The Ezra Klein Show - Jon Favreau on Where the Democrats Went Right

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

The government shutdown is the Democrats’ first big strategic bet of Trump’s term.Not everyone in the party agreed that shutting down the government was the right move or that health care was the right message. So why did they ultimately pick this fight? What are the risks? And what could Democrats learn here that might help shape their strategy for the midterms and beyond?Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter and a current co-host of “Pod Save America,” joins me to discuss.Mentioned:"Off Message” by Brian Beutler“What the Shutdown Is Really About” by Ezra KleinBook Recommendations:Civil Resistance by Erica ChenowethStride Toward Freedom by Martin Luther King Jr.The Radical Fund by John Fabian WittThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] 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 Annie Galvin and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio 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.

You know, The ongoing government shutdown is the first real strategic test of Democrats in Trump's second term. It is the first time when they've overcome enough of their internal divisions to choose a fight, choose a message, choose a set of demands, and actually take a risk. Behind this fight are a bunch of strategic schisms in the party, or whether or not it makes sense to confront Trump in this way to use what leverage they have to take this kind of risk. schisms over whether or not to fight on lawlessness, authoritarianism, democracy, or to only focus on pocketbook issues. And now we're in the shutdown and the road out of it and towards the midterms and eventually towards 2028 is going to require Democrats to face not just these, but a bunch of other

schisms in their party over what kind of strategy works for them, what kind of voters they're trying to win back and what those voters actually want. To talk through both how we got here and where the Democratic, Party is going, I want to invite on John Favreau. Favro, of course, was director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama, and he is the co-host of the hit podcast, Pod Save America. As always, my email, Ezrapline Show at NYTimes.com. John Favro, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So I want to start in the strategic divide that led to this. You go back a couple months, there's a debate inside the Senate Democratic Caucus, the House Democratic Caucus, about whether or not to have a shutdown, whether or not that is a safe thing for Democrats to do. What are the two sides of that debate? I think the side of the debate where people did not want to shut down is that the party that causes the shutdown almost never wins, that it was going to be impossible to ring any concessions out of the Trump administration, so why are Democrats closing down

the government? What is the end game? What counts as a win? How do you get out of it once you get into it? And would Democrats who do not have as big a megaphone as Donald Trump and do not use it as well, would they really be able to make their case about the shutdown in a way that is as effective or more so than Donald Trump. The other side of the argument is Donald Trump has basically usurped the power of Congress on a number of levels, whether it's tariffs, whether it's rescissions, whether it's impoundment, whether it's all of his immigration policy, whatever else. But he is on a number of those fronts, possibly violating the law.

And things are getting pretty scary in America right now. And this is sort of the one leverage point that Democrats will have between now and the terms to potentially not just force changes in how Donald Trump behaves, but also grab people's attention. And also, that argument is if we don't shut the government down, if we don't move forward, Donald Trump is just going to continue governing exactly as he's governing, and he's going to continue to impose tariffs. He's going to continue to do immigration enforcement exactly as he's doing it now and nothing will change and then we'll have the midterms and maybe that will be enough for Democrats to win. Just people's dissatisfaction with the way that Donald Trump is running

the government. But maybe we shouldn't bet on that because right now all the polling is, you know, shows a Democratic lead, but small enough that it's not something that we can be confident about. And the Democratic brand in Tatters. Yes. So then there's another division that opens up between the let's have a normal shutdown and let's have an abnormal shutdown, which is to say, When you were describing the pro-shed-down side, you were focusing on Trump's lawlessness, the authoritarian tactics, you know, as I put it in, in my essay, masked men in the streets, right? This is a profoundly abnormal time. You can't run politics as normal.

But big faction of the Democratic congressional wing, even among people who believe all that, who say, our voters or the voters we need to win over don't care. And our best issue is health care. and talking about democracy, talking about lawlessness is a loser. We should talk about something bread and butter. In some versions, it was terrorist, but usually it was health care. Health care won out. That's the shutdown we're in.

But talk me through how that happened. I think Democrats are absolutely right on the substance of what they are fighting for right now. If they voted with the Republicans to pass a Republican funding bill, price of health care goes up for 20 million Americans. Like, if they did nothing and they just went along with it, 20 million Americans see premium increases of, you know, double to quadruple. And this is at a time when the price of everything is still way too high, mostly because Donald Trump also raised taxes on everyone with his unconstitutional tariffs. They're likely unconstitutional. Politically, Democrats are already convincing people that, like, look, the government is closed right now.

And, like, 750,000 people are furloughed. Donald Trump is continuing to cut more programs to try to, you know, threaten. mass layoffs, air travel is getting delayed, right? And all he would have to do to stop this is stop people's premiums from going up, which everyone wants, or most people want. Most voters want. By the way, a lot of Trump's voters want it. Most MAGA voters won. I saw a poll. I think it was 58% of self-identified MAGA voters, one of the premium credits extended. Especially because the premium increases will disproportionately hit people in red states. And so the politics is on the Democrat side. The substance is on the Democrat side here. My question is, like, if I'm the

Republicans, it's in their interest to make a deal and to keep the government open again. Because they are now on the other side of an issue that the Republicans don't want to be fighting about this in 2026. They don't want to be fighting about this ahead of the midterms. Their voters want an extension of the subsidies. It's a losing issue for them. They want to take it off the table. Why not just let the Democrats take it off the table with them? and solve a political problem that they're facing right now, and then just go on their merry way. Now, to your larger question about Trump's lawlessness,

maskmen in the streets of the authoritarian takeover, my concern is, okay, so we get a deal on this in the next couple weeks. This being health care. This being health care. So we get a deal on this. It's off the table. Politically, does it benefit Democrats at that point? So Democratic voters have now seen that their party will fight for something. That's good.

