Today, Explained - Just one year to go!

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

The election is now one year away. Ezra Klein offers Democrats a strategy to win in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You know that election you keep hearing about? The one that decides whether or not Donald Trump gets another four years? And all those Democrats who want to run against him? Well, the good news is, it's officially just one year away now. Less good news is that we still don't really have any idea who's running against Donald Trump on November 3rd, 2020. We have no idea. Before I asked Tara Golshin at Vox to explain what we do know about the Democratic field, we took a moment to remember all those who have passed out of the race. Eric Swalwell was the first to drop out.

He's the congressman from California who's probably best known for being on the House intelligence and judiciary committees that have done a lot of the investigations into Trump. But he also saw very early on that he was not going to be president. It's time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans. Okay, who came after Eric? And there was Mike Gravel. Who? Who was the very, very old man from Alaska, former senator from Alaska.

I don't remember this one. Did he make a debate? He did not make a debate. His candidacy was actually propped up by a bunch of teenagers. We joke that our goal is to make Bernie Sanders look boring and moderate and young. He didn't make it on the debate stage, but his presence was felt. But we wish him all the best. Who came after that? Then there was John Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper. Of Colorado. He really famously

said he would never run for Senate. Or maybe he didn't say he'd never run for it, but he really shit on being a senator. Being a senator would be meaningful, but I'd hate it. And now he's running for Senate in Colorado. Hmm. That makes sense. Yeah. He has a really good chance of winning. Okay. And then Jay Inslee.

Inslee. The environment. He kind of became like the patron saint of climate change for the Democratic Party. The time is up. Our house is on fire. We have to stop using coal in 10 years. And we need a president to do it or it won't get done. He's got a cabinet position for sure. Oh, yeah, definitely. If. Well, yeah, we will see. Okay, what is he going to do next? Do we know? He is running for re-election as governor. Perfect. So that's a nice consolation prize. Yeah. After Inslee? I know he wasn't the last one. He was not. Seth Moulton? Seth, yeah. Yeah. Kinda? No. Which one was he again? Seth Moulton is one of those kind of like centrist Democrats, House representative from Massachusetts. And yeah, he was vocal in his opposition to Nancy Pelosi. He lost that fight, obviously, and also lost the race for the presidency.

When do we get to de Blasio? We're not there yet. Then we have Kirsten Gillibrand. Oh no, RIP Gillibrand. Oh no, RIP Gillibrand. Yeah, and it was kind of surprising that she didn't make a bigger splash in the race, but she is really well known for her work around the Me Too movement in the Senate. If our party is going to punish women who stand up for other women, then we are absolutely going in the wrong direction. She couldn't really make a mark on the presidential trail, so she dropped out. Hmm, rough.

Now we're at Mayor Bill de Blasio. Donald Trump is playing a big con on America. I call him Con Don. What happened to him? He couldn't make the money. I read about that one. Yeah, he couldn't make the money. He also just wasn't polling very well.

And the narrative around him was that everybody didn't like him. There's a poll about a month ago, Quinnipiac poll, that showed 76% of New York voters, 73% of New York Democrats say you shouldn't run. So what should the rest of the country think when so many of your fellow New Yorkers are saying don't run? And then comes Tim Ryan. Tim Ryan, Congressman Tim Ryan. Congressman Tim Ryan. Made it to some debates. Made it to some debates. Kind of a moderate flavor. Yes, moderate flavor, very feisty against Medicare for all, likes to kind of go after Warren and Sanders. He also was the person who tried to oust Nancy Pelosi and ran for speaker.

Also failed at that. Also failed at the presidential thing. And finally, on Friday, our boy Beto. Yeah, Beto dropped out on Friday. And those 38 electoral college votes in Texas are now in play and I can win them. That is how we defeat Donald Trump in November of 2020 and how we bring this divided country together again in January of 2021. What happened?

He just couldn't raise the same amount of money and he couldn't poll as well as everyone else. And it just ended for him. Will he run for the Senate in Texas like everyone wants him to? He has said so many times he is not going to run for the Senate. It was just less than a year ago that he wanted to be there. That is true. But there are also a lot of other candidates in the race.

Fair. Tara, thank you for going through that with me. RIP to all of those candidates. The great news is they're still alive. Who does that leave in the race? Still like a whole lot of people, right? There are 17 candidates. 17. All those people are out and there's 17 left.

There are 17 candidates left. Okay. Well, let me just pull up a list here so I don't get it wrong. Let's see. We've got Bennett, Williamson, Yang, Biden, Booker, Bullock, Buttigieg, Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Harris, Klobuchar, Messam, Sanders, Steyer, Warren. Is that all of them? Did I get all of them? You forgot Joe Sestak. Who didn't forget Joe Sestak?

