyists, they're trying to dodge, getting carpet bombed by these super PACs. And see, this is why nothing works for ordinary people. It's not because of woke

college kids or trans students or because there are interracial couples and serial commercials. It's because the people's elected representatives don't represent the people. They represent the donors. There's a credibility. He's very careful always to do this, which again is another Obama move.

Obama would always include an argument from the other side in the argument he was making. Always. Always. People say. Yeah. Right. And he does that, right? You know, both sides. And he's very, very careful to make this a critique of the system itself, of which Donald Trump is taking advantage of it, but is not its originating, Yeah. And I think that's also part of, again, it does help to, it helps to be getting your reps before the Georgia electorate. Yeah. You know, it's like comedians. Politicians are like comedians. You work the room. You see where your laugh lines are. You work different rooms. You work larger and larger rooms. And the room matters a lot. And what you, the feedback you get from the room is it matters a lot. It helps to be in a context where the room that you're working is a Georgia elect. I think this was true of Bernie Sanders in in Vermont where, you know, he only got to where he was after many failures, many electoral failures, many years in the electoral wilderness by figuring out how to talk to the median Vermont voter who was not a committed ideological social. It's why Barack Obama was as good as he was, because he was a black politician who had to work white rooms. Yeah.

You know, and he's talked about that, how much you'd do in, you know, to win statewide in Illinois to win in these rural areas where people were very skisks. of a person named Barack Hussein Obama in 2004. The other thing that I think is worth touching here, one thing I see among the Democrats right now is they're all competing to prove they're the fighter. And relatively few are working in the more inspirational side of the tradition. That you look at Newsom, you look at AOC, you look at Pritzker, right? Like they're all like, I am your brawler.

right, I will rip their throats out for you. And Asoff, even though he's sort of attacking corruption, he is not in that mode at all. It's a different register. There's a type of Democrat who, even if they've learned to suppress it, their fundamental feeling at all levels is a disbelief. I can't believe this happening. This is happening that anybody could like this guy, that these things aren't sinking him. Yes. And he is formed in races.

Exactly. Where that is not a register that works. And you cannot, a lot of Democrats have to kind of abstractly come to the view that there are people in this world who like Donald Trump, but they don't know any of them. Yes. And if they do, they maybe cut them out of their lives. Right. And that is not John Oslo's world. That's what I mean.

So he's formed fully in an environment in which the appeal of Trump and Trump and Trump. and Trump's power over the electorate and Trump's power over specific people that are, that he has to win over or whose family members he has to win over is present from the beginning. And I think there's something really useful and powerful about that for just, again, how you train.

But if you look at polling, and if you practically now look at the prediction markets, polling, Kamala Harris has a lead. I think people are skeptical that lead will lead to primary dominance, but I guess we'll see if she runs. But if you look at prediction markets, the lead is Gavin Newsom. And we all knew Gavin Newsom wanted to run for president.

I would say six years ago. Yeah. I was pretty dismissive of how that was likely to go. You know, handsome white guy with a bunch of scandals from California was like not the, not what the Democratic Party seemed to be looking for. Who he is in some ways has changed or actually in some ways may become closer to a core of him. What do you think about the way Newsom has maneuvered himself? into one,

attentionally capable in a way he wasn't always, but two, into, I think it is the fairly wide consensus right now that he is a Democratic frontrunner for 2028. I think I have complicated feelings. I mean, I think that there's some part of me that just thinks governor of California is tough,

a tough thing to do to win national, to be the present. Of course, New York real estate development. helper is also pretty tough too. So what do I know? Yes, I think that I think the, the choice he's made intentionally is the one of the most interesting, which is he was always a charismatic guy, but he was not, he has chosen omnipresence.

He's chosen to say yes to everything. He's chosen to go everywhere. He's chosen to host his own podcast. He's chosen to host his own podcast. He just had Ashley Sinclair on it. Yeah. He said Ben Shapiro on not long ago. He's doing things you would not expect.

Exactly. And I think it is pretty. reduced a comfort that is really, really useful in the world that we live in. I think there's a question of both what the Democratic primary electorate wants and what the general electorate wants in relation to Donald Trump. And here's what I mean by this. You were talking about like being a fighter. And I think there's a little bit of Freddie Hampton said, you don't fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water.

And there's a little bit of a question between, do you want to fight fire with fire or do you want to fight fire with water? And the our fighter version, like our brawler, our Trump, essentially, which I think is appealing to some people in the Democratic electorate, is sort of the mode that some democratic politicians have gone. And in some almost sort of perotic ways that Newsom has gone by doing the whole like Trump schick online. Okay, but let me complicate this in one way because it's why. I find Newsom really interesting. Because he is doing more than that. I agree. Yes.

There are two things. So one is the number of reps he's getting places he's going. I mean, you and I just saw him at the CAP Ideas Conference. He's just gotten better. Yeah. He's gotten better, faster than the other stuff. But the other thing, I think a really big problem Democrats have faced since Obama is about describing a kind of unity that we can find as a country, a way of living here together,

despite our disagreements, despite our history, despite our differences. And Bill Clinton did a lot in this register, right? He, you know, Rhodes Scholar, but poor Arkansas boy, you know, New South. Yep. Obama, I mean, the master of this register. Yes. But because he was a master of this register, he somewhat destroyed the ability of anybody else to use it. Because if he couldn't achieve it.