They now know that health care was an issue where their party stood up for what people wanted. And Donald Trump did not. In fact, Donald Trump not only didn't stand up for it, but tried to punish other federal workers and other people because he so badly didn't want to bring down premiums. And so that's good politics there. How long does that affect last? Do people remember that in the midterms? And then did we also miss our last chance to actually push back on Donald Trump's authoritarian takeover

and what he's doing around immigration enforcement? which is very frightening and very un-American. A couple pieces of that I want to pick up on, but one just about the question of whether or not success here is actually good or bad for the Democrats. So your former colleague Brian Boitler wrote on a substack, quote, if we get health care subsidies without any new constraints on Trump's abuses of power,

I believe we will come to regret it. He goes on to say, Democrats shouldn't have rescued Republicans from the pain of their own policies. And they should have insisted on a return to the rule of law when the leverage was there. And the argument here, basically, is that Democrats will have worked with Republicans to prevent a huge increase in premiums that would have made people very mad at Republicans. And so they will get this win, you know, in the shutdown, and already there seems

maybe like some increasing willingness to do something about this on the Republican side, but at the cost of taking arguably their strongest issue and the proof of how much better they are on the strongest issue off of the table. I think there is something to what Brian wrote there. Yes. And this is really tough because I'm not just a political hack here. I'm someone who, like you, like genuinely wants to make sure that premiums don't rise on 20 million people.

Like I think that's crazy. And I think if you can help people, you help them. And so it's not necessarily like, oh, you got to touch the hot stove. And everyone voted for this. And so now we should let people's premiums go up because maybe that will help us beat Trump later. It's also just, could you have made the shutdown about health care and still fought the fight over premiums, but also included, we have to reform the way that ICE is behaving?

Absolutely. You need a judicial warrant. If you're going to do a raid, no more militarized tactics and militarized style, no more flashbang grenades, no more long guns, no more middle of the night raids. If they detain a citizen or a legal resident, you must release them within 24 hours. There are proposals that you could put in that would tie ISIS hands, and in some cases just force them to obey the laws and the policies already on the books. And if they don't do it, then, you know, you cut funding, you make sure you have more congressional oversight than we have now. You make sure they turn the body cam footage on and report back to Congress. There's a whole bunch of proposals that you could have put in there.

Now, is Donald Trump likely to accept those proposals? Much, much less likely than he is to accept extending the ACA subsidies. But that is one way that you could call attention to the lawlessness and the militarization of our cities right now, which is only going to get worse. But this goes back to the strategic divide. I was asking about a minute ago, which is there is a division in the party about whether or not you want to call attention to it. You know, many say, look, Trump is not popular right now on immigration, but immigration is still a better issue for him than help. health care, then tariffs, then cost of living. Immigration is an issue where Republicans are more trusted and Democrats less trusted. This is true on crime.

This is true on a number of places where the Trump administration is deploying its most lawless and frightening methods. And so the argument from this faction is you do not want to make American politics about this. that the path of wisdom is, yeah, criticize it. But do the smart things that will allow you to take back the house in about a year. And, you know, then you can actually start raining this in. But a shutdown is not really leveraged to rein anything in. It's leveraged to draw attention. So draw attention to your best issue. Try to use that. Try to win the midterms. You know, you already see the way the Trump administration wants to make this about illegal aliens. Don't let them. What do you think of that?

It is a compelling theory that is predicated on politics and elections working as they have in the past. We have U.S. troops from red states deployed on the streets of blue states over the objection of people's elected representatives. Those troops are ostensibly there to defend the government's paramilitary force that now lands Black Hawk helicopters on Chicago. apartment buildings in the middle of the night and drags people out who are citizens and legal residents and children half naked screaming and crying who have committed no crimes. There was a priest who was praying outside an ice facility. It was on video and they just shot him in the head with a pepperball. He was doing nothing. He was a priest. He was praying. We might not want American

politics to be about this, but American politics is about this. The Trump administration has decided to make American politics about this, and they have used the federal government to make sure that American politics is about this. Am I surprised that the median voter, that the average American isn't as concerned about this as they are about their own premiums? No, of course not, because if it's not happening in your city and if it's not happening in your apartment building and you're not paying as close attention to the news as political junkies like us, you are of course going to care more about your premiums. But that doesn't mean that it's not important,

and that doesn't mean that if we let this slide and we just ignore it, that Trump is going to stop at deployments in Portland and Chicago. We're going to Memphis, but then I'm going to look at New York. We have to save St. Louis. Then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don't even mention that anymore. They're so far gone.

Remember, people thought maybe he would stop at deployments in Los Angeles, and D.C. And then he realized, I guess, that he didn't get the reaction he wanted. And so now Chicago seems like the one city where he is getting more of the reaction that he wanted because ISIS tactics have been so militarized and so aggressive. And so the question is, we get to 2026 in the midterms. Are there troops stationed by the polls? Are there paramilitary ice agents running around the streets around the election, do we have faith that if the results are close and that there was some kind of problem at the polls and there was intimidation or like that everything is going to be okay if there's a close election and we're going to do a recount and

Mike Johnson isn't going to decide to seat the Republican in a close race because the House ultimately gets to decide who is seated in a really close election in the House? I don't know. I hate being the Dumer person and I don't like getting people alarmed. necessarily. And I don't think we should be alarmed, but I think we should be clear-eyed about what's happening here and what it's going to take to stop it. It is possible, like I said, that people being dissatisfied with the way that Trump is running the economy, the tariffs, cost of living, everything else is enough to just win us the midterms comfortably. But that is a bet that we're taking that I don't think we need to because I think that we have a year until the

midterms, and I think that Donald Trump is moving very fast. I've been talking to members of the House and Senate, and both politically and morally, I've been going back to my big shutdown piece a month ago, on the side that says you can wrap health care and tariffs and authoritarianism into a single argument. And it is worth doing that if only to set up the argument you're actually making, if only to make American politics about what it is really. about. Part of you believe this is an intentional event. I was talking with my staff and we were looking at coverage on the front pages. And it's interesting how few front pages every day are

running the shutdown. In fact, the most recent policy of America at the top is, you know, the occupation of Chicago. And the shutdown has, instead of becoming the focusing event that ties together what is happening in American politics, it is one hermetically sealed event in American politics. And then there are these other events happening simultaneously and coverages splitting between them. Which is new, by the way, for a shutdown. New for a shutdown. It's like the first time we've had a shutdown where it's not the attention. It feels like it is getting less attention of the shutdowns. But the perception in the House, at least what you hear from them, is they've been just desperately trying to get the Senate to do something, right? Going back to March when there

could have been a shutdown some months ago, the House wanted it. Schumer and a crucial number senators didn't. I knew when I took this vote, there'd be a lot of protest, but I felt I had to do it for the future, not only of the Democratic Party, but the country, because here's as bad as that CR bill was, and it was bad. A shutdown is 10 times worse. So in this case, the House has wanted the Senate to hold strong. And then in the Senate, what the people running this will tell you is this was the argument that they could hold their members on. Already, they've lost about three senators, Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Mastow from Nevada, and Angus King, who is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats from Maine, they can't afford to lose that many more.