He just walked across the state of New Hampshire. That's why we forgot him, because he was walking. It's a great move, power move. All right, 17 people. Who are the frontrunners? Same old, same old? I think it's fair to say at this point that three candidates have consistently been polling at the top, and that's Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Senator

Bernie Sanders. How has this Ukraine drama affected the candidacy of Joe Biden? Has it? Can we see anything discernible? I wouldn't say that I've seen anything particularly notable in the national polls. He's still polling ahead of everybody else. He's still doing well in head-to-head polls against Trump. But there are still some warning signs.

We saw a recent poll in the state of Iowa, obviously the first race, very important for candidates to prove that they are viable candidates. And he came in fourth there. Fourth? Fourth. Fourth to Warren, Sanders, and? Pete Buttigieg. Wow. I hear his campaign coffers are much lower than they should be, too.

That is something that is noteworthy, is that he has had to go to these fundraisers and kind of explain why people shouldn't worry about this. And of course, that is something that that's different than other candidates that you have to tell your donors, hey, don't worry about this. I'm still electable. The scandal won't destroy my candidacy. Just keep giving me money. This was in the news recently because his campaign is opening the doors to having super PACs. And that's something that we've seen a lot of Democratic candidates really bulk at. You know, when billionaires and wealthy people contribute, they're not doing out of the goodness of their heart. They want something. And that is one of the great problems in American society.

Bernard, how's Senator Sanders doing post-heart attack? So in the last three months, he raised $25.3 million with more than a million donors. So he reached that record faster than everybody else. I mean, Warren was a close second. She raked in $24.6 million. But noticeably, Biden was far behind that. He raised $10 million less than them in the third quarter. Plus, Bernie got that AOC endorsement. We right now have one of the best Democratic presidential primary fields in a generation. And much of that is thanks to the work that Bernie Sanders has done in his entire life. So what effect has that endorsement had on his campaign? Anything?

It shows that the progressive wing of the party and the most famous face of the progressive movement is still behind Bernie Sanders. There's been this whole debate about whether Bernie should still be the face of the progressive movement. You have someone like Elizabeth Warren, who has the credibility among progressives, has a very progressive track record and policy platform, but still people like AOC, people like Ilhan Omar, people like Rashida Tlaib are going for Bernie Sanders. And that does strengthen his appeal on the left. But Elizabeth Warren doesn't seem to be hurting as a result. Elizabeth Warren has just consistently been going up in the polls. She kind of just sits

in that tied for first, second place in the polls consistently. And that's a huge change for her from when she first got in. What about everyone else? What are the other 14 candidates doing? Anything interesting? I think there are definitely candidates that people expected to be doing better than they're doing. Candidates like Kamala Harris, who last week her campaign had to announce that they had to make budget cuts. She was perceived as someone who could be the frontrunner and the nominee for the Democratic Party, and now there are questions around whether or not that's going to be possible.

And then there are candidates like Pete Buttigieg, who had this kind of early rise when he announced his candidacy, had this huge media cycle, was just everywhere. You couldn't open a newspaper or open a website without seeing articles about Pete Buttigieg. And then he kind of had a slump where he wasn't in the headlines as much, and he wasn't kind of registering as much support. And now we've kind of seen him come back, especially in early states like Iowa, where he is having a significant showing. Okay. So it's a long road ahead, a whole year, but we do start to get into primary season in just a few months.

Is that when we'll actually find out who this candidate will be? So in February, the Iowa caucuses will happen and then we'll very quickly go into New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states. And at that point, we will have a better idea of who is going to be able to rack up enough delegates to be the nominee in the Democratic primary. At this point, the polls are very much so just a snapshot in time of now. And if you talk to any pollster who's tracking this, there are a lot of undecided voters. And that's typical. Going into Election Day, people decide in the final weeks. So we're still kind of months away from when voters really are coming down to the nitty-gritty of who they're going to vote for. That said, we might find out a little bit earlier next year who's going to be the nominee because states like California are much earlier in the calendar. So that's a lot of delegates that are going to be decided a lot earlier. And that could really make or break candidacies for people. If you look back at past elections in 2008, for example, Hillary Clinton was leading the Democratic primary at this point. And Barack Obama obviously was the candidate. Rudy Giuliani was leading. Again, he was not ever the nominee. But when will we finally know? I mean, when will all the candidates

come out? And I don't know, Elizabeth Warren's husband like plays with balloons or something at the Democratic National Convention. July. July. July of 2020. Yeesh. Yeah. Okay. Can't wait. Can't wait. Can't wait. After the break, Ezra Klein ponders what these Democrats need to do to beat Donald Trump. This is Today Explained. About a week ago at this point in the show, you might have heard me talk to my young friend Desmond Kiwiko, today explained expert builder of crates and manager of Kiwiko projects. He mentioned that he wouldn't be building a Kiwiko costume crate for Halloween

because he himself had been inspired, maybe from KiwiCo, maybe not, who knows? We're not going to do an investigative piece about it, but he was inspired to build his own costume, and that costume would be a Today Explained costume. He was going to be Today Explained for Halloween. Maybe you were wondering if that actually happened. Turns out it did. I posted the evidence on the Instagram, on the Twitter. You can check it out. I'm at Ramis Firm. Truly incredible work from