Right. That's a good point. If what the Obama era cashed out into was Donald Trump. and the division and dissolution of like the shared moral and democratic framework we had, then to speak like Obama did in 2004, to speak like he did in 2008, becomes naive. Nobody's going to believe you. Right. But the weird thing Newsom is doing is containing these two opposite ideas in himself, which is one, like, I'll be your brawler.

But two, we will just. just disagree honestly and in public. Yeah. And continue the relationship with each other under those terms. You know, he'll talk to Charlie Kirk, you know, before Charlie Kirk was killed. He'll talk to Michael Savage. He'll talk to Ben Shapiro. He'll go to the left.

And Newsom is sort of, it almost seems to be making this argument that is not that we can live here together in some way where our differences dissolve. It's that our fights with. each other can be productive. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. It's a very Ezra Kleinist approach. I do wonder whether there's also a kind of incoherence in that narratively. That makes it a little difficult to pull off. I don't think he's been able to synthesize him yet.

I'm not sure you can. It's why I find his campaign very interesting. He'll often talk about the place right now in his rhetoric that falls in most flat for me is he'll start talking about they need to be a repairer of the breach. right, or repairer of the breach. It's biblical line. And you don't feel it. Like, you don't feel how he's going to repair the breach.

Right. I want to end here on the big attentional campaign that kind of ended in failure, which was Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles. Because if you were online, it was like this former reality star is coming out of nowhere. He's got the greatest ads.

You can't be on X for five minutes without seeing something from him. You know, he's going to, you know, maybe win 50% in the runoff, maybe, you know, maybe at least make the runoff. But then it didn't pan out to anything. He underperformed Donald Trump. I think it's a great counterpoint to many of the theories I've been supposing. So I'm glad we're talking about it because I mean, it was a very successful campaign intentionally.

I do think there's something going on. We should just say there's something going on with X right now under Elon Musk that is a little distinct to that platform, which is that it's become. a kind of hermetically sealed hot house of insanity that when you enter it, when you're not in it all the time, you enter it, you're like, you guys are nuts. Yeah. And that's exactly the way many people felt about like what we might call kind of peak woke Twitter. So part of it, I think, is a product of how much that was in X candidacy. Yeah, there's also a question of what's real there. Yeah.

What's being clip armed? Totally. What has a lot of bots pushing it. But the other lesson I think here, it is never going to be the case that attention is the entire story. There has to be something else happening. And I think with Pratt, there was nothing else happening, really. There was no reason for that man to be mayor, first of all, why that guy. I do think the Pratt campaign to me really is an object lesson in what X is at this point that I think would be very useful for everyone to internalize because you and I both remember back in the day when people would say Twitter is not real life.

And weirdly, I think that's even more of the case now, under the algorithmic empire of one Elon Musk. I think one of the greatest advantages Democrats have going into 2028 is not being there. Is that Elon Musk has control of Twitter. I think people think of this as a problem for Democrats. It's the opposite because Musk is warping Twitter towards a hard right, conspiratorial, hermetic nature. and in the way that when Democrats had dominance over Twitter, when liberals and progressives and leftists had dominance over Twitter,

they convince themselves of a bunch of ideas that were politically lethal, but they didn't understand that because where they were, it's like to have normie opinions was politically lethal. That's how it is for the right now on Twitter. And J.D. Vance is there and all of their staffers are there. Whereas like the liberals and Democrats and leftists are split and broken across different platforms. and that is genuinely an advantage. I have come to this exact same conclusion.

Yeah, like Twitter, it's like, it's a kind of a curse, right? It makes you feel very powerful and you pay for it. Let's end there. Always our final question. What are three books? You're going to recommend to the audience. So I'm going to spare you all my reading on Italian history, which I think is probably not particularly relevant.

I read and loved Ben Lerner's newest transcription. I will say as someone who went to Brown and he was in my class there, and I just went to my 20th reunion with Kate, who I met there. It had a particular potency for me that it may not have to the general audience. I recently read, and I can't believe I had never read this book, but I read The Godfather, the original novel by Mario Puso. It's a combination of some really weird and truly awfully misogynistic stuff, but it is incredible how good that book is in some ways.

And also, it kind of makes you understand why the movie is a masterpiece. It's like I didn't quite realize how faithful the movie was to the original source material. And the last one is a new novel that I just am about halfway through, through someone else that I know, Courtney Mom, called Alan Hopps Out, which is a great kind of really insightful, searing, comedic look at a Greenwich advertising executive who goes to live in the playhouse in his backyard. Chris Hayes, thank you very much. Thank you.

This episode of The Esauclan shows produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Annie Galvin, Kristen Lynn, and Mike Kelbeck, Jack McCordock,

Marina King, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Amun Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times pending audio is Annie Rose Strasson.