And I think it gets to something that I've been hearing this whole time from people in the Senate. I will be told by different members of Senate, the biggest divide in the caucus is between the Democrats who think we are in normal times and the Democrats who think we were not. The Democrats who think that you can just kind of wait this out and win the midterms. the Democrats who think something more like what you were just saying, which is that if you wait this out, the midterms might not be on a fair playing field. You know, maybe Chris Murphy is probably, I think, the loudest proponent of this view in public.

In countries that have lost healthy democracy, normally what happens is that over time, the party in power just contracts the space for dissent, for speech, for political opposition, such that well, elections still happen, the opposition party can never win. That is what President Trump and the radicals around him are trying to do to America. I think this is a hard argument. Also because even if you hold the Murphy view, it's not exactly clear what you do about it without more power. Right. I do think there are some Democratic senators who do believe that we are in a different kind of moment and that we are, beyond normal politics, but they also think that the best strategy to get out of this is to do, and I

actually think that that's probably the biggest group. And they have said, look, it is just too risky to fight on issues that are not our best issues, because at the end of the day, it's going to be people going to the ballot box and the median voter there is going to be caring about cost of living and health care more. And again, I don't think these are mutually exclusive issues. I see this as building an argument against what Donald Trump and this regime is doing that starts now, it goes through the midterms, it goes through 27 and 28. Like I see this as like building a movement and building a story and an argument for the movement. And for that, you need to start laying the building blocks now, making the fight the fight and making it bigger. And you mean, you mentioned

immigration. Everything I just said to you about the Black Hawk helicopters and all that and the troops in the streets, I didn't even mention immigration. Like, we knew that's what it was. it was about, but I think the point is, I don't think people who know this is going on think it's about immigration anymore. I don't think they think it's about crime anymore. And you've seen this in some of the polls, right? Like, they asked if crime was a big issue in the CBS poll, and it was like 8% said crime is their biggest issue. Immigration was down on the list, too. You know, majorities of voters near 60% don't want troops in the street right now. And I think if you made the argument about what ICE is doing, that they are, there are these mass federal agents trampling

on Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, your right to walk down the street without proof of citizenship, your right to call a lawyer or your family if you're suddenly thrown in the back of a van, even if you are here legally. If you ask someone, would you rather your premiums go up, or would you rather your child ripped out of his apartment in the middle of the night by masked men and then released a couple hours later after they were traumatized, I think they would take the premium increase. And it's like, I know that we can say these are important to the broadest number of people, but authoritarian takeovers, they sort of start at the edges of society and then they work their way in. And one thing we've seen from Donald Trump this year is like, if you give in,

he's not going to stop. He's going to keep going. It's working its way in quickly. Yeah. We are, we got to the occupation of American cities quickly. The president's most powerful advisor calls the opposition party a domestic extremist organization and has announced and talked about, along with the vice president, how they're going to start investigating non-profits that are left leaning, funders, individuals, and they throw around words like domestic terrorism, very loosely. Insurrectionists, legal insurrectionists, is another word we've begun to hear. They are cracking down on free speech. They've tried to get rid of comedians who've mocked him. I mean, like, I don't know what else we're waiting for here.

I think the comedy vote is going to swing in the next election. I think we're getting the comedians in 2026 and 28. I agree with everything you're saying. And I think most people following this podcast or who listen to Pod Save or if you're following politics on the liberal or leftist corners of X or blue sky, this is what politics is about right now and this is how it feels. I am so struck when I talk to members of Congress how much. how much it does not feel that way,

how much Congress is operating completely normally, giving Republicans cloture votes on all kinds of normal bills to do various appropriations processes and, you know, fund defense and all the things that Congress normally does it is simply doing normally. And one thing I have been hearing often during the shutdown fight in a way that feels strange, but I take it seriously, is from people who want to escalate the level of confrontation,

they're almost describing this to me as a learning experience that they and their colleagues have to go through, right? That the Democrats in the House and Senate, but particularly the Senate, need to convince themselves in a safer and more contained battle that they can stand up to Donald Trump without political disaster resulting. And that if they do that,

If they win the healthcare fight, well, they're going to pass a continuing resolution, and then they're going to need to come back in some months and do it again and do it again. I mean, this is how Congress works now. Yeah. And maybe having developed more confidence the next time they fight over tariffs, which is a place where I think the corruption and the bread and butter pocketbook issues come together a little bit more. Or maybe things get worse in Chicago and Portland, you know, he deployed. troops to New York, whatever it might be, and they have more confidence to fight on that.

That I find it hard to describe this because I'm pretty much at an alarm level of 11, but that they're, and I wonder if you're hearing this too, that there is a sense that the Democrats in Congress are in this fight, however many months into this we now are, eight or nine months, learning that they can fight. But the point is that they have to learn that in order to have another fight, you know, or three months or four months when and presumably if they need to yeah and you know the way you just put that makes me want to pull my hair out but are you not hearing that though oh yes no because i heard before and every time i but honestly it's the most persuasive argument to me for them

and as much as i wanted the other strategy and didn't want the health care strategy i am very happy with Democrats for deciding to go forward and not give the votes to fund the government without this. I think that's good. And it seems wild to me that you needed a fight like this to make you feel better about it. But I also hope that we don't learn the wrong lesson from this, which is we can only fight on cost of living issues and that we should ignore the masked men in the streets. That's true. But let me flip this and make a more affirmative argument for something they do seem to me to be achieving, which is I have seen huge amounts of polling that is not just that Democrats' strongest issue is cost of living, but that if you look at what the voters they need

to win care about, what they care about is cost of living, and they don't really think Democrats care about cost of living. And Democrats, a genuine political imperative for them, is to convince voters that they don't just support health care, but it drives them. It drives them. It drives drives them as much as immigration does, as much as democracy does, as much as as LGBT issues do, as much as all the things that have become more associated in the minds of many voters with Democrats a little bit to their detriment. And something that is true is that there is a lot more coverage over the coming premium shocks than there was a month ago. I just did a full episode with Neurotanin about how this is going to work.