Desmond. And Desmond's been doing incredible work with the KiwiCo crates. And who knows, they're meant to inspire interest in learning in science, technology, engineering, art, and math. And in the case of Desmond, man, he's on his way. Thanks for all you do, Desmond. Thanks to KiwiCo. You can learn more about them at KiwiCo.com slash explained, where you can try them out for your first month free. Ezra, we spent the first half of the show talking about the Democrats and where they stand right now, one year away from the election. And I just wonder, where does Donald Trump stand right now with the American people? What are his approval ratings?

What's extraordinary is Donald Trump stands exactly where he has stood, more or less, for the entire time of his presidency. We have never had a president in the post-World War II period who has been as stable and as non-volatile in approval ratings. His lowest, I think, is around 37. His highest is around 44, 45. So, you know, he's in, I'd say, the upper range, but he's been there for quite a while. And I think the big note there is we've had a lot of stories happening recently, right, in Ukraine, impeachment, Baghdadi. And even as those filter into the ratings, nothing's happening, which is to say people have decided if they like Donald Trump or not, and nothing that they are learning or have

learned over the past couple of years seems to have changed that underlying structure of opinion in any real way. I can imagine the people who support Donald Trump are unwavering because things like the Mueller probe and Ukraine and send her back and even, you know, good people on both sides don't really get in the way of his appointing Supreme Court justices, which he's done, or tax cuts for the rich, which he's done. But what about other stuff like the wall? I mean, he hasn't accomplished that in over two years of his presidency. Does that not affect him in some way? understand that is not that Donald Trump has not built the wall, but that the lamestream media, the failing New York Times, the do-nothing Democrats have stopped Donald Trump from

building the wall. And there he is out there fighting on their behalf, trying to get the wall built. And he's at war with Deep State and the swamp and everyone else. I mean, Donald Trump, I think, typically does not get blamed for a lot of what he does. It's why I think one of the few things that did appear to hurt him was the House Republican health care bill, because that was something where Donald Trump during the campaign had promised he would not cut Medicaid. He promised he would give everyone better health insurance. And then he signed on to this bill. He signed on. He supported this bill written by Paul Ryan that would have taken health insurance away from tens of millions of people that would not have been better for people that would not have protected

pre-existing conditions that would have cut Medicaid very dramatically. So that was a moment where the ability to say Donald Trump is being stopped by others and that is why he is not doing what he promised evaporated. And you had to say, oh, Donald Trump is actually just betraying his promise. And that seemed to have an effect. It's why when you talk to Democrats, they want to run against Donald Trump's embrace of more traditional Republican policies on health care and the economy and tax cuts and other things. They don't so much want to run against the craziness of the Trump show, the tweets, the eccentric behavior, because to them, the people who don't like him for those reasons, they already don't like him.

The place where you can find new allies and new votes are in the people who there's a dissonance between what they wanted Donald Trump to do and what he has been doing. And it's in Donald Trump's embrace of the traditional conservative agenda that you can begin to open up that wedge. Is it unusual for a president to have such steady approval ratings? Or did Obama have, you know, a 30, 40 percent margin that he just could never lose no matter what he did? It is unusual. And there are a couple of reasons it's unusual. So one is that Obama, for instance, had much bigger swings around his early honeymoon period where he had very high approval ratings, which Donald Trump never had. And there were some bigger swings around things like killing Osama bin Laden. But it is also true that most of the time, Obama was in a fairly narrow band.

So if you looked at the course of his presidency, you would see a larger potential variation. But if you looked at any given month, you would not see a huge difference from where Donald Trump is. Obama was somewhat more popular than Trump, and he was somewhat more popular than Trump amidst a much worse economy, which suggests to me that Trump is underperforming his potential approval ratings quite dramatically. The thing I would say about Donald Trump's approval ratings in the big picture is that he is in a condition right now where he should be quite strong. He has a pretty good economy. Unemployment is quite low historically. We have had steady job growth. We've had steady GDP growth. We've had, even in the last year or two, reasonable wage growth. So that, plus the fact that we are not currently embroiled in a huge new war, I think

one of the good things I will say about Donald Trump is he did not take the advice of many in his administration and try to go to war with Iran. You could imagine a president in these conditions at 55 percent. Not 70 percent, given the structure of partisan polarization, but sure, 55. The fact that he's at 42 speaks to the effect that his own unusual behavior, his tweeting, his fights, his just eccentricities, his recklessness, it speaks to the fact that he's not Teflon, that that has imposed a cost, a penalty on his approval ratings. And the thing I was thinking about Donald Trump is that he did not win in 2016 by much. He did not win the popular vote at all. And even in Pennsylvania, you would have had to change about 40,000 votes for Donald Trump to lose two. And so it was such a close election and the demographic trends are sufficiently in Democrats' favor that Trump, to get reelected into 2020, he doesn't need to match his performance in 2016.