Would I've done that if they hadn't moved to a shutdown? Probably not. is the answer. Without there being a live fight, it would have been hard to decide to devote the whole episode to that, as opposed to the troops in the streets. And so I would say where we are right now, the way the coverage of this is feeling to me, the way it's looking, I think this fight is going better than you might have, or I might have expected. That I think the Republicans in both choosing, like, vengeance in the Trump administration level, canceling grants and threatening mass firings, and then this weird health care for illegal immigrants attack they've decided to settle on.

That's also helped. Like, the two sides agree that it's about health care. Donald Trump said the shutdown is about health care. So to the extent a shutdown is a detentional event, it has focused attention on health care. Whether this will matter in a year, I don't exactly know. But they wanted to move attention to health care, and they've moved more attention to health care

than was there two months ago. That's for them, like in the structure of this that they set up, that's a win. I think what I hadn't anticipated is how the coming notices from the insurance companies would be helpful in the fight. And I don't know that you're going to get that

on other cost of living issues, right? Like, this is a cliff, basically. And people are going to start getting notices in the mail that they're going to get premium increases. And this isn't even something we had when we were arguing over Trump's economic bill in the summer, because those Medicaid cuts very purposely were, you know, pushed to 2027. Yes, there were rural hospitals closing before then that we can point to,

but people weren't feeling the effects of the Medicaid cuts for a couple years. And the fact that the premium increases are going to happen, or at least people are going to know that they're going to happen within weeks, I think is very helpful to making this a big fight that gets more coverage. Where we are in the shodden is early, there is a lot of pain being felt. And right now, Democrats have not had to witness. stand real pressure. And Republicans are not seeming eager to start negotiations to get the government reopened. We feel in a holding pattern. I have one particular fear about the position that Democrats

have staked out, which is that they seem obsessed with the polling question of who is being blamed for the shutdown. I know. They really want to make the argument that they are not the ones shutting down the government. The American people see it. Every poll we just saw one in our caucus today. They blame the Republicans. They blame them because they're not negotiating, because they're on the wrong side of health care, because they're in charge. They have the presidency, the Senate, and the White House,

and they've gone home. I don't think that argument holds a lot of water. I think that the correct argument is that it is worth shutting down the government. We are refusing to reopen the government until we see these health care subsidies extended because that is worth doing. We are not going to reopen a government just to see you get screwed. But already we have begun to see it's different polls, so it's hard to tell, but maybe some slippage on that question.

And I'm worried that the degree to which they have been bragging to me privately, that on the polls they are not being blamed for shutting it on the government, the moment they see that poll number move, and it certainly could move. They will begin to lose their nerve because they have decided that not being blamed for it is the measure of winning in the court of public. opinion. And it just feels to me like a real vulnerability or fragility in the way they are telling the story to themselves right now. I think the vulnerability is, if only, they were just saying that privately. But that message has come through very clearly publicly as well. I think they've gotten a little better about it since the very beginning of the shutdown. I think there's less of that now. But I mean, you heard me when we started the conversation. I talked about like Democrats shutting the government down.

I'm not pretending the Republicans shut the government down. I do think an honest argument you can make is we are not going to give our votes to fund a government that is going to jack up premiums on 20 million Americans. And if you want to keep that government open without giving anyone help on premiums, you are free to change the rules in the Senate. And you have the 50 plus votes that you can pass. it and get rid of the filibuster, and you are free to do that, you run all three branches of government, go for it. But we are not providing votes for that because we are fighting to make sure that

people don't have health care premium increases. You lose moral high ground if you start saying, oh, I got blamed, you got blame, or it's their fault, it's our fault. The Kaiser Foundation poll shows that we're winning. I would not be reading polls if I was them. I would not be talking about how they're winning. I would just be talking about this is a core moral issue for the Democratic Party and for people in this country who are already suffering from high prices and high taxes because of Donald Trump's tariffs, and we are not going to let this happen anymore. Yeah, I just think people have gotten a little obsessed with a very Washington way of thinking about this. I was just going to say, one thing we've learned over the last decade or so is people don't give a shit about

process arguments. This is why, you know, you were out there years and years ago, and I was right behind you on the filibuster, on getting rid of the filibuster. And I think it is substantively the right thing to do in order for Democrats to pass an agenda ever again with the way that the Senate map is. But I also think politically I was never afraid of that fight because most people in the country don't give a shit about the filibuster. They don't know what it is. They don't care about arcane Senate procedure. And I think that the government shut down, who shuts the government down when, who's supporting the CR and who's not. Like, that all gets lost with people. To the extent that they're paying attention, they are going to know that there are disruptions in government

services, which will happen when more, you know, especially with air travel. It's already starting to see some of the delays. They'll know that. And then they'll know that Republicans don't want to do anything about health care and Democrats do. That's probably the message that's landing with people to the extent that they tune into the shutdown. So I don't think the blame game is important. I don't think Senate procedure is important what Republicans do. But like I just, I think you've got to make it about health care, and that's it. I want to talk about the Senate map, which you just brought up. Let me do it this way. Why don't we talk about the House briefly first? Because I think it's more straightforward. And then let's talk about the Senate, because all of this is

leading to the midterms. The next moment of political accountability, the next moment of power shift is the midterms. Democrats are in an, I think an okay position to take back the House with the big question being redistricting. And so you have Texas moving to do this mid-cycle redistricting. Now you have California moving towards a ballot initiative. I think those are actually beginning to go out in the mail pretty soon or even now to suspend the nonpartisan redistricting maps they have there in order to sort of counter Texas. You then could have this sort of chain reaction of other states countering each other. How do you rate what that looks like right now? The people you talk to, the conversations you're having, how does the fight for the house look to you?

So I think the Prop 50 here in California, the polling for that looks good Republicans are sort of that they just pulled some money back on that campaign because I think they believe it's not going well for them. So I feel good about that. The best estimates I've seen if Prop 50 passes, so California gets to redraw the maps to partially neutralize Texas, Missouri, and then all these other states go. Republicans pick up around anywhere from six to eight seats, I think I've seen. But if Democrats win the generic. ballot by three, four points. That'll still be enough to take back the House. But it's, you know, it's close. It's not like 2018 Blue Wave territory, at least not right now. It's a full year. So who knows? And so I think that the people that I talk to that are working on these house races, they think these frontline members, they want to talk about costs. They want to talk about cost of living. That's what voters care about. And so that's what they're focused on. And they feel confident about the House. I think the Senate is more of a reach. But, you know, There's more optimism there now than I think there was when Donald Trump took office.

Recognizing that we don't know how the midterms are going to go, it's also my sense from the polling and from talking to people that it is not feeling to the people working on house races like 2018, 2006, Blue Wave territory. I'm curious why you think that is, though, because you compare this Trump administration the first one. Yeah. This Trump administration is inflicting much more real pain on people. than Trump did in his first two years of his first term. The tariffs are real pain. There is ICE agents in the streets. There's much more chaos around RFK Jr. at HHS. They passed something that is tax cuts, but also has embedded in it, something more like Obamacare appeal, given how profoundly they gutted Medicaid, the kinds of destruction of

health care that, you know, was very mobilizing for Democrats in the first term. you know, Trump isn't popular. He's looking, you know, about as bad as he did in his first term. He's about 42%, which is more popular than I'd like to see him be, given what he's doing, but is not a great number. So why doesn't this look like Blue Wave territory? A few things. I think the shock value has worn off. And so when Trump was doing everything he did in 2017, it was the first time people like, you know, think about family separation and what a, talk about an attentional moment.

And he actually had to walk that back because of political pressure. And we are so far past family separation now in terms of what he's doing, that immigration enforcement. But I think people get used to it, unfortunately. I think people are used to the pain of a Trump administration, which is a really depressing thing to say. But I do think that's playing a role. I also think people are exhausted after a decade. I talk to people in my life all the time who are, you know, in the first Trump term, were very politically active,

paying attention to the news all the time, wanting to get involved. And this time around, especially after the loss in 2024, there's just this feeling of defeatism. There's always been cynicism, but the cynicism has almost morphed into nihism with some folks.

And people are like, I just can't do it. I can't pay attention anymore. I can't do it again. It's been too long. I'm tired. I've got to go about my life. And maybe we should just wait, wait this out. and at some point, you know, he'll be gone

and things will be normal again and I don't want to be involved in politics because politics sucks. But that explains why you don't see the level of resistance organizing you did in the first term. I get that. And, you know, I end up in these conversations

often where people say, well, you know, why doesn't, and you do have no Kings marches and other things that have been significant. But when people, I think, are asking the question of why there doesn't seem to be as much resistance as it was in the first term, I think a lot of people in the resistance

feel it failed. I don't totally agree with that, but the sense that Trump got back in, like, we gave it our best shot, and now they don't really know what to do. I think that's very real. That doesn't explain why Republicans haven't collapsed on the generic ballot. They are battering the economy with tariffs. They've slowed the labor market. I mean, they have done things that are genuinely unpopular and are causing people pain where you wouldn't need the reaction people are having to be, I'm going to be out of the streets every single night. Right. You know, you could just have people saying, eh, I wanted to give these guys a chance,

but when a pollster calls me, I don't like what's happening. So I'm going to tell them I'm supporting the Democrats. You've not seen a collapse in Republican support, even as Republicans have, you know, signed on to some pretty profoundly unpopular things. And on tariffs in particular, the idea that they came through a cost of living election, and they decided to increase the cost of goods all across the economy. It's a wild political decision to make that has not had particularly wild consequences for them, at least as of yet.

Do you have a view on why that is? I think we're early on the effects of the tariffs. I think those will get worse. But I think if you look at the polling, who has Trump lost? He's lost some of the younger voters, the black and Latino voters that sort of move. his way in 2024. I think the core of Trump's support, as it has been for the last decade, remains because even if they are feeling sort of pinched on cost of living issues, he is doing what they want him to do. For a good portion of his base, they like seeing all this.

And so he has that support solid. I think if you look at his numbers with independence and the independents that are left, they're going to be more left-leaning anyway, because some of them have already voted for Donald Trump and become Republicans over the last decade. But the independents were left, I mean, he has collapsed in a big way, right? He's sitting at like probably closer to mid-30s, low 30s, than he is in the 40s. And, you know, it's like he's 2% of Democrats approve. But it's the support among the core base of Trump voters where he's delivering what he at least talked mostly about delivering outside of the economy, the support's holding up. But again, It's not a year yet, and I do think that the pain from the tariffs is going to get worse.

The economy is not by any means chugging along, and there is a year left of Donald Trump sending troops and masked men into the streets all over the country, which could cause a lot of chaos. How much do you think the Democratic Party's brand is part of the problem? In polling, Democrats have never been lower, or at least in modern polling, elections are ultimately a choice. How much of why Democrats aren't doing better on the generic ballot is that people don't really like Democrats? Yeah, I mean, Democratic voter dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and its leaders is at an all-time high, the dissatisfaction. And the last time voters of either party were this dissatisfied with their leaders was with Republicans in the Obama era right around when the Tea Party basically took over the Republican Party. So I do think a lot of this is Democratic voters saying I, and people who would tend to be Democratic voters to the extent that they vote, they are probably very unhappy with what Trump is doing, if not alarmed, but have not heard much from Democratic politicians. Now, part of that is where the party out of power, so we don't have one leader, our congressional leaders aren't necessarily the most effective communicators, Schumer and Jeffries.

that's why you have the 2028 potential contenders. You got Gavin Newsom out there and J.B. Pritzker making a lot of noise. But even a lot of the 2028 contenders are relatively quiet, aside from Newsom and Pritzker. They're quite quiet. I found it strange. Me too. Me too. And I assume that's a strategy to be like, okay, I'm going to hold my fire until, you know, we have a primary and I don't want to piss anyone off early. And I don't know. I can't tell the strategy. If anything is being rewarded in American politics recently, it's caution.