He needs to do better than it. And there's no evidence in his polling that he has expanded his base. A thing I tend to think about from time to time is that people exist in this country who voted for Barack Obama and then several years later voted for Donald Trump, which I guess often amazes people outside of this country. How do the Democrats win those particular voters back? So there's a huge amount of research now and attention on this quite small percentage of voters who switched from Obama to Trump,

and particularly in some of these Midwest states. My read of that research overall suggests that, in general, these were voters who were reasonably high in what social scientists call racial resentment. And you might say, well, how could they elect Barack Obama then? And the answer is that feeling a way about a group of people doesn't always drive how you feel about one person. white anxieties to sort of appear to people as somebody who was operating outside of some traditional enmities. You could kind of feel like you're getting past some of that. When Hillary Clinton then ran a much more explicit campaign arguing, you know, in favor of Black Lives Matter, talking about systematic racism and systemic racism on the campaign trail, those voters who are higher in racial resentment and have more intensely negative views about immigration, went over to Donald Trump. I do not know how winnable they are. If you talk to a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren, what they will tell you is that those voters were upset by Washington's

support for free trade deals, they weren't helped enough by Democratic policies over the past 10 years, and a more unvarnished form of economic populism will win them back. You talk to Joe Biden, but he won't quite tell you. But I think what is believed to be true there is Uncle Joe is a sort of older white guy, comforting figure. These folks believe he's on their side, like maybe they'll move over to him. I think that it is a mistake for Democrats to think about this all in terms of winning the last war. They'll probably get some of these people back.

And by running a different campaign and running a more popular candidate than Hillary Clinton They'll probably get some of these people back. And by running a different campaign and running a more popular candidate than Hillary Clinton, they can get some of them back. But they also would have won the election if African-American turnout had been at the levels it was under Barack Obama. That's probably very hard to reconstitute, but it's not necessarily impossible.

Parties really come back from a defeat in the way you will expect them to. So after 2004, there was this huge belief the Democrats had lost white evangelical heartland voters. And, you know, maybe they had become too open to gay marriage or they were too socially liberal. And's an African-American guy with a middle name, Hussein, from Chicago, right? Like, that was not Donald Trump's victory, but that they nominated a candidate who in being themselves an exciting, interesting, unique political force created their own political dynamics that Donald Trump had to respond to and was not quite able to. And what do you think that dynamic should be? I don't know. I think that what's really important is that Democrats do not just run as anti-Trump. I think that the Democrats need to have a vision and a theory and an inspirational charge of their own. And if they don't have that, that creates a lot of space for Trump to dominate the conversation. I think the biggest mistake Democrats could make would be to

be constantly reactive to whatever grenade Donald Trump has lobbed on Twitter that morning. I mean, if you look in 2008, I would not say that what Barack Obama ran on was an extraordinarily ambitious policy agenda. It was ambitious in the way the presidential agendas are ambitious, but he himself represented something in politics that excited people. He ran on a theory of how politics could be, how it could look, how we could relate to each other, how we could fix it. And that generated a momentum that really reshaped American politics for eight years. And I think that what Democrats are going to need to do is to not just sit around clapping back on Donald Trump, but have something that in its ambition, in its intensity, in its controversy, sets the conversation on their terms. One of the only times Donald Trump is actually reactive to Democrats is when he is arguing against their socialism.

It's one of the only times he responds. And so the ways in which I think particularly Warren and Sanders are able to use big ambitious policies to set the agenda such that it's at least a conversation happening on their terms. I think that's powerful. I think some of the other candidates are able to do it in some other ways sometimes, but certainly they're the two who've been able to set the terms of democratic debate. And I think as a kind of meta level of the campaign, being able to set the terms of the debate is a genuinely important qualification for the Democrat in 2020. Ezra Klein is the host of Impeachment Explained, a brand new weekly podcast from Vox. It drops every weekend and you can find it in your favorite podcast app right now.

Today Explained is proudly putting on our first live show ever this week and we're doing it in Toronto, Canada. We're going to talk about the huge year of wins and some disappointing losses also that the country has had. I'll be joined on stage by some really sharp Canadians, including a dude I used to watch on the TV growing up, George Strombolopoulos. The show's this Saturday, and you can find tickets at podcasts.voxmedia.com slash events.

Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Sean Ramos for them. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Bridget McCarthy, Amina Alsadi, Halima Shah, and Noam Hassenfeld make the show. Noam also makes music. The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder makes even more music.

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