It's good. Well, you know, I could see someone saying, okay, you know, there's just a poll out of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro, more popular than he's ever been in Pennsylvania, would beat J.D. Vance in that state by, I think, double digits, according to that poll. And so maybe Josh Shapiro was right to stay out of this. And he could just sit there as a figure who is quite popular in one of the most important swing states in the country, if not the most important. So I get that, but I also think that the information environment, the attention economy, requires you to be communicating all the time if you want to build a following, not just in your party, but in the country, at this moment in politics. People expect their leaders to be communicating constantly about what's happening, especially people who decide primaries. So you're talking a bit about the relationship between the Democratic Party's leaders and the Democratic Party as a organization and its base.

But I'm also thinking here about the people who are not Democratic primary voters who, you know, or maybe people Democrats could win over or have one over in the past, but have soured on Democrats. Democrats. And I think that brings us to the Senate map. So in order to win the Senate in 26, Democrats would need to successfully defend seats in Georgia and Michigan. They would need to win seats in Maine, which they have often thought they will beat Susan Collins in Maine and failed. They would need to win the Senate seat in North Carolina that former Governor there Roy Cooper is running for. That seems plausible to do. Then they would need to win in two states that Trump won by big margins.

The ones you hear mentioned here are Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska, Florida, or Texas. Alaska. Alaska. Maybe Alaska. Tough states for Democrats. Yeah. What would it take for Democrats to win in two of those? First of all, you need a national environment that is much better for Democrats.

So I think you need the generic number up much more than three or four points. So you need a national environment that's quite poor for Republicans and quite good for Democrats. And then you need candidates in those states that I think are well known, which is why you've got the Roy Cooper's of the world running and people excited about that, who are well-funded. And I think who have strong communication skills, maybe most importantly. I've been able to work with Republicans in North Carolina, and I have been able to try and stop them when they do bad things. Time and time again, we are seeing Washington hurt everyday people, taking food out of the mouths of hungry children.

You know, I've thought that I need to make a difference at a time like this. Yes, but who are the well-known enough Democrats? I mean, Ohio actually Richard Brown is running. that's the answer there. But Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Florida. Well, even that, I think in Nebraska, like if you have Dan Osborne running again, he at least ran statewide before. So he has the name ID. Colin Allred in Texas has name ID. James Teller Rico and that primary is, you know, getting some national notoriety. Mary Pilata in Alaska, right? She won the house seat from Alaska, which is statewide. So if she ran for the Senate there, she's well known. In Maine, Janet Mills, the governor and now grand platinum in that primary is also generating a ton of national attention and you know we'll see if that translates to attention in maine as well so i do think you need these candidates that are well known within their states who either because they have they've held office there statewide or they've run before so the thing that's been on my mind is how many states

the democrats were competitive in just normally competitive in a dozen years ago in the 2012 cycle say now feel like these incredible reaches. So when Obamacare passed, Democrats held Senate seats in Iowa, in Ohio, in Nebraska, and in Florida. That wasn't long ago. Like, I am not that old, nor are you. You've been in politics this whole time. What happened, in your view,

that so many of these states became so much tougher for Democrats to compete in, that Florida and Ohio, say, went from the canonical swing states to red states, that Iowa went from a place that Barack Obama wins to a place that Democrats lose. What went wrong? I mean, I think most of it is the result

of a political realignment along lines of education. I think two-thirds of the election. does not have four-year college degree, and a third does. And so when you have states like an Ohio, like an Iowa, where there are more non-college educated voters, then you're getting a realignment that was probably been lagging for a while. Because you had, to the extent you did have Democrats in those states when Obama was president, they were very conservative Democrats. And so at some point, voters think, do I want a conservative Democrat or do I just want a Republican, the real thing.

But that just restates the question. Why are Democrats the party that sees themselves as a party of the working class? The party that is still much more pro-union, party that is still trying to expand your health care, that is raising taxes on billionaires rather than cutting taxes on billionaires. Why are they hemorrhaging voters who don't have a college degree? I think because the economic policies that Democrats have passed over the last couple decades, while they have improved the lives of millions of people, have not improved them enough to sort of neutralize the effects of an economy where wealth inequality continues to

grow. Their view of the National Party has become, and part of this is the fault of the Republicans or the success of the Republicans. They view the National Party as a party of elites obsessed with cultural and social issues and not focused enough on economic issues. and this is basically been the Republican message and the Trump message for many, many years now and I think that when we've been talking this whole time, like cultural, social issues, identity inflected issues, they get more coverage and more,

they generate more attention than cost of living issues and fights over cost of living issues. And so if you're someone who is more conservative on immigration, trans issues, abortion, whatever it may be, and you look at the national debate and you tune in, you're likely to see Democrats stake out progressive positions on that. Republicans fight them on it. And you're not as likely to see fights about health care like we're seeing right now, which is, again, what led Senate Democrats to the strategy that they're pursuing right now, is this very dynamic. Now, do you just run

an economic populist like Sherrod Brown? And maybe that's enough? Possibly. Possibly. But I I also think that ignoring the identity inflected issues at this point is not feasible because, again, Trump and the Republicans have a vote, and they get to make the election about something as well. And again, the way that the information environment works, right, those issues are going to generate attention. So you do have to have a message on all those issues. And it has to be a message that resonates with people who may be more conservative

than national Democrats or more moderate the national Democrats on those issues. this is not about like so then we have to change all of our positions and moderate all of our positions but like at the very least let's try telling a story about our position on those issues that appeals to people or at least doesn't push them away and I don't think we've done a great job of that I think a debate you're getting at here which I think is a pretty big strategic debate in the party is is economic populism enough or in order for your economic populism to be heard? Do you have to, in these states, run Democrats or have Democrats run, who are more culturally in touch with their own state, who share the views of more of the people

in their states? So Dan Osborne, I think, is interesting. Dan Osborne runs in Nebraska. He's an independent. Every Democrat I know wants Dan Osborne to win. No, Democrat, I know, wants Dan Osborne to run as a Democrat. Right. Because the Democratic brand is trash and it would destroy his chances. But Dan Osborne runs quite far to the right of where the Democratic Party is on immigration. Social Security to illegals, who would be for that? I'm where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border. If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I'm pretty handy. And, I mean, the last time you had a Democrat representing Nebraska was Ben Nelson, who was a pain in the neck during

Obamacare, but was also the crucial vote to get it passed. He was a pro-life Democrat from Nebraska. And I think there is a pretty big divide in the party of can you hit the economic populism button so hard that you don't need to do anything

on the other stuff. You can maybe tell a bit of a better story, maybe to emphasize it. Or do you have to run candidates who make liberals in New York and California uncomfortable with their cultural positions. Do you have to re-regionalize the Democratic Party, have much more variation in the actual positions

of the Democrats running? You know, the way Joe Manchin was quite different than other Democrats. How do you think about that? I think the one gift politically that Donald Trump and Republicans have given us in the second Trump term, especially, is that they have become so extreme

on so many of these issues that we're talking about, whether it's immigration, whether it's trans issues, whether it's abortion, that Democrats simply staking out positions that are mainstream, that are reflective of where most of the public is, or reflective of where the party was under Barack Obama,

for a lot of these, I'm thinking especially of immigration here, I think you just need to do that. And when I think about Arizona, Arizona and West Virginia are very interesting to me. Because in Arizona, we had Kirsten Cinema, who became an independent and was a pain in the Democrats' ass for quite some time. And then you have Joe Manchin in West Virginia, who got a lot of shit as well. I think we all wish we had Joe Manchin in the Senate still right now, as opposed to Republican Jim Justice, who has that seat.

We don't know when there's ever going to be a Democrat again in West Virginia. And would Joe Manchin be voting to keep the government shut right now? Would he have been with Angus King in Catherine Cortez-Mastro? Yeah, he'd probably be with them. But I don't know. I'd rather have that vote in the Senate right now. He voted with Democrats on the Inflation Reduction Act. He voted on judges, right? Like, that's the best we're going to get in West Virginia. Arizona is a different story. Ruben Gallego is culturally in tune with his state, including on the issue of immigration, but is much more progressive than Kierston Cinema was and is much more mainstream Democratic and won that state, which is a tough state. Yeah, Rand of the Democratic Party's right on

immigration, but is not a, you know, would support health care and child care in a way cinema was incredibly difficult on. And I will say for Gallego, I remember interviewing him right after the election, and we talked about immigration, and it was right when Kilmar-Obrego-Garcia was sent to El Salvador. And he was in the camp that this is a trap. We shouldn't be talking about this too much. This is what Donald Trump wants. And as Donald Trump, immigration enforcement agenda has become more extreme, and they've been picking people up out the streets. I check out his Twitter feed, and he is much more forceful these days on immigration. And so I still think he has this position on immigration that is, you know, pretty mainstream

and where most of the country is, but that has not stopped him from speaking out forcefully about what's happening right now. Issues change in relationship to actual events. Yes. I mean, I think people think everything is stuck, and you don't want to rerun the last election. I do, though, think this issue of the Democratic Party's national brand is an important one. What I would like to believe is that Democrats could find candidates in these states that match the states, and that would be enough to win. And I think that's increasingly untrue. Yeah, because everything's nationalized. Everything's nationalized. And so Sherrod Brown, he held the Ohio Senate seat for three terms. Sherrod Brown is as economically populist as you get.

not just as a Democrat, like he is one of the anchors of economic populism in the Senate and before that in the House for a very, very long time. For decades, corporations have had all the power in our economy. It's going to take a lot of work to undo those decades of bad trade and tax policy

that gave corporations every single day the upper hand. I want to see employers competing for workers. That's a good thing. It's how you get rising wages, which gets spent in the community and then create growth for everyone, whether in Santa Fe or Columbus. He knows his state.

He is trusted in his state. He's beaten by Bernie Moreno, like a wealthy owner of car dealerships, who had to settle a dozen wage theft cases before he beat sterling economic populist, Sherrod Brown. And what I take from that, what I take from Dan Osborne,

who, whatever he is, is not in his soul, absolutely cannot run as a Democrat under any circumstances, is it it's not going to work. Even good candidate selection is not going to work if people feel the Democratic Party's national brand has a little room or respect for them. I don't really know how you change it. I've some thoughts that I'll probably expand as the weeks go on, but I think it needs to be understood as a more central concern that a world where the Democratic Party brings end is so bad that it is an anchor that will drag shared Brown down with it. I mean, that's a problem you need to find some way to fix. Yeah. Versus just never having the Senate or never having it

with more than 51 votes ever again. Democrats have gotten used to having a lot less power than they used to be able to have. Yes. They've also gotten used to, and partly this is Trump's fault, but being primarily a reactive party to what Donald Trump does. And then there's this conversation that, okay, well, we need a positive agenda. And then it goes right to like policies. And I do think we're missing a story to tell about where the country is and where we want it to go. And we are on the cusp of revolutionary technological change again that's going to reshape the economy and how we interact with each other. And we didn't do so great the last time at figuring that out.

We're still dealing with the effects of, you know, the attention economy. And now we're heading into artificial intelligence. And I think Democrats have to figure out a story about what kind of country we want to be, how people are going to work, how people are going to interact with one another. We are in a political crisis right now. I think Democrats need to, it's not enough to say vote for me and the political crisis will end. It's how are we as a country going to get out of this political crisis together? And in your poll, the New York Times poll, cost of living is now being eclipsed by political division

as the issue that people bring up as the issue that concerns them the most, telling a story about where we want this country to go. We want a path for every American to make a living, make sure there's a living to make, and make sure that we have a government that protects our rights and freedoms, no matter who we are, no matter who we voted for. and you don't want a country where people who don't vote for the right leader get punished after the election. I actually think that's quite a popular position that would really resonate with people. And so I do think that Democrats who have something to say about the moment we're in, the crisis we're in, both in the economy, in politics, and in how we interact with one another, technologically and culturally, and how we can get out of that, that's the story

we need to figure out how to tell. And if someone who tells a compelling story about that is going to help the brand more than any number of, you know, fucking polls and research and focus groups. Let me try a thought out on you. I think part of the problem the Democratic Party is facing, part of how it ended up in its current ditch, is that it really hasn't had a strong party leader since 2016, that Hillary Clinton loses in 2016, so she doesn't become the party leader. Joe Biden in 2020 is just a very strange kind of candidate. He has already, I think, suffered a significant deterioration just in his communication abilities. It's not, you know, as bad as it'll be four years later.

But he doesn't have the energy. He's a kind of consensus candidate in a strange way. You know, people flood to him after South Carolina as a safe bet. But he's not a candidate the party falls in love with in any real way. and he is acting in his own way from a place of coalition building and a certain kind of insecurity, so he's really trying to keep his tent broad.

The Joe Biden, you know, of 15 years before, I think would have had much stronger views on what the Democratic Party should be and how it should sound and act than the Biden of that era. But then, four years later, he's in no shape to craft his administration

into an argument about what the Democratic Party is and isn't. And so then you have this crazy period after the first debate. Kamala Harris ends up as a nominee with 107 days to go or whatever it is. And she obviously doesn't win, but you don't have a full primary people fight out what the party should be and what its direction should be and how it should work and what issues it should emphasize and what it should let go of. She makes a series of moves, like moving to the right on immigration and moving, you know, to right on fracking, but with no explanation ever of like why this here. huge change from her 2020 campaign to her 2024 campaign is happening, right? So the sort of party doesn't have the fight about itself that leads to change. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is changing the Republican Party in all kinds of ways. You know, he's bringing RFK Jr. and he's, you know,

has changed it on immigration and changed it on Medicare. I think it's very hard for parties to change without an agreed-upon leader who decides on the change. And the Democratic Party has been just leaderless now for a long time and as such it's ended up in a space of drift i think that a lot of democratic politicians and i think this spans generations sort of lost confidence and do not trust their gut instinct anymore about politics and i think that was true after to some extent after trump won the first time i think after trump wins again after everything we've been through they're like well and i have no idea what works i have no idea what works i have no idea what people actually want in this country anymore.

And I think when a leader has come along and changed their party, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or even leaders who don't make it all the way of their presidency, Bernie Sanders, it is because they believe something so deeply. They have a theory of the case. They have a story they want to tell about the country and where it should go. And if it works, it works. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. but they're going to try it out and they're going to have confidence in that story and you're going to be

able to sell it and you don't have to worry about like which medium you go to and and what shows you're doing because you know everyone talks about like we have a million conversations about media and stuff like that like Bernie Sanders everyone knows what Bernie Sanders stands for and do you agree with his policies do you not he knows what he stands for he feels good about it and he's going to keep talking about it and I think to be a leader to change the party, you have to have a story and have to feel confident in it. And I think right now, too many Democrats don't feel confident. And so they are looking around and asking too many people and looking at too many polls and too many focus groups to try to figure out

where they should be as opposed to deciding where do I think the country should go. What do I believe about the country? And then let's look at the polls and the focus groups to figure out how best to message that, right? But you've got to start with the core conviction. And I just don't I don't think we've seen that yet from a lot of Democrats. And they don't project confidence, which makes it hard to get people to follow you. Yes. Do you think it matters that the Democratic Party's leadership and its best known figures over the past, you know, decade or so, have really ended up completely concentrated in New York and California in a way that wasn't true before? So you think about, you know, you had Tom Dashel, who was a Democratic Senate leader from South Dakota, you had had

Harry Reid from Nevada. Now, leader of Senate Democrats is Chuck Schumer from New York, leader of House Democrats, it's Hakeem Jeffries from New York. The most prominent House Democrat is AOC. The biggest Democratic name in campaigns this year is Zoran Mamdani. Prior to this year, Pelosi, the leader of the last Democratic nominee was Kamala Harris. Currently leading in the polls is Gavin Newsom. I can't really remember a time when the party seemed to quite so concentrated. And look, I am a Californian who is currently living in New York talking to somebody in California. So I am noting a problem I'm part of. Maybe it doesn't matter. Good leaders can come from anywhere. But it seems weird. And I wonder if it, in ways that people

don't quite want to face up to, affects the party, the way it sees politics. It's instincts its sense of what strategies are acceptable even to try like do you think there's something worth worrying about there yes and i think most people would say that it's ideologically related and perhaps that's true but i also think when you are in new york in l.a and san francisco in Washington especially you're sort of ensconced in a bubble of people who don't just think like you do in terms of like what's my position on a given issue, but like how I see politics and how I say, like to the extent that politics is nationalized, it is very nationalized when you're in one of those cities. And I think when people hear, oh, we need more Democrats

from like the middle of America, a lot of progressives, their mind goes to, okay, we don't want some conservative Democrat like Joe Manchin. But I think that some of the most promising leaders in the party who speak in ways that I find compelling, right? Like, I think John Ossoff in Georgia, we talked about Gallego, to some extent, Alyssa Slaken in Michigan, right? Some of these younger Democrats in states

where they have had to win the votes of Trump voters and have done so while still maintaining their political identity as mainstream Democrats, not conservative Democrats. And I think

that those leaders, especially the younger leaders in those purple states, are probably where we're going to find sort of the next leader of the party. Let's leave it there. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? You know, I've gone from reading about what life is like in authoritarian countries kind of books, right?

I feel like we've already passed that. Now I'm trying to be more hopeful. I'm trying to figure out books about like nonviolent protest and resistance and civil resistance, what everyone needs to know by Erica Chenoweth, had them on Potsave America a couple months ago now. They have the three and a half percent rule, which is no authoritarian regime has been able to withstand a protest movement, a nonviolent protest movement that is three and a half percent of the population or more. Martin Luther King's stride toward freedom, which is his book and first hand account of the Montgomery bus boycotts. I was reading that again, and I find that just a fascinating study in the strategy and discipline necessary for nonviolent resistance and protests.

and political movement and social movement building. And then this is not a book that's out yet. It's out next week, but I just read the long essay by the author in the New York Times. John Fabian Witt, The Radical Fund, How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars upended America, about a very wealthy philanthropist who decided to donate all of his money to progressive causes back in the 1920s and sort of seeded the ground for a lot of the most progressive policies that we saw we would end up seeing in the New Deal, which was, and when he was doing this, it was also a in the 1920s where we are seeing a lot of the political and social and economic conditions

that we are seeing right now. So I find, I thought the essay was excellent. I'm excited to read the book. John Favro, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. This episode of Isfantio is produced by Annie Galvin and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Amman Zoda. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Marina King, Kristen Lynn, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Carol Sabarro and Pat McCusker. Audio and Strategy by Christina Similuski and Shannon Busta.

The director of New York Times-pending audio is Annie Rose Strasser. Thank you.